The Panama Hat Trail Read online

  “Where do they put it?”

  “Why, in their pockets!”

  Someone told the story of a series of meetings between the oil ministers of Venezuela, Mexico, and Ecuador. As the three dined at an elegant ranch outside Caracas, the Venezuelan host motioned toward the road just beyond the estate’s boundary. “You see that highway?” he exclaimed with pride. “We budgeted millions of bolivares for that. His guests nodded. “Ten percent,” the Venezuelan said smugly, tapping his wallet. “Ten percent.”

  A few months later the three were again enjoying a leisurely business luncheon, this time on the veranda of an estate south of Mexico City. “Remember the airport you landed at yesterday?” the Mexican prompted his companions. “We just completed a five-year improvement plan out there, worth hundreds of millions of pesos.” The two others complimented their host on a job well done. “Twenty percent,” the Mexican confided, caressing his wallet. “Twenty percent.”

  The three oil chiefs met again early the next year on the patio of an old hacienda north of Quito. “You see that hydroelectric dam?” the Ecuadoran host asked of his friends as he motioned with an expansive sweep to the west. “It cost us half a billion sucres.” The Venezuelan and the Mexican squinted hard, searching the landscape in vain for the dam. “A hundred percent,” said the smiling Ecuadoran, patting his wallet. “A hundred percent.”

  BIENVENIDO—HOUSTON, ECUADOR. That’s what the roadside welcome sign said as our chartered bus approached Shushufindi, an oil camp much farther out in the jungle. The trees, vines, and underbrush in the equatorial rain forest wore an astounding variety of greens: dark green, black green, light green, blinding green, thick green, young green, floor green, lively green, and forever green. Trees grow up so fast that they don’t have a chance to grow wide. A path cleared by machete is gone within a week.

  To get to the bus we crossed the Aguarico River in a motorboat during a storm, just missing logs bounding downriver. With me in the wind-tossed boat were salesmen for oil-field-equipment manufacturers, the United States Embassy Commercial Attaché, and other guests on their way to a birthday party for Minga, a company that sells and services oil-field equipment. The road to Shushufindi parallels the pipeline, which was covered with political graffiti and draped with drying laundry from homes in the few settlements along the way. Local residents have to step over the pipeline to reach the road every day. Their horses and mules do likewise. More than a hundred people came to wish Minga a happy birthday in a huge jungle warehouse that served as the company’s field headquarters.

  Outside, a soccer game was just finishing up. Inside, Western swing music alternated with Ecuadoran pop; rock ‘n’ roll with salsa. Workers from Minga, Texaco, and its subcontractors danced with teachers from area schools and others from Lago Agrio and Quito. One Texaco oil-hand wanted to talk about working for a multinational corporation: “During the oil glut a few years ago we’d work twenty-eight days. No one bitched when they told us we had to move our residence to Ecuador. I’m a bachelor and I’ve got a four-bedroom place in the Mariscal Sucre area in Quito. Company-housing allowance pays for my apartment. We’ve got profit-sharing—for every dollar I put in, they match it. We’re considered full-time residents here. The company pays our Ecuadoran taxes; since we’re ex-pats, we don’t have to pay U.S. taxes. The married workers send their kids to private schools in Quito and get home leave for the whole family.” He left to flirt with a local schoolteacher. They danced two numbers. The Latin one I couldn’t follow, but this much I know to be true: Amazon jungle Indians dance a lousy Cotton-Eyed Joe.

  Around the bar, men talked about the Dallas Cowboys, Minnesota Fats, and the pretty lady sitting by herself at a nearby table. This was the jet-set petroleum crowd, gossiping about its calling: “We’re down here on a swing through Ecuador on our way to Colombia. We just finished drilling in Peru.” “I’d move to Quito in a heartbeat, unless I could move to Midland. I’d play golf every morning,” said the representative from TRW Corporation. “I woke up in Tulsa yesterday, took a flight to Dallas and over to Miami, then down here.” “Britt’s going to talk with Occidental about landing their contract. We’d like to establish oil-field networks all over South America.” “Where’s that place in Caracas you stayed at last month?” I left around one in the morning. The bartender and the phonograph worked on into the steamy night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  TO COLOMBIA

