With a firm and slow voice, Carlos Carrero knows how to tell when someone who has fallen several times gets up, because he has heard that story repeatedly. That, that is his own story, the same one that is known throughout Mapiripán and that is a symbol of admiration and respect like that of all the inhabitants of this beautiful corner of Colombia.
The smell of burning seemed almost intact in the memory of those who lived the Bogotazo, back in April of 48, just five months before the heat of Villavicencio welcomed this man with brown eyes who never allowed it in his lexicon the word “defeat” existed.
The incongruities of a war that was not his touched him in such a way that he traveled several roads, slept under various roofs and woke up in as many places. Those same steps allowed him to arrive, once again, at Mapiripán, his home. “I have lived through all the good and bad times in this region. The last one we have 20 years of having arrived in Mapiripán, already without children because they are already grown up”. When he arrived several years ago, the situation was very different, “for example it was 8 days on the way from here to Villavicencio, it was very hard. I came after my dad who came first. I arrived two years later”.
Those were times when he could grow corn and sell the bunches for $ 100, and he would like to put on a grateful smile. Those were times when, then, marijuana appeared, then coca, and so on. All this he knew, but he did not allow it to touch him directly, neither him nor his family. With this, also came the steps of the armed groups that fought for control of the land, air, water, lives and even the consciences of its inhabitants.
“I dedicated myself to commerce and lived through the massacre of 97. At that time I started in a small boat as a river transporter, then as a land carrier with a camper and then by plane. You witnessed all those things, they were three tough years of fighting. That in the town was that it rained lead every day, cylinders and all that”.
In a shower of bullets and cylinders, one of the armed groups was entrenched on the other side of the river when “from there they deployed missiles to this side and a cylinder fell on us where we were hiding in a bathroom. Two minutes ago we had run out of there. We were miraculously saved. Although the cylinder did not explode, but it would have fallen on our heads”, describes Carlos, recalling that similar scenes were repeated two or three times a week.
Luck could not be any other according to this llanero: “It ruined our business, we had a disco on the river bank and we fell again. I lost a farm, they displaced me when I was a charterer and then when the cylinder happened. We ran for five months”.
It seems that the slogan was to end Mapiripán, but they did not succeed, just as they failed to divide this family that has survived with the love of his wife Lucy and their three children. “We are currently married for 48 years. We are a humble but hard-working and healthy family, despite three displacements we had”.
This is how this man speaks who constantly remembers how his first years of childhood were, “they were next to my old men! Authentic llaneros, campesinos! She, from San Martín, and he, an Araucanian with Venezuelan descent”. They taught by example the value of honesty and work, hence he, the eldest of eight children, could instruct in what he lived. “We did not have wealth, but we did have what was necessary and they taught me to work, cook, cook and iron.”
The passage of the pages on the calendar allowed him to get up and work to open three rooms in his small hotel, “after 16 years we already have 16 rooms and my dreams as a family is to see my children, although they are adults, they are already professionals, but I want to see them fulfilled, happy and healthy”.
He hopes that when life asks him to leave this land, he has spent his last days comforting himself in the embrace of his children, in the sweet gaze of his wife and the eternal smile of his family. For this reason, his humility is as great as his heart, as his stories loaded with tenacity, as his memories intact with hope.
“The engine that pushes me forward is the same love I feel for my children and my wife, that I will not rest until my strength leaves me and my faculties allow it. I will fight like all my life I have. I have always achieved my goals, without wealth, but the little that I have achieved is enough for me and I have plenty to feel fulfilled”, continues this plainsman who does not count how many times he fell, but how many he got up next to his family.
(End/PVR/CMC/AVA)
