Steve's tales from latin america

falls

I was lucky enough to spend quite a few years travelling through Latin America driving overland trucks.


If you want to see more recent stuff on Colombia and El Salvador then skip back to my homepage.

To contact me e-mail stevehide@yahoo.com

The photo left is of the Iguazu Falls, on the Brazil/Argentine border.

"Have you called about the disaster?"

First there was the earthquake, then the reporters

by Steve Hide

I am knocking in a tent-peg in a refugee camp in El Salvador while talking live by cellphone to the evening news in London. It is my first emergency with a medical aid agency and because we are the first international helpers on the scene, the world's newsdesks have got our numbers.
Conversations go something like this:
TV researcher (off-air): "We would like to ask you a few questions about the earthquake crisis in El Salvador."
Me: "But I don't really know much the earthquake, all I can tell you is about El Cafetalon,". (El Cafetalon is the name of the camp where we are working flat out to install emergency water and latrines to 1500 families made homeless by the quake.)
But too late, I am being counted in to a live slot on the TV news:
"So we've heard about the miraculous rescue of the man buried for 72 hours. What has been the reaction there?" intones the newscaster.
Errr. Ummmm. This is the first I've heard of the miraculously rescued man. So I waffle unintelligibly.
The BBC asks me about the "controversy that poor town planning caused the disastrous landslide that buried hundreds of homes in a middle-class housing estate...".
This is the first I've heard of any controversy, although I am aware of the buried homes: the interred suburb is less than a mile away and hundreds of cheap pine coffins have been carried by to a mass grave in a nearby cemetery.
The truth is I've been too busy to read the local papers or watch TV. After a long day's work I grab a quick meal and a beer then collapse in bed ready for another dawn start. The result is that in general I know less about the earthquake in El Salvador than the average couch potato watching CNN in Cincinnatti.
Within a few days the film crews arrive, by helicopter, to see for themselves.
"This refugee camp looks in remarkably good shape," says the ITN reporter. 		He's obviously seen a few worse ones. We size up the camp like hopeful house-buyers: "There's 96 water taps, 60 latrines, and the very latest Red Cross single-pole family-sized tents. And plenty of room to expand into adjacent parkland." Hopefully cholera won't show up with a full survey.
A California radio station calls to compare the effect of earthquakes in the 'third world' with California.
"Isn't it true, Mr Hide, that people in El Salvador have a fatalistic approach to earthquakes and will always live in precarious places most at risk from future disasters?" asks the compere.
I mumble some half-hearted agreement.
Later, much later, I realise what I should have said:
"Isn't it true that the average person in California spends more on a year's supply of teeth-whitening treatment than the average Salvadoran does on basic foods…and if all of California was a huge plantation of coffee beans, and most Californians were paid $1 a day to pick them … and the only land left on which to set up your shack was a slippery hillside…would you call them fatalistic…"
Nothing personal against Californians. You get the point.
The truth is the media moves the story in its own direction. The BBC's very British angle is of class division and town planning, while ITN is muddying its feet in yet another refugee camp. Residents of California need reassuring, of course, that it Won't Happen Here (or at least not as bad) and lifestyle can triumph over nature.
Then, just when we're getting used to them, and actually thinking up sensible things to say, the film crews disappear like rats down a drain. Suddenly no ITN, BBC, ABC, NBC, CBC.
That night we do watch the news and find out why: earthquake in India…tens of thousands feared dead…foreign aid being rushed in….
El Salvador is already yesterday's disaster.

Tracking down Che Guevarra

Dead, but not so red. In Bolivia the legendary revolutionary has become a religous icon and tourist attraction

by Steve Hide

"You're here about Che Guevara?" says the nurse in the office of Vallegrande's hospital. She is used to tourists turning up asking for the hospital laundry.
"You'll find it there, by the trees, standing alone," she says, waving her hand towards the back of the low buildings. She goes back to her files.
I feel awkward, following a trail of death into this little Bolivian hospital, but curiosity spurs me on, and a minute later I am standing at the spot where on October 10, 1967, Ernesto Che Guevara made his last photo call. It's a whitewashed adobe building with a steep tiled roof, circled by a low chain link fence. There is no-one here but me and a flock of parakeets chattering in a nearby stand of cedar trees. They break cover, a green flash heading for the red hills. I step over the fence.