  Ildefonso Muñoz insisted I visit Colombia, his homeland. Muñoz, in his late fifties, came to Ecuador in 1950, either because he was a Protestant under a government that was intolerantly Catholic, or because he was on the losing side of a coup (the truth depends on which story you prefer). During his first two decades in Ecuador he owned and rented out a few bungalows on the Aguarico River west of present-day Lago Agrio at a place he named Muñozlandia. His tenants included ichthyologists from the United States, one of whom named a creature after him: Centrolenella muñozorum. A man who remembers Muñoz from the early days described him as a renegade: “He had been converted by the missionaries, and went out to convert others. The missionaries would drop charity supplies that said FRIENDSHIP FROM THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES; and he’d sell the stuff in his tienda. At the time Puyo was the biggest place in the jungle, and he’d strut into town with a six-shooter strapped to his hip and a cowboy hat on his head.”

  This particular afternoon Muñoz wore dirty jeans and a soiled yellow guayabera offset by his sparkling eyes, shining teeth under a black mustache, and slicked-back thinning hair. He stood behind the counter of his restaurant, Piragua, lettering a birthday sign for a party in honor of a CEPE-Texaco worker later that evening. His menagerie of jungle animals kept their distance outside: a thigh-thick boa constrictor, a giant rodent, and a tigrillo. At Halloween Muñoz hangs foot-and-a-half-long crocodiles from the ceiling. “They snap at people’s ears. It’s all in fun.”

  Muñoz had been in Lago Agrio from its beginning, and knew more about its people than anyone. His restaurant had a reputation for relative cleanliness and good food. On Thursday nights he serves chile con carne to the Texans who venture out of the compound for dinner. “One year the workers were going to take up a collection for me to go to the chili cook-off at Terlingua, Texas.” The idea fell through, but Muñoz was honored at the thought.

  “I want you to try a drink I have prepared. It’s called sinchicara. Here. Have a shot.” It was grape-colored, but so bitter that sucking a lemon afterward seemed sweet. The flavor was lost between the bite and the afterbite. “You like it? I make it myself from my own private formula. If you take it first thing in the morning, you don’t even need breakfast. It’ll give you enough energy for the entire day.

  “Sinchicara has five ingredients. All of them grow here in the jungle.” He named four of them. “The last one—that’s my secret! I’ve patented it. It’s good for arthritis and grippe, and it kills off amoebas. People swear by it.” I asked for a second shot. “It’s a sort of hallucinogen. It costs two dollars and fifty cents a bottle.”

  Fausto, a mechanic from the garage next door, nodded. “It gives you the strength of Samson.”

  “It takes three days to make, then fifteen days distilling. I’ve always got some brewing. Once I shipped a few bottles to some doctors in Chicago.”

  Just as the sinchicara started to take effect, a middle-aged Southern Baptist missionary couple walked in and sat down at the table next to me. “We’ve only been in the Oriente a few years,” Elaine Joiner volunteered, “but we’ve lived in the country for thirty years. We started out here by setting up a sheet on a wall and sent a truck through town advertising movies with a religious theme. In Quito we had rocks and bottles thrown at us when we did that. Of course that was before Pope John.

  “Our work is to help the Lord make a change in the people by teaching the word of God. There’s a town of Secoya Indians where missionaries have been at work for twenty years. As a result, most of the Indians there are now Christians. Garreth here,
he’s sort of a circuit rider. He goes from Indian village to Indian village.”

  Garreth had a theory that the transistor radio was responsible for the acceptance of evangelists in the countryside: “The Indians and others were softened up by HCJB,” the evangelical multilingual shortwave station from Quito. “When we got here they already knew what we were all about.” The Joiners live in a prefab suburban home near the banks of the Aguarico. “There’s a house of prostitution not far from us. Prostitution isn’t supposed to take place within three kilometers of a school or a residence, but the Mafia runs prostitution here. There’s so much money in it.” Sr. Muñoz served me another trago of his psychedelic home brew.

  Elaine, again: “It’s a rewarding experience. There’s always something new. We’re appreciated. After thirty-three years we’re still Americans. We like sliced bread and potato chips. But we realized during the strike that we were trapped.” Earlier that year workers in the Oriente staged a general strike, closing down the one road to Quito and sabotaging oil production and the pipeline. It ended when the government promised to pour money into the region and provide more services.

