The DMZ Page 13
No, not indifferent.
As the guerrilla’s slow scan crossed her own curious gaze, Julie felt the shock all the way down into her toes. That was anger blazing behind those narrowed eyes—though the hard planes of his face showed no expression at all. The party had just drawn abreast of her when Julie saw him bend his head to mutter something inaudible to his shorter, older companion. His companion was not so discreet.
“You are being concerned for nothing,” came his audible reply as the two guerrillas strode past. “After all, what safer place is there for us than before the cameras of the world. The militares will not dare to try anything with such eyes on them. Besides, should we not take advantage of any opportunity to shout our cause to the world? The media are our friends even if their governments are not.”
The younger guerrilla was clearly unhappy about this mission, did not want to be here, and—unlike his companion—did not appreciate the cameras that were recording his every step for the world to see. Probably got his face on a wanted poster somewhere!
The occupants of the other two limousines were making their way toward the plane now, the soldiers holding back the press corps so they could get through. The two groups converged at the foot of the roll-away stairs that led up to the open door of the DC4. A slightly built man in the international business uniform of suit and tie separated himself from the second group, the two Colombian officers at his heels. As he climbed the roll-away stairs to the platform at the top, the TV crews pressed forward with a babble of shouted questions. Ignoring them, the young man paused to adjust a clip-on microphone before turning to address his audience.
“Ladies and gentlemen, if you’d give me your attention for the next few minutes, my name is Bill Shidler. I’m the political/economic officer for the American embassy here in Bogotá. It’s our pleasure to be of service to you this morning.”
He didn’t look as though it were a pleasure. He seemed harried and tired, with the beginning lines of worry across his forehead and down both sides of his mouth.
“I know we’re running a little late, but we’ll be boarding in the next few minutes. However, I’ve been instructed first to make a few announcements on behalf of the embassy. To begin with, if you want to save your film, we will not be making any further press statements than we’ve already made. At this point, we know no more than you do.”
When this statement was greeted with a skeptical silence, he cleared his throat. “Okay, then. First of all, we would like to express our appreciation to the representatives of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia who have traveled here to escort us into their territory.”
The two guerrillas might not have understood the English, but the name of their movement elicited another beaming smile and wave for the cameras from Manuel Flores and impassive silence from his younger companion.
“We would like to extend our appreciation and welcome as well to the United Nations forensic unit who have consented to be part of this operation—uh, humanitarian mission”—he nodded toward the party in white coats—“along with our own State Department team who will be assisting in this investigation into the deaths of our citizens.” A briefcase-toting pair from the first limo raised their hands in unsmiling acknowledgment.
“Also to the Colombian government, which has graciously undertaken your travel arrangements into the demilitarized zone.” This time his nod included both the pilots and the Colombian military officers who had accompanied him.
“And of course those of you of the press who have traveled here today to chronicle the events of the following hours for the citizens of your respective countries. However …”
He cleared his throat again, this time louder. “However, I’ve been asked to make it very clear that neither the presence of the media nor that of any other civilians on this mission is sponsored by the U.S. State Department nor supported by this embassy. The United States government does not maintain diplomatic relations with any guerrilla movement. This means we aren’t in any position to guarantee the safety of private citizens who choose to participate. Our State Department has, in fact, issued an advisory warning against the travel of American citizens anywhere in Colombia. In view of this, I have here a waiver”—he held up a pale-blue form—“that each of you will be asked to sign before boarding, releasing both governments from any responsibility for your decision to ignore that warning. If anyone should wish now to reconsider their participation …”
And blah, blah, blah! Julie’s own restless shifting echoed the impatience around her. They’d all been through this routine before. The idea, as any reporter knew, wasn’t to discourage anyone from the trip, but to cover the State Department’s posterior. If the media allowed themselves to be spooked by every embassy advisory warning, not much news around the world would ever be reported. But then, the media had always been out on the front line of war and disaster where the State Department feared to tread.
“I also have here a preliminary press release from the State Department and what background data I’m authorized to release to you at this time. The flight will last approximately ninety minutes. The plane will remain on the ground in San Ignacio until the United Nations forensic unit is satisfied. We expect that to be sometime this evening.
“Okay, then, we’re now ready to board. Of course, the use of electronic devices will not be allowed on this flight, so if you have last-minute press releases to file”—for the first time there was a glint of humor in his gloomy expression—“I would do so at this time.”
AP and Reuters were the first to slap their cell phones open. Babble erupted again as reporters speaking a half-dozen languages scrambled frantically to slant the zero they had just received into a news item. Beyond the circle of soldiers, Julie spotted Sondra talking into the camera balanced on William’s shoulder. Julie, responsible for a magazine article rather than the evening’s news, didn’t bother to unearth her phone. Instead, she chose to beat the rush, filing forward to scribble her name across the blue waiver form and receive her briefing file, then strolling leisurely up the stairs and onto the plane.
