Late Night Choke Hold Muggings

by Benjamin Dangl

4/07/05

When I was traveling in Peru a few years ago, I read a section of a guide book which warned of "Late Night Choke Hold Muggings" in a certain section of Cuzco. It was hard not to laugh at such a phrase, yet there was no doubt a reason why it was in the guide book. I was reminded of that warning as I listened to horror stories from tourists in Caracas, Venezuela. In the three weeks I had been there I heard from over a dozen travelers who had been robbed, which was a much higher number than anywhere else I have ever traveled.

One Argentine couple was robbed at gun point on their way back from the airport in an "official" taxi. The robbers pulled out automatic weapons and took the Argentines' bags, money and credit cards, so when they arrived at our hostel they were penniless and shaking. A Swiss person walking down the street had his shoes robbed from him and three Swedish women had their beer robbed from them when walking back to the hostel one night. One afternoon a Dutchman was ushered into a van by police who demanded a bribe. The Dutchman had over a thousand dollars which had just been wired to him from home. The police asked where he was staying and then let him go. As he was walking up the steps to his hotel, he was hit with a stun gun and went unconscious. When he woke up all of his money was gone.

Other Swedish tourists were approached by police twice in two days and forced to give a bribe in order to not be hauled off to jail. Others had stories of being robbed by gunpoint on the beach, attacked with machetes or being forced to take money out of an ATM. Others had been drugged, waking up two days later in the hospital without a cent…

Illegal Spring

I this wrote in my notebook before leaving Caracas, Venezuela:

“The skyscrapers are all holding their breath and the subways just inhale. Silence is the sound of a truck backing up. The sun pounds at the asphalt until the heat and the tar surrender in a soft release and the mirages that rise off the surface of the streets dance silently. The ink is melting off the newspapers and the stoplights are drunk with humidity. Even the mosquitoes are too lazy to move. Evening arrives like a snow storm in the middle of a burning building. People start to crawl from behind fans and gather on porches and street corners. The sweat soaked day self consciously oozes into night.”

The flight from Caracas to New York City, from one planet to another, seemed incredibly short. In NY I wrote the following in my notebook about the city’s imminent spring:

“Even when there is no rain, small streams run between the tracks in the subway. They are made up of the slimy byproducts of a city with too many things to buy. New York City’s waste gathers between those steal rails and rots into the soggy pages of world history. These are the smells of the city’s roots, desperately reaching into the tired earth with an unnatural hunger, hiccupping out of drain pipes and sewers, bubbling into the city streets like a fifth season, an illegal spring. Spring in the city is the produce section in a supermarket during a blackout. Flowers exhale themselves into existence, and suddenly there is something more colorful than the garbage in the streets. Grass pops up between the cracks in the sidewalks and the birds sing to the beat of winter’s death rattles. Spring is Mother Nature’s fecund indigestion, her bad breath blowing upwind towards summer.”

* * *

Now that I am back in the US, know I’ll miss the language in South America, the music, the lively conversations, politics and places, where the buses are named after the jungles they travel through, and where the mosquitoes, like policeman, only travel in pairs.

On the plane to NYC, I explained to a Costa Rican man sitting next to me how I’ll miss traveling and the friends I met on the recent trip. He told me a saying his mother liked to use: “Life is nothing but memory.” When he told me this I couldn’t help remembering a quote from the Uruguayan musician Jorge Drexler who said something like, “There is no greater waste of time than dwelling on the past.” It was hard to know who to believe.

Benjamin Dangl is the editor of UpsideDownWorld.org. To read more of his articles click here.

HOME