Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

  The drug lords of Medellín, these instant millionaires, are known in Colombia as “the magic ones.” Cocaine is seen, in Medellín, as a North American problem. The traffic grows out of demand in the United States.

  And the traffickers have been wise to spend large amounts of their money on public-works programs. The majority of the big-time soccer teams in soccer-mad Colombia are said to be owned by drug lords who can afford astronomical salaries for the best players.

  Traffickers have subsidized schools, bought soccer fields for children, built parks, and given away food to the poor. They have organized programs like “Medellín Without Slums” and built small villages of homes with plumbing for people who once lived in cardboard shacks. Carlos Lehder funded a fire department for his hometown and renovated major buildings.

  Now, a few weeks before the start of his trial in the U.S., poor people all over Armenia and Medellín were praying for him at candle-lit vigils.

  So a number of Colombians had reason to dislike North Americans, and we might expect some hostility. But I had done a press conference in Quito two nights before, and felt that gangs of sicarios, paid assassins, would be the most immediate threat. The assassins, according to a story in Rolling Stone by Howard Kohn, are actively recruited between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. They go to one of seventeen different schools, where they sit through lectures, run obstacle courses, and learn to shoot during marathon sessions on the firing range.

  Solely for training purposes, Kohn states, a prospective assassin must engage in a “murder of proof.” Usually, an innocent stranger is selected, unless the trainers feel that a more difficult test is needed, in which case the victim may be a neighbor or a relative. Becoming a certified sicario “depends on shooting the unsuspecting person in a public place with witnesses and at point-blank range, eyes meeting eyes.”

  The assassins are sometimes organized into gangs like the Terminators, who stitch their victims up with bullets in the shape of a “T.” The Black Flag gang leaves little black flags in the bullet holes. I don’t know what the Devils, Rambos, Crazies, or Cockroaches do.

  I did know that, a week before the start of Carlos Lehder’s trial in the United States, it was a bad time for an American citizen to be passing through Medellín.

  * * *

  WE RAN down a double highway toward some modest mirrored skyscrapers, and the city of Medellín. There was time to notice a haze of pollution in the city which was set in a basin below steep slopes. Medellín is just under a mile high, a temperate but frenetic city where flowers bloom in green parks, and men in expensive suits dine in elegant-looking restaurants.

  We entered the city in an industrial section and stopped for diesel. Luis stood close by, watching everything, his suitcase in hand.

  I asked Santiago if this was a dangerous city.

  No, no. Not so bad. About like Lima or Caracas. Still, it wasn’t a place you wanted to go to alone. It was best to have Colombian friends along.

  You mean, I suggested, as guides. Like somebody might want a guide to Disneyland. Because of all the wonders?

  Santiago smiled, all goodwill and charm.

  I saw a newsstand across the street and decided to go buy a paper.

  “Teem!” It was Luis.

  “I’m going for a newspaper.”

  “No.”

  THE STREETS OF MEDELLÍN wound through a factory district alive with bustling workers, all of whom turned to regard the truck with what Garry took to be hungry eyes. He felt he was in a den of thieves.

  “Taking the truck down this street,” Garry said, “is like taking a naked woman through death row.”

  “The truck’s filthy dirty.”

  “It’s like taking a filthy-dirty naked woman through death row.”

  Hard-looking men did seem to be staring at the Sierra with a kind of lust in their eyes.

  ON OUR WAY out of town, we passed an area of recent mud slides. Everything on all sides was green and fragrant, except for a half-mile-wide swath, like an avalanche chute, where the earth was naked. In that half-mile section of slope, rain had loosened the earth, and its face had melted off the bone. There were poor homes—made of cardboard and tin and tar paper—to either side of the rock-and-gravel scar.

  I saw a mound of dirt several feet high and a mile long where the debris from the mud slide had been plowed off of the Pan-American Highway. I could see bits of cardboard and tin and tar paper in the dry red dirt. It made me think of those dogs, howling over the places where their owners had been buried.

