At one meeting with milk farmers across our area, an older rancher with a white mustache complained about a coming tax. Jefferson’s comandante had arranged for New Zealand milk-farm technicians to come share their knowledge, and he was also importing milking machines from Argentina. In return, the milk farmers would have to pay more.
The trade representative, a lazy and stupid man whose election we’d supported, should have handled the issue beforehand, ensuring all understood they had no option. But instead of saying this without saying it, he hissed, “What are you doing? Jefferson will kill you!”
The rancher, a proud man named Rodrigo Serrano, puffed up, mustache twitching. “I don’t have any fear of Jefferson,” the rancher said, his pride speaking instead of his brain. “I fought the guerrilla twenty years before Jefferson came here, and I didn’t—”
“Jefferson does not want you or anyone to fear him,” I said, lying. Of course, Jefferson did want fear, but he didn’t want that fear to be tested. Threatening rich men is dangerous, and killing them can lead to real resistance. From the milk tax we wanted money, not problems.
The rancher scoffed. “I—”
“You fought the guerrilla twenty years ago?” I leaned forward, trying my best to look eager and curious. “I didn’t know anyone here had the guts to fight them before the autodefensas came.”
“Yes,” the rancher said, surprised and unsure of himself, but also looking pleased. “It was a dangerous time.”
“Tell me about it.”
“I don’t think we have time—” the trade representative began.
“Shut up,” I said. “The guerrilla killed everyone in my town except for me. I want to hear how the man defended his community.”
The trade representative, who did fear Jefferson, turned white. I had never spoken like that to a man in a position of power. It had never occurred to me, before then, that I could speak to a man in a position of power like that. It changed the atmosphere of the room. Instead of the trade representative and me against the rancher, it became the rancher and me against the trade representative.
“Well,” he said, “it started when they kidnapped Nelson Pérez . . .” And then he launched into a story about how his father, who had socialist sympathies in his youth and used to help import weapons from Medellín to sell to the guerrilla, had fallen into a rage after the kidnapping. Using the same contacts he’d used to get weapons for the FARC, he’d gotten weapons for himself and a few other men. They’d waited until the guerrilla came for payment of the vaccine, they ambushed them, and they killed them.
I acted amazed, asked questions, urged him into more and more detail as the trade representative became increasingly frustrated. And then I told him, “Given your history, I think we could come up with something different. Instead of the tax, you could contribute to security. There have been kidnappings on the road north of your lands and Jefferson was intending to post some of our men there. But it is always best to have local people.”
The rancher gawked at me.
“How many men do you have?” I asked. “Men who can handle themselves? There will be fighting.”
The rancher smiled, looked around for support. “I think those days are behind me,” he said.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “You’d avoid the tax.”
“No,” he said. “No. The tax is fine.”
The rich, I thought, are foolish and vain. It was strong knowledge to possess.
• • •
Jefferson gave me a raise, from eight thousand pesos a day to twelve, and I began working with all the paramilitary groups under Jefferson’s control, from little bands of beggars like the one I had come from to more professionalized groups who spent less time managing cities and towns and more time on the border, working the trade of coca out and gasoline in. It gave me a sense of the world, to see the range of things a man like Jefferson was involved in, and to see how unimportant a little band like Osmin’s was to him.
As a child, I thought there were guerrilla, and there were paracos, and they were at war with each other, but with Jefferson I learned that it was so much more complicated. There were cocaleros, like I had been, working the fields and sometimes organizing into little self-defense unions. And there were narcos, who bought and transported coca. And there were police and army. But within each group were different factions. Narcos who worked with us, but not the guerilla. Narcos who worked with the guerrilla, but not us. Narcos who worked with both. Guerrilla who would work with us against other guerrilla. Paracos who would work with narcos against us. Cocaleros who protected the guerrilla. Army officers who asked us to do the work they could not. Police who worked for everyone and no one. Sometimes it seemed like it was all a great game. Sometimes it seemed like hell. And always, it seemed so much bigger than I had imagined. Those days, I would sometimes think with wonder at how little worth I had possessed in the world, and how easily I could have been erased from the earth, and how even a whole town, like the one I had come from, could be destroyed without changing the calculations of the powerful.
But now I mattered to the powerful. I moved into an apartment in La Vigia, far from Osmin and the family he had provided me. I had my own bed. I had a little table and a lamp. I drank beer and soda in peace whenever I wanted. I even got a TV, and started watching Las Juanas, which would be my favorite show for years, until I eventually fell in love with Catalina Santana in Without Tits, There’s No Paradise. I kept the television on while I
