Hold the Enlightenment (30 page)

He doesn’t always escape unscathed in all situations, however. I had just seen Pelton admonished by a CNN anchor in an appearance on that station an hour previous. UN personnel had recently been kidnapped in Sierra Leone and the anchor asked: “Is Sierra Leone a dangerous country?”

“Yes,” Pelton said, “especially if you’re a member of the UN.”

“It’s not funny,” the anchor replied, and indeed it wasn’t, though the question itself was moronically laughable, and Pelton, as I was to discover, doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

His house had been built in the fifties, a kind of tract home that Pelton and Linda had transformed into a showcase on the sea. Pelton, like me, loved to cook—Italian food was a specialty—and had designed the kitchen himself.

We were going to Colombia tomorrow, which, if you believed the State Department, and I did, was the most dangerous country in the Western Hemisphere. The last time I’d been there, doing work for a multinational corporation, I’d been provided the services of a twenty-four-hour, Uzi-toting bodyguard.

Pelton and I spent our last evening in the States arguing recipes.

Soon enough, we were in Colombia.

Of course, Pelton realized that if we had any hope of experiencing genuine, bloodcurdling terror, we were going to need to break free of the regimented itinerary the army and national police had prepared for us, and to do that, we were going to need to get our hosts to trust us. For the week before we arrived, Pelton’s contact in Colombia—Steve Salisbury, a freelance correspondent for
Semana
, the Colombian weekly magazine, as well as several newspapers in the United States—had been getting the ball rolling in this direction. And so on just our first full day in the country, the three of us, plus photographer Rob Howard, and Pelton’s cameraman, an ex–special forces operative, Rob Krott, found ourselves inside the wood-paneled office of General Fernando Tapias, who is something like the Colin Powell of Colombia. The general was an articulate, avuncular man who said that the parallels which had been noted between the current situation in Colombia and the one in
Vietnam circa 1962 were all wrong. “People assume U.S. soldiers are involved in these operations,” said the general, as Krott filmed the scene with one of Pelton’s video cameras. “There are just two hundred U.S. military advisors here, and none engage in operations. Still, whenever the guerrillas lose a battle, they always claim ‘it was against American troops.’ ”

In sum, the general said, the army was fighting a leftist insurgency. The strongest group was FARC, with as many as seventeen thousand fighters. There were two other major leftist groups. At the other extreme were the “illegal self-defense groups,” rightist paramilitaries, opponents of the leftists, the strongest of which was called the AUC and headed by a man named Carlos Castaño. The general did not say that the army was often accused of turning a blind eye to massacres (of suspected leftists) committed by the paramilitaries. He did say that since both the Medellín and Cali cartels had been smashed, “narco-guerrillas” had begun taking a large piece of the cocaine and heroin trade, both from peasants who grew the stuff and the dealers who sold it abroad.

The hard reality, the general said, “is that narcotics trafficking supports these outlaw groups. It is no longer about ideology. In the 1980s, when we captured [FARC rebels] they carried books about Marx or Lenin. Now they have account books and spreadsheets.”

The general was proud of the fact that numerous opinion polls gave the army a 69 percent approval rate. Only 6 percent supported FARC. As we left, we were given a brochure entitled “Guerrillas and Illegal Self-Defense Groups Guilty of Genocide.” It said both rebels and paramilitaries “are systematically assassinating thousands of Colombians, not as a result of their race, religion or political beliefs, but in order to control the regions where illegal drugs are being harvested … to control a business that has represented over 3.6 billion dollars over the past eight years.”

The brochure listed the names of 910 civilians killed by guerrillas in 1999, with 40.2 percent of the deaths attributed to FARC. Paramilitary groups had killed 743. The lists were horrifying, as were ghastly, full-color photos of members of the army who had been tortured and killed. FARC guerrillas, for instance, had captured
and decapitated two soldiers, brothers as it turned out. Their heads were boxed up and sent to their mother. The severed heads were pictured right there on page three, followed by photos of dead men with their eyes gouged out or their skulls crushed.

