“Daniel’s father arranged with you to let me in,” Alex said.“ Remember?”
“Yes. Of course.” Lady Dora shook her head. It was four in the afternoon the day that Alex had met with Joseph Collins at the Stanhope. The landlady was barefoot in the front vestibule and wore a pink bathrobe, her gray hair in bobby pins. She was on one of her daily rants. This one ended when she spotted the resident of 3-C, a self-proclaimed “documentary film maker” whose work was sold only over the Internet. Alex had a hunch that the man’s oeuvre might be unsuitable for family viewing.
He was in trouble with Lady Dora for something, so Alex headed upstairs with the file in her hand and closed her door on the argument that ensued. It was at this moment that she made a note to phone Ben later that evening, just to vent. Calls between them were becoming more frequent. Alex appreciated the friendship more with each passing week.
That evening, Alex settled into this cozy atmosphere on East Twenty-first Street. She spread out some yogurt and fruit on the small dining table, turned it into her evening meal, and then repaired to the sofa in the living room to read.
Alex embarked upon her reading at a few minutes past eight in the evening.
For years, as the file explained in detail, Collins had been quietly financing the missionaries at a village named Barranco Lajoya in a mountainous region of southeastern Venezuela. The missionaries rotated in and out. There were several teams of them who worked in shifts ranging from six months to two years.
They had been living among a large tribe of primitive indigenous people, learning their language so that they could translate the Bible into it and bring the Christian faith to them. Some of the missionaries doing this work lived with the Indians for at least a year or two in order to learn the language and create an alphabet for it, and then translate the Bible. Some of them brought their families. Their children grew up in these remote villages. There had been considerable early success, first bringing literacy itself to these people, then bringing the Christian faith. And yet, after considerable early success, there then appeared to be an effort to destroy the missionaries’ work and force them to leave the country.
A school built by the missionaries and the villagers had caught fire one night. Livestock had disappeared. The local streams, tributaries of the Rio Xycapo, had been polluted by industrial waste from a higher elevation. Yet there was no industry at higher elevations, and no known settlements. That meant that the waste had been brought in and dumped.
But why? The villagers had nothing that anyone would want. They were simple people who had been self-sufficient for centuries. Why should anything change now? The people were so remote that who could care enough about them to victimize them?
Perhaps, conjectured the writer of this document, the interest of outsiders was enough by itself to put the small tribe on someone’s list of enemies.
Alex began making notes in the margins, observations and questions to ask Mr. Collins when she reported back to him. She started to feel a pull toward these people. It was as if this was the path now intended for her. This mission to Venezuela emerged as something different than anything she had ever done in her life, exactly the type of thing she wanted to do. Against what she had expected, she was interested. An open mind could be dangerous.
She skipped ahead to a photo section. She scanned through several dozen photos of the village of Barranco Lajoya and its people; smiling faces of barefoot children, a classroom bringing literacy, a medical clinic set up, a joint Episcopal-Methodist-Baptist service in a small church. Kids playing soccer.
There were before-and-after shots of people who had received care from Collins’s medical people. She was impressed. The man was doing good in corners of the world that badly needed benefactors. In return, he asked for nothing.
She waded through a background section on their village culture, then ran smack into an assessment of current-day Venezuela and its government.
The government of Venezuela was headed by President Hugo Chávez. His fanatically anti-American policies didn’t make life any easier for Collins or his missionaries. Collins had had the foresight to send Christian workers with supposedly neutral passports-there were three Canadians, two Hondurans, and one English nurse there at the time that Alex read the dossier-all of whom spoke good-to-native-speaker Spanish. But the activities of foreigners in a village in the jungle aroused the ire and suspicion of paranoid rulers in Caracas.
Chávez, Alex knew, was a former paratrooper who staged an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1992. He was a latter-day blend of the populist Juan Perón and the totalitarian Fidel Castro. Chávez had assumed office of president democratically in 1998 after winning an election in which he ran on a populist platform. Chávez had long been convinced-not necessarily incorrectly and not that he hadn’t brought it on himself-that the United States government had a hand in an unsuccessful coup attempt against him in 2002.
He remained obsessed with the idea that the US wanted to assassinate him. Given the long history of CIA involvement in almost all left-leaning countries in Latin America, there was a real rationale behind his fears. Castro had survived an exploding cigar, a booby-trapped conch shell, and a poisoned milk shake among numerous other “gifts” from the enterprising souls at various workshops in Langley, Virginia.
Further, as Chávez had already survived two attempts on his life, there was possibly something imminent to his assassination fears.
Chávez not only made no secret of his concern, but also paraded it regularly on his highly popular radio talk show, Aló Presidente, which was aimed at his power base, the poor and working-class people of Venezuela. Further, his overt hostility to the US, open admiration for Fidel Castro, close ties with the FARC-las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-guerrillas in neighboring Colombia, and tight control over the huge Venezuelan oil industry, had made him a thorn in Washington’s side.
Alex read carefully. The dossier continued.
Chávez recently seemed to have made overtures of toning down the anti-American rhetoric and making Venezuelan oil more accessible to North America. But he would do this only if the new US administration would cease both its efforts to undermine him and to isolate him from other Latin American countries.
The author of the document wrote: “The United States government is anxious for a shot at a more ready access to Venezuelan oil. We are ready to reconcile with him.”
Yet next Alex ran into a set of political contradictions. While a US-Venezuelan rapprochement was in the offing, it still appeared that there were powers attempting to run the Indians off their land. Considering the mood of the two governments, who could have been behind that?
Chávez? Washington?
The international petroleum cartels?
Business interests would not have wanted to antagonize either government, and the local Indians didn’t seem to have anything worth taking. They had no other tribes in the area that they were at war with, and there were no guerrilla activities in the area.
Applying what she knew about the area, the land, the political climate, and the geography, it was unlikely that there was any “spill over” activity from Colombia or Brazil. Was it just the proposition that Christianity was being spread to a native people that had antagonized someone?
Something was missing from the overall picture. As Joseph Collins had described it, it didn’t make sense. She was forty pages into a forty-six page document and increasingly drawn to the assignment. After all, as Collins had suggested, her assignment was to go and observe.
To troubleshoot. To report back and not get involved.
She turned the page to the final section. And then suddenly, almost out of nowhere, she was smacked in the face by what she was reading.