Road Fever (16 page)

Catbird regulations would be our biggest problem on the drive. We had done our best to butter the borders in thirteen different countries. It was possible that somewhere, at some blistering desert border point, our information would be wrong, incomplete, or simply out-of-date. It
was daunting to think that, in such a situation, we would have to depend on charm.

I
THANKED THE PILOT
, unhooked the military-style six-point harness, and went into the passenger cabin, where I put a frozen chicken entrée into the microwave oven. Later, I went to bed in the back of the first-class cabin. It was a three-layered-bunk affair. Soon enough—seventeen hours after leaving New York—we were in Buenos Aires.

It was 12:30
A.M
. Buenos Aires time, and the airport tarmac seemed virtually empty. We deplaned and watched the workers unload our truck. It was rolled to the cargo door on its pallet and loaded onto a device that looked a little bit like a construction crane. The truck swung out and swayed just in front of the growling Flying Tigers logo on the side of the 747. There were glaring lights and men shouting in Spanish.

They wouldn’t let us stay with the truck. We insisted and were rebuffed. The Tigers people felt that the airport was safe enough. For Christ’s sake, just go clear immigration and customs. Get the truck out later.

We were directed to an old red Ford Falcon. A man drove us to the main airport. Two men in blue work shirts were mopping a large empty expanse of floor. There were no commercial flights scheduled that night. The Falcon man took us to a door and indicated that we should knock. The Buenos Aires airport is bright, modern, efficient, but we had arrived at an off-peak time. The immigration official had been asleep. Nevertheless, he stamped our passports with good grace.

We went to customs. No one was there except for a man of about sixty, who appeared to be of Italian origin. He was wearing a miracle-fiber suit that was shiny with wear, and when he saw our cameras he shook his head sadly. “Electronics are prohibited,” he said. We couldn’t go through.

We found it difficult to believe that a country like Argentina, which has a large tourism industry, would ban cameras, and we mentioned this to the agent, offered it as an observation. The man noted that different countries have different laws. Yes, we said, that was certainly a fact that no one could deny and we absolutely had to agree with him there. It was strange, however, that when we had been to Argentina only a few months ago and had flown into this very airport, there had been no such prohibitions.

We showed the man our letters of introduction from the Canadian government, from various officials in Argentina. We gave him a thick
paper handout that described our trip. We showed him our passports. All were in order and very impressive, but it was his bitterly sad duty to inform us that we could not enter his beloved country with specifically prohibited electronic cameras. We were alone with the guy. There was no one around. Over the public-address system, very bad American-style Muzak—symphonic versions of Beatles songs, and at that particular moment, “My Love Is Blue”—were playing, loudly. It occurred to us that this guy might accept a bribe.

The gentleman simply stood there, smiling with theatrical helplessness and shaking his head sadly. He was relatively short, about five five, round, and gray. He had a great W. C. Fields honker of a beak wondrously corrugated by hundreds of tiny flesh-colored wartlike protuberances and striated by branching rivers of veins. I gathered the gentleman enjoyed an alcoholic beverage now and again.

We pretended not to understand. Garry dug out a Canadian-flag lapel pin. We had purchased several hundred of these for just this sort of situation. The high-quality pins—we also had a bag of pins that were exact replicas of our truck—could be used as gifts. We liked the idea of gifts rather than bribes: pin money.

Garry had used the system on previous trips and was of the opinion that every single human being on earth wants a lapel pin.

The man examined the metal maple leaf for some time, then asked if it was something that he could wear in the lapel of his suit. We assured him that it was. This seemed to delight the fellow and he asked if we had any more. Garry gave him about thirty. The customs official said that he really sympathized with our plight, that he wished us the best of luck on our Pan-American endeavor, and that—here he put his finger to his lips—if we did not tell anyone, he would let us pass.

The transaction had taken just over an hour. I had a vision of this gentleman in a Buenos Aires café, sitting there with his shiny suit and glowing nose, proudly wearing his maple-leaf lapel pin as if to say, “Look at me, I’m a real dickweed.”