One soldier—this photo has disturbed my sleep ever since—had had his face sliced off. “These are the guys,” Pelton said, referring to the face-slicers, “we really ought to be talking to.”

But first we had to let the national police fly us up to the northern town of Cúcuta and watch them blow the shit out of some coca leaves.

Since the guerrillas and paramilitaries supported themselves with “taxing” the drug trade, the government had been devoting more and more resources to obliterating coca bushes, drug labs, and harvesting sheds. Cúcuta was at the center of one of the main areas for these efforts. Just weeks before, fifty-one people had been massacred in the two towns directly to the north and west, apparently by paramilitaries and/or rebels trying to eliminate competition for their own growers and distributors, and Cúcuta itself had been the site of frequent bombings.

Our escort, Captain Fernando Buitrago of the police, had secured us rooms in a hotel chosen primarily for its proximity to the local police station. “Do not open your door to anyone,” he instructed as we checked in. “Call me if someone knocks. I can tell, my friends, you are not safe here.” I glanced over and saw Pelton was filling out Rob Howard’s registration card.

The next day we were dropped by helicopter, along with thirty other journalists, on a hillside about thirty minutes away. Down below, waist-high coca bushes stretched to the horizon. There was also a little three-walled shack with a thatched roof, some plastic bags, a bin full of silver-white coca leaves, and a few barrels of gasoline.
Presently, a plane flew over, there was a loud explosion, and the drug lab exploded in picturesque billows of black flame.

Pelton was filming all this with a digital camera about the size of a box of Cracker Jacks.

“Good stuff?” I asked.

“Dog-and-pony show,” he muttered.

The next day the army flew us down to Putumayo, the largest coca-growing area on earth. We were ushered into a prefabricated, tentlike building surrounded by razor wire and sandbags (Pelton began referring to it as “the circus tent”), where a Major Muriel laid out the situation for us in an interminable Power Point presentation, complete with charts, maps, graphs, and many, many words on the army’s commitment to human rights. Muriel made a big point of telling us that the country’s rivers had become “ribbons of commerce in drugs and arms,” at which time we were led to a large pavilion overlooking one of the rivers. A young soldier stood at a lectern, reading from a script. “A narcotics lab is located across the river,” he announced, and a helicopter swept out of the sky, strafing some trees on the far bank, while, on the pavilion’s sound system, Kool and the Gang implored listeners to “move your feet to the rhythm of the beat.” Two open boats containing a dozen soldiers each came roaring out of the fog and blasted the same broken trees with 50-caliber shells. The boats landed, soldiers poured into the forest, there were the sounds of light-arms fire, and then silence, except for the disco.

“The drug lab is neutralized,” the young soldier announced, and then the army flew us back to Bogotá.

I knew, of course, that the whole thing had been one giant publicity stunt. But, to be honest, I was also feeling relieved that I’d survived another day with my face still attached to my skull. We’d been in Colombia for almost a week and all we’d done was interview some generals and attend “media events.” Crap you see on television every day.

Pelton apologized for the timid nature of our research so far. In the coming days, he promised, we’d find danger if it killed us.

…

The next day, there was another one of those hideous crimes that happen with such appalling frequency in Colombia. In the rural town of Chiquinquira, Mrs. Elvia Cortés, a fifty-three-year-old dairy farmer whose son was a banker, had been fitted with an explosive necklace made from PVC pipe. Eyewitnesses heard Mrs. Cortés yelling, “We’ve paid and paid and paid.” A male voice replied: “You won’t pay? We’ll see about that.” Mrs. Cortés was seen coming out of her house wearing the bomb. Police were called and, along with an army explosives expert, worked for five hours trying to defuse it. The media were there, filming the whole thing: the woman’s terror-stricken face, the policeman’s caution, his attempts to calm her. No luck. The bomb exploded, killing the woman and the cop. FARC was immediately fingered for the atrocity (though the authorities would later admit that they couldn’t be sure about that). At any rate, occurring as it did on the day after Mother’s Day, the media began calling it the “mother bomb.”

