by Brad Willis
Two more men, also with firearms, approach us with the same formal politeness of Isaac and softly say, “We must check you for weapons.” One man frisks Dennis and me with seasoned proficiency. The other deftly goes through all of our bags. “Thank you,” they both say after concluding we’re unarmed.
“Through here.” Isaac takes charge again and leads us into the main door. We go down a corridor with aging hardwood floors and yellowish stucco walls, past a small room filled with filing cabinets, and then a larger room with desks and a few men studiously doing their work. No one glances up, but everyone is aware of our presence.
Now we’re turning left down another corridor. Isaac unlocks a door and we enter a comfortable living room with couches and chairs. There’s a wide bay window looking out onto a small courtyard with deep green shrubbery and a few trees soaking in glancing rays of warm sunlight. “Please set up your camera,” Isaac instructs. “Mr. Tambo will be with you shortly.”
After fifteen minutes, Oliver Tambo steps softly through a side door wearing a traditional wax-dyed shirt, called a batik, of bright yellow, red, and green patterns. He is almost seventy years old. He has salt-and-pepper hair, a light beard, and thick, black-rimmed glasses. He welcomes us with a soft smile as Dennis clips a microphone on his shirt.
Before I ask a question, he says, “We have struggled against oppression for generations. It is now time for our liberation.”
“Critics say your movement embraces terrorism and has many communist members,” I reply in a respectful tone. “What is your answer to this?”
“We are puppets to no one,” Tambo says with authority and conviction. “We want a democratic, nonracial South Africa where all political parties can participate. We have taken aid from socialist countries because no Western democracies will help us, despite their public statements about seeking equality and justice throughout the world. We have also received support from Scandinavia, which is hardly a radical nation. And no one who assists us tells us what to do.”
It’s the Cold War again, a story that’s played out too many times in too many places around the world. America and the Soviet Union fight each other this way, using smaller, less developed countries as proxies. Its victims always seem to be those facing poverty and struggling for freedom. Mr. Tambo is eloquent in articulating his case, and the interview ends far too quickly for me. After ten minutes of conversation, his aide says he must go. We have all the material we need, but I could talk to this wise and elegant man into the middle of the night.
Isaac guides us back to the compound entryway. Incredible luck. Chris Hani has just arrived under heavy guard for a meeting with Tambo. Hani is one of the most controversial, elusive, and wanted figures in the movement. I remember seeing his photo during my research and I was struck by the power he exuded. Hani leads the armed wing of the ANC. It’s called Umkhonto we Sizwe, which means Spear of the Nation. Unlike the Gandhi-inspired nonviolence embraced by Mandela and Tambo, members of Umkhonto we Sizwe are convinced that the brutality and injustice of apartheid can only be overcome through armed struggle. South Africa’s Secret Police hunt these guerilla fighters relentlessly and kill them when they can. This is probably why we went through so much secrecy and backtracking to get here this morning.
“Mr. Hani.” I stop him as he is about to enter the residence. “We’ve just completed interviewing Mr. Tambo. May we have a word with you?” His guards stiffen and are about to brush us aside when Hani stops them and answers, “Of course. I can give you a minute.”
Dennis swings his camera onto his shoulder and slips a microphone into my hand with amazing speed. “Why violence?” I ask. “Why not follow Mandela and Tambo? Peaceful resistance. Civil disobedience?”
“I am a communist and a patriot,” Hani says gently. His boyish face and wide smile make it hard to believe he embraces armed struggle until he says, “I make no apologies. The South African government has brutalized, tortured, and killed too many of our people. They make false promises, break agreements, treat us like children. The only thing they will ever understand is violence. We must let them taste the suffering they have given us, make them insecure in their homes and on the streets.” Hani is charismatic and articulate. He is the second most popular figure in the resistance movement after Nelson Mandela. Six years after we air our interview with him he will be assassinated.
