Gersony was back in Washington by this time and learned something important from this bureaucratic food fight:
The various branches of USAID—the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, the disaster assistance response team, and so on—made up of liberal humanitarian State Department types, did not always accept guidance from their higher-ups, in this case from the USAID administrator and the White House itself, despite the fact that this philosophically liberal bureaucracy was dealing with a liberal Democratic administration. “Would it probably be worse with a Republican president?” Gersony thought to himself. Moreover, all this came on the heels of USAID’s success in Bosnia, where the agency was able to get basic reconstructions started in the immediate aftermath of the Dayton Accords. But that was part of the problem, he realized. The USAID bureaucrats operating in Central America did not share in the success of the Europe division in Bosnia led by Tim Knight, and were doubly jealous because Bosnia had been garnering all of the media attention for years on end by now. This lack of an effective bureaucratic chain of command and teamwork across USAID and the State Department was like a cancer metastasizing in the government, another indirect outcome of the end of the Cold War and the end of the discipline that the Cold War had enforced. As Gersony would learn firsthand a few years later, it was to have devastating consequences for U.S. policy in post-invasion Iraq.
Indeed, the experience of Hurricane Mitch was prologue for what Gersony would find in Baghdad. Hurricane Mitch had identified a lack of discipline within the State Department and USAID that in Iraq would help facilitate the Pentagon’s takeover of reconstruction there—to a horrendous result.
But Gersony wasn’t in Washington long.
Because half of the disaster relief and reconstruction money that Mrs. Clinton had promised was to be spent in Honduras, Bob and Cindy were ordered back there to do an assessment. In the 1980s, Bob had worked in southern Honduras investigating the Colomoncagua refugee camp and later in eastern Honduras on the contra issue, while Cindy had worked for years on neighboring Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. They now spent more than five weeks driving 4,000 miles, interviewing 460 farmers, cattlemen, and laborers in 90 villages in central Honduras, between December 1998 and April 1999. It was filthy, hot, and humid everywhere, with roads destroyed by landslides and huge chasms where bridges had once stood. At least there were no sensitive political or human rights issues to deal with. It was yet another bread-and-butter assignment, and the results were completely undramatic. They learned that few jobs had been lost in the agro-industry sector because of the hurricane. Seasonal workers for the melon and banana harvests were out of work for up to a year, but were receiving food baskets from their erstwhile employers. Three-quarters of the people in displaced persons centers were still working at their day jobs. The situation was simply not severe enough to warrant the U.S. government spending $50 million on temporary jobs and so on. In a way, it was a disappointment for Bob and Cindy, who would have liked to spend a few years running a long-term reconstruction program in Honduras, much like what they had done on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. Earlier in his career, Bob had wanted to escape Central America; now, after years in Africa, he didn’t mind returning there. But he had to be honest about the fact that he wasn’t needed, even though USAID had already been sold on the story of a monumental hurricane catastrophe in Honduras—but yet, once again, on close inspection, things on the ground were not quite what they seemed from afar. The real hurricane destruction was mainly on the farm-to-market roads. So, as Gersony told Brian Atwood in Washington: “Don’t send food or create thousands of temporary jobs, just fix roads and bridges and stabilize the hillsides on which the roads are situated by planting indigenous, deep-rooted grasses.” He then gave the USAID administrator a long list of all the bridges and roads that needed to be repaired, which would keep people employed for years.1
* * *
—
Bob and Cindy would spend the spring of 1999 in Albania dealing with the refugee crisis brought about by the Kosovo War. This was a period when two other of his assignments fell through or were aborted due mainly to bureaucratic foot-dragging: one in Gaza, and another in the desert region of Turkana in northwestern Kenya, where Gersony blew three tires out of his car and worked up a sweat at seven each morning because of the intense heat while interviewing over a hundred people, before the budget ran out at the end of 1999 without him even writing a report on the trip. He also withdrew from a USAID project in Cuba in this general time frame simply out of fear he would be arrested as a spy by the communist regime there. Gersony began to feel that he was washed up. Months of depression followed.
* * *
—
Then in June 2000 he got a cold call from Hilda “Bambi” Arellano, the USAID mission director in Quito, Ecuador. She told him that the United States was about to embark on Plan Colombia, an ambitious nation-building effort to rid Colombia of cocaine-smuggling guerrilla armies. As she explained, there was a fear that the spray-killing of the coca fields in southern Colombia, combined with military operations against the left-wing FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), would trigger a mass movement of people across the border into northern Ecuador. Because of Colombia’s very size and population, the United States organized its approach to the region around Colombia policy, but this also meant that the effects of Plan Colombia would likely be momentous in adjacent Ecuador.
“There is no government presence in the north [of Ecuador by the Colombian border]. We have no idea what is going on there. We need a complete assessment,” Bambi told Gersony over the phone, adding: “I’ve got $8 million to spend for a start, and I want to know exactly how we’re going to use it. I’m sick of the old-boy network in USAID. We’re not pouring this money out the window just because it’s there. I want sound, useful projects that make sense.”
