Days and Nights of Love and War
Galeano, Eduardo & Brister, Judith
I CLOSE MY EYES AND AM IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SEA I lost quite a few things in Buenos Aires. Due to the rush or to bad luck, no one knows where they ended up. I left with a few clothes and a...
...Each death dies over and over again until, finally, the only thing your soul retains is a mist of horror and uncertainty...
...They all chip in and buy an issue of Crisis* and then go to a cafe...
...At Ezeiza, in one afternoon, more Peronists were killed than during the years of resistance against the previous military dictatorships...
...There won't be any more poor...
...Paralytic adventures: reality remains intact, but its appearance is altered...
...And I told him, "I'm going for good...
...Roque was a living absurdity who never stopped...
...A band of thugs left him on the ground with a double-factured jaw and a concussion...
...And we're always going to talk...
...Montevideo or Buenos Aires...
...Someone would be the chosen one...
...7 Do you know what the sunrise in Rio looks like, brother, from the window in your house...
...When it ends, they leave the magazine at the cafe as a present for the owner, and return to my country, where it is banned...
...He dug his fingers into my arm...
...I did not know, fifteen years ago, that in the prisons and barracks of my country blackouts would occur because of the excessive use of electricity...
...Marta is having a baby...
...those who cry...
...My eyes still retained the image of the Broad Front's* torches as they weaved along the avenues of Montevideo...
...See...
...He was wearing his miner's helmet and jacket...
...Then I don't think a damned thing...
...Inner fever: cities and people, unattached to my memory, float towards me: land where I was born, children I made, men and women who swelled my soul...
...We ate tortillas...
...22 NACLA ReportSoptIOct 1981 23 voice, every voice as one, broke into song...
...He picked the date and the place: an overpass at a train station where no trains passed...
...with particular emphasis can be sentenced for "attacking the morale of the Armed Forces" to a minimum of 18 months and a maximum of 6 years in jail...
...There are ugly people who can at least say, "I'm ugly, but symmetrical...
...Almost all the enemy soldiers were Indians...
...The steady pelting of rain on the walls begins to dissolve the white paint...
...I passed through Chile a few times, but never dared take up his time...
...The party ended in a massacre...
...They have enormous eyes...
...He had also worked for 0 Estado, Visao and the BBC...
...Reference to a 1572 massacre olf French Protestant leaders...
...She has a tube in her mouth...
...He returned to Buenos Aires and was soon bedridden...
...And then who is going to pay the poor for their crops...
...He asked about our common friends in Montevideo and Buenos Aires...
...I was sorry I couldn't have seen them flower...
...Ariel did not look up from his book...
...I'm proud of myself...
...I am sad, you are sad," Ariel said...
...At three in the morning, when the job was done, we opened up a space between the editorial desks and played soccer with some paper wadded into a ball...
...The Hanna Mining Co., which had toppled two governments in Brazil, had succeeded in making a company official Guatemala's Economics Minister...
...He liked this, but knew how powerful the machinery of fear could be...
...They've suicided him," he says...
...But there was nothing to be done...
...The floor above was a torture chamber...
...Joy takes more courage than grief...
...And if he would rather have been a stockbroker's son...
...They were armed to the teeth...
...A window slams shut someplace...
...The unemployed have multiplied...
...2 The magazine is finished...
...Because Juan, the poet, wanted her body to be the only country where he could be defeated...
...Lying, poor thing...
...Sometimes the referee could be bought off for a plate of beans or a black tobacco cigarette, and then the fists flew until the shop sent up the first copy of the paper: ink-smelling, finger-stained, just born from the mouth of the press...
...They even smashed the rocks...
...Milton was that big guy with the lovely look inl his eyes who interviewed you for Crisis...
...Ariel Dorfman walked, slowly, through the streets of this remote Paris suburb...
...When she was sent to the provinces, he would be put in Devoto [a prison in Buenos Aires...
...Michelini, who had celebrated his birthday that day, lived in a hotel in the middle of Buenos Aires...
...Later the land was returned to the United Fruit Co...
...It was a long ordeal...
