That was about ten dollars.
“I like Coca-Cola,” the farmer said. “But I never bought it.”
“And now?”
“From here to Cunaviche . . . one vaccine.”
“How? Are the Jesúses working with the Peludos? The Elenos? Did they fight them? What happened?”
The farmer shrugged. “I started drinking Coca-Cola again.”
“What about your”—how did you say ranch hands?—“workers? Do they drink Coca-Cola now?”
“Don’t tell them you’re here to learn about the guerrilla. Some of my men are from the north, and they have a different attitude.”
When they got to the farm, he was primarily interested in showing off his cattle—a group of big, healthy-looking animals grazing in a mountain valley. It reminded her a bit of home, coming down the curve of a hill to see cattle grazing in a field edged with trees, though here the fields were rougher, the greenery was richer, the view stretched out farther down mountains so much steeper and wilder than the Pennsylvania hills. Bordering the field was an open-air structure with a tin roof and a few support beams. The farmer pointed to this. “Where we process our milk, and the milk of smaller farmers who want to sell with us,” he said. This was the part of the project the Defensor del Pueblo had wanted her to see, since much of the equipment had come through government programs.
The farmer took her into the field, stepping through mud and around cow shit, right up to one of the larger beasts, whose dull eyes were just a few inches below Lisette’s.
“These cows are half American,” he said proudly. “Half gringa. Here, touch her.”
She put her hand out and stroked the nuzzle of the animal. The cow’s eyes flattened backward, then relaxed, and she continued chewing.
“We got straws of semen from America,” he said. “Holstein and Swiss brown. Santos signed a treaty that let Europe sell milk here and the prices . . .” The farmer made a low whistling noise and pointed his finger down to the ground. “The government had to help us and they sent us semen. It is very good, the semen. The cows we breed give much more milk. So for me, it’s not so bad that the price of milk went down. But for the little farmers who come to us to process their milk it is very bad. They have the same old cows. Five, six liters a day. Not very good. The semen only went to the bigger farms. If you’re a poor campesino, with one or two cows, what are you going to do with a straw of semen from America?”
In the processing hut, where the musty smell of the farm took on a sharper tinge, he took her to a delicate-looking man with shoulder-length black hair and a thin mustache who was pouring milk from a large metal jug into a square trough covered in what looked like cheesecloth. The man’s brothers and parents were cocaleros, the farmer explained, and he was willing to talk to an American.
“I did not know you were a woman,” he said.
And since he seemed uncomfortable, Lisette simply asked if she could follow him around, see what his work was like, and he agreed. Lisette started by asking simple questions—how long he had worked at the dairy farm, how he liked the work, what were his duties. She shared information about herself, that she had been in Iraq and Afghanistan.
She didn’t want to push him too hard, but he could be an important source. The cocaleros, or coca growers, were an interesting group. They were mostly very poor people who, of all the different players who profited off narco trafficking, received the least amount of money. And since they were tied to the land they farmed and were thus the easiest to target and control, they suffered at the hands of the police and the army and the narcos and the guerrilla and the American-supplied planes that sprayed poisonous chemicals over their fields. But in Norte de Santander they’d formed unions and self-defense groups. A couple of years ago they had even shut down all the roads in the department and forced a response from the president of the country himself. If she could get him to trust her, he might serve as a bridge to a group with a very different sense of what was going on than any of the townspeople she’d interviewed.
An opening came when the farmworker mentioned that times were currently difficult because his father had become sick and couldn’t work like he’d used to. Lisette shared that she had an uncle who was dying of cancer. “Uncle Carey,” she said. Sometimes, with a potential source, if you opened up about your own history, especially a history of pain, it would make them feel as though they had to pay you back in kind. Lisette, who rarely talked about such things even to good friends, would often talk about them with sources. In her mind, the fact that it was a part of her work justified it. What she didn’t admit to herself was how cathartic it could be, pouring out your heart to a stranger and trying to find links between their pain and yours.
“I’m very sorry,” he said.
“He lives in a part of America that is very poor,” she said. “He tells me they are the forgotten Americans, because people in the cities do not think about people like him.” And she spoke of how pretty it was where her uncle lived, and how coming to the farm had reminded her of it, because there were farms where he lived, too. And also a lot of drugs.
He listened, and told her he was glad to work in milk and not in coca, like the rest of his family. He said some people he knew had wanted to switch from coca to farming palm oil, but that it was dangerous to switch crops. The narcos didn’t like losing supply. He said that near the border