Departing Lusaka, we move deep into the countryside, passing through small villages and remote areas where armed gangs with murky allegiances often ambush travelers. Zambia had previously been the British Colony of North Rhodesia until it declared independence in 1964. Billy Nkunika, a cross between an intellectual and a street-savvy survivor, was a leader of the resistance against the British and is now an advisor to the ANC. We’re lucky to have him with us as both guide and protector.
It’s our second day of moving south from Lusaka toward the borders of Zimbabwe and Botswana. Just before nightfall, we round a sweeping corner through the jungle and find the road blocked by two battered pickup trucks. As Jonas slams on the brakes, we’re quickly surrounded by a dozen armed men. Two of them have rifles pointed directly at us. The rest brandish large machetes as they order us to get out of our car. It’s little matter that Dennis and I are not South African; the fact that we’re white and carrying expensive camera gear is enough to place us in grave danger.
Nkunika orders Jonas to leave the engine running as he jumps out fearlessly, barking at the men with great authority. A few of the younger members of the gang, who look to be in their early teens, start tapping their machetes on the hood of our car while pressing their faces against the window, staring hard at us. I think about the five thousand dollars I have in my satchel for travel needs and emergencies. Our camera gear is worth a small fortune.
Dennis whispers, “This is trouble.” I’m about to agree when Nkunika bursts back into the car, shoving the young men aside, slams the door and rolls down his window still yelling that he fought against racism before they were born. One of the battered trucks is pushed back and we roar through the roadblock. Dennis and I look at one another and sigh in unison. Without Nkunika, who knows what would have happened.
“These young men are crazy,” Nkunika says at a jungle hut where we are spending the night. “They don’t know anything about this struggle. They are filled with rage. All they want to do is rob people.”
We are having a simple dinner of nshima, a bland, pasty dish made from maize. It’s also called mealie-meal. It’s almost impossible to swallow. Then it sticks to your ribs.
“It’s hard to blame them,” I say. “They’ve been terribly oppressed. There are no jobs, no future. I understand why they would want to rob us. What did you say that saved us?”
Nkunika smiles. “I lied to them,” he answers. “I told them we had three more trucks behind us in an armed convoy and they would all be killed on the spot if they didn’t let us go and scram before our soldiers arrive.”
The following morning, deep in the arid bush, we film lines of women standing for hours in the brutal sun with their children to get a few cups of grain from humanitarian organizations. Relief workers weigh their infants and provide powders for malnutrition, diarrhea, and dehydration. Despite the obvious poverty, many of the children seem happy and are glad to see us there. Others stand with blank gazes, flies covering their faces, lips bleeding from the scorching heat, bellies swollen like ripe watermelons from the ravages of dysentery.
Zambian countryside, 1986.
In preparing for this trip, I came across facts that floored me: Half the people in the world live on less than two dollars a day. More than thirty thousand die daily from starvation; of these, fifteen thousand are children. We came to do a story on apartheid in South Africa and Nelson’s movement, but we’ve also captured scene after scene of the poverty that rules these African nations, and I will weave it into the narratives at every opportunity.
Thinking about this on the flight back to Boston, I realize I take so many simple luxuri
es for granted: A beautiful home. A refrigerator filled with so much food there’s always some that’s going bad. A bathroom with running water. More widgets and gadgets than anyone needs. It’s embarrassing. What are any of my problems compared to those who are forced to struggle every day just to survive? Who am I to ever complain about a sore back, even if it’s on fire right now as I sit in first class having a filet mignon and my second glass of cabernet?
CHAPTER 6
Drug Wars
THE YEAR 1989 is coming to a close, and crack cocaine is exploding on the scene. Crack is a highly addictive form of the drug that is smoked for an instant high. Its name comes from the crackling sound it makes when it’s lit. It’s cheap and readily available on street corners, and many inner-city Boston neighborhoods are ruled by gangs, guns, and drugs. It’s a powerful story, and it’s complicated. Gangbangers are building empires, and there are shootouts in the darkest hours of night. Innocent victims get wounded and sometimes killed. Courageous cops risk their lives. Corrupt cops are on the take. Weapons flood the streets. This is much more than a local story. It’s a national epidemic. An estimated 2 million Americans use cocaine. More than a quarter of a million are already hooked on crack.
