Puerto Cabello, Venezuela
18 august 2001
Here's the second installment of our South American Journey which started August 1 of last year when we arrived in Venezuela. This week we are battling an entrenched bureaucracy attempting to retrieve our vans from customs in Puerto Cabello. They arrived the 12th of August from Miami but we didn't extract them from the port until nearly the end of the month. About the 28th, we started our real journey when we finally drove away from Puerto Cabello headed for the western Andes near Colombia. Folks, it does get better as we move along...the people are nicer, the scenery spectacular and the frustrations less concentrated. Were all international travel like what I have tried to describe in this entry, not many would even bother.
August 18, 2000 from Puerto Cabello, Venezuela the land of friendly people ruled by corrupt bureaucrats. One could say that this is truly the home of the rubber stamp.
Well here we are some 16 days into our "adventure" and what an adventure we have had-the majority of it has been dealing with an impossible bureaucracy where bribery, corruption and duplication rule. Petty bureaucrats are stacked one on top of the other in spaces not unlike rabbit warrens built especially for them by the government. The one particular one where we have lived for the past week is called the Instituto Autonomo del Puerto de Puerto Cabello. Yesterday, when I was on the third floor of the port building, I saw a whole room full of trophies - not unlike those that would be given in the US as sports trophies. Here in Venezuela, I suspect they were given for excelling in duplication of effort and obfuscation of facts. And friends, believe me when I say that Venezuela has the market cornered on corruption and duplication of effort. The main import must be paper pulp with rubber stamps and stamp pad ink running a close second to support the massive use of forms. I suspect that the whole country may some day tip north from the weight of all the paperwork stored here along the coast and slip noisily into the Caribbean.
Let me back up, yesterday Kai and I went to the port building for the first time to try and jump through the hoops that the government has set up like a fish seine to extract money from the people who intend to ship anything of value into or out of this country. As we were getting our passes to enter the cement fortress called the 'Aduana' I was called back as I started down the hallway to the entrance desk and told that I couldn't enter the building. You would never guess why. It's because I was wearing shorts! So here in the land where Spandex must have been invented because every woman who entered the building was literally covered in it, I was called back because I had shorts on. The "Spandex" comment screams for elaboration.
Truly, beauty must be just skin deep because here in beautiful Venezuela, every woman under 80 is clad in skin tight clothing. Since they can't just go naked, they get as close as they can. The "moda" is to wear dark G-string type underwear under white Spandex pants leaving little to the imagination. But we have not as yet visited the area above the navel. Venezuela's national emblem must be the female breast. I'm surprised there isn't a suitable monument somewhere. Here where every woman who walks by any man is ogled as would be a morsel of bread by a starving man, the comment "Ola, mi amor" (Hello, my love) is heard a thousand times a day. It's no wonder not much work gets done since most of a man's waking hours are focused on watching every woman that passes by.
Back to 'above the navel.' Bras must not be available here in any size greater than 32A because every set of breasts is stuffed into an undersized bra so that they protrude upward and outward in every direction. Many times halter tops are worn to work. Now all you guys who want to immigrate to Venezuela to watch the show, beware: at the snail's pace that officialdom moves here, by the time you would get your naturalization papers, you would be too old to do much more than watch helplessly from the sidelines. But I digress.
Not to be outdone by a rule left over from the Spanish conquest of South America where the "aduana" or port facilities were to be shown some kind of respect, the gate keeper said that I might enter the fortress of the aduana if I had on long pants. So Kai and I decided to trade clothes.
Kai is a skinny guy about 6' tall weighing about 160 pounds. Those who know me can see that I am about 5'11" tall and weigh in at just under 200 pounds. Kai's waist is 32" my waist is 38". So here we go to the bathroom with a borrowed key and we unload our pockets into the sink camera, extra batteries, billfold and passports. Then Kai lies to me and says that his pants are really 34" waist. While laughing uncontrollably, we trade my shorts for his pants. PROBLEM: I easily got his pants on but zipping them up was not possible and buttoning them would have required immediate liposuction on my part. SOLUTION: Find some kind of rope to tie the pants up so they wouldn't fall off me once we left the bathroom. So we look around for some string or rope…anything. Then we look down at Kai's shoes and decide to use his shoelace. So he takes his shoe off and unlaces them. His shoes are sort of like moccasins and when he has one of them unlaced we discover that the laces are sewn into the shoe.
Searching for another string, we eye the camera lying there in the sink. Attached to the camera is a looped carrying cord. We find out how it comes off and loop one end through the buttonhole and tie the other end through a belt loop and it just leaves enough string to tie a knot in. That done we decide to let my T-shirt stay outside my pants to cover up my bare belly where the pants don't meet! Why can't men wear Spamdex… oops, I misspelled it, that should have been Spandex. Anyway, it worked - out I went and up the stairs to the offices of the aduana.
