Potreros De Santa Teresita Via A Restrepo, Meta Colombia

On the road to Restrepo that follows the paw of the Eastern Cordillera of the Andes out of Villavicencio passed the Aereopuerto de Vanguardia lies a parcel of land that has for many years been known as Santa Teresita. The house belonging to the finca is situated to the left of the road. The pastures are to the right and extend across the shallow raudal of the Rana for nearly two kilometers.

These were the fatting pastures of Don Tom Kirby, an old Florida Cowboy, and his wife Ricky. Tom had come to Colombia in the early 1960's on behalf of several Florida businessmen who were trying to hold on to some 50,000 hectarias in southeastern Meta, they called Mapiripan. That was long before the colonols built the little town of Mapiripan on the edge of the Rio Guaviari, that eventually became the municipio of some 8 to 10,000 inhabitants.

It took two days to get to Mapiripan from Villavicencio by either of two different routes. One way was south through San Martin where not far out of town one encountered a turnoff to the left in a southeasterly direction out of the piedmont and up onto the southern badlands of the serrania, around the headwaters of the Rio Manicacias to the north, through El Crucero, Morichito and Las Auras to the east. The road had been made years before by some ancient mariner who simply took off across the savannah with a compass in hand looking for the straightest and driest route from one point to the next in search of a destination.

Farther south was another turnoff to the left, that passed through Candilejas, the namesake of the entire southern route traversing what was by then the Departamento rather than the Intendencia of Meta. The llaneros would say, "Por la via de Candilejas," rather than, "Por los Kioscos," which was the other route to Mapiripan through Puerto Lopez and Puerto Gaitan." If you followed la via de Candilejas another half day, you would come to a turnoff to the right of the road heading due south through the serrania, between the headwaters of the Rio Pororio and the Cano Ovejas that approached the vegas of the Rio Guaviari and the pueblo of San Jose Del Guaviari on its southern banks. Continuing passed the turnoff to San Jose, through the highland of the Serrania between the Rio Manicacias to the north and Cano Ovejas to the south, through the landmarks of Amparo and Brasillia, you came to another branch in the road that headed south to the savannahs of Mapiripan.

The road to Mapiripan passed between Cano Ovejas to the west and Cano Jabon to the east on a narrow strip of serrania highland that subsided as it approached the Rio Guaviaria. On either side of the serrania the land dropped off toward the damp bajos and zurales where the comejen and pasto rabo de zorro were, that boarder the Canos Ovejas and Jabon. It was what the llaneros called "un rincon ciego," for which there was no other way out except in this case across the Rio Guaviari. From the mouth of the rincon in the north, to its farthest extention in the south were some 75 kilometers, by an average width of perhaps 25 that were the savannahs of Mapiripan. Just to the river though it was but some 30 kilometers from the headwaters of the Ovejas and Jabon.

There at the river’s edge was where the pueblo of Mapiripan came to be in the mid 1960's. It began as just a few ramadas. Then someone began selling food for the colonols in the surrounding selva and fuel for their outboard motors. Before you long there was a town and the people of the town needed land in a land that had never been subject to any kind of formal tenancy before, except for that of Don Tom’s and the Florida businessmen. It was not that the colonols wanted Tom’s savannah. They needed selva to slash and burn and plant their crops of yuca, arroz and maiz in. The savannah was no good for growning their crops.

It was everyone else that would become the problem. It was the town itself that was in direct conflict with the old tierreteniente’s claim to the land. Before they built the town no one went there and nobody gave a good god damn who used it. But once there was a town, once there was a place to gather, it became a magnet for anyone who had nothing, and everything to gain by being there.

The colombian writer, German Castro Caicedo wrote a novel about the role of the Dakota DC3’s in the llanos at that time that ferried tons of people and supplies out of Vanguardia to remote locations of the frontier. He said that sometime in the late 1970’s the crews of DC3’s began carring increasing amounts of people and cargo to lonely airfields were few had gone before. To such places they took beer, food and chinsaws to the agony of the jungle that died daily by the stroke of the ax.

I flew out to Mapiripan once, during the wet season of maybe 1974, on one of Alvaro Enao's DC3's. I remember we flew low and the terrain below was so green. The storm clouds roiled ominously in the distance and here and there dark sheets of rain fell from the sky. I can not remember which of the HK's it was, but I do remember there was a little plaque on the interior wall of the airplane that said it had been completely overhauled in 1954. So, it was the one that had been rebuilt in 1954, if none of the others had been rebuilt in the same year.