  Elaine answered slowly when I asked what she missed about the States. “I suppose what I miss most is American women to talk with. The idea of not having your own kind. We try to think we blend in with the foliage, but every now and then we are reminded that we are foreigners.”

  Garreth had an answer quicker than the question: “Spare parts. When something goes wrong with the car or we need a new bushwhacker, we have to wait a month or more.”

  After the Joiners left, Muñoz reflected on the influx of missionaries, oil companies, and homesteaders. “You know, civilization in this area is like feeding strong medicine for a small illness. It almost kills the patient. Sudden civilization has done that here. For example, the Cofán Indians were primitive people when the oil companies came. They were very sane. With the oil companies came civilization and liquor and aguardiente. They’ve changed a lot since then.” I recalled a comment that David Archer, the Texaco supervisor, had made about the Cofán: “I used to get a string of beads from them for a cigarette. Now they think nothing of asking three hundred sucres.”

  Muñoz laid out an itinerary for me. I should visit Colombia one day, and the Indians the next. He’d find some Cofán in town to ride the bus with me out to Dureno, their village downriver.

  The San Miguel River fifteen miles north of Lago Agrio separates Ecuador from Colombia. The port village there is San Miguel, but everyone calls it La Punta. An open-air bus painted like a circus poster left Lago every three hours. On my midmorning ride the driver kept constant pressure on the horn, which repeatedly squawked out the first ten notes of “La Marseillaise.” He dropped us off at the dock, where soldiers from the military garrison checked to make sure we weren’t guerrillas. We paid 250 Colombian pesos each for a forty-five-minute motorized canoe ride to Puerto Colón on the Colombian side of the river. Three of the other eight passengers were cows, strapped down in the middle of the canoe.

  The jungle looked the same on both banks—dense, high, and impenetrable. On the Colombian side a small hut appeared every few minutes, its occupants waving lackadaisically. The sun shone brilliantly through a clear equatorial sky. The Amazon jungle was at its friendliest. My fellow passengers were locals attuned to the customs of both sides. They traded in cattle, crops, and small merchandise, back and forth every day.

  At Ipiales, Colombia’s major border town with Ecuador on the Pan-American Highway, the National Police welcome visitors with a full-page warning:

  • Don’t leave your car unattended when you go to make purchases.

  • Guard your personal possessions.

  • Avoid transactions with strangers or suspicious people.

  • Don’t display any money or jewelry on the sidewalk.

  • When you go to deposit or withdraw money from the bank, ask a policeman to accompany you.

  As we got closer to Puerto Colón, a friend’s warning came to mind: “You watch yourself when you go to Colombia. They’ll steal the milk right out of your coffee.”

  When we docked, the six of us got out of the canoe and scrambled up a hill to pass immigration. The border official, a soldier a few sizes smaller than his uniform, perfunctorily nodded the first three men through, then looked up at me. “Papers, please,” he said without emotion. I slid my passport out of its waterproof case and handed it to him. (Border-crossing tip: In delicate situations, always proffer your passport as if surrendering a weapon—handle-side toward your opposite.) “I’m only planning to stay in Colombia for the afternoon,” I told him, “then catch the late canoe back to Ecuador.” He looked at my passport photo, then up at me, then back to the picture, then up to my chin.

  “I shaved.”

  “Do you have any other documents?” His voice was unarmed. I rummaged through my shoulder bag—pen and notebook, newspaper clippings, a jacket, the University of Chicago pocket Spanish-English dictionary, Nostromo by Joseph Conrad, and a map—and finally came up with a wrinkled photocopy of a letter of introduction from my editor in New York. I handed it to him and held my breath as he slowly moved his lips through the florid Spanish courtesies: “Les agradeceremos de antemano las cortesías y la cooperación que le proporcionen . . .” The Colombian border guard nodded and bowed slightly. “Pásale,” he said solemnly. You may enter.