The two guerrilla leaders had already boarded, and so had the State Department representatives who had accompanied Bill Shidler. They were clustered together in the front row of the plane, though neither side gave any sign of noticing the other’s existence. The UN team was still filing to the rear of the plane. Through the open door to the cockpit, Julie could see the two pilots.
Julie selected a window seat just in front of the wing. The plane filled up quickly behind her, others abandoning last-minute communication with their news bureaus in a rush for good seats. The CNN crew grabbed two full rows across from Julie, their correspondent Tom Chaney staking out one window seat while the cameraman took the other.
It suddenly occurred to Julie that she hadn’t seen any locals among the media teams. But then, the Colombians weren’t foolish enough to put their heads into a noose, and their journalists had been a prime guerrilla target for years.
Not that in this case there was any danger. The FARC had personally guaranteed their safe passage—an assurance that was less of a comfort to Julie than it might be to others on board.
Her eyes strayed to the mottled green of two combat caps visible over the seat backs only two rows ahead. She tried to forget the anger she’d sensed in the younger guerrilla’s eyes.
“This seat taken?”
Julie glanced up at the terse question to see her last night’s seatmate, Sondra Kharrazi. Without waiting for an answer, the NBC correspondent gestured for her burly cameraman to lift her carry-on into the overhead compartment. She glanced around fretfully as Julie snatched the folder Bill Shidler had given her out of the other seat.
“What I wanted was a window seat. Look at Tom Chaney over there. Two of them. Like they need more than one camera!”
Sondra threw a pointed glance at Julie’s window, but when Julie didn’t rise to the hint, she sank reluctantly into the aisle seat, dug a paperback from her hand
bag, and buried her nose in it without another word. Julie caught a glimpse of the cover. A romance novel. So her seatmate no longer felt a need to impress Julie with her intellectual qualifications. But maybe that wasn’t being fair. Maybe Sondra had already done her homework.
Speaking of which …
Julie dutifully opened the State Department folder, but once they were in the air, she couldn’t keep her eyes on the page before her. By daylight, the view of Bogotá was much as Julie had visualized it the night before, the urban sprawl maybe a little bigger, but the surrounding patchwork of dairy farms and wheat fields and the pine forests sweeping up to snowcapped peaks were as beautiful as she remembered.
Julie swallowed repeatedly as the plane rose higher, the drop in cabin pressure pushing against her eardrums. Below, a glacier glittered blinding white under the morning sun. Then the DC4 skimmed through a pass and they were dropping down the other side, the green flanks of the Andes tumbling away beneath them to open grasslands spotted with wandering herds of Brahmin cattle. The DC4 was flying low enough for Julie to make out the tiled roofs of farmhouses perched above fields and coffee plantations set so steeply on the mountainsides that a favorite Colombian folktale was of the family cow falling out of the pasture.
Tucked into mountain canyons where no fumigation plane or helicopter could reach were signs of a less innocuous crop—bright red fields of poppies, whose byproduct, heroin, was beginning to rival cocaine as Colombia’s most profitable export.
A thin silver line snaked along a ridge below—the pipeline built by multinational oil companies to carry oil from the petroleum-rich lowlands north to Bogotá. Julie grimaced at this reminder of why she was on this plane.
Then the plane banked away from the mountain range. Here the grassy plains with its cattle ranches intermingled with patches of uncleared scrub jungle. The ranches grew more scattered and the patches of scrub jungle larger and taller until at some undistinguishable point, they were flying over an unbroken sea of rainforest.
This was country Julie knew well. The planet’s most majestic hardwoods towering high above the rest of the jungle canopy. Lazy, wandering rivers that connected the scattered villages far more efficiently than any dirt track. Dugout canoes and flat-bottomed barges and, along the riverbanks, bamboo shacks built on ungainly stilts far out over the water.
Julie swallowed hard again, though her eardrums had long since adjusted to the change in altitude. The countryside down there meant nothing to her now, of course. But it was more unsettling than she’d expected to see childhood memories unrolling under the wings of the plane.
Tearing her eyes from the window, she fastened them on the first page of Bill Shidler’s briefing. A jungle is a jungle is a jungle. You’ve seen plenty of them in other countries‚ so what’s the big deal?
The first article in the folder was a field report from C-PAP. Julie skimmed through it quickly. She was already well acquainted with the project that had ended in the death of three of its members. The Coalition for the Preservation of Amazonic Peoples was actually a conglomerate of several of the more extreme environmentalist groups, their mission statement, according to this report, being the preservation of the Amazon Basin’s remaining ethnic groups from the contamination of outside cultures.
