MAPS
In most
of Latin America mapping is directly linked to national security. While
cartography itself has come a long way from two dimensional representations of
boundaries, land forms and transportation infrastructure essential to defense,
its production and distribution remain firmly in the grasp of the military and
its civilian attendants. Those seeking geographical information must thread the
needle between the charybdis of military secrecy and the scylla of bureaucratic
red tape. Consider the following account, with identities scrubbed for obvious
reasons.
8:00 Early
on a Friday morning I left my hotel in a taxi that dropped me at a military
security checkpoint. Here a noncom
packing a pistol and an attitude exchanged my passport for a visitor's badge
and offered directions by pointing his nose to my right. Further up the road
lay a sea green, three story building that houses my destination, the Instituto
Geografico Militar.
Inside, a
series of glassed-in cubicles and a long table fill the only space open to the
public. The table holds a series of
publications: price lists of available products, samples of maps in various
scales and formats and a guide to the recently-published national map, at
1:50,000 scale. This is what I had come for. The entire set consists of more
than five hundred sheets, divided into quadrants set to satellite images. I had brought along a wad of dollars and a
duffle bag large enough to haul the maps away. The noncom had allowed me to
take the duffle past the checkpoint; he did not look in my pocket.
8:30 An
attendant emerged from one of the cubicles to show me the ropes. "Use this form to list the name and
number of each of the sheets you want to purchase," he said, handing me a
lined sheet of paper with the Institute's letterhead. I set pencil to paper, filled the sheet and
returned to the attendant for another.
He frowned. "The information must be written in ink, blue
ink," he explained, supplying a pen and two additional forms. An hour
later, I was back, completed forms in hand. Apparently I telegraphed my next
words since before I could pronounce them, my attendant/antagonist interrupted,
"no more than fifty requests per day." That ended my vision of walking out of the
building with everything rolled up into a big tube, but not my encounter with
regulations.
9:30 Now
another man, an auditor perhaps, emerged from his office to review my work.
With his pen, red ink, he marked each of my selections, "yes" or
"no" as he mumbled a running commentary, "mining area,"
"out of print," "restricted" to justify his
rejections. The auditor whittled my
request from fifty to thirty-eight sheets; still worth the trouble, I
thought.
My next
stop was with a secretary who typed, at ten words a minute, the name and number
of the thirty-eight available maps on official looking stationery and
calculated the cost, $170. She also had
me declare why I wanted the maps and then pointed me in the direction of a
cashier who took a copy of the typed form and the three bills that I offered in
payment. Without uttering a word, he
swiveled his chair and pointed to a sign
on the wall that read "NO CURRENCY LARGER THAN $20 ACCEPTED."
11:00 The
office would close at noon for the weekend, and there was no way for me to get
seven twenty dollar bills in an hour.
The cashier listened to my explanation of how far I had come and how
valuable the maps would be to researchers.
He responded with a single word, "NEXT." My only route lay in
going above his head. Searching the room
for a higher authority, I spied a likely suspect, a man dressed in a suit
reading a newspaper. I explained my predicament, waiving my order and my
money. He listened sympathetically,
smiled and took the documentation and the bills through a door marked
"Employees Only." For a moment it seemed that I would leave with
neither maps nor money. But no, back he came following an elegantly-dressed
woman, his boss.
After
introducing herself, she listened as I recounted my situation. She asked to see the bills and pulled a
jeweler's loupe out of a drawer. Now that's interesting, I thought. Do you suppose a loupe is standard office
equipment, like scissors or a stapler?
"We have to be very careful with large bills," she explained,
"foreign counterfeiters are active in my country." After inspecting
the engraving through the loupe and swabbing the ink with alcohol, she declared
the bills genuine and instructed the man in the suit to accompany me to the
cashier who grudgingly accepted my money and stamped the receipts as paid.
Turning
around I noticed the secretary hailing me with a paper in her hand. "Since you are not a citizen, you must
complete this form to petition the commanding general to release the maps; come
back in two weeks." This was the
time to offer a bribe, but I'm not very good at that, and since I was the last
customer in the office, all eyes seemed fixed on us. So rather than money, I offered a last-ditch
suggestion. "What if I ask a citizen to pick up the maps?" "Well, sure, you could do that,"
she said, and we all went to lunch.
