Juan Rulfo, a child of nine, is surrounded by ghosts who look like him.
Here there is nothing alive—the only voices those of howling coyotes, the only air the black wind that rises in gusts from the plains of Jalisco, where the survivors are only dead people pretending.
(48 and 400)
1927: El Chipote
The War of Jaguars and Birds
Fifteen years ago the Marines landed in Nicaragua for a while, to protect the lives and properties of United States citizens, and forgot to leave. Against them now loom these northern mountains. Villages are scarce here; but anyone who hasn’t actually become one of Sandino’s soldiers is his spy or messenger. Since the dynamiting of the San Albino mine and the first battle, at Muy Muy, the liberating force keeps growing.
The whole Honduran army is mobilized on the border to prevent arms from reaching Sandino from across the river, but the guerrillas, unconcerned, acquire rifles from fallen enemies and carve bullets out of the trees in which they imbed themselves; nor is there any shortage of machetes for chopping off heads, or sardine-can grenades filled with glass, nails, screws, and dynamite for scattering the enemy.
U.S. airplanes bomb haphazardly, destroying villages. And Marines roam the forests, between abysses and high peaks, roasted by the sun, drowned by the rain, asphyxiated by dust, burning and killing all they find. Even the little monkeys throw things at them.
They offer Sandino a pardon and ten dollars for every day he has been in rebellion. Captain Hatfield hints at a surrender.
From his stronghold in El Chipote, a mysterious peak wreathed in mist, comes the reply: I don’t sell out or surrender. It closes: Your obedient servant, who desires to put you in a handsome coffin with beautiful bouquets of flowers. And then Sandino’s signature.
His soldiers bite like jaguars and flit like birds. When least expected, they lash out in a single jaguar leap, and before the enemy can even react are already striking from the rear or the flanks, only to disappear with a flap of wings.
(118 and 361)
1928: San Rafael del Norte
Crazy Little Army
Four Corsairs bombard El Chipote, already encircled and harassed by salvos from Marine artillery. For days and nights now the whole region thunders and trembles, until the invaders fix bayonets and charge the stone trenches bristling with rifles. This heroic action ends with neither dead nor wounded, because the attackers find only soldiers of straw and guns of sticks.
U.S. papers promptly report the victory without mentioning that the Marines have demolished a legion of dolls with wide-brimmed hats and black-and-red kerchiefs. They do verify, however, that Sandino himself is among the victims.
In the remote village of San Rafael del Norte, Sandino listens to his men singing by the light of campfires. There he receives word of his death.
“God and our mountains are with us. And after all is said and done, death is no more than a little moment of pain.”
Over the past months thirty-six warships and six thousand more Marines have arrived as reinforcements in Nicaragua. Yet, of seventy-five big and small battles, almost all have been lost, and the quarry has slipped through their fingers, no one knows how.
Crazy little army, the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral calls Sandino’s battered warriors, these masters of daring and devilment.
(118, 361, and 419)
“It Was All Very Brotherly”
JUAN PABLO RAMRÍEZ: We made dolls of straw and stuck them there. As decoys we fixed up sticks topped by sombreros. And it was fun … They spent a week firing at them, bombing them, and I pissed in my pants laughing!
ALFONSO ALEXANDER: The invaders were like the elephant and we the snake. They were immobility, we were mobility.
PEDRO ANTONIO ARAÚZ: The Yanquis died sad deaths, the ingrates. They just didn’t know how things work in our country’s mountains.
SINFOROSO GONZÁLEZ ZELEDÓN: The campesinos helped us, they worked with us, they felt for us.
COSME CASTRO ANDINO: We weren’t drawing any pay. When we got to a village and the campesinos gave us food, we shared it. It was all very brotherly.
(236)
1928: Washington
Newsreel
In an emotional ceremony in Washington, ten Marine officers receive the Cross of Merit for distinguished service and extraordinary heroism in the war against Sandino.
The Washington Herald and other papers devote pages to the crimes of the outlaw band who slit Marines’ throats. They also publish documents newly arrived from Mexico, with impressive numbers of spelling mistakes, proving that Mexican president Calles is sending bolshevik weapons and propaganda to Sandino through Soviet diplomats. Official State Department sources explain that Calles began revealing his communist sympathies when he raised taxes on U.S. oil companies operating in Mexico, and fully confirmed them when his government established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.
The U.S. government warns that it will not permit Russian and Mexican soldiers to implant the Soviet in Nicaragua. According to official State Department spokesmen, Mexico is exporting bolshevism. After Nicaragua the next target of Soviet expansion in Central America will be the Panama Canal.
Senator Shortridge declares that the citizens of the United States deserve as much protection as those of ancient Rome, and Senator Bingham says: We are obliged to accept our function as international policemen. Senator Bingham, the famous archaeologist who sixteen years ago discovered the ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru, has never concealed his admiration for the works of dead Indians.
For the opposition, Senator Borah denies his country’s right to act as the censor of Central America, and Senator Wheeler suggests that the government send Marines to Chicago, not Nicaragua, if it really wants to take on bandits. The Nation magazine, for its part, takes the view that for the U.S. president to call Sandino a bandit is like George III of England labeling George Washington a thief.
