Missionaries

by Phil Klay

  Despite Luisa’s bluster, La Vigia seemed like a nice town. The streets were tidy, and full of industrious-seeming people. There was a small central park with a carved book inscribed with the Ten Commandments. It was safe to walk around at night. And there were more jobs than elsewhere in the region. Palm oil processing. Leather goods. La Vigia had three bars, one modestly pretty church, and a disproportionate number of old men playing dominoes. More than one local expressed surprise and confusion to see an American journalist there.

  Lisette tried not to put too much pressure on herself in the first couple of days in La Vigia. She told herself she was engaged in a more open-ended form of reporting than she was used to, and she should give herself time, learn the rhythms of the town. So she hung out with the foundation workers, chatted up the old men playing dominoes, tried to befriend the local Defensor del Pueblo, and avoided getting frustrated by how difficult it was to get an honest answer from anyone about what had happened in the town since the death of El Alemán.

  Mention the name Jefferson, the supposed big scary narco boss, and townsperson after townsperson described him to Lisette as a businessman. The construction at the north end of town—an expansion of a processing center for palm oil, which farmers harvested in the surrounding areas—that was him. And the talks with the cell-phone company to build a tower and connect La Vigia to the rest of Colombia, that was Jefferson, too. He was changing things, they said, for the better.

  And if she asked if Jefferson was associated with the Jesúses, she got a mixture of silence, half-hearted nods, or explanations that the Jesúses were merely a local neighborhood watch, the product of townspeople getting together and throwing out the criminal elements so that legitimate businesses could thrive. Diego had promised her an unstable region where the drug trade mixed with communist guerrillas and refugees poured in over the border. Instead, she had a thriving community where life was improving.

  “Business is very good,” one bar owner told Lisette. “There’s fewer bad types on the street, and a lot of the Venezuelans have money.”

  “The Venezuelans have money?” Lisette asked.

  “The town keeps the bad Venezuelans away,” he said.

  “The refugees,” Lisette said.

  “Yes,” he said. “The refugees bring many problems. I have sympathy! Don’t look at me like that! But we are a little town, and it is hard enough to deal with our problems. The poor Venezuelans, they’re the ones who voted for Chávez! They wrecked their country, now they want to come here.”

  “How does the town keep the bad Venezuelans away?”

  The bar owner just smiled and laughed and wagged a finger in front of her face.

  She also sat in on some of the sad stories being recorded by the foundation, visited local businesses, and listened to the debates for and against the peace vote. It was a “yes” town. More or less.

  Something of a break came when the Defensor del Pueblo offered to set her up with a dairy farmer. “He knows the history and is part of a new program you might want to cover,” he had said, handing her a brochure that read “Strengthening Communities with Milk.”

  The farmer came in a rusty pickup truck, a battered old thing with a newish but still weathered front door of an entirely different color from the rest of the vehicle. Uncle Carey would have approved, and the truck made her like him even before he stepped out. He was a large old man with big bony hands that looked like they’d been carved from driftwood. He told her, “Ah. You’re a pretty gringa.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I am.”

  He drove fast, taking them quickly out of town and onto rural roads, one big hand spinning the wheel as they skidded across stones and dirt.

  “I called Luisa, because they said you were with the foundation, but Luisa said different.” He hit a curve fast enough that Lisette involuntary clutched at the door handle for stability. “She said it probably wasn’t a good idea to talk to you but I could make my own mind up.”

  “Tell her I say thanks for . . . the good word,” she said, trying to nonchalantly put on her seat belt without drawing too much attention. If Luisa was warning people away from her, that was a real problem.

  He looked at her and chuckled. “The buckle doesn’t work.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  “I told Luisa, I can talk. Why can’t I talk? It shouldn’t be a death sentence to talk.”

  “Are you nervous? To talk?” she said. “Many people said to me the Jesúses are good for La Vigia.”

