Author: Gaiutra Bahadur

By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Takatu River is so slender a border between Guyana and Brazil that speedboat taxis skim across it in a minute. In the dry season, villagers ford it by jeep or even on foot. At Lethem, the official gateway into Guyana’s southwest, there is no checkpoint. Only a medicated sponge on the riverbank, which visitors from Brazil must step on to ward against foot-and-mouth disease, marks it as an international crossing.

For decades, garden-variety contraband has flowed across Guyana’s largely unpatrolled borders. Now, with crackdowns elsewhere, the remote regions of this South American nation of 700,000 have become part of the hidden highway for Latin American drug smuggling.

Cocaine destined for the United States is increasingly passing through this swatch of rain forest and sugarcane fields _ a mostly untouched paradise conjured as the mythical “El Dorado” by European explorers _ on its way from Colombia.

This deadly black market threatens finally to ruin a place independent only 38 years and already broken by poverty, racial tension, rigged elections, and soul-sapping emigration.

“There is believed to be significant drug trafficking through Guyana,” said Daniel Daley, a U.S. Embassy official in the capital, Georgetown. “As interdiction in Venezuela and Colombia have effect, the traffic in Guyana is likely to increase unless steps are taken to prevent that.”

A U.S. government report on the global drug trade in 2003 described Guyana as “a prime target for narcotics traffickers.” Several recent cases have shown how the country _ with its slack border controls, rampant corruption, and far-flung diaspora _ has become a transit area for drug smuggling.

In November, U.S. law-enforcement arrested cargo and baggage handlers at New York and Miami airports who had, over a year, unloaded tens of millions of dollars of drugs outside the eye of surveillance cameras.

More than 400 kilos (880 pounds) of cocaine had arrived on flights from Guyana and Jamaica in luggage and cargo boxes and under ice in a plane’s galley.

In May, a former Miss Guyana was arrested at a Toronto airport with $1 million of cocaine in bottles of lotion and in the false sides of her suitcase. And Guyanese ships bearing logs also carried $13 million of cocaine to England in May.

Cocaine seizures at Guyana’s main airport grew six times to 230 kilos (500 pounds) last year. About 200 couriers, some with U.S. passports, have been arrested there since 2002. Security workers now shake bottles of the country’s prized El Dorado rum because passengers have dissolved cocaine in it. Others have tried to smuggle tacolike “rotis” stuffed with the drug.

“We feel they’re not the real players,” said Leon Trim, the country’s anticrime chief. “We feel they’re just fetching the drugs. Most of the big guys, we haven’t really touched on them.”

The only case ever brought against a suspected drug lord was dismissed by Guyana’s highest court in 1996. Trim said prosecutors had presented only part of incriminating wiretaps from Canadian authorities. The evidence against the alleged kingpin, the owner of a department-store chain, has since disappeared.

In its journey through Guyana, cocaine has corrupted government officials and bankrolled a paramilitary squad responsible for vigilante killings. It has also introduced Uzi submachine guns _ and a climate of fear _ into a country where a sugarcane cutter’s scythe was once the most common weapon.

“We’re seeing more and more drug defendants walking away, because witnesses are not turning up,” said Steve Crossman, deputy British high commissioner. “You have to ask why.”

An Allentown, Pa., woman, among six U.S. citizens in prison on drug charges in Guyana, recently backed down from testifying against a Guyanese man.

“I don’t want any further trouble, here or at home,” Karen Chobot, face flushed, chin trembling, said in court last month. “I’m afraid of what he is capable of doing in the future.”

She told the judge she would not testify against the snackette owner who gave her the cocaine-laced food seized as she tried to leave Guyana in November. Still, Chobot, serving three years in prison, stood by her statement implicating him.

She said a Guyanese man she met in Allentown last year bought her a ticket to visit him and told her he would marry her. That promise fell apart, and on her way home, she carried a package for his supposed cousin, the snackette owner.

“I just want to go home,” she told her attorney, while holding a card with a Bible verse from her parents. “Please help me.”

The intimidation seems to extend beyond witnesses.

“You don’t know who to trust,” a police sergeant who asked that his name not be used said. “One day you make a report to your boss. The next day you might turn up dead.”

Guyana’s Stabroek News won’t investigate the alleged nexus of drugs, militias and government corruption. “No way,” said publisher David de Caires. “It’s too dangerous.”

The deputy director of the antidrug unit was riddled with bullets as he stopped to buy a newspaper on his way to work in 2002. Last year, 200 people, including drug agents, police and couriers, were slain.

“The number of killings is alarming,” said human-rights activist Mike McCormack. “The failure to arrest anyone is a little beyond belief.”

