How I Got Mugged-- July 2007

I guess it's a little late to be updating this blog about the adventure that technically ended several months ago, but for the sake of posterity, and for the sake of remembering it myself, I think I need to write out the whole "mugging story." Despite it being a little frightening at the time, it actually contains some quite humorous elements.

So. The day before I had just met up with Carlos in Cochabamba, and the first (and alas, only) semi-touristic thing we decided to do was make a journey to the Cristo Blanco, a White Christ (there are several of these in South America) mounted atop a hill that serves as a lookout point over the city. Usually, there is a chair lift that brings you up there, but the lift was broken and we were happy to get a little more exercise using the stairs. I don't know how many stairs there were, but I'm estimating about 500. Carlos and I walked about half the way up before stopping to admire the view and take a break to eat some clementines. In the company of a 26-year-old Peruvian man, I wasn't exactly on my guard for getting mugged in the middle of the day, and evidentally neither was he. We sat down on the stairs and had just begun peeling the fruits when we heard two people coming down the stairs from behind us. Assuming they were just some more tourists wanting to pass, we both moved over to separate sides of the stairs. Before we knew it, we both had knives pointed at us and two burly men were telling us to give them everything we had.

Luckily, Caity's mugging story from Ecuador had prepared me for pretty much anything, and I didn't panic, but just let the guy search in my purse, repeating in Spanish, "I don't have anything," which was a total lie. Later Carlos told me that he might have considered resisting if it hadn't involved me, but he looked over and saw that my assaulter had a serrated kitchen knife (kind of unprofessional, no?) and thought, "Man, that would be a painful death." I actually got incredibly lucky because my assaulter idiotically did not realize that I had a digital camera in my bag, worth significantly more than anything I had in my wallet or even my bank account (it was the end of the trip, I was getting low on funds). He took my wallet and was satisfied. Meanwhile, Carlos was negotiating with his assaulter to leave him his passport, and somehow succeeded in that, but in retribution the guy just made off with his entire bag minus the passport. They told us to stay where we were and ran back up the stairs with our stuff.

We emerged from the incident pretty much unscathed; I had a few scratches that I would later refer to as "knife wounds," and Carlos had an unpleasant cut on his hand, but nothing serious. I was thinking kind of irrationally after the incident; for a few minutes I had the idea in my head that the guys had asked us to stay where we were because they were coming back, and so I cleverly hid my camera in a bush and sat there waiting. After a few minutes we both got over the shock and started heading back down the stairs. Finally, about 5 or 10 minutes after the incident, we spotted a couple of policemen. "Help! We just got robbed!" we yelled, waving our hands in the air. After explaining to the police what had happened and giving them vague and probably incorrect descriptions of the perpetrators (when someone had a knife pointed at your throat, the last thing you're usually concerned about is the shape of their nose), the police mounted their motorcycles and sped up the hill in pursuit of the villains.

Carlos and I went back down to the bottom of the hill and waited. Not too long after we'd reported the crime, an officer came and told us that they had detained two men who appeared similar to our descriptions. We would have to come to the police station one by one to identify them. So Carlos got on the back of one officer's motorcycle and they sped off while I waited with another female officer. While we were waiting, this heavy-set woman started asking me some questions. What was my name? What was my friend's name? Where were we from? What happened? What did my assaulter look like? I described him to the best of my ability. He was "gordito," I said, using a very common Spanish term that essentially means "a little fat," though it is not taken anywhere near as offensively as it would be in the U.S. Nevertheless, the female officer's response challenged my American standards of politeness: "REALLY fat, or just fat like me?"

"Well, I guess not THAT fat," I said awkwardly.

"Yes, I see, so was he fat like me?"

Finally I gave in. "Yes, fat like you."

So, after I called a police officer fat, the motorcycle cop came back and it was my turn to hop on the back of his vehicle (if you're imagining him taking some kind of safety precaution like giving me a helmet, don't). We arrived outside the police station, and there were two guys in handcuffs sitting on a bench, completely still and sedate, with stone-cold expressions on their faces. Having to decide whether to accuse these two men of the crime was almost as nerve-racking as getting mugged. I really could not remember one detail about the assaulters with certainty, other than the fact that one was "gordito," but I told the officers the truth to the best of my ability, which was that I thought I recognized one of the men but not the other. Apparently Carlos had recognized the same guy, but neither of us could even remember which one of us he had been assaulting.

Meanwhile, all the local friends and family members of the detained men had come to the station to defend their kin. They stood there ranting about how they knew these men and they were good people, that Carlos and I were just stupid tourists and scared so of course we would lay the blame on anyone, given the opportunity. Carlos and I just stood there silently, not knowing what to do or say. The officers kept asking to see our "wounds," but made no move to get Carlos a bandage or anything. "Look," said Carlos eventually to an officer, "we're not sure if that was one of the guys or if it's just someone that looks like him. We don't know anything else. Can we go now?" But no, we were absolutely not permitted to leave yet. Instead, we were taken inside the police station and asked the same three questions by at least five different people. After sitting there for about 15 minutes we started becoming a little aggravated, and Carlos said again, "Hey, we have nothing else to tell you, can we go?" The authorities kept objecting, but we were firm and eventually just announced our departure and walked out. That seems to be the nature of Bolivian bureaucracy: just be firm and you'll discover that most of the people in power actually have none.

After we escaped the police station, the most pressing issue was that we had absolutely no money, apart from 5 Bolivian pesos I happened to have in a little change pouch. I had stupidly been carrying my debit card in my wallet, and Carlos, being an artisan who lives off the money he makes selling his jewelry on the street on a day-to-day basis, doesn't even have a bank account as far as I know. Well, I decided to use the 5 pesos to call my parents. It was quite an interesting telephone conversation with my mother:

"Hello?"

"Hi Mommy, it's me. Listen, I don't have very long to talk right now, but it's kind of an emergency. My friend Carlos and I got robbed and I need money."

"You WHAT?!" [screaming and general panic]

"Why are you yelling at ME?! What was I supposed to do, they had knives!"

[more panic] "What the hell do you expect me to do? I don't even know how to send you money! And you're in the middle of Bolivia with some strange man!"

"OK, calm down. I'll go find a bank and figure out how you can wire me money, and then I'll call you back."

Well, that was the last of our money, so Carlos went and set out his jewelry on the street so that he would be able to sell enough for us to at least eat dinner, and meanwhile I went looking for a bank. By this time it was almost 6:00 and all the banks were about to close if not closed already, but I did manage to find out that it's pretty easy to send money almost instantly through Western Union. Considering it was kind of late though, it took Carlos a couple hours to sell anything, and evidently that was long enough for my mother to take me for dead. When I called home again my dad answered sternly.

"How could you wait two whole hours to call us back?! Your mother is in hysterics. She's over at the neighbors' house calling the Bolivian embassy."

Later I found out that my mother had spent at least $100 making phone calls to Bolivia, and all for nothing. The next day I picked up $200 from the Western Union office, and felt quite rich. And so ends my tale.