After money, the number-two topic that people like to ask us about our trip is safety. I first heard it from my friend’s uncle in Utah. She had told me he had taken a similar road trip through Central America twenty years ago, and I was interested to hear if he had any special advice to give me before I departed on our own road trip through the Americas. I was disappointed when he said, “Want my advice? Stay home.”
We soon found that there was little to fear on the road in most places. In Mexico, we parked and slept in many public places, usually after checking with some locals, all of whom said we would be fine—unless we were extremely unlucky. The real problem, they said, would be when we left Mexico and got to Guatemala. Guatemalans, however, warned us against El Salvador and El Salvadoreans against Honduras and nobody fears Costa Rica because Costa Rica has closed themselves so much to the possibility of aggression that they got rid of their army and put their defense budget into health and education, and subsequently have the richest and safest country in Central America. When we got to South America, everyone asked us how we had made it through Colombia alive, but Colombia’s biggest problem for us had been the roads, most of which were under construction. Our biggest fear on a daily basis was breaking down or running out of gas.
Over the course of 20 months on the road from San Francisco to Ushuaia, I was scared two times. The first time was just a few weeks into our trip. Sleeping on a beach in Baja one night, I had a scare when four men pulled up just next to us on the deserted coastline. They ended up being teenagers who probably saw our Volkswagen van and figured we had drugs. They smoked a few cigarettes and left when they found out we did not. The second time I was scared was in the Argentine city of Tucumán, where we were stranded for a few days with car problems. These days happened to be the same few days that riots were erupting in large cities across the country. One night we came back to our hotel to find a crowd of merchants armed mostly with sticks and metal rods, but a few old shotguns as well—guarding the market against potential looters. The next day, walking around downtown, half of the stores were closed and the other half could only be accessed through the ubiquitous pull-down riot shields. Shop workers were papering over their windows to prevent glass breakage, as it seemed they had done before. There was a palpable tension in the area, and I thought I could feel people’s eyes on each other, waiting for someone to start trouble. Argentines are used to this kind of insecurity. They think Colombia is scary, but we avoided the trouble spots of Colombia the same way we avoided drug territory in Mexico. Juan likes to say that there are two kinds of people: people who are afraid of Mexico, and people who have been there. True, there are trouble spots around the border—these are the places that get all of the media attention—but you can avoid going to them altogether, the same way we avoided certain parts of San Francisco and Oakland, after living and working in these cities for years. You learn how to deal with it and you avoid thinking about it. You can’t live your life afraid.
But now, as we prepare to return home to California, I feel the return of a feeling that I had been so accustomed to that I had forgotten it was there. At lunch the other day, Juan asked me if I’d heard that six people had died in Santa Barbara. I winced: a shooting? I hated that this was the first thing that came to mind—a willful act, and not some kind of traffic accident. But in the months before we left the Bay Area in September 2012, a man killed seven people at a college in Oakland, and then another disturbed man killed twelve at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Then just before Christmas, as we spent the night in Palenque, we heard about Sandy Hook. It goes on and on. A few months ago, it was a shooting in Fort Hood—again. From down here, our country seems to be the one we should fear the most.
I’m sure there are many contributing factors to the rise in mass shootings in the US: a an ailing health care system that fails to adequately address the mentally ill, a cultural glorification of violence, an increased incidence of social disorders—but the single biggest way to reduce these manifestations of tragedy would be to reform gun laws. Guns are legal to own here in Argentina, but when I asked Juan if he would know how to go about getting one if he suddenly wanted one, he answered he did not. I, on the other hand, who has never shot—nor wanted to shoot—a weapon, answered that I would probably go to a pawn shop. Or Wal-Mart.
Browsing the news on my reader, I looked and saw that the word “rampage” is now a tag that I can include in my favorite topics list. And yet down here, nobody asks us if we’re scared to go home to such a violent country. These terrible events are not contained to a few rebel hot spots in drug and guerrilla country, places that may loom large in the media consciousness but are in fact easy to avoid. These horrible occurrences are increasingly common and widespread, taking place in ordinary towns that I would never tell a tourist to avoid. When these acts of violence occur with such frequency, we can no longer view them as isolated, random incidents, but part of a larger, disturbing trend that we must confront directly. All of us are at risk. A year and a half abroad has re-sensitized me to the fear of this sort of violence. It hasn’t been a part of my everyday life for the past twenty months, and I don’t want it to be.
President Obama has a plan in place, but it’s not happening fast enough.