The battle against the fire in the Tolima mountains

The only thing Jairo Berrío Mendoza could do, to at least somewhat cover what happened to him, was to turn over his mattress. To hide against the boards that yellow and black stain nearly a meter in diameter, which still smells of that particular burnt fabric odor. The general layout of his house, located in Chagualá, in the rural area of Coello (Tolima), is, however, unmistakable: the entire door, made of aluminum, burned so much it seems to have melted with the frame and does not open. What was once his gate no longer exists, nor the plants that adorned it. The brick facade has black stains nearly one and a half meters wide. All the grass around is turned to ash. Like him, hundreds of farmers suffer an unprecedented emergency in the region.

EL TIEMPO toured several of the affected areas and accompanied farmers, soldiers, firefighters, and emergency organizations who have been facing the flames for weeks. From Coello to the mountains surrounding Ibagué, the journey allows one to grasp an emergency that is already impacting homes, crops, livestock, water sources, and wildlife, while new hotspots appear after others are controlled. Behind some of the fires, besides the conditions associated with the dry season, authorities are investigating deliberate actions by people and the possible involvement of armed groups.

Mendoza, in Coello, raised a house no bigger than a store. Next to it is a burnt bicycle, with melted tires and in the spot where the recent fire crushed it. “The bicycle is what one relies on, because I don’t even have a motorcycle. It’s sad to see the things you find all burned. That bicycle was good, it just needed a little fixing and look how the fire left it,” he told this newspaper.

This place, despite this catastrophe, is just a snapshot of a series of fires that have already consumed up to 50,000 hectares in the region, according to official data from the Government of Tolima. A fire hurricane swept through the La Joya hamlet, western rural area of Chagualá, a couple of days ago, taking with it the color of the grass, houses, and forests. Neighbors drove the cattle onto the road, their backs crashing into each other in stampedes. Movable and immovable property were petrified before the flames.

A fire hurricane passed through the La Joya hamlet, western rural area of Chagualá, a couple of days ago, taking with it the color of the grass, houses, and forests. The community recalls how the flames reached up to 15 meters high and a sound similar to strong winds, but carrying fire inside. The scene was chaotic. The chickens couldn’t decide whether to run or fly, terrified. Neighbors drove the cattle onto the road, their backs crashing into each other in stampedes. Movable and immovable property were petrified before the flames. For some, like Berrío Mendoza, the fire reached their most sensitive belongings. This man can no longer sleep peacefully, neither physically nor emotionally. His hamlet is recovering, now labeled as a controlled fire region.

Diana Marcela Gutiérrez, president of the communal action board of Chagualá, wishes she had 10 pairs of hands, as she coordinates aid coming from all over Colombia to her hamlet. She must attend to almost a thousand people. Her face is explicit, with deep dark circles, like someone who has been sleepless for weeks. The departmental emergency has already lasted three weeks. Her house is a center for receiving food, water, and coordinating aid. What was once her living room is now a collection center. Her daughter’s stuffed animals are mixed among piles of non-perishable food. “It’s hard to describe how in a second, in a moment, my hamlet was left. Seeing how it was left breaks my heart,” she said. And this effort, as titanic as it is, here only soothes one of the multiple tragedies that remain in all directions of the department.

Starting from Bogotá, the fire tragedy becomes evident quickly, descending through Chinauta. A panoramic view of the mountains reveals that smoke filled the sky, blurring the sun’s rays in a dense layer. The smell of burning is constant and aggressive. Eyes redden from toxic gases. Just a few meters from the well-known Nariz del Diablo, a hotspot is visible among the brush. Smoke rises to the sky, watched by locals who stop their motorcycles and bicycles on the road, unable to do more. Images like this repeat over and over again, further ahead, in Girardot, Coello, San Luis, Suárez, Venadillo, Lérida, Ambalema, Armero Guayabal, Carmen de Apicalá, Coyaima, Rovira, Guamo, Ataco, Planadas, and Rioblanco. There are 507 affected hamlets. It is a departmental emergency.

At night, the scene is even more dramatic, as the mountains are wounded by fire, as if they had been stabbed and flames were sprouting from their forests. Almost always diagonally, from the treetops, because the embers consume everything downward, in a process that seems slow but covers meters per second. In fact, the government reports that 174,306 hectares are at imminent risk due to forage loss. That is, any plant material, such as leaves, stems, or whole plants. This figure must be noted, as it is comparable to almost the entire size of Bogotá. The road leading to Ibagué is a spectacle of desolation, as fire is igniting in all directions of the mountains, and the night makes it more evident in a clearly infernal contrast.

José Mauricio García is in a hurry because some cows he has in a lot in the municipal head of Suárez, in eastern Tolima, wandered into a neighboring farm. Before herding the cattle, he stops on the bridge over the Magdalena River, on the municipality’s edge, to watch as an Air Force helicopter borrows water from that river to take it to the Sinaí hamlet, about five kilometers into the forest, where the fire has already consumed two mountains. To his average farmer problems, he adds a high-level headache, as that blaze threatens to knock down the house where he lives in the countryside. He cannot escape that image, as there are three fire hotspots in the mountain range surrounding his town, and two of them point to his home.

“We are all losing. Those who will read this too. The livelihood of Colombians is born in places like this. The animals have nothing to eat anymore. This situation is like the end of the world. Year after year it happens to us, but we used to control it. We put our foot down. But now we put it out and it lights up again. I don’t know what’s going on. The only one who can solve this is my God, and we hope He brings us a big rain,” said García. To reach his house, one must travel through several hamlets to the east. Along the way, dozens of neighboring farmers arm themselves with low-displacement motorcycles, boots, scarves, machetes, and yellow sprayers filled with gallons of water. They advance toward Rusio hill, because an emergency of this magnitude is everyone’s business. They have been three weeks without rest.

