▶ FIELDWORK LOCATION: COLOMBIA
“A LO MEJOR NO PASA NADA”
ME: Is it safe to travel to Murindó en el Chocó?
FRIEND: A lo mejor no pasa nada.
This phrase is the response I received every time I sought to determine the safety of a place to which I hoped to travel within Colombia. It translates as “hopefully” or “ maybe nothing will happen.” It put the onus on me, the recipient of this advice, to determine what “a lo mejor” meant. Did it mean “hopefully” there was only a 10 percent chance that something would happen, or “maybe” a 50 percent chance? It required assessing the risk tolerance of the person providing the advice. In a country in which violence stretches as far back as anyone can remember, violence at times seems to loom in the future as well, and violence has touched nearly everybody and everywhere, the phrase “a lo mejor” comes to mean something different. And then I had to assess, what is my own risk tolerance? Will I travel somewhere if it is a 50 percent chance, but not a 60 percent chance, that something might go wrong? What would change that calculation?
I began researching Colombia in 2003 with a project on the onset and dynamics of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) insurgency. While in the field, paramilitary organizations that fought against the FARC began to sign peace agreements, disarm, demobilize, and follow puzzlingly divergent postwar trajectories. Some of the organizations dissolved. Others remained strongly cohesive. Some maintained governance roles and authority over civilian life, and others played anemic roles in their communities. Some silenced their guns, and others returned to organized violence. Explaining this variation brought me back to the field for several years to conduct surveys and interviews of ex-combatants, their families, psychologists, recipient communities, and victims for my dissertation and first book. I have continued to conduct fieldwork in conflict areas across the world to study the outcomes and dynamics of postwar elections for my second book on why citizens vote for political actors who used violence against the civilian population. One of the key aspects and challenges of my fieldwork is navigating safety concerns, which is the focus of this chapter.
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.
After interviewing paramilitaries for several hours, I have to go to the bathroom. I am a woman in an all-men’s prison. I ask the person in charge. He met me at the prison entrance. He has accompanied me around the prison. He arranged the interview room. He helped keep everything orderly during my meetings. He is a prison guard. He says, “of course,” and proceeds to lead me down a long, dark corridor. Through the musky gloom I make out men’s cells on either side. At the end of the corridor is a closet-sized bathroom. I am trapped. My companion points out his cell. I realize that he is not a prison guard, but a prisoner. He is de facto in charge; roles appear reversed here. My heart begins to race, and my inner thoughts ping-pong between “everything will be OK, everything will be OK” and “you are an idiot, you are an idiot.” I did emerge unscathed, but I did not know who was really in charge inside the prison.
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.
I frequented a restaurant in Apartado that had my favorite juices: feijoa and uchuva. A magnetic woman usually held court at a table next to mine. She alternated between hushed whispers, barked orders, and boisterous merrymaking. I later learned that she was the sister of Carlos Mauricio García Fernández, alias “Doble Cero,” an infamous paramilitary commander in Urabá and Córdoba. Quién manda por acá?
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
Adding to the complexity of deciding whether a place is safe for fieldwork is the false sense of security and the quotidian nature of life during war. Even in the most active combat areas in a war, violence does not happen every day, or even every week, nor everywhere. Violence is episodic. When I traveled to Tibú in the Colombian region of Catatumbo, near the Venezuelan border, people told me it was “very caliente” (meaning combustive and dangerous). But that did not mean that I saw anything violent or experienced anything of the sort. In fact, quite the opposite, because daily life usually goes on, no matter how dangerous a place is. People drank tinto, sat about chatting, walked this way and that, worked, laughed, and shouted. The fact that life looks very normal during war makes it highly challenging to assess danger because you usually cannot see it.
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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Sarah Zukerman Daly is assistant professor of political science at Columbia University.
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.
• ——. “The Dark Side of Power-Sharing: Middle Managers and Civil War Recurrence,” Comparative Politics 46, no. 3 (April 2014): 333–53.