(39 and 419)
1928: Managua
Profile of Colonial Power
North American children study geography from maps showing Nicaragua as a colored blob labeled Protectorate of the United States of America.
When the United States decided that Nicaragua could not govern itself, there were forty public schools in its Atlantic coast region. Now there are six. The tutelary power has not put in a railroad, opened a single highway, or founded a university. At the same time, the occupied country falls farther into debt, paying the costs of its own occupation, while the occupiers continue to occupy—to guarantee the payment of the expenses of the occupation.
The Nicaraguan customs offices are in the hands of North American creditor banks, which appoint Clifford D. Ham comptroller of customs and general tax collector. Ham is also the Nicaraguan correspondent for the United Press news agency, The vice-comptroller of customs and vice-collector of taxes, Irving Lindbergh, is the correspondent for the Associated Press. So Ham and Lindbergh not only usurp the tariffs of Nicaragua, they also usurp the information. It is they who inform international public opinion about the misdeeds of Sandino, criminal bandit and bolshevik agent. A North American colonel leads the Nicaraguan army—the National Guard—and a North American captain leads the Nicaraguan police.
North American General Frank McCoy administers the National Electoral Junta. Four hundred and thirty-two U.S. Marines and twelve U.S. airplanes preside over the voting tables. The Nicaraguans vote, the North Americans elect. The new president is barely chosen before he announces that the Marines will stay.
This unforgettable civic fiesta has been organized by General Logan Feland, commander of the occupation forces. General Feland, all muscle and eyebrows, crosses his feet under the desk. In the matter of Sandino, he yawns and says, “This bird has to fall one day.”
(39 and 419)
1928: Mexico City
Obregón
At the Náinari hacienda in Mexico’s Yaqui Valley, the dogs howled.
“Shut them up!” ordered General Álvaro
Obregón.
But the dogs barked more than ever.
“Have them fed!” ordered the general.
But the dogs ignored the food and continued their uproar.
“Throw them fresh meat!”
But the fresh meat had no effect. Even when they were beaten, the din went on.
“I know what they want,” said Obregón with resignation.
This happened on May 17. On July 9, in Culiacán, Obregón was sipping a tamarind drink in the shade of a porch, when the cathedral bells tolled and the poet Chuy Andrade, slightly drunk, said, “They’re tolling for you, friend.”
And the next day, in Escuinapa, after a banquet of shrimp tamales, Obregón was boarding a train when Elisa Beaven, a good friend, pressed his arm and pleaded with him in her hoarse voice, “Don’t go. They’re going to kill you.”
But Obregón entered the train anyway and rode to the capital. After all, he had known how to muscle and hustle his way ahead in the days when bullets buzzed like hornets. He was the killer of killers, the conqueror of conquerors, and had won power, and glory, and money, without losing anything but the hand that Pancho Villa blew off; so he wasn’t about to back off now that he knew his days were numbered. He simply went ahead, blithely but sadly. He had, after all, lost his one innocence: the happiness of unconcern about his own death.
Today, July 17, 1928, two months after the dogs barked in Náinari, a Christ-the-King fanatic kills reelected President Alvaro Obregón in a Mexico City restaurant.
(4)
1928: Villahermosa
The Priest Eater
Obregón is hardly dead, felled by the bullets of an ultra-Catholic, when Governor Manuel Garrido of the Mexican state of Tabasco decrees vengeance. He orders the cathedral demolished to the last stone, and from the bronze of the bells erects a statue of the late lamented.
Garrido believes that Catholicism shuts workers into a cage of fear, terrorizing them with the threat of eternal fire. For freedom to come to Tabasco, says Garrido, religion must go; and he kicks it out, decapitating saints, wrecking churches, yanking crosses out of cemeteries, forcing priests to marry, and renaming all places named after saints. The state capital, San Juan Bautista, becomes Villahermosa. And in a solemn ceremony he has a stud bull called “Bishop” and an ass, “Pope.”
(283)
1928: Southern Santa Marta
Bananization
They were no more than lost villages on the Colombian coast, a strip of dust between river and cemetery, a yawn between two siestas, when the yellow train of the United Fruit Company pulled in. Coughing smoke, the train had crossed the swamps and penetrated the jungle and emerged here in brilliant clarity, announcing with a whistle that the age of the banana had come.
The region awoke to find itself an immense plantation. Ciénaga, Aracataca, and Fundación got telegraph and post offices and new streets with poolrooms and brothels. Campesinos, who arrived by the thousands, left their mules at the hitching posts and went to work.
For years these workers proved obedient and cheap as they hacked at the undergrowth and roots with their machetes for less than a dollar a day, and consented to live in filthy sheds and die of malaria or tuberculosis.
Then they form a union.
(186 and 464)
1928: Aracataca
The Curse
Swelter and languor and rancor. Bananas rot on the trees. Oxen sleep before empty carts. Trains stand dead on their tracks, not a single bunch of fruit reaching them. Seven ships wait anchored at the Santa Marta piers: in their fruit-less holds, the ventilators have stopped whirring.
