Hold the Enlightenment

by Tim Cahill

  Pelton and I conferred by phone and picked Colombia. With a suddenly booming kidnapping business; a bloody, forty-year-long civil war; two major violent leftist guerrilla factions, and even more violent rightist paramilitary groups; a military often accused of human-rights violations, not to mention the world’s most active drug trade, this midsized Andean nation spans South America from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It was, hands down, the most dangerous destination we could have chosen in the Western Hemisphere. Our plan, as Pelton described it, was simple: we’d fly down to the capital city of Bogotá, and observe some scheduled military “operations” designed to show outside journalists that the army wasn’t really the corrupt band of human-rights abusers everyone thought it was, then shake our hosts, and slip off into the bush to interview some seriously heinous guerrillas, the kind of “driven, resolute” people who, as Pelton describes in his newly released autobiography, The Adventurist, “burn fiercely, but briefly.” If all went well, he told me, he should get some excellent footage for an upcoming Dangerous Places episode, and I’d be back fishing at my Montana summer cabin in under two weeks.

  As Pelton worked out the details, I did some research of my own, boring stuff which I always find scintillating when my life is at stake. A few months earlier, I discovered, the U.S. State Department had issued an advisory that said while “U.S. citizens are warned against travel to Colombia at any time,” recent events presented “additional opportunities for criminal and terrorist elements to take action against U.S. interests.” The risk of being kidnapped in Colombia, the report said, was now “greater than in any other country in the world,” with left-wing guerrillas accounting for most of the action and common criminals the rest, although the criminals sometimes made a quick buck wholesaling their richest hostages to the guerrillas.

  I also learned that, as homicide was now the leading cause of death for Colombians above the age of ten, an antiviolence children’s movement had sprung up. A ten-year-old leader of the movement had recently appeared on television pleading for an end to the violence. Several days later, three men carrying grenades and pistols dragged the fourth grader off his school bus and spirited him away, apparently as a warning to any other loudmouthed children with similar ideas. A few days later, a TV and radio satirist described as the country’s most beloved humorist was brutally murdered when gunmen on motorcycles machine-gunned his Jeep Cherokee.

  Robert Pelton fired off a number of e-mails to me describing many of these same events. The one he headed “Bring your bank statement” concerned the leftist Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC, the largest leftist insurgency in the Americas. One of their field marshals, a man whose nom de guerre is Mono Jojoy (pronounced moan-oh ho-hoy), had announced that FARC would begin kidnapping millionaires, a necessary step, he said, to counter government aggression fueled by its taxes on multinational organizations and “Yankee imperialism.”

  Research suggested that it was the worst possible time to go to Colombia, and Pelton was greatly encouraged. “Our timing,” he e-mailed me, “is impeccable.” You never knew what was going to happen, he continued, but there was every indication that our visit to Colombia would be exceedingly eventful. There would be five of us traveling together. “Freak-outs,” he warned—facetiously, I think—“will be sold to the highest bidder.”

  On a flight to Los Angeles, where I would meet Pelton for the first time, I finished thumbing through The Adventurist. Pelton has stated that he considers himself “only a passable writer,” and some reviewers have savaged him, though other readers, and I am one, have found the book perversely fascinating, despite the occasional purple extravagance in what is otherwise a pretty straightforward work.

  There are gloomy descriptions of his bleak childhood on the plains of Alberta. After his parents’ divorce, at the age of ten, he was sent to St. John’s Cathedral Boys’ School in southern Manitoba, the youngest kid in what was then known as “the toughest boys’ school in North America.” It was a place where kids ran fifty-mile snowshoe marathons, and paddled huge freight canoes on one-thousand-mile journeys that followed the historic routes of French fur trappers. (Twelve boys and one teacher drowned on one such escapade when their canoe capsized in the frigid waters of Lake Timmisskiming.)

