The other day I had to do one of those dreaded bureaucratic transactions at the U.S. Embassy here in Bogotá. Practically everyone I've met here has a horror story about being treated like shit by the paper-pushers while trying to get visas and such – I was soon subjected to the same.

The Embassy here is a gigantic white cement fortress on one of Bogotá's main thoroughfares. It is said to be the second- or third-largest U.S. Embassy in the world after the ones in Baghdad and Kabul. That is, before Bush's War on Terror, it was unrivaled.

I showed up at the wrong entrance, so I had to walk almost four city blocks around the massive structure to finally enter through the right door. The sidewalk lines an eight-foot tall fence, much of it adorned with razor-wire and closed-circuit TV (CCTV) cameras perched at regular intervals.

As I rounded a corner, I noticed a small shop across the street, opposite the Embassy. Like most Colombian bodegas, the shop sold all types of convenient items (candy, cigarettes, food, drinks, etc.) and had a few men sitting in white plastic chairs outside sipping beers – at 10 a.m.

But what caught my attention is that a handful of chickens had taken over a patch of grass on the road's median. (It's not that rare to see chickens or even a cow or two in certain parts of the city.) One chicken had apparently moseyed its way across the street and I watched it slip beneath the Embassy's heavily fortified fence.

Within the Embassy grounds, which international law designates as sovereign U.S. territory, the lone chicken was pecking at the verdant grass at one of the most heavily defended U.S. government installations in the world. I imagined Marines inside training the CCTV cameras on the bird, laughing: "Hey, Johnson! Look, do you think this is an Al Qaeda chicken?"

Something about the sheer dissonance of the moment and the simple futility of the security infrastructure stopped me in my tracks. I stood there for a minute admiring the brave chicken.