In addition to frothy, stone-cold terrorists, there are vivid accounts of security force depravity and a horrible "ends justify the means" extravagence on the part of police who routinely stuffed people in the trunk of a car, never to be seen again. Unlike many other countries that have "truth" commissions, Peru decided that there was nothing to gain by poking at the wounds and, after a general amnesty for any government misdeeds, just moved on. (to which I explicitly demur from expressing any opinion)
Meanwhile, the embassy has warned that whether it be venal crime or political crime, Peru is not out of the woods yet. If someone knocks at your door delivering Pardo's Chicken, but you did not order Pardo's Chicken...well, do not open the door.
So today at Carter's taekwando, across the street from the embassy and next to the hotel where we lived for 6 weeks, the grandfather of 2 students who started at the same time as Carter came over to chat with me as usual. He appears to be in his low 50s and has lived in the US for 18 years driving trucks, currently in Massachusetts, but is down for half a year to see his son and grandsons. But today he starts the conversation with "Terrible what happened in Libya, those terrorists...". After some political chitchat that I kept tugging towards the shallow end of the pool, he then proceeds to tell me that people now don't want to remember what was really going on. He was a policeman, I am told, who trained in Spain and fought terrorism undercover in Lima, Bolivia, Ecuador. His brothers, he said, were also policemen, killed by the terrorists. He had to leave, he had a target on his back.
Interesting, right? But since I started this post referencing my reading material, I am sure you are now, as I was then, feeling a few hairs up on end. Sure, he may be a Peruvian in the US so long that he is lonely in his own country and specifically picks me to befriend at the twice-weekly taekwando. But really? Would an ex-secret-policeman really choose to chitchat about his intense past, in public, across the street from the embassy? It almost seems designed to turn my desire to connect directly with this country into a weakness, to exploit my naive egoism.
One of the things about the way we got ourselves to Peru is that, for better or worse, we are part of the diplomatic corps. This means that a veiled stranger with bad intent may want something more of us than our North American wealth. It means that even I, a spouse of a Peace Corps employee, am forced to suspicion. And of course, the sad part is that the guy may just be what he presented...a lonely man with a checkered past ready to talk about it at last. I mean, he bought his grandsons the full kit of expensive taekwando equipment!
This evening, directly after relating all this to Jennifer, our doorbell rang at 9:20pm. We did NOT order Pardo's Chicken. Jen asked who it was through the intercom, but got only garbles in response. Eventually we went and stood by the perimeter door and she hollered "Who is it?" Repeated queries never received anything more than "Señora Mariza" (our empleada). Mariza nervously couldn't fathom who would be asking for her at all, let alone this time of night. At this point, we called the embassy security who had the local car there in minutes. It was the pool guy apparently worried that he had left the pool filling to overflow. More likely, the household agrees, is that he is incoherently drunk at the end of the day and unwisely decided to pursue a crush on Mariza.
And that's a small account from behind the perimeter wire in our little corner of Peru.
PS: Lest anyone feel inclined to say "Be careful!" because my flip language here seems to lack seriousness about these things...be assured, that is not the case. This post is, if nothing else, a description of what it feels like to constantly be saying to oneself "Be careful."
No comments:
Post a Comment