I Was Robbed on My Birthday

This is what I learned

Everyone in Colombia raved about this place, San Andrés. It’s a seahorse-shaped island off the coast of Nicaragua, and basically the Colombian version of Hawaii. My students, my girlfriend Mariana’s family, and basically anyone who knew anything about it told me the same thing: it was safe.

So we booked a ticket to celebrate my birthday. I did my research. I read everywhere online that you can just walk to your hotel in North End from the airport as it’s just 10 minutes away at a brisk walk. The cab ride, which would have cost 15,000 pesos and taken only 3 minutes, was out of the question for me. Everyone I asked insisted that I would not have any issues walking to my hotel from the airport — we’re talking about one of the most touristy locations in Colombia, after all.

We landed, quickly got our baggage, and walked out. We were about one block from the airport when Mariana quickly noticed some shadowy figures at the tops of some trees in a pitch-black park. This spooked us, of course, so we crossed the street and walked faster.

Less than a block later, a black teenager materialized in front of us, seemingly out of thin air. He had been hiding behind a building and jumped out at us. He wore a red shirt, black shorts, and sandals. This was my third mugging, and I had never seen a mugger wear sandals. He immediately said, in Spanish, “Surprise! Give me everything that you have!” He then took out a sharpened screwdriver and pointed it at us. Mariana to this day insists it was a long knife; I don’t know which one of us is right. Trauma does weird things to the brain.

Unfortunately, we had nearly everything on us. We had been expecting the walk to be so short that we hadn’t even bothered with hiding our important documents. My passport, my cedula, my credit card, you name it — it was in my pockets. Since San Andrés was supposedly so safe, I even stupidly had both our cell phones in my front pocket.

My immediate reaction was exasperation and incredulity. I asked him in Spanish, “Seriously? Really?” He must have been about 16 years old and had not expected this reaction, let alone any sort of passive verbal pushback. I just could not believe it. Mariana and I just stood there stunned and in silence, not moving.

He looked behind his shoulder. Impatient, he said, “Just give me anything. A phone, a wallet, whatever.”

Mariana said, “Give him my phone.” I did. He grabbed it and ran away with it the instant it made contact with his fingers. We stood there, stunned but okay. Mariana mentioned that we needed to find help, so we walked a few yards ahead and there was a tall moreno (mocha-colored) man wearing a wife-beater standing there. He looked at us. He constantly had his mouth puckered up and open as if he was imagining what it would be like to grab peanuts like an elephant.

We asked him for help and he obliged. He said his name was Hans. He was a San Andresano (a resident) and he told us that he knew the teen who robbed us.

“He’s just a kid from the barrio and he’s going to try to sell the cell phone for whatever few pesos he can,” he told us. He had a laissez-faire attitude about him that bothered me.

A couple that Hans knew — we also recognized them since they were on our flight — showed up just then by taxi. We told them what happened, and instantly the man, his wife, Mariana, and I sprinted back to the alley where the thief had run.

We immediately saw the guy in the red shirt running away with two other guys — his accomplices. They ran away giddy, excited, and laughing, down the alley into the abyss that was the barrio. There was nothing we could do.

Mariana and I convinced Hans and his friends to walk us back to the airport since we were now terrified of getting robbed again if we continued walking, even though we were only two blocks away from the hotel. We walked back to the airport, dejected and feeling like hell, and Hans gave me his phone number. He told us he’d try to talk to the teen to try to get him to sell it back to us instead of selling it to someone else for almost nothing.

We got a cab and told the cab driver everything. He was moved by our story and deeply saddened. He couldn’t believe it had happened, which surprised me. We got to the hotel in 2 minutes. It was inside of a mall, so the taxi left us outside. Through a window in a room inside the mall, there was an elderly man in his boxers laying down on a bed, drunk out of his mind and passed out while vallenato music blasted from his boom box. I knocked on his door several times, but each time he would just momentarily wake up, look around in a daze, and then go back to sleep.