  WE WERE DOING SOME HARD DRIVING and the car that belonged to the president of Col Motors was not faring well. It had suffered two flat tires, and its brakes were fried. Santiago was using the emergency brake. Happily, we were out of the mountains, running through the northern rice-growing flatland that was veined with rivers, swollen red with the jungle mud that had been washed down the hillsides in the recent rains.

  It was pleasant to follow Santiago and not have to ask directions in my bad Spanish. Because I didn’t have to concentrate, I could observe, more closely, the delightful intricacies of the South American direction dance. It often involves making a quarter turn and extending the arm straight out from the shoulder, a stiff arm. Sometimes the wrist is held limp and the hand is flicked upward. This is a motion a person might make shooing flies off a cake on a table. It means, go straight. Another less common but more ebullient gesture is the simple basketball hook shot which is meant to take you around a corner and send you speeding down a straightaway.

  Because Santiago was no fool and used the triangulation method of asking directions, we stopped many times and were treated to a dozen different styles.

  Garry, Joe, and I began awarding points and arguing the merits of various performers.

  “Oh, man, I’m telling you, that was a 9.6.”

  “Naw. 9.1, maybe. I thought he was a little slow on the stiff arm.”

  “Yeah, but did you see his shoofly? Absolutely superb shoofly. Followed by a double-hook shot. Double hook, man. 9.6 for sure.”

  THE PRESIDENT of Col Motors’s car was running on one patched tire, and was now badly out of alignment. It was night, along a rural stretch of the lush flatlands, and Santiago hit a pothole that popped off a hubcap. He stopped to retrieve the hubcap that belonged to his boss, and suddenly out of the darkness, a huge screaming vehicle with one dim light in front shot past us at about eighty miles an hour, narrowly missing Santiago, who all but dove into the ditch. There was a man sitting atop some kind of strange frame, about ten feet in the air, and he was howling drunkenly.

  “What the hell was that monster?” I wanted to know.

  “Dune buggy from hell,” Garry said.

  “Looked like something out of The Road Warrior. Monster roaring out of the night with one bad eye. Somebody up there screaming curses.”

  “It was just a frame and a steering wheel up there.”

  “Why,” I wondered, “would something like that exist?”

  “It looked like a truck,” Garry said. “The guy must have stripped it. No cab, no box, just an engine and a frame.”

  Santiago was standing in the middle of the road sadly regarding the hubcap that belonged to the president of Col Motors. It had been squashed flat by the dune buggy from hell.

  WE SLEPT THAT NIGHT in Sincelejo, and made Cartagena the next afternoon. It was an easy day, with a mere half dozen military checkpoints, and two moving stops, only one of which required a gun at my neck.

  Garry and I checked into a beachfront hotel on the Caribbean. There were telephones that actually worked in the rooms, real air-conditioning, and an in-room bar. We were sitting on the balcony of my room, looking out at the sea, and drinking a beer. We had one business day to complete the paperwork necessary to ship the truck to Panama.

  “Nothing,” I said, “can go wrong now.”

  DOCUMENT

  HELL

  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

  October 9–12, 1987

/>   I CANNOT PRODUCE a list, an orderly list, of the things one must do to load a one-ton four-wheel-drive pickup truck onto a containerized cargo ship out of Cartagena. The suffocating blizzard of paper generated in the process, when finally assembled, stacks up like the manuscript pages of War and Peace. It takes two or more people to cart the paper around, and all the documents must be allowed to visit many different buildings in all areas of the city.

  The boat was leaving sometime in the evening or early morning hours. It was Friday, October 9, and we had one business day—until five o’clock—to write War and Peace. If we failed, it would be a week or more before we could book passage on an appropriate ship. It was a make-or-break day.

