The Panama Hat Trail Read online

  Olga’s friends were celebrating El Día de San Juan in their own home. Men lounged around the living room reading the morning paper from Quito. Women entered with bowls of chicha. A cassette deck played music by an internationally known local group, Nanda Mañanchi. One fellow strummed a guitar with a decal of Che tattooed on its shell. Another wailed on his bamboo flute, and a third accompanied the others on his harmonica. A shrine to Jesus, surrounded by candles dripping wax onto the floor, held a prominent spot. A collection basket rested in front of it. A dozen of the Indians danced to the music, single file, around and around. Quiet at first, their feet became the rhythm section, growing in volume until they stomped so hard the house fairly shook. The tune sounded like an endless repetition of the third line of “Frère Jacques.” Some of them chanted in Quechua while their brethren paused for more chicha. Another donned a gorilla mask and kept running up to Olga in mock attack, squealing at her in a high-pitched voice. She feigned fear and everyone laughed. The noise became deafening. One of the stompers came over and urged Olga and me to join them. Normally slow of step and dependent upon a cane to steady herself, when invited to dance at a spirited Indian fiesta the octogenarian sprang alive. Her cane, which she pounded in rhythm with the beat, added to the floor’s tremors as she kept pace with the dancers. More booze flowed. A boy of sixteen sat slumped on the couch, his eyes half-closed. “He’s sleeping off this morning’s drunk,” Olga said through the din, “and resting up for the afternoon drink. He’ll be fine.”

  Ten minutes later we were back outside in the pastoral countryside ready to leave when Julián Muenala, whose house we had just visited, walked up. “Give me a kiss,” Olga exclaimed on seeing him. He and Olga, friends for thirty-five years, embraced. Behind his Oscar de la Renta sunglasses his eyes sparkled as he described his most recent trip to Italy. His business, selling Otavalan weavings, had originally been nurtured by Olga until it took wings of its own.

  “The Otavalans are starting to use automated looms,” Olga said as we headed back toward Quito. “They can make a lot more weavings in a shorter period of time, but they aren’t as artistic as many of the other Indians. These are a highly cultured people, technically skilled and extremely smart. But they are not creative or original. I used to give them designs to weave. I don’t do that anymore. They must do that on their own.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  SOUR LAKE OIL

  Most of Ecuador’s Indians live in the central highlands between the two parallel mountain chains that make up the Andes. These are the indigenous people at the bottom of the social heap who plant corn, harvest potatoes, work for the better off—and make hats. Virtually all the rest of the Indians live in the Oriente, Ecuador’s sparsely populated Amazon jungle region. Although geologists had spent decades drilling Indian hunting land for oil, not until the 1960s did they discover the country’s future. Aboriginal Indians versus petrodollars—the face-off was too tempting to resist. The countdown for my Panama hat shipment to New York still allowed time for me to travel to the jungle for a look at the changes oil has brought about. Claude Levi Strauss’s observation about South America rang true: “A continent barely touched by man,” he wrote in Tristes Tropiques, “lay exposed to men whose greed could no longer be satisfied by their own continent.”

  What must the Indians have thought when the first Anglos came to their land? An Amazon-basin legend retold by Will Baker in Backward offers a clue: “It is said white men come to the selva with their gifts in order to capture the Indians, take them to secret places, and render them into oil which is used to power airplanes, motor boats and autos. So fueled, these craft return, bearing more gifts, seeking more Indians.”

  Some Indians refer to oil as “the black water that burns”; others call it “the excrement of the devil.” By any name it has irrevocably altered the country since the first black gold was sent through the trans-Ecuadoran pipeline to the coast and shipped abroad in 1974. Nowhere had this change been more graphic than at Lago Agrio, Sour Lake in English, whose name comes not from any nearby body of rancid water but rather from Sour Lake, Texas, where a young company named Texaco had its first gusher in 1902. Carved from an unpopulated riverside rain forest, Lago Agrio has become a frontier jungle town that serves as a trading center for the Cofán Indians and as field headquarters for Texaco, Inc.

