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Do you know in what year the first epidemic that hit Colombia happened? What was that epidemic of? And, since then, what is the city that has suffered the most epidemics as time goes by?
Those were the questions that a curious and restless friend asked me, in the midst of the quarantine, and from that moment I did not have tranquility again until I began to investigate everywhere. There were nights when I woke up consulting history books, gigantic mamotretos, old chronicles, testimonies of travelers, stories of navigators.
That is why today I can tell you this: it is very likely that before the sixteenth century, to which the date that I am going to mention below belongs, other pests had already appeared in the territory of what would be our country. But this is the first of which there is confirmed and reliable news in historical records.
It was the leprosy epidemic that attacked Cartagena de Indias in 1550, 470 years ago. At that time the city was just seventeen years old.
It turns out that Cartagena was already becoming the main seaport of America, replacing Havana, for trade with Europe. Ships came from everywhere. Precisely in them, collective diseases traveled.
And, as if that were not enough, from Africa came ships loaded with black slaves, one of the greatest infamies that has been committed in the history of humanity.
Elefancia and walls
How gigantic would be the commercial activity in Cartagena five centuries ago that, in 1586, when just 36 years had passed since the ravages caused by leprosy, the Spanish empire had to start the construction of walls, castles and fortresses, to protect the city and their cellars from the attacks and looting of another dark plague: the pirates.
As a curious fact, I must record that the Cartagena people of that time called leprosy “elefancia”, because it deformed human skin to leave it like the leather of an elephant.
At that time there was a record of 1,500 infected people, more than half of the entire population.
This is where I must stop along the way to tell them that, according to other researchers that I have been able to consult, that was not really the first but the second plague registered in Colombia.
They maintain that 36 years earlier, in 1514, when Cartagena had not even been founded, a kind of swine fever fell on Darien, in the region that we know today as Urabá, between Antioquia, Chocó and Panama.
The plague in Urabá
Founded in 1510, Santa María la Antigua del Darién, located in the region we know today as Urabá, between Antioquia and Chocó, was not only the first population created by the Spanish in Colombia, but in the entire American mainland. The only ones who beat him are the island towns.
It does not exist today. It was sacked by new Colombian and foreign pirates, like those who came from Europe to appropriate relics and historical treasures. And nobody did anything to avoid it. Oh, corruption …
Now I go back and tell you that, around 1514, the plague of the pig attacked Santa María, causing the death of 700 inhabitants, who were no less than 70 percent of its population.
Muequetá of Bogotá
Colombia’s history is full of so many curiosities and extravagances that not even its own capital escapes them. Imagine that Bogotá was founded several times and with different names.
The last and final of these, which took place in a place that the indigenous called Muequetá, finally became a formal and legitimate baptism, on August 6, 1538, officiated by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada. They named it Our Lady of Hope, but a year later they changed it to Santa Fe.
Good. In that same year of the foundation, as if it were a heartbreaking irony of fate, the new village was crushed by its first epidemic: a flu plague that caused more than a hundred deaths. And 262 years later, when Independence was a little short, the same flu epidemic returned to fall on Bogotá.
Fearsome yellow fever
We were walking around when, in the year 1729, the first yellow fever outbreaks occurred that attacked not only in the countryside, but also in urban areas and in the hot areas of the country.
Once again, the plague began in Cartagena. A mosquito transmitted the infections, causing hemorrhages, even causing death to half of those infected. They called it that because the sting made people pale.
Researcher Roberto Franco relates that this was the first yellow fever epidemic in Colombia. It came and went. It hid and reappeared. Thus it lasted 183 years, no less, until 1912, when the last cases were presented.
And it was also the first time that the great Magdalena River, which runs through the country from south to north, served to bring misfortune. Hence, they have baptized it as “Magdalena fever”. It even reached regions as far inland as Ambalema, Honda, Guaduas, Girardot and Espinal.