“This woman is just like Janet Ballantyne!” Gersony thought. “The drought’s over. My life is beginning again.”2
Cindy was pregnant by this time. Nevertheless, Gersony immediately left for Washington and made the rounds of experts. Tom Cornell, the head of USAID for South America, lamented: “The State Department sees USAID as the development agency that looks down the pike twenty years but can’t get anything done in real time.” Message: Get something done in northern Ecuador. “What should I get done in northern Ecuador?” Gersony, in turn, asked a USAID environmental adviser, who answered: “I don’t see what else can be done, other than to develop natural-resource-based governance of a type that targets the most vulnerable areas.” Political science jargon, Gersony thought. But as he knew, you had to talk to people in Washington before your trip, so that they would listen to you when you came back.
* * *
—
Quito, Ecuador. The country’s capital, an exquisite and rustic overgrown town with amazingly clear, golden air is nestled in the mountains and surrounded by active volcanoes. Residents have to periodically sweep the volcanic ash from their house fronts. Here is a diverse population of indigenous people in a Spanish colonial setting. On the equator at 9,350 feet in elevation, it might be the greenest place on earth at such a high altitude.
He met Bambi, who in person was even more like Janet, full of no-nonsense sparkle. The same with Ambassador Gwen Clare, who told him: “We and the Ecuadorians know absolutely nothing about the north. I’ll be fascinated by the results of your work.” In other words, this was northern Uganda all over again. Despite the conceits of the digital age, the world of the early twenty-first century was actually full of empty spaces on the map in terms of what was known about them in the capital cities. Thus, as in northern Uganda, the Ethiopian-Somali border, and other places where he had been, he felt a bit like an explorer, since you couldn’t analyze the effect of Plan Colombia on northern Ecuador without actually going there and finding out virtually everything about it.
He was heading into a 300-mile-long border area p
opulated with 400,000 people, full of mosquito-ridden rivers that helped feed the Amazon basin. “It isn’t the end of the earth, but you can see it from there,” the U.S. Embassy political counselor, Peter Harding, told him. This back of beyond was divided into three starkly different provinces, all bordering the Putumayo and San Miguel rivers that formed the border with Colombia. In the east, as Gersony was to learn vividly on his own, was Sucumbios: a flat, broiling hot, jungly terrain inhabited by Cofán Indians and ugly new boom-and-bust towns that lived mainly off oil. In the center was Carchi: cool, high in the mountains, with picturesque, hundred-year-old villages devoted to cross-border trade. In the west was Esmeraldas, populated by Afro-Ecuadorians, the descendants of escaped slaves.
Gersony selected a driver from the embassy car pool: Rodrigo Viera, a stocky man in his late thirties with a shock of black hair and a nice countenance, who, in the manner of many Ecuadorians, was quite formal, always wearing a jacket and tie, and addressing Bob as Señor Gersony. Gersony addressed him likewise, as Señor Viera. They would spend six weeks together, covering over 2,500 miles on unsurfaced roads, interviewing 160 people in 40 towns and villages: farmers, fishermen, priests, clam diggers, local officials, and so forth. Like his previous drivers, Señor Viera was Gersony’s veritable partner, helping him find people to interview, locating where to sleep out in the bush, making introductions in some cases, getting him everywhere in an age before GPS existed—and never getting exasperated.
The big questions that diplomats in the capital of Quito wanted Gersony to answer were: Who were the people of northern Ecuador loyal to? Did they feel themselves to be Ecuadorians, Colombians, or what? Or were their identities strictly local? As Gersony discovered, the answer was both simple and complicated. Because so many had migrated to the north from the heart of the country, 100 percent identified themselves to him as Ecuadorians, who spoke with disdain about the “violent” Colombians. Yet thousands of these northern Ecuadorians seasonally migrated across the river to Putumayo in southern Colombia to pick coca leaves for the production of cocaine. And 80 percent of the commerce in Sucumbios, as Gersony learned, consisted of Colombians coming south across the border to buy fertilizer and gasoline, while occupying the hotels and restaurants and visiting the brothels. “Coca tourism,” Gersony called it. “Most Colombians treat you okay unless they’re drunk,” a prostitute named Fanny told him. “But Colombians are very violent. They knife someone in the bar, and you just have to keep dancing like you didn’t notice.”
Though he would find no overriding theme linking his adventures in northern Ecuador, the economy of this borderland was very precarious. For example, when right-wing paramilitaries battled the FARC in Putumayo, coca production suffered. Almost everyone Gersony interviewed told him they were afraid of a new, self-reproducing bacteria introduced by the Americans to destroy the coca crop. But it would also destroy all kinds of vegetation and could be carried across the border into Ecuador by wind, insects, rain, and people’s clothes. There was no such bacteria, but the FARC and local left-wing elements were spreading these rumors. How to stop them? Gersony wondered.
