by T I WADE
The President appeared on all media channels and asked for peace. He explained that he had heard the voice of the people and that he was overriding the chains of command and would make policy starting that day to start bringing troops home starting the first week of January. Since there would be a change in Presidents after the New Year, he would work with the new President to help him bring 50% of all American troops back into the United States by January 31st. His promise to the American people was that at least 80% of U.S. military forces abroad would be home by Easter.
Chapter 8
Carlos Rodriguez
Carlos Manuel Fidel Sentra Rodríguez was born in Bogotá, Columbia in 1973. His father was a very successful coffee merchant and Carlos was his first and only child.
Carlos left Bogotá when he was a week old and for some reason his parents did not tell him that he was actually born in Colombia until many years later. They sold their ranch the week before his birth and then his father, mother, newborn Carlos, and his nurse, Sissie, flew out of Columbia for the United States two weeks later. Once the family became citizens of the United States, his name was shortened to Carlos Rodriquez, his mother to Sentra, and his father to Manuel Rodriquez.
The pictures he still had of his nurse, Sissie, who had looked after him until he was 12, he kept in a special chocolate box in his sock draw. Although a Colombian by marriage, Sissie was not born in Colombia but originated from South Dakota, and this was where the Rodriquez family moved and purchased a nice-sized house in a nice neighborhood called Rapid Valley, a few miles to the east of Rapid City.
When Carlos looked back at his youth in Rapid Valley, he saw a family of three who lived well by South Dakota standards, worked hard, and succeeded in everything given to them. Carlos was the only Latino in his class. He was actually the only Latino in the whole school of over 300 children, and it was a sure bet that the Rodriquez family was the only Latino family in Rapid Valley. He only recalled fellow Latinos visiting from other parts of the United States and talking with his father in the corner store he had purchased and now ran with his wife Sentra.
In 1983, when Carlos was ten, he started helping in the store. It was the only general store in Rapid Valley at the time and the only other shopping opportunity for the locals was a Safeway in downtown Rapid City. By the age of ten, Carlos spoke like an American because his father had forbidden any family member to speak Spanish after they moved to South Dakota.
Sissie had started working with him on the English language by the age of four and arithmetic at the age of five. She washed the dishes, cleaned the house, and looked after Carlos while his parents were at work all day. Sunday was the only day the family was together. The neighbors were friendly and everybody was polite and waved back and forth, but nobody was ever invited into the large house as guests and his family kept pretty much to themselves.
Over the first couple of years, Manuel added onto the house. First an extra bedroom for Sissie, then an added veranda and outside party area, then a swimming pool, which was fun for a couple of months in the summer. With the pool came a high stone wall around the exterior of the garden. The house was full of good and expensive furniture and Carlos’ first memories were of a happy big house full of comfort and color.
By the age of 12, he was excelling in school. Sissie had worked hard with him, and his grasp of school was well mastered by having an extra teacher at home. His English and math were perfect and he never came home with anything less than an A.
One day, Sissie vanished—just disappeared from his life. He arrived home from school as usual, and for the first time he could remember, his father was waiting in the study for him. Carlos looked around for Sissie while his father asked him to sit down with him and began to tell him a story.
“Carlos, my boy,” his father started. “I need to tell you about Sissie. Sissie has decided to return to what she wanted to do when I first met her in Columbia many years ago. Sissie is actually a relative of your mother’s and had just had a nervous breakdown when we met her, and that was why we invited her to come with us and act as your nurse. Sissie had been beaten up by a gang of boys in Medellin, hurt very badly, and was in hospital for several weeks. She had been pregnant and she lost her baby as a result of that horrible beating. Sissie lost the child a month before you came into this world. She was born here and spent her first 12 years in South Dakota before she moved to Colombia, and after she told us what it was like, we decided that South Dakota was a perfect place for us to move to.”
“But why is she gone now, Papa?” Carlos asked, focused on his immediate problem.
“When I met Sissie in Columbia, she wanted to go into the Catholic Church and become a nun, but the church did not like that she had become pregnant without being married. They are very funny about that,” continued his father. “I went to see the Catholic Church in New York a year or two ago and gave them her full story. After much time and deliberation, they agreed to allow her to study to become what she wants.”
“Will she ever come back to visit us?” interrupted young Carlos with big eyes, trying to understand why his only real friend and support system in the world was not there for him anymore.
“Yes, one day, my boy. You see, to become a nun, she loses her freedom to come and go as she wishes. For many years she will not be in control of her life, she will not be allowed to visit you, but one day she will come back to see us. She told me to promise that to you.”
“But why didn’t she say goodbye to me?” asked Carlos, white-faced and questioning.
“I think because she loves you so much, Carlos. To her, you are as much a son as you are to your mother. Sentra has always understood the love between you and Sissie, and she was happy to have such a loving nurse for you. Sissie is family and nobody minded sharing you, but because Sissie lost the only child she will ever have, you took the place of her lost child and that was good for you—good for helping Sissie mend and good for us because we needed time to start a new life and become successful. Believe me, Sissie will be back one day and your mother and I will always welcome her back with love and affection.”
