8,300 Feet Above Sea Level

Hasta pronto, Bogota

This will be my last post from Colombia. I leave tomorrow with sadness in my heart. I made good friends during my five weeks in Bogota, people who helped me understand the way they live, the way their city works; people who taught me how to appreciate Colombian rum and gallina campesina. I'm amazed that one is able to establish such strong connections in such short period of time, that one is able to learn so much about a city and its residents in just over 30 days.
I'll miss the morning chats with Irma and her colorful commentary about the news in El Tiempo. I'll miss the cafe perico at Juan Valdez, the ride along Avenue Caracas at a TransMilenio window seat. I'll miss Marta, the dear friend who made this experience so much richer to me. I'll miss my walks along Carrera 9, my day with the National Police, the streets of Candelaria, Botero's gorditos, arepas for breakfast and ajiaco on cold days. I'll miss my creaky bed, the books by Santiago Gamboa, the Sunday afternoons of Spanish tapas and sangria with Mauricio and Luz Maria. I'll miss the people of Ciudad Bolivar, folks who welcomed me in their humble homes and scraped the can to offer me a fresh, strong cup of coffee. I'll miss Forney, Adriana, Jairo and Oscar, and I wish them luck in their fight to keep the dump from taking up a swath of the green mountains in southern Bogota.
If you've been reading my blog, you will know that taxi drivers are not my favorite type, but I think I'll miss them as well. They taught me to never let my guard down, never reveal too much to a stranger, for you never know what they want from you.
This is my last post from Bogota, but this is not adios. This is simply an hasta luego.

After four days sunbathing in the Carribean, I'm back to Bogota, enjoying my last days in the city. I was in Cartagena, a beautiful town still surrounded by the same walls built by the Spaniards in the 16th century as a means of protection against constant pirate attacks.
Cartagena's old town is a gem, but what surrounds it is dire poverty and deserperation from a people whose only means of survival lies on the crowded tourism industry. The city is one of the poorest in Latin America, with 70% of its residents making less than the Colombian minimum wage of roughly $300. It's also the main destination for people who are displaced by Colombia's conflict and poverty. From the plane, one can see the slums on the outskirts of the city, the humble homes of the people who clean our hotel rooms, cook our food, wait out tables; the same people who smile to us, who tell us they're pleased to serve us, who wish us a nice day as we walk to the beach.

Pollution and the beach

My head hurt and spinned as I made my way back home at rush hour. It couldn't be the beer, I thought, for I had downed only one. Perhaps it was the pollution, the thick black smoke that spewed out of the back of the many buses that travel along that strip of Carrera 11, transporting workers from downtown Bogota to their homes somewhere in the north. Thank God I quit smoking a year ago. With Bogota's air, who needs a After Mexico City, Bogota is the most polluted capital in Latin America, mostly because Colombia's emmission rules are lax, so old buses still travel the streets, leaving behind a lingering trace of smog. A 2000 survey of 1,200 Bogotanos found that 82% experienced runny nose, 72% suffered from dry throat and 68% had headaches because of pollution.
The city has taken some steps to minimize the effects of pollution on its 8 million residents. Every other weekday during morning and evening rush hour, traffic is restricted to cars whose license plates end in odd numbers (when odd-numbered license plates are let out, people who drive cars with even-numbered plates have to stay home, and vice versa). Bogota has also increased the gasoline tax, closed 75 miles of roadway for seven hours on Sunday to turn them into a giant bike path, and instituted a car-free day once a year. The idea was adopted by Cali and Valledupar, two other Colombian cities also trying to reduce their levels of pollution.
As you can see, my lungs need a break. I'm headed to Cartagena, folks, to spend four days drinking cervezas and lounging at the beach. Mike is on his way here and will join me for the coming week. I'm at the airport, waiting for him. He's coming from New York and we leave at 6 p.m. for our mini-vacation.
I filed my first story today, about the success Bogota has had in the past 10 years in bringing down its murder rate. It will run in the Christian Science Monitor sometime soon, I hope. I'll post the link here once it's out.

