A JAPANESE AMERICAN BUILDS AN EMPIRE IN COLOMBIA IN EMERALD COWBOY
Colombia is the world’s main source of emeralds. In the Colombian biopic Emerald Cowboy, based on his biography, a twentysomething Eishy Hayata (played by Luis Velasco), an American citizen born in Tokyo, one day decides to visit Colombia. On learning first-hand that miners are selling purloined emeralds on the streets near the mines, he becomes so fascinated with the emerald industry that he abandons his airline engineering job in Los Angeles to live in Bogotá, and in 25 years is the chief executive officer of the world’s top emerald company. He finds new emerald mines in the Andes, pays his employees handsomely, and manages accounts of perhaps the most profitable legitimate business in Colombia. Over the years, Colombia changes drastically, with guns increasingly providing order rather than the law. Hayata, therefore, encounters security problems as he navigates his empire amid scam artists, rival emerald merchants, guerrillas, kidnappers, corrupt officials, the cocaine cartel, and labor unions. On March 25, 1995, ultranationalist members of a phony union seek to shut down his business. Hayata is vulnerable because he retains his American citizenship, though his spouse is Colombian (played by Carolina Aristizabal), so the government investigates Hayata to find wrongdoing, thus satisfying the ultranationalists, but he responds that his family is Colombian and that so is he in spirit. Hayata does not back down to threats. His fists fly at unionists trying to block his office on an upper floor of a Bogotá building, and his associates join in, resulting in a retreat of the ultranationalists to the ground floor just in time for police to come to Hayata’s rescue. On November 1, 1998, his Colombian daughter begs Hayata to take her to the emerald mines before her high school graduation. Although warning her of the danger of the excursion, she insists. On exiting from the mine, an armed band indeed attacks the Hayata party. Outnumbered, Hayata escapes with his daughter, yet they find their way back to the car that they use for the trip. His daughter then graduates on schedule from a high school in Colombia, bound for Harvard University. What is remarkable about the film, which the Political Film Society has nominated as best film exposé of 2003, is that the older Hayata stiffly plays himself. Filmed in handheld digital, the film is a quasidocumentary, codirected by Hayata and Andrew Molina. In 2000, Hayata fell into a coma from a gunshot wound. Emerald Cowboy serves as his epitaph and eulogy. MH