...Can't stop killing...
...Vladimir Herzog was news director of "TV Cultura," an official organ of the state of Slo Paulo...
...The pictures began falling off' the walls...
...You did me a favor two years ago...
...But I returned, many times...
...a brief spark would light her eyes when she warded away enemies or clouds or flies with her left hand...
...Suddenly Castillo Armas' emissary found himself alone, with the door shut behind him...
...5 The vice president was named Clemente Marroquin Rojas...
...we drink beer, we eat crabs...
...I wonder, now, what will have remained of him...
...The sow finished off what was left of Roque...
...Then she suddenly remembered she had left something underground...
...Now we're going to Buenos Aires...
...A single execution can unleash an international scandal: for thousands of disappeared people, there is always the benefit of the doubt...
...Definitions of the world ("Some people possess the truth, but the matter of life is possessed by others...
...Afterwards, kill all memory of the grass...
...Daily news item: "Individuals in civilian attire, faces covered by black hoods...
...She said little or nothing about her curse...
...The letters I should answer get mixed up with the articles to be edited and the titles of yet unread manuscripts...
...Poor little thing, poor little thing," they said...
...In this country everything revolves around oil now...
...Their faces were shot up and their fingers severed so that they wouldn't be recognized...
...It's quite difficult to write to Buenos Aires...
...God has prestige because he shows so little of himself," Peron had told me, years before in Madrid...
...The miners ask the Devil to make the mine flourish...
...of revolution ("Cuba will never be a showcase of socialism, but rather a living example...
...In it were all his clothes and belongings...
...The miner's son was dying...
...Brazil," the man said...
...Will we be of any use if, when we return, we are broken...
...TEN YEARS AGo I ATTENDED THE DRESS REHEARSAL OF THIS PLAY 1 How many men will be yanked from their homes tonight and thrown into the wastelands with a few holes in their backs...
...2 We all meet death in a way that resembles us...
...Terror stalks out of the shadows, strikes and returns to the darkness...
...To lead men you have to fly like an eagle, not a sparrow...
...Milton had gone to see some French doctors who knew more about his disease...
...A lightness from the sky rises behind the tiled roofs and the hills slowly turn purple...
...the smells of frying and of grilled beef penetrate, through the skylight, the air thick with cigarette smoke...
...I don't have change...
...What statistic records those condemned to resignation and silence...
...It was useless...
...When night came, he fell asleep...
...His voice sounded hoarse...
...4 I reach the hospital...
...He found the only other passenger and sat down in front of him...
...He says, "You were born with everything 18SeptIOct 1981 19 already decided...
...GEORGE CAME GALLOPING UP ON His WHITE HORSE AND SAVED HIM FROM THE DEVIL 1 The cars sported plastic stickers bearing the national colors and the slogan, "Brazil: No One Can Beat You...
...Six thousand liberal arts students and just two students training in petroleum technology...
...thinking of holding a big plebiscite...
...I held her arm so she wouldn't fall...
...It's the youngest, Father...
...It was edited by Eduardo Galeano 11 Sept/Oct 198112 NACLA Repofl No computer could have dealt with her...
...Then he remembered...
...Eight officers raped a comrade in front of him...
...In the end, it slayed him through treason: it delivered the bullets from the precise place he least expected them...
...Gathered around his great clay image, the miners drink and talk...
...Most I didn't even recognize...
...My hand moves through the mountain of papers, poking, probing...
...Where is Eduardo?' " he asked...
...That was a birth...
...The train departed and a few moments later the man said, "I'd like to be a clown," looking at the black window...
...Night has fallen...
...The following week he would receive another list, with other names on it...
...It won 20% of the presidential vote in the November 1971 elec- tions...
...Even if it were just for this," I think, "it would be worthwhile...
...Those papers never turned up...
...And little by little the stubborn words reappear...
...They killed him for not knowing anything," Galeno says...
...We embraced in a street in Valparaiso, surrounded by the torches of people who were shouting his name...
...The machine is crazy," I think or say...
...They blossomed when I was away...
...The waitress brought us coffee...