Alvaro Enao owned Aereolinas La Urraca, based out of el Aereopuerto de Vanguardia, near Don Tom's fattening ranch there at Santa Teresita on the road between Villavicencio and Restrepo. It serviced the greater llanos from Arauca to the north, out to Venezuela on the east and on down to Mitu, Miraflores and Leticia in the selva of the Transamozonica to the south. La Urraca means magpie in English and the logo of the airline painted somewhere on each of the aircrafts in the early 1970's was a cartoon of a black magpie. Later the planes were painted differently, but my personal favorite was always the little black cartoon magpie. The magpie was the signal of La Urraca's intent to steal airfreight and passengers from whoever whenever they could and remains legendary in the hearts of those who remember the sight of the DC3's proudly assembled on the earthen tarmac of Vanguardia, noses to the summer wind, heading dos, dos al Norte.

Sadly Cries the Plover

The Southern Lapwing is a member of the Plover family, a widspread resident of Central and South America. In the Eastern Colombian Llanos it is called "El Alcaravan." It is the constant and welcome companion of the Llanero as he tends to his cattle on the savanah, and seldom forgotten in his poetry, foklore, and music. He is..."el companero...El Alcaravan."

The Southern Lapwing

Vanellus chilensis (formerly Belonopterus cayennensis lampronotus) is a large wader. It is a common and widespread resident throughout Central and South America, except in the jungles of the Amazon and the Andes. This bird is particularly common in the basin of the River Plate. It is the national bird of Uraguay.

Discription
This lapwing is the only crested wader in South America. It is 31-33cm in length and weighs 300g. The upperparts are mainly brownish grey, with a bronze glossing on the shoulders. The head is particularly striking; mainly grey with a black forehead and throat patch extending onto the black breast. A white border separates the black of the face from the grey of the head and crest. The rest of the underparts are white, and the eye ring, legs and most of the bill are pink. It is equipped with red bony extensions under the wings (spurs), used to intimidate foes and fight birds of prey.

During its slow flapping flight, the Southern Lapwing shows a broad white wing bar separating the grey-brown of the back and wing coverts from the black flight feathers. The rump is white and the tail black.

The sexes are similar in plumage, but young birds are duller, with a shorter crest and browner face and breast. There are four geographical races of Southern Lapwing, differing mainly in the details of the black and white face pattern.

The call is a very loud and harsh keek-keek-keek.

Habitat and status

This is a Lapwing of lake and river banks or open grassland. It has benefited from the extension of the latter habitat through widespread cattle ranching.

Behaviour
Southern Lapwing breeds on grassland and sometimes ploughed fields, and has an aerobatic flapping display flight. It lays 2-3 olive brown eggs in a bare ground scrape. The nest and young are defended noisily and aggressively against all intruders.

When not breeding, this bird disperses into wetlands and seasonally flooded tropical grassland.
Its food is mainly insects and other small invertebrates, hunted by a run-and-wait technique, mainly at night. This gregarious species often feeds in flocks.
http://ibc.hbw.com/ibc/phtml/votacio.phtml?idVideo=1405&Vanellus_chilensis

Panorama of the Tribes of Colombia and Panama

Lomalinda

Southern Meta, Colombia

Instituto Linguistico Verano

In the mid 1960's the Wycliffe Bible Translators, also known as the Summer Linguistic Institute (Instituto Linguistico de Verano) built the little town seen above, on the outskirts of Puerto Lleras in the Ariari River Basin, as the base for an operation to establish a written language for native Colombian Indian tribes in the Llanos and Selva of the Orinoco River Basin of Colombia. Once each language could be written, it was the institute's objective to translate the Bible into each tribe's native tongue. The effort was highly respected by the Colombian government, which had no program to preserve the Indian native dialects at the time. However it caused a great deal of resentment among various profession disciplines, who felt the effort should be Colombian, and the town left the local inhabitants of Puerto Lleras very suspicious of the real intent of the gringo operation in their midst. I had the opportunity to visit the community on a number of occasions to visit Herb Russo, an animal husbandry major from Cal Poly Pomona University, in Southern California, whose job it was to assist the the Indians with food production. To my knowledge, Panorama of the Tribes of Colombia and Panama, was the only book published by the linguists of Lomalinda, describing the breath of their program, most likely for the faithful, who were the financiers of their program so far from home. I purchased the book on the international used book market and on the title page of my copy was stamped the name of the previous owner in green letters. It read, "Alliance Church, P.O. Box 61, Lilburn, Georgia, 30247". The book is a richly illustrated soft cover depicting the desert, mountain, plains and jungle Indians of Colombia that were the foundation of the Mestizo culture that evolve after the arrival of the Spaniards. Lomalinda disbanded in the early 1990's due to leftist guerilla activity in the southern Llanos and Selva of the Orinoco.

