Road fever : a high-speed travelogue

by Cahill, Tim

  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 Diaz. 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 Medellin 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 Medellin 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 Medellin.

  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, S300,000; 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 Marahon 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 Medellin. For the first time, the DEA realized that the world's cocaine trade was a near monopoly run by the Medellin cartel.

  The above information is taken from an informative six-part series

  in The Miami Herald. It was ground-breaking 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 Medellin, 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 Medellin 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 Medellin, a place where angry, dangerous men had had three days to think about what needed to be done with (or to) United States citizens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I asked Santiago if this was a dangerous city.

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

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

  Santiago smiled, all goodwill and charm.

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

  "Teem!" It was Luis.

  "I'm going for a newspaper."

  "No."

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

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

  "The truck's filthy dirty."

  "It's like taking a filthy-dirty naked woman through death row."

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

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

  I saw a mound of dirt several feet high and a mile long where the debris from the mud slide had been plowed off of the Pan-American Highway. I could see bits of cardboard and tin and tar paper in the dry

  red dirt. It made me think of those dogs, howling over the places where their owners had been buried.

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

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

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

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

  "Oh, man, I'm telling you, that was a 9.6."

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

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

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

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

  "Dune buggy from hell," Garry said.

  "Looked like something out of The Road Warrior. Monster roaring

  out of the night with one bad eye. Somebody up there screaming

  curses."

  "It was just a frame and a steering wheel up there."

  "Why," I wondered, "would something like that exist?"

  "It looked like a truck," Garry said. "The guy must have stripped

  it. No cab, no box, just an engine and a frame."

  Santiago was standing in the middle of the road sadly regarding the

  hubcap that belonged to the president of Col Motors. It had been

  squashed flat by the dune buggy from hell.

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

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