Road Fever

by Tim Cahill

  BY THE TIME WE CROSSED the equator, Joe was feeling better. Garry and I were elated.

  “We’re in the Northern Hemisphere,” I shouted. “Nothing can go wrong now.”

  “Don’t say that,” Garry pleaded.

  Stamp this document, then that one. Stamp. Stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp. Uh, señor, this says that your truck is from 1988.

  Yes, brand-new.

  How can that be? This is 1987.

  Well, it’s what we call a model year.…

  Did you go into the future and bring this truck back? Ha, I made a joke.

  And a very good one. But no, you see, in the United States …

  There is a mistake on your carnet, no?

  A mistake?

  It says 1988 but it is 1987.

  Oh, right. Very good you caught that: a stupid mistake. This is clearly a 1987 truck.

  Just as I thought. Very good.

  Stamp. Stamp, stamp, stamp.

  Across the border into Colombia. Stamp, stamp, stamp. Occupation? Mother’s maiden name. Marital status? Stamp. Stamp, stamp, stamp. Carnet? Rip, stamp, stamp. Stamp, stamp, stamp.…

  A mere four hours of this and we were in Colombia where we were met by two men from GM Colombia, called Col Motors or Colmotores. Santiago Camacho wore a blue jacket, jeans, loafers, and wore his black hair moderately long. He had the quick smile of a ladies’ man and walked with a confident swagger.

  The other man, Luis Nieto, stood by the truck while we spoke with Santiago. He had close-cropped dark hair, a nose that had been broken at least once, and he carried a small black suitcase in one hand. People passing by would look at the truck, as they always did, everywhere, and Luis would look at the people and then they wouldn’t look at the truck anymore.

  Santiago said we were to follow him to the port of Cartagena and that the drive would cost us two days.

  “Two days,” I said, amazed. It didn’t look that far on the map.

  Well, we would stop at night between about midnight and five in the morning, Santiago explained.

  “Because it’s dangerous to drive at night?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” Santiago said.

  * * *

  BUT OF COURSE it is dangerous to drive at night in Colombia. A travel advisory from the U.S. State Department in my clip files read, “Because of sporadic guerrilla activity, travel in certain areas may be hazardous. Before venturing into rural areas, check with the nearest U.S. Consulate.…”

  The clip file was bulging with newspaper articles which indicated that Colombia was either a vigorous country of extremely high-spirited adventurers or a nation on the verge of anarchy. “Ranchers and peasants in rural Colombia are arming themselves with more and better weapons to resist attacks from leftist guerrillas,” The Miami Herald said. The guerrillas kidnap ranchers, engage in extortion, and harass rural business people. The ranchers were buying Uzi submachine guns. A government official thought this sort of thing could escalate the spiral of violence.

  Which seemed to be true: members of the Patriotic Union—a political party representing the leftists and born out of a 1984 guerrilla-government effort to reintegrate armed rebels into civic life—were being assassinated at an alarming rate. In the last two years, 375 members of the party had been shot to death by unidentified gunmen.

  There were three groups of rebels: ELP, M-19, and FARC M-19 had, for a time, been at war with the Medellín drug cartel, but the drug lords had taken to disemboweling the leftists and hanging the corpses in trees outside the homes of the victims’ families. There was an uneasy truce at present.

  FARC, previously on good terms with the cartel, was now engaged in a miniwar with drug traffickers for control of plantations in the eastern jungles.

  The previous week, one clipping read, a rebel land mine killed three government soldiers and wounded eleven others. Meanwhile, rival gangs of emerald traffickers killed twenty-three people and injured twenty-four during a war for control of the precious stones.

  And last year eleven thousand Colombians were murdered, making homicide the country’s leading cause of death among males aged fifteen to forty-four.

  In the area of the country we were presently driving, a lot of trucks were being hijacked. It was easy to see why.

  The road was a good two-lane blacktop with ample shoulders, but the pitches were steep through mountains rising to seven thousand feet. Along the sheer hillsides, there were scars where the mud and rock had simply given up to gravity and fallen away from the land. The roads writhed painfully through this wounded land. The turns were sharp and continuous. Our tires screamed through them: Garry was pushing hard and we were doing no more than thirty miles an hour.

