1964: Juiz de Fora
The Reconquest of Brazil
Almost thirty years after Captain Olympio Mourão Filho fabricated a Communist plot at the orders of President Vargas, General Mourão Filho buys a Communist plot fabricated by Ambassador Lincoln Cordon. The modest general confesses that in political matters he is just a uniformed ox, but he does understand about Communist conspiracies.
In the Juiz de Fora barracks he raises his sword: “I’ll snatch Brazil from the abyss!”
Mourão has been awake since before dawn. While shaving he recites the psalm of David, the one that declares that all verdure will perish. Then he eats breakfast, congratulates his wife on being married to a hero, and at the head of his troops sets out to march on Rio de Janeiro.
The rest of the generals fall into line, and from the United States, already heading for Brazil, come one aircraft carrier, numerous planes and warships, and four fuel-supply ships. It’s “Operation Brother Sam,” to assist the rising.
João Goulart, irresolute, watches it happen. His colleague Lyndon Johnson sends warmest approval to the authors of the coup, even though Goulart still occupies the presidency; the State Department immediately offers generous loans to the new government. From the south, Leonel Brizola’s attempt at resistance produces no echo. At last, Goulart heads into exile.
Some anonymous hand writes on a wall in Rio de Janeiro: “No more middlemen! Lincoln Gordon for president!”
But the triumphant generals choose Marshall Castelo Branco, a solemn military man without a sense of humor or a neck.
(115, 141, and 307)
1964: La Paz
Without Shame or Glory,
like the president of Brazil, President Victor Paz Estenssoro boards a plane that will take him into exile.
He leaves behind him René Barrientos, babbling aviator, as dictator of Bolivia. Now the U.S. ambassador participates in cabinet meetings, seated among the ministers, and the manager of Gulf Oil draws up economic decrees.
Paz Estenssoro had been left devastatingly alone, and along with him falls the national revolution after twelve years in power. Bit by bit the revolution had turned around until it had shown its back to the workers, the better to suckle the new rich and the bureaucrats who squeezed it dry. Now, a slight puff suffices to blow it over.
Meanwhile, the divided workers fight among themselves, as if they were Laime and Jucumani tribesmen.
(16, 17, 26, and 473)
1964: North of Potosí
With Savage Fury
the Laime Indians fight the Jucumanis. The poorest of poor Bolivia, pariahs among pariahs, they devote themselves to killing one another on the frozen steppe north of Potosí. Five hundred from both tribes have died in the past ten years; the burned huts are beyond counting. Battles continue for weeks, without letup or mercy. The Indians cut one another to pieces to avenge petty grievances or disputes over scraps of sterile land in these lofty solitudes to which they were banished long, long ago.
Laimes and Jucumanis live on potatoes and barley, all the steppe with great effort will yield them. They sleep on sheepskins, accompanied by lice that welcome the warmth of their bodies.
For the ceremonies of mutual extermination they cover their heads with rawhide caps in the exact shape of the conquistadors’ helmets.
(180)
Hats
in today’s Bolivia are descended from Europe, brought by conquistadors and merchants; but they have been adapted to belong to this land and this people. Originally they were like cattle brands, compulsory disguises that helped each Spanish master recognize the Indians he owned. As time passed, communities began to deck out their headgear with their own stamps of pride, symbols of joy: stars and little moons of silver, colored feathers, glass beads, paper flowers, crowns of corn … Later, the English flooded Bolivia with bowlers and top hats: the black stovepipe hat of the Potosí Indian women, the white one of those of Cochabamba. By some mistake, the borsalino hat arrived from Italy and settled down on the heads of La Paz’s Indian women.
The Bolivian Indian, man or woman, boy or girl, may go barefoot, but never hatless. The hat prolongs the head it protects; and when the soul falls, the hat picks it up off the ground.
