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“What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
“I’m a businessman, first and foremost.”
She snorted.
“I am. Moving drugs is a business just like any other.”
“Except that it’s illegal.”
I shrugged. “Well, there’s that.”
“How did you get into it?”
“I thought that I was going to be a petrolero, which was my father’s profession, and it had kept our family comfortably wealthy my entire life. I could have sat back on my millions and lived comfortably on the interest for my entire life.”
“And then?”
“Then, dollarization happened. Suddenly, our money had been reduced to a shadow of what it was.”
I held her a little tighter. It wasn’t easy to remember the time when my entire life had fallen apart.
“We could’ve fallen to pieces. There were plenty of people at our level who did. They didn’t know how to live or work. They didn’t sully their hands with plebeian concerns, like making enough money to put food on the table.”
“What saved you? What made you different from the rest?”
“We had a secret weapon: my mother. She’d been a wealthy middle-class girl when she’d met my father at PUCE, a university in Quito. My maternal grandfather had struggled as a businessman until she was a teenager, when he’d finally signed a few contracts to export roses to the United States.”
“Roses?”
“Yes, roses. Valentine’s Day was the biggest event of the year for them. My mother had been raised to think that she should work for a living, even though she’d gone through all the etiquette classes that a teenager should go through.”
“So she’s part of both worlds.”
“Yes. She fit into my father’s family with its bloodline that went back to the Spaniards from the colonial days, but my paternal grandparents had always been rather snide about her somewhat humble upbringing, since my maternal grandfather actually worked and continued to work, even when he had more than enough money.”
She whistled softly. “Your grandfather sounds interesting.”
“My mother is a strong woman. It was my mother who thought of buying farmland in the Andes. It was my mother who had hired people to cultivate ancient plants, plants that had been grown there for millennia.”
“Coca.”
“Coca,” I confirmed. “It was legal in Ecuador to cultivate coca. After all, it was highly important for indigenous cultural rituals. In addition, altitude sickness, what some people called sorojchi, could be cured with coca. And in the mountains, who would know?”
“So your mother was the one who got you into the cocaine business?”
“Yup. We rebuilt our fortune with kilo after kilo of white powder that our customers couldn’t wait to get. And we’d kept our house, the one that was registered as a historical landmark, and our lands that UNESCO almost stole since they had pre-Columbian pyramids on them. Money talks.”
Naelle was quiet.
“Thank you for sharing your perspective. Have you ever thought about the cost to society? Obviously, running drugs is lucrative, and it probably saved your family.”
“It did.”
“But at a high cost to other people.”
“Naelle…I’ll do everything in my power to help and protect people I consider mine. Beyond that, I don’t care. They aren’t forced to buy my products at gunpoint. If they wanted to go to rehab and get clean, they could. You can’t fight human nature.”
