Darien Gap I: Monteria and the AUC

“Open your eyes, man!”

The ferocity of tone more than the words themselves startled me awake, but I could not open my eyes. My lungs were locked, body frozen, and something pressed into my gut. The consuming panic for air and vision was compounded by the intimidation of an unseen commander whose directions I could not follow.

I did not surrender to the panic. From deep inside the darkness I told myself this was just a rebooting error, that I had awoken before my brain had the time to release my muscles back to voluntary control, and that even militants were unlikely to do violence to the unconscious.

The checkpoint, the barking sergeant with the rifle muzzle poking my gut, everything I imagined while my lungs and eyelids stood locked and shuttered, was all wrong. When my eyes finally opened the van was still moving. No one was looking in my direction, but forward. The other passengers were wide awake with expressions ranging from anger to fear.

Another voice, less forceful but with grave clarity, said “It’s ok if you need some rest. Pull over, take a nap if you need to. But don’t risk our lives if you are too tired to drive.”

Sensible advice. There were enough dangers to worry about in Cordoba without your driver falling asleep at the wheel. The driver sounded defensive, though his response was unintelligible. He stopped at the next village and we took a coffee break at a thatch-roofed store.

No one was in the mood for talking. We drank coffee from tiny plastic cups and took turns eyeing the driver as he drank one, then another of the sickly sweet caffeinated shots, gauging for signs that he’d be able to get us to Monteria without another nap.

I looked around at the sullen group for clues as to who they were and where they were going. If they were rich they’d have driven, if poor, they'd have saved a few dollars and taken the much slower bus service. That was all I came up with, that my fellow passengers were likely of middle income, a decidedly narrower band than back home. Beyond that I drew blanks. A few of them regarded me with similar questions on their faces. What was this foreigner doing on a mini van to Monteria? A plump woman in her late forties took meditative bites from her arepa as she stared at the notebook I had taken from my bag. “Well,” I imagined her eyes said, “hope this one is not a journalist.”

Me too. I hoped that my habit for reading the papers, talking to strangers, and suspicious scribbles in a little black book did not qualify me for the country's third most dangerous profession. Braver men than I were doing the job. The reports coming out of Monteria--daylight grenade attacks, assassinations reminiscent of the worst cartel days, thousands of displaced people flowing from upturned villages into the regional capital--illustrated trends running counter to the rest of the country.

Colombia on the whole has experienced a dramatic reduction in murder rates over the past eight years, though on the ranching plains of northwest Colombia, violence was again on the rise. New cartels were flourishing, the papers said, and were responsible for the cocaine shipments flowing through the porous Venezuelan border and on as far east as the African coast to dodge American surveillance on traditional routes through the Pacific and Caribbean. Of course by the time drug strategies reach the papers they are are likely obsolete, but they hadn't hit foreign wires as of yet. While still in Barranquilla, I typed a few lines to this effect to a friend and Washington editor. He asked me if I thought I could write these things up in a dispatch and offered to introduce me to a colleague at the New Republic.

Sure, I said, I’d look into it. Cordoba was unavoidable on my way through to the Panamanian border. I was excited about the opportunity to write for a real publication, flattered that my second hand observations might be worthy of a dispatch. That was over a month ago. Part of the reason I had put off leaving Barranquilla for so long, Rosa’s fish stew had set back my departure another week, was that my stomach churned every time I thought about nosing around a lawless drug town asking questions about the men who make sport out of threatening journalists, trade unionists, and any politician not already on the payroll.

And for what purpose, to reprint in English that a new crop of cartels have filled the vacuum left by the decimation of the FARC and the disbanded paramilitary groups, whose rank and file have been absorbed into the emergent criminal networks? To say, look here, there is still a Colombian cocaine trade?

My fears mixed with the dissonance from an earlier conversation.

“You can do better than that William,” Maria said from our balcony table safe from the flower sellers and the touts down on the plaza San Diego. “All the world hears about is the drugs and violence here. There are so many other stories you can tell about Colombia.”

So said the young doctor from Bogota whom I had met in line on the cobbled streets of Cartagena while waiting to hear Martin Amis tell me I was interested in the wrong revolution. (If that’s so, Martin, why did your arguments wither against the residual Catholicism of this wealthy daughter of the capital?)

She was right, people want to hear about drugs. By the time I hit fields of Cordoba, the question was already settled. This was not an ethical stand, rather, I had waited too long to conduct any worthwhile investigation. I was down to three days left on my visa, the last week lingering in Barranquilla had killed the possibility of any serious reporting on the way through to the border.

Even if I convinced myself in time that I was eschewing professional opportunity for some nascent personal code, this was also the latest in a series of missed chances, failures with a chronology that traced a line back along the geography of my route home. Of course it was an inescapable coincidence that the route also happened to course from the country of primary cocaine production to the land of consumption and all the trans-shipment points along the way and that anyone with eyes and ears and a knack for economics sees the effects of supply and demand and the violent forms of competition that accompany any lucrative and addictive product on the black market. I had a feeling that no matter how many times I played professor at the party with my grating little dicho "No hay produccion sin consumidores" (There is no production without consumers) there was no escaping the story of drugs on the land and sea between Colombia and the United States. I was sure I'd find room. Failure and drugs go well together, after all, regardless of the revolution that consumes you.

Back in the van with a caffeinated driver. I remembered Henry’s comment that you know when you have entered paramilitary country because there are no more checkpoints. I had assumed at the time this was either was bravado or passed down wisdom from an earlier time. But now it had been over an hour since the last checkpoint, where an officer approached the driver’s window and asked us to produce our documents and alight from the vehicle where we were each patted down in turn.

No one seemed to mind the searches. Soldiers under the Uribe regime do no ask for bribes, and regular checkpoints alone have nabbed hundreds of rebel soldiers on their way to and from their families and their jungle outposts, there were less than 14,000 FARC guerillas fighting the government forces. Most of these plastic booted troops have been pushed from Colombian soil. The major guerrilla forces now operate from bases inside the boundaries of Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador.

Here on the ranching plains of Cordoba, the guerrilla forces had been beaten back even before Uribe’s campaign to restore national security. In the late 1980's the paramilitaries began to assert control in the countryside. Despite the fact the first massacres occured at the inception of the movement, like bloody focus groups for a new brand of violence and social control, I still met conservatives who maintained the paramilitaries were a good idea gone awry.

The country was abuzz early this the year with the publication of “The Gates of Uberrimo”, a book by Ivan Cepeda and Jorge Rojas documenting the history of the paramilitaries in Cordoba and the nexus of guilt by association of President Uribe’s extensive ties to the region and its paramilitary leadership.

The story starts with the rich men who ruled the immense green pastures sprinkled with gold leaf trees, the men who organized private militias to confront left-wing terrorism in the countryside. These outfits in turn evolved into internationally recognized terrorist groups themselves. They funded their operations through extortion and drug trafficking while they massacred thousands of peasants, many times with the complicity of the regular army, in the guise of eliminating the Marxist threat.

The career of Salvatore Mancuso personally illustrates the paramilitary phenomenon. According to local legend, the son of an Italian immigrant was just a wealthy rancher walking his property with a couple of his farm hands when he spotted three guerrillas approaching through the fields. Mancuso took a rifle from one of his men and waited for the soldiers to approach. They had come to take him for a ‘meeting’ with the local commander, which could have meant anything from a shakedown to kidnapping or even execution. As the guerrillas drew near, Mancuso raised his rifle and pointed it at the chest of the lead soldier.

“If you want to take me, you’ll have to haul off my dead body,” he said. “And before that happens, I am shooting this rifle. So, why don’t you tell your commander if he wants to hash out our differences, that’s fine. But we’ll do it right here.”

The guerrillas would have been wise to shoot him. The looks on their faces inspired the mantra he used time and again to rally his troops, “the enemy is also afraid.”

The year was 1992. Mancuso spent the next 15 years on a path to second in command of the AUC, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, the nation’s major paramilitary organization. Mancuso became the strong man behind a movement with aims beyond the safety of rural landowners and organization of the drug trade. Mancuso sought to consolidate the paramilitary movement into a political force that would secretly reshape the leadership of the country. In 2001 he convened at his estate outside Santa Fe de Ralito with 50 prominent Colombian politicians and emissaries who signed a clandestine pact promising a new social contract for Colombia.