  He nodded. “In many ways, yes. In other ways, no different than the others.”

  The road crested over a ridgeline and then they were descending into a valley. “Where we’re heading, I’ve got two hundred head of cattle. So I pay the vaccine. Fifty mil a head. Same as a year ago.”

  La vacuna. The vaccine. What people called extortion payments.

  “Twenty years ago, I pay the vaccine to the FARC. Fifteen years ago, I pay to the paras. Ten years ago, I pay to the Elenos. Five years ago, I pay to the Peludos. And then it was the Urabeños, and the Peludos, and then the Urabeños.” He shook his head. “This place was a football and they’d kick it back and forth.”

  “You think that the town will obtain more stability with the Jesúses?”

  “I pray for that, yes, but”—he held up one long finger—“that is not the most important thing. I always paid the vaccine. Always. But that only protected me around La Vigia.” He pointed due east. “I ship milk down to Cunaviche, along the way, I hit a roadblock, I’ve got to pay the vaccine to the Elenos. I go north . . . Peludos. South . . . it changed—one day this group, another day—but you understand. And if you wanted to buy equipment, or anything, really, that had to be brought from outside, it was so expensive. Do you know how much it used to cost here to buy a can of Coca-Cola? Thirty mil.”

  That was about ten dollars.

  “I like Coca-Cola,” the farmer said. “But I never bought it.”

  “And now?”

  “From here to Cunaviche . . . one vaccine.”

  “How? Are the Jesúses working with the Peludos? The Elenos? Did they fight them? What happened?”

  The farmer shrugged. “I started drinking Coca-Cola again.”

  “What about your”—how did you say ranch hands?—“workers? Do they drink Coca-Cola now?”

  “Don’t tell them you’re here to learn about the guerrilla. Some of my men are from the north, and they have a different attitude.”

  When they got to the farm, he was primarily interested in showing off his cattle—a group of big, healthy-looking animals grazing in a mountain valley. It reminded her a bit of home, coming down the curve of a hill to see cattle grazing in a field edged with trees, though here the fields were rougher, the greenery was richer, the view stretched out farther down mountains so much steeper and wilder than the Pennsylvania hills. Bordering the field was an open-air structure with a tin roof and a few support beams. The farmer pointed to this. “Where we process our milk, and the milk of smaller farmers who want to sell with us,” he said. This was the part of the project the Defensor del Pueblo had wanted her to see, since much of the equipment had come through government programs.

  The farmer took her into the field, stepping through mud and around cow shit, right up to one of the larger beasts, whose dull eyes were just a few inches below Lisette’s.

  “These cows are half American,” he said proudly. “Half gringa. Here, touch her.”

  She put her hand out and stroked the nuzzle of the animal. The cow’s eyes flattened backward, then relaxed, and she continued chewing.

  “We got straws of semen from America,” he said. “Holstein and Swiss brown. Santos signed a treaty that let Europe sell milk here and the prices . . .” The farmer made a low whistling noise and pointed his finger down to the ground. “The government had to help us and they sent us semen. It is very good, the semen.
The cows we breed give much more milk. So for me, it’s not so bad that the price of milk went down. But for the little farmers who come to us to process their milk it is very bad. They have the same old cows. Five, six liters a day. Not very good. The semen only went to the bigger farms. If you’re a poor campesino, with one or two cows, what are you going to do with a straw of semen from America?”

  In the processing hut, where the musty smell of the farm took on a sharper tinge, he took her to a delicate-looking man with shoulder-length black hair and a thin mustache who was pouring milk from a large metal jug into a square trough covered in what looked like cheesecloth. The man’s brothers and parents were cocaleros, the farmer explained, and he was willing to talk to an American.

  “I did not know you were a woman,” he said.