That's where I first saw the room full of trophies. Let me describe some of the other sights there. Desks crammed into one small room while the room next door is empty except for piles of broken furniture. Piles of papers at least three feet high on some desks and on others, there was nothing. A room full of computers which were not even turned on sits beside a room full of paper pushers from another era. Beside that is a room empty except for trophies. Outside, messengers come and go carrying sheaves of papers. They push the door open to an office and enter. They stand in front of a "functionary's" desk and turn their papers toward the functionary. Then they open the papers to the page where they need a rubber stamp, pick out the particular rubber stamp that they need from the assorted ones on the lazy-susan on the functionary's desk, stamp the paper where it needs to be stamped and push the paper toward the functionary so that he can affix his "firma" or signature. Then they repeat this several times for one group of papers. Then they rush out of that office to another office next door or down the hall or one floor up or down and repeat the same motions for another rubber stamp and another signature. Immediately they are replaced by another messenger with another sheaf of papers and then another and another and another. This goes on all day long (except for siesta of course when all closes down for 2 or 3 hours) every day 313 days (365 days 26 weekends = 313 days) a year every year and it has probably been this way since the Spanish conquest 400+ years ago.
The funniest thing in this area is that people who work in an office often leave the office and shut the door behind them only to be locked out of their own office. And none of them seem to have the key. They have to knock on their own office door to have someone let them back in. I saw this happen with the same individual numerous times. Each stairwell in this building is isolated from the rest of the building by bars that resemble the bars of a jail. Some floors are occupied and others are trashed and closed off. The first floor of the building has a huge counter especially built to accommodate paperwork but it is not used. Other offices lie vacant while next door to some, mounds of papers loosely tied together are strewn on the floor. Folks, this is not a pretty sight but in America Latina it is a common sight. Everyone in America who thinks that we are saddled with a bureaucracy in the US should visit the Aduana of Puerto Cabello for a day.
So here we are with our "tramitadoras" (the name of the people who do this paper shuffle day in and day out) waiting outside an office with 20 other tramitadoras while inside the office all work has stopped and the topic of conversation has turned to a birthday party…or was it the latest soccer match? Oh, here comes my blue Spandex clad tramitadora Iraida with a large rotund man adorned with lots of gold chains and bracelets sopping his sweaty brow with a handkerchief. His name is Jorge Serrano and his desk was the only one in the office outside which we waited that had no rubber stamps on it so obviously, that made him some kind of great grand poobah (jefe) of the third floor rabbit warren. She explains to me that we have to take him to the port for him to "revisar" or look at the vans and the box that we are trying to get into the country.
So we hop in a taxi and go to the port. The officials at the gate there seem to have never seen the man before and there is some confusion as we enter the port but the tramitadoras know where our vans are and they also know where the box with our personal effects is so first we go to the box which is in a huge warehouse filled with liquor - that is most of it is filled with liquor. There is a big water filled pond in the middle of the warehouse where the floor has fallen in from which issue thousands of mosquitoes. In the pond is a piece of abandoned earth moving equipment half covered by water. Not to digress, we find our box of belongings at the end of the warehouse and the "functionary" wants to see inside so they bring a forklift to open the box by prying off the top. Since we used deck screws to close the box rather than nails, this tactic is futile at best but after some effort, the fork lift manages to break off a piece of plywood about the size of a piece of notebook paper and from there the functionary could see a suitcase inside. That was all he needed to see. As we were soon to find out, this was just another exercise in futility.
Next we went in the waiting taxi to see the vans - the first time we had seen them since delivering them to the port of Miami the 31st of July. There they were baking in the tropical sun and amazingly everything inside seemed to be in place. So the rotund "functionary" walks around the vans still mopping his brow with a handkerchief and figures out by the color which one is which and then he asks the tramitadora to write down the license numbers on the back of the paperwork. If he had bothered to look at the front of the paperwork, he would have seen that all the numbers were already on the papers but like so many things here, this was not work but rather, it was the setup for a bribe.
After writing some numbers down in pencil on the back of the paperwork (Kai's van had no license plate so he just skipped that small detail), we hop back into the taxi and head back to the aduana. It's then that the tramitadora tells me that we have to pay the functionary for his "services." I am told the "fee" read bribe is 50,000 Bolivares or about $74 to be handed forward to her who then hands it to him who doesn't even acknowledge that anything has taken place. I thought this was the last detail in the process but guess again, it was only the beginning!
The day before when all this nonsense started, we were asked the value of the cars - they wanted a paper telling them the current value of the vehicles. I told them that we had no such paper. They said they just had to have one so I decided to comply. First, we went to the internet café that we had found the day before and I connected to the Kelley Blue Book on line and we put in the years of the vans and manipulated the condition of the vans till we had some figures ($2,500, $4,500 and $5,000) that we had made up ahead of time for the three vans. Then we printed out the papers and took them back to the hotel. Then I had Les who writes in an unreadable script sign the papers in blue as "Thomas J. Kelley." This morning, while in the office of Paragua Maritima who is supposed to be facilitating this process of getting the vehicles, when the secretary came in I saw her pick up a stamper and set a new date on it. When she left her desk, I reached through the window and snagged the stamper, pulled the faked Kelley Bluebook values from my case, lay them on the floor and stamped them with her stamper. Then when no one was looking I replaced the stamper on her desk. So now our Kelley Blue Book papers appear to have been signed by Thomas J. Kelley himself and in addition bear the stamp "Recibido-Paragua Maritima-17 AGOSTO 2000."