  Santiago and Luis were out ahead in another Chevy that looked like a Monza but was called a Classic. It was red and had an automatic transmission. Santiago was driving, pushing the gutsy little gasoline engine hard, and when he passed a truck, he’d hold beside it for a while and then we’d see his arm shoot out the window and make a graceful circle: come ahead, come now.

  If there was a car coming, he’d make a motion like patting a dog on the head: stay back.

  “The guy,” Garry said, “is a great driver.”

  Sometimes Santiago would circle us forward, then quickly pat the dog on the head: come ahead, ahh, sorry, not now boys, we got certain death up here.

  The trucks, even the best of them, were moving ponderously on this serpentine roller coaster of a road. We followed one semi down a pretty perpendicular hill and he was going so slowly that our speedometer didn’t even register. The driver, certainly in his lowest gear, was tapping his brakes every thirty seconds, holding them for perhaps five seconds and then letting go. The truck was probably overloaded—I imagined the driver was carrying at least twenty tons—and if the vehicle got away from him on a grade this steep, he would go screaming to the bottom of the hill and be horribly crushed by his own cargo. The grind of the brake pad against the wheel echoed off the scarred hillsides. It sounded like the moaning of a large wounded animal.

  The truck, I couldn’t help but notice, was going no faster than a man could walk. An ambush could be a one-man affair: jump up on the running board with a gun and discuss the matter with a man who couldn’t take his eyes off the road or his hands off the wheel.

  JUST AFTER SUNSET, we came screaming around a corner that led into yet another blind curve, but in the middle of this one there was a disabled truck carrying a load of logs. There were no lights or flares, and we didn’t see it in the dark. Santiago slammed on his brakes and the little Chevy stopped about two feet from a projecting log.

  Both Joe Skorupa and I knew that, on a steep downhill grade, our four- or five-ton vehicle was never going to be able to stop. We were going to smash into the back of the Chevy, drive it into the logs, and kill Santiago and Luis. But Garry hit the brakes full on and he stopped with inches to spare.

  Garry was delighted and talked with Joe about GMC antilock brakes and real-world capabilities and the wonders of this Sierra, which wasn’t just a truck anymore. It gave me a hiddach.

  We passed through too many military checkpoints to count. In the darkness, we’d switch on the dome lights so the soldiers could see us. Coast up to the guns with our hands where everyone could see them. Sometimes the soldiers simply waved us through. Sometimes they spoke with us for less than a minute. Sometimes they pulled us over.

  “God, I hope they don’t have a pit,” Garry said, “anything but the pit.”

  When we were stopped, Santiago and Luis came back and talked to the soldiers. Luis showed them some sort of identification that seemed to impress them.

  The road took us through a few towns and the streets were narrow, just wide enough for two trucks to pass. The sound of music boomed out of the open doorways of the crowded bars, and couples walked the streets, hand in hand. Everyone, it seemed, was socializing in the cool of the evening.

  I saw a black woman with a rather astonishing figure standing in the doorway of a
pool hall. There was a bright yellow light behind her, and I could see the shape of her legs through a thin bright-red skirt. A man standing beside her whispered in her ear, and she raised her fingertips to her lips to cover an involuntary smile.

  I was contemplating this charming scene when a white Jeep carrying four municipal policemen in green military uniforms cut us off, forcing Garry to stop. I stood there with my hands in the air, smiling happily, while yet another teenager held an automatic rifle at my neck. I was getting awfully sick of this scene.

  One of the officers searched the cab while Santiago and Luis talked with the man who seemed to be in charge. The guns came down after a tense few minutes and the officers began checking documents. They seemed especially impressed by a letter we had from the Colombian ambassador to Ecuador: “Please afford all possible cooperation to Garry Sowerby and Tim Cahill …”

  “Good,” the officer said. “Go.”

  He saluted us.

  But it had been another Psalm-91 situation: a fast stop and lots of guns.

  I pulled the map off the suckerboard.

  “You know what the name of that town was?” I asked. I was probably shouting. Bad stops always made us loud and giddy. “Buga!”

  “Buga?”

  “BUGA!”