...As usual, we drank the coffee black...
...How many people have I felt I owned...
...In the slums, children slept on the floor or in cardboard boxes...
...The successive military coups were no more than tributes which fear paid to the truth: given free elections, Peronism would win...
...When I saw her at her home, before they sent her to the hospital, she could no longer speak because her chest jumped, crazily, with each word...
...Every now and then a girl would drop by to give us liver pills or shots of vitamins...
...I want him to not be able to believe that this was possible...
...After that we kept on seeing one another...
...These men meet around the Tfo, in the mine's secret crannies, and talk about their problems and how to change things...
...Vlado was not buried in the space allotted to suicides...
...One fine day Carlitos Dominguez' father decided to play his last card...
...Aztec ceremonies are held in Argentina...
...Just a few strips of her maroon-colored covers were left...
...Whoever thinks that the country is a house which belongs to everyone shall be the child of no one...
...She never wanted to get up again...
...It would be a waste of paper," the police said...
...There will be no autopsy...
...Later, they dumped them into the Pacific...
...The only thing on the tape was a buzz...
...No one will own anyone else...
...BUENOS AIRES, JULY 1976: WHEN WORDS CANNOT BE MORE DIGNIFIED THAN SILENCE, IT IS TIME To KEEP QUIET 1 We are obliged to submit our galley proofs and manuscript pages to the Presidential Palace...
...they don't decide anything...
...Your father's friends have been screwed...
...I looked for you in Montevideo and couldn't find you - you were away on a trip...
...His face is drawn and his eyes wet...
...I squeeze his arm...
...That feline tension so noticeable when I interviewed him in mid-1964 had to explode sooner or later...
...Achaval lived far away, more than an hour from Buenos Aires...
...It is Humberto Vinueza, coming from Agustin Cueva's house...
...There was nothing else to do...
...How many times have I forbidden those I most loved freedom and speech...
...I ought to go to the hospital...
...he asked, and I agreed...
...2 A few months before, Gutidrrez Ruiz had come to the magazine smiling from car to ear...
...Carlitos walked into that dark trap of a house and read the letters they wrote to one another before he was born...
...I don't complain...
...Vicente told him he was going crazy with work and he didn't have a free moment and...
...He noticed because his sleeves became soaked in blood...
...He glanced at his watch and said, "This is your land...
...He sank into the train station...
...they gave Chile General Pinochet...
...Jos6 Artigas led the fight for freedom in Uruguay from 1811-1820...
...I don't know whether or not he answered me...
...The death penalty was incorporated into the Penal Code in mid-1976, but each day people are killed in this country with benefit of neither trials nor sentences...
...Out of his pocket Ariel pulled the novel, The Clown, and started to read...
...I try to light a cigarette...
...My poison, my food...
...He always got on the same car and sat in the same seat...
...I OWE HIM A COUPLE OF STORIES, THOUGH HE DOESN'T KNOW IT, AND I'M GOING To PAY HIM I don't know don Alejo Carpentier.* Someday I'll have to go see him...
...Her lips were cold...
...Transformed into Newbery, I listened as he ranted against the Americans, because they didn't do things properly...
...The sugarcane workers, who called him "El Justiciero" (The Bringer of Justice) heard from his lips and understood, for the first time, words like "rights," "union," "agrarian reform...
...There below the shepherds on horseback had risen in rebellion...
...If they don't survive, the death certificate will say they tried to escape, stumbled and fell over a cliff, hung themselves, or died of asthma...
...Every day we didn't publish was a day to get money together so we could come out the next...
...We do not accept humiliation as an epilogue to the beautiful adventure that has brought us together for more than three years...
...Luis reads a long poem or love story...
...Six months ago Allende had been killed, mowed down by bullets...
...They moved me and locked me in a cell...
...He was the most joyful of us all...
...Come have a beer with me...
...I am sad," said the man, "because I want us to win, but in my heart I don't think we will...
...Am I this ear that listens or am I the melody...
...He had no legs for dancing, but he clapped his hands to liven up parties...
...None of those gathered here knew him...