Defiant in death

I'm immediately taken back to that powerful photo, once seen never forgotten, of the executed guerilla laid out on a cement washing tub, eyes wide open, Christ-like and defiant even in death. Prodding him are the uniformed soldiers of the Bolivian army who tracked him down.
A year before the picture was taken, Che and his gang of Cuban guerrillas had come to the rumpled scrublands of south-east Bolivia to foment a "Vietnam in the Americas". Their plan went prickly-pear-shaped when the local peasants refused help and instead tipped off the Bolivian military.
Army units harried them through the Andean hills for many months. Then the 2nd Bolivian Ranger Battalion, trained by US special forces and guided by CIA agents, trapped Che and his 17 surviving compays in a ravine 30 miles south of Vallegrande. Che, who was by then already an international figure for his role in the Cuban revolution, was captured and taken to a nearby schoolhouse.

"Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome".

Next morning, after a brief interrogation by a CIA agent, he was machine-gunned by a drunken Bolivian sergeant. By most accounts Che met his end with dignity, thus fulfilling his own edict that "wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome".
His body was flown by helicopter to the Vallegrande hospital laundry for that last press outing. Today, that humble building has become an unlikely shrine to the likeable revolutionary. The wash tub still stands, its cement stained from a dripping pipe exactly as in the photo from three decades ago.
A graffitied litany covers the tub and the laundry's whitewashed walls: "Che, you could never close your eyes because you are eternity", "Commandante, you are the light and the path" , "USA with Che".
The only off-message scrawl (in English) reads "Che's dead. Get over it." But it's unlikely this generation will, or the next.

Che's new image

Through his heroic death Guevara "will be eulogised as a model revolutionary", read a memo from a CIA analyst to the US state department sent just two days after the killing.
Almost true - it should have just read: "eulogised as a model". Today's image of the Argentinian-born guerrilla, more realpolitik than revolution, sells everything from beer to designer labels to skis to CDs to Swatch watches.
Even Christians have hijacked communist Che's chic. A few years ago British churches ran a poster campaign that swapped his trademark beret for a crown of thorns. "Meek and mild. As if," said the slogan.

Minor miracle in wash house

The devout folk of Vallegrande would approve of that. The nurses who washed his body all those years ago couldn't fail to notice the fighter's striking resemblance to Jesus Christ. Word quickly spread of this minor miracle in the wash-house and next day throngs of curious townsfolk turned up to sneak a look at the cadaver.
Some clipped locks of his hair and keep them for bueno suerte, good luck, others lit candles to pray for 'San Ernesto'. Some still do today, especially in times of drought. The fuss was all too much for the Bolivian colonels. That night they chopped off Che's hands for fingerprint evidence then 'disappeared' the rest of him into a secret grave under the local airstrip.
His bones were found two years ago and returned to Cuba for a hero's burial.

Tourists on Che's trail

Che may have at last left this quiet corner of Bolivia, but now tourists come to follow his last journey over the rugged rural landscape.
Nothing much has changed here since the guerrillas machetted trails between hidden camps. Donkeys trains traipse over the dusty hills, peasants spread their beans on the roadsides to dry and their goats stretch up to the low trees to nibble the odd green leaf. Of course, every local you meet once met Che.
"I was delivering empanadas to the hospital the day they brought him in", says the empanada seller in Vallegrande's busy market. Nearby shops sell Che stickers, cards and badges, and jeeps with guides can be hired to visit remoter Che waypoints. Villages that once hounded him out now welcome Che pilgrims with his poster image glaring down off adobe walls. One wonders what Che, the leftie anti-capitalist, would make of it all. "Che: alive like they never wanted you to be" reads one graffiti in Vallegrande. It's more likely that Che - pop icon, saint, tourist attraction - is dead like he never intended to be.

