Location: the border of Amatillo, between El Salvador and Honduras
1. When we arrive, the road is blocked by 12 tractor-trailers. There are bicycle taxis that come back and forth between the two borders. 20 men that approach our van, offering their services with paperwork. We tell them that we will handle it ourselves, and they get angry. A customs cop asks us to make a copy of the exit permit for the vehicle. We go make the copy and bring it back to that cop. He then sends us to an office to the side in order to get it stamped. The office is dark and rather looks like a
horse stable. We wait in line there and we get it stamped. Another cop takes both copies and lets us pass. We believe at this point that everything has been relatively smooth.
2. We cross the bridge to Honduras. The Honduran customs office is surrounded by all sorts of street sellers, selling anywhere from food to clothes, watches and pirated merchandise. Some of them set up right in front of the customs service teller booths. The humidity and heat make the scene even thicker than it is. We are told to go see a cop that sends us to see another cop, who in turn sends us to an office located on the other side of the highway, at the end of a hallway of a ruined building. When we get there we see a woman eating Cheetos, sitting at a lonely desk with a bunch of papers on her desk and one stamp. The office is as hot as a Turkish bath. She takes a look at my passport and all my documents. She asks for the piece of paper that we got stamped in El Salvador and then taken away. She says that without that form she cannot process our papers. So we have to get back to El Salvador to ask for that piece of paper and make a copy of it.
3. We get back to El Salvador. The cop that took our stamped document doesn’t want to borrow it back to us, offering the interesting possibility of having us remain in the international limbo forever. Finally we convince him, make the copy, and return to Honduras.
4. The woman of the destroyed office that is hot like a Turkish bath looks at our documents again. At times she seems to zero in onto a blank section of the document, and then she stares forever at a car repair shop receipt. We are drenched in sweat. I look at the AC unit, which is put on the window but has no engine. The woman throws in an enigmatic and worrisome phrase: “you have to go to the bank to pay the fee, but the bank just closed”. We seek guidance in her face but her expression contains the deepest and most absolute indifference. Finally she wields her one and only stamp and stamps it onto my passport. She sends us to another office across the highway where we need to pay “a different fee.”
5. We cross to that office to the other side of the highway, which is located between some restaurant with a (live) pig tied to its door and someone’s house where a man is reading his newspaper in undershirt and accompanied by two parrots that are eating rice and beans. The only place where we see no signs of life is precisely in that office where we are supposed to make our payment. We decide to wait.
6. We continue waiting.
7. We are still waiting. The pig is trying to eat a plastic bag on the floor.
8. We decide to go back to the woman with the stamp in the Turkish bath of the crumbled building and explain the situation. She calls a guy who is sitting in some corner and asks him to take us back to that office. The special envoy takes us back to that office and magically makes the guy in charge appear (he comes out of the house with the parrots). He charges us $10.
9. We are sent now to the immigration office, which is so blocked by street sellers that we have to go around to a side entrance. There we are told that they cannot help us there, but that we should go to see the man in the blue shirt sitting outside of the destroyed building on the other side of the highway. (The bank is closed, so the man with the blue shirt will handle the $40 payment). We go see this man. He blue shirt man looks at the paperwork and tells us that he needs two copies of the car’s title, my passport, the document of the man with the parrots, the passport page with the stamp from the woman of the Turkish bath, and the document that we got stamped in El Salvador and had to make one copy of. We go for the third time to a Xerox place and make all these copies. We now have a short novel made entirely of documentation.
10. We take it back to the blue shirt man. He reviews and signs each one of them and gives us yet one more document. “Have fun”.
11. We get on the van, but the cops stop us. They ask for all the paperwork, including the one of El Salvador’s stamp, the parrot and pig one, the Turkish bath, and the blue shirt man receipt. They say that they have to get through all our things in the van. They want us to take everything out. I show them that this would take all day. The cop spots a box of old granola bars that I got in Alaska, on the floor of the van. He asks me if I am trafficking seeds. I say “no”.
The cop says OK, you can go.
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Frontera de El Amatillo, entre El Salvador and Honduras
El llegar con mi camionera a la frontera, 20 hombres se aproximan a ofrecer sus servicios. Al decirles que no gracias, se enfurecen. Un policía me manda a sellar un permiso de salida. La oficina, al final de un edificio derruído, parece mas bien un establo. Entro a Honduras. Hay tantos vendedores ambulantes que no se puede hacer cola en la oficina de inmigración. Me mandan a otra oficina a pagar “otra cuota”. Hay un cerdo amarrado al lugar donde tengo que esperar al agente de aduanas para pagar la “otra cuota”. Espero por una hora. El cerdo se está comiendo una bolsa de plástico azul. Comienzo a buscar al agente entre las ruinas y por fin aparece. Me cobra $10. Hay que regresar a que me sellen el recibo de la otra cuota al edificio en ruinas. Finalmente salgo pero me detiene la policia para revisar la camioneta. Me decomisan una barra de granola que tenía olvidada en el piso, de los tiempos de Alaska, diciendo que estoy traficando semillas. Una vez que les doy la barra de granola, me dicen que me puedo ir.