AND, TAKING ARMS AGAINST A SEA OF TROUBLES, …
Isla Margarita, Venezuela, Friday, February 02, 2007

I was caught on the horns of a dilemma last night. I blamed the full moon for my fitful sleep and then the late dinner I had eaten. After falling asleep, it was 0230 when I put on a light again and checked my bedside-alarm clock. A silvery Caribbean full moon was shining through the screened and barred but unglazed window high up in the wall of the space where I had been sleeping. I pulled up an armchair to the light and started to read. I frequently wake up in the night; I make sure beforehand that I have a light and something to read nearby. I don’t like tossing and turning. But tonight my mind kept coming back to events of the past twenty-four hours or so.

I had retired about 2230 last night, Thursday. Kenneth and Maryanne were already in their bedroom asleep. Later, when I was beginning to wake up, I heard jabbering voices outside and, looking back, I recall hearing some metallic sounds. Voices in the street outside or the alleyway under my window are not uncommon. The Piragua Bar, a barn-sized dive conducive mainly to drunkenness and where the waitresses also, shall we say, dance with the customers – Piragua can get pretty noisy at times.

This morning, when Kenneth went to put out garbage he called me to the front door. The metal security gate was standing slightly ajar and the wooden door was pushed open. The bolts for the locks were standing proud so, technically in a sense, the gate was still locked. We immediately came to the realisation that someone had gotten the gate open during the night. A brief reconnaissance around the house revealed that the portable radio/CD player was gone from the kitchen window shelf.

Clearly someone had been inside the house!

Nothing else seems to have gone missing. My laptop is still there on the hall sideboard and so are the various cellphones and telephones. I play back the events and sounds of the night before and realise that I probably woke up just while the burglars were about their business. As I said, I recall hearing some low metallic sounds at the front door and excited voices under the window and, earlier, near the front of the house. Suspicious, I had put on a light and gone to examine the front door area suspecting there were some noisy drunks from the Piragua Bar down the street. Turfed out of the bar, they sometimes sit after last call on the curb in front of the house to continue their drinking. Nothing seemed amiss at the time, however, although I did not examine the door closely. Now I wonder if perhaps the burglar was even still in the house while I was awake, a pretty scary thought. I could have been coshed. On the other hand, he/they may have skidaddled around the corner and those were the excited voices I heard under the window.

Kenneth and I did not want to talk about it in front of Maryanne thinking she would be alarmed. They at least can bolt the door to their bedroom from the inside, which would stop a cat burglar perhaps if not a determined house invader. I, on the other hand, have been sleeping in an open space near the front entrance where the burglar must have been able to see me while he moved through the darkened but not totally black house. Maryanne soon had it figured out, however. She was alarmed but not panicky.

Looking at the front door it seems they were able to push back the inside wooden door and then open the grate door without a key. That can be fixed by making sure the wooden door is closed tight and that the locks have caught. Internal passive safety measures can be upgraded so that each bedroom has an iron bar that can drop into place at night. The same for the inside of the front door. No amounts of money should be kept in the house and valuable items should be kept in the barred bedrooms at night. These are the cheapest passive defences. The electrification of the roof and the provision of alarms and flood lights are bigger steps but will dealt with when friend Jens gets back from Europe next week.

My personal dilemma has to do with more aggressive defensive measures. I was offered the use of a pistol. The very night of the break-in Brian, an ex-pat American visited us. Brian is pretty opinionated and fancies himself an expert on quite a lot of things. Since he had been a corporal in the US Marine Corps in Viet Nam he reckons he is also an expert on “deadly force”, as he likes to call killing other people. We had discussed the hazards of living in La Guardia, indeed of Venezuela and other Third World countries (I personally would include many America cities in that category) or of travelling alone on a sailboat. “In my opinion,” he stated in one of his more tactful moments, “Anyone who travels in a boat without a gun is a fool!”

He may be right. But in some ways, guns also present as many problems as they solve. Sure, if somebody is climbing onto your boat at sea some dark night and has a shotgun in his hand, “He ain’t there because he thinks you are a hotel!” But situations are almost never that clear-cut. If he were climbing onto your boat, you are probably not sitting there with your double-barrelled Purdy shotgun across your knees waiting for him. If you are going to use the gun, you have to decide much earlier in the stream of events, i.e. when the situation is frequently not clear-cut at all. And then the chances of getting it wrong go way up. Even bad guys might go for their guns if they see you waving one around.