When the political tide turned against the paramilitaries, Mancuso helped negotiate the demobilization accords that left him temporarily unassailable in a government designated safe zone that encompassed his Santa Fe de Ralito estate. He could not escape justice entirely. Mancuso was the commanding officer over at least three major massacres, and by his own confession, delivered with the surreal professionalism of an 87 page Power Point presentation, hundreds more assassinations. In exchange for his confessions as part of the peace process his prison sentence was capped at eight years. Then in 2008, the Armani suited prisoner was suddenly extradited to the United States to be tried for drug trafficking. Mass murderers, it seems, can side-step the law in Colombia, so long as they don’t ship their cocaine into the United States.

Mancuso was only the the second most famous land owner in Cordoba. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, the elusive figure of the Gates of Uberrimo, owner of a sprawling estate of the same name in the fertile Sinu valley. As Governor of Antioquia, he avidly supported the militia-like security forces known as Convivir ‘coexistance’ who absorbed into the paramilitary networks when the Colombian courts deemed it illegal for private security outfits to possess assault rifles and other heavy weaponry. Many of the signers of the secret pact at the Mancuso estate would become influential ministers and ambassadors in the Uribe administration when he took office the following year. Cepeda and Rojas lead the critics who have noted the web of connections associating numerous paramilitary figures to Uribe and his cabinet, though they are unable to place the smoking gun in the hand of the president whose father was killed by FARC guerrillas in a botched kidnapping turned shootout. If such a gun ever existed Uribe did a good job of hiding it. From the beginning of his first term as President he set about disbanding the AUC with tireless force and energy while at the same time waging unrelenting war against the FARC.

So in theory, the right-wing militias were disarmed in the middle of the decade. On the ground it is less clear this is the case. The paramilitaries and the guerrillas had filled the void left by the disbanding of the Medellin and Cali cartels in the 90’s, and creating another opening in the drug business made it difficult to snuff out these groups entirely. Many of the AUC combatants were recycled into criminal networks still active in the drug trade and perpetrating the selective assassinations and displacements that have taken the place of massacres as the preferred method of intimidation and control in local governments and throughout the countryside.

Any lingering thoughts I had about my own half-assed investigation of the resurgent underworld in this remote cow capital extinguished when we reached downtown Monteria after nightfall. The other passengers got off the van before the city center. Had I known better I would have joined them.

I gave the driver the name of one of the two hotels I had found listed for Monteria in the national road atlas and tried to remain confident as he wove through the downtown streets that seemed to grow progressively darker with each turn. Few of the sparse street lights functioned, and unlit or heavily curtained buildings rose like dark monoliths blotting shadows onto the sky.

My view was bound to the twin cones of the van’s headlights. Street level shops were shuttered, the streets deserted, a few stray dogs nosed through the trash heaped onto street corners. I hoped the driver was taking me through some disused section of city on a shortcut. On a block as dark as the others, he slowed, then slalomed down the center of the empty road so that the angled headlights might reveal my hotel’s address.

The driver pulled to a stop. Either he counted the streets wrong or the atlas was mistaken, the Colombian address system is among the most efficient in the world. An address consists of three numbers, street, cross street, and the number meters from the intersection to the door. There wasn’t a door 40 meters from what he insisted was the corner of 3rd avenue and 5th, just roller shuttered shopfronts with no signs of a hotel on the floors above. He suggested my guide had the wrong street, and experience led him a few blocks to the only establishment that did not require the aid of headlights, a lone bulb was sufficient to illuminate the garish sign with uneven pink and black stenciling, all spelled out save a rabbit in tux and tie. A couple of high heeled loiterers of determined profession if indeterminate gender prowled the concrete within the parabola of yellow light.

He tried convincing me this was the place to stay in Monteria, but I refused to get out of the car. I was not going to pay by the hour for a night in a love motel, or risk mugging by the Amazonian hookers on the way to the door. The driver shrugged, then returned to the first address where he told me to get out, he was done for the night.

I offered him several thousand pesos to take me back across the river to the suburb where he had dropped off the others. He said no, he was not a taxi service, that he was going home in the other direction. As I thought of the words to beg him for some kind of help, the number for a taxi in this deserted city, he switched on the interior lights and I when caught sight of the festering rage in his bloodshot eyes I could only scramble for the door with a gracias senor and a buenas noches. I jumped to the curb with my backpack and without a plan.

The city was darker than any other urbanscape in my mind, though it was far from the pitch black I had imagined from inside the van. Light did spill from the upper windows of the mid-rise buildings. A working street light at the corner of the next block gave definition and measurement to the space in between and would illuminate anyone approaching from that direction.

More startling than the darkness was the quiet. I could hear the van for blocks after it motored away from the curb, it was minutes before the purr of the engine finally receded into nothing. There were no trains rumbling in the distance, no hiss of steam or exhaust from the buildings, no gurgle of generators, no voices or footfalls, the city was more than asleep, it was entombed. The only sounds were an intermittent breeze rustling the garbage and a far off punctuation of the dogs’ bark and reply. At least it wouldn’t be easy for unheard robbers to sneak up across the undisturbed vault of sidewalk, I decided, as I shuffled up the street.

Not more than twenty paces from where I started there was an unmarked door wedged between the rolling shutters of the neighboring storefronts. The address, blocked from street view by a small overhang, matched the one from my book. Perhaps in the darkness the driver misjudged the distance. I rang the bell and a young man answered the door. Yes, this was a hotel, he informed me. Yes, of course they had room.

The receptionist took my information at a desk crammed into a hot and narrow passageway in front of a clear plastic door to stairs leading up to the guest rooms. The doughy young man had the tips of his hair frosted and a hint of glitter on his face, an unlikely look in a cowboy town. I could tell by the way he looked at me after I began to speak that he wasn’t accustomed to seeing gringos, and that he welcomed the change. When I handed him my passport, he glowed beneath the glitter.

“Oooh, jess! I want to go to USA!”

I asked him where he wanted to go.

“New York...Miami.”

I asked him if he liked Monteria, and what there was to do in the ranching capital of Colombia. He gave an exaggerated shrug.

“Well,” he said, “Nothing happens here. But there are worse places.”

It was true, there were worse places than the dark and garbage piled corners of this regional capital, evidenced by the displaced families, unseen and unheard, but who according to the papers arrived daily from the surrounding towns and countryside.

I asked him if there was a restaurant in walking distance. He looked me up and down, rolled his eyes, shook his head.

“Better if I order you a pizza to your room.” he said.

I took his advice, unsure if the streets of Monteria would have been any less terrifying with functioning street lights.

I felt safe in the tiled eight by ten foot room in a city faceless save a flamboyant hotel clerk and a mustachioed pizza delivery man. The window opened into an interior air shaft, so I had no light to contribute to the ink blot skyline, nor could I look out and listen for pulse on this comatose city. Monday morning was a few hours away, and surely the streets would be gridlocked with cars, the sidewalks thick with vendors and pedestrians so that tonight would seem like some half remembered dream. Click Here to Read More..

Barranquilla XVII: Mourning Joselito

Dawn was just breaking and was she was already in mourning. Nancy sat alone--not even Ruiz was up yet--pensive at the courtyard breakfast table in a black satin gown. Fat Tuesday on the Colombian coast is a denouement, still a party, but with a theme well suited to reflection.

The final send off parade was not another manic celebration along the wide open swath of the industrial corridor, but a funeral procession within the narrower concrete banks of the Calle 84.

Within hours of the last revelers staggering home, or falling on the wayside of the once a year phenomenon of streets turned open air nightclub, women in black veils lined the raised sidewalks to weep for Joselito.

According to legend, Joselito was a coach driver who was found passed out drunk in his carriage the last day of Carnival. His friends put together a make-shift coffin and toasted Joselito with cane liquor before drawing his coach through the streets. Thousands of last-legged celebrants, laden with the guilt of their own overindulgences, stricken with grief for the unknown man whose fate was worse than hangover, fell into line unaware of the joke being played. Hundreds of years later Barranquilleros still recreate the mock procession. No one mourns more devoutly than Nancy Meyer.