  Later, when his mother and her new husband decided it was time for Pelton to leave the nest, he bought a $175 Nash Rambler and lived out of the car, picking fruit to survive. He was sixteen. There are also testimonies to the lessons Pelton picked up while clawing his way to the top of the dog-eat-dog world of setting up audiovisual presentations for corporate conferences. At the pivotal moment when he decides, while standing at his father’s snow-swept grave, that he’s destined for something more than the AV business, he writes, in one of the most unfortunate passages in the book, that “It was time to live like the wind and die like thunder.”

  Still, the most dramatic parts of The Adventurist are those in which he details his success with his current enterprise, passages made all the more compelling by the fact that they’re wholly confirmable by other sources. In the years since the minor AV tycoon cashed out of slide shows and used the proceeds to buy the old Fielding Guides out of bankruptcy, Pelton has transformed a moribund guidebook company into an entire travel and danger-themed conglomerate, selling books, producing the Discovery Channel’s highest-rated program, and hawking World’s Most Dangerous Places hats, T-shirts, coffee mugs, and stickers, all of which are festooned with the logo of a laughing skull—“Mr. DP”—that Pelton designed himself.

  I first met Pelton at the Los Angeles airport, about a thirty-minute drive from his house high on the headlands over the Pacific Ocean, where he lived with Linda, his wife of twenty-five years, who told me it was a waste of time worrying about Robert on his trips: he always comes back. Pelton’s stunning sixteen-year-old twin daughters were both athletes: one an accomplished horsewoman, the other an avid surfer. He doted on them. He was a big man, six-foot-four, with large hands and feet, and a prominent beak of a nose, all of which, combined with a pair of piercing gray eyes, gave him the look of a slightly goofy eagle. He could, if he wanted, be intimidating, which is how I imagine lines such as “die like thunder” got by any number of editors. (“I’m not going to tell him. You tell him.”)

  He doesn’t always escape unscathed in all situations, however. I had just seen Pelton admonished by a CNN anchor in an appearance on that station an hour previous. UN personnel had recently been kidnapped in Sierra Leone and the anchor asked: “Is Sierra Leone a dangerous country?”

  “Yes,” Pelton said, “especially if you’re a member of the UN.”

  “It’s not funny,” the anchor replied, and indeed it wasn’t, though the question itself was moronically laughable, and Pelton, as I was to discover, doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

  His house had been built in the fifties, a kind of tract home that Pelton and Linda had transformed into a showcase on the sea. Pelton, like me, loved to cook—Italian food was a specialty—and had designed the kitchen himself.

  We were going to Colombia tomorrow, which, if you believed the State Department, and I did, was the most dangerous country in the Western Hemisphere. The last time I’d been there, doing work for a multinational corporation, I’d been provided the services of a twenty-four-hour, Uzi-toting bodyguard.

  Pelton and I spent our last evening in the States arguing recipes.

  Soon enough, we were in Colombia.

  Of course, Pelton realized that if we had any hope of experiencing genuine, bloodcurdling terror, we were going to need to break free of the regimented itinerary the army and national police had prepared for us, and to do that, we were going to need to get our hosts to trust us. For the week before we arrived, Pelton’s contact in Colombia—Steve Salisbury, a freelance correspondent for Semana, the Colombian weekly magazine, as well as several newspapers in the United States—had been getting the ball rolling in this direction. And so on just our first full day in the country, the three of us, plus ph
otographer Rob Howard, and Pelton’s cameraman, an ex–special forces operative, Rob Krott, found ourselves inside the wood-paneled office of General Fernando Tapias, who is something like the Colin Powell of Colombia. The general was an articulate, avuncular man who said that the parallels which had been noted between the current situation in Colombia and the one in Vietnam circa 1962 were all wrong. “People assume U.S. soldiers are involved in these operations,” said the general, as Krott filmed the scene with one of Pelton’s video cameras. “There are just two hundred U.S. military advisors here, and none engage in operations. Still, whenever the guerrillas lose a battle, they always claim ‘it was against American troops.’ ”

  In sum, the general said, the army was fighting a leftist insurgency. The strongest group was FARC, with as many as seventeen thousand fighters. There were two other major leftist groups. At the other extreme were the “illegal self-defense groups,” rightist paramilitaries, opponents of the leftists, the strongest of which was called the AUC and headed by a man named Carlos Castaño. The general did not say that the army was often accused of turning a blind eye to massacres (of suspected leftists) committed by the paramilitaries. He did say that since both the Medellín and Cali cartels had been smashed, “narco-guerrillas” had begun taking a large piece of the cocaine and heroin trade, both from peasants who grew the stuff and the dealers who sold it abroad.