Race divides in almost every way in this former British colony, where sugar was king and slaves from Africa and bonded laborers from India were imported to grow it. Since then, these two main ethnic groups have been locked in a seesaw battle for power. Today, Indians run the ruling party; Africans control the army and the police.

Traffickers seem to have exploited that rift. Guyanese whisper that a “phantom army” outfitted by drug lords is responsible for many of the killings. They also say the squad serves the government, killing criminals the police and army won’t.

“If you start to use criminals to fight criminals, you become hopelessly compromised,” de Caires said. “After a while, you start to lose control. You then open a Pandora’s box of horror.”

Along the coast, machine guns signal the drug trade with their sporadic pop. The signs in the “Interior,” the hinterlands that make up most of Guyana, come under the cover of night. Villagers say that’s when planes pass overhead.

“You hear noise at night,” said Regina Simon, who lives miles outside Lethem. “In that direction, there’s no airport.”

Trim said cartels smuggled drugs into Guyana through secret airstrips or airdrops in the Interior and smuggle it out through Georgetown’s airports and seaports. He said the country simply did not have the personnel, surveillance or money to patrol its borders effectively.

“Given the resources we have, I think we’re doing a reasonable job,” he said.

President Bharrat Jagdeo asked President Bush for aid to fight drugs in October. But the United States has criticized the country’s record on drug control. Indeed, there are many in Guyana who murmur about whether their government can’t crack down on drugs _ or won’t.

“If not cooperation, there’s an understanding between major drug dealers and the government,” McCormack said. Some have called for Ronald Gajraj, the domestic affairs minister, to step down because he has failed to prosecute criminals. He did not return repeated calls for comment.

He “kept saying there was no crisis,” said Rhyaan Shah, head of a citizens group. “It’s like the Wild West. There’s no order, no discipline, no justice.”

By one estimate, the drug trade is a $175 million industry _ in a country where major exports such as sugar sell too cheaply and all goods and services garner only $700 million.

“Yes, people do make money from the drug industry,” said Col. Fairbairn Liverpool, antidrug coordinator for the Caribbean Community. “And they spread the money around. They have a ‘Robin Hood’ mentality.”

Drug lords also spread the money around to the government and police, he said. Bribed officials “talk about it. They don’t make money by being public servants.”

Ethnic struggle and socialist policies that led to food shortages have almost emptied Guyana. About one-third of the country’s natives live abroad. That has helped the drug trade _ with its reliance on networks across borders _ flourish.

Ronald Gajraj, the domestic affairs minister, has said some 600 deportees, criminals with U.S. street smarts and contacts, have remade the country into a portal for cocaine and a playground for its traffickers.

That, meanwhile, is likely to chase out more Guyanese. Lines outside the U.S. Embassy spill across the street, and many complain the country soon will be home to only the very young and the very old.

“Guyana did not become woebegone yesterday,” publisher de Caires said. “The drug trafficking is just a further complication. (Still,) I’d rather live under Lenin than Al Capone.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Four decades of working in the United States has left Carlos Diaz-Nunez, 63, a shrunken man. His face is lined with wrinkles, his left leg crushed by a box of mushrooms six years ago.

This farmhand from Mexico, despite his shriveled frame, carries much on his shoulders: His life reflects how the United States has met its desire and need for low-wage, low-skilled workers through its immigration policy over six decades.

He came to the United States as a bracero, one of millions of Mexican laborers with temporary work permits who streamed onto U.S. farms from the days of World War II to 1964.

The guest-worker program President Bush proposed last week has stirred up memories for Diaz-Nunez, of how he came to pick cotton in Texas for 45 days and learned that the United States held the promise of cash for hard work. Some immigration experts say that the comparison is apt – and that the past program holds lessons.

“What the bracero program did, and what this new program undoubtedly would do, is create new patterns of migration that will continue even after it ends,” said Louis DeSipio, a political scientist and a fellow at the Toms Rivera Policy Institute, a think tank that studies issues affecting Latinos.

“As soon as it ended, the workers still had the contacts. They knew growers who would hire them,” he said. “You’d accustomed them to the idea that you could go to the U.S., work, and go back to have a relatively good life in their country. They just kept coming, even if they were illegal.”

That is what Diaz-Nunez did. Less than a decade after the bracero program’s end, he returned to the United States with the help of a smuggler, or coyote. A few times, immigration agents deported him. But he found his way back – to pick lettuce in California, assemble cars in Illinois, and pick mushrooms in Chester County’s Kennett Square.