And so we emerged into the main terminal of the Buenos Aires Ezeiza airport which was, at two-thirty in the morning, completely empty except for one sleepy soldier. We had been told to wait in the “international hold” and had no idea where that might be. The soldier said we couldn’t go back and look for the truck. We stood there for some time, with our bags, wondering what to do. I asked the soldier for some information, explained the project, and told him that I was an international rally driver, which seemed to impress him. He took me to his commanding officer, who was in an office not far away.

We found out that the truck could not be picked up until the next morning at eight. We had reservations at the Sheraton and decided to go there. Somehow.

Outside it was forty-five degrees and dark. There were perhaps twenty cars parked in the large lot in front of the international terminal. I found a Falcon parked along the curb and saw a man sleeping in the backseat with an overcoat over him. I knocked on the window. “Taxi?” Yeah, he said, I’m a taxi. He’d take us to the Sheraton. And so we left the beautiful Buenos Aires International Airport via the wide and well-lit freeway. The freeway, in fact, is so well lit that thrifty Argentines often drive it with their lights off.

We checked into the Sheraton and Garry said he wondered if we were going to have problems getting the truck out of customs. In New York, he had told Flying Tigers that the truck was worth $50,000. It was a self-declared amount, for the purposes of the flight airbill. The problem was that the carnet stated the truck was worth $25,000. Would we have trouble tomorrow with that discrepancy? The worst-case scenario was that we might have to post a $25,000 bond. Garry was worried.

We had not completed all the work on our visas as well. I needed extensions on Panama, Guatemala, and Honduras, and a visa for Costa Rica. We also needed to check on our “drive-in” status in Ecuador and Nicaragua.

Tomorrow, I would work on the visas and permits. Garry would attempt to get the truck out of customs.

A
T NINE-THIRTY
the next morning Garry called GM Argentina. Duilio DiBella, the executive who was to be our contact, a man we had talked with for some time on our last trip, was not in. Garry was referred to Raul O. Capuano, who was, in fact, the former director-general of the company until his retirement. Sr. Capuano was a gentleman in his sixties, wearing a tastefully muted glen-plaid suit. DiBella, who was out of town, had asked Raul to help us arid he accompanied Garry to the airport to get the truck.

They walked into a long hallway, which was about the length of a football field and which was filled with agitated men dressed in a kind of unofficial uniform of black slacks and leather jackets. The customs agents all carried briefcases and they gathered at tiny open portholes in the wall. Behind the portholes, there were men sitting at desks—perhaps one hundred men and fifty desks—and in that room all was
pandemonium: the New York stock exchange conducted in panic Spanish. The customs agents shouted through the portholes at the men milling around on the other side. Behind the desks were goods that had come in by air, and the men were in the process of claiming them.

This appeared as if it would be an exercise in frustration, since just getting the attention of someone behind the wall looked to be a several: hour proposition. Raul Capuano, however, saw someone he knew in the hallway. The man had worked for him at GM before GM pulled its operation out of Argentina. Many of the GM people had gone to work at customs. This man was an expediter assigned the task of helping people with complex customs problems. It was best if the persons with complex customs problems also had money in their pockets.

The expediter opened a door, and Garry and Raul were inside looking out at the faces of the men looking in.

The truck, it seems, had come in late and had not been “put in the system.” It would have to be done “by hand.” This took five minutes. There was a storage charge of 1 percent based on the stated worth of the truck ($25,000), or $250, for which Garry got a receipt. As for the problem of the stated worth on the airbill ($50,000) as opposed to the $25,000 on the carnet, well, the expediter had to agree with Garry that the airbill was the stated worth for insurance purposes, while, in fact, it was perfectly obvious that the worth was as stated in the carnet. “Flying Tigers,” he said, “made a mistake.” Still, it would take two or three days to work this all out.

Unless …

It was a pretty straightforward deal. Fifty dollars to the expediter and two hundred australs to be distributed to the other workers. Garry cleared customs in two and a half hours.