(161)
1965: San Juan, Puerto Rico
Bosch
People stream into the streets of Santo Domingo, armed with whatever they can find, and pitch themselves against the tanks. “Thieves, get out!” they yell. “Come back, Juan Bosch, our president!”
The United States holds Bosch prisoner in Puerto Rico, preventing his return to his country in flames. A man of strong fiber, all tendon and tension, Bosch, alone in his anger, bites his fists, and his blue eyes pierce walls.
A journalist asks him over the phone if he is an enemy of the United States. No, he is only an enemy of U.S. imperialism.
“No one who has read Mark Twain,” says Bosch, “can be an enemy of the United States.”
(62 and 269)
1965: Santo Domingo
Caamaño
Into the melee pour students, soldiers, women in hair curlers. With barricades of barrels and overturned trucks, the rumbling advance of the tanks is stopped. Stones and bottles fly, while from the wingtips of swooping planes machinegun fire sweeps the Ozama River bridge and the thronged streets. The tide of people rises, and rising, separates the soldiers who had formerly served Trujillo: on one side, those commanded by Imbert and Wessin y Wessin, who are shooting people; on the other, the followers of Francisco Caamaño, who break open the arsenals and begin distributing rifles.
This morning, Colonel Caamaño set off the uprising for Bosch’s return, believing it would be a matter of minutes. By midday, he realized it was a long job, that he would have to confront his comrades-in-arms, that blood was flowing; and had a horrifying presentiment of national tragedy. At nightfall he sought asylum in the Salvadoran embassy.
Collapsed in an armchair, Caamaño tries to sleep. He takes sedatives, his usual dose and more, but nothing works. Insomnia, teeth-grinding, nail-biting: Trujillo’s legacy to him from the time when he was an officer in the dictator’s army and performed, or saw performed, dark, sometimes atrocious deeds. Tonight it’s worse than ever. He no sooner closes his eyes than he starts to dream. Dreaming, he is honest with himself; awakening he trembles, weeps, rages with shame for his fear.
Morning comes and his exile ends: It has lasted just one night. Colonel Caamaño wets his face and leaves the embassy. He walks staring at the ground, through the smoke of the fires, thick smoke that casts a shadow, and emerges into the shimmering light of day to return to his post at the head of the rebellion.
(223)
1965: Santo Domingo
The Invasion
Not by air, not by land, not by sea. General Wessin y Wessin’s planes and General Imbert’s tanks cannot still the free-for-all in the burning city any more than the ships that fire on the Government Palace, occupied by Caamaño, but kill housewives.
The United States embassy, which calls the rebels Communist scum and a gang of thugs, reports that there is no way to stop the disturbance and requests urgent aid from Washington. The Marines land.
Next day, the first invader dies: a boy from the mountains of northern New York State, shot from a roof, in a narrow street of this city whose name he had never heard in all his life. The first Dominican victim is a child of five. He dies on a balcony from a grenade explosion. The invaders had mistaken him for a sniper.
President Lyndon Johnson warns that he will not tolerate another Cuba in the Caribbean. More troops land. And more. Twenty thousand, thirty-five thousand, forty-two thousand. As U.S. soldiers tear up Dominicans, North American volunteers stitch them together in hospitals. Johnson exhorts his allies to join this Western Crusade. The military dictatorship of Brazil, the military dictatorship of Paraguay, the military dictatorship of Honduras, and the military dictatorship of Nicaragua all send troops to the Dominican Republic to save the democracy threatened by its people.
&nb
sp; Trapped between river and sea, in the old barrio of Santo Domingo, its people resist.
José Mora Otero, secretary general of the Organization of American States, meets privately with Colonel Caamaño. He offers him six million dollars to leave the country, and is told to go to hell.
(62, 269, and 421)
1965: Santo Domingo
One Hundred Thirty-Two Nights
and this war of sticks and knives and carbines against mortars and machineguns still goes on. The city smells of gunpowder, garbage, and death.
