bout de papier, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2002) — Spring/Summer 2002 // Printemps/Été 2002, p. 23
COCAINE TRAIN — TRACING MY
BLOODLINE THROUGH COLOMBIA
by Stephen Smith; Published Abacus (1999),
$17.99
Anyone in the Canadian Foreign Service who has worked for any length of time in the Latin America Bureau or at one of our missions in the Americas region will tell you how frustrating it is when people who should know better — and who often include our professional colleagues — cannot spell correctly the name of one of the largest and most newsworthy countries in Latin America, the capital of which is Bogota.
Thus my heart sank when, even before opening this book, I read the gushing blurb on the back cover, describing how “journalist Stephen Smith finds himself boarding the Cocaine Train out of Cali, home of Columbia’s [sic] infamous drug cartel.” … It sank further when I realised, as the book proceeded, that the eponymous train from Cali was to play no significant role in the story Smith has to tell; I could conclude only that his editors had liked the rhyme of Cocaine Train and thought (perhaps correctly) that this would also appeal to western stereotypes of Colombia. And things got still worse with every section of mangled and accent-less Spanish quoted by Smith as, in a failed attempt at verisimilitude, he recounted conversations in bars in that language. If he couldn’t be bothered to find a decent editor, I found myself thinking, then why should I be bothered to read this?
But I carp. Smith’s account of a 1998 visit to Colombia is constructed in the manner perfected (and never since surpassed) by Bruce Chatwin in his In Patagonia, the travelogue-camouflaged-as-search-for-long-lost-relative.
The relative in this case is Smith’s grandfather, one Leslie Frost, railway engineer, faithless husband and Man of Mystery. Frost was clearly a not uninteresting person and had been involved in the construction of the unique aerial long-distance Manizalesto-Mariquita cableway (which probably merits a book in itself). And Smith’s search for his roots takes him to some relatively out-of-the-way places such as Puerto Berrio and Barrancabermeja, redoubts respectively of the Paramilitary movement and of the rebel ELN.
But the problem is that not much happens to the author. Fine — we wouldn’t actually have wanted to have been murdered by the Paras or kidnapped by the FARC or ELN. But one would at least have hoped, in these circumstances, for a thoughtful examination of Colombia’s so-called culture of violence and of the paradox by which one can venture into places the mention of which makes even Bogotanos shudder, and emerge unscathed. No; instead, Smith merely recycles all the old statistics on violence, kidnapping and drug production and you are left simply not knowing whether he felt himself lucky to have escaped, or — on the other hand — whether he felt it was all exaggerated. There is no serious analysis of the drug phenomenon, nor of Colombia’s civil war. About the most exciting section is when Smith recounts the televised Colombia- England game in the 1998 World Cup, which he watched in a Medellin bar (and on which I won USD $40 in a Canadian Embassy sweepstake…); he is disappointed when nobody riots.
As for Leslie Frost, well unfortunately the documentary evidence that Smith is able to unearth is scant, and while Smith does track down an illegitimate son of Frost’s, his interest fades inexplicably. The final chapter of the book is a confused account of a visit to the tourist-trap Cathedral of Salt near Bogota, which itself concludes pretentiously: “You thought of the goodness of Christ, submerged in this blessed, unholy country, going on in the darkness.” Hmmm.
Colombia is the most beautiful, the most challenging and the most maddening coun try in Latin America today, and it is a place about which few good accounts have been written in English; an exception is the now rather dated The Fruit Palace, by Charles Nicholls (or, of course, you could read an English translation of 100 Years of Solitude, which is probably now more relevant to Colombia than it was at the time of its publication 30 years ago). Unfortunately, Cocaine Train does little or nothing to fill the gap: it is strictly for Colombia-addicts (of which I confess myself to be one).
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2002) — Spring/Summer 2002 // Printemps/Été 2002, p. 23. Read the rest of this issue →