In all, it was $250 for storage and about $100 for unreceipted services. This was all accomplished with much smiling and a great number of handshakes all around. Garry gave a copy of the trip description—a heavy paper handout with our pictures, an explanation of the run in Spanish, and a map on the back—to one of the customs officials, who promptly pinned it to a bulletin board.

Garry was convinced that it was a good deal. In the normal course of events, it would have taken three or four days to get the truck out of customs, and we surely would have paid well over $100 to stay in Buenos Aires for that amount of time. (Indeed, because of the stated airbill value of $50,000 as opposed to the carnet value, Garry might have been a week or more sorting out problems.) The overworked
customs agents made a few dollars. This was not, we were given to understand, bribery of any sort. We had simply paid some individuals to “find” our work on their desks.

Garry had a drink with Sr. Capuano. About a decade ago, GM had pulled out of Argentina. It was a time of extraordinary turmoil. In 1946, Juan Perón had come to power, supported by the military and the labor unions. Perón’s wife, Eva, was particularly loved for her devotion to the poor, the “shirtless ones.” The government practiced Robin Hood economics: the living conditions of the workers improved but the economy was left in shambles. In 1955 a military coup unseated Perón. A succession of five governments—three military and two constitutional—followed. Perón again took power but died in 1974. His vice president and widow, Eva Perón, “Evita” of rock-opera fame, assumed the presidency. The shirtless ones gathered at her office every morning, but Robin Hood economics left the country in chaos. Radicals—unionists, students, intellectuals—mounted an armed insurgency and there was guerrilla warfare in the streets. Murder and kidnapping.

GM executives were often targets of the radicals. They were men whose parents had immigrated from Italy as peasants and had risen to high positions in the country. They would get telephone calls—“there is a bomb in your house”—and a man would have to decide whether to evacuate his family. Were killers waiting for the family out behind the hedge with guns? Or was there really a bomb in the house?

It was the kind of decision executives were making in the mid-seventies.

The military deposed Señora Perón and set about suppressing dissidents with extraordinary brutality. In the “dirty war” that followed—it was called “the process” or “the trial”—the military crushed the insurgency. Some radicals were killed without a trial.

With the insurgency in tatters, virtually destroyed, the military continued its campaign. “We have,” one highly placed Argentine official told me, “a German-trained military.”

Intellectuals were rounded up. Members of unions. People who had once been members of unions. People who once knew someone who had once said something critical of the government. The terror was now sanctioned, official, and torture was its instrument. People named names and those they named disappeared, nine thousand of them in all.

The official terror did nothing to improve economic conditions. Still, the one thing the military was supposed to be able to do was fight wars, and after Argentina lost the Falklands conflict to Great Britain in 1982,
pressure for a return to constitutional government was irresistible. A civilian candidate won the elections of 1983. In 1985 two of the former ruling generals were sentenced to long jail terms for their part in “the trial.”

But in the mid-seventies, with terror in the streets and a failing economy, GM had a decision to make. They realized that in order to be competitive, they would have to introduce a new car. That involved tremendous expense. GM simply decided to cut its losses.

In 1987, Argentines were making an old GMC pickup, importing parts for a truck that was partially built at the Sevel plant, in accordance with Argentine law. Sevel, a consortium of Fiat and Peugeot, was authorized to market the truck under the Chevrolet name and GM had a skeleton staff installed there.

Raul Capuano had been called out of retirement to help with the project at Sevel. He was delighted because it got him out of the house and out from under his wife’s feet. We were looking for an electric heating coil for the truck—something to heat up water for our freeze-dried food—and Sr. Capuano called several places, then said he’d look for one for us tomorrow. Garry said, “But you must be busy.” Sr. Capuano said he’d love to do it and his wife would thank us as well. It seemed strange to have a former director-general of GM working as a gopher for us.

M
EANWHILE
, I was burning up the phones at the Sheraton. It seemed wise to hire a translator in my quest for visas. My Spanish was rusty and, in any case, I speak it one painful word at a time, all in the present tense, like Tarzan: we eat much food now; I have many women now.