END

No safe sex in El Salvador

by Steve Hide

"We know the girls are catching AIDS, we know they are dying. The fact is that no-one wants to use a condom. The clients just don't like them," says Rosita, manager of the Gypsy Bar. She pushes the white box of condoms back across the table. Behind, slopped in a hammock, a freshly-showered trabajadora rubs her arms with scented oil.
That's what the prostitutes call themselves here in El Salvador, trabajadoras . Workers. Their hard-eyed customers call then putas - whores.
Outside the Pacific laps the sweaty sand.The condom vendors walk on down the beach road, there's a dozen more bars with old Wurlitzwer jukeboxes rotting in steel cages and breezeblock backrooms full of sighs.
The bar names are wry: the Millionaires Club, the Las Vegas. Inside, no-one's winning. Sex costs $5. A beer costs $1. You can't buy a condom because no-one sells them. In this part of town the health workers can't even give them away because no-one uses them.
A trabajadora talks in hushed tones: "My friend was killed because word got out she had AIDS. A customer just walked in and shot her. Most girls are too scared to take an HIV test. If it's positive, we'll have to go into hiding. Anyway, what are we going to do if we do test positive? There are no drugs, no treatment. We'll die anyway."
Inland, in the claustrophobic capital, San Salvador, a Catholic bishop tells newspapers it is "scientifically proven" that condoms can't prevent AIDS. 		"The pores in the latex are larger than the HIV virus," he lies.
For two years the church has blocked a health guide for adolescents because it mentions masturbation. Meanwhile, a third of all first-pregnancies are to Salvadorans younger than 15 years old and the AIDS rate creeps up.
There are some hopeful signs. Sex workers in the capital are wising up. Condoms are beginning to catch on. Still, customers offer extra cash not to use them.
"Some pay up to half again to do it without, it's hard to say no," says a worker in a 24-hour brothel near the central market. Some rely on a visual health check. "If his pecker looks OK we won't insist on a condom," says one prostitute.
Others say they will forgo a condom with regular clients – "we trust them" – and none of the girls uses a condom with their husband or boyfriend – "they call us a bitch if we even suggest it".
"AIDS is for queers," says a truck driver in a frontier bar. "And for Africans," he adds, pleased at his afterthought.
His friend giggles and spins a beer bottle. A teenage girls tugs at his sleeves and whispers in his ear.
On the road out of town is a huge billboard with a government attempt at a safe sex message. It shows a huge map of El Salvador with the legend "AIDS is a reality. Avoid it".
The reality here is that no-one really is.

Meeting on the Great Salt Flat

Bolivia's Uyuni Salt flat is the biggest in the world. And not a good place to break down.

by Steve Hide

The car smugglers are in trouble. They've crashed one new Mitsubishi, and another has a flat tyre. They are also parked on an island in the middle of the world's largest salt flat and a long way from the nearest garage. "Have you got any air?" asks Eduardo, in the lead car. It's a pertinent question at 14,000 feet above sea level, when even a short walk can leave you breathless.
As it happens, I have.
I start the engine on my truck and connect a line to the compressor tank. Eduardo plugs the loose end onto his tyre valve. We crouch down to the satisfying hiss of the tyre filling. "Where are you going?"
"Oruro," he says.
It's a busy mining city to the north.
"What happened to the car?"
"It rolled."
I express surprise. The Uyuni salt flat is the biggest and best road in all of Bolivia; 40,000 square kilometers of hard, flat, white, salt, with little traffic and few obstacles.
"He was doing a hundred and fifty," he points to the other driver, who is well-dusted but appears to have escaped injury. The convoy has taken a circuitous route through south-west Bolivia to avoid customs checks. The cars, all without licence plates, are crusted with salt. I wonder if the new owners will get a rust warranty.
An eagle flaps down beside us and cocks its head at the hissing tyre.
On a nearby rock, a vischacha whistles an alarm. It is a strange rodent, a cross between a rabbit and a kangaroo, fearless of humans, but wary of the large bird of prey.
The vischacha hops off to hide in its labyrinth of tunnels.
The island is a hotchpotch of craggy boulders of fossilised algae covered in giant cactus. It rises from the plain of salt icing like a mutant wedding cake.
Mirages of light make objects on the glaring flat appear to float in mid-air.
Distant trucks become wingless planes, lonely bicyclists are airborne like in ET, and Chile, a line of bare mountains hovering over western horizon, seems somehow to have unchained itself from mother earth.
"Are you camping on the island," asks Eduardo.
Yes. Will it be cold?
It will be cold, he assures us.
I am driving an old Mercedes truck carrying 20 paying passengers through the Andes. We're used to camping in sub-zero temperatures, but have read that the bleak salt flat can reach as low as a rock-cracking minus15 degrees centigrade on a winter's night. We'll need those extra blankets.
I turn off the airline, but there's still a hiss. Eduardo curses, his friends crowd around. The tyre is not holding air. It's a tubeless tyre, they have no repair kit.
Eduardo finds the source of the leak, a minute hole.
Someone passes forward a cactus spine. Eduardo jams it in the hole, snaps it cleanly off, the hissing stops.
"That's a different way to fix a puncture," I say. "God put the cactus here for a reason," he says with a smile, and spins tight the first wheel nut. The convoy is soon ready to roll. "How much do you want for the air?" he asks, offering coins.
"Air is free. Even up here."
They wave goodbye and head off, fluid blobs which melt together and vanish into the white plain.