  The hard reality, the general said, “is that narcotics trafficking supports these outlaw groups. It is no longer about ideology. In the 1980s, when we captured [FARC rebels] they carried books about Marx or Lenin. Now they have account books and spreadsheets.”

  The general was proud of the fact that numerous opinion polls gave the army a 69 percent approval rate. Only 6 percent supported FARC. As we left, we were given a brochure entitled “Guerrillas and Illegal Self-Defense Groups Guilty of Genocide.” It said both rebels and paramilitaries “are systematically assassinating thousands of Colombians, not as a result of their race, religion or political beliefs, but in order to control the regions where illegal drugs are being harvested … to control a business that has represented over 3.6 billion dollars over the past eight years.”

  The brochure listed the names of 910 civilians killed by guerrillas in 1999, with 40.2 percent of the deaths attributed to FARC. Paramilitary groups had killed 743. The lists were horrifying, as were ghastly, full-color photos of members of the army who had been tortured and killed. FARC guerrillas, for instance, had captured and decapitated two soldiers, brothers as it turned out. Their heads were boxed up and sent to their mother. The severed heads were pictured right there on page three, followed by photos of dead men with their eyes gouged out or their skulls crushed.

  One soldier—this photo has disturbed my sleep ever since—had had his face sliced off. “These are the guys,” Pelton said, referring to the face-slicers, “we really ought to be talking to.”

  But first we had to let the national police fly us up to the northern town of Cúcuta and watch them blow the shit out of some coca leaves.

  Since the guerrillas and paramilitaries supported themselves with “taxing” the drug trade, the government had been devoting more and more resources to obliterating coca bushes, drug labs, and harvesting sheds. Cúcuta was at the center of one of the main areas for these efforts. Just weeks before, fifty-one people had been massacred in the two towns directly to the north and west, apparently by paramilitaries and/or rebels trying to eliminate competition for their own growers and distributors, and Cúcuta itself had been the site of frequent bombings.

  Our escort, Captain Fernando Buitrago of the police, had secured us rooms in a hotel chosen primarily for its proximity to the local police station. “Do not open your door to anyone,” he instructed as we checked in. “Call me if someone knocks. I can tell, my friends, you are not safe here.” I glanced over and saw Pelton was filling out Rob Howard’s registration card.

  Name: Howard the Duck

  Occupation: Rich American

  Reason for visit: Drug Bust

  The next day we were dropped by helicopter, along with thirty other journalists, on a hillside about thirty minutes away. Down below, waist-high coca bushes stretched to the horizon. There was also a little three-walled shack with a thatched roof, some plastic bags, a bin full of silver-white coca leaves, and a few barrels of gasoline. Presently, a plane flew over, there was a loud explosion, and the drug lab exploded in picturesque billows of black flame.

  Pelton was filming all this with a digital camera about the size of a box of Cracker Jacks.

  “Good stuff?” I asked.

  “Dog-and-pony show,” he muttered.

  The next day the army flew us down to Putumayo, the largest coca-growing area on earth. We were ushered into a prefabricated, tentlike building surrounded by razor wire and sandbags (Pelton began referring to it as “the circus tent”), where a Major Muriel laid out the situation for us in an interminable Power Point presentation, complete with charts, maps, graphs, and many, many words on the army’s commitment to human rights. Muriel made a big point of telling us that the country’s rivers had become “ribbons of commerce in drugs and arms,” at which time we were led to a large pavilion overlooking one of the rivers. A young soldier stood at a lectern, reading from a script. “A narcotics lab is located across the river,” he announced, and a helicopter swept out of the sky, strafing some trees on the far bank, while, on the pavilion’s sound system, Kool and the Gang implored listeners to “move your feet to the rhythm of the beat.” Two open boats containing a dozen soldiers each came roaring out of the fog and blasted the same broken trees with 50-caliber shells. The boats landed, soldiers poured into the forest, there were the sounds of light-arms fire, and then silence, except for the disco.