Panorama of the Tribes of Colombia and Panama
Edition 1: 186 pages

Panorama
Townsend Press
Lomalinda, Meta, Colombia
MMMDCC 1973
Field Adresss
Instituto Linguistico de Verano
Apartado Nacional 5787
Bogota, COlombia, South America
International Adress
Wycliffe Bible Translators, Inc.
P.O. Box 1960
Santa Ana, California, 92702 U.S.A.

The Young Llanero

W.H.G. Kingston
About “The Young Llanero”

The first edition of this book is dated 1877. The publisher was T. Nelson and Sons, Paternoster Row, London; Edin; NY The number of pages is 444.

General information
Kingston seems to be quite good at writing about South America. One wonders why he is so anti-Spanish, but as he was brought up living in Portugal this may have something to do with the matter.

We are taken on a tour round Venezuela (that’s the country on the north of South America, that has lots of oil, and whose main waterway is the Orinoco).

So there is a change of location from New Granada and Peru, but we have the same problems with Indians, Spanish troops, boa constrictors, and other flora and fauna. There are also the usual friendly priest and ditto doctor.

There were 44 engravings in the book, most of which are very nice indeed, and their quality can be seen in the pdf we have produced for the book.

About the Author
Kingston, William Henry Giles (1814-1880), English novelist, son of Lucy Henry Kingston, was born in London on the 28th of February 1814. Much of his youth was spent at Oporto, where his father was a merchant, but when he entered the business, he made his headquarters in London. He early wrote newspaper articles on Portuguese subjects. These were translated into Portuguese, and the author received a Portuguese order of knighthood and a pension for his services in the conclusion of the commercial treaty of 1842.

In 1844 his first book, The Circassian Chief, appeared, and in 1845 The Prime Minister, a Story of the Days of the Great Marquis of Pombal. The Lusitanian Sketches describe Kingston’s travels in Portugal.

In 1851 Peter the Whaler, his first book for boys, came out. These books proved so popular that Kingston retired from business, and devoted himself to the production of tales of adventure for boys. Within thirty years he wrote upwards of one hundred and thirty such books. He had a practical knowledge of seamanship, and his stories of the sea, full of thrilling adventures and hairbreadth escapes, exactly hit the taste of his boy readers.

Characteristic specimens of his work are The Three Midshipmen; The Three Lieutenants; The Three Commanders; and The Three Admirals. He also wrote popular accounts of famous travellers by land and sea, and translated some of the stories of Jules Verne.

In all philanthropic schemes Kingston took deep interest; he was the promoter of the mission to seamen; and he acted as secretary of a society for promoting an improved system of emigration. He was editor of the Colonist for a short time in 1844 and of the Colonial Magazine and East Indian Review from 1849 to 1851. He was a supporter of the volunteer movement in England from the first.

He died at Willesden on the 5th of August 1880.

Contents

Chapter I.

The home of my childhood in South America—My father’s history—Sent to school in England—Life at school—Summoned back to America—Voyage with my uncle to Jamaica—Sail for Venezuela—Chased by a Spanish man-of-war—Cross the bar of the Magdalena River—Driven on shore by a storm—Boat nearly wrecked—Our night encampment—Repair boat—A deer shot—Disturbed by Goahira indians—Flight—Pursued—Reach the port of Cervanos—Meet Tim Molloy—His delight at seeing us—Hospitably received by the Commandant, but very inhospitably by the mosquitoes.

French Photographic Double Page No 38

Double Page
Photos No. 38
Venezuela/
Gerard Sioen

by

Miguel Otero Silva

Gerard Sioen &

Naty Garcia Guadilla

Published 1986

48 Pages

ISSN: 0295-6810

Double Page,

24 Place Des Vosges

75003 Paris

Parilux Paper

Printed Switzerland

by Hertig

Inside the book the caption beneath this photograph reads: Llanero (gaucho from the Llanos) Orinoco Plain.

