Lisette tried not to put too much pressure on herself in the first couple of days in La Vigia. She told herself she was engaged in a more open-ended form of reporting than she was used to, and she should give herself time, learn the rhythms of the town. So she hung out with the foundation workers, chatted up the old men playing dominoes, tried to befriend the local Defensor del Pueblo, and avoided getting frustrated by how difficult it was to get an honest answer from anyone about what had happened in the town since the death of El Alemán.
Mention the name Jefferson, the supposed big scary narco boss, and townsperson after townsperson described him to Lisette as a businessman. The construction at the north end of town—an expansion of a processing center for palm oil, which farmers harvested in the surrounding areas—that was him. And the talks with the cell-phone company to build a tower and connect La Vigia to the rest of Colombia, that was Jefferson, too. He was changing things, they said, for the better.
And if she asked if Jefferson was associated with the Jesúses, she got a mixture of silence, half-hearted nods, or explanations that the Jesúses were merely a local neighborhood watch, the product of townspeople getting together and throwing out the criminal elements so that legitimate businesses could thrive. Diego had promised her an unstable region where the drug trade mixed with communist guerrillas and refugees poured in over the border. Instead, she had a thriving community where life was improving.
“Business is very good,” one bar owner told Lisette. “There’s fewer bad types on the street, and a lot of the Venezuelans have money.”
“The Venezuelans have money?” Lisette asked.
“The town keeps the bad Venezuelans away,” he said.
“The refugees,” Lisette said.
“Yes,” he said. “The refugees bring many problems. I have sympathy! Don’t look at me like that! But we are a little town, and it is hard enough to deal with our problems. The poor Venezuelans, they’re the ones who voted for Chávez! They wrecked their country, now they want to come here.”
“How does the town keep the bad Venezuelans away?”
The bar owner just smiled and laughed and wagged a finger in front of her face.
She also sat in on some of the sad stories being recorded by the foundation, visited local businesses, and listened to the debates for and against the peace vote. It was a “yes” town. More or less.
Something of a break came when the Defensor del Pueblo offered to set her up with a dairy farmer. “He knows the history and is part of a new program you might want to cover,” he had said, handing her a brochure that read “Strengthening Communities with Milk.”
The farmer came in a rusty pickup truck, a battered old thing with a newish but still weathered front door of an entirely different color from the rest of the vehicle. Uncle Carey would have approved, and the truck made her like him even before he stepped out. He was a large old man with big bony hands that looked like they’d been carved from driftwood. He told her, “Ah. You’re a pretty gringa.”
“Yes,” she said. “I am.”
He drove fast, taking them quickly out of town and onto rural roads, one big hand spinning the wheel as they skidded across stones and dirt.
“I called Luisa, because they said you were with the foundation, but Luisa said different.” He hit a curve fast enough that Lisette involuntary clutched at the door handle for stability. “She said it probably wasn’t a good idea to talk to you but I could make my own mind up.”
“Tell her I say thanks for . . . the good word,” she said, trying to nonchalantly put on her seat belt without drawing too much attention. If Luisa was warning people away from her, that was a real problem.
He looked at her and chuckled. “The buckle doesn’t work.”
“Ah,” she said.
“I told Luisa, I can talk. Why can’t I talk? It shouldn’t be a death sentence to talk.”
“Are you nervous? To talk?” she said. “Many people said to me the Jesúses are good for La Vigia.”
He nodded. “In many ways, yes. In other ways, no different than the others.”
The road crested over a ridgeline and then they were descending into a valley. “Where we’re heading, I’ve got two hundred head of cattle. So I pay the vaccine. Fifty mil a head. Same as a year ago.”
La vacuna. The vaccine. What people called extortion payments.
“Twenty years ago, I pay the vaccine to the FARC. Fifteen years ago, I pay to the paras. Ten years ago, I pay to the Elenos. Five years ago, I pay to the Peludos. And then it was the Urabeños, and the Peludos, and then the Urabeños.” He shook his head. “This place was a football and they’d kick it back and forth.”
“You think that the town will obtain more stability with the Jesúses?”
“I pray for that, yes, but”—he held up one long finger—“that is not the most important thing. I always paid the vaccine. Always. But that only protected me around La Vigia.” He pointed due east. “I ship milk down to Cunaviche, along the way, I hit a roadblock, I’ve got to pay the vaccine to the Elenos. I go north . . . Peludos. South . . . it changed—one day this group, another day—but you understand. And if you wanted to buy equipment, or anything, really, that had to be brought from outside, it was so expensive. Do you know how much it
