www.counterpunch.org
JANUARY 15, 2013
"It's the
Real Thing"
by CHELLIS GLENDINNING
Cochabamba.
I had already
spent more hours attempting — with zero success, I might add — to be
awarded the 2013 roseta/decal the police require on your windshield than I
had the year before: six hours, to be exact – and yet my time was running out.
The deadline was in two days, and after that, well, I might as well kiss my
1978 Jeep adios.
Granted, last year
my illustrious motor vehicle — which I had polished to resemble an antique car
of worth and then ¿what´s a gal to do for six hours in the December sun?
polished again and then moved on to polish the hoods of the other cars in line
– only passed because fifteen minutes before close-up time, the police computer
croaked. A flurry of perplexity ensued, but Bolivian law enforcement,
fine-tuned by history to sense an uprising in the making, knew to whip out the
old paper forms. O.K. I could not have predicted that, twenty feet from the
target of our ambition, construction workers were heaving sawdust over the
fence when our cars passed by, so my efforts to make my Jeep at least look roseta-worthy had gone for naught. But all that mattered at that moment was that
the officers were clumsily juggling paper and pencils — and working against the
clock to avert a car-owners riot.
So, without even
getting to show my brand-new fire extinguisher — and despite that my brights
ponied up exactly nada in the realm of lighting — I got the damn roseta.
So when Roseta Time rolled around
this year, I rolled my eyes with annoyance – and this was even before I knew
that the chassis number scrawled on the pages of my car´s documents was not to
be found on said chassis. I learned this only after waiting in line for an hour
(and slipping the officer 30 bolivianos due to a horn that had decided to
imitate Marcel Marceau´s voice) when an unduly large cluster of black-booted,
olive-clad men surrounded my open hood with serious question marks on their
foreheads. My plastic folder holding all the files was broken open and
searched, and sure enough VJ8J83EEE41672 appeared everywhere on paper but
nowhere on metal. A Gogolesque disaster.
Far be it from me
to describe how the other five hours were used up searching a means for a
number-less chassis to pass the 2013 inspection, but I will reveal that my
brilliant idea of hiring a welder to fabricate a VJ8J83EEE41672 plaque was
rejected by Fredy the mechanic as the fastest route to getting to know the
ex-ministers and ex-judges of the Evo Morales administration, accused of
corruption, in the Palmasola slammer. And farther be it from me to tell you
that, just the day before, I had learned that, previously unbeknownst, the
documents that would grant me the roseta for the Jeep´s natural-gas tanks
had been falsified both before my time and under mine own blind eyes.
No. Let us speak
now of only the 2013 roseta.
I got wind of a station
outside of Quillacollo where twenty Coca-Cola trucks in various states of
mechanical tragedy were to be “passed” with no inspection whatsoever, just with
a slip under the table of 50 bolivianos.
I think we can
agree that Context is Everything. The Mayan calendar provided some big thoughts
here in Bolivia, the kind that elsewhere were being tossed about by shamans and
New Agers, you know, people on the fringe — but that here were being
disseminated from the Palace itself. Before the solstice our
Canciller/Secretary of State David Choquehuanca announced: “El 21 de
deciembre de 2012 es el fin del egoism, de la división, el 21 de diciembre
tiene que ser el fin de Coca Cola, el comienzo del ´mocochinchi,´ del ´wilaparu´”/December 21 is the end of egoism, of division, December 21 has to be the
end of Coca-Cola and the beginning of our natural peach and corn drinks.
I was sure this meant that the
government was going to surprise us the morning of the southern hemisphere´s
longest day with one of its celebrated military take-overs, this time at the
bottling factories, and I confess I thought it a worthy plan. But then I got
confused. In mid-December I saw that said corporation had sprung for a
sixty-foot-tall Christmas tree made of 2.5-liter Coke bottles (all full) in the
parking lot at the ritzy supermarket I.C. Norte. Why would a company whose days
were numbered spend massive bucks on a holiday ornament? I said to myself.
I got in line
behind three ratty-looking Coca-Cola trucks. Just the day before the United
Nations had agreed for the first time in history to revise its norms concerning
illicit drugs and approve the legality of the coca plant. Strange: all these years campesinos and mineros could not legally
chew their own coca grown in their own little plots — while Coca-Cola had
held the right as a multinational corporation to extricate tons of the sacred
leaves for massive international use in its secret recipe.
At first things at the
make-shift “inspection” station were subdued. Drivers sat on neighboring stoops
in dour silence, a girl was searching for a lost Chihuahua under the wheels,
and dust blew up the street in billows. Then, in a Hundreth Monkey sort of
move, everyone got up and walked toward an iron gate up the block, their papers
flapping in the breeze. I followed.
Now in the familiarity of a
huddle, the drivers made jokes about the deteriorated state of their tires and
turning signals, their brake pads and carburetors — and about the fact that
they were engaging in an illegal act under legal watch. We were to amass our
documents in a particular order, staple them together, and hand them in a stack
to a woman at the gate. My God! The cops were not even going to stroll vehicle
to vehicle and glance in to see if you had a fire extinguisher!
Then, as if from a puff of
smoke, a photographer appeared. Like a gaggle of goslings following the Great
Mama, they, I, and the now-found Chihuahua skittered at his ankles from one
mastodon of a truck to the next for a snapshot of each license plate and each
driver´s mug. Each could go home after his picture was taken, but no, they
moved down the line of parked vehicles in a clump of excited camaraderie,
smiling and cheering as each truck was crossed off. The tall one with the
blazing yellow eyes whispered to me in a throaty voice like a Latin version of
Rod Stewart: “Fifty bolivianos.”
“Remember what Choquehuanca
said?” I asked as I surreptitiously stuffed the bills into his jeans pocket.
He clamped his eyes on mine
like a vinchuca bug on a sleeping vein. “The Coca-Cola corporation is a world
economy in itself,” he said wryly.
“Yah, but does it have its own
military?”
“The U.S. Marines.”
My photo came out
a little different from the solemn shots of the drivers; it shows a beaming norteamericana,“!Estoy muuuuy feliz!” bursting from open mouth and proudly holding up a fire
extinguisher –- which, let´s face it, was the only thing on the check list she
had to brag about.
If you want the Real Thing,
this is it: Bolivian corruption not in the high halls of governance with judges
and lawyers at your side, but at street level — and due to the fact that the
previous owner of my Jeep had apparently done things as they are done in these
parts, I am right in there, doing as is done to get the job done.
I have to admit:
standing among the Santa-Claus-red trucks, I felt as triumphant as if I had
been awarded el Premio Miguel de Cervantes — not because I had joined in the
grand old tradition; no, rather because I had exited with the coveted roseta. I popped Glenn Miller´s “In the Mood” into the Jeep´s stereo, said a
quick prayer to Che Guevara that it would start, turned the ignition (successfully),
and tore out as fast as an engine on natural gas can tear.
Except for one
cola I had downed at the San Francisco premiere of Apocalypse Now, I
had’t had a soft drink since 1965. I stopped on Juan de la Rosa for a Coke.
Chellis Glendinning is the author of five books,
including Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy and Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade. |
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