I made my own coffee in the kitchen and joined the somber matriarch. She attempted a smile, but her mouth could not push back at the wrinkles weighing down her cheeks; her eyes were dulled with sleeplessness and the recent humiliation of her dethroning in the bleachers. Her face was a mask of somnolent reflection betraying the tens of thousands of hours at trial before the mirror, in cross examination of every new blemish and imperfection, the accumulated testimonies in the case of beauty versus time. I noticed what seemed a new flaccidity of jowl, a new ring on her neck recording her sixty fourth Spring. The coming year would leave her a half century past her reign as Queen Carnival.

I hadn’t returned to Villa Meyer until yesterday evening, and had yet to hear what happened to Nancy and Diego after their scuffle in the stands at Saturday’s parade. The sergeant at the police tent had assured me they were not in the habit of arresting the elderly. Nancy seemed to have enough on her mind without me asking about her ignominious departure.

“Diego has returned to Bogota.” Nancy said.

“Is he alright?”

“A papaya given, a papaya taken,” she said. It was a Colombian expression, with so many uses I was never sure of the meaning. In this case, an admission that she had allowed herself to play the fool, or perhaps there was another papaya.

We sipped our coffee and listened to the breeze blowing through the mango and almond trees, ripping at the dead palm fronds and rustling the plastic on the trash heap the next courtyard over. In the distance I could make out the churn of river-stained surf.

We lingered in our thoughts as the grey light of dawn gave way to morning sun that rose hot and sharp over the coastal hangover. As I thought of the words to thank my host for her hospitality, I saw the confidence rebuilding in the grooves of her face. She put her cup on the table and took my hand into hers. What power those eyes must have held forty years ago. The old puma’s stare no longer mesmerized.

“You know there is room for you here, my love.”

She squeezed her hand to feel for Diego’s replacement. Why wouldn’t she entertain the possibility with the lost gringo, out of step with time and reason, on a sojourn to understand a place where she fancied herself royalty. I was an older man for her after all, Diego was seven years my junior.

Clasped in the dry scales of her hand, I entertained the possibilities of lingering at the Villa Meyer--Irene’s outrage, Ruiz’ redoubled looks, the upstairs bedroom. Had Diego made love with the woman five decades his senior? It seemed implausible that the shadow of a boy was capable of such a delicate production as intercourse with a sexagenarian, but then I could not have imagined the unannounced explosion of energy that propelled him off the bleacher and into the gut of his foam spraying antagonist, or his furious protest at his and Nancy’s arrest on the parade grounds.

The spell was broken when the doorbell rang. Irene was at the front gate, she had either crashed with someone in town or stayed up all night. By her red eyes and flushed face I guessed the latter. She grumbled morning and went straight for her bedroom.

Moments later a guttural roar shook the house. Irene burst back through the bedroom door and headed straight for the computer where her sleepy eyed youngest daughter was watching a video. She grabbed the child’s arm and began shaking her.

“Everything is a mess. What is wrong with you? I didn’t raise you to be a pig!”

The little girl, who couldn’t have been awake more than a few minutes, protested her innocence. Irene slapped her across the face.

“Don’t talk back to me. You need to learn how to act like a girl.”

I ducked into the room which looked about the same as it had on the first night when five of us shared the two mattresses. The mess, dirty clothes and empty DVD boxes on the floor, an overflowing ashtray by the bed, was mostly Irene’s.

By the time I reemerged with my backpack, Irene was finished with her youngest daughter. The little girl whose name I had already forgotten, children are an afterthought during Carnival, was curled into a ball crying in the corner. I wondered if she was old enough to know that mommy’s cocaine addiction and not anything she had done was responsible for the outburst.

“You are a good girl. You are a very good girl.” I said it several times as I patted her on the head. It was all I could think to say.

I paid my respects to the matriarch in mourning, thanking her for everything. I would not have experienced Carnival had it not been for Nancy Meyer. I tried to give her the press pass she had insisted so vehemently I get, but she smiled and shook her head.

“That is for you, mi amor, so you’ll remember to return to us.”

She bid me a speedy return, in time to celebrate another Carnival.

“When you do, I have a niece for you. She is a good girl, she will make a good wife.”

I returned to the city in time for a family lunch at the Najar’s, Rosita and Elena were eager for a report on Carnival with the Meyers. The two families were plausibly within concentric circles of gossip, so I spared the salacious details. It was scandalous enough to the old maid and her ancient mother that an old and single woman like Nancy was still out on the town in any capacity. Elena smiled and shook her head whenever I mentioned the elder Meyer.

“No, no, no” she said as she chuckled into her lap. The joke would have been funnier if she had known about Nancy’s twenty something lover, or their parade exit in handcuffs. The comedy for her was a woman who did not know when to accept the limitations of age.

With the whole Najar clan back, stuffed into their living room, there was not enough couch space to accommodate the toll of sedation induced by mama’s fish soup. Rosita must have sensed my hesitation before the long road to Monteria. Since their Carnival renters had left that morning and they did not have a new tenant, she suggested I take back the apartment.

“Wee-liam! Stay! As long! As you want to!”

My eyelids were too heavy to contemplate the next move, though the journey had been condensing in my mind for weeks. Across the jungle to Panama, up the spine of Central America to Mexico and Texas, from New Orleans to Natchez and finally the Trace home.

First I needed a nap. I handed Mama the bills meant for the bus ticket and shuffled into the tenant’s apartment where I fell back into the uneven mattress and afternoon dreams of death and lost time. Click Here to Read More..

Barranquilla XVI: Calle 84

Our thirty odd travelers and four Colombians absorbed into a tributary of celebrants two blocks from the main channel of the street party. Traditional wood-benched Chivas buses, rented by well heeled Barranquilleros as bars on wheels for Carnival, stalled in the party-clogged streets. A few of the riders jumped down to coax the foreign girls onto their buses while their girlfriends splashed us with handfuls of flour.

The stream bottlenecked between two trucks of out of town policeman parked just beyond the reach of the street lamps on the 84. I could not make out their faces in the shadows, whether they were good cops or bad, relishing another opportunity to grab the batons and riot shields stacked inside the vehicles and bludgeon through a wall of drunks, or just happy to be drawing wages on a balmy Caribbean night, listening to the dance beats over the murmuring crowds.

The stream thickened then coagulated as we neared the sidewalks and parking lots along the main strip of the zona rosa. The scene on the raised banks of sidewalks along Calle 84, the now dry riverbed for one of Barranquilla’s fiercest arroyos, was reminiscent of the Venetian Carnival, where the flesh managed to pack to within centimeters of the canals without spilling over into the water. Slow moving cars with open windows and trunks doubled as sound systems, blasting competing notes of salsa, meringue and vallenato up into the crowd. A slightly older set emerged from the cabs and pushed through the wall of bodies to the doors of the night clubs, which seemed like madness, unless by experience they knew the interior passageways were less crowded and sweat soaked than the street party outside.

From a distance the crush of people along the 84 appeared as writhing chaos. Closer in, the atoms of individual parties were distinguishable within the larger celebration elemental. A Doctor Fernando type held the center of each nucleus. His arsenal of booze kept the dancing electrons bumping back to within arms length so that he could pour rum and aguardiente straight from the bottle and down their throats. More surreptitiously, slender vials passed between the fast moving particles along the edges. Flirtatious friction further charged the outer valences as dance partners jumped back and forth from neighboring parties. Occasional free radicals in twos and threes slashed through the outer rings, young men spraying their foam cans in the air and mashing handfuls of flour over heads and faces in the crowd.

Covered in flour, filled with powder, the unbroken mass danced a grind to the proximate rhythms, shouting epithets in honor of Carnival gods.

We wormed our way down the edges of the party to where Carlos knew a spot on a less crowded block fronted by a deep parking lot there were still pockets big enough to accommodate our group. The little Colombian pumped his fists in the air as he rode atop the shoulders of Shawn and the even more enormous Bruno, a rugby prop from France who with his free arm poured streams of aguardiente down his own throat. I trailed with the rest of the Irish contingent in the wake behind our twin crowd breakers.

