The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (37 page)

With great difficulty the vehicles manoeuvred back and forth in the encroaching mud until it was finally possible to return to Valledupar in advance of the water, which came to within fifty kilometres of the town and then gently receded.

The Government declared no national emergency, and no rescue operations were attempted. As far as they were concerned, the revolution was justly buried and forgotten.

On the top of the escarpment, Pedro turned to Aurelio, ‘Is Carmen under that?’

‘No,’ said Aurelio. ‘We live on that high ground over there on the other side. It is untouched. She will believe that I am dead, but when I return she will find that I am not.’

Pedro gazed out over the enormous lake that was now placid beneath the moonlight, and tickled the ears of the cat that was rubbing his cheek with its own.

‘We were lucky to escape from that.’

‘You were lucky I was here to listen to the animals,’ replied Aurelio impatiently.

Josef came up behind them and stood with them a moment, ‘Think of all the money I have wasted,’ he said, ‘paying Don Ramon for a proper burial and the three masses.’

‘Do not concern yourself,’ replied Pedro. ‘I think Father Garcia would do it for nothing, so you would still get a burial and three masses having paid out for exactly a burial and three masses.’

Josef nodded and absorbed the logic of Pedro’s words.

‘All the same,’ added Pedro. ‘You would do more good in the world by being fed to my dogs, eh cabron?’

IT SOMETIMES HAPPENS
that in relatively powerless and impoverished countries there arise men of enormous vision who are frustrated and offended by the limitations of their lives, and seek to reach out for the stars on behalf of themselves and their nations. It is as if they wished to cry out from the mountain tops, ‘Behold! How mighty are our dreams! Look on at the birth of Greatness!’ It also may happen that two such men arise at the same time, and when this happens the world must look on in awe. In our case the two men were the Economics Minister, Dr Jorge Badajoz, and the Mayor of the capital, Raoul Buenanoce, whose activities, although not directly connected, ran curiously parallel.

It was just beginning to be possible for the President to feel a little more optimistic about the economy; the urban guerrillas had seemingly miraculously disappeared. He had heard the rumours about their secret extermination by the Armed Forces, but was relieved that now every bridge he opened was not blown up the day after the opening, and that power cuts were caused nowadays not by bombs but by good old-fashioned incompetence. He was also pleased that so many Trade Union leaders had vanished inexplicably, during the recent general strike, as their successors were more moderate in their demands for higher wages to offset the two hundred per cent
rate of inflation. He had inaugurated campaigns of hundreds of arrests against strikers for breach of the peace and obstruction, and General Ramirez had very kindly sent a large number of plain-clothes soldiers among any groups of strikers to incite them to violence. As soon as this happened, the police would arrive with their batons and water cannon, and would release clouds of vomit gas, which caused the strikers to spew violently at the same time as being drenched and beaten over the head. The workers, having experienced the hell of flailing around on the ground in a rank lake of vomit became understandably more content with their steadily falling standard of living, and industrial harmony was largely restored.

The rural guerrillas in the mountains and jungle were not a problem as far as the President was concerned. He never went into the interior himself, did not want to, and did not care what all those dirty and illiterate peasants got up to as long as they stayed out of the capital. The ones who did arrive and set up home in shanty towns and favelas he discouraged by ordering the city police to burn down their cardboard shacks, load the peasants into lorries, and offload them as far away as possible in the countryside.

Now that economic progress was possible, the President appointed Dr Badajoz to perform the miracle. He was the chairman of the State Oil Company, and was also in the chair of the Free Trade Council. He had extensive contacts in the world of international banking, and having been educated at Eton, was a snob and an Anglophile. He had taken his degree in economics at Harvard, and had been completely converted to Friedmanite monetarism, in the belief that market forces can cause prices and inflation to stabilise in an atmosphere of competition.

Dr Badajoz came to office and inspected the state of the economy on his first day: there was an external debt of fifteen billion dollars, a balance of payments deficit of five billion dollars, almost no reserves of foreign currency, and the growth rate was actually in negative figures and was being called the ‘shrink rate’. He found that the government for fifteen years
had had a policy of nationalising all failing industries, and now the state employed nearly half of all urban workers. He also found that in the past the state had passed formidably protectionist measures against imports, thus helping to keep in business a great many inefficient companies. Dr Badajoz decided to sell off the state industries, and to remove the prohibitive import tariffs, but was forbidden to create unemployment by the President, who believed that the unemployed would all become terrorists. Dr Badajoz realised very quickly that it was not going to be as simple as he had thought; the only way out was to gamble on being able to squeeze living standards and increase productivity at the same time, so as to keep everybody employed on increasingly worthless wages.

Dr Badajoz boldly allowed prices to rise to their natural level on the free market, so that tobacco doubled in price instantly, and petrol rose by forty per cent. Soon prices on everything were rising by half each month, and he found that he was creating the inflation he had come into office to defeat; so he froze all wages and effectively reduced the buying power of all wage-packets to less than half of what it had been before he assumed office.

Dr Badajoz found he could not raise the country’s income through taxation; no one except state employees had ever paid any taxes, and now that he was denationalising, there was even less tax coming in than before. Everyone other than state employees used to bribe the tax-officials not to tax them, and in any case nearly all business was transacted in illegal US dollars, whose blackmarket value was even quoted daily in the newspapers.

Some years previously the government had introduced index-linked stocks and bonds, and people used to use their wages to buy them in order to offset the effects of inflation; they would only cash them in order to go shopping when they could not resort to barter. No one used cheques any more because in the three days they took to clear they lost a lot of their value.

Dr Badajoz decided to place his faith in oil, coffee, and tropical fruit, the traditional basis of the economy, and began to
campaign to give big incentives to agricultural concerns whilst the de-control of imports forced manufacturing industry to become more competitive. In this way the country was completely de-industrialised as cheap foreign goods replaced local ones and foreign capital moved in to asset-strip the abandoned industrial base.