...Don't I recognize that pulse, that sound, in my people now...
...I mean, they began it several times and had to put it down...
...Ivan has a copy of Tabernay otros lugares...
...People walk in and out of the hopsital door...
...The air would soon be grey, announcing the first dav of 1976...
...The dictatorship is an infamous pattern: a machine that makes you deaf and dumb, incapable of hearing, impotent when you speak 19 SeptlOct 198120 NACLA Report and blind to that which you are not allowed to observe...
...A professor can be fired for reading or saying something questionable, and he loses his job if they arrest him, even if it is only for an hour and by mistake...
...Nine-thirty in the evening...
...and we fall silent when, at the door, a large-eyed, olive-skinned woman appears, wearing a red bandana around her head, gypsy-like...
...I HAD NEVER HEARD ABOUT TORTURE Fifteen years ago, when I worked at the weekly Marcha, I interviewed an Algerian student leader...
...It requires military precision...
...Marroquin Rojas greeted me with an embrace...
...The whistling grew louder and louder- until one Today we have been talking about what they call cultural alienation...
...That night he took me to Conc6n and in the early hours of the morning we were left alone in the room...
...Is it good for anything, my memory...
...The people, with longlasting patience and an iron will, had recovered their caudillo and they returned him to his land with a royal welcome...
...I read Nietzche and you don't know anything," Canarinho attacks...
...THE OLD PROVERB SAYS, "BETTER TO ADVANCE AND DIE THAN TO STAND ST.IItI AND DIE" They came in several white cars, the kind the police use...
...In the developed countries the fetishes and symbols of the youth rebellion of the Sixties in the United States and Europe are being mass produced...
...I COULD NOT SEE LIGHT NOR WALK MORE THAN THREE PACES Returning from another trip shortly before the coup, I learned that the police had been to my home in Montevideo looking for me...
...I know this...
...I'm alone...
...A man came running up to me out of the darkness...
...Sad and silent, we drink beer, one glass after another...
...they had cut off our telephone, and our only radio fell and broke...
...I never saw anyone kiss like they did...
...Who is wiser, the person who can read palms or the person who can understand what these decrees are saying without saying it...
...The nights were quite cold in the high Guatemalan jungles...
...The Cuban seashells and the Chinese swords, the Guatemalan tapestries, the records and the books and everything else...
...Another had been shot through the back in a bar in Zacapa, and the other had been shot down in a bar behind the Central Station...
...It's not necesary to fire a functionary: it's enough to let him know he can be summarily sacked and that no one will give him work in the future...
...They open a door so I can go in and see her...
...Carlitos' lather signed the papers selling his house and that same (lay thte Minister of Economy passed a decree...
...Who fails to reproduce, within himself, the world that makes him...
...He thwarts or causes cave-ins...
...This afternoon a journalist interviewd me in Galeno de Freitas' home...
...The typewriters didn't have ribbons and at two in the morning we went out in search of rolls of newsprint...
...She has on her blue nightgown, but the color of her skin has changed and it is all pricked up by needles...
...They took him away and everything in the house, including the children's magazines...
...He's from Tacuaremb6, the son of a cobbler...
...At the same time he confessed, he was horrified by torture...
...They had sent the news from Sio Paulo...
...There he was, dressed as a pitcher, playing baseball...
...Can you love the river and not love the sea...
...Afterwards, at the end of the summer of 1976, the military returned to the Presidential Palace...
...He loved the apple pancakes at the old "Morini" and Santa Rosa Cabernet wine made him smack his lips out of pure politeness, for we both knew Chilean wines are much better...
...Ruano Pinz6n had deserted...
...Eric sat by the window, looking out...
...She walked into the apartment, tripped and had a bad fall...
...Ivan, who knows the Prague tavern, "Ufleka," reads a poem aloud...
...He told me all of it...
...In 20 years," Eric says, "I'm going to tell him the things that are happening now...
...Crisis, an outstanding monthly journal of literature, poetry, art and politics, was published from May 1973 until mid-1976...
...Gini was a professor...
...Inside my chest- a bullring--liberty and fear do battle...
