Extortion, Part II
El Amatillo, Honduras
Note: To read from the beginning, click here.
Immigration offices, care of: www.guanacosonline.org
Boat Shoes “helps me” first, giving me the multi-layered and multicolored carbon copy form required to take Dolly into the country for the three hours it’ll take us to cross through the Honduras' southern tip and into Nicaragua.
There's an office across the way can fill out the form for me. But I opt to do it by hand myself. The service, I figure, is for the illiterate. No reason I can't do it myself. He watches me pull a pen from my purse and deliberate over each line. The form, a rainbow-colored bureaucratic wonder, requires multiple stops and multiple stamps. But I don’t know that yet. All I know is that a form is a form is a form, and I have filled out plenty.
The border is open 24 hours a day, but the bank that processes the border fees is not. This logic, see, is just too much for me. I join the line standing vigil outside Banco Occidental, watching a small girl chase a cockroach along a ledge with her finger.
When the bank finally opens two guards with large barreled, pump action guns escort us into the lobby, three at a time. They use metal detecting wands and brisk hands on the men, but let us women pass without a groping.
Inside, it’s cool and shiny, somewhere I'd like to stay awhile. Instead, the teller tells me I’m in the wrong branch. This office can't process the money I need to pay for the Vehicle Certification. She points me down the street, in the direction from which I’ve just come. At the main customs building, there’s a closet-sized room with two tellers and it’s own, less vigilant security.
Again, I'm turned away. I can't pay the $42 vehicle permit fee until I’ve been to another office, where a private company enters the information on the Vehicle Certificate into “the system." I don't know what this means, but it sounds very important. She points me toward a tree, obscured by a giant truck. Over there. She waves me off, a bug in her ear.
Photo care of: www.guanacosonline.orgTim’s reading Didion’s Salvador behind the steering wheel, with the window up to keep the vendors and street kids and money changers -- the present horrors of El Salvador -- from distracting him from the horrors of twenty five years ago.
At the data entry office men wait, leaning against the window, holding folders thick with forms. They’ve been there an hour, waiting to hand over their packets of someone else’s papers. Finally, a large women, eyes and lips painted in blue and hot cherry red, slides open the glass window without a word. The men shove their arms in between metal bars, dropping their papers onto the counter. Nobody speaks. One of them, the only one wearing a pressed shirt and slacks instead of jeans and a grubby t-shirt, grabs my arm and shoves it through the crowd, depositing my papers at the top of the stack. Chivalry, even at Amatillo.
A half hour later, the data entry woman slides the window open again and my papers appear, along with her open hand: $11 US for typing the information I’d filled out and printing it on a separate, stamped piece of paper, along with a stamped receipt. I give both to the teller at Banco Occidente, along with Dolly’s rainbow-colored visitor’s permit. I only have dollars, El Salvador’s official currency since 2001. But this Honduran bank doesn’t accept and will not change dollars. She waves me off again, pointing to a fat man with a four-inch thick wad of bills, sweating on the street outside.
I pay my $42 dollars in Honduran Lempiras and the teller stamps the many layers of multi-colored forms -- then hands me another form for good measure. Back across the street, Boat Shoes is working hard to get his computer to accept an illegitimate password.
He enters it again and again. After half an hour of entering digits, with careful pecking but no luck, he gets a cell call and leaves. I pray it’s tech support, but upon his return, he resumes the half-hearted pecking -- typing starred digits, hitting Enter, then entering them again.
Finally, he makes the call--the call that will save me from murdering this man with the rimless glasses. Or so I hope.
To be continued...
Freda Moon
1 Comment
View Printer Friendly Version
Reader Comments (1)
I'm going to have to come down there & smack those
fools around.....Italian style...
this sounds so hellish....
EXTORTION...
you need to drive through for 3 hours so you
get extorted....
just remember all the good times you two have had...
my birthday was perfect in oh so many ways...
even got a slice of pizza...after the hot springs soak