The police commissioner in Atacames doesn’t want to know.
“We don’t deal with Mompiche,” he says flatly, refusing to look up from his papers, behaving more like a stuffy bureaucrat than a policeman.
“But they told me to come here,” I plead, hurting from the long bus trip; badly bruised and battered the day after the machete attack.
“No. We’re not interested.” He turns his back and waves me away, as if I am nothing more than an insect bothering him unnecessarily. The police logo on his desk says “To Serve and Protect”.
Angry and frustrated, I leave. He’s the second policeman I’ve encountered in two days who could care less if Mayor had chopped me into human sushi. The first being Jimmy who, normally round and jolly, suddenly transformed into stone. At this point, I wonder if Ecuador actually has any laws regarding machete attacks. Are women, whatever their age, race, creed or color, not protected against violence, domestic or otherwise? Apparently not.
Exhausted and sore, I return to Mompiche and spend a couple of days in bed, recovering from my injuries; physical and psychological, and thinking about my next move. At some point, I have photos taken of my wounds.
The Police Commissioner in Muisne is only slightly more helpful.
“We will issue a restraining order and then request that he come in and talk to us,” reassures the enormous dark policeman. He reeks of onions. I shy away from his foul breath.
“Talk to you?” I ask, incredulous. “Is that it?”
The commissioner shrugs effeminately. Whatever happened to putting criminals in handcuffs and putting them behind bars? Is that not done here? Clearly, unless some form of remuneration is passed under the table, his soft, un-calloused hands are tied. One lunatic almost murdered me and this corrupt creep expects me to pay him to uphold the law? He disgusts and dismays me. Restraining order in hand, I take the next bus to Esmeraldas. My body aches in protest at the long distances I have to travel to get anything done.
The Provincial Chief of Police is happy to receive me, if only I could wait a few minutes. Of course. Hands throbbing, head aching, eyes red from stress and exhaustion, I sit in a waiting room for almost an hour while Colonel Ponce concludes his meetings.
“He what?!” Colonel Ponce asks, his jaw dropping after I describe the crime in detail and then Jimmy’s subsequent reaction. I go on to outline the other meetings with the commissioners in Atacames and Muisne.
Nodding and frowning as I relate the events of the previous few days, grey-haired Ponce is clearly disturbed. His thin face, deeply lined with the responsibilities of his province, twitches as he absorbs the information.
“This is unacceptable,” he states, picking up the phone. “We’re going to do something about this immediately.”
A few minutes later, another commissioner shows up. “Come with me ma’am. We’re going to take your statement downstairs.”
A grueling half-hour with Constable Solis Mina Wellington in the interview room reveals mostly that this lean crew-cut policeman has never learned to type, much less read or spell. And he doesn’t know the first thing about listening. The statement is incomplete, and filled with errors. I try to explain that there is more, that we’re not even half done. He’s not interested. It’s the end of his shift. Wellington wants to go home.
“You have to come back tomorrow to verify your signature and get a medical examination,” he says, printing the document. He doesn’t even give me a chance to read it before he signs it, hands me a copy, and vanishes out the door. At the front desk, the clerk insists I sign the papers because Constable Wellington has already signed both the office copies. Reluctantly, I sign my name at the bottom of each page.
This half-assed statement in hand; typos, names and dates incorrect, spelling errors and all, I head back to the bus station only to learn I’ve missed the last bus back to Mompiche. The last bus to Chamanga is leaving in ten minutes. I doze most of the way to Tres Vias.
Dropped off at the turn-off, I discover there is no phone signal, and begin walking. I cover almost the entire seven kilometers to the village in the dark before Miguel comes along and gives me a ride the last bit of the way home on his motorbike. A few minutes later, when I go to deliver a copy of the restraining order to the police station, I learn that Jimmy has been transferred out of Mompiche; replaced by Constable Ricardo Sanchez. It’s loathe at first sight. In another place, another time, he might have been profiled as the perfect Gestapo recruit. He’s also a friend of Mayor’s.
At dawn the next morning, I head back to Esmeraldas to verify my signature and get a medical examination. CTW, my eye witness, comes along. She was with me in the house when Mayor showed up and she witnessed the whole gory incident. She’s agreed to make a police statement. We are misinformed that we will have to wait until 3pm. After whiling the time away in internet cafes and wandering around the streets of the city, we finally arrive at the provincial District Attorney’s office. There, we’re made for wait for over an hour until they decide what to do with us. Finally, just before 5pm, we’re taken upstairs. A hurried secretary leads CTW into an interview room and I’m taken down the the doctor’s office to make an injury report that, in the end, never makes it to the District Attorney’s office in Atacames. CTW’s statement is also incomplete and riddled with mistakes.
Once again, the last bus to Mompiche is long gone by the time we arrive at the bus terminal. We board the last bus to Chamanga. Tonight, by prearrangement, Galo Intriago picks us up at the entrance. Barely able to keep my eyes open, I can’t even be bothered to eat before I hit the sack.
