16.The war for the land

 Back in Boca del Rio Sucio, Pedro, the man who took her every day on his tricycle from Puerto Nuevo to Boca del Dirty, an adult, fat man, with all the features of an Afro-descendant but with lighter skin, He told him what was happening at the Finca de la Urbanización Campesina while they were crossing it.

"The Peasant Organization fell apart since the band-aids of Liberation Theology were taken out," he said while they were stopped on the road by some cows, who were waiting their turn to milking and have their milk drawn by hand.

-When I pass that? - Maxima asked, adjusting her hat and glasses, while a furious swarm of cattle mosquitoes attacked them.

- It was around 1985, more or less. In the times of Febres Cordero, the president who persecuted the Alfaro Vive Carajo and all the communists. One day they came to the home of the health promoters when we were in a course, they put us face down on the floor, they were looking everywhere for weapons. They took us outside to interrogate us one by one and threaten us.

 They sent Father Julio to Italy and Father Gracia to Quito, here we stayed with the leaders, but the one who remained, Felipe, d drowned in Boca de las Manchas, when the organization's boat, which was powerful, With two tremendous engines he turned, the man did not know how to swim. Then there was another colleague Eribe, who took over the truck, the sawmill, the cocoa dryer, and even the warehouses that the organization had in Guayaquil to export. Then his crooked business was discovered and on top of that, the organization's house in Muisne burned down. There practically everything died, then only the promoters were left.

When his father came to do the malaria research, they came with the other two doctors who were gay, or rather bisexual, but they seemed like good people. One was Ecuadorian, the other was Colombian, the two did not get on well with his father, and they began to make trouble for him about everything, until they removed him from the project. They built the session room of the promoters' house, which is now full of leaks.

-If it is, it is in poor condition, I have had to rehabilitate the bathrooms, I put some canopies to collect water, I bought tanks and the bats sleep with me in the room.

-It is that the promoters also disbanded. We stopped meeting. Ferdinand left for Atacames and he was the tough one. There he made his own organization to export cocoa. But first he worked with his father, who gave him tuna, oil, rice, beans, to make mingas, with that they built a school in Matambal, above Bunche.

Ferdinand accompanied his father down the Bunche River to do vaccinations, when he did the rural one in 1982, in which his mother also went. That was when a plague of whooping cough and measles hit. Everything was a mountain invaded by people from Manabí, many of them had been fleeing from justice, with their families, they are white, blond, with blue eyes, but fierce, it was from Chone, where now the strongest drug trafficking organization is, that of the Choneros.

They took away the cocoa exporter from Ferdinand because, I don't know how many, he abandoned his children and his wives, only his daughter accompanies him, he is an alcoholic. At promoters' parties and meetings he ends up fighting, harassing and vomiting on the floor.

-He's that ugly, cheeky little man who got drunk the first day I arrived ... right?

-That same

-He pretended to open the door for him when he was sleeping and wanted to go overboard with me when he was drunk.

- That's always been around and I don't know how they haven't killed him yet.

"Who is it that has now brought them back together?" Asked the doctor, when at last the dogs and their owners managed to move the cattle from the road, where they used to sleep before milking in the mornings.

-Angel is now the one who brings us together. It is is that he has the farm at the entrance of Puerto Nuevo and the store on the field. The Correa government is now building a house for him on the highway, and also for others like Condorito in the town. He is also an old promoter.

- And Eugenio?

-He is my relative, and he has been president of the promoters for years. He too and his wife are the ones who bring us together. But now we are in a tremendous fight between the promoters and the former leaders of the Organization for the farm. They have already distributed it like buzzards over the prey. We are the ones who prevent them from taking the last 40 hectares of the 100 that he had. And the former leaders of the organization have already negotiated the farm with a drug trafficker, who wants to pay them a lot of money.

 

Upon reaching the town of Boca del Sucio, a huge wooden truck finished loading hundreds of pieces of wood, illegally cut from the Mache Chindul Reserve.

-Why don't the police stop these trucks that traffic wood?

- For the police and the Ministry of the Environment they are accomplices.