  And since he seemed uncomfortable, Lisette simply asked if she could follow him around, see what his work was like, and he agreed. Lisette started by asking simple questions—how long he had worked at the dairy farm, how he liked the work, what were his duties. She shared information about herself, that she had been in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  She didn’t want to push him too hard, but he could be an important source. The cocaleros, or coca growers, were an interesting group. They were mostly very poor people who, of all the different players who profited off narco trafficking, received the least amount of money. And since they were tied to the land they farmed and were thus the easiest to target and control, they suffered at the hands of the police and the army and the narcos and the guerrilla and the American-supplied planes that sprayed poisonous chemicals over their fields. But in Norte de Santander they’d formed unions and self-defense groups. A couple of years ago they had even shut down all the roads in the department and forced a response from the president of the country himself. If she could get him to trust her, he might serve as a bridge to a group with a very different sense of what was going on than any of the townspeople she’d interviewed.

  An opening came when the farmworker mentioned that times were currently difficult because his father had become sick and couldn’t work like he’d used to. Lisette shared that she had an uncle who was dying of cancer. “Uncle Carey,” she said. Sometimes, with a potential source, if you opened up about your own history, especially a history of pain, it would make them feel as though they had to pay you back in kind. Lisette, who rarely talked about such things even to good friends, would often talk about them with sources. In her mind, the fact that it was a part of her work justified it. What she didn’t admit to herself was how cathartic it could be, pouring out your heart to a stranger and trying to find links between their pain and yours.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said.

  “He lives in a part of America that is very poor,” she said. “He tells me they are the forgotten Americans, because people in the cities do not think about people like him.” And she spoke of how pretty it was where her uncle lived, and how coming to the farm had reminded her of it, because there were farms where he lived, too. And also a lot of drugs.

  He listened, and told her he was glad to work in milk and not in coca, like the rest of his family. He said some people he knew had wanted to switch from coca to farming palm oil, but that it was dangerous to switch crops. The narcos didn’t like losing supply. He said that near the border with Venezuela a cocalero had switched to palm trees, thinking it’d be easier, and the Jesúses nailed him to one of his trees like Christ on the cross. He said the palm oil had oozed from the man’s hands and feet.

  Later, she asked the dairy farmer about this story and he laughed and told her that young palm trees don’t produce oil, and don’t have a trunk you could crucify a peasant on. “Even a very small campesino,” he laughed, “and campesinos are often very small.” These were just rumors that floated around, he said, probably from the Jesúses themselves, since having people believe in murders was easier than murdering, and these groups were full of lazies. “This is the problem in this country. People believe in easy money.” He kicked at a pile of dirt, as if to say, What I do here is not easy.

  On the way back, thinking of Diego and his statistics, she asked him if life was better with the Jesúses, and he said, Yes. More money, more businesses, less fear. Then she asked if people out in the countryside felt the same, and he said people in the countryside always complained, but they had reason, because their lives were hard and the troubles always fell on them first.

  As they made their way through the main streets of La Vigia, he passed by the central square and Lisette saw two naked women with brooms in their hands, sweeping from one corner to the other. The farmer tensed and drove past, stopping outside the foundation as if he hadn’t seen anything.

  Around the square, some people gawked, some people studiously avoided looking toward the square, and one imperious-looking man sat on a horse, surveying the scene. “Who’s that?” she asked, and the farmer sighed.

  “Javier Ocasio,” he said. “He has done this before.” He gestured to the naked women. “This is how he likes to punish women who don’t follow the rules.”

  “What rules?”

  “The Jesúses have a lot of rules,” he said. “Don’t look at him. Just go into the offices and stay inside.”

  Lisette was used to men trying to “protect” her by not letting her do her job. She left the car and walked over to the square while the farmer watched. The air was warm and dry, she felt a lightness as she made her way to the figure on the horse, a lean, severe-looking man with scars on the left side of his face.

