In my meanderings around Barranquilla I had met an American foreign service official. He felt that he had been marooned in the place; he ran the cultural centre; his name was Dudley Symes. On election day, he telephoned me at my hotel and asked whether I wanted to see the people voting. Was it safe? I asked.
'We'll see,' he said. 'I figure if we keep a very low profile, no one will bother us.'
I trimmed my moustache and put on a wrinkled short-sleeved shirt, dark trousers and my leakproof shoes: I would blend perfectly, I thought. But it was pointless. Dudley wore sandals and bright plaid Bermuda shorts, and his car, a great lumbering Chevrolet, was unlike any other I saw in Barranquilla. A low profile, he had said, but people stared at us wherever we went, and the car was nearly unmanageable on the narrow broken roads in the middle of town. Almost immediately we were in a traffic jam. And the people who had sold their votes, whose homeward-bound buses could not leave for another day, milled around wearing the paper hats of their particular candidate; they looked curiously into our car. There was shouting, and singing, and at various campaign headquarters - store-fronts draped in bunting -hundreds of supporters (tee-shirt, paper hat) chanted candidates' names and awaited the results. (In the event, the votes were not correctly counted for two weeks.) The voters were clearly identified as supporting this party or that party; it would not have been hard for any of the opposing parties to pick a fight. But the soldiers were numerous, and the only blood-curdling sounds I heard were those of the twanging tin-drum music and braying voices - one party headquarters trying to drown out another.
Dudley manoeuvered his car down a back street, cursing the potholes and blowing his horn at the crowds. It was hot and humid; the faces of these people were shining with perspiration.
'See any violence?' said Dudley.
I said no.
'These people,' he said - and he might have been speaking about the boys who were now thumping the rear fenders of his car with their fists - 'are known as "the happy people of Colombia".'
Happy was not precisely the word I would have used. They looked hysterical; their voices were shrill; they wiped their faces on their campaign tee-shirts, darkening the face of the man already printed there; they cat-called from cars, and we saw one new car run smack into the rear of a jeep and drive it into a tree. The new car's radiator burst and water dribbled into the street.
'His daddy will buy him a new one,' said Dudley.
'Who calls them the happy people of Colombia?' I asked.
'Everyone,' said Dudley. 'That's why nothing ever happens here. The government doesn't do anything here. They don't have to. They know the people are happy, so they don't give them anything.'
Some of the cars, and all the buses and trucks, had thick bunches of palm fronds tied to the bumpers just ahead of the tyres. They looked like tropical decorations. They were no such thing. In election time, playful Colombians sprinkled broken glass and nails on the roads; a vehicle without the palm fronds would have its tyres punctured, and then the occupants could easily be robbed or intimidated. But if the palm fronds were tied correctly they swept the glass and nails aside.
'Now if I was a little smarter,' said Dudley, 'I would have put some of those things on my car. I will, next time, if I live that long.'
Dudley was black. He had worked for a number of years in Nigeria and Mexico. He spoke Spanish with a drawl. He said Barranquilla was the worst place he had ever been, and he wondered sometimes if he would not be better off back home in Georgia.
'You seen enough of this election?'
I said I had. And I had seen enough of Barranquilla. The city had no centre. It was no more than hundreds of dusty roads running at right angles; a traffic jam at every corner, a rally on every street; soldiers positioned at polling stations, policemen aimlessly tweeting their whistles. Music, and mobs. The editorial in the morning Chronicle had said, 'Living in a democracy often makes one take its liberties for granted.' This might have been a democracy - it certainly looked chaotic enough to be one. The voting was unreadably busy and the crowds in the streets looked as if they expected something momentous to happen.
But nothing happened. The next morning, all the parties claimed a victory of some sort. Perhaps that was the answer. In a dictatorship only one party wins; in a Latin American democracy all the parties win; and such victories can only end in squabbles. It was like a Latin American football game. The score, the playing, the strategy mattered very little; the mob satisfaction mattered most. And it had to be a free-for-all because, no matter what happened, Barranquilla would remain Barranquilla. 'I once went to Buenaventura,' an American said to me. 'Someone told me that Buenaventura was the worst place in Colombia, and I couldn't believe that anything could be worse than Barranquilla. It was pretty bad, but it wasn't anything like this.'
While the election was going on, the Germans, the British, the Lebanese, the Americans, the sunbathing Japanese - all the communities that live in Barranquilla, all members of the Cabana Club -were observing the curfew from the swimming pool and patio of the Prado Hotel. The women read old copies of Vogue, the girls played radios, the men twirled the gold crucifixes around their necks; they flirted and idled. A mile away, in town, the farmers sat down in doorways, with the money in their pockets from the votes they had sold, and they waited until the curfew was lifted, so that they could go back to the mountains.
One commodity links all the people in Barranquilla: dope. Some grow it, some sell it, some buy it, some smoke it. Many people are in Barranquilla's jail for trafficking in dope (Henri Charrier, 'Papillon', spent a year in the same jail after he left Devil's Island), but far more have become millionaires by trading in marijuana. They even have a group name: they are marijuaneros - marijuana-ists. The profit is obvious in Barranquilla- more obvious than in any other city in South America, because Barranquilla is poorer than any other city. Less than a mile from the littered streets of downtown Barranquilla, on gentle hills that have a view of the Magdalena mudflats and the haze which hangs over the Caribbean shore, there was street after street of the strangest houses I had ever seen. They are the houses of the smugglers and drug peddlers who are known imprecisely as 'the Mafia'. The houses are built like bank vaults. They have high walls or unclimbable fences surrounding them. Most are faced with marble slabs and many have no windows. Windows here are long slits, six inches wide. They are more than burglar-proof; they are capable of withstanding a siege. These houses make the fortified suburb of the Bel-Air Estate in California look positively friendly and unprotected. And how, one asks, do the citizens of such a poor town find the money to build such prisons, each house a series of slabs arranged mausoleum-style? Why so many guard dogs, air-conditioners, coils of barbed wire?
It helps to look at the map to find the answer. Barranquilla is strategically located. It has a port. Between the mountains to the east are many flat hidden valleys, where planes can land and take off without being detected. The mountains rise to a high peninsula called the Guajira. The weather is perfect on the Guajira for growing marijuana, and the Guajira is a one-crop economy. Pot-smokers the world over recognize the taste of its product, known as Colombian Gold. Most of the houses in that Barranquilla suburb belong to farmers who have made their pile in the drug trade. The profits are vast for both farmer and smuggler. It is not unusual for a plane to leave with a ton of raw marijuana, and the smuggling has become such an institution that Barranquilla is the centre of the cocaine trade as well. The coca leaves are grown in Peru, smuggled into southern Colombia, processed in Cali, packaged in Bogotá, freighted to the coast, and by the time they arrive in Barranquilla it is ready for consumption. A kilo is worth half a million dollars in the States. The risks are high, but so are the rewards.