Silence fell in the study while Manuel allowed Carlos time to grasp the situation.
“So I will see her soon?” asked the young boy, picking at any possible straws.
“Yes, Carlos. You will see her soon. But she is not in control of when or where.” Tears did their best to wind themselves out of Carlos’ eyes, but to be strong in his father’s eyes was also important to the 12-year old boy. So he got up, thanked his father for the information, and slowly walked down the hall to his bedroom to let his emotions erupt behind the closed door. Naturally, his father heard the sobs from the bedroom, but smiled to himself about how bravely his son had carried off his departure with his head held high. He was proud.
It took a long time for Carlos to get over Sissie not being in the house, but the education she had instilled in him from an early age was like concrete, and Carlos continued to mature in excellent form. At age 15, he won his first science award, and at 16 he received his first math award. At 17, he and the family moved to Washington D.C.—a whole new world for Carlos, because he did not speak one word of Spanish, and for the first time in his life he was in school with many other Hispanics and Latinos.
It was not an unexpected move, since his father had put the general store on the market a month earlier and it had quickly been bought by the Safeway chain of supermarkets. Times were good in Rapid Valley, and their pretty house was also snapped up, only a week later. There was a week left of the school year and then there were goodbyes to the neighbors they had never really met and to several of the teachers and a couple of school friends with whom he sat on the bus. Then the moving van arrived, they packed up the house in one day, and left South Dakota, never to return. Carlos’ father didn’t tell him why they were moving, or even why they had lived in South Dakota in the first place, but Carlos had up to now never asked.
His father had driven all the way to In
diana before Carlos asked the first question of his adult life.
“Papa, why are we going to Washington?”
“A good question, son, and it’s about time you asked a few questions. I know your head is full of astronomy and science and math, and you are a dreamer and have never really been one to ask questions, but you have got to learn that asking questions is a way of learning, too. It is very important to ask questions and it is very important to get them answered correctly. So let me start at the beginning, and I will answer your question well. We have another six hours of driving today, so that gives me enough time to give you a good answer. Are you ready?” he asked looking across to his wife and getting a nod of agreement from her.
“It sounds like another story, Papa,” replied the teenager. “You haven’t told me a story since Sissie left five years ago.”
“Maybe I’m not good at telling stories, son,” his father replied. “In my old job, telling stories was not a good idea.”
“Is that why we left Columbia?” asked Carlos.
“We left Columbia to stay alive. But let me start at the beginning. Many years before I met your mother my father was a farmer—a farmer of certain types of plants that they now call “drugs” in the United States. We lived outside the town of Florencia in the mountains, a couple of hundred miles south of Bogotá. In those days, it was normal for a farmer to grow those plants and my father was a large landowner, worked very hard, managed over a hundred laborers and their families, and owned an extremely large farm given to him by his father, my Grandfather. My father did not believe that he was doing anything wrong, nor did anybody else. People did not use drugs in those days as they do today.”
“Your Grandfather was a very good man, Carlos, and much respected in Columbia,” added my mother.
“My father was murdered in front of my eyes when I was 13 years old, Carlos. He never had a chance to defend himself. In those days, there was very little crime nor as many bad guys as there are today. A large, organized group of men wanted our land and our money. They arrived in two trucks and shot my father as he went out to greet them. My mother, my sister, and I were all watching from the house, since it was a large group of men and we did not get visitors very often. They did not even say a word to him. He went out and greeted them as any farmer would do, and a dozen of them just shot their pistols at him.”
“What happened to you and your mother?” Carlos asked, breathlessly.
“The boss of the group walked up to my mother and told her that we had half an hour to pack up our belongings and leave in one of his trucks to Bogotá,” Manuel continued. “He demanded the keys to my father’s safe in the office and my father’s bank account number at the local bank, and threatened to shoot me and my younger sister in front of her. She gave them to him. The safe had a roll of money in it and fake papers for the farm, my mother told me later. The man in charge shouted to the others to load us up and get us off his property. They only gave us ten minutes to pack and then we were dragged out of our rooms with a suitcase each and placed next to my mother on the back of the truck. My father was still laying in his own pool of blood where they had shot him, and we were taken down to the main road where our land ended. They threw us off the truck there and told us not to come back ever.”
“What did you do?” asked Carlos.
“My father was a clever man,” replied Manuel. “He must have heard about this happening to other farmers and been prepared for such an occasion. It was about three miles into the local town and it took us about an hour. Nobody passed us and we were on the only road to town, so we knew the bad men had not yet reached the bank. There was a little money in the only account my father had in his name, but a lot of money in my mother’s account. She told the assistant manager what happened to my father and ordered him to give anybody who gave the right information all the money in his account and tell them that her husband had gambled the rest of his money away. I remember everything she said vividly. The assistant manager was my mother’s nephew and knew us very well. My mother told him to wire all the money in her account to another account in Medellin, in my uncle’s name and delete her account and make it look like it had never existed. My father had a large safe deposit box in the bank, and she went in and cleaned it out. She then ordered her nephew to gather as much information about the men as he could. She planned to return one day to kill every one of them. She gave me the heavy bag to carry and we caught the next bus to Cali, which was west of where we were. It didn’t matter where the bus was going, but that we were safe. We weren’t heading to Bogotá anyway, but to Medellin.”