Unable to force a surrender, the invaders, all-powerful as they are, have no alternative but agreement. The nobodies, the nothings have not let themselves be beaten. They have fought fierce battles by night, every night, house to house, body to body, yard by yard, until the moment the sun raised his flaming flag from the bottom of the sea, when they lowered themselves into darkness until the next night. And after so many nights of horror and glory, the invading troops do not succeed in installing General Imbert in power, nor General Wessin y Wessin, nor any other general.
(269 and 421)
1965: Havana
This Multiplier of Revolutions,
Spartan guerrillero, sets out for other lands. Fidel makes public Che Guevara’s letter of farewell. “Now nothing legal ties me to Cuba,” says Che, “only the bonds that cannot be broken.”
Che also writes to his parents and to his children. He asks his children to be able to feel in their deepest hearts any injustice committed against anyone in any part of the world.
Here in Cuba, asthma and all, Che has been the first to arrive and the last to go, in war and in peace, without the slightest weakening.
Everyone has fallen in love with him—the women, the men, the children, the dogs, and the plants.
(213)
Che Guevara Bids Farewell to His Parents
Once again I feel under my heels the ribs of Rocinante: I return to the road with shield on arm …
Many will call me an adventurer, and that I am; only of a different type—of those who risk their hides to demonstrate their truths. This may be the decisive one. I do not seek it but it is within the logical estimate of probabilities. If that’s how it is, this is my last embrace.
I have loved you a lot, only haven’t known how to express my affection; I am extremely rigid in my actions and I think you sometimes didn’t understand me. It wasn’t easy to understand me, but just believe me today.
Now the will that I have polished with the delight of an artist will sustain this flabby pair of legs and these weary lungs. I will do it. Think once in a while about this little twentieth-century condottiere.
(213)
1966: Patiocemento
“We know that hunger is mortal,”
said the priest Camilo Torres. “And if we know that, does it make sense to waste time arguing whether the soul is immortal?”
Camilo believed in Christianity as the practice of loving one’s neighbor, and wanted that love to be effective. He had an obsession about effective love. That obsession made him take up arms, and because of it, he has died, in an unknown corner of Colombia, fighting with the guerrillas.
(448)
1967: Llallagua
The Feast of San Juan
Bolivian miners are sons of the Virgin and nephews of the Devil, but neither can save them from early death. They are buried in the bowels of the earth, an implacable rain of mine dust annihilating them: In just a moment, a few short years, their lungs turn to stone and their tracheas close. Even before the lungs forget to breathe, the nose forgets smells and the tongue forgets tastes, the legs become like lead and the mouth discharges nothing but insult and vengefulness.
When they emerge from the pit, the miners look for a party. While their short life lasts and their legs still move, they need to eat spicy stews and swallow strong drink and sing and dance by the light of the bonfires that warm the barren plain.
On this night of San Juan, as the greatest of all fiestas is in progress, the army crouches in the mountains. Almost nothing is known here about the guerrillas of the distant Ñancahuazú River, although the story goes that they are fighting for a revolution so beautiful that, like the ocean, it has never been seen. But General Barrientos believes that a sly terrorist is lurking within every miner.
Before dawn, just as the Feast of San Juan is ending, a hurricane of bullets slashes through the town of Llallagua.
(16, 17, and 458)
1967: Catavi
The Day After
The light of the new day is like a glitter of bones. Then the sun hides behind clouds as the outcasts of the earth count their dead and carry them off in little carts. The miners march down a narrow muddy road in Llallagua. The procession crosses the river, dirty saliva flowing among stones of ash, and threads onto the vast pampa heading toward Catavi cemetery.
The sky, immense roof of tin, has no sun, and the earth no bonfires to warm it. Never was this steppe so frozen.
Many graves have to be dug. Bodies of every size are lined up, stretched out, waiting.
From the top of the cemetery wall, a woman screams.
(458)
1967: Catavi
Domitila
cries out against the murderers from the top of the wall.