One day in Lago Agrio, the provincial capital, Gersony had Señor Viera drive him up a hill to see the bishop of Sucumbios, Msgr. Gonzalo López Marañon, whose offices were in a grand colonial church building, the most impressive in town. Msgr. López was the leading citizen of the province. He was anti-American and an advocate of Catholic liberation theology, and had also founded a civil society group in order to critique the impact on northern Ecuador of Washington’s Plan Colombia. Because there were no phones in town, Gersony just walked in cold to the church offices. Each time he was told the bishop was too busy and that a certain amount of bureaucratic procedure was required to make an appointment. Finally, at 4:30 p.m. one day in early July 2000, Msgr. López agreed to meet Gersony.
As soon as Gersony walked into his office, the bishop had a coughing fit.
“Are you all right?” Gersony asked in his perfect Spanish.
“There is something sticking in my throat. Maybe it is your presence,” the bishop responded.
Gersony stayed calm. He wasn’t upset. Seeing the bishop was just a box he had to check for his eventual report. Gersony’s only goal was to achieve the bishop’s “non-opposition” to what he was doing. He engaged the bishop in conversation in Spanish. The bishop warmed up after a bit, and then surprised Gersony with what he said:
“Please do good quality work that’s durable. Respect the dignity of the people. Come with goodwill in your heart and you will have support. Give people some hope. Let us remember that Señor Robert Gersony came up here and did a good job for us.”
“The bishop’s words reminded me of when I put the note into the Western Wall in Jerusalem, asking God to help me get it right in Bosnia,” says Gersony. “I really wanted to get this right. I always sweat the details. The bishop inspired me.”
Señor Viera drove Gersony in their white USAID vehicle back to his simple hotel in Lago Agrio. Gersony had a quick dinner as the sun went down and the town went black. He returned to his room. Suddenly the hotel phone began ringing by the bed table, competing with the sound of the loud air conditioner. Cindy was on the line. She had just had a sonogram. Her pregnancy was going fine, she told him.
“Oh, there’s one other thing,” she said before hanging up. “It’s triplets.”
He was at a complete loss for words. He was delighted, relieved, and absolutely terrified. He was about to turn fifty-six. He had never thought much about kids, having married so late because of all the traveling he did. He realized he didn’t even know how to change a diaper.
The next morning he left Señor Viera at the dock and got into a dugout canoe for a journey of several hours eastward down the Aguarico River to where the Cofán Indians lived. The Aguarico was a narrower version of the Coco River on the Nicaraguan-Honduran border, where Cindy had been kidnapped almost four years earlier: the kind of jungle-infested river that one imagines leading to a mysterious destiny of sorts.
He knew that there was an American, Randy Borman, the son of missionaries, who had married a Cofán woman, had kids, and lived among the Indians. Borman’s family occupied a thatched wooden structure on stilts above the water without even mosquito nets.
“Come in,” Borman said.
In such a place, and without phones, there was obviously no need to make an appointment. Gersony reclined in a hammock and Borman sat in a chair. They talked for hours.
It got dark, and Borman pointed Gersony toward a group of cabins a few hundred yards away. “There are no snakes or scorpions, just a lot of jungle noises,” Borman assured him. In one empty cabin there was a bed, a mosquito net, and a little table where Gersony put two candles. He ate from a can of tuna and tried to sleep. A huge cockroach climbed near his bed. As he got up to swat it, he tripped over a large bullfrog. He wasn’t at loose ends or depressed here. He always had simple needs, and so didn’t mind the lack of food and drink, or the spartan conditions. He thought about how happy Cindy would be to visit this place deep in the Ecuadorian jungle. And he thought now about his mother and father, and the cosmic wonder of the passing of the generations, as the news about the triplets was still just beginning to sink in. Thus, in the jungle dark his mind raced onward about where they would live, how their lives would change, and how he would pay for college for three children. Would he have steady work, given the handful of misfires before this assignment? His mind was thousands of miles away from where he lay in the forest, oppressed by cascading thoughts.
The following morning he continued his talk with Borman. No breakfast was offered, though Gersony rarely ate breakfast anyway. After listening to Borman discuss the failure of one NGO project after another, Gersony asked, “Is there anything we could do here—however small—that would actually be useful?”
“You could clear a trail, and put in guard posts and signs, around a large fore
st area preserved for the Cofán people, but which is being encroached upon and cleared by outsiders.”
Gersony liked the idea. It was simple and labor-intensive, and would thus create local jobs. It would allow USAID to work with the indigenous people, while helping to protect the environment.
Gersony next journeyed back up the river to Lago Agrio to investigate the security situation in Sucumbios. Señor Viera met him at the dock in his jacket and tie. Gersony learned from the local authorities that in the previous eight years, eighteen Americans and Canadians had been kidnapped and held for ransom here, while four taxi drivers were knifed to death. The police and army were useless. Often the FARC—which the Americans were trying to defeat—came across the border from Colombia and administered justice. An army commander admitted to him:
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