“Did your mother really go back and shoot every man?” asked Carlos in wonder.
“Yes son, but I’ll get to that shortly,” was the reply. “We arrived in Medellin two days later and found a room in a large house with family for a few weeks. My mother looked around the area and finally paid cash for a small farm with a ranch house with the money from the safe deposit box. The farm was only a dozen acres or so and the house only a few years old. It was a nice farm with beautiful views about 20 miles south of Medellin and pretty close to her family. My mother waited and looked after us until I turned 18. I was pretty big and a mean SOB as she proudly called me. I must have gotten it from her because I later found out that she was just as mean an SOB as I was.”
“Does SOB mean what I think it means, so she basically called herself one of those?” Carlos asked, shocked.
“Yes, son, she was that mean. I remember her treating the laborers very well when my father was alive, but none of them wanted to get on the wrong side of her. My father was always the nice guy and my mother the controller. When I turned 18, I entered the police force and spent my first year training in Medellin. My family had some connections in the police force and one day I was told that I was going on plain clothes duty and they asked if I wanted to join a new drug squad that was being formed. A cousin of mine would be in command and he wanted me in. I joined, and we spent another six months in Texas, training under American trainers. My English had been good throughout school and I started speaking it fluently. When we returned to Columbia, we were transferred to a new nongovernmental-looking building above a large fruit and vegetable market. We became a coffee export company and completed a month’s course in the mountains learning about Columbian coffee to use as our cover. We acted like coffee buyers. We were 11 men and the commander. The biggest shock of my life up to that moment was when we were called to a meeting one day, a week or so after we had moved, and my mother walked into the room.”
“My own mother! I couldn’t believe my eyes. Here was my mother in our secret building. She was introduced to the men but no mention was made to the other men that she was my mother. The commander told us that she knew an area in the south where many atrocities had been committed against farmers over the last ten years, and for our first year of work, we were going to start cleaning up that area. She was to be our guide. What she told me later was that the assistant manager in the bank had kept her up-to-date on all the killings, all the land transfers, and changes in bank account ownership. He even went back to the beginning of the bad times and worked out that several different gangs had killed over a hundred farmers, taken over their farms, and emptied their accounts. It had started a couple of years before my father was killed and some of those gangs were now in control of thousands of acres and had upwards of 30 to 40 men. He also gave the names of the gang members in the area’s police force, which included the local police chief himself.”
“That must have been a problem,” said Carlos.
“Not really son. We drove into Florencia and four of us acted like a gang of our own for the first couple of days we were there. The commander and my mother were part of the four. We stayed in a small hotel. In the 1960s, Florencia had a population of about 30,000 people—a small town with many rural people living just outside of it. There were several multi-story buildings, but nothing like today. The town and area’s police force consisted of only
25 men, of which at least a dozen were in the pay of the different gangs. We knew their names and we started to work. Within a day, the police chief came over to the hotel and asked us who we were. My mother recognized him but he did not recognize her. We asked him to meet us outside town because we had a deal for him worth a lot of money. We also named six of the bad cops and asked him to bring them with him. Hey! There are only four of us! our commander added to prove that they wouldn’t be in danger. We mentioned the names of the several gang leaders in the area and said that we were under orders to offer him an opportunity with some of the gangs wanting to band together. There were only four of us at the meeting—my mother, who acted like the wife of our commander, him, me, and another guy. We did not want to show all our faces, and we had been well-informed by the bank’s assistant manager, so he easily fell for the fake opportunity.”
“Everybody agreed to meet somewhere else so no one would have the chance to tape our conversations. It was simple. They walked into our ambush and tried to fight back when we showed our badges. We had to kill three of them, and the rest we transported back to Bogotá with the dead. We made sure the place where they were caught never looked like anybody had ever been there. We were backed up by people in high places, and it wasn’t long before every one of the captives spilled their beans. They were pronounced guilty and placed in a newly-built and secret high-risk solitary confinement prison several miles outside Medellin on an Army base where nobody could contact them. Even the special guards had been carefully picked for their jobs. Then we went back.”
“Of course, many people were asking questions about the disappearance of the police officers, but we put the word out that was probably gang-related and then the gangs themselves came into town to find out. Our commander took over as the new police chief and my mother still pretended to be his wife. They arrived in a new police car and had three new policemen, our guys, with them. It was all Bogotá could send right now. Within a month, we had done something similar with all the other bad cops, one at a time, and we now had six of our guys in new police uniforms. Then our guys started getting offers and threats. The first gang of 20 men came into town one day, all well-dressed and driving fancy new American cars. They took the new police chief out for drinks, made him pick up his wife at gunpoint, and warned him about what would happen to his wife if he didn’t do what he was told. Of course he agreed, and was ordered to tell the gang who had gotten rid of the old policemen. The commander told them that he thought that the three single men who had transferred with him were special policemen. Two of them had been in the area beforehand and had worked undercover at the station for several weeks.”