29. The narco-gas stations and the narco-lines

Like every morning, Máxima would go out to the beach to make her three-kilometer journey, but it struck her that the two fishermen's gas stations, where the price of gasoline was less than a dollar, were taken over by buyers of huge amounts of money. plastic fuel tanks.

No doubt that gasoline was not for the boats of some fisherman, the most she needed was two 20-gallon cans.

The fishermen's cooperative, which was run by the same people who ran the fishermen's dispensary, had as a fundamental business the sale of fuel, but they also had an ice factory, which competed with the ice factory of the richest man in town, which he had some fishing boats and he dried his nets in the streets outside the park.

The park had beautiful and giant acacia trees, with red flowers, with very thick trunks and branches, but the playgrounds were destroyed.

Apparently, the towns that had a gas station for fishermen were visited by trucks that loaded large tanks.

- Where does so much gasoline go? .- Máxima asked an operator of the state gas station, who sold exclusively to fishermen.

- To the ships.

- Boats need diesel or gasoline

"Both," was the curt reply.

Then he remembered that his friend Geraldo told him that he had fishing boats, and the gossip said that speedboats, or those that pirates steal, are supplied with fuel on fishing boats, before reaching two hundred miles to contact with ships that bought the drug from the high seas or exchanged it for smuggling, and to go with gasoline to the Colombian Pacific Coast to process the cocaine or to Central America.

On another occasion, she found one of the boats that was going to other beaches to the north, where she ran, that disembarked things that were brought from the Chinese ships, which pass through the 200-mile limit, or from those that were entering or leaving the Port of Esmeraldas.

But she caught his attention that the trucks that came to collect the sardines, that brought the boats of the rich man from the town, could wait days, the drivers dominated in a hotel while they waited.

To Máxima, this long wait for the trucks seemed suspicious, as they lost money by not working during the waiting days. She wondered if something illegal was coming on the ships, like cocaine, that could easily be put between the fish, ice, and sawdust to take to Manta, where the trucks would go once they were full.

The conflicts between the doctor and the president of the affiliates continued, She was harassed. The president who was nicknamed the big-assed ant, because of her huge buttocks and her brown skin, that she insisted that the schedule be changed, to please the nurse who insisted that she change the schedule that did not suit her.

Finally, it became clear to him that the main and most lucrative business in the town was the sale of gasoline and oil for the motors of the boats, then fishing

But there was something else, the president of the health promoters was at the same time the top leader in the town of the Avanzando political movement, which was the movement of the director of Social Security or IESS. that he had been a candidate for vice president for a list different from that of the current government, and that when he lost, he became an ally of the current government, which put him first as Minister and then as director of the IESS.

Tobacco grew spontaneously in the dispensary and one block on the road to the highway, on an abandoned lot, there was a lot of tobacco. Máxima knew that tobacco is the most important medicinal plant in America but at the same time the one that kills the most human beings.

Soon a few months after her stay in the new dispensary, in the back garden many weeds began to grow, which were actually medicinal plants, which the doctor cared for and used, doing combined therapy.

- The affiliates do not pay for you to give them plants, but for you to give them medicines - the president of the affiliates claimed.

"I am the doctor, and I know how I heal my patients," she replied, with the same aggressiveness. The Rural Social Security is also determined that doctors work with midwives, healers and that we use medicinal plants, as part of the new intercultural medicine.

As in the towns that were before, the old people who were the majority of those affiliated with the Rural Social Security, many were addicted to pills, injections, especially painkillers, antibiotics, and vitamins. When they did not receive them, they went mad, complained, or protested.

Finally, the dispensary would periodically run out of water in the summer and Máxima relived the drama of the foul toilets, which prevented her from living in the back room of the dispensary and the new dentist did not work under that pretext.