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Waiting for Godot in quarantine Héctor
Abad Faciolince reveals the cruel psychological torture suffered by
Colombians seeking visas and places them within the broader context of the
world's poor - the new plague-ridden pariahs of society who must be quarantined. Before
the Embassy stands a doorkeeper. A Colombian comes up to this doorkeeper and
asks to be admitted to the Embassy. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant
admittance for the moment. The man reflects and then asks if he will be allowed
in later. “It is possible,” says the doorkeeper, “but not at the
moment.” The door to the Embassy stands open, as usual. When the doorkeeper
steps to one side, the man bends down to peer in. On seeing him, the doorkeeper
laughs and says: “If you are so keen, just try to enter despite my veto. But
bear in mind that I am powerful and yet I am only the least of the door-
keepers. From hall to hall there are more doorkeepers, each more powerful than
the last. The third doorkeeper is so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at
him.” This
is the opening of “Before the Law”, one of the most celebrated stories by
Franz Kafka. But there is one
slight change: in the original the word ‘Law’ appears in place of the word
‘Embassy’ and the word ‘countryman’ instead of ‘Colombian’. Thus
there are masses of us, Colombians, queuing outside all the embassies in the
First World, just like Kafka’s countryman before the Law. Before them there is
always a doorkeeper and then another doorkeeper and yet another and so on into
the distance, behind bullet-proof glass another arrogant bad-tempered official.
We Colombians ask them in a trembling voice if they will give us a visa later.
“It is possible,” they say, “but not for the moment.” We
dare not take one more step. We hope as we stand there shivering in the Bogotá
drizzle or under the burning midday tropical sun with its ultraviolet rays.
There are days when we are granted an appointment. Some come to queue up the
night before, others get up at four a.m., others again make a job out of it by
selling their places in the queue. Placards in front of the railings of the
consular offices bear the words “Don’t buy places.”
But we Colombians patiently hope for some sign of light and some sort of
answer. We
harbour brief illusions when they eventually hand us application forms as big as
bed sheets with an endless list of questions: recent photos of various sizes
taken from different angles; documented proof of present employment specifying
position held, duration, monthly salary and vacation dates (there are no visas
for the unemployed); bank account details over the past months (there are no
visas for those who do not possess a bank account or substantial savings); a
written invitation from a citizen of the country we wish to visit who is willing
to arrange board and lodgings, personal expenses and the return trip (there are
no visas for those who do not have foreign friends); a two-way air ticket (that
we forfeit it on being denied a visa doesn’t matter); original and copy of
property title deeds (there are no visas for those who are not property owners);
in the case of tourism, an international credit card with spending limits in US
dollars or other strong currencies; consular charges (non-reimbursable if the
visa is denied) which vary from 25 to 200 dollars; “a mandatory warranty”
policy (God knows what that is) from a financial agency. Etcetera. This
‘etcetera’ is not meant loosely but literally. It is a true, indefinite and
unknowable etcetera since some forms add: “The Embassy reserves the right to
demand any other type of document prior to granting visas.” Any other type of
document? And what is that supposed to mean? A recommendation from the parish
priest? HIV negative? Level of glucose in the blood on an empty stomach? State
of the prostate gland? A gene map? A TOEFL certificate? There’s no way
of knowing, for when they say “any other type of document”, it means that it
could be just “any other type of document”. We walk into the embassies,
assuming of course that we actually get that far, with bulging folders filled
with countless documents, more than those required just to be on the safe side. We
Colombians appear hemmed in, confined like animals in a burning den. Every time
it is more difficult for us to get out or, what comes to the same thing, to get
into another place. Of just over 200 real or fictitious countries in the world,
177 require a visa for Colombians to enter their territories. Misfits in our own
Colombia, we are also the pariahs and misfits of the world, perhaps alongside
the Afghanis, Iraqis and Vietnamese. At this point it would be far easier to
list the few countries that do not require a visa than to name all those
that do require one. Among those that do not require a visa (yet) there are a
few “fraternal” Hispanoamerican countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, El
Salvador, Chile and just a few more. Among those that do require visas, apart
from the obvious ones (the USA, Canada, Australia and the European Union), there
are 130 countries that do not even have consular offices in Colombia: Togo,
Tonga, Turkey, Burkina Fasso, Mauritius, Pakistan, Swaziland, the Ukraine,
Zambia, Zimbabwe and many others. Within Europe, only the diminutive island of
Malta does not require a visa, but as there are no direct flights to that State
it is equally inaccessible. Until a few months ago there was still Spain. Now
the queues of people applying for visas outside the Spanish Embassy in Bogotá are
at times several blocks long. The
case of Spain is emblematic of the passive and almost closed attitude of many
people and also of the Colombian
government itself. In March of last year, when a few Colombian intellectuals
headed by Gabriel García Márquez and Fernando Botero announced that they would
not return to Spain if it introduced visas for Colombians, their protest caused
more of a stir and met with more support in Spain than in Colombia itself. While
the Colombian State accepted the new restriction with passive resignation, the
parliamentary socialist group defended us in the Spanish courts as follows:
“Over the last decade the number of Colombians arrested has fallen from 565 to
354, while there have been far more arrests of drug-traffickers from other
countries – France, 624; Portugal, 764; Britain, 432; and Italy, 375.
