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  hardie karges 10:57 pm on February 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: crime, Customs, Panama   

  Nickels and Dimes 

  The Casco Viejo, the old town in Panama City, was no better.  That was right after Customs strip-searched me GETTING ON the plane, so I was still a little fragile.  First thing, some guy in Panama lunges for my bag.  I pulled away quickly; I’m not THAT fragile.  The next day I looked out my window and saw a Panamanian woman holding on to the strap of her bag that had just been slashed, and crying.  I flagged a taxi and boogied.  Mexico wasn’t so bad, except for Oaxaca, though I’ve heard Mexico City is now one of the worst in the world.  Most of my problem in Oaxaca was with parking my truck on the street.  I think it got hit every time.  I don’t think it ever got hit in Mexico City.   Yes, I used to drive in Mexico City.  I even drove in Taxco once, up and up and up, all the way until I found a way to come back down.  But the worst place for larceny was Colombia.  After I got set up on the little drug farce, nothing happened again to me, but it did to many that I met, some under the influence of perfume.  In Colombia, rumor was that they had a school for pickpockets.  They were good.  Mostly I smoked dope there, anywhere and everywhere, hanging with the homies.  I‘ve never been mugged anywhere, or physically assaulted for any reason.

   

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  hardie karges 3:59 am on February 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Alan Garcia, crime, Peru ( 5 )   

  South American Disease 

  Peru used to be the larceny capital in the world, after Colombia, of course.  I used to walk down the streets of Lima zigzag, just so that if I saw someone else doing the same, I’d know something’s wrong.  I’d walk with a fistful of coins in my hand, just in case I had to take a swing at someone, there’d be some weight behind my punch.  As if it weren’t bad enough that a hundred bucks would be a bag-full of those god-forsaken intis that passed for currency during the first Garcia regime, then you’d have to walk through a den of thieves with them.  Garcia told the Gringos to fuck off, so why shouldn’t everyone else?  While standing at the edge of a crowd in the Plaza San Martin, a thief riddled through my shoulder-bag so fast that if you’d stopped the video at the point I realized I’d been hit, I probably wouldn’t have been able to pick the guy out of the crowd.  He went for the main compartment and settled for a side one all in the space of a few seconds, without getting anything.  That leather bag seemed to attract them.  I could just feel eyes casing it out constantly, or was I just imagining things?  So I decided to leave the bag in my room.  The next day a Peruvian I’d never met asked me, “Where’s your bag?”  I could’ve died right then and there, convinced that the world was an evil place.  The first time I’d been to Lima, it was just an overgrown village really, naïve and sympathetic.  This was a far cry from that.  The last time I was there, six weeks ago, it had almost reverted to its former innocence, pollos a la broaster and all that.