We met an English yachty with his wife and 6-year-old son while in The Galapagos.
“Did you hear what happened to us on the way here?” he asks on the way to shore in the water taxi. “We were swarmed at night by fast pangas (open, outboard-powered, 22-foot fibreglass motorboats used by fishermen all up and down the Pacific coast). “It was on a moonless night on the way from Panama. We were in that bit of international water between Ecuador and the Ecuadorian-owned Galapagos Islands. We were under sail. They didn’t show up on radar so we were taken completely by surprise. Suddenly we heard them coming towards us full speed and then they flashed us with big floodlights!”
“What did you do?
“I dropped the sails (of the catamaran), turned off the running lights, turned on the engines, turned to starboard and motored away. Then I called the UK Coast Guard on our Iridium satellite phone. They put me in touch with the US Coast Guard who said they had a vessel somewhere in the area (sic). They were diverting it to assist is. ‘Stay in touch!’”
“Did the pangas follow you?” (the actual number of pangas was a little unclear in his story: he said a “swarm” but the rest of the story sounded like just one).
“No.”
“But they could surely have caught you with their big outboards, couldn’t they have?”
He gave no real answer and we had arrived at the dock by then so I had no more opportunity to question him.

But the event was on everyone’s lips. Nearly everyone was convinced that there were probably driftnets set out in front of the sailing vessel, and that the pangas were fishermen trying to warn him off. Witness the flashing lights, etc. By turning away under power he did exactly what the pangas intended to prevent the sailboat becoming fouled in the nets or drift lines.

My point is that the situation was very open to subjective interpretation. As many American cruisers argue when the subject of guns aboard comes up, you could also I suppose argue that anybody who comes near me in unclear circumstances should realise he is at risk of being shot dead by me. Of course, Americans, I have noticed, realistically or unrealistically, seem to think they are at risk all the time and therefore they have conditioned themselves to have lots of firepower around: next to the bed, in the car, etc. I wonder if there one could actually reach a gun in time in many situations. Canadians and Western Europeans don’t go around with this background fear. The question is, who is right? If that Englishman had been an American and he had had a gun aboard, at what point would he have opened fire? Assuming for the moment it was indeed a fisherman, how was he going to explain a dead or seriously wounded man who by daylight turns out to have been on an innocuous mission?

Now, back to my dilemma. I argued with Brian against keeping firearms, but I was now seriously alarmed. I was offered a handgun by somebody and I actually went to pick it up, had it in my hand even. I know how to use a gun and I reckon, given the right circumstances, I would use it. And, I regret to say that is gave me a very comforting feeling. At last nobody could threaten me. Bring it on!

Americans are always telling you how they have to defend their families and property. But I was torn. We have had lots of events at the house of late. I mentioned the burglary last night. Two nights last week there were people actually inside the patio area; they rifled around but nothing was taken and they could not and apparently did not try to get inside the house itself. A few weeks ago, too, we had four guys with bad reputations up on the roof of the house in the early evening while I sat outside on the patio all unaware of it with my visitors. The neighbours called the police when they spotted the guys, who climbed down somehow and blended into the night again. Much earlier there had been Peeping Toms who had climbed up high on the outside wall when the Swedish kids were staying with us.

In the end, however, I decided not to keep a gun under my pillow. I do not want to be responsible for killing somebody and especially somebody under vague circumstances. Imagine also the situation if I, a gringo, shoot and kill a Venezuelan. Wounding him might be even worse. I know that they are modnerinising the prisons in this country. That might not mitigate my fear of spending any time whatsoever in a Venezuelan jail while they sort things out? I reckoned my chances as an outsider in front of a local magistrate when the trial eventually comes up? In the end I give the pistol back and go home to check the locks on the front door. A gun would not have stopped the burglars or the roof guys from entering anyway unless I plan to sit up all night with the weapon in my hand.

But I decided I would do everything I could to tighten up the defences, make sure I didn’t have large amounts of money around and keep documents hidden. Maybe I would even get a baseball bat or big stick for defence and maybe pepper spray. But I am not going to use a gun. Others said I should shoot into the air to scare them off. Might work but not certain. If I’m just going to make noises a starting pistol with blanks would do as well. If they saw that betimes, burglars might think it real and shoot me first.

As far as I am concerned, if they break through all the passive defences, any burglars can just take whatever they want. Just take it and hope they don’t mess me up. The gun made me feel strong for a minute. But I think it was a false confidence. Maybe I am indeed a “fool”, as Gringo Brian says, but that’s where I come down on the issue.

And, by the way, a handgun on a boat can cause a lot of hassle for cruisers. In addition to all the situational ambiguities and dangers, you are legally required to declare concealed weapons when you enter most countries and the police keep the handgun until just before you leave. Getting caught with an unlicensed weapon can lead to your boat being confiscated and you perhaps landing up in the jug. The most dangerous time is anyway in harbour, and in remote anchorages, exactly the time when you would not have your gun aboard. At sea you hardly even see other vessels for days on end so you are a great sight safer than you are on the streets of any American big city or in countries like Venezuela.