She snorts. “No. I am asking as a representative of Norte de Santander. Which, I’m sure, means nothing to you. Most of us here”—she waves a hand in the general direction of the National Capitol—“don’t really represent, do we?”
I’m not sure what she means.
“You’re from Antioquia, yes?” she says. “That department has seventeen representatives. Seventeen! You probably don’t even know who they are.”
She cocks her head, eyes me aslant. I think of a bird examining a beetle it’s about to snap into its beak.
“I usually figure their party is more important than their department.” When I vote, I vote by the party list.
“Yes. Party over department every time. Which means elites in Bogotá decide what is best for people in Tibú. And elites in Bogotá don’t care about the people of Tibú, do they?”
I say nothing. According to Maloof, this woman holds enough personal power in her very small department that she can do whatever she wants and still be on the party list. That makes her unpredictable.
“I don’t come from the same twenty families as everybody else here. I don’t care about them, I don’t care about what they want, I only care about the people. I am a representative who represents.”
Said that way, it sounds like a good thing, but Norte de Santander is complicated, a place where the state often has little presence, provides few services, little order, little ability even to adjudicate basic legal disputes over land and contracts. Where the economy sometimes owes more to smuggling goods from Venezuela and drugs and illegal mining than to anything coming from the central government. What would a true and honest representative of such a place look like?
“That’s very good,” I say.
She sits back and considers me for a moment, then nods. “I was a bus driver, you know, when I started running the chance.”
I nod and fold my hands together, trying to look relaxed, ready to be told a story. She smiles.
“One day, five paras walk onto my bus without paying, they take out guns and wave them at the crowd. Their leader starts walking the aisles while one of his men keeps a pistol resting on my shoulder. He starts telling me I’m pretty, and that pretty girls should do what they’re told, and stay calm. Now, listen. Do you think I was scared?”
“No.”
“Idiot. Of course I was scared. But I was angry, too. This was my bus, my passengers. The leader walks the aisles, and he’s got a piece of paper in his hand, and he reads out two names. ‘Albeiro García Camargo. Ciro Muñez.’ I will never forget the names. And Albeiro and Ciro get up. I knew them by sight. They had taken my bus every day for months. Polite. I never had a conversation with either of them. I didn’t know their names until that day. And they didn’t say anything as they stood up, walked down the aisle, walked past me, and left the bus. The leader of the paras was the last to leave, and he handed me a twenty-thousand note, and smiled a beautiful, horrible smile at me. Two days later the police found Albeiro and Ciro, their bodies wrapped in barbed wire in the trunk of a car. They had difficulty getting them out. It was incredible, people said, how small the space where they fit two grown men.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Back then, I was angry at the paras. But I’m older now. I think of them, and I think, young boys with guns. Even their leader was no more than a child. You know what makes me angry now? Thinking about the list. Let’s talk about the list. Who gave them the list? Who told them who to kill?”
Usually, it would have been power brokers in the town. Businessmen, mayors, or even police and local army units pointing out the subversives, the guerrillas, the union leaders, criminals, leftists, drug addicts, and undesirables. And that’s what I tell her.
“Yes.” She looks away for a second, seemingly lost in thought, then faces me again with a blank expression on her face. “Over the past decade, we killed sixty-five leaders in the FARC and seven leaders in the ELN. Last year the whole world was informed by The Washington Post that we did this with the help of the Americans. They help us make our list. But with a treaty coming, I look at our list and I think to myself, if this is breakfast, what will we be served for lunch?”
Ah. I see. Agamemnon is lunch. Deadly strikes like the El Alemán raid, many of them likely to happen in her department. She knows it, and so do I. Does she want to stop the military taking over Agamemnon? That would be bad for the country. Without the Americans providing us aid, the military won’t be able to maintain its air assault capabilities. Without air assault capabilities, we don’t have the ability to project power around the country. Without a war, we don’t have an excuse for American aid. So now, with the war supposedly ending, we need a new campaign. I unfold my hands and study them. This is delicate.
“The method we used against the FARC,” I say, “brought their leadership to the negotiating table. It brought peace.”
“Peace. Yes. But the FARC was a military force. What happens when we put the names of Colombian citizens on a list and then”—she waves her hands—“like magic, they cease to be a problem because they cease to exist.”
“Colombian citizens?” I say. “Or gangsters? I would prefer we don’t become El Salvador, with its gangs.”
“And I would prefer we don’t become El Salvador, with its death squads,” she says, “Or like America, with its fancy death squads.”
“I’m sure the various gangs in
