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July 14, 2005
ROBBERY!!!, or my love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with Ecuadorian bureaucracy
On a somber note, my apartment was robbed two weeks ago, which really scared me because it was the first night I had my laptop in my apartment. Luckily it was in my room. The robbers came in through the window, and needed to have climbed onto the 1st floor roof (we're on the third floor) with a ladder to get in. The window of the living room was open in the morning, and the plants directly below the window were carefully and silently moved away from the window. With all that f***ing effort, all they stole was our crappy and old stereo system (but not the more expensive speakers for the stereo or the hundreds of original CDs sitting right next to it (a rarity for the pirating capital that is Ecuador)). They also stole our phone and answering machine (but not the power adapter to plug into the phone). So now we have a really cheap phone with no answering machine. We still get calls though! It was such a strange robbery, and so little was stolen from us that the landlord thought one of our friends was playing a trick on us! I didn't think it affected me that much, but it really did, and I've been a bit paranoid at night in the apartment, although this feeling has reduced significantly in the ten days since it happened.
The strange part of the story begins now. My landlord came to my door five days later after having followed up on the case. He talked with the guards on the street, and the guard two blocks away reported that a robbery had occurred in a building two blocks from my apartment the same night around the same time. Furthermore, the guard found an old black stereo without speakers sitting in front of the entrance doorway to that apartment building the next morning. Most likely, it was our stereo. However, the guard called the police to report the robbery, and some detectives took the stereo back to the police station where it was impounded.
I was told to try to recover the stereo, so I decided to flex my Spanish skills in the bureaucracy of the Judicial Police building. After being re-routed twice and told to go to two different offices which each said to go to an additional one, I was finally told that I must first make a report (denuncia) of my robbery on the first floor of the building. So after waiting in line for an hour, I successfully completed the report, a triumph for my Spanish skills, but a victory without the material benefit of our stereo.
Right before leaving, the officer with whom I filed the report told me that I needed to go to the financing office and then another office, and that in the third office I would be lead to the impounding room and pick up my stereo. I was also told that I needed some sort of confirmation of ownership of the stereo to get it back. Two issues made it seem unlikely that I would ever get the stereo back. First of all, the financing office closed for lunch (for two hours!) three minutes before I arrived there. Second, because the stereo was at least ten years old, and because it was not my stereo, nor my housemates, but rather Leonore’s (my academic director from SIT here), we doubted that a receipt or proof-of-purchase could be found. Even if it was, another report would have to be made, because the receipt would not have been in my name. I called up Leonore, and she looked around and couldn’t find anything.
A few days later, Leonore phoned and said that she found the instruction booklet. However, we discussed the issue and decided that the best possibility was to utilize our in-roads to the police system, because cronyism is legendary in Ecuadorian bureaucracy. Leonore’s daughter, who’s currently in Italy, works in some facet for the police, and we found her police ID card. Additionally, my roomate’s friend is good friends with someone high up in the police department, and decided that this was our best bet. My roommate has currently taken over the process, and the end result could be one of three options: 1) we don’t get anything back; 2) we get our stereo back, or 3) our stereo wasn’t the one impounded by the police. But our friend’s friend lets us pick a stereo of “similar value” from the unclaimed one’s lying around in a room in the police station. I’m hoping for the third result.
Posted by Lee Gilman at July 14, 2005 05:53 PM
