QUIÉN MANDA POR ACÁ
It is difficult to know when you are safe because the correct answer to the question Quién manda por acá (Who is in charge?) may be illusive. Here are a few examples.
I enter the ominous, cement cinder block building, hollow on the inside, daunting on the exterior. I progress through the security checks, and they stamp my forearm with an invisible stamp, only decipherable under ultraviolet light that indicates “I am just visiting … I may be released.” I wonder what would happen if it rubs off, or if, in the heat of the midday sun, I sweat it off. As I wonder, I emerge into the bright light of the patios on the inside of Bellavista prison. I am in the patios of the former Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), the paramilitaries. FARC has their own patios. Different gangs have their own patios.
ROLE REVERSAL
On another day inside the prison, I interviewed a paramilitary commander who had been responsible for extorting all buses and taxis for the entire metropolitan area of Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city—a massive operation. He was guilty of countless crimes and was sentenced to a combined forty-five years in prison. He had not shaved in what looked like months and had barely bathed in as long. He exuded a stench. During our conversation, he seemed distracted and kept staring at my hands. I moved them out of sight, below the desk. His eyes continued to look down. Finally, he blurted out, “I cannot believe that you did not get a manicure.” I was taken aback. We were discussing the extortion racket, victimization, and coercive governance, and he was concerned about my cuticles! Over the course of our interview, he continued to return to his utter disbelief at the disrepair of my nails, which seemed ironic given his present physical condition and the gravity of his crimes. Weeks later, I found myself in a nail salon, getting a manicure. I thought to myself, “quién manda por acá?” Role reversal.
On other occasions, I incorrectly assessed who was in charge. It was at these moments that I felt less secure. I visited a “high-security” prison in Tierralta, at which many of the masterminds of the paramilitary phenomenon in Colombia were gathered. I assumed that the commanders would be in cells. Instead, only a low hedge separated these human rights abusers from liberty. The commanders explained to me that they were there of their own volition and therefore did not need cells or barbed wire. When I interviewed several of the top FARC commanders, including Pastor Alape, Marco Calarcá, Carlos Antonio Lozada, Sandra Ramírez, and Rodrigo Granda, there were guards outside their doors, but it was unclear if the guards were protecting them or me. I had to recalibrate my understanding of quién manda.
Figuring out who is in charge and who you can trust is essential for ensuring your safety during fieldwork, but it requires that you allow roles to be reversed, and assumptions and priors to be popped. Risk assessments during fieldwork are complicated by a number of other factors as well.
THE STORY BEHIND THE NUMBERS
For the past fifteen years, I have tracked violent events in Colombia, beginning with those in 1964 and continuing to the present. This added a numeric probability to violence in different places at different times. On one hand, it made me aware that almost nowhere was “safe,” and on the other hand, it demonstrated that the likelihood of anything happening in X location at exactly X moment in time was very low.
The benefit of being in the field is that there is a story behind every number, and you can learn that story. The numbers sometimes can abstract from the story, but other times they fail the reality. For me, the qualitative and quantitative diverged one evening in Aguachica, a small city in northeast Colombia. In thick, saturated air, I sat at a desk opposite a FARC guerrilla in the courtyard of a school, abandoned since classes had let out several hours earlier. I began the section of a survey I was enumerating on why he had joined an armed group. He answered that the most important factor in his decision to join the FARC was “wanting money, land, and food.” I asked him to tell me the story of how he joined. He descended into a narrative of how the paramilitaries had come into his town and had killed his family. That was when he decided to join the FARC guerrillas. Fieldwork provides the opportunity to marry the numbers with real stories. In this case, it helped me understand the multiplicity of motives underlying recruitment and the challenges of using blunt survey questions to reveal these complex motives.
QUOTIDIAN LIFE DURING WAR
Compounding this is the false sense of security that extended time in the field creates. It is psychologically exhausting to live in fear, and for this reason we have coping mechanisms. We create a sense of security in an unsafe environment, and our risk tolerance increases because we crave and need a semblance of normalcy. Understanding these factors, which render assessments of security blurry in conflict zones, is also important to keeping oneself safe in such environments.
Situations morph constantly and quickly on the ground in conflicts: one day a place might be deemed safe, and the next, dangerous. Before traveling to “complicated” parts of Colombia, I sought input from people I knew high up in the military intelligence services and would seek their advice the night before I traveled. I mapped the local violence patterns down to the neighborhood level, knowing that one vereda might lie above my risk threshold and the adjacent one below it.
If you are studying political science because you care about the real world, then you will enjoy, and even love, fieldwork. Allow yourself to “muck around,” to have the field complicate and revise your view of the issues and processes, and to have the realities and voices on the ground marinate before imposing theoretical order on them. But for fieldwork to be productive and enjoyable, you must prioritize your safety. Find trusted people who can help you assess security risks in the moments before you travel, learn the stories behind the numbers, be wary of the quotidian life during war and a false sense of security, and always seek to know quién manda.
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PUBLICATIONS TO WHICH THIS FIELDWORK CONTRIBUTED:
• Daly, Sarah Zukerman. Organized Violence After Civil War: The Geography of Recruitment in Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.