  “Then,” Joe Skorupa suggested, “those guys were the Buga men.”

  Joe, it seemed, was becoming slightly roto.

  “They checked under the front seat again,” I said.

  “They always look under the front seat,” Garry replied.

  “They see those jerky wrappers.”

  “Figure us for jerky junkies right off.”

  Joe Skorupa, newly roto, thought that we could kick the habit. “Just go cold jerky,” he said.

  He was taking brutal revenge for those darting cows.

  WE PULLED INTO THE TOWN of Pereira about midnight and were promptly stopped by two motorcycle policemen who listened to our story and took us directly to our hotel. They rode little dirt bikes with small engines that sounded like the buzz of mosquitoes against the throaty roar of our big diesel. Last night a press conference, I thought, today a motorcycle escort.

  We went to sleep at twelve-thirty and were back on the road in four hours. On the way out of town, we were stopped by two more teams of police on dirt bikes: the mosquito patrol.

  “I had a good time last night in town,” Garry said. “Rode an elevator up one floor. Locked my door. And this morning was great. I brushed my teeth. There’s a lot to do in that little town, especially when you schedule enough time to really enjoy yourself.”

  WE ROSE through lush mountains, alive with flowers, and watched as banks of clean fog rolled down the green coffee-growing hillsides in the distance. We rose up over a series of classic bus-plunge curves and, at the most obvious places—here, here is where the bus is going to go over—there was usually a shrine about the size of a doghouse with a statue of the Virgin inside. Sometimes there was just a metal plaque with an inscription: Humberto Díaz. Just that name and the date poor Humberto went spinning out into the abyss.

  Everywhere in the country, on every mountain, we saw sweating cyclists in high-tech gear pushing expensive ten-speeds up impossible slopes. Colombian cyclists are the best hill climbers in the world. It is a known fact and a great source of pride to Colombians. Santiago always leaned out the window and cheered them on. Animals, he called them.

  “Ahhh-knee-maul.”

  At the top of each summit there were always two establishments: a coffee stand and a brake shop. We stopped now and again for coffee, which was better than any coffee I had ever had in my life. It was served in small ceramic cups, and rough-looking truck drivers drank it daintily, with a pinkie in the air.

  We had a chance to talk with Santiago and Luis a bit. Santiago was the supervisor of the testing grounds at Col Motors, which, I suppose, meant he was one of Colombia’s best test drivers. He had four children: the oldest was eighteen, the youngest was seven. Santiago had no English, and he couldn’t speak with Garry, but he made it clear: Santiago Camacho thought Garry Sowerby was a hell of a driver. Garry returned the wordless compliment and showed Santiago pictures of Lucy and Natalie.

  Luis was one of the senior security executives at Col Motors. He had four children. His oldest was fifteen. He was a friendly man with a slow, lazy smile, but somehow I didn’t feel that I could ask him what he carried in his black suitcase.

  “IT’S AN UZI,” Garry said. We were running over another summit with puffy white clouds below us.

  “Probably.”

  The road wound through a typical bus-plunge abyss, complete with three shrines, and Garry geared up to pass a truck on a blind curve. Santiago had already passed and all Garry could see was an arm, a circling hand gesture.

  “It’s funny,” Garry said as we pulled in front of the truck. “There’s three of us in here. Think about our families and everyone who knows us, and what they’d feel if we went over this cliff. I mean, we come into a blind corner on the edge of a cliff and there’s a huge truck in front of us and here’s some guy I can’t even talk to and I’m looking at his hand and he’s saying come ahead. And I do. That’s trust.”

  “Am I wrong,” I asked, “or do you get the feeling these guys really sort of like us?”

  “It’s because we’re putting our lives in their hands.”

  “You know what Luis told me? He said that the Chevy they’re driving belongs to the president of Col Motors. It’s his personal car.”

  “Oh Jesus,” Garry said. “We’re beating the crap out of it.”

  Ahead of us, Santiago swerved to miss a large dog running across the road.

  “You see that,” Garry said.

  “Big dog.”

  “You wouldn’t think a dog along the Pan-American Highway would live long enough to get that big.”