  So different! With just a river to separate the two countries, the people of Puerto Colón had a personality distinct from Ecuadorans. They carried themselves more rhythmically and with more confidence. They were looser, smoother talking, and quicker to smile. The town itself was a pitiful little river port, small enough to be walked in half an hour, relaxed enough to find people to chat with everywhere. Morning fishermen hauled in their daily catch. Soldiers from the local military camp kicked a soccer ball around. Mothers swept their porches and chased their children. A bus sputtered down the main street, about to embark for quieter towns in the interior. Daytime prostitutes waved from dockside hovels. Most men wore wide-brimmed hats whose straw was coarser and sturdier than paja toquilla and whose designs involved intricate black interweavings. The men and women of Puerto Colón showed a measure of prosperity slightly higher than that in La Punta downriver.

  One reason may be overflow from some of the world’s most productive coca cultivation and processing operations nearby. In one 1984 drug raid northeast of Puerto Colón, for example, almost fourteen tons of cocaine were discovered—the largest seizure at any one time anywhere. Because of its enormous cocaine traffic, Colombia may be the only country where the black-market dollar is actually worth less than the official exchange rate.

  Ecuadoran police and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration have flown helicopters over and motored down the same stretch of the San Miguel River that I traveled, finding coca fields just a few hundred yards south of the river. Hidden near the fields were laboratories for processing the leaves into paste. The discovery raised Ecuador’s status from a country through which coca was merely transported to one estimated by the U.S. State Department as possibly the world’s third largest coca producer. Some coca farmers, who live in crude thatched jungle huts, have satellite dishes hooked up to color televisions powered by gas generators. Commenting about the drug farmers near the San Miguel River, an investigator reported that “one can be a hundred miles from the nearest road or village and find Indians watching MTV.” The sleepy stretch of the San Miguel between the two countries, so friendly and easy to travel, turned out to be one of South America’s major drug highways.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  UP THE AGUARICO

  The next day I took a wood-frame bus from Lago Agrio to Dureno. Watercolor drawings covered its side, and cases of Coca-Cola destined for settlements deep in the jungle bounced on top. A sign on the back said DON’T BOTHER ME—I’M CRAZY. Some thirty passengers had boarded by the time the bus completed its swing through town—elderly fair-skinned men with bedrolls and straw ha
ts, and thin black women in loose print dresses with children under their arms. Some carried umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun. Sr. Muñoz had arranged for Mauricio and his son Luis, two Cofán Indians who had been in town selling beaded necklaces and lances to tourist shops, to take me to Dureno. There I might find Randy, a gringo born and raised by missionary parents. The lances the two Cofáns sold were unlike the longer ones their tribe used to make, but the shorter ones sold well, and better still if they were adorned with feathers. Likewise, the more color they put in their necklaces, the more they sold. Mauricio was dressed in a loose shirt which hung to his knees over baggy, rolled-up corduroy pants. He went barefoot. No more than fifty whiskers protruded from his handsome oval face. His front teeth looked as though they had been absorbed by his gums. His headband appeared to be a corn husk. Luis dressed in bell-bottoms, sandals, and a T-shirt. The two talked in the tribal tongue spoken by all three hundred Cofáns.

  Mauricio turned to me. “Do you have your documents with you? The military checkpoint is just ahead.” We sat next to each other and talked some, but the engine’s noise and our distance made for a strained conversation. The pipeline road we traveled on had been built during the previous decade. Huge equipment trucks roared up and down it every hour. For part of the trip we could see the Aguarico, which flowed on our right. Thick brush grew all around, including a vine so strong it choked full-grown trees to death and became a tree itself. After an hour Mauricio signaled the driver to stop. “This is it. Let’s get off here.”

  There was nothing to distinguish the spot from any other. The jungle looked just as thick and the area just as desolate as anything we had seen for most of the ride. Luis pulled some brush to the side, uncovering a wide path leading downhill toward the Aguarico. Just before we reached the river he moved some more brush aside and pulled out a paddle and a long bamboo pole. The family canoe was parked at the end of the path. We hopped into the thirty-foot craft, Mauricio in front with the pole, Luis in the rear with the paddle, and the fearful white tourist crouched in the middle. How symbolic, I thought, to have these two Indians doing all the work while the visiting gringo simply sits in the middle. Why, this was how the West was won! And in Ecuador, the East too. Mauricio jarred me out of this disturbing realization when, about halfway across the river, he turned and said: “Oh, by the way, this will cost twenty sucres.”