She lives in two rooms without latrine or running water with her miner husband and seven children. The eighth child is eager to be born. Every day Domitila cooks, washes, sweeps, weaves, sews, teaches what she knows, cures what she can, prepares a hundred meat pies, and roams the streets looking for buyers.
For insulting the Bolivian army, they arrest her. A soldier spits in her face.
(458)
The Interrogation of Domitila
He spat in my face. Then he kicked me. I wouldn’t take it and I slapped him. He punched me again. I scratched his face. And he was hitting me, hitting me … He put his knee here on my belly. He squeezed my neck and I almost choked. It seemed like he wanted to make my belly burst. He tightened his hold more and more … Then, with my two hands, with all my two hands, with all my strength I pulled his hands down. And I don’t remember how, but I had grabbed him with my fist and was biting him, biting … I was horribly disgusted tasting his blood in my mouth … Then, with all my fury— tchá—I spat his blood all over his face. A tremendous howling started. He grabbed me, kicked me, hollered at me … He called the soldiers and had me seized by four or more of them …
When I woke up as if from a dream, I’d been swallowing a piece of my tooth. I felt it here in my throat. Then I noticed that this monster had broken six of my teeth. The blood was pouring over me and I couldn’t open my eyes or my nose …
Then, as if fate ordained it, I began to give birth. I started to feel pains, pains and pains, and sometimes the baby that was coming seemed too much for me … I couldn’t stand it any more. And I went to kneel down in a corner. I supported myself and covered my face, because I couldn’t muster even a bit of strength. My face felt as if it was going to burst. And in one of those moments it came. I saw that the baby’s head was already out … And right there I fainted.
How long afterward I don’t know: “Where am I? Where am I?”
I was completely wet. The blood and the liquid that comes when you give birth had soaked me all over. Then I made an effort and somehow I got hold of the baby’s cord. And pulling up the cord, at the end of the cord I found my little baby, cold, frozen, there on the floor.
(458)
1967: Catavi
The God in the Stone
After the gale of bullets, a gale of wind sweeps through the mining town of Llallagua removing all the roofs. In the neighboring parish of Catavi, the same wind topples and breaks the statue of the Virgin. Its stone pedestal, however, remains intact. The priest comes to pick off the floor the pieces of the Immaculate One.
Look, father, say the workers, and they show him how the pedestal has shrugged off the burdensome Virgin.
Inside this pedestal the conquered ancient gods
still sleep, dream, breathe, care for petitioners, and remind the mine workers that the great day will come: Our day, the one we’re waiting for.
From the day it was originally found and worshipped by the workers the priest had condemned the miracle-working stone. He had shut it up in a cement cage so that the workers couldn’t parade it in processions; then he put the Virgin on top of it. The mason who caged the stone at the priest’s order has been shaking with fever and squinting ever since that fateful day.
(268)
1967: On the Ñancahuazú River Banks
Seventeen Men March to Annihilation
Cardinal Maurer arrives in Bolivia. From Rome he brings the Pope’s blessings and word that God unequivocally backs General Barrientos against the guerrillas.
Meanwhile, hungry and disoriented, the guerrillas twist and turn through the Ñancahuazú River scrub. There are few campesinos in these immense solitudes; and not one, not a single one, has joined the little troop of Che Guevara. His forces dwindle from ambush to ambush. Che does not weaken, won’t let himself weaken, although he feels that his body is a stone among stones, a heavy stone he drags along at the head of the others; nor does he let himself be tempted by the idea of saving the group by abandoning the wounded. By Che’s order they all move at the pace of those least able to move: Together they will all be saved or lost.
Lost. Eighteen hundred soldiers, led by U.S. Rangers, are treading on their shadow. A ring is drawing tighter and tighter. Finally, a couple of campesino informers and the radar of the U.S. National Security Agency reveal their exact location.
(212 and 455)
1967: Yuro Ravine
The Fall of Che
Machinegun bullets break his legs. Sitting, he fights until the rifle is blown from his hands.