Four hundred strikers are behind bars, but the strike goes relentlessly on.
In Aracataca, United Fruit throws a supper in honor of the regional Civil and Military Chief. Over dessert, General Carlos Cortés Vargas curses the workers, armed evildoers, and their bolshevik agitators, and announces that tomorrow he’ll march to Ciénaga at the head of the forces of order, to get on with the job.
(93 and 464)
1928: Ciénaga
Carnage
On the shores of Ciénaga, a high tide of banners. Men with machetes at their waists, women toting pots and children wait here amid the campfires. The company has promised that tonight it will sign an agreement ending the strike.
Instead of the manager of United Fruit comes General Cortés Vargas. Instead of an agreement he reads them an ultimatum.
No one moves. Three times the warning bugle blares. And then, in an instant, the world explodes, sudden thunder of thunders, as machineguns and rifles empty. The plaza is carpeted with dead.
The soldiers sweep and wash all night long, while corpses are thrown into the sea. In the morning there is nothing.
“In Macondo nothing has happened, nor is happening, nor ever will happen.”
(93 and 464)
1928: Aracataca
García Márquez
The roundup is on for the wounded and hiding strikers. They are hunted like rabbits, with broadsides from a moving train, and in the stations netted like fish. One hundred and twenty are captured in Aracataca in a single night. The soldiers awaken the priest and grab the key to the cemetery. Trembling in his underwear, the priest listens as the shootings begin.
Not far away, a little boy bawls in his crib.
The years will pass and this child will reveal to the world the secrets of a region so attacked by a plague of forgetfulness that it lost the names of things. He will discover the documents that tell how the workers were shot in the plaza, and how Big Mamma is the owner of lives and haciendas and of the rain that has fallen and will fall, and how between rain and rain Remedios the Beautiful goes to heaven, and in the air passes a little old plucked angel who is falling into a henhouse.
(187 and 464)
1928: Bogotá
Newsreel
The press reports on recent events in the banana zone. According to official sources, the excesses of the strikers have left a total of forty plantations burned, thirty-five thousand meters of telegraph wires destroyed, and eight workers killed when they tried to attack the army.
The president of the republic charges the strikers with treason and felony. With their poisoned dagger they have pierced the loving heart of the Fatherland, he declares. By decree, the president appoints General Cortés Vargas head of the National Police, and announces promotions and rewards for the other officers who participated in the events.
In a spectacular speech, the young liberal legislator Jorge Eliécer Gaitán contradicts the official story. He accuses the Colombian army of committing butchery under the orders of a foreign company. The United Fruit Company, which directed the massacre, according to Gaitán, has subsequently reduced the daily wage that it pays in coupons, not money. The legislator stresses that the company exploits lands donated by the Colombian state, which are not subject to taxes.
(174 and 464)
1929: Mexico City
Mella
The dictator of Cuba, Gerardo Machado, orders him killed. Julio Antonio Mella is just another expatriate student in Mexico, intensely busy chasing around and publishing articles—for very few readers—against racism and the hidden face of colonialism; but the dictator is not mistaken in thinking him his most dangerous enemy. He has been a marked man ever since his fiery speeches rocked Havana’s students. Mella blazed as he denounced the dictatorship and mocked the decrepitude of the Cuban university, a factory of professionals with the mentality of a colonial convent.
One night Mella is strolling arm in arm with his friend Tina Modotti, when the murderers shoot him down.
Tina screams, but doesn’t cry. Not until she returns home at dawn and sees Mella’s empty shoes waiting for her under the bed.
Until a few hours ago, this woman was so happy she was jealous of herself.
(290)
1929: Mexico City
Tina Modotti
The Cuban government has nothing to do with it, insist the right-wing Mexican papers. Mella was the vi
ctim of a crime of passion, whatever the Muscovite bolshevik yids may say. The press reveals that Tina Modotti, a woman of dubious decency, reacted coldly to the tragic episode and subsequently, in her statements to the police, fell into suspicious contradictions.
Modotti, an Italian photographer, has dug her feet deeply into Mexico in the few years she has been here. Her photographs mirror a grandeur in everyday things, and in people who work with their hands.
But she is guilty of freedom. She was living alone when she found Mella mixed up in a crowd demonstrating for Sacco and Vanzetti and for Sandino, and she hitched up with him unceremoniously. Previously she had been a Hollywood actress, a model, and a lover of artists; and she makes every man who sees her nervous. In short, she is a harlot—and to top it off, a foreigner and a communist. The police circulate photos showing her unforgivable beauty in the nude, while proceedings begin to expel her from Mexico.
(112)
1919: Mexico City
Frida
Tina Modotti is not alone before her inquisitors. Accompanying her, one on each arm, are Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo: the immense painter-Buddha and his little Frida, also a painter, Tina’s best friend, who looks like a mysterious oriental princess but swears and drinks tequila like a Jalisco mariachi.
Kahlo has a wild laugh, and has painted splendid canvases in oils ever since the day she was condemned to pain without end. She had known other pain from infancy, when her parents dressed her up with straw wings. But constant and crippling agony has come only since her accident, when a shard from a shattered street car pierced her body, like a lance, tearing at her bones.