When we arrived to our destination at the tail end of the street party, a trio with flour bags and foam cans sliced through our group. The guys received the customary handful of flour to the face, though the women got more thorough treatment; the temptation of real flesh in this land of surgical augmentation was too much to resist. I noticed the lead flour man, short and muscular, didn’t bother with Sarah’s blonde hair. He kneaded his flour covered palms into the burgeoning symmetry of her chest.

The Irish boys also noticed the display. Mark shielded his girlfriend and both he and Liam grabbed the offending groper by the wrists. The little body builder lashed free, and after another dip in his bag he jumped up to slap a handful of flour into Liam’s head, and another in Mark’s face.

Shawn, now alerted to the chalky hand prints on Sarah’s chest, set our Maestro to the ground and wrenched the flour tosser around to face him.

“Fuck’s wrong with you mate? Keep your hands off the girl.”

“Tranquilo, es Carnaval (Easy, its Carnival),” The flour man replied. He then ripped at his bag and as he mashed two last fistfuls of powder into the Irishman’s face his fat fingers dug into Shawn’s eye sockets.

Shawn grabbed the the flour man and flung him backwards. His head pin-balled off elbows and thighs on his way to the concrete.

The two accomplices sprang between Shawn, and their downed comrade, shouting and gesturing at the bigger man who stood seething beneath his fresh mask of powder. Liam and Bruno, whom the Irish lads hadn’t known more than a couple of hours, stood shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with Shawn.


The downed man sprung up from his ignominious dive. The combination of cocaine and public humiliation had popped out the veins on the little body builder’s neck and at his temples. Rage bulged his bloodshot eyes and flared his nostrils as he pointed his finger at the Irish boys.

“Are jew crazy, gringos locos?” he shouted.

Then he turned and pandered to the crowd behind him where a dozen young men now flanked his associates.

As quickly as the crowd grew behind the Colombians, the foreign ranks thinned. Our only common link was to our little host whose entire body screamed danger. Bug-eyed and hands trembling, he hopped along the back line of the crazy gringos and tugged Shawn, Bruno, and Liam at the elbow, repeating over and over, “We go. We go. We go.”

Liam turned halfway to Carlos, and then back to Shawn, waiting for a cue from his friend that it was ok to split. Though Liam’s face was expressionless, I was sure the worst case scenario was locked on repeat in his mind. He didn’t get the out he was seeking. The other two lads ignored Carlos and focused on the other short Colombian in front of them.

The remainder of the disparate travelers heeded Carlos’ alarm and resisted the temptation of spectacle. We melted away in twos and threes. I grabbed the girl next to me, another wandering San Franciscan named Veronica who was transfixed by the coming showdown. I whisked her to the far side of the parking lot where we could watch from a perch of concrete embankment just beyond the arc of street light.

We turned to see the little body builder strut between the rump of the Carlos crew and crowd behind him. He continued his taunts in English so that the foreigners could be sure of the stakes.

“Fucking Americans! Don’t you know you’re in Colombia? We are going to keel you tomorrow. We are going to fucking keel you fucking gringos! Tu puta madre me la chupa!”

For many Colombians in the interior of the country, Gringolandia was a vague, transnational supercontinent that encompassed most every nation in the non-Latino, European derived world. I have told Colombians I am from the USA who enthusiastically replied they had relatives in Paris or Sydney. Among costeños, like their neighbors on the Caribbean rim, gringo had more specific associations with the United States. It takes a far higher level of language skills than most locals possess to pick up accents in a second language. The English speaking foreigners became American by default.

But the Irish guys didn't know this, and Bruno, still at Shawn’s side, could have only caught snippets of the heavily accented vitriol. Not that it mattered. Both sides were sufficiently powdered, inside and out, and any insult from the muscle man was enough fuel for a fight.

“What’d the little cunt call me?” Shawn asked, turning his head back to whom he assumed was Carlos and the rest of the hostel at his back. In fact he had turned on the only empty space on a sidewalk elsewhere thick with bodies. After his frantic attempt at intervention, Carlos had melted away along with the rest of us. Even Mark had disappeared, wisely escorting Sarah into the anonymity of the crowd. Only Carlos’ cologned drenched business partners stood at a distance behind the gringos. With no need to fear the impending race war, they could afford to be spectators. They did not make any signs of alignment to the gringo cause.

Liam, still stoned out of his mind, clenched a bottle and made an awkward chopping motion with the intention, so he claimed, of splashing the Colombians with the remainder of his beer. He didn’t judge the distance between himself and the opposing line, and unfortunately the taller sidekick leaned forward just in time with the downward snap of Liam’s hand. The lip of the bottle smacked across the bridge of the Colombian's nose.

Silence. A strange silence, because music still pounded from oversized speakers and in every direction the party churned on. Yet for a long moment, what must have seemed an eternity to the three Europeans, a whisper would have been enough to break the spell. Everyone within 50 yards of the confrontation stood hushed and still, enraptured by the insanity of the gringos either too crazy or too stupid to turn and run.

“You threw a fucking bottle at my head?” The tall flour man stepped forward and asserted himself in Liam’s face. Then he turned to Shawn, then back to Liam. He swiveled a third time and threw a sucker punch that landed square on Shawn’s jaw. The attacker coiled to launch a sprawling hook. Shawn easily ducked the second punch. Only then, with an open shot on his attacker, did he seem to appreciate the scenario. Instead of leveling his assailant he grabbed at the shirts of his old friend and new acquaintance and the three took off in a dead sprint for the street.

The mob waited for a second, then their little Napoleon shouted, “Kill the Americans!”

The crowd at the edge of the sidewalk parted for the honorary Yankees. Sympathetic revelers waved them forward as if they were runners on the home stretch of a marathon. As the boys jumped down into the street, a taxi driver attuned to the situation opened his back door. One after the other they dove head first into the back seat. The French giant was still airborne as the cab cut away from the curb.

Bruno’s legs dangled out the back door, providing the opening for two Colombians to jump into the moving cab and grab at the bodies in an impossibly crowded backseat. The second attacker could not get enough of his torso in the car and his dragging feet pulled him out onto the curb. After a brief scuffle the second attacker tumbled out backwards onto the concrete.

The street was too clogged with bodies and cars for the taxi to make a clean get away. With a half dozen men closing on the traffic constricted vehicle, the driver swerved into the oncoming lane and screeched a u turn that narrowly missed sideswiping the crowd filling out to the edge of the opposite curve.

Surely such a scene would have drawn attention from the police, but I couldn’t see a uniform in either direction. Neither did the mob. With Liam, Shawn and the Frenchman out of the way, the pack of taxi chasers scanned the crowd for another target.


“Where is the other one?” shouted the muscle man, scanning up and down the sidewalk for the boyfriend and the blonde with the powdered chest.

***

At first I couldn’t see what he was pointing at. Not Mark and his girlfriend, they should have been long clear of Calle 84.

Then I saw them. A flour besmudged couple made their way up the channel of the road.

Were they insane?

No, apart from North European ancestry, the two foreigners edging along the street only superficially resembled the Irish couple who had wisely fled the scene. The man was too short to be Mark, too gangly, and even at 100 yards it was evident his woman lacked the measurements worthy of a street riot. But they had the same coloring as the Gaelic pair. With the competing sound systems and the thousands of wasted revelers spilling out of the lots to the edge of the sidewalks above them, the approaching Canadians were completely oblivious to the half-dozen cocaine riddled beserkers flying in their direction.

The sequence slowed down in my mind. The wheels of justice turned. For a moment I enjoyed the illusion of fleeting equilibrium in our rapidly expanding universe. The wheels of justice were grinding, and I was in perfect position to watch the scumbag editor’s moment of reckoning.

As the pack closed to within 20 strides, probably still shouting kill the Americans and something about what they would do with their grieving mothers--I was well out of range to hear the particular epithet--I watched it dawn on Ian McKay that he was the target of their venom and that the Maple Leaf sown onto his day pack was not going to save his ass this time.

There was no time for mediation, to plead a case of false identity, nor was their honor in his last moments. He made no move to protect his lovely girlfriend. He had probably just been pouting about her pulling him from the safety of their comped hotel room. He just threw up his hands and lowered his chin into his chest. He twisted towards the curb and lowered into a half squat so that the whole of his body reflected his existential terror of the oncoming plow.

