la dama de negro
by Gloria Perez
May 19th, 2020
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, a woman dressed in black and with her face covered directed police officers to evict poor people from their shacks in a vast slum in Bogotá, Colombia.
According to people living in the neighbourhood, the woman had shown up several times with the police, and directed tractors to demolish people’s shanty houses. The evictions took place even though Bogotá has been locked down for about eight weeks to control the spread of the virus. The identity of the woman and her relation to the municipal government and the police remains a mystery.
The Lady in Black report is far from front page news. In Colombia, similarly obscure figures accompanied by state army officers have shown up for decades in rural and urban areas to violate peoples’ rights. Most Colombians have a story about a dark someone or something that threatens civilians. Dark figures represent a scary alliance between state forces and thugs. The following stories are mine.
When I was growing up in a small town in the Andean mountains, there was the Black Hand. The Black Hand was a popular name for an organization within the police forces in charge of social cleansing. Locals easily recognized its members, but that did not matter to them—they were untouchable. These men (at least in my town there were no women in this group) would go around after 9pm in a Toyota SUV that would move very, very slowly. People knew that when the Hand was out, someone would die that night. Growing up, I thought that the Black Hand was a local thing, but it had tentacles through the entire region. Years later, when I was practicing medicine in the capital of my province, I met a patient who had some addiction problems. When I asked him how he had gotten sober, he told me that the Black Hand had picked him up by mistake one night when he was at a bar. Responsibly, the Black Hand checked the man’s ID and realized that he was the wrong victim. They let him go, and since then, he stopped drinking and smoking.
I lived in Medellin during the Colombian drug cartel war in the 1990s. At the time, there was the story of a man that went around marginalized neighbourhoods with the national army. The man, unarmed, wearing military fatigues and a black mask, directed the soldiers to houses where the “unwanted” people could be found. Those taken away from their homes in Medellin never came back. The man with the black mask was a paramilitary boss working with the national army. We know this now because most paramilitary bosses demobilized in the 2000s as part of a national peace agreement, and as part of the deal they had to tell the “truth” of what they did and what happened. They went to jail for a maximum period of eight years, and now are free.
There was also the Phantom Plane—a gift from the United States to Colombia to combat insurgent guerrillas. The phantom plane was black and only flew during the night, so guerrillas could not see it. When the phantom located insurgents in the Colombian mountains, it threw a bright flare and proceeded to bomb these “communists.” I would watch the flare’s light while sitting on the sidewalk of my town’s hospital, and prepare for the wounded peasants to arrive at the emergency room. Maybe they were peasants, or perhaps not. Maybe they also helped the army or the paramilitaries—hard to tell, but the airplane was dark grey and American.
In Colombia, we say that everybody can fish in rough waters. It means that in difficult times there are always possibilities for profit—if one chooses to be on the right side, that is. I have heard many similar stories to those of the Lady in Black, the Black Hand and the Phantom Plane. Some stories are associated with narco-traffickers, some with paramilitary groups. Others reveal dark alliances between the police and the army with paramilitary and foreign governments. And in many others, the devil with his dark and scary face favours mining, banana and palm oil corporations. Covid-19 is the cover now. Before it was communism, and insurgency.
Semana, “La dama de negro, mujer con el rostro cubierto adelantando desalojos en Bogotá,” Desalojos en Bogotá La dama de negro, mujer con el rostro cubierto, accessed August 6, 2020, https://www.semana.com/bogota/articulo/desalojos-en-bogota-la-dama-de-negro-mujer-con-el-rostro-cubierto/672541.