Several times a week, the city’s yellow press would carry graphic photos of drivers slumped in their seats, their clothes spattered with blood. All over the city, cheap cell phones appeared in bus-company offices. And Libertad wasn’t the only company under threat. Over the next few years, some 40 Libertad drivers would be killed, and the company would pay more than $600,000 in extortion. He hired back Juan Perez Panlo Gutieres, his previous driver, and took a desk job at Libertad. Going to the police was out of the question: A murderer in Guatemala stood about a 5 percent chance of being convicted. Many had sons, brothers, or fathers driving their buses. We left you a present, the voice on the other end said. In the Libertad office, the phone rang again. A young man had dropped it off at the office, demanded that it be given to the directors, then left. Inside, he found the director and the other bus owners gathered around a cheap, black disposable cell phone. Palo rushed back to Libertad’s headquarters, a canary yellow row house in a quiet neighborhood in Zone 2, a little north of downtown. Return immediately to the office, he told Palo. There had been only occasional instances of petty crime against drivers, mostly robberies. Palo had no armed guard, but he wasn’t worried. In the wake of the country’s 36-year civil war, the military and police had ceased to be effective forces there were now far more private security guards than uniformed cops. ![]() The streets he passed had a fortified look-stores had bars on their windows and were flanked by private guards with pump-action shotguns. On this particular day, Palo was winding through the city, heading from the working-class neighborhoods of Zone 6 to the downtown Terminal, a giant open-air bus station with pitted asphalt that serves as the bus system’s hub. On a good day, Palo’s bus was packed throughout his entire 14-hour shift: students, housewives, day laborers, street vendors with woven shawls or baskets of cheap sunglasses. Every day, more than a million people-or a third of the city-use the buses, which are heavily subsidized by the government to keep them affordable. ![]() Palo’s bus was part of the fleet of almost 10,000 privately owned urbano passenger buses that provides Guatemala City’s working class with cheap transportation. Dressed in his usual wardrobe of brightly colored polo shirts, he joked with the other drivers and passengers as he went along his route. ![]() It had been a long time since he had been behind the wheel and he was happy to be there. It was August 2007 and Palo, a short, gregarious man in his early thirties (whose name has been changed to protect his identity), was driving his bus through the humid streets of Guatemala City. Carlos Miguel Palo had barely been back on the job for a week when the first terrifying call came in.
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