  After a severe drought in the early 1970s struck Loja, hundreds of its residents were shuffled off to this new settlement on the Aguarico River. To encourage colonization, the government exempted new businesses from taxes and deeded land to homesteaders who kept crops in production. Some of the land had been traditional hunting territory for the Cofán and other Indians. Because Lago Agrio is only a short distance from Colombia, thousands of the ambitious, shiftless, and desperate from that country as well as Ecuador moved there for its remoteness and its frontier-style laxity.

  Lago Agrio’s airstrip has two terminals, one for the thrice-weekly commercial flight from Quito, and the other to serve the consortium between Texaco and the Corporación Estatal Petrolera Ecuatoriana (CEPE)—the Ecuadoran State Petroleum Corporation. When I visited, the main street of town was equal parts mud, oil, gravel, and tar, all sloshed together. Anything smaller than a pickup truck was doomed, especially during or after the daily torrential rainfall. Although Lago Agrio was no more than fifteen years old, it looked a weary fifty years old. Huge trucks from United States heavy-equipment companies rumbled through on their way to and from the fenced-in Texaco compound at the edge of town and the oil wells beyond. Bars, cafés, and bakeries competed for Ecuadoran sucres and Colombian pesos, available on the very public black market. Stores selling hardware, clothes, and music lined Lago’s few streets. Chickens plucked coffee and cacao beans drying by the side of the road. Lanky Colombians, black and bony, played checkers in front of a Chinese restaurant while cumbias blasted from their cassette players. Most wore bathing suits or rolled-up pants, their feet covered by sandals or nothing. Machetes slapped against their thighs. Walking the streets of Lago Agrio for a few hours revealed a town with more sewing machines than toilets, more whorehouses than schoolhouses.

  Down one street stood the Salón Descanso Intelectual, the Intellectual Resting Place, a small cantina whose sign pictured a man sitting at a school desk reading a book. Below an outdated wall calendar and a picture of a couple making love sat a phonograph on which the owner played both sides of a record—“Evil Thoughts” and “Heartless Woman.” Afterward he carefully wiped it off with his hand, leaving mosquitoes and beads of sweat in its grooves. The Hollywood Beauty Salon was nearby. A couple of churches seemed planted only as an afterthought. On one, a poster quoted a smiling Pope John Paul II: “The well-being of the workers is more important than economic benefits.”

  The two most recommended hotels were the severely misnamed Residencia Hilton and the Residencia Utopia. “You’ll like either one,” a shop owner assured me. “Both use mosquito netting.” A new one, El Cofán, was under construction, its restaurant already open for business. “For a while everyone called the town Nueva Loja because the first settlers were from Loja,” its owner said. “The patron saint of Loja is the patron saint here. It’s like our birthplace. We have had a violent struggle to establish a town—to get water, light, sewers, and electricity. Whatever we have in services here is inefficient and insufficient. Most people get their water from either the river or the rain. They promised us a lot, but gave us nothing.”

  The Vaquero Bar in the center of town had genuine Old West swinging doors in front and a laid-off oil-hand at the bar. On the stereo, Alexandra, the morning-shift bartender, played “Lost and Drunk” and “I’m a Vagabond” in honor of a customer who was all three. He told her about his twenty-two-year-old wife: “I ran her off. She was no good.” He looked up at me. “I’m half-Cherokee and half-Irish. I grew up in Oklahoma.” The words came out so slurred I couldn’t tell which was worse, his Spanish or his English. “I been here six months. Have a beer? What’s the matter, d
on’t you like my railroad overalls?” He described each of his eight children and a six-pack of wives. Alexandra passed the time carefully cutting paper napkins in half with a scissors, doubling the Vaquero’s supply. “Leaving so soon?” the jungle Okie asked. “Here.” He leaned over and slobbered a loud kiss on me.

  One fifth of all the women in Lago, which had ten thousand residents, were prostitutes, a doctor told me. “On the first Wednesday of every month we give them a checkup and a shot.” Club Boricua, the current favorite, had oil-company trucks parked in the mud outside and wall paintings of couples in action inside. On oil-camp paydays, the place is jammed far into the night. Prostitutes sidle up for money for the Wurlitzer (one sucre for a song) or for themselves (five dollars for twenty minutes). Lago’s finest brothel covers its jukebox with wire mesh to protect it from flying bottles and chairs.