Yankee Justice in the land of drug cartels and guerrilla war

The U.S. has spent close to $80 million to get Colombia ready to switch from a written, inquisitive judicial system to the accusatory system that starred in courtrooms in Bogota and a few other cities three months ago. It's a system much like the one we see in criminal court in the United States, except for jurors. Here, judges are the ones responsible for deciding whether someone is innocent or guilty of a crime. I'm writing a story about this, so I won't let out all the secrets, but I'll tell you this much: To sit in a Bogota courtroom these days is much like watching a Spanish episode of Law & Order. Take my experience today at Courtroom #7 in Paloquemao Judicial Complex, which is next to the headquarters of Colombia's equivalent to the FBI, the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, a building destroyed in 1989 by a Pablo Escobar sicario who parked a bus packed with 500 kilos of dynamite in front of it and blew it up, killing 70 people. At Courtroom #7, Judge Rosa Irena Veloza Escobar presided over a bail hearing for a skinny 25-year-old named Julian Leonardo Toledo Castro, aka El Chiqui Toledo, accused of stabbing a neighbor during a street fight on Jan. 1. The prosecutor sported leather jacket and pants and bright red lipstick to match her carrot-colored hair. The public defender had on a navy blue suit and a pair of brown shoes in desperate need of replacement or, at least, repair. The prosecutor presented her case for Julian to be kept behind bars. The defender seemed well intentioned, but couldn't quite articulate his arguments that favored Julian's release. Julian left the courtroom in shackles, escorted by a guard.
The defender, Jorge Hernan Sanabria, told me later that he thinks the judge didn't understand what he really meant to say. Then, he theorized that maybe the judge made a mistake, for he's confident he raised reasonable doubt - and when in doubt, the judge should favor the defense, he said. Sanabria left the courthouse disappointed. I felt bad and offered to buy him lunch. He told me he wanted to take a walk and organize his thoughts before he ate anything. "Some other day," he said, "when you come back to Colombia."
Speaking in court is among the greatest difficulties lawyers have had in adapting to the new system. Before, they had to be good writers, for every argument they made, every step of a criminal, case was argued in paper. Oratory is an art and, from what I've seen and heard, not too many have mastered it. The U.S. Embassy here is offering two-week training courses in the new system to prosecutors, defenders, judges and investigators. Each course carries a day of oral argument training and a chance to argue a ficticious case at a mock trial that marks the end of the program. One day to learn how to get up and talk, to verbalize what, for years, lawyers had done in writing. Tough task.

Ramblings

I have asked, but have yet to hear a convincing answer: Why are New York Yankees hats so popular in Bogota, a city where most know nothing about baseball?

Why are thongs called Brazilian panties in Colombia when Brazilians do not wear thongs? As far as I can remember, Brazilian underwear companies don't even manufacture thongs.

Why does the woman who cleans the house where I'm staying insists on calling me Su Merced, Spanish for "Your "Honor," even though I've told her I'm not a judge?

Why do Bogotanos sing "Happy Birthday to You" - yes, the English version - rather than the one in their native tongue?

Why does every cab driver think it's funny to tell me they know the word buseta has a much different meaning in Portuguese than the one it has in Spanish? In Spanish, buseta means a small bus; in Portuguese, it's a rude way to describe a woman's private part.

Five hours in paradise

Waking up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday for a five-hour hike through the woods how I usually start the weekend, but Marta wouls likely not have waited for me if I showed up late for our scheduled trip. We boarded a TransMilenio to Portal de la 80, the westernmost stop for the accordeon-type red buses that transport 12 million riders a day, and waited for Juanita Leon, her boyfriend, Miguel, and friend, Mateo, to pick us up on their beat-up silver van and drive us an hour away to Soacha, a city that, in pre-Columbian times, was part of the Zipas' Kingdom and whose name means "City of the Male God."
Soacha is home to Chicaque National Park, a piece of paradise high up the Andes. The entry fee for foreigners is three times that of locals, so Marta ordered me to keep quiet so I could get away with paying the $3 charged to Colombians. Sad but true, friends: Four weeks in Bogota has not been enough to wipe away my Brazilian accent.
We set off on our hike at 8:30 a.m., literally walking through a thick of clouds as we entered the woods. We went up and down, across two mountains and over the rocky formation that unites them, then headed down a trail once used by indians, toward Santandercito, a pueblo of cobblestone streets and colorful houses that draws its subsistence from the growth and sale of flowers. We wet our dry throats with a cold Aguila beer and hopped on back on the van for a lunch of arroz con pollo at Miguel's farm.
My legs hurt so much today I can barely walk. But the effort was worth it, for I feel like the hike brought me closer to heaven.

What a drag!

