Residente, Visitante
A border is a politically expedient obstacle, and although we anticipate them, they permeate with uncertainty.
We learned that lesson the other day on our way to Bolivia. After driving around the beautiful Lake Titicaca, a surly immigration official made us feel irrelevant before finally looking past his bifocals to explain to these tragic traveling souls that our daughters’ Chilean passports are not valid in Bolivia. Evo’s government only recognizes their US passports. The argument: the Peru exit stamp was in the US passport. The message: if you’re going to parade your daughters around the world as miniature blonde chimaeras of an evil empire, then be prepared to pay our reciprocity fees of $189.20 per person, your children’s Chilean roots be damned. We kindly replied: ‘No thanks, Bolivia’.
Although the Peruvian/Bolivian border at Titicaca seems peaceful, an international border is anything but smooth. Here, where two countries merge is where the joints of humanity are most tense. Travelers are on the go. Cultures are in flux. Languages meld. These regions are the farthest flung from the nation’s nerve center, as such, they are the most vulnerable. Here is where citizenship is put to the test and where nationalism is questioned.
These lines of division are more than flags and political boundaries. They are physical barriers and geographies of austerity. Between the US and Mexico, the Rio Bravo is bravo, but apparently not bravo or grande enough for Trump. Look at the Perijá mountain range dividing Colombia and northwestern Venezuela: a steep barrier slotted with deep canyons, where a lack of improved roads makes the border even more unapproachable. The Chile/Peru border is a desert, a groaning waterless expanse of sand, sun, and wind. Others, like Lake Titicaca seem to be as big as an ocean, hundreds of kilometers across, thousands of meters deep. There are ice fields covering large swathes of the Patagonia in Chile and Argentina where the two governments still haven’t agreed upon a border, on where to chop the ice. One problem is that frozen water doesn’t flow either way. How can you divide resources locked in the wrong state? If any of these countries could divide the oxygen in the air, I think they would.
Nobody wants to be stuck on a border, the consummate no-man’s land, the fourth world, a kind of airport terminal sans Starbucks. As if it were a warzone, governments spend money on fences, staffing, infrared, anything to repel the potential invader. And the nearby cities are horrible. After leaving Titicaca, we drove to Desaguadero, which fittingly translates to “The Drain”. It’s a funnel where all cargo and goods lumber down the bumpy highway through Southern Peru into Bolivia. Here, a repulsive town teeters on the edge of the nation, where everything that isn’t fit to flow through the drain rots.
We continued over the cordillera to Tacna, Peru’s last city where the border was established after Peru lost the devastating War of the Pacific to Chile. Bustling Tacna sits in the open desert like a scar from the 19th century expansionist strategies, yet incongruously populated with modern niceties. Today’s Tacna is a border of attrition, where the winds always seem to blow north, yet another sign of Chilean might.
We couldn’t leave Tacna behind fast enough. Married to a Chilean for the last six years, I knew she was getting butterflies just thinking of the homecoming. After taking photos on the border with a Bienvenidos sign, we came to the sad realization that the Rainbow would not be bienvenido. Our Colombian-plated van is in my wife’s name, and unless we are importing the vehicle, Chileans are not allowed to bring foreign cars into Chile. Custom authorities are automatically suspicious of any Chilean driving a foreign car. Ignacia broke down, as if betrayed by her patria. How could her own country not allow her, after three years abroad, to bring her Colombian campervan to visit longer than 15 days? Importation was also out of the question since we would not be staying in Chile to live. Our cards were played.
Immigration and custom authorities operate not in the interest of the tourist, but as guardians of the homeland. Anyone crossing their border is treated as somebody who has come to stay. They issue legal writs in the form of visas to curtail that stay, always repelling the visitor back to his or her country of origin after a maximum of three months. ‘Tourist’ is just a fancy word for a foreigner-who-better-not-stay.
Borders need paperwork to function. We check the boxes, show our papers, and our collection of visas and stamps that supposedly define our residency. As a family that has never lived in either of our home countries, we are not easy to process at borders. Owning a third-country vehicle makes it even more complicated. For now, we have no residence except the Rainbow, a border-jumping, rubber-tramping, home on wheels. And for the next five months, we will continue to fight our way through the tangle of South American immigration and customs regulations, no matter how long we get stuck at the border.
Originally published at https://nicoparco.com on October 15, 2019.
