Colonel Zolo
Colonel Zolo
Mayan pyramid at Palenque, Chiapas
COLONEL ZOLO:
THE HOSTEL
Where ever I’ve travelled, I’ve always had adventures. It didn’t matter if I was in Central America, Upstate New York or Eastern Europe. Every trip has thrown curve-ball incidents at me, ones that in retrospect have made great stories but at the time seemed like that just maybe my life was in danger.
We were staying at a hostel in the town of Frontera Corozal, on the Mexico-Guatemala border. We’d already been to see the Mayan sites in Palenque and were just chilling out, getting ready for our journey back north to Ciudad de México.
The hostel we were staying in wasn’t really a hostel at all but a home a local family rented to people passing through, mainly tourists. It was cheap, and seeing as myself, Tomas and Igor were getting ever low on cash, a good thing really.
“I’m just going out for a smoke,” I said to the boys, who were lying on their beds.
I went out onto the balcony. As soon as I had, the heavens opened up. It happened too regularly in this part of the world. I thought I knew what rain was as I’d witnessed it plenty of times before in Ireland and England, but this was on another level altogether.
ENTER ZOLO
A voice said something to my left in Spanish.
“No entiendo,” I said to the middle-aged gentleman smoking a cigar, who looked like the movie villain Colonel Zolo from Romancing the Stone, Panama hat and all.
“Americano?” he asked me.
“No. I’m from Europe,” I said in English.
“Which country?” he then asked in English too.
“The UK, but I’m Irish,” I answered.
“Irlandes,” he said with a smile.
“Sí.”
“And where are you from?” I asked.
“Cali, Colombia,” he said, again with a smile.
Did he know something I didn’t?
He was the first Colombian I’d met since 1992. Back then, I’d been working as a lab technician (actually a test tube and petri dish washer) in a laboratory in Birmingham and working with a nice lady from Medellín, Colombia. The woman — whose name escapes me — was on some kind of scientific exchange programme for a few months. We built up quite a friendship, though no romance bloomed as she was at least a decade older than me. At the time, Colombia was in the middle of a civil war that had gone on for decades against FARC, a counterrevolutionary movement fighting against President Gaviria’s government. Gaviria was also preoccupied with the Medellín and Cali cartels ongoing war. Coupled with these, cocaine drug lord Pablo Escobar — from the lady’s hometown — was being held in his self-styled prison, La Catedral, on the outskirts of the city, much to the chagrin of countless families of his victims over the years, who sought proper justice for the ‘world’s richest criminal’. Additionally, the country was going through an energy crisis brought on by El Niño. She taught me a lot about her country, so when I met that Colombian on the rainy Chiapas afternoon in 1997 I was ready for a conversation.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Colombia,” I said.
He took out a cigarette:
“Then why don’t you, then?” he said in good English.
“Your English is good,” I said to him.
“I learned in America… So, what, you on vacation?”
“Yeah, with friends.”
“Where are they?”
“Inside. Sleeping.”
“You enjoying México?” he asked me, pronouncing Mexico like it should be pronounced.
“Yeah, sure I do.”
“That’s good — you smoke?” he said. I lifted up my right hand holding my cigarette. “I don’t mean that,” he added.
“Marijuana?” I said.
“Yeah, marijuana?”
“Sometimes, yeah.”
“And coke, cocaine?”
“No,” I said.
I felt a weird sense of danger then. I threw my cigarette on the ground and was about to go back inside.
“Where are you going?” he asked me.
“I’m going in.”
“Don’t. Stay. Talk a while.”
I didn’t know what to say, but I said something anyway:
“What do you want to talk about?”
Tomas came out on to the balcony, stretching.
“Hi,” Tomas said to him.
At that point he introduced himself by name, although I can’t remember what it was now — I’ll call him Eduardo.
Tomas had only come out for a second to grab a smoke off me — he was heading to the nearest store for a bottle of water.
The conversation took a normal direction until I asked Eduardo why he was in Mexico:
“My cousin, he’s in prison,” the Colombian asked.
“In prison?” I said, swallowing hard.
“Yes, in Cobán, Guatemala. I’ve come to get him out.”
I could only guess what for, but I didn’t ask. I had to get away from him. I had to make an excuse:
I yawned.
“Oh, my god, I’m so tired,” I said, stretching.
“Would you like to know why he’s in jail?”
“No, not really,” I answered.
I made my excuses and went back inside. That, however, wasn’t the end of the story with Mr Eduardo.
SECOND MEETING
Later that night, we were out drinking in a cantina in the centre of Frontera Corozal. It was a sad little place. Poor, with Mexican soldiers everywhere (this was the year the Zapatista Uprising was intense, and the Acteal Massacre was about to happen in the winter, more about that in a later post), and we felt a little unsafe, but my two Czech friends were thirsty and demanded a drink.
Romancing the Stone, a 1984 film starring Michael Douglas that Colonel Zolo was the baddy in. Poster from WikiCommons