  “The drug lab is neutralized,” the young soldier announced, and then the army flew us back to Bogotá.

  I knew, of course, that the whole thing had been one giant publicity stunt. But, to be honest, I was also feeling relieved that I’d survived another day with my face still attached to my skull. We’d been in Colombia for almost a week and all we’d done was interview some generals and attend “media events.” Crap you see on television every day.

  Pelton apologized for the timid nature of our research so far. In the coming days, he promised, we’d find danger if it killed us.

  …

  The next day, there was another one of those hideous crimes that happen with such appalling frequency in Colombia. In the rural town of Chiquinquira, Mrs. Elvia Cortés, a fifty-three-year-old dairy farmer whose son was a banker, had been fitted with an explosive necklace made from PVC pipe. Eyewitnesses heard Mrs. Cortés yelling, “We’ve paid and paid and paid.” A male voice replied: “You won’t pay? We’ll see about that.” Mrs. Cortés was seen coming out of her house wearing the bomb. Police were called and, along with an army explosives expert, worked for five hours trying to defuse it. The media were there, filming the whole thing: the woman’s terror-stricken face, the policeman’s caution, his attempts to calm her. No luck. The bomb exploded, killing the woman and the cop. FARC was immediately fingered for the atrocity (though the authorities would later admit that they couldn’t be sure about that). At any rate, occurring as it did on the day after Mother’s Day, the media began calling it the “mother bomb.”

  We were among the first people in the country to hear about the mother bomb, because we were at police headquarters in Bogotá listening in on 911 when it happened. The police, finally having tired of Pelton’s demands for more “authenticity,” were letting us spend the night with them and ride along on the call of our choice. At about ten that night, we rode with detectives who took down a car theft ring. One officer had trouble with a cranky stick shift on his car and I found myself driving it back to the station. The car jackers had been armed, but the cops were fast and efficient and no shots were fired. Pelton asked if I thought the experience was an “adventure.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “I usually ride in the back of
police cars.”

  Later that night, about 3 A.M., we accompanied police raiding a house where urban militiamen, thought to be affiliated with FARC, were holed up in an apartment in northwestern Bogotá. In no time, we were speeding down unpaved roads into the heart of the barrio and scurrying through a muddy alleyway to a narrow street of two-story poured-concrete houses. One policeman—I couldn’t believe this—knocked politely on the door of the suspected stronghold.

  Pelton, in one of those little bits of advice to be found scattered throughout The World’s Most Dangerous Places, had suggested I take a position behind the front wheel of any car parked on the street, where I’d be protected from bullets by the engine block. There were, of course, no cars parked on the street.

  But I had a couple police in front of me, a couple behind, and they were going to have to serve as engine blocks. All of us were standing up against the wall, under the balcony of the house, to minimize the chances of anyone getting a clean shot at us. All of us, that is, except for Pelton, who was standing out in a muddy field just across the street, filming the whole thing with his tiny Cracker Jack–box camera.

  Suddenly, the door swung open, the police swarmed in and came face-to-face with … one rather stout woman, two small children, and a fit-looking young man in his underwear. After some rummaging, the police also unearthed a bunch of unfired .38-caliber bullets and a few military-style backpacks and ski masks, but there was no denying: Pelton and I had been foiled again.

  Such was the twisted state of our little waiting-for-guerrillas routine that we now started arguing about who’d been acting more irresponsibly back there. I told Pelton that I thought a field thirty yards from the front window of the house wasn’t exactly the best place to stand when you’re expecting a firefight. He countered that urban militiamen weren’t likely to have rifles—“too conspicuous”—and he was out of pistol range, while the insurgents could have easily dropped a grenade on our heads.