Lupe walked through the thick, sweaty crowd and stepped onto the small stage at Kabu, the "It" spot for gay bogotanos. Lupe was dressed like a diva: bright red mini-dress with a ruffled skirt and snug top, knee-high black leather boots, sparkly rings on eight of her fingers and a black boa slung over her shoulders. At the sight of her, the men went wild. They hollered, blew kisses at her, pleaded that she lip-syncs their favorite 70s tune. Lupe liked the attention and twirled on stage like a fashion model, protruding her lips as if blowing a candle every time someone pointed a camera at her.
Lupe is a drag queen who claims to be 42, but looks at least 10 years older. She is a celebrity of sorts among gays in Bogota, who gather in the dark, smoky Kabu Wednesday nights to watch her performance. Lupe is the queen of musica para planchar, losely translated to "music to be listened to while ironing." These are love balads spiked with a pint of irony, Mexican and Colombian hits from the 1970s and '80s that are utterly tacky and, therefore, uber hip (sort of like wearing a mechanic's shirt complete with embroidered name on the chest to a New York club). The crowd - most of them gorgeous young gay men, but some very affectionate gay women as well - sang along with every tune. Rather, they screamed along, at the top of their lungs, their voices drowning out the music that came out of the loudspeakers at times.
I went to Kabu with the host of a popular evening newscast in Bogota, a gay man who shall remain nameless, for I don't want to be the one outing him to the world. Luz Maria, news editor at El Tiempo, Colombia's largest daily newspaper, came along, and so did the anchor's partner on screen, a beautiful woman with a penchant for vodka and orange juice (argh!). My new friends promised to take me Friday to Theatrum, another gay club. From what you can see, my husband, Mike, need not worry about my nights out in town.

A salt sanctuary deep inside the mountain

The walls glittered as we walked through the dark tunnels at Zipaquira, to the cathedral 180 meters underground, where the air is cool and smells the way the ocean smells in my hometown, the way seaweed smells when it dries on the sand. It was dark, except for the lights that hauntingly illuminated the angels and crosses along the way, in the 14 small chapels that represent the Stations of the Cross. If you touched one of them and sucked the tip of your finger, you would see that these angels, crosses and, in fact, the entire cathedral are made of salt, chiseled out of a mine that still yields 600 tons of salt a day.
Zipaquira is a pueblo lost in time, a place where locals move around in horses, where the Colonial buildings sit untouched in the Colombian savannah. Irma, my hostess, and her daughter, Maria Fernanda, joined me on this day trip. We drove for about an hour, 50 km away of Bogota, until we reached the winding road that leads to the cathedral. There were army soldiers and police officers in every kilometer, rifles hanging from their shoulders, their eyes trained on the cars that drove past. Yesterday was a holiday here, so the roads were packed with travelers. Many took the entire week off, for Thursday and Friday are holidays too in observation of Semana Santa, or holy week. Flooding highways with soldiers and cops is the solution President Uribe found to prevent kidnappings. It is, then, fairly safe to drive in Colombia these days, so long as you stick to the main roads and travel before the sun goes down.

The bad and the ugly

The first thing I noticed when I walked into Fundacion La Fortaleza Thursday morning was the little girl who played with an inflated condom as if it were a balloon. La Fortaleza is home to 32 demobilized paramilitary soldiers, their partners and children. It's a two-story Colonial of chipping-white walls and green window trims. The men and women who live there renounced their arms and surrendered to the Colombian army, just like 7,000 others who live in roughly 50 auberges throughout Bogota. These men and women joined a federal resocialization program, but they spend most of their time watching TV, trading war stories or lounging on the sidewalk to the disgust of local residents, who want the ex-paras out of their backyard.
Jovany sat down to tell me the story of his ascent within the ranks of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia - from patrolman to military commander to political leader of one of the group's eight blocks. Jovany is well-spoken, but is apt to long pauses. His legs tremble uncontrolably while he talks. He has a companion, Monica, who is 19. They sleep in a bunk bed and share Room 8 with four other couples. Their living areas are separated by a bookcase and, in one case, a hung blanket.
Before he joined the AUC, Jovany used to help his father make furniture out of wood. He showed me a jewelry box he made for Monica and told me he would like to work as a carpenter again. For now, though, he spends his time writing a draft to a law he hopes to have introduced in Congress; a law, he said, that would give the former combatants who have joined President Uribe's reinsertion program more to do with their time than sit on a plastic chair and watch TV.