  Luis and Santiago met us at the hotel in the battered Chevy. They introduced us to a tall clever-looking man, Jaime López, who had some experience in expediting these matters. Jaime, I saw with dismay, was not at all sure we could complete the work in one day, and especially not on this day. The coming Monday, October 12, was a national holiday, Discovery of America Day, and Colombians were looking forward to a three-day weekend. Latin Americans are little different from North Americans in such a situation. Not a lot of work gets done on Friday afternoon. People were looking forward to family outings, parties, binges at the disco.

  My stomach felt fluttery, a sensation symptomatic of incipient Zippy’s.

  THE SHIPPING AGENT took our money and told us that our ship was called the Stella Lykes. He said they did not have twenty-four-foot containers: if our truck was twenty-one feet long, we’d have to shell out for a forty-footer. We paid cash, and got a few hundred receipts for our money. The shipping agent said we’d have to come back to this downtown office later with certain official forms obtainable only at the port.

  There was a parking lot at the port where a crowd of people saw fit to surround the Sierra and the Chevy. Luis looked at them and they went away. A black man with a crutch and a withered left leg wandered into the sudden void and said he’d watch the car for us. His upper arms were huge. He said his name was Danny and that he had been in twenty-seven countries and he was wondering whether we’d like to buy any cocaine.

  A few of us stayed by the truck until we were cleared to drive it into the port area. We gave Danny $5 to watch the Chevy. In point of fact, we had all noticed that Danny’s crutch would be useful for wreaking havoc upon automobiles owned by penny-pinchers. It was the president’s Chevy and, for that reason, we wanted Danny to like us. The car had suffered enough.

  After an interminable conversation with a number of friendly but uninformed officials, it became clear that we couldn’t put the truck in the cargo container and obtain the documents we needed to give to the shipping agent until we secured yet another set of documents at the customs office, which was not at the port but conveniently located a mile away.

  The customs office looked like a junior college in Bakersfield and a man wearing muted-green slacks and a bright-green shirt came out to examine the truck. He looked like the late comedian Andy Kaufman: he had that same expression of eager bewilderment. It was, he said, impossible to examine the truck because it was raining. Did we have an umbrella? No? This is true? He seemed to be staggered by the information. He appealed to Jaime López: these men had driven the length of South America without an umbrella? Yes. But it was unthinkable!

  A compromise was reached. Kaufman would ride down to the port, where a soldier could examine the truck in the rain and report to him, and then we could all ride back to the customs building and sign the proper documents.

  Back at the port a tall soldier in a crisply pressed uniform opened the camper shell and reeled back, assaulted by the putrescent odor of rotting organic substances and the reek of diesel. This was, by far, the worst the truck had ever smelled. Everything had been baking in the tropical sun. Garry and I were very proud.

  The fastidious soldier fingered an extra pair of shoes I had—they were covered over in what must have seemed a strange, vaguely strawberry-colored crust—then took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his hands.

  He could, it seemed, sign one of the necessary documents himself if Andy Kaufman cosigned.

  Luis stayed with the truck. Santiago, Jaime López, Garry, and I piled into the Chevy and drove back to the customs office. Kaufman noticed that Santiago was drifting into intersections at stoplights because he was using the hand brake to stop.

  “Don’t you have any brakes?” he asked.

  “No,” Santiago said, “I don’t.”

  Once inside the customs building, we were subjected to a cruel psychology experiment involving a maze of offices. A man sitting behind a desk and wearing a big gold chain around his neck looked at the carnet, stamped it, and gave it back. In an office fifty feet down the hall, a large lady in a red skirt with tightly curled black hair put another stamp on top of the stamp the man with the gold chain awarded us. We visited five more offices where we secured various stamps or where previous stamps were initialed. After an official initialed a preexisting stamp, he usually stamped it himself, bam, for good measure.

  The group of us had scattered throughout the maze, working independently but for the same goal. Jaime López appeared in the lobby, looking disproportionately forlorn. He motioned us back through a maze of corridors into a corner office where Andy Kaufman sat behind a large empty desk, looking morose in his eagerly bewildered way.

