A bad Bolivian police movie

Well, so it seems that the odds finally turned against me ! After more than 4 months of relatively safe and easy travel, I got robbed... in a bloody taxi in bloody Bolivia. Not that it was bloody, luckily, by lack of any real physical violence, by the REAL threath was certainly there. In short, what will you do if they tell you will stripped down of everything, stuck in a cab, if you don´t give up your valuables ? Give it up, I´d say, ´cause I didn´t want to end up in some Bolo chicken stew !In short, it all happened in less than 5 minutes...getting out of the bus terminal in Santa Cruz after a 16h night bus ride from Sucre (my LAST one now I can assure you!) at 7am, with my head still in my ass, and getting into a cab outside the terminal. Mistake 1 : never to take a cab outside a bus or flight terminal...well, they cost half the price but they´re also half as safe or twice as dangerous in my case. Mistake 2 : not to get into the back of the cab, with all my luggage next to me, buying the taxista´s excuse that the front seat was wet and that I couldn´t sit there. Mistake 3 : not to take a look at the license plate before to get in to the cab... Soooo many people told me about this scam, and warned me : ´Always take a look at the plate and the cab´s number and NEVER get into a cab with other people.´ Well, after 4 months you start bending the rules, especially in Bolivia, where colectivo taxis are the rule if you want to drive cheap. And up til now, even though some Toyota taxis look like they will fall apart any minute, they had proven to be safe. And in my experiences with old Toyota´s, I have rarely been dissapointed. Anyways, I had not even given the cab driver my directions (which he oddly enough couldn´t locate), or he stopped and 2 other guys got into the cab. One in the back, and a few meters further, one in the front. The cab driver quickly put his coat over the seat and told the guy he could sit there. Mistake 4 : to start talking to them, and answering their questions on where I came from and where I was going. Small chit chat in cabs is like your daily free Spanish course in Latin America. I rarely will not talk to cab drivers, it´s just WHAT you tell them, right ? By this time, the guy in the front got really serious and pulled out (what proved to be a fake) police ID. He told us he was looking for drugs in luggage of foreigners and fake dollars. By the moment I heard this line, I knew I was in trouble. I had heard about the scam before in La Paz, but this was with ´fake´ cops on the street. And from those, you just walk away, no matter what they say. Except if they pull a knife or gun of course. But here I was in a cab, being told we were going to the ´police station´ to do a complete ´search´on me. When I asked him to stop to get into another cab, he wouldn´t. Meanwhile, the third guy in the back was fully ´cooperating´and showed the cop all his ´dollars´ (probably fake) and his bag, that he quickly sniffed through and gave back. ´You see, nobody is going to get robbed here.´ Yeah right : BIG mistake 5 if anybody would believe that !So when he insisted on showing me my bag and my dollars, I told him I would only do so in a real police office, and that normally he didn´t have the right to search me, even if he was a real cop. Getting nervous by so much gringo smart talk in Spanish, he started yelling at me and told me they would ´take care of me´ in the police station if I wouldn´t show my bag. Getting pretty scared now, I slowly opened my bag and had him have a look, hoping that at one point a red light would turn up so I could jump out. But no chance, he brutally ripped the bag out of my hands, and start going through my stuff, camera and the works. I told him I wanted the bag back but he wouldn´t let me, saying that he was looking for fake dollars. Getting to the point where I was seeing no more exits than to give up my money as well, I slowly pulled out my 215 dollars out of my secret side pocket and showed them to him. He quickly took them as well, and on that moment I grabbed on to my bag, rather loosing the money than all the stuff in there. He yelled again that nothing was being robbed and showed me, putting the boliviano money in the bag. Now, desperate, I grabbed my bag by force, and the taxi stopped. The guy yelled even more at me now, shouting ´Baja ! Baja !´ (´Get out !´), which I did, almost shitting my pants. I was never more scared in my life. I was too confused to think straight so... Mistake 6 : I didn´t get the plate number of the cab. I must say he took a real quick turn and when I ran after it (so far as I could with my 18kg bag), he was already too far to see. Then I looked in my bag and I saw that my dollars and my camera were gone... Mistake 7 : not to have taken out my memory card while on the road. You can replace a camera (hell, the insurance company MAYBE refund you like 30% of its value if you get lucky, the bastards!) but you can´t replace pictures... So I lost more than 150 pics of my trip through Bolivia (the ones I didn´t put up on the Internet), and that was the hardest pill to swallow. And moreover, it was all on the 512MB card that my brother lent me... All I can say now is that Latin America is maybe not that safe as I thought. Well, I knew it was unsafe - you hear the wildest stories ! - but all those things always happened to other people !It nearly makes me forget to tell you what a wonderful trip I had on my last week in Bolivia, hanging out at the Potosi mines (when you see how people work there, it makes you think again about the value of life...) and cruising through beautiful Sucre. I went to the national museum of Bolivian history over there, which was a hilarious experience, having a very enthousiastic guide who knew that General Sucre, one of the liberatadores of Bolivia, originally was from Belgium. Maybe from Tienen?? I saw some memorable stuff like the last Bolivian flag ever risen over the Bolivian port town of Antofagasta (before the lost it to Chile) and the army outfit of the last general to surrender, and his last famous words : ´Rendirme? Que se rinda su abuela, carajo!´ (´Surrender? Your grandmother right, asshole!´). Hehe, wish I could have told that to my robber !And now here I am in hot and steamy Brazzzzil, taking it easy after a couple of days of fever (one setback never comes alone!), but that story is for the Brazil section! Hasta luego!