In the 1980's a stunning series of French Photographic Magazines appeared. Every issue contained the work of one internationally renowned photographer coverering a specific subject. They each contained 48 pages of the most amazing colour plates measuring 24cm x 32cm x 0.5cm and weighing 331 gm. Issue number 38 was the photographic work of Gerard Sioen taken in Venezuela. It included scenes of the Western Venezuelan Llanos. It begins, Venezuela, as well as a few other countries in South America (read Colombia) have inherited the fabulous legend of El Dorado: Eldorado, the golden land of a mythical Eden, a paradise of gold that the conquistadors thought was situated between the Orinoco and the Amazon Rivers.

La Violencia~ War Without End

Guadalupe Salcedo Prototype Liberal Guerillero

Time

Monday, Aug. 18, 1952

War Without End

"Death has become commonplace in Colombia," said a well-informed U.S. traveler returning from Bogota last week. "The words assassination and murder are bandied about with no more emotion than we talk of beans, butter & bread."

He was talking about the bloody, matter-of-fact, half-underground rural war that has raged for the past three years between Colombia's Liberals and Conservatives. The most cautious estimates of the men, women & children killed now run to 15,000; other estimates go as high as 20,000 or even 50,000.

In Mountain, In Plain. The struggle pits guerrillas of the out-of-power Liberal Party against the troops and military police of the Conservative government. On the map, the guerrillas hold a third of the country, but their third, the rolling, grassy eastern llanos, is thinly populated. In the llanos, 5,006 irregulars commonly ambush and cut down invading government troops and steal their arms. The guerrillas themselves are targets of futile bombing.

Fighting has been reported recently in other areas around Riosucio, Puerto Berrio, and near Cali, but most of rural, mountainous Colombia has felt such battling at one time or another since 1949. The cities have escaped because big army garrisons control them.

Inter-party warfare is not new to Colombia; in the 19th century her citizens fought some 70 civil wars, big & small. One of them cost 80,000 lives, another 100,000. Colombians fight because each and every person, with rare exception, is emotionally given over to party loyalty as much as to national loyalty. Citizens are born Liberal or Conservative.

From France, From Spain. Ideological distinctions, originally stemming from Liberal admiration of the French Revolution and from Conservative roots in monarchical Spain, have become blurred. The most frequently mentioned issue nowadays is religious: Liberals are mildly anticlerical (although Colombia is 99.5% Catholic); Conservatives warmly embrace the church and its hierarchy. There is no clean economic cleavage between the parties, but industrialists, labor, white-collar classes tend to be Liberals, while landholders, many farmers and most priests are Conservatives. Liberals, in the last contested election, polled 58% of the vote.

Elaborate attempts have been made by statesmen from both parties to strike a truce—but they could not control the countryside partisans. More recently the Catholic Church, bulwarked by an appeal from Pius XII and parades displaying great fervor for peace, tried to halt the war but failed. Now the only limitation on the ferocity of the struggle seems to be the amount of arms the guerrillas can smuggle over the border or seize from dead policemen

"Tiro Fijo" (Sure Shot) Last of the Bigtime Bandit Chieftains

Time Magazine
Friday, Jun. 26, 1964

The Backlands Violence Is Almost Ended

The orders read like the work of a bored general trying to inject a little life into a standard peacetime troop maneuver: the Colombian army and air force were to invade, conquer and hold the "Independent Republic of Marquetalia," a 1,400-sq.-mi. enemy enclave deep in the Andean highlands 170 miles southwest of Bogotá. But this war is real, and so is Marquetalia. Colombians know it as the stronghold of Pedro Antonio Marín, 34, alias "Tiro Fijo" (Sure Shot), last of the country's bigtime bandit chieftains.

Communist Country. By wiping out Tiro Fijo, Colombia would just about end the savage backlands violence that began in 1948 as a feud between the country's Liberals and Conservatives. But catching Sure Shot is no sure thing. Reared in poverty and squalor, he drifted into a Communist guerrilla band in the early 1950s. By 1960 he had his own gang, and moved his family and followers onto a 10,000-acre hacienda near the foot of snow-topped Mount Huila—after killing the hacienda's owner. From his new home Tiro Fijo began taking over all neighboring haciendas, establishing Communist cells throughout the area, indoctrinating peasants, levying a monthly head tax and collecting up to 30% of farmers' profits. His bandit gang numbered some 250 men; to the area's 6,000 population, he was the only law.