Upon arriving at García’s farm, a specialized platoon in Army risk management, a handful of firefighters, and the community await. All are ready to risk their lives, not only because the flames are destroying everything in their path, but because this same group of soldiers, also equipped with sprayers, was threatened by FARC dissidents this week, who told them that if they kept killing the fire, a drone bomb would be dropped on them to tear them apart in the mountain. In this country, as often happens, one must keep going. The group walks toward the fire hotspot, which will take an hour. The landscape is arid and the temperature rises above 35 degrees. Along the way, there are dead animals, dry trees, and the scene of two forces that, minute by minute, are about to meet: fire and water.

A farmer guide, whose farm borders García’s, leads the group to the area of interest, a few meters from the hotspot. A water spring supplies the sprayers, which go from being shells to weighing 45 kilos for the soldiers. That would break anyone’s back, so every movement must be precise. The Army measures every effort in terms of time, distance, and leg strength. They take the path uphill, among trees, shrubs, and rocks, but after half an hour the guide accidentally loses the team. One soldier says he won’t move another meter until they find the exact fire location. However, it is the blaze itself that signals where it is, almost as if challenging the group. That fire gale has its own voice and says it is about 15 meters above.

The group of soldiers and farmers splits up. They must tackle the conflagration from all sides, surrounding it to its minimum expression. They communicate with shouts of “¡Eo!” to indicate their positions. The idea is to push that fire dance several steps back until it is reduced. From the already calmed parts, smoke rises as if the earth itself were a boiler.

And when only an area smaller than a bathroom remains burning, the finisher of the matter appears: the helicopter that befriended the Magdalena River in favor of the Suárez mountains. The vehicle hovers over the area, dropping a rain of water that crushes the blaze and makes it disappear. The soldiers celebrate such precision and sit down, while the faint remaining mist of water soothes their faces. Here the work is done, after five hours.

Meters below, after the grueling shift, the group meets another set of farmer firefighters doing the same at a nearby point, led by Fredy Quimbayo, one of the neighbors with a farm close to the flames. He is accompanied by the mule Chupeta, which carries two water containers at its side. “We have to be united. That way we are always stronger. I was born and raised here, I know the area like the back of my hand. It’s very sad to see it like this. With this summer, everything ends. The animals suffer, the plants suffer, we suffer too. I hold on to the emotional part. One feels very moved when finding support from people, the community, the neighbor,” he told EL TIEMPO. The day was saved, tomorrow there are more fires to solve.

According to the Government of Tolima, the fires have already caused more than $134 billion in economic losses, about 42,451 tons of lost food, and up to 3,262 affected homes. The cattle ranchers’ federation Fedegán states that in 22 municipalities, up to 1,136 members report losses. Authorities estimate that around 163,000 animals could die in the coming days due to lack of food. The severity of the situation forced national and regional authorities, as well as the Army, Police, and Air Force, to lead a permanent Unified Command Post at the National Police Training School in Gualanday, which is also a victim of the fire, as all its surrounding mountains are scorched.

Inside the school are also the regional firefighters. One of them, who requested to remain anonymous, has been working nonstop for two weeks. His mother, meanwhile, due to heart conditions unrelated to the fires, is in an Intensive Care Unit in a hospital in El Espinal, with the flame of her life waiting to be rekindled or extinguished. This human being is broken in two but keeps working. He breaks down with a couple of questions. “I keep calling all the time, because what else can I do,” he says. His story makes one wonder, how many people attend these focused tragedies with their own homes on fire?

The commander of the Fifth Army Division, Brigadier General Carlos Ernesto Marmolejo, is another person who remains there and who, at this time of year, lives putting out fires. He not only coordinates the soldiers who reduce the region’s fires but also those who fight the criminality entrenched in those same mountains. In an interview with EL TIEMPO, he explained that criminal hands have been identified behind the emergency. “There is presence of dissidents, both from the Mordisco faction and the Calarcá faction, who could be trying to push institutional authority to the limit and demonstrate capacity. Items have been found, containers with fuel, and arrests have been made. The criminals outsource the action by paying third parties who burn the forests,” he said.

On one of the farms in Cunira, in the rural area of Coello, a few meters from the road leading to Ibagué, there is a little box that holds a hope. It is inside a vehicle from the Tolima Regional Autonomous Corporation (Cortolima), whose officials monitor the results of mitigating a fire on a nearby mountain. The box contains a baby opossum that fits in one hand and survived the fire. Its belly is burned and it breathes rapidly, almost twice per second. What a fifteen-meter blaze is to a human being, for it must have been like the world collapsing. It is one of the 22 animals Cortolima has rescued since the start of the emergency, which has also broken the wildlife ecosystem.

Ocelots. Opossums. Iguanas. Bluebirds. Anteaters. Armadillos. Snakes. All these species have died burned by the flames, powerless before the voracious passage of the fire hurricanes. Daniela Guzmán is the Cortolima researcher who walks the region looking for animals to rescue and take to the entity’s specialized care center. “The impact is massive. Both the native forest and the water sources are affected. This will be a long, arduous job, lasting many years, to recover our ecosystem again,” she concluded. The ecosystem dies meter by meter. Just look up, in any direction, to notice the boilers. They put them out and they come back. They are increasingly numerous. Tolima is consuming itself, stained red on its horizon, and the efforts to counteract this, although powerful, seem short compared to the disaster’s scale.