In the mid-1980s, his wife and eventually his entire family followed him to this country. Today he lives in a white clapboard house in a Wilmington neighborhood in the shadow of Interstate 95. His house in the mountains of central Mexico – a house that U.S. dollars built on land that U.S. dollars bought – is empty these days. In fact, most of his village in Guanajuato state has given its sons and husbands, if not entire families, to the United States in a relationship that began with the braceros.

“A lot of Mexican Americans in the U.S. have family roots that go back to that program,” said Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center.

For many of those Americans, the term bracero conjures images of their forefathers crammed into barrack-like dormitories, paid too little, worked too hard, and subjected to racism – a system so exploitative that Lee G. Williams, the Labor Department official in charge of the program at the time it ended, called it “legalized slavery.”

That, Suro said, would not likely be the way Bush’s proposal takes shape in an America transformed by workplace regulation and the civil rights movement.

“We’re a very different country now,” he said.

Bush’s proposal, though thin on details, differs from the bracero program in other key ways. It would provide jobs in any sector of the economy, not just agriculture. It would provide visas for longer stints – three years, possibly renewable. And it would be available to workers from every country, not just Mexico.

One immigration expert, Rodolfo de la Garza, a political scientist at Columbia University, argues that Bush’s proposal would be, in fact, the reverse of its predecessor.

“The bracero program created illegal immigration,” he said. “This one is designed to respond to illegal immigration. Whether or not it [creates more in the long run] is irrelevant. They’re coming anyway. That’s already in place.”

“In the past, we used the INS in cahoots with bad employers to screw Mexican workers,” de la Garza said. “All of that stuff is behind us, I think.”

Diaz-Nunez, who became a legal U.S. resident through an amnesty for certain illegal immigrants in 1986, is not so sure.
He remembers his first stint on an East Texas cotton farm in the autumn of 1959. The money was good – he earned $200 for picking 115 pounds of cotton – until a freeze ruined the crop early in his contract. For more than a month, he hunkered down with 10 other braceros, two to a bedroom, and waited until it was time to go home.

“The proposal of Bush,” he said in Spanish, “is bad because it doesn’t give the opportunity to the workers [because employee sponsorship is required]. It’s the same situation as when we came as braceros.”

He came, he said, because “I had a hope to be better, to have a better life, but it wasn’t very good.”

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

By Gaiutra Bahadur
The Philadelphia Inquirer

Two men, pinkies linked, strolled across the ruins of the old Portuguese fort. With the afternoon sun still overhead, the fort crawled with tourists. But it was easy to imagine the bayside setting – with evening spread out against the Bombay sky – transformed into the perfect spot for lovers and wooers. My eyes followed the male fingers delicately curled around each other.

“No,” said my friend, his eyes following mine, as they lingered over the fingers. “They’re not gay.”

Most likely, they weren’t. Men in India, despite the country’s mosquito net of modesties and taboos, hold hands as comfortably as they might in San Francisco’s Castro or New York’s Chelsea.

Never mind the “Ladies Compartments” on Bombay’s trains, set aside as a barrier against the aggressive gazes of men. Or the fat concrete benches along its most romantic promenade. Custom-made for chastity by the city’s conservative ruling party, they seat only one. And no matter that perched on a hill above Munnar’s center is a mosque whose threshold adult women cannot cross.

My great-grandmother left India in 1903 from the port of Calcutta. She climbed, pregnant and alone, aboard a ship bound for the Caribbean. And I – her descendant, an Indian-looking woman who grew up in the United States – was traipsing alone around the country she had relegated to her ancestors.

I knew, of course, that India was still a place with many rules for women, just as I knew that many of its women had challenged those rules with great passion. What I did not expect was the alienating force of those rules during my first trip ever to the country that had been calling to me – and indeed, had shaped me – from a distance.

You don’t walk down the street with a cigarette between your lips. That provokes sniggers. You don’t travel the country solo. That sparks gossip. And you don’t go to the cinema by yourself at night, even if you carry an American-bred sense that you can do what you want, when you want. That courts trouble.

*

The driver from the hillside resort near Munnar deposited me on a bus the color of dust.

“America,” he told the fare collector, with a thrust of his chin in my direction.

The other passengers – inky silhouettes, bundled against the predawn cold – stopped to look.

I was wearing an orange paisley churidar: pants tapered at the ankles, a loose tunic that flowed down to my shins and a long scarf over my head. It was the same one I’d worn on the beach the day that Ashok, a rickshaw driver, told me I looked “just like a regular Kerala girl.” (Kerala is the southern state where Munnar is located and where most of my time in India unspooled.)