Only one detail, or lack of one, saved Ian from more than the humiliation of soiled shorts and the initial blow from the wedge of attackers. The lovely Vanessa had just a hint of convexity under her tee shirt. It was such contrast to Sarah’s bosom, that no man, tit man, ass man, straight or gay, could have possibly mistaken the two blondes. The pursuing general, noticing the disparity, called off the attack. The danger had passed I walked closer to the scene so as to get more details of the aftermath.

I hugged the distraught Mrs. McKay. She hugged me back and whispered something in my ear as the bystanders peeled her shell shocked husband off the concrete and sterilized his wounds with searing splashes of cane liquor.


***

Alas, Barranquilla is not a city of Justice or Karma. After the heroic cab driver threaded the needle’s eye and delivered the Irish boys to safety, the mob petered out. I imagined the rest on my solitary walk back to the hostel. Veronica had found what she had been looking for, a smooth faced and quick-footed Colombian whose ostentatious dance moves were superfluous to his going home with the 26 year old American.

Back at the hostel, the Irish-French contingent were the heroes of the night. They recounted the play by play of the fracas between congratulatory shots of rum and and pulls from bottles of Aguila beers, the same label which had nearly induced a lynching.

"He left himself open,” Shawn said as he shadow boxed on the sectional couch. “I could have dropped him after that hook, but then they would have killed us."

“You’ve been in a few fights in your life?"

“More than a few,” Shawn grinned.

“Where did you go?” another of the vanishing spectators asked Mark.

“Me? I’m too pretty to fight.”

With every angle of the street fight hashed and rehashed, it was wasn’t yet 2 AM. Bruno, who remained stoic throughout the glory session, suggested there was still time to hit a nightclub.

I mentioned Frogg’s Leggs. The Irish lads were in, even Mark was up for it. Sarah, our Helen of Troy in the near riot, had gone to bed. The Colombian boys, still a touch too fragrant, offered to drive. Maybe Carlos was there ahead of us. No one had seen him since the confusion of Calle 84. Shawn asked me to tell him once more about the pre-pays and again we ventured into the night. Click Here to Read More..

Barranquilla XIV: The Second Casa Carlos

The Battle of the Flowers concluded several miles to the southwest as the last comparsa danced into the sunset. At street level it was already dark. The last glow of fast fading tropical twilight concentrated in the western sky.

The side streets teemed with Carnival goers in a languorous flow away from the river and the spent expanse of parade route. The concrete was refinished with a sticky carpet of overindulgence: beer cans meshed with candy wrappers, corn shuck woven into mangled straw hats, florescent colored flyers advertising restaurants and nightclubs cross hatched with several thousand green pamphlets explaining the personal power and exaltation, the godliness achieved with man’s defeat of the reactive mind. The police who manned the barricaded entry points to the boulevard had handed out these last pamphlets, no telling what or how the Scientologists paid for this tacit sponsorship.

The words of L Ron would proselytize in the matted garbage until the first deluge of April or May invoked arroyos which would run counter to the slow moving herd. Brown rapids scrubbed the surface filth and carried it along with anything without foundation-- dogs, children, cars, shanties--into the Magdalena. The city without a drainage system was a seasonal garbage disposal, and not just for the mundane. Toxic waste trucked clandestinely from as far away as Medellin and Bogota mingled alongside more conventional garbage in anticipation of the seasonal flow. When the rains fell and the rapids formed it would all go gushing into the muddy river and blossom a shit brown plume into the sea.

Toxic waste and deadly rapids would wait for the hangover after the party that would continue into the night, the morning, and the next week on the streets-cum-riverbeds of Barranquilla.

Even the most euphemistically named barrio held its own block party, most with their own stages and line-ups of musical performances, where whispers of a Shakira appearance were de rigueur. The rumors themselves were a sign of respect, appreciation that Barranquilla’s brightest star has not forgotten her hometown. Students, out of towners, the posh set of Barranquilleros flocked to the zona rosa along the Calle 84 where the din of competing baselines rumbled through the bodies crammed onto every inch and elevation of banked sidewalks and parking lots. The corner lot of last night’s street battle with the cops was where I agreed to meet Ian and his wife.

The crowds thinned as I turned north into Prado Viejo, the old money neighborhood where villas set back from street had collected their favored strands of the early 20th century immigration, facades flush with flowery Churrigueresque of Spanish Baroque fluttered alongside the grounded geometry and soothing repetition of the Levantine tradition. Everywhere the walls were splashed with Bougainvillea and assorted blooms so vivid as to seem artificial. Gnarled roots of ceiba trees cracked the sidewalks and rows of tapering palm trees reached for the sky. The Prado Hotel stood like a fortress on the neighborhood’s flank, its block-long neoclassical walls shielded the old world neighborhood from the high rise apartment blocks to the north and west. Though designed for the city’s affluent, collectively the towers reminded me of the drab concrete worker hives ringing the charming centers of Prague and Ljubljana.

The high rises began on a subtle upward slope of irritated follicles across a twenty block mosquito bite on Barranquilla’s concrete skin. What was subtle to the eye was obvious to the storm rains, the gradient inspired bright yellow and black warning signs posted every two hundred meters depicting an upturned car floating atop a river of curving black lines.

The security guard did not look up from his television as I entered the aluminum gate into a narrow courtyard and out of my imagined exile. As I walked through groups of fellow travelers who stood on the steps and sat along the low wall, a psychic wind was stirring, its vortices tickling at the back of my mind. Then a gust. I could feel it tearing away the months of inertia. Suddenly I was surrounded by familiarity, a setting dense with texture, texts and sub-texts, I could readily interpret. I was starved of social fluency, an essential vitamin complex for any higher order primate. The depletion had caused my self to atrophy. For the first time in months, shirts weren’t just shirts, nor backpacks backpacks. The hairstyles and piercings, smiles and postures, and most of all the words--English was the default language of all but one of the clusters--were all steeped in meaning.

I found an empty section of wall to sit and watch and listen. And no one seemed to mind. It was unlike the those-in-the know hostels where the new arrival was immediately sized up for membership. Here there were no intimidating glances, no silent hostility from a jaded in-crowd with the menacing territoriality of middle school cliques and cell block gangs. In part because there were no veterans here, everyone had arrived today or last night, and everyone thought of themselves as a friend of Carlos. It was a Democracy of gap years and Peace Corps, next year’s law schoolers and committed wanderlusts, good timers and aspiring novelists, murky pasts and and opaque futures, all smoking and drinking and planning procurements for the all-night party ahead.

Was I back on the gringo trail? A matter of perspective, like the Cold War joke about a railway platform in Warsaw where the westbound Russians marveled at the bright city lights alongside eastbound Germans who could not believe a capital lay shrouded in such darkness. I had ended a self-imposed exile from the far reaching tendrils of the guidebook-destination travel complex. But the second annual Casa Carlos was hardly an established outpost. It was a five-night phenomenon, an ethereal agglomeration too fleeting for the pages of the next Lonely Planet or Rough Guide. What better place to re-acclimate? I was getting back on the trail soon, after all. I had been delaying my trip north for weeks, and just eight days left on my visa. I needed a weekend at Carlos’s fun house. I could stop being a shadow on the streets of a wasteland city and pass out in company for a change.

The energy was good in this courtyard. For the backpackers Carlos had drawn from the seedy alleys of Getsemani, his insider’s invitation to a city-wide street party had been a revelation. Carlos knew his audience--the budget travelers who couldn’t afford the charms of old-town Cartagena, a UNESCO site among the most beautiful cities in the world. They had gotten stuck in the dingy hostels off the Calle Media Luna, where the cocaine dealers and hookers jostled for space in the doorways beyond the fortified walls that bounded the old town’s fairytale and astronomically expensive tourist zone. Travelers could lose weeks there, mired in a drug binge or waiting for a boat to Panama that never materialized. Carlos filled his four apartments on a single visit to Cartagena’s backpackers ghetto. And every traveler here loved him for it. For twenty bucks a night, by far the cheapest rates in a town with no vacancies, Carlos had given them Carnival time in Barranquilla. A reaffirming experience after a week wandering the cobblestones of magical consumerism.