...26 NACLA ReportSeptlOct 1981 On the Buenos Aires-bound plane rode a batallion of tourists...
...He wore neither shoes nor socks on his feet, which were swollen with chilblain...
...It suffers from vertigo...
...BUENOS AIRES, NOVEMBER 1975: I LIKE To FEEL FREE AND STAY HERE IF I WANT 1 Drops of perspiration slide down and fall, clip, clop, on the papers scattered over the table...
...Know where that is...
...Shortly thereafter, when he was getting into his Peugeot, a round of bullets riddled his back...
...They were going to shoot him but four days before the execution the government fell...
...He said he had to see Vicente urgently...
...Outside the cities beggars surrounded tourist buses...
...Everything was scarce--milk, vegetables, spare parts, cigarettes...
...4 Felipe was born at 5:30 in the morning on September 4. Eric phoned his best friend in Sto Paulo...
...Most of the time I can manage by just making love...
...4 Conversation I either heard or imagined during those days: "A revolution from sea to sea...
...Sometimes the Tfo makes pacts with the mine contractors or lessors: he sells them riches in exchange for their souls...
...I remember the corpulent orator who spoke to us with a serene voice while at the same time spitting fire from his mouth, that night of angry shouts and banners in Montevideo...
...The Broad Front (Frente Amplio) was a coalition of Socialists, Communists and Christian Democrats...
...He said, "I had to move...
...I know this is not sufficient...
...Now, Father...
...His head falls into his hands...
...Time passed...
...Hours of indignation and of impotence...
...I don't owe you anything anymore...
...He forgot he was in the presence of a journalist...
...2 An image remained with me from that first period in Buenos Aires which I'm not sure was real or dreamed up some awful night: the crowds pressed together at a subway station, sticky air, a feeling of suffocation, and the subway wasn't coming...
...There are those who embrace death...
...Wouldn't the sorrow of being murdered by those who had been your comrades have been stronger...
...The official communique stated that he had hung himself...
...Some returned beaten to a pulp...
...You have to come and give him the last rights...
...In Montevideo I accompanied him to political meetings and demonstrations...
...His wife, Diana, had been murdered four months earlier...
...devastated land, violated land, land unloved by its owners...
...I am not the eye that sees: I'm the images...
...I didn't know whether I would be locked up for days or years, and before long one loses count...
...The police returned at dawn...
...The next day the Argentine Defense Minister 28 NACLA ReportSept/Oct 1981 declared to reporters, without batting an eye, "It was an Uruguayan operation...
...They came here...
...Ra61 thought up the best jokes and his eyes sparkled when he drew near to give them to me...
...Why don't you let us publish the news...
...Gillette said, "Brazil, I trust you...
...God doesn't live because he can't die...
...Matapasiones ("passion-killers") they call them in those parts...
...asked the stupefied people...
...Haroldo Conti was an Argentine novelist, philosopher and lilrnmaker...
...There was a clear sky and a commotion of people and pigeons...
...Before, Lucifer himself opened the mining carnival...
...6SeptlOct 1981 THE TRAGEDY HAD BEEN A TRUE PROPHECY 1 In mid-1973, Juan Domingo Per6n returned to Argentina after 18 years of exile...
...It's not because I feel guilt-stupid, Christian guilt--but because I'm far away and, above all, because the gravity of what is going on there comes up against a rubber wall here...
...That was a ritual...
...With Manolo, the waiter of the "Ramos," we would watch the people pass by on the avenue...
...There's nothing to be afraid of," he said...
...The Buenos Aires oligarchy has done us much harm," he whispered...
...A few yards away stood the armed guards of the embassies of several countries...
...He had loaded bananas in Central America and taken snapshots in Mexican plazas to earn his living, and he had risked his life by throwing himself into the "Granma"* adventure...
...Today I killed her...
...The whole country up in arms...
...Crossing the coastal mountains together, we saw a large sign which proclaimed, "With Frei,**poor children will have shoes...
...All his papers as well...
...Orlando Letelier wrote in The Nation that the economy is not neutral, nor are the technicians...