I kept at it because I had no choice. Eventually, he woke up and explained that he was the night watchman. He got his wife, the hotel manager, who gave us the key to our room. We explained to her that we had gotten robbed. She blamed us.

“Of course, you don’t walk here at night, everybody knows that!” she said. Well, I thought, maybe not if everyone tells you the exact opposite for a year straight.

I couldn’t sleep. I waited and it became midnight. I sat down on the bed and put my head in my hands. Happy birthday, I thought.

This wasn’t my first rodeo, as I explained above. I had been robbed before. But something about a thief’s audacity to jump out with a weapon and yell, “Surprise!” at you before an armed robbery, as if it’s some kind of sick joke, made it that much worse psychologically. It made me want to find the guy and just destroy everything that is him. It made me want to obliterate him from the earth. I wanted his existence to end. I wanted to make him feel like I felt.

That was my welcome wagon to San Andrés. I barely slept. The pent-up resentment wouldn’t let me.

The next morning, Mariana convinced me that we should file a denuncia, a formal registered complaint to the police. We went to the police station and explained what had happened. Most of them were from San Andrés but the sergeant was from Bogotá. The officers assumed I couldn’t speak Spanish.

I could tell by their body language that they were trying to figure out a way to dismiss our denuncia, as they would be forced to register the complaint to the national government which could impact tourism on the island. According to data at the time, muggings were virtually non-existent. Now I knew why. They weren’t being acknowledged or logged.

At one point I heard an officer say, “This isn’t going to work. He’s a foreigner, but she’s from Bogotá… She knows how this works…” Mariana heard this as well and called them out on it, but they acted none the wiser. After about 20 minutes the sergeant came out and told us that two detectives were assigned to our case and that we would be accompanying them.

Mariana and I looked at each other. This was weird. We followed the two plain-clothed officers outside to their respective motorcycles. They gave us helmets and asked us to get on with them. That’s how we ended up rocketing through downtown San Andrés, aimlessly bouncing back from one street to another. I knew this was completely pointless. How was this in any way an investigation? But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t enjoying part of it.

That’s when I spotted Hans munching on a bag of chips outside of a pharmacy. “Stop!” I yelled to the officer driving. Both officers stopped and we all got off the motorcycles. Hans didn’t look surprised to see me and barely changed his expression.

“This is Hans,” I said. “He told us he knows the guy who robbed us.”

Hans immediately gave me a look that told me that he was not going to cooperate with us at all. His body language went from comfortable and laid-back to tense and squirrely.

“I used to know his cousin,” he said.

The officers grilled him but got nothing out of him. We got back on the motorcycles and drove through the downtown core at random again. After a while, the officers got bored and drove us back to the station. That was the investigation. They refused to let us file the denuncia. That was that.

That was my birthday.

When we got back to Bogotá I was livid. I told Mariana’s family, my students, and nearly everyone I knew about what happened. I expressed my belief that they had misled me into thinking that San Andrés was so safe, that one could walk anywhere without a care in the world. They all had the same reaction to my complaints. They shrugged and said, “Well, you walked on the street. You should have known better. You gave papaya.”

(Note: “Giving papaya” is a Colombian expression that means that you let someone take advantage of you. For example, a papaya salesman would never be stupid enough to give away his papaya for free, people would blame him for letting his customers take advantage of him.)

Although these conversations reeked of victim-blaming to me, I found this response was ubiquitous in all of my interactions after the robbery. It was my fault for walking at night. It was my fault for not taking a cab. It was my fault for having all of my personal belongings on me. It was my fault that I let my guard down since everyone had told me I could. And above all, it was my fault that criminals were scouting for victims to rob at a popular tourist destination.

After this trip, I never truly trusted anyone I asked regarding an area’s safety again. Be vigilant at all times when traveling, even in stereotypically “safe” areas of the world. Maybe at home, it’s wise advice to walk whenever possible for the exercise and to save a few bucks, but taking a cab is a much safer bet when traveling. You deserve a better birthday.