I arrived at the police station in Usme, one of Bogota's poorest localities, around 11 a.m., escorted by Patrolman John Mejia, my guide for the day. Mejia is 25, has olive skin and beautiful green eyes. He has worked as a cop for seven years, all of them at Bogota's community police program. Mejia walked me to the police station's cafeteria, where I found Lt. Raul Nunez perched in front of a video game machine, playing the role of a mercenary who kills guerrilleros to free a hostage. "Do you like PlayStation?" the 21-year-old lieutenant asked me minutes later, as we lumbered uphill aboard a ragged police truck. He slid a CD into the stereo and Mick Jagger's voice soon drowned out the police radio. Jagger crooned "I can't get no satisfaction" and Lt. Nunez sang along, though he didn't quite know the words. I thought about what a surreal moment this was: me, Mejia, Lt. Nunez and our driver, Patrolman Perez, riding in a Metropolitan Police truck through a narrow street of even narrower sidewalks where kids perilously played even as cars drove past without slowing down.
Colombian cops work a lot. If you're a ranking officer, your day starts at 6 a.m. and often doesn't end until midnight. They work 15 days to take two days off, but it's not uncommon to be called to the station to fill in a vacant spot, though that doesn't mean they'll get more money in their paycheck. There are no unions that represent them, for Colombian cops are supposed to be apolitical. They get paid about $300 a month, which is barely enough to make ends meet in Bogota. The single ones, like Lt. Nunez, are allowed to live in the police station, in common rooms of bunker beds that at least allows them to save on rent.
After reading about fufu at the blog kept by my colleague Catherine Poff, I became intent on savoring some exotic Colombian delicacy, so I asked Lt. Nunez to take me some place where only locals would eat. He brought me to Piqueteadero Las Mercedes in Usme and ordered picada, a giant plate of plantanes, yuca, chorizo, country chicken, arepas, and - ready for this? - pig intestines filled with rice bathed in pig's blood, a dish otherwise known as morcilla. Dis-gus-ting!
I don't expect any weird food tomorrow, just some interesting talks with demobilized paramilitary soldiers who have joined President Uribe's reinsertion program and are now living in residencies in Bogota. Stay tuned.

A magazine that knows how to keep its reporters happy

Marta turned 39 yesterday, so we went out to celebrate with a few of her friends from Revista Semana, Colombia's lead news magazine. Marta is a festy reporter and an expert in Colombia's conflict, which she has been covering for nearly a decade. Semana sponsors a Monday night happy hour at a cafe that sits a half-block from its headquarters at Zona Rosa, where Bogota's elite lives. Anyone who works at the magazine can drink two of anything they want on Semana's tab - whisky, rum, beer, whatever. Hey, do you guys have an opening?
Semana's editor-in-chief, Alejandro Santos, is a balding young man who hails from the most powerful media family in Colombia, the Santos family. They own El Tiempo, Bogota's largest daily newspaper, and have a direct line with Casa de Narino, Colombia's White House. Yes, my friends, Santos is a powerful last name in this country, though my Brazilian accent soon tells that this Santos is not from here, which means I get no special treatment.
After our free drinks, we left the cafe and headed to Marta's apartment to end the night drinking a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label to the sound of Argentinian tango. She lives five blocks from where I'm staying, but I called a cab to take me home. Bogota may be a safer city these days, but no respectable citizen would dare walking its streets alone late at night.

"I may have nothing, but my home is close to the stars."

I heard that from Maria, a woman who gathered three of her eight children one night six years ago and escaped the bloody war that has torn apart her hometown, a place tucked in the jungles of southern Colombia, close to the border with Brazil and Peru. Maria and what's left of her family live in a shack built out of discarded wood and plastic sheets, perched high up a mountain that affords them a prized view of Bogota. They have no sewage and water arrives only once a week, brought by tanker trucks that slowly climb the unpaved hills of Ciudad Bolivar to fill the blue plastic barrels that sit outside Maria's shack and the 32 neighboring shacks that belong to families also displaced by violence.
Ciudad Bolivar is a neighborhood of 800,000 residents that barely existed 20 years ago. Now, it absorbs most of the 150,000 people who arrive in Bogota every month from Colombia's war-torn countryside. It's a neighborhood that most would consider dangerous, for it's said to be peppered with militias partnered with guerrilla and paramilitary groups. A TV reporter warned me not to venture in on my own because I may not come out alive, so I enlisted the help of Oscar Baron, a community organizer who moved to Ciudad Bolivar when it was only a cluster of humble homes off Avenida Boyaca, in southern Bogota. Oscar introduced me as "la periodista," or the reporter, and that was enough for people to open their hearts and their homes to me.
I found no danger in Ciudad Bolivar. What I found were people who had nothing, but didn't mind splitting a chicken breast with a stranger who showed up unnanounced to explore the other side of Bogota.