...I killed the pests on the jasmine and I was able to see the shoots come up...
...Years later I sometimes asked myself how Radl had kept himself from going mad during that long time he spent locked up in holes...
...The NOA (New Anticommunist Organization)-- which proclaimed that it worked "together with the glorious army of Guatemala"- pulled out its enemies' tongues and cut off their left hands...
...We were breaking through a cloud bank...
...I explained that I wasn't a priest...
...From barracks to barracks they kept him deep in the earth, with a cover over the top of the hole, and his water and bread were lowered by rope, so he could never see the sun nor talk to anyone...
...Ten years have passed-or an instant...
...When the effect of liquor wore off they were already in uniform and carrying guns...
...The washing machine broke...
...Her eyes amazed me - so large and full of lashes and born of pain...
...It is held by the left hand and played by the right...
...2526 NACLA Report "Maybe you remember Milton Roberts...
...When he was sent to the north, she went south...
...Things didn't happen as Allende had expected...
...A half hour passed, perhaps more, and the news got around that a girl had thrown herself onto the tracks at the station just before ours...
...He told me he had been threatened by phone...
...He had committed no crime other than teaching his students to look straight at the world...
...There are about 20 of them...
...But what about the invisible jails...
...No rich, no poor...
...Eric says, "I thought this had ended...
...Sad epilogue to a popular movement...
...When she returned home she told me, 'Now it doesn't matter if I die.' " So THE GRAND AVENUES CAN BE OPENED* I recognized neither the voice nor the name...
...Eric fell silent...
...But no one fished anymore near the city of Gualin because the nets brought up human bodies...
...He told me that when he was president of the Central Bank he had signed the bills with the word "Che" to poke fun, and he told me that money, that shit-awful fetish, should be ugly...
...He told me he had written a letter to some students, explaining to them that they had to fight for an America which was one country, owner of its own wealth and free of yankees, but he had given the letter to some guy to take to the post office and he had turned out to be a spy...
...Sometimes we left the Socialist Youth meetings together...
...No," I said...
...With so many people lost, to cry over things is to lack respect for pain...
...I now think this is something you have to learn to do, like so many things in life...
...The coffee jostled on the trays...
...Without waiting for the change, he arose...
...In the country of silence, the light in your eyes can land you in a concentration camp...
...The professional killers then stepped in to take the place of the people...
...They had given me a table, in the Party headquarters, and there I had a razor blade, drawing ink, tempera paint and brushes...
...The news report that night was prepared under his name...
...Later I thought it wasn't worth telling you any more...
...What would this be like...
...His was the unusual case of someone who abandons a revolution which he and a handful of crazy people had already made, to throw himself into beginning another one...
...Nothing was recorded...
...Before, she asked for or promised trips to the movies or the beach or Brazil, but now she can't speak and she doesn't say this or anything...
...She taped two or three hours of conversation...
...He carried a sealed letter for the dictator Somoza...
...I scratched my name on the wall...
...No, No," you explain, thinking you are awake...
...It's the heat, probably, or maybe it's just that I'm stuck...
...Excuse the solemnity...
...Looks like we'll have our choice between torture or a bullet in the neck...
...Inside the shaft it is fatal to pronounce the name Jesus, although the Virgin can be named at no risk...
...his fists clenched...
...This is the ch'alla...
...At first Babylonia treated me quite badly...
...She never came again...
...The majority are deaths without bodies...
...Whoever denounces injustice commits treason against the country...
...He had survived bullets and jails and the years of hunger and clandestinity...
...A bird flies near you, like a whip: it is the sign of a new day...
...To have taken something would have been cheating...
...2 There were a few Indians among the guerrillas...
...and within this scenario real history unfolded as a continuous contradiction...
...The wall behind the store stretched up and up...
...He will never die," and with my eyes fixed on the face of that Jesus Christ of the Rio de la Plata I longed to congratulate him...
...Someone took him there in his wheelchair and placed the loaded pistol in his hand...
...The porter must have shut down the elevator by now...
...Below, someone scribbled, "With Allende, there won't be any more poor children...
