License and Registration, Please

The other night I had my second experience with Colombian Transit Police, and I did not like it any better than the first one.

I was riding with a friend when the street we turned onto was full of cops wearing neon green vests (couldn't tell if it was 3M reflective material, Daddy). The transit police set up checkpoints at random places in the city, usually where you can't see them until you're already on the street. Here, they don't have to have a reason to pull you over and can have you stop the vehicle even if you've done nothing wrong. The cops on this street were stopping every car passing in either direction to check for the driver's license, proof of insurance and sobriety. My friend present his license, passed the breathalizer and gave the cop his insurance card.

Turns out the insurance was not the most recent one and was several years old. The only way to prove the car is insured is with the card, and it has to be dated 2009. If you can't present that, the cops seize the vehicle.

So clearly we began tearing the car apart, looking for the most recent insurance card. The car is actually my friend's aunt's, so he wasn't sure if she would have taken it out for some reason. This also presented us with more of a reason to panic, as clearly she would not be pleased if her nephew got her car impounded. Our search yeilded insurance cards from 2006 and 2007, several assorted business cards, candy wrappers, a spoon, cassette tapes and a bookmark.

No 2009 insurance card.

He finally decided he'd have to call his mom, to have her try and wake up his aunt (they live in the same building and it was probably about 1 in the morning). His aunt didn't answer, so there was no way to figure out if she would have done something with the card. You have to pay to renew it and the only proof you've done that is the card itself, so if you lose it you're pretty much screwed. We decided that the cop who pulled him over the last time (during my first run in with Colombian Transit Police) must have taken it to check and forgotten to give it back. [My friend had gotten pulled over this time for turning through a red light since there were no other cars on the road, only to find the police waiting further down the street after he'd turned. He was able to avoid getting a ticket by paying the cop all he had in his wallet (11,000 pesos, which is about $5) and doing some sweet talking.]

So we pretty much were resigned to the fact that the card was not going to appear. His mom tried calling a policeman friend of hers, to see if he could help us, but no answer. She then got on the phone with the cop, to try and bribe him not to take the car. This was successful, so we were allowed to leave with the car to go to his house to get the money. He had to get an ATM card from his mom, go to the bank for the money, and then we went back to find the cop. We had to pretend we had found the insurance card, so that none of the other cops noticed. He put the money (100,000 pesos, a little under $50) in the case the insurance card should have been in and presented it to him, as if we had found it. He counted the money and then we were allowed to drive away.

While I do not enjoy the fact that we were openly endorsing corruption in the Colombian police force, I was extremely relieved the car didn't get taken. In the US, there's no way you could ever pull something like that to convince the cops not to impound your car or give you a ticket. (My one traffic ticket was in high school for running a red light in Uptown, and a Venezuelan exchange student was with me at the time. She asked why I couldn't just pay him not to give me the ticket and I said unfortunately it doesn't work like that here.)

Apparently I'm bad karma when it comes to traffic cops (or good karma if you consider he avoided getting a ticket and having the car impounded with me there) so I don't think I'll want to be driving with him anytime in the near future.