We were among the first people in the country to hear about the mother bomb, because we were at police headquarters in Bogotá listening in on 911 when it happened. The police, finally having tired of Pelton’s demands for more “authenticity,” were letting us spend the night with them and ride along on the call of our choice. At about ten that night, we rode with detectives who took down a car theft ring. One officer had trouble with a cranky stick shift on his car and I found myself driving it back to the station. The car jackers had been armed, but the cops were fast and efficient and no shots were fired. Pelton asked if I thought the experience was an “adventure.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “I usually ride in the back of police cars.”

Later that night, about 3
A.M.
, we accompanied police raiding a house where urban militiamen, thought to be affiliated with FARC, were holed up in an apartment in northwestern Bogotá. In no time, we were speeding down unpaved roads into the heart of the barrio and scurrying through a muddy alleyway to a narrow street of two-story poured-concrete houses. One policeman—I couldn’t believe this—knocked politely on the door of the suspected stronghold.

Pelton, in one of those little bits of advice to be found scattered throughout
The World’s Most Dangerous Places
, had suggested I take a position behind the front wheel of any car parked on the street, where I’d be protected from bullets by the engine block. There were, of course, no cars parked on the street.

But I had a couple police in front of me, a couple behind, and they were going to have to serve as engine blocks. All of us were standing up against the wall, under the balcony of the house, to minimize the chances of anyone getting a clean shot at us. All of us, that is, except for Pelton, who was standing out in a muddy field just across the street, filming the whole thing with his tiny Cracker Jack–box camera.

Suddenly, the door swung open, the police swarmed in and came face-to-face with … one rather stout woman, two small children, and a fit-looking young man in his underwear. After some rummaging, the police also unearthed a bunch of unfired .38-caliber bullets and a few military-style backpacks and ski masks, but there was no denying: Pelton and I had been foiled again.

Such was the twisted state of our little waiting-for-guerrillas routine that we now started arguing about who’d been acting more irresponsibly back there. I told Pelton that I thought a field thirty yards from the front window of the house wasn’t exactly the best place to stand when you’re expecting a firefight. He countered that urban militiamen weren’t likely to have rifles—“too conspicuous”—and he was out of pistol range, while the insurgents could have easily dropped a grenade on our heads.

We were still arguing about this two days later, out in the middle of Colombia, on the Magdalena River, the country’s longest ribbon of illegal commerce. The army—along with the navy and marines—had finally caved in to Pelton’s badgering, so now we were in a gunboat of the sort we’d seen in Putumayo, with Pelton and me outfitted in helmets and heavy flack jackets.

A small ferry carrying dozens of passengers hailed us urgently from a distance. The passengers shouted that a column of guerrillas was stationed on the east side of the river—they were only minutes away. All the passengers pointed in the same direction:
That way, guerrillas …

Shells were jacked into the .50-caliber guns, and we coasted slowly—agonizingly slowly, in my opinion—along the east bank of the river, where grasses grew higher than a man’s head.

“They’re there,” an officer assured me. “They see us. They won’t shoot because they know they’re outgunned. We’re trying to draw their fire.”

Great. So now Pelton had the army in on our perverse little game too. Back and forth we puttered in front of the shore. The soldiers were practically jumping up and down on the deck, yelling, “Shoot us! Shoot us!” And—nothing. Not so much as a hurled coconut.

That night over a drink in the hotel bar, as a large-screen TV replayed the terrible saga of the mother bomb for about the seven hundredth time, I finally had a chance to ask Pelton what he got out of continually putting himself in these situations.

“Look,” he said, between sips of aguardiente, the licoriceish-flavored drink he favored in South America. “I know some people think a travel guide to war zones is pathetic. Big-time journalists, for instance, assume that ‘little people’ should not be attempting their great feats. It pisses them off, because the democratization of information and experience just might contradict the drivel they write from the hotel bar. Journalists,” he said, referring to me and my colleagues, “are mostly pompous pussies.”

How did this guy get to be such a jerk?

He had, I knew, essentially been abandoned by his mother at “the toughest boys’ school in North America.” She hadn’t left a forwarding address when she dropped him off.