Busy with outbreaks of banditry elsewhere, the federal government let the remote coffee-growing land slip away by default. Marquetalia paid no taxes, and death awaited any police or military force rash enough to cross its borders. Last December Tiro Fijo and his men ambushed an army patrol, killing six soldiers. All told, the army credits him with 200 murders.

Two-Stage Assault. The army started planning Tiro Fijo's downfall months ago. Combat units were divided into small, tightly organized teams, given extensive training in anti-guerrilla warfare. To backstop the military campaign, new roads, schools and other civic-action projects were planned to draw the peasants closer to the government. The offensive began four weeks ago as units of five battalions—totaling 3,500 men—poured into Marquetalia.

Flitting through the thickly wooded mountainsides, Tiro Fijo's men fought half a dozen bitter skirmishes. But in the deadly game of hide-and-seek, the guerrilla-wise soldiers came out on top, pressed steadily on toward Tiro Fijo's hacienda headquarters. Early one morning last week, a fleet of helicopters airlifted 170 crack troops into position surrounding the hacienda. The desperate Communists opened fire from underbrush and foxholes. In the three-hour fight, they wounded only one soldier; finally Tiro Fijo put the hacienda to torch and retreated into the mountains. That night his men ambushed an army patrol, killing two soldiers; four nights later they killed four more.

But "Operation Marquetalia" was virtually complete. The yellow-blue-and-red Colombian flag now flew over the area for the first time in its history. Tiro Fijo himself was holed up with 50 to 80 men in a narrow canyon six miles from his old base, and at week's end two army pincer columns were closing in for the kill.

The Struggle for Airways in Latin America William A.M. Burden

SACADTA~ GERMANY TO COLOMBIA 1926 Airmail Mix Cover

Time Magazine
Monday, Jun. 21, 1943

THE STRUGGLE FOR AIRWAYS IN LATIN AMERICA — William A. M. Burden—Council on Foreign Relations ($5).

Last year William Burden. Special Aviation Assistant to the Secretary of Commerce, said, "The air age ... is not a thing of the future. It is already here."

He was speaking at a New York Herald Tribune forum on the problems that the air age gave to education. Winning the war means training youth to use air power. Creating a civilized postwar world means educating the whole U.S. to the possibilities of the new life whose framework is already here. These problems demand ''new world maps, a new geography, the rethinking of international relations . . . the support of an enthusiastic and discerning citizenry," and the abiding knowledge that "in the long run, air communication is bound to develop a sense of unity among people'' and further "the world organization which all civilized men desire."

The Struggle for Airways in Latin America is a prudent, expensive, handsome, 245-page, 9-by-11-in. atlas in green cloth binding that documents his case and illustrates his meaning. It is a record rather than a report. Reviewing a few years of progress, from nothing to continent-girdling order, it is as spare as the pioneers' records of their land titles and family connections.
The story is as simple in outline as it is complex in detail. Restricted in aviation after World War I by the Versailles Treaty, German companies, heavily subsidized, started South American lines. Slow, with poor safety records, high rates and poor equipment, and routes selected for military and political purposes, their efforts were seldom commercially successful. Only when they reached too near the Panama Canal was sluggish American opinion awakened.

In March 1928, a French company, Aeropostale, opened a route from France to Dakar by plane, across the Atlantic by boat to Brazil, by plane via Uruguay to Buenos Aires. One of the great ventures of a business age. the creation of Marcel Bouilloux-Lafont, Aéropostale could get an airmail letter from Paris to Argentina and a reply back in less time than U.S. business correspondence could make the one-way trip from New York.

In comparison, the story of the first U.S. ventures, involved in the tangle of airmail contracts in the U.S.. embittered by perplexing fights over routes, makes chastening reading for Americans. A few people—Elmer Faucett of Compaňia de Aviación Faucett and Hugh Wells of Cóndor Peruana de Aviación—challenged the European combines. The German stranglehold was broken when Axis airlines were nationalized by Latin American governments in the past two years. And now, says Aviation Assistant Burden, in cautious language: "The airplane promises to give Latin America a semblance of physical unity by overcoming the formidable geographical barriers which have divided it from time immemorial. . . . The airplane promises to open up this huge area rapidly. . . . The project is comparable in magnitude to the opening of our own West."