Julie grinned as she read that piece of creative writing. Anyone who’d ever had anything to do with the Coalition knew that C-PAP’s real passion was the planet’s untouched expanses of rainforest, not the scattered handfuls of human beings living within their margins. The advantage of championing the Amazonic tribes, rather than the thousands of other ethnic groups living in equal misery around the planet, was that the jungle tribes were both few in numbers and could invariably lay claim at some point in their uncharted history to vast tracts of virgin countryside, the competition having either died off or long since melted into the mestizo gene pool.
Julie had enjoyed the C-PAP personnel she’d interviewed from time to time. But they made no secret of the fact that they were a lot more interested in the four-legged creatures running around their precious rainforests than in any two-legged ones.
“There’s plenty of humans,” one C-PAP activist had told Julie acidly last year when she’d been covering their demonstration outside Triton headquarters. “You don’t see them in any danger of extinction.”
The World Conservation Institute was much more balanced—at least in the estimation of its members. However much it might wish matters to be otherwise, WCI recognized that the conservation of the earth’s remaining resources had to be balanced with the needs of the human beings who shared the planet. You just couldn’t ask Third World populations living in grinding poverty to selflessly starve to death so the environmentalists could have another unspoiled habitat to study. Especially when those same environmentalists drove new cars, lived in houses replete with modern conveniences, and rejoiced in the benefits of a top-notch education—all products of a society that had grown rich through the rape of its own resources and those of other nations.
WCI didn’t waste time demonstrating outside petroleum headquarters and logging sites. It chose to concentrate its efforts on what it could do rather than on what it couldn’t, negotiating with local governments to create national parks and wildlife reserves while at the same time working together with other aid organizations to teach the locals how to increase productivity on their present land and how to develop their remaining resources in a way that would minimize negative impact on the environment. They had done so competently enough that any recommendation from WCI was taken seriously by both the U.S. Congress and the United Nations.
Colombia, though, was one place where WCI was in accord with the more extreme activists groups. Hence their present alliance with C-PAP. The Amazon Basin of southern Colombia and northern Brazil contained the largest remaining primeval rainforest on the planet. It was home not only to a host of unique plant and animal species, but to some of the oldest remaining hardwoods in the world.
And there was no reason for the rainforest’s destruction. Colombia had plenty of undeveloped territory that could be ceded to colonists. WCI had been working with the Colombian government for the past two years to have most of the remaining rainforest declared a natural reserve (it was no coincidence that C-PAP’s claim on behalf of their present proteges, the I’paa tribe, covered exactly that same territory).
Then Triton Petroleum had discovered oil on the very edge of the proposed reserve. Lots of oil. Enough to keep the whole of North America on the road for a year, if you believed Triton’s estimates. The Colombian government was naturally interested in the proposed financial bonanza. They immediately rescinded the Ministry of Environment’s tentative approval of the nature reserve and issued a permit to Triton to conduct seismic operations to determine the extent of the oil reserves. WCI’s warnings that the environmental costs would more than offset the projected profits had fallen on deliberately deaf ears.
Julie knew plenty about those costs since she’d done the research for an editorial Norm Hutchens had written about the reversal. Triton claimed—with some justification—that the environmental impact of drilling operations was minimal beyond the boundaries of the drilling sites themselves. And they were perfectly willing to sign any kind of settlement to restore such sites to their original state.
But it wasn’t the drilling sites themselves that had the most negative impact on the environment. It was getting that oil to market. Triton’s projected pipeline ran smack through the middle of the proposed nature reserve. Regardless of the oil company’s assurances, environmentalists had planet-wide experience with what happened when a pipeline ran through a fragile ecosystem. Constructing a pipeline meant clearing the land and building roads and maintenance camps. Villages would spring up along the new roads as colonists moved in to take advantage of opened-up land. Uncontrolled development would spread from either side of the pipeline like a canker until the nibbled-away edges met the rotted-out center, and the ecosystem was no more.
Julie shuffled through the rest of the folder. There was a history of the I’paa people, written by the murdered anthropologist Dr. Winifred Renken, a press release detailing what little was known on the deaths of the three activists, and a State Department warning on travel in Colombia. Nothing of interest.
Tucking the file into her knapsack, Julie straightened up to find Sondra Kharrazi’s eyes on her, plucked brows arched high.
“You actually read all that stuff? Why bother? I haven’t read a briefing myself in years. That’s what researchers and staff writers are for.”
Julie didn’t bother enlightening the NBC correspondent as to the gap in their respective professional positions.
“Though I’m going to have to do some work on this one,” the other woman went on fretfully. “No matter how much I screamed, they wouldn’t give me more than two seats on the flight. One of the top news teams in the world, and they barely get my cameraman on board. Forget a script writer or even a hairdresser!”
Her morose gaze roved across the cabin. “I see Tom Chaney over there has that fabulous make-up artist of his along. And his full camera crew. What does CNN have that the rest of us don’t?”