Colombians accounted for 15% of foreign arrests in 1991, and in 1999 they
accounted for just 5%. As we can see, it is we ourselves who at times go about
emphasising the negative features of our poor reputation and as we feel anointed
by a collective guilt, we feel that the moral sanction represented by a visa is
deserved. Even one of the writers who signed this statement, Álvaro Mutis,
recently declared, the knees of his trousers worn away by so many genuflexions
before Spanish royalty, that he had hesitated to sign as Spain had every reason
to demand a visa since there was no other way of keeping hordes of delinquents
from entering its country. The
way things are going at world level, especially since the attack on the Twin
Towers, the problem of closed frontiers is tending to worsen. Not only do we
have visas, but we have increasingly more conditions to fulfil in order to
obtain them. Moreover, since these requisites are, above all, economic, the
number of Colombian ‘mafiosos’ entering other countries will not decrease as
a result of the new restrictions since, although the embassies are asking for
bank and property ownership certificates from aspiring travellers, these same
embassies have no way of knowing whether such assets were purchased with illicit
money. Other
Hispanoamerican countries have recently followed the example of Spain. Costa
Rica, the Central American nation that has received most Colombian investment in
the last decades, has now imposed visas on all Colombians. Similarly, Ecuador,
which in the 19th century formed part of Greater Colombia, and Panama, which
until 1903 was a Colombian state, have also imposed visa restrictions on us. The
maltreatment on the pavements outside the embassies, the Kafkaesque nightmare of
some Colombian who wants to travel abroad, will tend to increase rather than
decrease. What
we now have is a rise in consular mafias – shady characters who will, in
exchange for large sums of money, grant a visa to the United States, for
example. The results of such illegal mediation are uncertain and most probably
it is, in addition to being a criminal offence, also a fraud at the expense of
desperate people who want to realise “the American dream”. For this reason
many are prepared to risk travelling as stowaways, in which case they risk
either freezing to death in the luggage compartment of an airliner or else being
thrown into the sea by merciless sailors as has already happened to a number of
ship stowaways. During the Middle Ages and until a few centuries ago, travellers who arrived in Europe from any country suspected of having a pestilence were obliged to spend a period of quarantine on the islands near their port of arrival. The same happened at a number of ports in a much newer country of great promise: the United States of America. If the traveller survived his forty days’ sanitary vigilance in good health, then he was allowed into the country. Apart from sida, ebola and a few cases of cholera, modern medicine has succeeded in defeating the majority of pestilences. But now there is a new, planetary plague, namely poverty, and also the new plague-ridden - the poor. The countries of the world with very high proportions of the population who suffer from this terrible disease called poverty, are also subjected to a period of quarantine. The difference is that this time it does not last forty days but a whole lifetime and must be carried out in one’s country of residence. Under these rules, obviously, all patients die before entering the promised land. And the final irony, as in Kafka’s story, is that at the hour of our death we shall be told that it was this door, this Embassy, this country that was best suited to our destiny. Note: This article was first published in English by JUST Response on August 15 2002. Héctor Abad Faciolince is a leading Colombian journalist, novelist and academic who resides in Medellín.
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