It was also the first time that the Magdalena River, which runs through the country from south to north, served to bring misfortune. Hence they have baptized it as “Magdalena fever
The Cholera Times
More than a century passes during which Colombia is not spared from minor pests. With telling them that During this period, 22 different epidemics were detected in the city of Bogotá alone., including eleven smallpox.
In those we were walking when, in the year of 1849, Cartagena is again attacked by cholera. That was the time that Gabriel García Márquez collected in his novel Love in the Time of Cholera, in which the historical streets of Cartagena and an endless journey along the Magdalena River roam.
Shortly after the plague, José María Lisboa, a Portuguese journalist and navigator based in Brazil, made a trip through Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador and wrote a book in which he recounts the devastation that was experienced in the city.
(Also read: Despite openness, ‘no covid’ peoples will continue their extreme measures)
He says, for example, that he had the opportunity to visit the hospital that the Spanish government had built in the Caño de Loro hamlet, on the seashore, in the late seventeenth century.
That yellow building can still be seen today, from the sea, when one sails through the bay of Cartagena. It was a colonial leprocomio. And since then people keep saying “the lazaretto”.
The reconquest
Before going any further, I ask permission to turn back the crank of time and tell you what happened in 1815, when Cartagena had barely four years of declaring its independence.
It turns out that same year the city, in which there was 18,000 inhabitants, was attacked by a new cholera plague.
And in August it is also attacked by another dark plague: the army of the Spanish reconquest, commanded by Brigadier General Pablo Morillo. It is not known which of the two pests was worse.
The cartageneros who did not die sick died of shooting or starvation, because the invaders did not allow food.
People did not surrender either to the plague or to the Spanish. So it was that since then they called it ‘Heroic City’.
Six months later, at the end of 1815, the siege and the epidemic ended. They came together and they went together.
And the city only had 8,000 people left. It had lost, in just five months, more than half of its inhabitants.
The black plague arrives
We are already in the twentieth century. Means of transportation and travel between populations are progressing and, therefore, epidemics are spreading faster.
A new disease surprised the Colombian Caribbean in 1913. It caused damage to the eyes, lungs, and sexual nodes, leading to death. It was the bubonic plague, which people identified as “black plague.”
A careful investigation directed by the historian Jorge Márquez Valderrama, from the National University of Bogotá, could establish that the first cases were registered in various populations of the Atlantic: Usiacurí, Isabel López, Baranoa. From there it jumped to Santa Marta and Aracataca. And from there, to Cartagena and Calamar, in Bolívar.
Spanish flu
And that’s how we got to the sadly famous Spanish flu of 1918. It ravaged Colombia. It entered through the ports of Santa Marta and Cartagena, but, to the amazement of the entire country, it caused its worst damage in an unsuspected region: the Boyacá Mountains, so far from the sea.
A very careful investigation of the Museum of the History of Medicine, of Tunja, established that the virus reached them by the road that came from Bogotá.
It was also shown that in proportion to its size and population, Boyacá was the most affected place in Colombia, since 2,800 people died in a region that had 58,600 inhabitants. Imagine: five percent of the total.
Scientists concluded that this tragedy was possible due to the devastating effects caused by the cold and the mountainous heights of Boyacá, more than 2,000 meters above sea level.
Epilogue
And so we come to today and the coronavirus. I do not want to end without mentioning other epidemics that have hit Colombia.
Some of them may still be remembered by older readers, because they are the most recent plagues, which occurred in the twentieth century and so far in the twenty-first.
I have been able to trace among them the following: the 1958 Asian flu, the Hong Kong flu in 1968, the Ebola that broke out in 1976 and reappeared in 2018.
They follow the AIDS of 1981, the respiratory syndrome of 2002, the avian flu of 2003 and the new swine flu of 2009.
(You may also be interested: The 8 deadliest animals in Colombia: the first place will surprise you)
I cannot say goodbye to you without mentioning the worst epidemic that is destroying this country, the one that attacks not only our body but all the defenses of our soul, the one that infected justice, the fearful plague that ends what put and for which we have not wanted or could find a vaccine or remedy.
I am referring, naturally, to corruption.
JUAN GOSSAIN
Special for TIME