Lunch time

Don't try to reach anyone in Bogota between 12 and 2 p.m. The city stops for two hours every weekday to give workers time off for lunch. Bogotanos take their lunch seriously. They often walk out of office buildings in groups and stroll side by side, taking up the entire width of the sidewalk and blocking the way of fast walkers like myself. It used to aggravate me at first, but I'm getting used to it now and, like bogotanos, enjoying the daily break I'm forced to take.
I had lunch at Salto del Angel today, a tony restaurant in tonier Zona Rosa, one of the wealthiest sections of Bogota. The service was incredible; there were three polite young men waiting my table, and every other table for that matter, before you think I had extra attention because I was a woman having lunch on my own. For Colombian standards, Salto del Angel is an expensive place to eat. They play bad American music and charge $27,000 pesos for New York Strip Steak. I found it to be an outrage to pay so much for food, for lunch has cost me no more than $12,000 pesos a day. I ordered a salad, then, and it was only on my way to an interview that I realized that $27,000 pesos is no more than $13 - a bargain for good steak.
For people with dollar in their pockets, Bogota is a cheap city and a great place to buy shoes (I can see my husband cringe as he reads this line). I haven't bought any yet. After all, I'm a fellow on a stipend!
Tomorrow, I'll meet the leftist mayor of Bogota, Lucho Garzon, a former union leader and the son of a Colombian maid abandoned by her husband when Lucho was only 7 years old. Today, I met ex-mayor Enrique Penalosa, who was born in Washington, D.C., graduated from Duke University and has a an office on the 11th floor of a building on the edge of Zona Rosa, where one has a panoramic view of Bogota.
The two mayors represent the paradox that's so real in a city where a disarmed paramilitary soldier walks the same streets as someone who fled the violence of the war that rages in the Colombian countryside.

Who am I?

There's not one person I've met who hasn't warned me about Bogota's taxi drivers, so i'm obviously very suspicious of them all. The cabbies love to pry and they will interview you like an obnoxious reporter to find out as much as they can about who you are, where you live and what you do for a living, so I've taken to lie for the sake of making it home in one piece. To most cab drivers, I'm an unemployed secretary from Brazil looking for work in Bogota, or an unemployed Brazilian teacher who is trying to work at one of this city's 20-plus universities. Most cabbies must think I'm crazy, for the unemployment rate in Colombia is higher than that of Brazil. Well, let them think I'm nuts. That - and the fact that I'm an unemployed, and therefore broke - might be enough to eliminate me as a target.
I took this cab yesterday to Universidad Nacional, Colombia's largest public university and the alma mater of many leftist guerrilla leaders. In a checkered jacket and patterned tie that didn't match, the driver, Elizio Zapata, didn't seem interested in duping me. He was interested in finding out if I had a husband and where he was and if I would consider a date with a divorced bogotano who is a great salsa dancer (at least, that's what he told me). I politely declined, but not until I got out of the cab at my destination.

]]> If you're wondering why I still ride cabs, it's because it is safer than riding the bus. Bogota's buses are old and filthy. Plus, bus drivers are maniacs: They go through red lights, cut off cars and slam the brakes constantly - a practice that's not only dangerous, but also makes me want to puke.

El Demonio y la Senorita Prym

Diego Felipe Gallego Martinez is a man who likes to read. At a corner of his mahogany desk, within arm's reach, are two equally high piles of books. Harvard Business Review's "Liderazgo," or "Leadership," is a must-have management reference book, Martinez told me; Paulo Coelho's "El Demonio y la Senorita Prym" is for when he needs to reflect.
Colonel Martinez is the commander of Bogota's Community Police program, a man of soft speech who never averts his gaze when he's talking to you. His office is in a single-story brick house on the northern edge of a park, a boxy construction colored a fading shade of pink. Martinez is 38, but has 19 years of police experience, including three years of patrol in Medellin during the time Pablo Escobar's capos killed cops for kicks. When I asked if he ever feared for his safety, he told me about a night he and two friends were cornered by a menacing type in downtown San Francisco (?!?), and how he felt afraid. Must have been some scary dude, for he frightened a police officer who works in one of the most dangerous countries in the world.
Martinez didn't want me to be a victim of the paseo millionario, or millionaire's ride, the flash kidnapping-for-cash scheme run by the crooked cab drivers of Bogota, so he ordered a patrolman to take the police cruiser, drive me to a busy street and hail a cab for me. On my way home, the cabbie didn't even speed through yellow lights. He stopped and waited for the red, even as frantic drivers behind him honked and hollered.
I went to the U.S. Embassy in the morning, before I met Colonel Martinez, but that was a bore.
Before I say buenas noches, I'd like to thank Detectives Dennis Laffin and Joe Cavituolo for the NYPD patches. They are a hit among Colombian cops.