Hoping to turn off the tap at the source, President George H. Bush is holding a drug summit in Cartagena, Colombia, with the leaders of Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru, where most of the world’s cocaine is produced. Cartagena is a magnificent, centuries-old city sitting on the confluence of the Magdalena River and Caribbean Sea. I took working vacations there a few times before moving to Boston, helping produce an International Music Festival for Colombian TV with Camillo Pombo, the nephew of Colombian president Cesar Gaviria. It’s a natural. I’ve got a strong local angle on a national and international story, and I have good connections and know my way around where the summit is being held.
When I pitch the story, news director Stan Hopkins supports me again, and I’m soon in Cartagena with Dennis, broadcasting live reports from a temporary headquarters set up by NBC’s Miami Bureau. The summit is big news around the globe and all the networks are here, along with Latin, European, and Asian correspondents. But it’s more political theater than substance. The United States blames the source countries and wants the coca crops destroyed. Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru resent being blamed. Still, they need trade and assistance from America and are always happy to take the millions of dollars America offers for eradication programs. Some of it might even go toward eradicating coca crops. Most of it will wind up in the pockets of the politicians and business elite.
As far as the people here are concerned, the cocaine epidemic is America’s problem. Our national addiction has created the industry and funded brutal drug cartels that often have more power than the governments down here. In Colombia, for example, politicians and judges who don’t acquiesce to the drug lords are periodically kidnapped or assassinated. As Camillo likes to say to me, “Why don’t you tell the Americans to wipe their noses and stop sniffing cocaine? Then we will have nothing to sell to you. End of problem. Don’t come running down here blaming us and telling us what to do.”
Each day of the summit I go live from the NBC headquarters, reporting for our evening news on WBZ. I feel closer to the possibility of a network job when I meet the networks’ Miami bureau chief, Don Browne, here to run NBC’s coverage. He’s dynamic, in charge, constantly projecting a sense of contained authority. As we talk, it’s like the job is sitting there in front of me on his desk and I can almost reach out and grab hold of it.
At night, I head into the elegant old city to eat at Paco’s, owned by Camillo’s close friend Paco De Onis. His world-class restaurant is a two-story villa of white plaster, stone floors, and broad wood-beam ceilings. Camillo, here from Bogota to report for his national radio show, always joins me for dinner.
Tonight the restaurant is cordoned off by heavily armed Colombian military police. Immediately curious, Dennis and I push up to the cordons. A guard with an automatic rifle gestures for us to leave. I flash the badge I have for the summit. It’s meaningless, but it looks official. Before he can even look at it, Dennis and I slip past him, ignoring his shouts for us to stop. It’s a simple ploy. Stop and he might arrest us, or keep going and he’ll think we must be authorized to be there. It usually works like a charm, and this time is no exception.
At first, we can’t figure out what’s happening. Finally, we get to Paco’s and see it’s surrounded by more guards. Because we made it through the outer cordon, they readily grant us access. Once inside, Camillo is shocked to see us. “How did you get in?” he asks with wide eyes. “The presidents and their men are here. I had trouble getting in myself.” He means the presidents of Bolivia and Peru here for the summit, not George Bush. This is a Latin meeting. Off the record. Behind the scenes.
“We bluffed our way in,” I laugh as we greet one another with our usual hug. “Where are they?”
“They are upstairs,” Camillo says, referring to the presidents. He glances at Dennis’s shoulder bag. “If you have a camera, do not take it out. Whatever you do, do not go upstairs.” I’ve never seen Camillo so intense.
