“He’s over there,” she said to Oscar when he went to the reception area, pointing at a sunburned, full-bearded man who was reading an out-of-date copy of the Globe and Mail. A few minutes later, in Oscar’s office, the visitor identified himself as Luigi Ponti, a doctoral student in anthropology from the University of Verona conducting research on the Cuiva Indians of the tropical rainforest on the Meta River, close to the border with Venezuela. Death squads, he said, hired by ranchers who wanted to drive away the Indians in order to graze cattle on their lands, had moved into the area, burning their villages and shooting them on sight. He had gone to the police but they refused to act. He had spoken to Colombian bureaucrats, called on politicians of all political parties and even approached the newspapers.
“But nobody wants to do anything about it; they all say they’re afraid of the big landowners and their hired thugs. But I think the real reason is the governing class quietly supports the death squads. Getting rid of the Indians would open up vast areas of the country and be good for national development. I’m now making the rounds of the embassies trying to get them to take an interest in what’s going on down there. So far, I’ve been to see the Americans, the French, the British, and the Dutch. They all told me that nobody back in their capitals is interested in the fate of a few primitive Indians in the jungles of Latin America. Their publics are all out of compassion. The horrors of the war burned them out.”
“And so you’ve come to me because someone told you I was an Indian?” Oscar asked, pouring shots of aguardiente for his guest and for himself.
“That’s right,” Luigi said, drinking to Oscar’s health. “I took a chance that you might be interested in the fate of your brothers down here.”
“I’d like to help, Oscar, honest to God I would,” said Georges Leroux, Canada’s ambassador to Colombia.
The ambassador had grown up in the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico City, where his father was an expatriate businessman, and had attended a school for the children of rich foreigners and upper class Mexicans. On his way to and from school each day, he could not help but see the poorly dressed, underfed, suffering people, especially the Indians, who came into the city each day in search of work.
“You have lots of money,” he told his father, “why don’t give some of it to the poor?”
“I’d like to help, son,” his father had said, “honest to God I really would, but the problem is far too great for any one person to solve.”
Georges hoped his father was wrong, and after graduation from McGill University in the late 1930s, he joined the Department hoping to make the world a better place. However, his staffing officer posted him to the Canadian embassy in Buenos Aires to spend the war as an assistant to the Canadian trade commissioner. With the resumption of peace in 1945, Georges asked to be sent to the Canadian mission to the United Nations to work on human rights issues, but he had demonstrated such a flair for trade promotion in Argentina that the Department denied his request and sent him as trade commissioner to the Canadian embassy in Havana, Cuba.
Canada’s ambassador in Havana, however, was a unilingual Anglophone who neither spoke nor had any interest in learning to speak Spanish. And since the great majority of Cubans did not know English, or if they did, preferred to speak their own language with their foreign contacts, the circle of contacts of the head of post was confined to the American and British ambassadors and members of the overseas Canadian community. Georges, who spoke Spanish like a native Cuban, thus became responsible for developing and maintaining links with members of Cuba’s government and power elite.
The Department quickly promoted him to the rank of deputy ambassador to reflect his new duties and moved him into a fully furnished three-bedroom, four-bathroom house with extensive gardens filled with fragrant yellow and white flowering frangipani plants and chirping crickets. A cook, maid, and gardener, who lived in staff quarters on the grounds discreetly out of sight of the main house, prepared his meals, washed and ironed his clothes, and cut the grass, tended the gardens, and brought him gin and tonic cocktails with snacks whenever he rang a little bell. He became accustomed to cha-cha-cha music and white-tie dinner parties in the hot and humid night air around swimming pools under giant royal palm trees. Profiteroles stuffed with vanilla ice cream and covered in hot chocolate sauce became his dessert of choice. Dom Perignon champagne, Chambertin burgundy, and Château d’Yquem sauterne, purchased at the local diplomatic duty-free shops, became his favourite wines. He relished the atmosphere of the casinos frequented by mobsters from Miami and corrupt government officials and their high-priced call girls. Each time a high roller won or lost millions at the throw of the dice, and whenever bombs placed by revolutionaries trying to overthrow the government exploded nearby, an addictive thrill of excitement, a sense that he was living life on the edge, ran through his body.
Georges decided that he wanted to spend the rest of his career in Latin American capitals like the Havana of the late 1940s and set aside his youthful enthusiasm for making the world a better place. And because he proved to be so good at promoting trade and making friends with the people who counted in Latin American society, the Department acceded to his desire, and in no time at all he rose to become an ambassador. His son, who attended local private schools in the countries of his service, and who was deeply concerned at the sight of so many beggars on the streets, sometimes asked his father why he never did anything to help the poor, but he never received a satisfactory answer.
“The Spaniards and then the Colombians have been slaughtering Indians in this country for centuries,” Ambassador Leroux said, continuing to lecture Oscar, “and they’ll keep on slaughtering them until the last one is dead. When they’re not killing Indians, they’re killing each other. In the last three years they’ve murdered a half-million of their own people in some of the most godawful ways. We don’t know what makes these people tick. They’re crazy. I think they like killing people. Outsiders shouldn’t get involved. It wouldn’t do any good if we did.”
“But we’re living in the twentieth century,” Oscar said. “Canadians helped draft the United Nations Charter and signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Surely we should speak out when we see governments standing by and doing nothing when their Indians are being killed.”
“Oscar, I feel like I’m talking to my son. You were a soldier. You’ve seen the Nazi death camps, I presume. You know what man is capable of doing. And yet you’re more than a little naïve. We signed those human rights declarations just for show, just to make us feel better for treating your people, and all the others in Canada who have no power, the way we do, just to make us look good internationally. The Indians will remain at the bottom of the heap for my lifetime at least. I shouldn’t have to tell you all this.”
“What if I was to go with this anthropologist and see what’s going on for myself and send a report to Ottawa?”
“What do you think we would do even if you prove the allegations are true?” asked the ambassador, who always associated himself with the Canadian government in his pronouncements. “We would do nothing. And we wouldn’t do anything if we could. In embassies in these places in the middle of nowhere, we don’t care about Indians. What we care about down here is selling asbestos, mining equipment, diesel generators, automobiles, tractors, trucks, bagged flour, and shiploads of beans, anything at all to make a buck and keep Canadians working. When we can’t sell our goods fair and square, we do like our competitors and bribe the hell out of the corrupt bastards in charge to get the deals, even if they just pass on the increased costs to the poor. And when you get right down to it, there’s no real difference between bribing people and killing Indians except the amount of evil involved. We all agreed to get our hands dirty, whether we knew it or not, when we joined the government. We’re all Indian killers, Oscar, even you.”
Overcome