I knocked, then gently pushed the door open, remembering last year’s flophouse with mattresses blanketing every inch of empty space save the desk wedged into the corner of the room that doubled as the office for Carlos's fly by night enterprise. The sleeping quarters were elsewhere. This year Carlos had the use of a furnished apartment to serve as a living room for his guests. A beige sectional couch wrapped around a glass coffee table centered over a white tile floor. A canopy of waxy jungle ferns rose along the walls behind the couch. A pair of potted pygmy palms framed an LCD television atop a black cabinet with gold trim. Barranquilla’s ghetto good version of Miami.

Three early college age Barranquilleros, local friends of Carlos, residents of the apartment, sat on one side of the couch positioned to watch the television and the door. They each wore pressed shirts unbuttoned halfway down their chests. The two with straight hair combed theirs straight back. The third had his curls under the lid of a Yankees cap. As I leaned forward to shake their hands I did well not to grimace. They may as well have bathed in the cologne that burned through my nose.

The young men wrung their hands as they watched and waited. Casa Carlos had transformed their living room into a landscape formerly accessible only through Hollywood and the internet. They were voyeurs in their own apartment, a brave new world where girls, the good girls, smelled of sex the way the boys reeked of perfume. Girls free to act like boys, to flirt and fuck without a thought of tomorrow. Carlos had stocked their building with young women from across the globe, some of them traveling alone. The boys knew enough to know that if they played it right, these exotic women were capable of doing things tonight, and more, that they might not get from the local girls, the good girls, after many persistent months of pursuit with promises of marriage.

Conservative mores in Colombia had so far held up a counter weight against the global tide of sexual revolution. Not that the cracks weren’t showing. Gay culture was remarkably open in contrast to a hetero world where young couples were forced to meet at underground sex motels. Part girls navigated the murky every man’s land of the prepaga and the disco, where girls acted like their first world cousins for (and at) a price. Good girls were by and large reactionaries. What was left to bind them to this old world? Catholicism? These young women went to college, parties and bars. They wore their skirts cut high and their tops low and were immersed in the same do-it-now advertisements from the rapid frame global media. They lived in the same world where the rest of us were second and third generation beneficiaries of a movement that had long divorced sex from marriage, love, religion. Yet unlike these boys, they mostly lived at home.


With their ironed shirts and waterfalls of cologne the young Barranquilleros had prepared themselves for the onslaught, the long-past revolution drawn suddenly inside their door. But how would they act on this opportunity, the four more nights of uprising? Could they riff off the irony soaked words flying through the courtyard or decode the outfits that designated hipster from raver from granola from post-post punk? By what language did they navigate these daughters and granddaughters off the barricades and onto the mattresses?

They twisted their hands in terror at the prospects of the girls who, despite all the misunderstandings and lack of conversation, would still choose to come home with them. Because what then?

We sat and watched the Europeans, the Commonwealth Anglos, the Latinas who had grown up in the States, we sat and admired their short-shorts and cleavage baring tops as they came and went through the apartment looking for Carlos, their new friends, their stashes of liquor.

Carlos was out. This worried me, Carlos was not one to leave guests unattended. He spent the year planning, living for and off of this makeshift hostel. It would have taken a crisis, say Nancy and Diego’s misadventures at the police station. The boy in the baseball cap claimed not to know anything, the others nodded in silent agreement. I thought to explain I was a friend of Carlos, but then everyone here was a friend of Carlos.

So I waited in the living room where for the next four nights I was the native and they were the foreigners, their collars galvanized in cologne, parsing the runes of near future feminine advances. Click Here to Read More..

Barranquilla XI: Saturday Morning

I had slept off the worst of the hangover, I thought, until I tried to sit up and my neck buckled with the dead weight of what may as well have been a taxidermy head. So I lay on the mattress and listened to the chorus of breathing and snores on the bed above me, Irene the bass, the two child sopranos, and a tenor I did not recognize. Carlos had left the day before yesterday to set up his Carnival hostel. There was a new adult in the room.

Nancy was the only person awake. She sat at her courtyard table sipping coffee and looking over the wall towards the sky above the sea. She was dressed in flowing white linens, the only costume I had seen her in during my stay at Prado Mar. She either owned a closet full of matching gowns, or she hadn’t changed since Thursday.

“Today is Battle of the Flowers, the best parade of Carnival,” she said as I sat down at the table, “All the best comparsas march today.”

A comparsa is similar to a New Orleans crewe, a group who enters a float or a dance group in the parades. They also serve as social clubs throughout the year. Comparsas practice their dances for months and can be seen training in parks throughout the city from November through February. All but the most established crews must compete in lesser events to make the cut for the final weekend, as hard as it is to imagine that a six-hour long parade does not accept all comers.

Soon after I sat down a slender young man about 26 came down the stairs and joined us at the breakfast table. Dressed in knee length shorts, a snug fitting ironic t-shirt and top tinted aviator shades, Eduardo dressed the part of Natalie’s international DJ boyfriend I heard about from Irene. Nancy took hold of one of his soft hands as she drank in his smooth face and Old World features. I looked around to see what looks Ruiz might be giving the boy who had just emerged from his daughter’s bedroom, but this morning Nancy’s manservant was nowhere in sight.

“Good morning mi amor!” Nancy said.

With two younger men at each side, neither of whom was her 27 year old boyfriend, the matriarch glowed.

“It is a pleasure to host young men with such class,” she said, turning from Natalie’s boyfriend to me and back again. “I can see you both come from good families.”

She took a series of slow, deep breaths, as if to savor the young flesh and old money.

After some more flattery about the class of her guests, she reached out and took Eduardo’s hand in hers. “Amor...”

Sure of her new tack, I pushed back from the table yielding right of way for Nancy to make her pitch to the son of the Venezuelan elite.

At first I had been taken aback by Nancy’s request for money since at the same time she was adamant that I was her guest. But I was a stranger here, a friend of a friend with no connection to the Meyer clan. So it was not unreasonable that Nancy ask me for rent even if she had invited me to stay here. Now, in front of my eyes, Nancy was asking for twice as much from her daughter’s visiting boyfriend. So it turns out I got a great deal at the Villa Meyer, except that I was sleeping with the wrong sister. I wondered if Diego paid rent.

Irene came out from her room as if she had sniffed out the transaction. Her look turned from annoyed to incredulous as the situation sank in. She stormed towards the table.

“Mother! What are you doing?”

Nancy had already folded the bills and pocketed them inside her linen gown.

“Fernando picks us up at 11,” she snapped back, “You need to get ready.”

“You can’t take money from Natalie’s boyfriend,” Irene shouted. By this time Eduardo had disappeared from sight. “And I’m not going to the parade!”

Irene stormed back in the direction of her room as if she might have considered going before watching her mother extort pesos from her sister’s boyfriend. Irene had told me yesterday she had no intention of joining us in the city. The old Carnival Queen turned her chin away from her retreating daughter to emphasize she was the one ending the conversation.

I spied Eduardo at the top of the stairs. He shrugged and cracked a furtive smile.

A moment later a younger version of Irene appeared in the courtyard to say hello to Nancy. Nancy introduced me to her granddaughter Nina. It was the first time I had seen the girl so I assumed she was the tenor. I asked her if she lived in the city.

“No, but I am only person who works around here,” she said in English with a thick Jersey accent. “AND I go to college.”

Nina had grown up in New Jersey and moved back to Colombia with her mother when she was 16. It was a rough transition for her. She thought her Spanish was good while growing up, and it was a shock when she couldn’t even understand the math teacher in her first month at school. Now she was 21 and loving her life in Colombia. Her native English skills qualified her for teaching jobs in the same University she attended. She was full of questions: why I was here, how old I was, where I was from, and where I had been living in town. She chuckled when I tried to describe the Najar’s neighborhood.

“Over there is ghetto good,” she said.

“Ghetto good?”

“You know, people have nice things, they think it’s something better, but it’s still ghetto.”

Short of Prado, Nina reckoned ghetto good was the best descriptor for a city like Barranquilla.