  Javier Ocasio tugged the reins of the horse slightly and the animal reared, its front two hooves going up, striking the earth and then resettling, the animal slowly shifting sideways so that now he was facing her, his eyes trained on her, and she felt even lighter as she walked forward, unafraid and self-conscious of her lack of fear, pleased with it and, as she approached, even a little self-congratulatory about where it was bringing her. Finally, she thought, a man who knows what’s actually going on.

  * * *

  —

  The farmer watched the gringa journalist make her way to Javier and then, remarkably, he saw Javier smile. The naked women in the square, guilty of who knows what infraction against morality, against the duties of women and mothers toward their families and toward God and toward Colombia, kept sweeping, heads down, seemingly immune to humiliation. The gringa reached up, her hand extending to Javier, passing him something. A card of some kind.

  God. Jesus. He set the truck in gear and rolled forward. What a fool he’d been. Luisa had told him not to trust the gringa. He’d thought she was being surly. Being Luisa. So he’d spoken openly of the Jesúses to her. He’d taken her to his farm. And worse. Unforgivable. He’d introduced her to his men. Mother of God. Son of a whore. It had been too long since there were murders in La Vigia, and he had gotten too rich. His instincts for avoiding trouble had dulled.

  He sped through the city streets and then out of La Vigia. The muddy river at the side of the town curved away from him, and ordered fields flew past, followed by plots of palm trees, and then he made a turn sharp enough that he had to lean into it, his body weight balancing against the force pulling him leftward, and then he was up into the mountains, passing a tall, yellow guayacan tree, barreling forward and only breathing easier as the trees became sparse and the road dipped and he saw his farm before him.

  Admitting his stupidity to everyone was not possible, so when he got there he simply asked the worker who’d talked about the Jesúses to help him load milk jugs into the back of the truck, and then asked him to join him on the trip.

  “I need an extra pair of hands today,” he said.

  As they left the farm, though, he turned right, not left.

  “We’re going north,” the worker said.

  And that is when the farmer told Aníbal that he should spend a few days with his family. That he should let them know, and the rest of their family in
the ACCV, the coca growers’ union, that there was a gringa journalist who claimed to be working with Luisa’s foundation but wasn’t.

  The worker looked at him strangely, and the farmer suddenly felt foolish. Paranoid.

  “Who is she working for?”

  The farmer had no idea. All he knew was that Luisa didn’t trust her, and that she had walked right up to Javier Ocasio as if she knew him.

  “The Jesúses,” he said.

  It was a tentative conclusion, but it was one that would soon become gospel truth in the north, where coca prices were low, discontent was high, and resistance had already been growing for months.

  4

  Before coming to La Vigia, the only women Valencia regularly saw who looked like Luisa were homeless indio women, begging on the streets or selling trinkets, women Valencia had sometimes given food to when she was on charity missions with the nuns at her school. “Victims of the guerrilla,” her father, Juan Pablo, would say. Now she was hundreds of miles away from home, and a woman with the sort of flat, dark, peasant face she unconsciously associated with poverty and helplessness was ordering her around. And sometimes berating her for her stupidity.

  There was much to berate her for. Valencia’s responsibilities included setting up equipment, recording audio during the interviews the foundation was conducting, typing up transcripts, sorting them according to various metrics and which types of atrocities each fell into, loading the information into the foundation’s database, and running any other duties Luisa and her staff could throw at her and at Sara, the other student from Nacional. She barely had time to eat, barely time to think. “The goal is peak efficiency,” Professor Agudelo had explained to them at the outset. This meant, in practice, that Valencia listened to atrocities during the day, typed them up during the night, and ate and slept who knows when. She was tired, and, despite the training on the equipment she’d received back in Bogotá, prone to making mistakes.

  On her third day there she had plugged the microphone into the wrong channel, the input set wrong on her control track such that she thought she was recording audio but, in fact, had nothing. In the common room afterward, in front of Sara and in front of Professor Agudelo, Luisa had lost her temper and shouted at her, “When we are interviewing victims, we have to be perfect! You think it’s easy to tell a story like that?”