CTW stays for a couple more weeks, enjoying Mompiche and helping to cook, clean and wash my hair; activities I am unable to do with badly injured hands. After helping me move into the half-constructed house, she leaves for the USA.
“So why did you fire the builder?” asks the DA’s secretary, Luis Castillo.
“I got tired of the sexual harassment, the verbal abuse and the general lack of respect, the poor quality building methods, and being robbed every time I turned around, amongst other things,” I tell him, describing a few specific incidents of the sexual harassment.
For a long moment, Luis Castillo sits at his desk with his mouth open, appalled. It seems there are laws in Ecuador regarding sexual harassment.
“You have to make a separate statement for the sexual harassment,” he informs me. “Then you need to go and see the detectives so they can investigate the crime scene. I’ll also send you to the doctor for a legal examination because the last report never arrived.”
I spend another hour with another man who can’t type, making another statement, incomplete and full of errors, regarding the sexual harassment I was subjected to while Mayor was building my house.
“Why didn’t you fire him sooner?” Luis inquires.
“Because I thought I’d get hung up by the thumbs by the labor council.”
A friend had recently been done over by a worker he’d fired for theft. The labor council made him pay the worker over three thousand dollars – a year’s salary – for breaking the employment contract. I didn’t want to end up in the same predicament.
“Sexual harassment is hard to prove,” he states, painstakingly punching out one letter at a time with his index fingers.
Tell me about it.
Next, he sends me to the Atacames Police to organize the investigation. Detective Alejandro Paredes could have fallen off the set of a very bad detective film. He has greasy unkempt hair, the beginnings of a paunch and Marty Feldman-ish goggle eyes. He closely inspects the neckline of my tank top, as if that’s precisely where he’s planning to launch his investigation. During our interview, his eyes shy away from meeting mine.
“You’ll have to pay for the gasoline so I can come to Mompiche and do an investigation,” he says, staring at his chipped fingernails.
He’s kidding, right? Apparently, he’s not kidding. I’m down to my last hundred bucks in the whole world and this joker who is paid by the state expects me to pay his gas.
“Why don’t you come in a police car?”
His look shows that he knows I know. I look straight through his eyes. He looks away.
“Okay. I can probably find a police car in the next week.”
“What will you do exactly?”
“Investigate the crime scene. Take photos. Look around.”
A week later, Detective Alejandro Paredes shows up in a police car, with a male friend and two girls in shorts and bikini tops in tow. Very professional. Not. He spends half an hour in my house, touching everything, asking irrelevant questions, peering into my bedroom. At every step he takes, my hackles rise higher. I say nothing. He takes photos. He asks me to pose. I prefer not to. Photos of my physical injuries have already been submitted to the DA’s office. Paredes doesn’t need photos of me, just of the damage to the wooden door and all the blood stains. My unwillingness to cooperate makes him antsy.
“We need these photos for evidence.”
“These bloodstains on the floor are the evidence.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to…”
“You’ll figure it out. See you tomorrow.”
I’m relieved to see the back of him. Sleazy is not a nasty enough word for him. The next day, when I go to the police station, he can’t figure out how to download the photos from the camera to the computer. I have to show him. He makes me slide past his chair and lean over his back to transfer the files. I ask him to save them to my USB drive so I can print them. He accidentally deletes every file I have saved. I spend fifteen minutes retrieving them, then he yanks my USB out of the computer. Finally, with his USB in hand, I get the photos printed then return to the police station so he can spend three hours typing descriptions of each photo and then pasting them onto white sheets of paper. We then go to deliver the photos to the public prosecutor. On the way back from the DA’s office, we pass an ice cream shop famous for its tasty handmade ice creams.
“Let’s get ice cream,” he suggests.
I consider the limited funds in my pocket. We missed lunch. I can spring for an ice cream cone each and still have bus fare home. Once inside, he orders a fancy fruit salad bowl with four scoops and whipped cream, nuts, cherries, all the trimmings. Wipes out my wallet. While slurps his ice cream, loudly sucking on pieces of watermelon and papaya, he licks his lips and greedily ogles every girl that walks past, checking them out in the mirror as they turn the corner.
“Tell me about the sexual harassment,” he says, looking me up and down.
“It’s in the statement.”
“What did he say to you? What did he do? Did he touch you?”
“Read the statement.”
“I want you to tell me.”
“I’m sure you do.”
When I get on the bus, penniless, I tell the conductor that I have no money because I was robbed in Atacames. It’s kind of true. The conductor tells me not to worry, he’ll get me safely to Mompiche and I can pay him next time. He will never know how eternally grateful I am to meet a sincere man with a gentle heart right at that moment. It’s those kind souls who restore my battered faith in the human race. The first time since being attacked, I shed a tear.
Ya Mismo: Thirty Minutes North of Zero 