Can Limit Latin Life : Expatriates ‘Hostage’ to Safety Fears

Poised behind his desk, a computer at his fingertips and a large staff at his command, the American executive seemed the prototype of hard-nosed corporate decision-making. Then the phone rang and it became sadly plain that he was master of all except his own life style.

“There’s this great new restaurant,” the executive told his caller. “A friend has invited us for tonight. Can I go?”

The caller knew the place. It is crowded, lively, open to the street and in a high-toned suburb. The food is good, and so is the service.

No way, the caller told the executive. Don’t go.

One Dinner Wins

They bickered for a time, an expatriate American and the shadowy security expert his corporation employs to keep him alive. In the end, executive determination won a grudging one-meal victory.

“If it was up to them, I’d never eat anywhere but at my guarded house or on the top-floor restaurant of some hotel,” the American said with a sigh, turning away from the phone. “Sure, they protect me, but they also run my whole life. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it.”

It is no secret that much of the world is no longer a friendly place for Americans, but less advertised are the physical and psychological burdens that expatriate Americans often endure in showing the flag abroad on behalf of their government or business.

Now that Americans have become prime targets for terrorists, kidnapers, burglars and garden-variety muggers, security has become the overwhelming fact of life for high-profile expatriates in one country after another.

The Personal Price

Security is an incessant topic of conversation in the carefully vetted precincts where Americans gather. They talk about the personal price they pay for living with protection, but they caution: “No names, please. The security people say. . . .”

In violent countries like Colombia and Peru, the most dangerous in South America for foreigners, the human cost of being constantly protected can sap one’s spirit and one’s confidence.

“No jogging, no golf, no bike rides with the kids, no picnics in the countryside; the world is one big ‘no,’ ” a banker said the other day.

Like most expatriate executives, he lives at a much higher economic and social level here than he would at home, but he finds himself increasingly envious of his more laid-back peers laboring to pay mortgages in suburban America.

In essence, putting one’s life in the hands of a security expert means surrendering freedom as a defense against the threatened loss of life. Those who must endure it complain that they sometimes feel hostage to their own protectors.

“I understand all the reasons, but it’s hard to get the job done when the list of places you can go becomes shorter than the list of forbidden places,” said a U.S. diplomat who has served in Bogota.

Foreign Service officers assigned to the fortress-like embassy in Bogota may take their spouses with them but not their children.

“When I joined the Foreign Service 20 years ago, the embassy security guys worried about who was selling visas,” the diplomat said. “Now they are the source--the controllers of all life and the conduct of diplomacy. They’d like me to carry a gun and ride around in a bulletproof car that looks like a James Bond legacy.”

The teen-age daughter of one U.S. executive was pleased to leave Peru: When she went surfing, two bodyguards patrolled the beach.

The wives of some American executives in Lima have two-way radios in their cars and are expected to deliver regular location reports during afternoon shopping forays.

Executives of a U.S.-based multinational in Lima are forbidden to drive the same car to work two days in a row, or to take the same route, or to leave home at the same time.

On the advice of her security maven, one American matron in Bogota never leaves home without her umbrella. In one year, she has routed two sunny-day muggers with it.

Listening to complaints about the restrictions they impose is part of a security expert’s job. They may be sympathetic personally. Professionally, they are inflexible--by training and inclination.

“There’s a war going on out there,” the security director of an American company here said the other day. “Our job is to identify the threat to our people and to neutralize it. Their job is to observe precautions for their own good. Every routine day when nothing happens is a victory for us.”

Visitors may enter his company’s offices, but not easily. A sign in the armored lobby advises, “Company policy requires positive identification for admission.” Visitors must leave a passport or identity document to get in--and produce a signed authorization slip to get out.

“We sometimes run into the macho syndrome, guys who say ‘It’s my life’ and won’t play the game,” said Lou Palumbo, a retired CIA security specialist who is now a partner in a Miami risk-analysis firm. “That’s dumb. I know companies that have withdrawn executives who were effective businessmen but ignored security. That’s smart.

“There’s no big book in the sky that says you’ve gotta get kidnaped. When I was in the spy business we used to have target-selection committees. Terrorists have their committees, too. Our job is to get people off the target list, to make the terrorists’ job hard for them.”

In practical terms, that means that if your peers have stringent security, you need it too, lest you become the softest target in a group at risk.

Companies like Palumbo’s advise not only residents but also would-be corporate visitors. The company ranks rural areas of Colombia and the Peruvian highlands along with Libya, Iran and Lebanon as “highly volatile” places where travel is discouraged. For major Colombian cities, the advice is “travel only when essential and with rigorous precautions.”

In an airliner over Peru not long ago, a New York fabric buyer stared moodily at the landscape below and observed: “That’s Peru down there. I know I could do some business in Lima, but the security people say the risk is too great.”

A young Peruvian executive of an American pharmaceutical company said: “We hardly ever get front-office visits any more, and when people do come they have to check back with headquarters every few hours to say they’re OK. If something happens in the mountains, 1,000 miles from here, they are told to leave immediately.”

Radio-equipped cars and defensive driving techniques are now a basic part of expatriate life in Andean countries. Some American businessmen carry guns and employ bodyguards, a practice Palumbo, for one, dislikes.

“When the time comes to use a gun it’s already too late,” he said. “A kidnaping can become an execution. It’s better to simply avoid the situation. Guards at the house are fine because it’s not the individual but the goodies inside that are the target. A bodyguard, though, is a bad idea. Why abrogate your responsibilities to somebody who is probably the lowest-paid member of your staff and whose first name you don’t even know?”

The experts tailor precautions to anticipate threats, which vary markedly from individual to individual, city to city and country to country. The director of an American company in Colombia lives with presidential-level precaution; the director of that same company in currently tranquil Argentina would have no real security problems.

Kidnaping has been a growth industry in Colombian cities for two decades. In Peru, by contrast, kidnaping is a worry only in Lima--and after a spurt last year it has waned.

Diplomats and executives, the most alluring targets for terrorists and kidnapers, respectively, are warned away from places where they might become victims.

That can make for a bizarre dichotomy of life for Americans in the same town. The throbbing, occasionally firebombed restaurant area of the Miraflores suburb here is popular with American scholars, students, journalists, longtime foreign residents and tourists. It is off-limits every night to American Embassy personnel and accessible to expatriate executives only by special security dispensation on a restaurant-by-restaurant, night-by-night basis.

Fewer Americans

“If a tourist is blown away, his family suffers,” Palumbo said. “If it happens to an executive, company assets are at risk and the whole corporate structure is disrupted. Something happens in Colombia and suddenly all the guys in Ecuador imagine they’re being followed around.”

An accelerating trend is to reduce exposure by cutting to a minimum the number of Americans companies send abroad. That has been a boon to many young local executives and an itinerant class of Latin American expatriates, including many Argentines, Panamanians and Venezuelans, who have replaced them. The Latinos are born to the language and are less conspicuous than most Americans.

“I take no precautions myself,” said the Peruvian manager of a large American corporation here, “but I keep close rein on my kids” because of concern about kidnapings.

Expatriate risk is severe, longstanding and more or less constant in Colombia. It is relatively new in Peru, but security experts are warning U.S. corporations here that the truly bad times may be just beginning.

“They are now saying that soon it will no longer be safe to live in a house, no matter how well-guarded,” one American here said. “Apartments, they say, that’s the answer. I tell them that if they can move my lawn and swimming pool to a 10th-floor terrace, I’ll go. Otherwise, if the time comes when I have to flee my house, I’m going home.”