Huambo is normally a quite calm, quiet city. I feel perfectly comfortable walking around the city by myself in the middle of the night. The biggest reason to worry is the packs of dogs (and the high rates of rabies here) that wander the streets at night making noise and getting into trouble. Things have livened up a bit in recent weeks.
The main job of the traffic police here is usually stand on the side of the road, since they don’t have vehicles, and stop cars at random to check if their documents are in order. If a driver doesn’t have the proper documents, either the car will be taken to the police station and be kept their until the person pays a fine or the driver can offer a gasosa (bribe) to the officer and go on his way. The drivers especially targeted are the minibus taxi drivers, who have only begun to appear in large numbers in Huambo in the last year and who often don’t have the documents required to operate a taxi.
A few weeks ago, a traffic police officer pulled over a taxi driver. They already knew each other from past encounters on the street, and both knew that the driver didn’t have his documents. The cop let the driver go on the agreement that he would pay a gasosa on the way back after he had dropped off his passengers. When the taxi driver returned, he paid the bribe and left. Later in the day, the same driver passed by the same cop with a car full of passengers. The cop pulled him over again. The driver was upset, as he had already been stopped and paid that same day. How was the cop going to stop him again in the same day? The cop forcefully pulled the driver out of the car and in response, the driver hit him. Seeing this, another cop came over and drew his gun on the driver. He told driver to turn over the keys to the car. When the driver refused and turned around to get in the car and leave, the second cop pulled the trigger and shot him in the back. He only managed a couple steps and fell and died there. The passengers then got out of the taxi and rushed the cop that had shot the driver. They proceeded to beat him until he was nearly dead.
After that, when other taxi drivers found out about the shooting, they decided to take revenge. A group of them gathered together some weapons, including automatic weapons that not even the police have, and went to a couple police stations. They arrived outside the police stations and opened fire. One of these stations just happens to be across the street from my house. I was sitting in the office behind my house with my colleague Nil. We heard the shots, and looked at each other. I said, “Firecrackers?”
“No, those are bullets.”
I thought, or hoped, that maybe it was some kind of celebration and people were shooting in the air. The shooting increased and kept going at a steady pace for a couple minutes. Our guard came running behind the house. After the shooting stopped and we waited a while to make sure it wouldn’t start again, we went to find out what had happened. Nil just shook his head and said, “I haven’t heard that sound in a few years.”
After this, there were protests and attacks on police throughout the city. An air of tenseness stayed over the city for a couple weeks, with heavily armed police and armored cars all over the city and reports of various attacks and killings, many of which turned out not to be true. Apparently another officer shot and killed a second taxi driver. Eventually, about 12 taxi drivers were arrested and sentenced to 60 days in jail and a fine of about $600. The cop who shot the taxi driver remains in critical condition in the hospital. Traffic police now work in groups of officers from different departments.
This experience, along with the time when some guerrillas were killed trying to set off a car bomb at a police station around the corner from my house in Medellín, make me think that maybe it’s best to keep a little distance from police stations when choosing a house.
