“Someone stole a taxi around here and killed the driver. The wife didn’t go to the authorities. She went to the FARC. Three days later the taxi was returned, the thief had been executed, and they charged her $200 [for the service]. People don’t believe in the official justice system…only the guerrillas [from over the border in Colombia] can solve problems.”
Gersony and Señor Viera went on a long trip to Puerto el Carmen in the northeast of Sucumbios, several days of driving on bad roads. They met a farmer who told Gersony that his wife had given birth to sixteen children, nine of whom had survived. The farmer chopped down a coconut from a palm tree, quickly carved it out with a knife, and gave Gersony a straw to slurp up the juice. Gersony can still remember how it felt as the juice coursed through his body in the hammering heat. The farmer told him what everyone else did: the price of coffee was down 35 percent, there was no work, the NGOs had accomplished nothing, and the only possibility for people was to go north across the border to Putumayo in Colombia to work as raspachines, harvesting the coca crop.
Still, there were rumors everywhere about the evil being contemplated by the Americans with their self-reproducing bacteria.
And in this fetid jungle, just like in the semi-desert of the West Bank, everyone told him they needed water: clean water coming through pipes, with storage tanks.
That was Sucumbios.
Gersony and Señor Viera drove west up into the mountains to the province of Carchi. There, they met many traders who hated political stability: it was instability that they liked, which led to fluctuations in the values of the Ecuadorian sucre and the Colombian peso, allowing them to make a profit. The road along the Colombian border was one of the worst Gersony had experienced in all his travels, full of deep, axle-breaking ruts. It hindered commerce, security, and medical help. He next went into the area of the Awa Indians where many of the mammoth pedestrian bridges across the rivers and streams had collapsed, stranding whole communities. He crossed west into the province of Esmeraldas by the Pacific Ocean. Here was a world of generations of Afro-Ecuadorians who had escaped slavery in mines and cotton plantations in adjacent provinces and built redoubts on the hillsides called palenques, originally to prevent their recapture. They lived by hunting, fishing, shrimping, and digging for clams in the mangrove swamps.
In recent years the Colombians had crossed the border and introduced the African palm here, whose fruit is processed into palm oil and cooking oil. Small holdings were bought out and big African palm plantations emerged. Unemployment went down and salaries rose dramatically. Then NGO groups began lobbying the Ecuadorian government not to grant licenses for the processing plants because, as they alleged, the new plantations were eliminating the virgin forest. This made the local inhabitants furious with the NGOs.
Again, there was no real theme in northern Ecuador. The vast region’s complexities both defeated and made irrelevant every ism: Marxism, realism, neoconservatism, and what-have-you. In that way, it was merely like most of the earth beyond the developed world. The only commonality among the three provinces of northern Ecuador was the hue and cry for clean water.
* * *
—
For Gersony it was back to the capital of Quito and a luxury hotel after many weeks of travel: a shower, laundry, sandwiches, lots of orange juice, then, for good measure, a long hot bath and—a new thing for him—answering emails from the hotel business center.
He told Bambi Arellano that he needed four hours with her.
“No problem,” she said.
She had many questions, and didn’t want him to skip one detail.
He began with a lengthy disquisition on northern Ecuador’s history, economics, and environment, before descending into the minutiae of his journey.
“So what do we do with the $8 million we have to start with?” he asked out loud, rhetorically.
He then provided a list of thirty specific water and sewage projects for the area. He advised USAID to fix the border road in Carchi and repair the pedestrian bridges there. In Sucumbios he wanted the Cofán forest preserve demarcated, and a local commission set up to monitor the environmental impact of Plan Colombia, in order to dispel rumors about the self-reproducing bacteria.
“You can’t send Americans to do any of this,” he warned, “because they’ll be kidnapped by the FARC or the paramilitaries.” He recommended that USAID pay aid workers from IOM, the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration, whose South American director was Diego Beltrand, the Uruguayan lawyer who had negotiated Cindy’s hostage release in Nicaragua and who knew Bambi well.
Bambi and Bob went to dinner together that night and sealed the deal.
Bambi says this about Gersony:
“Bob was so good at not projecting his experience in other countries onto northern Ecuador. Every place he went in the world was absolutely unique in his mind. He gave you this blank slate without previous assumptions or models about how the world or aid should work. In his mind, not only was northern Ecuador completely different from every place else on earth, but one part of it was completely different from another part of it. All his recommendations worked well and they worked quickly.”
As it would later turn out, USAID’s inspector general would report that IOM completed 38 water projects and 5 major sewage projects, and built 52 miles of roads, 8 major steel and concrete vehicular bridges, and 13 massive steel pedestrian bridges, as well as hardening 6 irrigation canals and repairing several reservoirs: benefiting 255,000 of the region’s roughly 400,000 people—all with maintenance built into the cost.3
Back in Washington, Gersony did the usual rounds of briefings at USAID, the State Department, the National Security Council, and this time the CIA, whose own area specialists were curious about northern Ecuador. Everywhere he carried along a Nokia flip phone, awaiting Cindy’s call from Columbia Presbyterian hospital in New York City, which had a special unit for multiple births.