Then there was the question of our tourist cards. A tourist card is given you on the plane before you land in Venezuela. You have no instructions nor are you told how to fill it out. We did our best to fill out the card correctly. Item 12 said TIPO DE VISA item 13 was DURACION with DIAS and MESES item 14 is AUTORIZADO M.R.I. and item 15 was LUGAR DE EXPEDITION. Valeria mistakenly filled in item 12 with Tourist and item 15 with Miami, Florida, USA, even though US citizens need not have a visa for Venezuela. When we presented our cards at immigration in the airport at 1AM on August 2nd, only one of them was stamped and the other ones were left blank. Since Valeria had information on hers that was not on any of the others, the officials insisted that all of them be filled out by the proper authorities and that we get a visa even though it is clear that no visa is necessary for Venezuela when arriving by air. So I told the tramitadora that I knew a fellow staying in our hotel who worked for LAN Chile (a lie) and that he could fix the tourist cards. That night I filled out item 12 with "Tourist," item 13 with DIAS 90, MESES 3, in item 14 I scribbled in a signature that no one could read and for item 15, I filled out Miami, Florida, USA. Then yesterday I delivered them to the tramitadora and she took them to the functionario and miraculously, all these forgeries were approved! They never even noticed that two of the three tourist cards didn't ever get stamped by immigration on the way into the country because the luggage carrier broke down and while everyone was waiting for it to start up again till 2AM, the immigration officials went back to bed so we just walked freely into Venezuela! Well, you may very well walk in freely but to get our vans we had to pay and pay and pay again.
So next hurdle is the report of the robbery when Les lost his carnet and in addition the title to his car. Although we had already made a photocopy of the title complete with the US Customs stamp from Miami before the robbery and that is all the functionarios needed, they just had to see the original to make sure that the copy wasn't a fake. And if we couldn't produce the original, we had to have a police report stating that it was stolen so two days ago, we rush off to the PTJ (Policia Tecnica Judicial) - another paper factory - on the other side of town to get a police report. We do so and in the report it states that a suitcase was taken and that inside was the title to a car but when we presented it to the aduana, they said that it had to state exactly the information on the title: whose car, what the title number was, etc. This is the frustrating thing about bureaucracies here, one person tells you one thing and someone else tells you something else. One person OK's something and at the desk next door what they said is negated and you have to start over from go. So we have to go back to the PTJ and do the whole thing over again the next day.
So yesterday at 4:45 we get all the papers signed and all the official stamps affixed and are on our way to the port to get the vans before it closes for the weekend at 5PM. We get there and the guard won't let us in till we give him 1000 Bolivares ($1.48) as a bribe to pass through the gate. Then we get to Almacen #9 where the box is and find out we can't get it because we don't have the correct papers for it. Then to add insult to injury, when we are nearly within sight of the vans, we are told we can't get them either since we need one more infernal signature from the guardia national who is absent but when they are there, it is the guardia who seem to run everything within the port. So dejected and fed up with bureaucracy we start the long walk out of the port so we can get a taxi back to the hotel that we checked out of this morning when we were sure we would get the vans today. When we get halfway back, we meet the guardia national who is in charge of the vans but since it is past 5PM he can't see anyway that he can sign our papers so angrily we leave.
This seems longwinded and convoluted and yet this is just the tip of the iceberg in relation to what we have been through this week. So now we are in limbo again till Monday when we will begin the game all over again. One thing I have promised myself and that is that I will never return to this country. (A week later I changed my mind.) Ever since the first time I was in Venezuela in 1972, it has been the same - bad things happen to me here. Yes, there are some very kind and giving people whom I have encountered more on this trip than at anytime before but it seems that there are ten times as many people here who want to rip you off any way they can. As they would say here, "no vale la pena visitar" which means, "it's not worth the bother to visit."
This was written by me, Larry Calhoun. These opinions are mine and might not reflect anyone else's opinion on this trip. I have been coming to Latin America for more than 30 years now and I admit I have a love-hate relationship with the area. Some things I love and some I hate. In general, I love the things of the countryside and the people who live there and I don't care for the hustle of the city and the problems one finds there. Port cities are almost always the worst. I knew before we left that this process of getting the cars through customs would be one of the worst experiences of the trip but I had no idea it would be this bad.
(Yes, that's our blue Spandex clad tramitadora Iraida leading us into the rabbit warren.)