Her curiosity satisfied for the moment, Nina turned back to her grandmother, gave her a peck on the cheek, and bolted for the front gate before Nancy could rope her into any Carnival commitments.

Diego, Natalie and the rest of the crew slowly gathered at the courtyard table, each in turn placating Nancy as 11 o’clock came and went without any sign of the doctor. The girls got out their phones and after a few calls determined no one was coming by Prado Mar to pick them up. At first Nancy refused to process the news, it was unimaginable that the Carnival Queen of 1960 was left unaccounted for on her biggest day of the year.

Nancy was adamant we find another neighbor to give us a ride into town. Natalie rolled her eyes, and convinced her the only way we could get to the city on time was by taxi. Fury bubbled up into Nancy’s face, but we managed to get her to walk with us out to the main road in search of a taxi.

While we were waiting, Nancy jumped into the street and flagged down a motorbike. The biker looked confused as the old woman held out some pesos in front of his helmet and ordered him to go to the store for cigarettes, cola, and a bottle of liquor. The young man pocketed money and continued down the road. I wondered to myself how many times such boldness had worked for Nancy, and if so, how long ago. Did this 74 year old woman--with a boyfriend almost 50 years her junior--realize that her long faded beauty could no longer command whimsical acts from men she plucked off the street? Or maybe he would return.

Diego rubbed Nancy’s back as we waited for the taxi and the possibility of a motorcycle delivery. A taxi pulled up before the motorbike returned, and as Nancy negotiated the price the six of us piled into the tiny car. Nancy blanketed Diego in the front seat as she continued her back and forth with driver, Eduardo took what had once been my place underneath Natalie’s perfect curves, and Natalie’s friend Violeta, to whom I had just been introduced, reluctantly squeezed in on top of my lap The driver shook his head, we were so stuffed into the little cab that he had to wag his disapproving finger out the window.

“Too many,” the driver repeated several times, still shaking his head. He refused to leave with more than four in the car. A chihuahua might not have fit into the airspace left in this two cylinder ride, but Nancy was determined to get her way on something this morning. It had been her idea to take one car, though I was sure Eduardo and I would end up splitting the fare. Eduardo must have realized this too, he mumbled from under his girlfriend about paying for a second cab while Nancy barked directions into the driver’s ear. Her assertiveness did not have its intended effect.

“Get out!” the driver yelled.

Then Natalie put a hand on the driver’s shoulder and from her position doubled over into the space between the two front seats, she made a soothing plea into into the driver’s ear. The driver kept shaking his head, but he stopped shouting. Natalie was angled so that a quarter turn of the driver’s head would have given him a perfect view down her low cut top. After a long moment he put the car in gear.

I could not see Diego from behind the two women on top of us, though he somehow managed to hand back a plastic bottle filled with cane liquor. The girls took nips and then leaned forward so that Eduardo and I could take pulls from the bottle. Though I had sworn off liquor just last night, I figured a swallow might help with the heat of the cab and the weight of the girl who made no effort to be delicate on my lap. I closed my eyes and drifted back to the ride with Natalie in Fernando’s car a few nights before.

The cab let us out a few blocks from the route, where the crowd in the street pushing towards the parade route was too thick for traffic to enter. The side streets leading to the main parade were lined with tents where the pungent smells of grilled meats and fried corn meal mingled with the dust and stink of sweated alcohol. Vendors swam against the tide competing to sell cans of soda and ice cold beers. Every quarter block six foot high speakers drowned the crowd in competing bass lines. Masked revelers attacked Carnival goers with handfuls of flour to the head and face and with cans of foam spray which according to the papers had been banned along the parade routes because of their potential for inflaming respiratory problems. A few groups ahead of us an angry mother sought to enforce the no foam rule. Her effort backfired as the party minded crowd responded with laughter, mock applause and handfuls of flour as the culprits redirected their noxious spray on the would-be vigilante. Otherwise the scene had all the tranquility of the first Friday of a Spring Break beach exodus, we were all brothers here to drink and broil together under the tropical sun.

Click Here to Read More..

Barranquilla X: Bride Shopping

I walked from the abandoned pier into Puerto Colombia and caught a bus for Barranquilla. I had agreed to meet Henry and serve as an accomplice for his story on international brides.

The old Blue Bird school bus was striped with Colombia’s national colors: yellow for the land, blue for the sea, and red for the blood of the people. The paint scheme was reminiscent of the brightly colored wooden Chiva buses that still operate in remote parts of the northern Andes, though the throw back sleighs have reincarnated in urban areas as party buses that deliver tourists on night crawls to the local dance clubs.

Though Puerto Colombia marked the end of the line and the bus wasn’t due to depart for another ten minutes, there was hardly any standing rooming left when I boarded. The aisles were packed in with families and groups of revelers headed for the parade that unleashed four nights of insanity on the Caribbean coast. Following the advice that body counts on the passenger casualty lists posted at all major bus terminals in the country heavily represented passengers in the front half of vehicles, I weaved my way through the crowd to the back of the bus.

The Carnival chant I would hear once an hour for the next four days, Mamo Ron, Mamo Ron, blasted through the sound system. The cabin was steamed with sweat and alcohol, and the rusted windows wouldn’t shimmy open more than a crack.

I found myself wedged between two student groups who took the cue from the music and embarked on a competition to drain their bottle of aguardiente faster than the others across the way. As was beginning to seem the custom, each group was lead by a captain who held the bottle and a single plastic cup to distribute shots to his team. When one of the female crew members on the seaward aisle charges refused her turn by slumping her head into the seat back in front of her, the captain offered me her shot. Either to match the gesture or maintain competitive balance, the landward captain also offered me a drink. I could feel the clear liquid burn a course down into my gut. The successive drinks weathered what was left of my social reserve; it didn’t fit to stand aloof on a commandeered party bus. I can do anything for four days, I thought, as I yielded to the transient camaraderie.

Team seaside had a worthy drinking captain. The beer bellied twentysomething wore a whistle on his neck and a marimonda mask atop his head. He pressed with a friendly yet forceful hand when administering the medicine. The liquor burned a bit less with each each swallow.

My mind wandered back to rugby drink-ups, the one place where I pulled weight on the team. I had convinced myself cheap keg beer was just flavored water so that the only obstacle was how quickly I could swallow. To this day I guzzle a pint, water not keg beer, each morning, out of mindless habit that once kept me in form. Cane spirits are swallowed with a single tilt of the head, and they do not sit like flavored water in the stomach.

By the time I removed myself from the drinking competition the damage was done. The bus hadn’t started rolling until after the fourth shot, and my head was spinning by the time we passed Prado Mar.  As city lights announced Barranquilla, I realized I had missed another tropical twilight. The glow in my head began to assert its own gravity. My inner revolutions were not in sync with the bumps and jerks, the lingering heat, or the afro-Caribbean beats blasting through the school bus. I tried closing my eyes, which only made the spinning worse, and made me more vulnerable to the pickpockets who make a living off of the amateur drunks at Carnival.

Fortunately the bus let me off at my destination, a posh mall near the northern city limits where blocks of high rise apartments abruptly gave way to the slopes down to the delta marsh and mangrove bordering the sea.

Henry had lived in Colombia long enough to to pick the right setting for an interview with a potential Colombian wife. In Barranquilla the mall was the place for nearly all social interaction. It’s where families came for outings, students to study, lovers to date, evangelicals to proselytize, and for women of all ages to show off the bandages from yesterday’s nose job. Where else would they go? The only movie theaters were at the mall, so were all the best fast food outlets and supermarkets. As one of the few air conditioned spaces in the city some people came just to sit by the indoor fountains and escape the heat. Neighborhoods have come to be named after their malls and when people gave directions they reflexively started them from the parking garage of the nearest shopping complex. Only when the mall closed did the locus of activity shift to the nightclub.

Hard at work on his article, Henry had been meeting hopeful wives all day. In a measure to prevent stalking and to keep his dates separated from each other, his schedule had rotated between the Metrocenter, Prado, and here at Buenaventura mall. I saw him waiting for me inside the front entrance. I waved but did not risk opening my mouth as I made a bee line for the restroom where I made an offering of aguardiente to the porcelain throne of the gods of commerce. Post sacrifice I took stock in the mirror--not too bad, considering. Though my eyes were glazed and sunk behind swollen cheeks, I had kept the garlic fish sludge from splashing onto my shirt. I dabbed some water on my face and combed fingers through my hair a couple times, not that I wanted to look too presentable. It’s better a bride knows up front what she’s getting into.