In November 2000, Cindy Davis Gersony gave birth to three healthy children: Greg, Lizzy, and Laura. Within a week, Tony Jackson, Pierre Gassmann, and Janet Ballantyne flew across oceans to see the new babies.
Bob didn’t work for the next six months.
* * *
—
Getting married is often not the life-changing experience that it is advertised to be, but having children is. And Gersony had three at once, all waking up at different times during the night for the first four months. What’s more, Bob and Cindy had to leave their small apartment in Manhattan and close up the apartment of Bob’s ninety-six-year-old mother at the same time. New York City had been Bob’s base throughout his life into his midfifties. So the departure was final, traumatic. They sold both apartments and moved into a big house in the woods of Great Falls, Virginia, taking Bob’s mother with them. “I had always wanted a house with trees, a bit apart from people,” Gersony says.
After this moving houses and being kept up at night by the kids for months, the phone rang in April 2001, almost five months after the triplets were born: perfect timing, as he really wanted to get back to work. But from now on, Gersony, always emotional, would feel a physical pain in his chest whenever he left the house on an assignment. The experience was overwhelming. For the danger never really ceased. There were relatively few others like him in the diplomatic and aid communities: a middle-aged, self-employed family man going off on his own to places like northern Uganda and northern Ecuador.
* * *
—
When the phone rang in April 2001 it brought very good news. USAID was still in the early phases of launching Plan Colombia, an assistance project with a $1.3 billion down payment—an unheard-of sum at the time—aimed at restoring Colombian government sovereignty over vast swaths of land controlled by drug cartels and left-wing insurgents. With so much money available, USAID wanted Gersony to visit the capitals of all the countries bordering Colombia in order to
assess what the multitude of spillover effects might be, as a consequence of such a dramatic political and institutional change for this regional giant. “Finally, a junket for the first time in my life,” the fifty-six-year-old Gersony quickly surmised, the best way to ease him into the new reality of traveling throughout the developing world with a family back home. There would be five-star hotels, all in roughly the same time zone as Cindy and the kids. The pay was good. He was forever worrying about the cost of college for the triplets. The ulterior motive of his trip as far as the State Department and USAID were concerned was for him to get all the regional U.S. embassies on board for Plan Colombia.
The dozens of interviews he conducted with diplomats and security officials in each capital revealed a familiar story. Colombia, like so many countries in this world, had remote borders where there was little or no government presence. Drug armies and smaller criminal cartels ran riot, with warehouses in the jungle for storing precursor chemicals for converting coca paste into cocaine. Colombian anarchy had already been regionalized across the country’s own borders. None of the U.S. or other embassies had a clue which group exactly controlled what area. Maps with their neat demarcations lied. It was all a mystery.
He was at home in Great Falls, Virginia, in August 2001, expecting to make another undemanding trip to South America, when he got a call: USAID needed him immediately in southern Colombia itself, near the border with Ecuador. Now things returned to normal: hardship and danger.
* * *
—
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, did not affect his plans. Again, as when the Berlin Wall fell, the so-called new political age did not change the local realities in the plethora of places where he worked. On September 16, he flew to the Colombian capital of Bogotá: a clean, fashionable, and sophisticated city with cool temperatures in the mountains, home to great restaurants and the finest Spanish spoken in Latin America. Colombia was a country of high standards, as I know from my own experience there: it has magnificent cities, good civil administration, and super efficiency—especially in the meticulous planning and cruelty of the murders and kidnappings outside the capital.
The background to what Gersony had to do was simple. The Colombian president who was about to leave office, Andrés Pastrana Arango, had given the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) a zona de despeje, a demilitarized zone, in which to live—as a concession in the hopes of arriving at a peace agreement with the group. It backfired. In fact as it turned out, President Pastrana had given the FARC guerrillas their own country larger than Switzerland in south-central Colombia, which the FARC made into the biggest drug-dealing center in the world: a place where it brought in military trainers from the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and which became the headquarters for holding hundreds of hostages.
A desperate Pastrana then conceived Plan Colombia with another president about to leave office, Bill Clinton. The heart of the plan was to provide security in the vast jungly reaches of the country, eradicate coca fields, and provide the farmers and peasants with substitute crops. The most difficult area was Putumayo, located between the zona de despeje just to the north and the Ecuadorian border just to the south. Putumayo had 1 percent of Colombia’s population and 2 percent of its land area, but 50 percent of its coca production. It was a place of rampant murder and kidnapping. That’s where Gersony was headed.
In Washington, Jim Mack, the principal deputy assistant secretary of state in the narcotics bureau—an endearing, yet absolutely direct guy with no tolerance for diplomatic evasions—had told Gersony there were two questions that had to be answered:
What is the psychology of the area?
Is there any trust between the people and the government there?
Bill Brownfield, the principal deputy assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, had told Gersony:
“Nobody goes to Putumayo. We have no idea what’s going on there. We’re desperate for information.” A refrain with which Gersony was long familiar.
