My part of Nicaragua is close
to the meeting point of two highways, each of which leads from the Honduran
frontier. There is a decent sized police
presence here. From time to time, my
taxi or the bus will have to negotiate a roadblock. A couple of times my bus has been pulled
over, and police officers boarded and walked up the aisle looking around and
then left and the bus went on. I figured
they were looking for drugs.
Last Saturday I was on my way
back from Ocotal in a packed bus. We
were close to my site when I stood to struggle up the aisle so I could get off
when the bus stopped. As the bus was negotiating the roadblock, the police
signaled us over. Standing at the front,
I watched 2 officers enter, one through each door. The cop near me went up to a
guy and opened the back pack he had stored above his seat. With no further ado, the cop put the guy in
handcuffs, examined some tattoos on his arm and trundled him off the bus,
leaving the backpack in the rack. A cop
at the back had another guy handcuffed.
From the windows we watched
as the two suspects were first segregated and then sent to sit in a police
car. After a while the head policeman
came back to the bus and to the backpack he had briefly examined before. He opened it, removed a shirt and pulled out
three bricks of something brown, two about the size of a brick and the third
half that size. The packages were wrapped in plastic. I don’t know enough to guess what it was. Then—finally—the officer took the evidence
with him off the bus. He returned again,
this time with one of the suspects, and the two made their way toward the back
of the bus where the suspect gave up another conspirator who was immediately
taken from the bus handcuffed, there apparently being no honor among drug
dealers. It seemed to me that the police
had information—identifiers for the suspects like the tattoos and the number of
men involved.
All of this took about
fifteen minutes. The bus was
steaming. The people were docile and
awed the way people are around serious bad news. I had stayed put in the bus really out of
curiosity. I wanted to see how it all
would go down. But as the heat rose and
the action looked to be over, I got off the bus and looked for an officer. I wanted to walk to my site but I didn’t want
to make a wrong move, not that I looked at all like a possible suspect. The police were pretty impatient, annoyed to
be asked. But they let me go and I took off for home lugging my big sacks of
groceries. I don’t know how long the incident took to resolve, but I can say I
got to my site before the bus passed on its way.
When new volunteers complain
of boredom during the admittedly tedious first 2 months of service, I advise to
get out of the house and go somewhere.
Something always happens out there.
It always does.
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