  The carnet was written in French and though he didn’t speak the language himself, he knew what information went where. All except for item number twelve. He didn’t know what it said and couldn’t sign the document.

  The desk was covered with a glass plate, and under the glass was a large picture of Jesus, His Sacred Heart glowing in His chest. Garry looked at the picture. It was huge, about twice the size of a record album.

  Garry explained, through Jaime López, that he was from Canada and that French was a national language there, taught in all the schools.

  “Ahh, well then you could …”

  “Of course.”

  Garry can’t read a lick of French. He stared down at the picture of Jesus, took a deep breath, and lied. “Item twelve is the number of your badge.”

  And so, with another flourish of the pen, we had cleared customs. Back at the port Danny offered us the services of attractive women who might help us enjoy the use of illegal drugs, and we gave him $5 to watch the car. There was, it seemed, the need for another search by another soldier. Buffeted by an unspeakable stench, he motioned for me to close the camper shell, hurry up, right now. Another document was signed.

  Garry could now drive the truck into the container, which was a large rust-colored metal box with iron hooks protruding out of the floor to secure the load. We had to fold back the wire side mirrors to fit the truck into the container, and it was necessary to position the vehicle in the middle of the box, for balance. We couldn’t however, lock the container until we had certain other necessary documents. Santiago smiled at the soldier, put an arm around his shoulders, and walked him a little way down one of the piers. There seemed to be an exchange made, hands touching hands. They came back laughing together and the soldier said that, for us, he would lock the container. Not only that, he’d personally stand guard over it until we came back.

  Then we were speeding through the crowded streets of Cartagena, on our way to collect documents from the immigration service, when Santiago had to pull up hard on the emergency brake. We slid halfway out into a street where a parade was in progress. Attractive young women in abbreviated black dresses were doing hoochi-coo dances in the back seats of old Chevy convertibles. We backed out of the festivities and waited. It was maddening: how many 1966 Chevys could there be in Cartagena?

  “What did you say to that soldier back at the port?” I asked Santiago. “How did you get him to do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Get him to watch the truck?”

  “He’s my cousin,” Santiago said.

  WE WERE PARKED next to the Fortre
ss of San Felipe. It had thick brick walls that sloped inward as they got higher. There were gun ports scattered over the great expanse of leaning brick that rose perhaps forty feet above us. It was a historic old fort, built around 1600, and, from my position at the bottom, it seemed impossible that any number of men, armed only with muskets, could overrun these massive and intimidating fortifications.

  The central part of Cartagena itself, the old city, was surrounded by walls about ten feet high and fifteen feet thick. The walls were built by the Spanish between the years 1634 and 1735. There were two more forts defending the city and one that guarded the sea approach.

  Cartagena was in need of walls because it was a collection point for all of the gold and silver the Spanish conquistadores collected from the conquered Aztecs, the Incas, the remnant Maya. Gold was shipped out of Peru and taken north up the Pacific coast to Panama, where it was ferried across the narrowest part of the isthmus by man and mule. It was then collected at a port on the eastern coast of Panama, Portobelo, and shipped down to Cartagena, where it was stored, sometimes for as long as a year, until a flotilla of cargo-carrying galleons and warships could be assembled to take the treasures back to Spain.

  The amount of gold that the Spaniards took out of Peru alone is staggering: billions of dollars worth of it. The Incas used gold ornamentally. There were hammered golden plates representing the sun, which was sacred to the Incas. There were whole temples containing ornamental gardens made of gold: golden stalks of corn, for instance. Piles of golden potatoes.

  All these riches poured into Cartagena, and the city was a tempting target for privateers, as the English pirates preferred to call themselves. They were only doing their patriotic duty, harassing Spain in the interest of England. Sir Francis Drake and 1,300 men sacked the city in 1586. A Frenchman, Baron de Pointis, took Cartagena with 10,000 men in 1697. In 1741, the great walls were in place, the fortifications strengthened and improved. An English force of 27,000 men laid seige to the city for fifty-six days but were finally turned back.