“I can see you aim to make a good first impression.” Henry said when I returned to the entrance. He offered me a piece of gum which I declined.

“No, I insist,” he said with the charm of a drinking captain.

It wasn’t yet seven. Per custom, the girls would be at least a little late, so I had time to catch up on Henry’s day of interviews. The strongest contender so far was Yamile, the young cosmetologist in training who had brought her mother, father, four sisters, two brothers, and a baby niece along for the date. Her family in rapt attention, Yamile assured Henry that with her training in massage and the facial arts she would provide him a life of relaxation and physical bliss. Henry had a hard time relaxing or contemplating her definition of physical bliss with the twenty eyes on him sizing up their potential in-law. It was not the only family date he had stumbled into, and it had gotten expensive. The day’s tally of overpriced mall coffees and ice cream for seven dates and 32 relatives had set him back more than he’d make selling his article. It also put a crimp in his Carnival budget, though lucky for him his girl friend was arriving tomorrow from Bogota.

This was his last scheduled meeting of the day, a twenty year old named Katherine. After the Yamile episode, he requested by text she bring a single friend and no extended family along for the date. Katherine hailed from barrio Beautiful Coast. Beauty is relative, but her neighborhood was located nowhere near the coast.

Henry spotted two girls on the other side of the entrance hall, the angle was such where we could just see them through the triangle of space under the escalators. They were huddled near a store window, the shorter of the two cupped her hand to the corner of her mouth as she whispered to her friend. They had probably been there scouting us for a while. They hadn’t run away, so Henry and I approached to see if they were our dates.

Katherine was a lanky girl with thick black hair and dark caramel skin. Henry explained he was our translator and then made our introduction. Katherine introduced her friend Soledad, a short and heavy set girl a few shades darker than Katherine. After the introductions we silently agreed to get on the escalator and head for the ice cream shop in the food court because that is what people do on a first date at the mall.

Seconds after we sat down, I felt my stomach sinking. It wasn’t the aguardiente, this time it was something worse, my conscience a step ahead of me. A depressing reality was unfolding that this was one of those encounters only funny in the abstract. It seemed like a hilarious idea yesterday that I go along with this charade for the sake of Henry’s story. At the time I had a sweating can of beer in my hand and a new friend to impress. Now the joke involved Katherine and her friend who had traveled an hour on some equally insane bus ride through streets filling with crowds from neighborhood block parties. Now they were here in an empty shopping mall on the the first night of a party Barranquilleros lived the rest of the year waiting for.

Katherine’s radiant smile and hopeful eyes somehow made the set up all the more awful. Couldn’t she see that the promise of gringolandia wasn’t worth a guy who could barely hold what was left of his lunch down on the escalator?

The trace of glitter on her cheeks and eyelids made Katherine look younger than her twenty years. She was wearing a purple halter top with the word sexy airbrushed in yellow stars on her flat chest. The girls from this wealthy neighborhood might have snickered at her cheap plastic heels and lack of a boob job had they bothered to notice her at all here.

Henry started the interview by explaining to the girls that he had put the classified ad in the paper on my behalf, a 30 year old American from San Francisco, California. He told them that we would start with me asking her some questions. My stomach turned over again. I had no idea what to ask this girl. I didn’t want to ask her anything, nor did I want to be here in this climate controlled palace of commerce, teasing this poor girl with a chance for a membership into the first world shopping club. It was too late to run, at this point I had to play along.

“What kind of a wife will you make?” I asked lamely.

Henry began the translation, but Katherine cut him short. She understood the question, and had practiced a response in English.

“I make good wife,” she said with pauses between each word, “I work hard. I like the cooking. I love the children. I love English. I want speak good English.”

“What places would you like to visit in America?”

This time she waited for Henry’s translation. She looked at Soledad and then back at me.

“New York.” she said.

I put this question to every young person I've met here and have noticed a pattern. The rich and poor almost always choose New York, while every middle income Colombian answers Miami and Orlando. Most children of the wealthy have been to all three cities. They have relatives in Miami and New York, and daddy took his little princess on the obligatory pilgrimage to Disney World. As young adults they know New York is the cultural capital and the ex pat city that confirms their worldliness. My guess is the middle income kids were aware that their better off cousins took the trip to Orlando and still fantasize about going themselves, with a trip to South Beach to round off the vacation. Poor girls like Katherine answered New York because that is the city they have heard of, perhaps through a distant relative or because a brother or uncle followed the Yankees. Disney does not market to her demographic.

Katherine answered the rest of my questions with a politician’s positive. I felt a little less fraudulent by the end. Even if I wasn’t the gringo from Henry’s Clash of Civilizations classified, I was single and open to possibility. However unlikely it was that I’d fall for a waifish girl from the Barranquilla slums, I like to imagine that anything is possible so far from home.

I would have felt better still if Katherine hadn’t seemed to be enjoying the interview so much. So far, other than showing up drunk, I hadn’t done anything to make it clear I was not her prince charming.

Henry picked up on my inward turn and asked Katherine if she would like to ask some questions. I resolved to bomb her half of the interview and get out of there. She gave me the opportunity straight away when she asked about my family. Family was the most noticeable difference between Americans and Colombians in the daily experience. The Colombian family is a twenty four seven experience, even teenagers hang out with their friends in the same room with their parents. I could have told her how close I was to my family--I saw them two or three times a year. Or I could have told her how much I loved children and how I didn’t want to spoil that love by having any. I could have gone anywhere with the question. What popped into my head was my roommate’s fantasy about our San Francisco household.

“My family life is very special, and very important to me. That’s why I am here, to grow my family, but my family might not be the kind of family you think of here in Colombia," I said, then waited for Henry to translate.  "In San Francisco we have a lot of gay people. I live with two other women, they’re both lesbians, and we have a special relationship. We’re looking for a third woman to live with us and have our children. We would all have a relationship together, like a marriage. You would be married to me and two other women, and we would all be parents to the children.”

Henry flashed the prurient look of the Channel Four documentarian even as he faithfully translated my words. Soledad also looked scandalized, but the grenade fell short of its mark. Katherine didn’t blink or break smile. Her posture exuded confidence and graciousness as she gave a thoughtful response the dazed reporter could only paraphrase.

“She says she has a big family too, and is used to living with loads of people under one roof. A man with such kind eyes must have a loving family that he cares for deeply. The children will be very lucky to have so many people who love them.” Henry raised his eyebrows as if to say. “Next question, mate.”

This wasn’t my idea, I thought to myself. But that didn’t make me feel like any less of a schmuck. I had agreed to be here. That Katherine seemed ready to walk away from everything she knows and join a man with kind eyes who is taking her to a polyamorous household in a foreign land, made it all the worse. 


If the coarse alcohol hadn’t been tightening viselike at my temples, I might have appreciated the cult forming possibilities Katherine's case presented. I had drunk too much cane liquor kool-aid to imagine myself the reverse Jim Jones, snatching the girls out of the jungle and back to San Francisco. No, I felt like a run of the mill sex tourist.

I answered the rest of her questions as succinctly as possible so I could go find another bottle of fire water and a hole to pass out in. I couldn’t make eye contact with either of the girls as Henry thanked them for traveling across the city to meet us and wished them luck on their long ride home.

Katherine told Henry that we were both invited to her birthday party next Tuesday. She wrote her phone number and the closest coordinates to her house-- households often lack proper addresses in the barrios-- on the back of a napkin. Henry said we would try to make it.

Later I’d discover I was just another subject in a mock reality that so often passes for the way things are in the BBC or CNN version of the world. Put a camera in front of a situation, and see if people act the same; send a writer out for a story, see if he doesn’t come up with a story. At least I would be the butt of the joke. Henry wove a yarn about a Yank journalist representing the Ethical Traveller while binge drinking and bride shopping his way through Carnival. And fortunately, he published the article in Spanish.

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