  “El Oriente,” Henri Michaux wrote, “an Ecuadoran says this word as if it were Paris, both dangerous, hard to reach, and presumably awe-inspiring.” When Claude Phillips first went there in the mid-1960s, it was all that and more. Phillips grew up in a poor southeast Texas farming family and worked on nearby oil rigs. “When I got here, there were no roads in this part of the Oriente, and only one well. They had to fly the entire rig over from Colombia. The town of Lago Agrio didn’t exist. It was all jungle. We’d come down on rope ladders and clear the location with machetes and axes. We built a helicopter pad so choppers could come in. We had to bring a lot of equipment in on barges on the Aguarico River. It took us three months to build that airstrip. I was a maintenance foreman, but at the time there was nothing to maintain.

  “Back then Ecuadoran workers got seven sucres a day plus sugar and water. They lived in a tent and had to hunt their own meat and bake their own bread—of course, there was nothing for them to make bread out of. We had both Indians and mestizos, anyone they’d throw into the jungle to work. I was criticized for even talking with Indians and others in the lower class. None of the workers even knew how to use a pipe wrench. In order to work with these people I couldn’t be Claude, I had to be Claudio. So I changed my name. It worked.”

  Phillips and the others built a little thatch-roofed club. “We stocked cold beer. All we did was play cards. We had no women out there. I used to wander through the jungle by myself. I only got lost once.” Phillips estimates that he has drilled more than three hundred oil wells in the Oriente over the years. “On the last one we drilled ninety-two hundred feet in eleven days and two hours. I was on the rig.”

  During his three-week breaks after twenty-one straight days on duty in the jungle, Phillips lives on a dollar salary in a sucre economy. With his Ecuadoran wife he has a large pinewood home in a valley outside Quito. Its shelves hold books by Steinbeck and Freud, videotapes of ballets, and recordings of Vivaldi and Bach. With prodding, his two parrots squawk “¡Por favor! ¡Por favor!” He goes deep-sea fishing off the coast and freshwater fishing on jungle rivers. Upper-class Ecuadoran friends join him for a round of golf on a local course, or at the house for a barbecue.

  In the middle of one conversation he paused: “What’s the word I want? My English is getting rusty. I don’t use it too much anymore. I’m virtually an Ecuadoran citizen now. I’ve got a resident visa.” He thought long and hard when I asked about the difficulties of the expatriate life. Finally he shook his head. “There are none for me. The younger ex-pats, though, they’ve never had a maid or a cook in their lives, then they come here and everything they want is provided for them. They can’t adjust, especially the wives. For them it gets to the point where all they do is gripe.”

  The Texaco compound, a twenty-minute walk from the heart of town, is worlds apart from Lago Agrio. Past the armed guard are dormitories for the workers, company offices, a mess hall, machine shops, and storage sheds. Permanent subcontractors maintain huge facilities nearby. Their crews eat at Texaco’s dining room and relax at the new two-million-dollar recreation building. The compound has its own electricity, hot water, and sewage facilities. Its lawns are manicured and its road paved. While Lago Agrio itself has few telephones, and most of them don’t work, dormitories at the compound have phones in each room from which workers can talk toll-free with their families in Quito. In many ways Texaco’s installation is like a little military base in a foreign country.

  Since the CEPE-Texaco consortium’s operations swung into full gear during the 1970s, more and more Ecuadorans, trained at their own universities, on the job, and in the States, have taken on office and field work. Most Texaco oilhands, in fact, are Ecuadoran—engineers, mechanics, technicians, and laborers. Like the gringos, they live in the cinder-block dorms, eat hearty company meals, and take the half-hour flight on the company jet back to their families in Quito for a long weekend.