Ashok had said it not to compliment but to explain his concern. Regular Kerala girls, he said, don’t sit by themselves on the beach – as I had for hours, just staring at the Viking-like fishing boats skimming the Arabian Sea. Unless, he added, they’ve had problems at home and are, for example, contemplating suicide.

Whatever the advantages of passing as a “regular Kerala girl,” I no longer had them on the bus in Munnar. As it hurtled along the twisting, one-lane mountain roads, swerving to avoid cars, buses and rickshaws going the opposite way, men kept turning back to stare at me.

For 10 motion-sick hours, I was an American on display. I’m not sure if that meant I was simply a curiosity, or worse. Either way, I didn’t like it.

I liked the role of tourist even less. But that was inescapable outside Bombay. I wanted to be recognized as an American when it suited me, but I didn’t want to be boxed in as merely a holder of American dollars. India was much more than a commodity to me, and I felt that I should have been more than a traveling buyer to India.

Those who make their living off tourists with roots in India know this schizophrenia well.

Take, for example, Ashok, who drove me around Fort Cochin. The island, one part of the city of Cochin, is so much a tourist hotspot that the Monte Carlo Internet cafe and its menu of masala tea and “seafood upon order” had a copycat on almost every corner.

Drivers such as Ashok mill around the hotels there in search of tourists to toot strategically around town. Many of them pocket commissions for steering customers to particular spice, jewelry and handicraft merchants, en route to the city’s 16th-century synagogue or the whitewashed church that claims to bear the bones of Vasco da Gama.

But Ashok also set himself up as my protector and guide. He stayed close while I read on the beach, in my churidar. And he emerged from the wings to shoo a group of men who had gathered around me, just standing and staring.

I was the only nonwhite guest at the Fort Heritage Hotel, and Ashok wanted to know my story. I told him I didn’t know exactly where in India my forebears were from. I only know they left four to six generations ago to work as indentured laborers on England’s sugar plantations in Guyana. I was born in that former colony in South America and grew up in Jersey City, N.J., a scrappy city with a view of the Manhattan skyline.

Ashok appraised my features and complexion and decided my family must have come from Kerala. Probably not, but it was sweet of him to answer so decisively the normally nagging question of identity.

If it weren’t for Ashok, I wouldn’t know how to interpret the abundance of colorful concrete houses set between the palm trees. (You can build three concrete houses with the money it takes to build one from wood.) I wouldn’t know that Yesudas, a Catholic singer, was the golden voice of Kerala. Or that the government banned rickshaw drivers from wearing lungis, the bright bolts of cloth tied at the waist and folded above the knee, a common alternative to pants in the south of India.

Still, when we stopped for dosas, crepes filled with spicy potatoes, and chai, he sat at another table, his back to me.

Before we parted, Ashok took me to his house. It was small and neatly kept. A Technicolor picture of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge, stood on an altar above a small refrigerator and television set. Nearby hung a cross and rosary beads, left behind by Ashok’s landlord, a Christian who asked that they keep the icons in place.

Ashok’s daughters, Ahana in pigtails and Abhana with a boy cut, sat smiling shyly on the couch. His wife emerged from the kitchen with two glasses of milky, hot tea. Ashok gave me his e-mail address.

Keep in touch, he said.

When the time came, I paid Ashok what a teacher in Kerala makes in a month and a half for the two days we zigzagged around Cochin in his rickshaw. I liked him, and I do believe our encounter was on some level genuine.

After all, India had woven, from the distance of a century and nearly 10,000 miles, the cocoon I was raised in. It had warmed our New Jersey apartment with cumin-spiced split pea soup on Sunday mornings and the sweet crooning of its soundtrack diva, Lata Mangeshkar. It had tucked pictures of Ganesh, the god with the elephant trunk, in our bedroom closet.

But once I finally was in India, that intimacy became something much more complicated. The land of my forefathers shook my sense of self as though tectonic plates were smashing against each other, in the uncertain territory under the surface of my brown skin.

I felt this from my first hour there.

An immigration official, his rebuke as crisp as the khaki he wore, had demanded to know why I, a “regular Kerala girl,” was talking to a stranger, a tabla maestro from New York, so warmly. What I answered was an attempt to explain, to put my brown skin in its proper context. But it also contained the bristle and swagger of someone used to speaking to whomever she pleased, as warmly as she pleased.

“I am an American,” I said.

I can’t help but wonder if I paid Ashok so much, in fact, to transcend the role of tourist, to become more than just another American with cash. I had wanted to pass as an Indian – and, even if my churidar had failed me, I wanted to connect with Ashok, as two people who recognize themselves in each other do.

© The Philadelphia Inquirer. All rights reserved.

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