There are three sides to every story. - your side, my side and the truth. 

And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each differently.”

Rebecca Shea

Sandino tossed an email on Perico’s desk. “We may have a bigger problem than we  thought, than just the loss of the last shipment, my General.” 

“How so, Sandino?” he said as he reached for the email. He scanned it and shoved it aside. “What makes you think that’s a problem. There are any number of Chinesy looking people here in Colombia. None of them have any connection with the Chinese government.”

“Right, that’s what I thought too. But I called Chavez back. He says she has an accent that he couldn’t place. He says she looks like a little kid. He said he didn’t hear a lot but that what he did hear, he said she thinks like an adult and gives orders like an adult. He thinks it was her who lead the reprisal. He was emphatic about it. She’s not Colombian according to Chavez.” 

“So what do you want to do about it? Have you got anything in mind?”

“Si, my General, I want to contact the Chinese Embassy and find out if they know anything about it. We might be able to tell even if they don’t give us a straight answer. We need to know what we’re dealing with. We might be able to suck more funding from the Americans if we can convince them the Chinese are trying to influence the rebels or the cartels.”

“Okay, what else do you have going on?”

“I’m planning a couple of clean-up sweeps. I’ve got one going to  happen down in Papayón and another that’s going to take another shot down by Túquerres to see if we can’t find out where our weapons, money and drugs went. We need a good result there to redeem the loss from the Mayoyoque Christmas operation. My wife is still bugging me about the cancelled trip to Spain. Plus, I have tuition fees to make up.”

“I hear you, we all took a hit on that one. It would be nice to see that bounce back somehow. That’s impacting our scheduling for the renovations to our Communications Centre as well. The architects are after me for another progress payment before they’ll update the plans. The whole reno took a serious hit with that one, plus we lost the chopper and crew. Finance is all over me. 

“Chavez is after me to make good on the men he lost as well. I can’t avoid paying him. If I don’t, we’ll lose cooperation at the border again. You’ve got to make both of those operations stick Santino. No fuck ups. 

“Don’t worry, I get it. But there’s a lot more to it than that. I’ve been assembling new information about drug flow between Colombia and Brazil and it’s starting  to make sense. I’ve involved three teams of observers. While it hasn’t looked like I’ve had much going on for months, that’s not been the case. You know it takes time to get intel back from the jungle. My guys aren’t all pros but most of them have been remarkably effective, I think. It looks like we have a lot of drug traffic going out of Colombia using Amazonas Department as a back door  through Brazil as well as the usual from the coast. Most of the action has been in the southwest sector because that’s where the roads are. But the cartels seem to be opening up the east.

“If you look at this map, you’ll see that La Pedrera is in the remotest corner of Colombia, near the Brazilian border.  We have essentially no army presence there so no government presence either.  The few jobs there consist of people with no money hiring themselves out to others with no money or doing whatever donkey work the armed cartels give them to pack cases of marijuana through the jungle and over the mountain passes. La Pedrera is on the Caquetá River there where it crosses into Brazil.  See that?” he said pointing to a river shown on the map. “You remember from the last time we were there? We thought  it was isolated then, now it’s a strategic transit route with lots of drug traffic. It’s a highway waiting to be paved. The Apaporis River, you remember? See? That isn’t far off either. Those rivers are crucial waterways for the cartels to transport drugs, weapons and children. Little girls mostly.”

“What are they doing with the children?”

“Looks like they’re selling them to outfits operating open pit mines. I’m not sure what they’re pulling out yet but it must be worth a lot of money because there’s a lot of foreign nationals out there in the mud and you know how they hate rain and getting wet.

“As I said, we don’t have any presence up there but guess what? The guerrillas do.  About five miles upstream, there’s supposed to be a FARC checkpoint charging tolls to pass.

The only way to make real money in La Pedrera is by carrying marijuana, over the passes to Brazil. Where marijuana goes, cocaine soon follows. Since it’s on the Caquetá River, which crosses into Brazil, it’s the best and easiest transit route unless you’re in a plane. Less convenient, because it takes longer, is the Apaporis River. Both of these  rivers are superhighways. Without marijuana and cocaine, La Pedrera could not exist as a viable town.” Santino maintained. “Where am I going with this? I need more men, my General. I can’t patrol no-man’s land with ghost soldiers.”

Perico, hesitated a moment, turned and pulled a form out of his drawer. “Here,” he said. “take this requisition, fill it out and append what you just told me to it and bring it back  to me and I’ll see what I can do.”

“Si, my General, we seize anywhere from eight to ten tonnes of MJ a year. The rebels call it “skunk”. Coke is still a small portion of that. The child trafficking is incidental. No one bothers with that because who needs the headache of trying to reunite a crying child with a mother that likely sold her in the first place? One is bad enough. Can you imagine having to deal with ten of them?”