  “A rule,” I said. “There are no old dogs on the Pan-American Highway.”

  We were coming into Medellín and I was thinking about the dogs I had read about in my clip file. A week ago, an avalanche of red mud and rock killed at least 175 when it thundered down a mountainside and covered a neighborhood of tar-paper shacks to a depth of twenty feet. According to The Miami Herald, “rescue workers said they were guided in recovering many bodies by dogs howling at the spots where their owners were buried.”

  THE U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT has issued an advisory: “Travel to Medellín is potentially dangerous and if travel is necessary it should be undertaken with great care.” The State Department would seem to have a point.

  In 1981, Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) officials, noting the markings on drug seizures, began to realize that much of the cocaine sold in the United States was supplied by a group of men working out of the Colombian city of Medellín.

  In 1984, a small-time Colombian importer-exporter named Francisco Torres purchased seventy thousand gallons of ether from a New Jersey chemical wholesaler. Ether is used to refine cocaine from the coca leaf. Torres paid cash, $300,000; the ether was to be shipped to Colombia. It all seemed a bit suspicious: the salesman Torres spoke with called the DEA.

  Chemical drums were bugged and the shipment was tracked to a huge complex of cocaine labs in the Amazon basin, not far from the border of Peru, where coca leaves are easily obtained. Some of those leaves, no doubt, came from the same plantation I saw on the banks of the Marañón in 1977.

  The jungle city built on cocaine—it was called Tranquilandia—was raided by Colombian police in March of 1985. They seized fourteen tons of cocaine. It was the world’s largest seizure ever, but records at the site showed that the lab had produced nearly twenty-five tons of cocaine in the previous seven months.

  The records—a series of ledgers—showed links between the top drug lords of Medellín. For the first time, the DEA realized that the world’s cocaine trade was a near monopoly run by the Medellín cartel.

  The above information is taken from an informative six-part series in The Miami Herald. It was ground-breakin
g reporting, but there were no bylines on the front-page stories. That would be too dangerous, the editors agreed. The cartel was perhaps the largest criminal conspiracy on the face of the earth, and murder was a favored tool of the drug lords. In Medellín, the morgue processes an average of nine homicides a day. Drug lords have taken credit for the violent deaths of dozens of judges and police officers in Colombia, and they even gunned down a federal witness in Louisiana.

  One of these drug lords was a handsome charismatic man named Carlos Lehder, a country boy who liked John Lennon and Adolf Hitler. Lehder’s peculiar genius involved transportation of drugs from Colombia to the United States. Using early profits, he bought an island in the Bahamas for the purpose of shipping drugs into the States.

  Eventually he was chased from the island and returned to his hometown of Armenia, in Colombia, where he bought eighteen apartment buildings and fifteen cars. He built a resort where the disco featured a huge statue of John Lennon, complete with bullet holes in the chest.

  The provincial police chief told The Miami Herald that, “his influence was such that some youths were dressing like he was and talking like he was.” Townspeople addressed him as “boss” or “doctor.”

  Lehder was indicted for drug trafficking in the U.S. and his extradition was sought in 1983. The Colombian Supreme Court approved Lehder’s extradition. For the next three years, he hid in the jungle. Once Colombian police followed his girlfriend to one of his hideaways, but Lehder escaped in his underwear. He left behind a cardboard box containing over a million and a half dollars, mostly in American twenties.

  On February 4, 1987, he was finally captured and flown to Florida in a DEA plane.

  In June of 1987, the Colombian Supreme Court, under a death threat from the cartel—many judges were, in fact, assassinated—struck down its extradition treaty with the U.S. Lehder had been extradited under the terms of the old treaty. His trial was set to begin next month, in November 1987.

  Now, in October 1987, we were approaching Medellín in the aftermath of a visit from John Lawn, America’s top drug enforcement official, who called on the government of Colombia to resurrect the extradition treaty. He said the arrest of Lehder in Colombia and his upcoming trial in the United States proved that the old treaty had worked. Lawn had said these things only three days ago. He had, I guess, been allowed to leave the city. We were rolling downhill, closing fast on Medellín, a place where angry, dangerous men had had three days to think about what needed to be done with (or to) United States citizens.