Brownfield adds, decades later: “Putumayo, when Gersony went there, was really dangerous. I mean, it was a place where people regularly got whacked.”
Gersony made the rounds in Bogotá. A political officer at the U.S. Embassy warned him:
“It’s good having information, but it’s not worth getting killed for. By the way, the FARC, which is led by psychopaths, is going to take over the crop substitution program. If you can get me the name of a single farmer who signed a voluntary eradication pact—who’s going to uproot his coca to plant another kind of crop—I’ll eat my hat. The odds of this working are zero.”
In late September, traveling alone, Gersony boarded a commercial flight from Bogotá to Puerto Asis, the provincial capital of Putumayo. Heading south, he looked out the window: an absolutely rugged and beautiful landscape, Afghanistan with trees. Colombian chaos was to a significant extent geographically determined. The civilized cities were on the plateaus and mountaintops; the marauders were in the jungly lowlands where the Spanish had killed and enslaved the Indians. Then there were boom-and-bust cycles—centered around quinine, rubber, and coca. No real agriculture had developed and there had been no cultural accumulation of any kind. It was one, dreary history in the lowlands. “Nobody in Bogotá has any idea what is going on down there,” Gersony thought to himself in the plane.
Knowing that he was stepping into a kidnapping zone, he decided he would tell everyone that he met the truth: “I work for the mission director of USAID in Bogotá, and he wants to know what you think.” They’re going to find out who I am anyway, I might as well get the credit for having balls. By telling them that I work for the U.S. government, I am putting my life in their hands, and by talking to me they are putting their own lives at risk.
The FARC and the right-wing paramilitaries were everywhere. He never really knew who he was talking to. Whereas the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda were mere anarchic barbarians, southern Colombia was infested with violent organized crime syndicates, with their own armies and intelligence organizations. It was private-sector big business, and bloodcurdling. Gersony’s first two drivers quit on him, a bad sign. So he had to get around completely by himself.
His hotel in Puerto Asis had no name and no security, but plenty of bedbugs. It was $20 a night, with no private bathrooms. Puerto Asis was in the southwest of Putumayo, the most intense coca-growing area in the province.
This was no way for a fifty-six-year-old man to earn a living. Every waking hour he was terrified of being kidnapped. He hardly slept. He lived with 0.25 milligram tablets of Xanax, which he popped like M&M’s. He ate at burger joints, several steps in quality below American fast food. After dark there was not a soul on the streets. Since he conducted interviews from early morning till sundown, the streets were empty when he walked to dinner. He kept his head lowered, and avoided eye contact. His eyes were in a book while eating. One man shadowed him everywhere. He turned out to be from the right-wing paramilitaries. It could have been worse. At least the man wasn’t from the FARC.
He went to markets and all sorts of stores in Puerto Asis and Mocoa to the north, talking to people: shopkeepers, traders, farmers, carpenters, priests, nuns, and so on. To travel outside the towns was too dangerous, and at least here, again, he fell back on his experience as a commodity trader, asking everyone detailed questions about growing coca versus growing cacao, rubber, palm oil, and hearts of palm. He may have been the first foreigner these people had ever talked to. (All the NGO staffers were local hires.) In four weeks he interviewed 160 people (he liked round numbers), 50 of whom were either coca farmers or raspachines, the harvesters of coca leaf, who had all come into town from the fields. It wasn’t a bad sample given the security situation.
And in the course of all these interviews, Gersony put together the following synthesis of what had happened in Putumayo prior to his arrival:
In late 2000 and early 2001, private contractors working for the U.S. government had sprayed 32,000 out of 60,000 hectares of coca leaf from the air. Because the spray carried an adhesive that stuck to the leaves, the spray was absolutely effective—it was like hitting beehives with a baseball bat. The coca farmers were all in a panic, and quite a few considered moving east, deeper into the Amazon jungle basin, in order to do the backbreaking labor of clearing land to plant coca out of range of the private American contractors. Because of the recent excessive rains and right-wing paramilitary attacks on the FARC, the aerial spraying was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back for the local coca industry. After the spraying, only 15 percent of the farmers decided to replant. But just as this eradication plan was beginning to work, on February 9, 2001, President Pastrana suddenly suspended the program. Instead, Pastrana instituted a voluntary eradication program, in which each farmer received $900 and a promise from USAID to help provide him with an alternative crop. But because Pastrana had granted the farmers a one-year grace period, the farmers pocketed the $900 and replanted coca anyway, this time using a new seed: Tingo Maria, from Peru, which yields 40 percent more coca. Every farmer Gersony interviewed told him that they now had no plans to eradicate their coca crop. These poor farmers had done the rational thing in terms of their own self-interest. In effect, President Pastrana had used USAID money to legitimize even more coca production. (After all, Pastrana’s constituents in the major Colombian cities were concerned with common crime, living standards, and so forth, but not specifically with coca production, which was only an American obsession, since it was in the United States that cocaine was addicting people and undermining society.) Nobody else but a fluent Spanish speaker with a background in commodities like Gersony could have teased out this story, which had further, tragicomic details:
The Good American Page 42