  The new recreation hall has brought Western civilization to the Amazon basin. Its bar looks like a happy-hour tavern, its movie theater shows Hollywood thrillers, and new pool tables and pinball machines bridge the time between games on the six automated bowling alleys. A wall-sized screen dominates the television room, and, for the more literary minded, a library offers books by Charles Dickens, Erskine Caldwell, and Richard Nixon. After years of makeshift entertainment, Texaco’s oil-camp workers finally had a full-fledged modern student union. For the residents of Lago Agrio, it is off limits.

  A planeload of government ministers, provincial mucky-mucks, and dignitaries from Quito and Texaco’s Latin American headquarters in Florida flew in for the recreation hall’s opening festivities. Bands played, booze flowed, visitors oohed and ahhed. Workers jammed the theater for the Miss CEPE-Texaco competition. Each of the six finalists was asked why she thought the Oriente should be developed. From Cristina Reynosa, the winning answer: “For the good of the country!” “¡Que Viva!” the crowd cheered. “¡Que Viva!”

  Bill Allen, a professional bowler from Orlando, Florida, sat bewildered. “I was watching television at home a couple of days ago when I got a call from Brunswick asking if I’d make an appearance at the dedication of some new alleys. Now I’m in the Amazon jungle. Is it true that most of these people here have never even seen bowling?”

  Claudio, who dropped in for the opening, nodded. “When you teach them something, you’ve got to be patient. Explain it very carefully over and over and look them in the eye. When they first say they understand, they usually don’t. When that spark lights up in their eyes, they’ve learned. They’ll do it right every time after that.”

  One hundred fifty Ecuadorans crowded in to watch their first game of bowling. Allen spoke over the public-address system: “Now you take four steps. If you’re right-handed, start with your right foot. It’s the rhythm, not the speed of the ball.” Two Ecuadorans, encouraged by friends and alcohol, volunteered. Tossing gutter balls at first, they finally knocked down pins frame after frame, much to the delight of the spectators. In the next room, a visitor played “If I Were a Rich Man” on the saxophone.

  “It’s the beginning of the end,” said Terry Andrews, who headed the workers association, as he marveled at the spanking new facilities. Andrews sat with David Archer, whose wife had just bowled the jungle’s first strike. Archer, then Texaco’s field-operations superintendent, agreed: “I never thought I’d see the day when we had bowling here. Ecuador was in a fifteenth-century economy before this,” he added, indicating the promise of petroleum. “Now it’s up to the nineteenth century.”

  Oil production in Ecuador has reached more than 275,000 barrels a day, most of which is shipped overseas. The income from that accounts for two-thirds of the country’s total export earnings. “We figure it costs eighteen days a year to cover production costs, taxation, royalties, and concession fees,” Archer said. “Texaco profit comes to one full day’s production a year. The rest goes to the government. Our contract expires in 1992.”

  René Bucaram table-hopped around the opening-night party. Bucaram, from a Lebanese family long active in the country’s affairs, ran all of Texaco’s activities in Ecuador. Smoo
th and aggressive, he was its spokesman, liaison between the central government and corporate headquarters, and general top dog. “You work for me?” he said to Bernardo, a pipeline worker from Riobamba sitting at a table of celebrants.

  “Yes, I work for you. But my interest is with Ecuador.”

  “Yeah? So is mine.”

  “What do you think of yourself?” Bernardo asked his top boss.

  “I tell you, I’m a sonuvabitch. Punto. When I dropped down on that cable from a helicopter in 1970, there was nothing here. Nothing. I’m proud of that and all we’ve done out here since then. Everything else is just bullshit.”

  The boss drifted away, and Bernardo looked around at the party. “These people aren’t Ecuadoran anymore. They’ve been corrupted. They know that technology equals dollars. You know what progress makes men? It makes them machines.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with development here,” added Vince, who ran the electrical generator. “It’s the Spanish influence. At the all-Ecuadoran operations nothing gets done. They’re inefficient and there’s corruption through and through.”

  Another worker complained about the brother of a top government official. “That guy requisitioned a tractor for two million sucres, then changed the purchase order to two million dollars. He paid for it and pocketed the rest. We call it ‘the golden tractor.’”

  “This is a boom town. The government takes money out, but they don’t put it back in.”