I’m dying to shoot footage of this, but taking the camera out would be crazy. It would quickly be confiscated and we might be taken somewhere for a good beating. But I can’t resist going upstairs. Shortly after our dinner arrives, I excuse myself to the bathroom. Then I slip up the curved stone stairwell. It’s a lavish party. The room upstairs is filled with men I take for presidential aides and security agents. There are also several incredibly beautiful women, surely hired for the occasion. I glance around quickly, getting the best look I can before I’m noticed. I can’t see any of the presidents. There’s no way to ensure they’re here except for the overwhelming anecdotal evidence. Why else would armed guards cordon off the street? And then there are Camillo’s warnings. He always knows what’s going on and who the players are. Still, I can’t confirm anything and I’ve already pushed it too far.
On a coffee table I see a large, oval tray made of crystal. There’s a huge mound of sparkling white powder in the middle, like a pyramid. Cocaine. Pure cocaine. I see a razor blade and a few thin lines, three or four inches long, waiting to be snorted. Now I realize how dangerous it was to come up here. What a summit. Promises of cooperation during the day. Something else at night. If only I could turn on a camera. Film anyone involved with the drug summit. Get video of the coke. The world-class escorts. It would be a monster story. Everything would stop in its tracks. The summit would crash. An international incident. Oh God, would I love to bag this one.
A muscular looking man in an expensive black suit steps over to the tray, leans over, and snorts up a line of cocaine. He straightens back up and glances at me as he sniffs his nose. Then he does a double take. He’s alarmed. I act casual but get downstairs as fast as I can, blending in with the crowd.
Sitting for dinner with Camillo and Paco, I don’t speak a word about what’s upstairs, but I can’t stop thinking about the camera on the floor by Dennis’s feet. I’ll risk almost anything for a big story. But this wouldn’t be a risk. It would be insanity. I can hardly imagine our fate if we tried to pull this off and got caught.
Refining cocaine is a hideous process. It begins in rustic laboratories called pozos, typically hidden in the tropical mountain forests. Pozos look like anything but labs. They’re created by digging large pits in the earth under the cover of the jungle canopy. Tons of coca leaves from farms blanketing the hillsides below are transported in on the backs of mules. Hundreds of gallons of kerosene are poured into the pits, and local children are recruited, often by force, to stand in the sludge for up to twelve hours a day, stomping it with their bare feet. This leeches the cocaine alkaloid from the coca leaves. The soupy mixture is shoveled into large sieves strung between tree branches. The kerosene trickles out through the sieve, leaving behind a thick yellowish paste called basuco, which is then loaded into burlap sacks for transport to much more sophisticated city lab
s.
After the summit, Dennis and I set out to produce a series of in-depth reports on the origins of cocaine. We fly to Bolivia and then helicopter into the mountains above the city of Cochabamba with a heavily armed Bolivian military strike force, funded by the United States as a result of the drug summit, seeking to destroy as many pozos as it can discover. Smoke plumes from fires built to keep the workers dry and to cook their food are always the tip-off. As soon as he spots one, our pilot manages to land in impossible places. As he’s touching down, we jump out with the troops as they invade the lab. The noise of the chopper tips off the refiners and they flee before we arrive. It doesn’t matter. The labs are the real target. The strike force burns down every one it finds simply by sloshing the pozo kerosene over everything and tossing in a match. This hardly puts a dent in the trade, but it shows that Bolivia is doing something with the millions of dollars of American aid it’s receiving.
Coca Drug Lab, Bolivia, 1989.
The paste from the jungle labs is smuggled down the mountain into cities such as Cochabamba. Here, it’s refined into pure cocaine and eventually smuggled worldwide. Like most drug-refining cities, Cochabamba is host to powerful cartels who bribe and intimidate local officials. Finding a lab here would be next to impossible, even for the strike force. We part company with the soldiers and decide to illustrate what basuco is doing to the local culture in Cochabamba, which is also a haven for low-level drug dealers. They hook young street orphans on smoking basuco, use them to deliver drugs, and force them into prostitution. Some of the children are barely five years old.