Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

“I’ll be frank,” Paula said one day, while we were sitting in a coffee shop. “The Indians and all the farmers who live along the river you’re damming hate you. Even people in the cities, who aren’t directly affected, sympathize with the guerrillas who’ve been attacking your construction camp. Your government calls these people Communists, terrorists, and narcotics traffickers, but the truth is they’re just people with families who live on lands your company is destroying.”

I had just told her about Manuel Torres. He was an engineer employed by MAIN and one of the men recently attacked by guerrillas at our hydroelectric dam construction site. Manuel was a Colombian citizen who had a job because of a U.S. Department of State rule prohibiting us from sending U.S. citizens to that site. We referred to it as the Colombians are Expendable doctrine, and it symbolized an attitude I had grown to hate. My feelings toward such policies were making it increasingly difficult for me to live with myself.

“According to Manuel, they fired AK-47s into the air and at his feet,” I told Paula. “He sounded calm when he told me about it, but I know he was almost hysterical. They didn’t shoot anyone. Just gave them that letter and sent them downriver in their boats.”

“My God,” Paula exclaimed. “The poor man was terrified.”

“Of course he was.” I told her that I had asked Manuel whether he thought they were FARC or M-19, referring to two of the most infamous Colombian guerrilla groups.

“And?”

“He said, neither. But he told me that he believes what they said in that letter.”

Paula picked up the newspaper I had brought and read the letter aloud.

“‘We, who work every day just to survive, swear on the blood of our ancestors that we will never allow dams across our rivers. We are simple Indians and mestizos, but we would rather die than stand by as our land is flooded. We warn our Colombian brothers: stop working for the construction companies.’” She set the paper down. “What did you say to him?”

I hesitated, but only for a moment. “I had no choice. I had to toe the company line. I asked him if he thought that sounds like a letter a farmer would write.”

She sat watching me, patiently.

“He just shrugged.” Our eyes met. “Oh, Paula, I detest myself for playing this role.”

“What did you do next?” she pressed.

“I slammed my fist on the desk. I intimidated him. I asked him whether farmers with AK-47s made any sense to him. Then I asked if he knew who invented the AK-47.”

“Did he?”

“Yes, but I could hardly hear his answer. ‘A Russian,’ he said. Of course, I assured him that he was right, that the inventor had been a Communist named Kalashnikov, a highly decorated officer in the Red Army. I brought him around to understand that the people who wrote that note were Communists.”

“Do you believe that?” she asked.

Her question stopped me. How could I answer, honestly? I recalled Iran and the time Yamin described me as a man caught between two worlds, a man in the middle. In some ways, I wished I had been in that camp when the guerrillas attacked, or that I was one of the guerrillas. An odd feeling crept over me, a sort of jealousy for Yamin and Doc and the Colombian rebels. These were men with convictions. They had chosen real worlds, not a no-man’s territory somewhere between.

“I have a job to do,” I said at last.

She smiled gently.

“I hate it,” I continued. I thought about the men whose images had come to me so often over the years, Tom Paine and other Revolutionary War heroes, pirates and frontiersmen. They stood at the edges, not in the middle. They had taken stands and lived with the consequences. “Every day I come to hate my job a little more.”

She took my hand. “Your job?”

Our eyes met and held. I understood the implication. “Myself.”

She squeezed my hand and nodded slowly. I felt an immediate sense of relief, just admitting it.

“What will you do, John?”

I had no answer. The relief turned into defensiveness. I stammered out the standard justifications: that I was trying to do good, that I was exploring ways to change the system from within, and—the old standby—that if I quit, someone even worse would fill my shoes. But I could see from the way she watched me that she was not buying it. Even worse, I knew that I was not buying it either. She had forced me to understand the essential truth: it was not my job, but me, that was to blame.

“What about you?” I asked at last. “What do you believe?”

She gave a little sigh and released my hand, asking, “You trying to change the subject?”

I nodded.