Dispatch Number 70 -Bomb the Police Kiosk

Anarchy Lives! Revolutionary Movements Live! People not afraid to risk it Live! Or maybe it was a bombing ordered by one of the cocaine cartels. Nothing is clear in Colombia. On April 21, 2010 at 9:30 pm from a hard bed in a cheap hotel nursing a cathode ray nipple I heard my first bomb go off. Three blocks away. It detonated in Pasto's central commercial district, my home for three days before I entered Ecuador. It was very loud and sounded like a crane dropped a 40' container ten stories onto the sidewalk in front of my hotel. A deep percussive sound that made my body clinch.

After three months of travel throughout highly militarized Colombia and more than 50 roadside check points under my belt I was accustomed to feeling safe with the professional nature of the national police and various branches of the Army. I present car papers, the occasional passport and answer questions, especially when I drive alone. No one travels alone in Latin America and my arrival at a check point this way always aroused curiosity. Sometimes they would search the truck, but not very hard. The worst I ever experienced was in Panama when traveling with two Colombian friends and a Dutch woman when we were stopped at a permanent check point and given a drug dog sniff, even then they did not open a single bag when the truck was parked in one of those special search bays that feel eerily empty. The sight of the drug dog made my heart skip. Suddenly, I didn't feel in control of very much. Our drugs were well hidden (joke).

The sole exception to this professionalism were the highway cops, they could see you cross a double yellow line behind a mountain or around a curve where they'd be standing patiently next to their patrol bikes waving you over with calm authoritarian arms and big assault rifles draped lazily over their shoulders. The story was always the same after thirty minutes of pleading and haggling, but never begging: you can pay here and be on your way or have a real ticket written and pay the fine at the bank (takes hours). Once I pulled $2.50 out of my pocket to settle a bribe in the name of gas money for their new Kawasaki patrol bikes. We all expected more money from my pocket and the area commander I negotiated with laughed out loud at the sight of my small money. His rifle totting lackeys joined in and my embarrassment grew.

Pride bruised I hollered, Wait, wait! as I ran across the highway to my truck and dug out another $10. Too late, the paltry $2.50 and the laughter had done me in. I had to live with that moment being laughed at clinching that lousy two-fifty. I'd switched the $50 I was carrying to the other pocket while they hassled a local driver who wanted to give them a bag of oranges for his freedom. What I never knew was if I had grabbed the big bills or the small ones when I made the switch. The two-fifty was a surprise to all of us.

Back to the bomb.

It was planted next to a national police sub station or kiosk in city of 100,000 people. An otherwise crowded district during the day, the city is very quiet after 8pm (maybe the Colombians know something. Warfare is remarkably organized and rule bound when you study it.) Had it been anytime between 10am and 7pm there would have been blood, lots of it.

It blew out one of the walls of the sub station and shattered windows of all buildings that shared the corner with it. The catholic church, apartments and offices on the second floor all had shattered windows. It was a loud bomb, but not too powerful unless you were standing next to it. At first I though it may have been a natural gas explosion from the damage, but confirmed with a policeman who stood in the remaining doorway of the attacked kiosk that it was a bomb. One believed to have been planted by guerrilla forces.

If I had been injured by that bomb I wouldn't have felt like I did in the safety of my room where I thought, That was cool. While emergency lights and sirens filled the night.

David
Banos, Ecuador