“What’s driving the drug traffic in that area? It’s all jungle for thousands of miles. Who’s asking?”

“The cartels are recruiting the pueblos nativos (indigenous peoples) for “hormigueos” – they’re the human leaf carrying ants on the trails. Instead of pieces of leaves, these men are the new pack animals carrying drugs to the boats and pirogues on  small creeks to float down the tributaries to the Amazon and the Brazilian drug cartels. The Brazilians are financing the FARC here. That’s why we can’t get ahead of them. They have better financing than we do.”

“MALDITA SEA! (God dammit!) Why didn’t you tell me that first?”

“Hmm, Here’s the kicker. That little red haired Chinese girl has been seen in this area too. Something is going on.”

“How  can a little girl be in two places at once. And walk through jungle! How the fuck are we going to find one little girl with no name in all of Colombia? But, you know what? This isn’t our problem. Forget about it for now. If the Chinese really are involved, sooner or later, they are going to become conspicuous, just like this little girl. They have a lot going on here in South America. They can’t afford this  to get out of hand any more than we can. Sooner or later someone is going to start falling all over themselves to give us money to plug that hole. We don’t have to beg. On second thought, like I said, just forget about it. Let’s see what happens.”

Sandino was back an hour later. 

“What is it now? You have results already?”

“Si, my General, look at this picture.” he shoved a small indistinct photo across the General’s desk, “That, apparently is the little red haired girl who is causing all the trouble.”

“Huh, her hair doesn’t look that red to me.”

“Probably hair dye, my General.”

“She doesn’t look that small either. Is this the only shot of her?”

“Without some sort of context in the shot, you can’t tell how tall she is. She is supposedly under about one and a half metres (4’-10”). 

“Regardless, we aren’t going to send a squad into Amazonas looking for her. Just set up three squads to patrol the towns we can reach with armoured vehicles. If we catch her, we catch her.

                                                                                                …

The attaché at the Chinese embassy was not impressed when he saw the email from a Capitán Santino about a Chinese operative in Colombia. China, recently sensitive to being blamed for various incursions around the world was doing it’s best to conduct itself on a non-interventionist policy approach. Stepping back from past practices was complicated and the aide knew his boss, Wang Xiaoyuan would not be amused by this latest insinuation. He looked at the  fuzzy photograph of the suspected intruder. 

He was pretty sure China had no subversive activities going on in Colombia, but the usual straightforward denial wouldn’t convince anyone that China had no interest in Colombia beyond it’s current push to increase trade in cocoa and infrastructure projects. The last thing China wanted was some sort of scandal to interfere with trade talks that seemed to be going so well. China was aggressively expanding its influence throughout South America and was trying to add Colombia to its Belt and Road Initiative. Colombia’s hesitancy was based  on its dependance on US financial aid to shut down drug trafficking. Now here he was, potentially sitting on what might be a Chinese orchestrated drug exodus out of the bottom end of Colombia and into both Peru and Brazil. He was staggered.

He had to escalate Captain Santino’s query.

Ambassador Wang took the note seriously. He was perfectly aware that Chairman Hu Jintao was contemplating the end of his term. A problem like this could turn out to be insignificant and not worth his time. Conversely, this little girl could be the merest tip of a huge iceberg and taint Hu’s legacy beyond belief, to say nothing of his own 

He decided that the best way to approach this query would be to put out feelers and see what turned up. He made three phone calls. The first was to Colombia’s President Juan Santos to find out what he knew, thought or was prepared to share. That turned up nothing. Santos didn’t seem to know any more than he did himself. Regardless, a ball had started rolling and in that rolling, it was most likely rolling away from himself and China. That of course wasn’t enough to allow him to stop there. China did have operatives in any country where they had an ambassador. They were considered part of the security team that provides ears to the ground. His next call was to Huang Minhui, Chinese ambassador in Peru and following him, Qiu Xiaoqi, ambassador to Brazil. He made a request to each of them to explore the possibility of a Chinese connection to the drug trade between the three countries.  He made specific reference to the red-haired Chinese girl. He wanted to know more about her and what her significance was.

As quickly as possible, the nearest thing to a dragnet in South America was put out to find this girl before news of her involvement could hit the public airwaves. 

The Chinese official response was that the girl was an anomaly and nothing to do with them. Unofficially, she was a disaster of international proportions. It got worse. What followed was the only known photograph of the girl. She was a child, no doubt, but she was also, undeniably beautiful and undeniably Chinese. With a face like that, she had the potential to become the face of all that was wrong with society in the twenty first century.