Having observed all these unanticipated effects, Dr Badajoz decided to stabilise the currency by attracting foreign investment, so he freed interest rates and set the official value of the peso at two hundred to the dollar (when it was really four hundred) to reduce inflation, but turned a blind eye to those who were trading at the real rate. When he realised that his father, one of the richest men in Latin America, was about to die, he carried his non-interventionist credo to its logical conclusion, and abolished death duties.

The great economist’s best asset was his credibility amongst the major figures of world banking. It may have been his lean, cadaverous seriousness, his precise English, his Savile Row suits and his air of aristocratic
savoir-faire
, but whatever it was, he got everything he wanted out of the foreign banks. He raised six hundred million dollars from a group of American banks, he raised three hundred million from European banks, and three hundred million from the IMF on easy repayment terms. He even opened a branch of the National Bank in Paris.

It was so easy for him because the dramatic drop in the standard of living and the flood of cheap imports had halved inflation to one hundred per cent, and the increased internal competition had raised the rate of growth to five per cent. A good coffee harvest put both the balance of payments and the foreign reserves healthily into the black.

Had he been as wise as his reputation suggested, he should have retired at that point so that someone else could reap the whirlwind; but, believing that all was under control, he foolishly carried on. The President still forbade him to create unemployment by his denationalisation programme; but the foreign corporations who bought the industries were not interested in running them; they merely took away all the
machinery to their own countries, leaving armies of unemployed. Badajoz had to re-employ them, even though he had nothing for them to do, so that the number of state employees remained the same as before and the state’s share in the nation’s spending began rapidly to rise.

The Doctor also found that there was a major sector of the economy which he could not control, and the President even refused to tell him how large it was. ‘It would only upset you,’ he had said, ‘and I cannot bear to think about it myself.’ Badajoz realised he would never get inflation defeated as long as the Armed Forces spent whatever they wanted. They had their own chemical, shipbuilding, textiles, steel and aircraft factories, and they spent vast sums abroad on German tanks, American fighters, British radar, French helicopters, and missiles from wherever they could be had. Additionally, they would not let the Economics Minister veto the purchase of six airliners by the national airline, on the grounds that they would be useful in the event of war. They were supposed to be used on new routes to Japan and Singapore, but no one ever went there, and the aircraft remained idle. Badajoz also discovered that it was customary amongst businesses to pay the military up to five per cent of any deal as ‘goodwill’ money; and he could not stop the Navy from investing heavily in nuclear research and hydroelectric plant. In short, as the economic situation in the country improved, the military saw its chance of demanding ever greater sums of money.

It seemed as though everything happened at once; the tractor and car industry, which consisted of five large companies, collapsed in the space of one month because of cheaper imports and the over-valued peso. The new agricultural revolution, which had been meant to save the economy, had to proceed on foreign machinery. Dr Badajoz had freed interest rates to prevent dollar speculation, and suddenly they went higher than the rate of inflation so that all the farmers went bankrupt and nobody would invest in anything any more. People sold all their assets and speculated instead on the financial markets. Foreign capital poured into the economy to take advantage of
the new interest rates, and one month later poured out again, taking the government’s money with it in the form of interest payments. Three banks collapsed and went into liquidation because they could not call in debts; if they had done, the ownership of the indebted factories and farms would have come into their hands, with no chance of ever making a profit from them.

Successful speculators on the wildly fluctuating financial markets went abroad on lavish holidays and spent $41,000,000,000 over two years, mostly in the United States, because the peso was still officially overvalued against the dollar, thus making dollars cheap. For the same reason imports increased by fifty-five per cent in one year.

After three years of the economic miracle, Dr Jorge Badajoz took stock of the following information in his ministry’s annual report: since he had come to office ninety per cent of credit and currency were in the hands of the state, living standards had dropped by fifty per cent and so had manufacturing output. The foreign debt was $60,000,000, and inflation had doubled to four hundred per cent. The Treasury had printed the first ever million peso note. Dr Badajoz sold everything he had, and, bitter, disillusioned and sad, disappeared suddenly with trunk-fuls of dollars, and was next heard of living in Uruguay.

Raoul Buenanoce was a cultured man who foresaw a great future for the capital under his paternal guidance. Here is his speech upon acceding to office in the same year as Dr Badajoz:

‘We have indeed a proud city, with its splendid colonial edifices, its four high-rise blocks, its parks and boulevards! We have here a branch of Selfridges where one can buy leather and jewellery! We have men and women who are as elegantly dressed as those of Paris. We have four theatres that show the best productions of Buenos Aires and Madrid! In 1944 Segovia performed here, and again in 1963!

‘But we cannot rest on our laurels! It is my intention that by the end of my term of office our beloved capital will not only be the capital of our proud nation, but the cultural capital of the civilised world! I shall utterly remove the favelas, those “villas
miserias” that ring our suburbs, and in their place I shall build a park such as the world has never seen! It will be a park where our grateful citizens may go for rest and recreation after they have wiped the sweat of the toil of the day from their brows!’

This noble oration, followed by loud applause, preceded the most extraordinarily ambitious building programme in the history of the world.

His first project was to build a giant motorway to the airport which would cut right through the middle of the city. He raised $1,000 million on the international markets and cut a swathe through the most ancient and historical part of the city, since the motorway was to be fifteen lanes wide. It was absolutely straight except for where it had to go round the Norwegian Embassy, which had refused to move until Regina Olsen was released. Buenanoce made three thousand people homeless, and the project was never completed because he was impatient to get on with the park. The last part of the motorway ended half-way across a bridge, and everyone still drove to the airport along the old route.