...Three weeks before the coup...
...I always thought that Roque would meet death roaring with laughter...
...It was days...
...The merchants, briefly expelled from the temple, reentered through the rear door...
...we saw more of each other...
...He had courage to spare, so he didn't need to mention it...
...A century has not gone by...
...When he was in the hospital, Carlitos would visit him and he would beg his son to pull out his I.V...
...He talked about this...
...This doesn't go in...
...8SeptiOct 1981 9 3 Jos6 Luis Nell was one of the victims of the Ezeiza massacre...
...It's enough to harass them, to prevent them from resting, to bring them down...
...Does it not turn each person's home into a jail as well...
...You aren't very important...
...A nerve that breaks and can't be mended...
...At first the Algerian didn't want to talk about himself...
...pilots, had left Panama and dropped napalm over a mountain in Guatemala...
...I remember him with his baby's smile in that rough, clay face, asking me between his teeth, "Do you have a razor blade...
...STREET WAR, SOUL WAR Each of my two halves could not exist without the other...
...I feel bad...
...I find him with his back against the wall...
...Some pigeon would leave the sunlight on the sidewalk and come in to eat...
...Sorry, I'm not being fair...
...Cowards...
...And there are no old men...
...cut through the agrarian reform which had expropriated the uncultivated land of this company and distributed it among landless peasants...
...I'm not a prisoner of things...
...Chile was being flooded with dollars and on city walls bearded men * In his last speech to the Chilean people, shortly before the rebellious Air Force bombed the Presidential Palace, Allende spoke of his belief that, "sooner, rather than later, the grand avenues would open" for those who will build a better society...
...Tfo, help us...
...Every week the lists changed...
...The other evening we went out for pizza together, Vicente was sad...
...But I want to stand up and I can't: my legs are limp rags...
...others, asking forgiveness or permission...
...Every week I had to produce a political cartoon...
...The soldiers all fired at once...
...In those days I did not suspect that torture *Gencral lic tions had bctn promised in Uruguay Ifin No 'venmbtr 1976...
...They shot him in the temple with blanks...
...He's leaving us...
...I read, haphazardly, the words of women I loved and men who were my brothers...
...The Army nabbed them when their festivals ended...
...Ten years ago bodies appeared in the Rio Motagua or were found, at dawn, in gorges or roadside ditches: featureless faces which could never be identified...
...I touched my companion's knee...
...Today, the Devil festival attracts throngs of tourists from all over the world...
...He lived not for triumph, but for struggle--the ever necessary struggle for human dignity...
...He's a fellow of few words...
...Years later Ar6valo became a government functionary...
...She managed to escape, running, and scrambled up the steps...
...Not even his children's watches were spared...
...He got off at Duilio Street and I stayed on for a few more blocks...
...But the owners of power, those who had lost the go vernment, had retained control over the arms and the judicial system, the newspapers and the radios...
...What official report or denunciation by the opposition lists those who are imprisoned by fear...
...They don't kneel before the Devil...
...Where did you get so much sweetness...
...I can't imagine him in this darkness...
...If they came, I would fly...
...I think that God doesn't have the right to do something like this...
...Look...
...That Sunday night Elda had three lungs...
...The teletypes did not vibrate to tell the world about the assassination of this poet who was born in neither Paris nor New York...
...At dawn she winked at me and could say, smiling, "I made a deal with the -v And now her best friend says to me, "I want to tell you what she said when she returned...
...No, No...
...I used to have that book as well, back in Montevideo...
...He spoke to me about Solano L6pez and his noble death and about the War of the Triple Alliance...
...She no longer breathed- she gasped...
...God alone is not enough...
...What multitudes filled my mind when I passed the "Ramos," the "Ciervo" or the "Bachin...
...Porky," once an elegant French address book, had been reduced to a heap of pages and scraps held together with a rubber band, frayed, tattered and full of ink and dirt stains...
...Must be a sad profession, " he said...
...By generalizing, it absolves...
...Who, me...
...As we enter the "Lamas" we pass through mountains of oranges, bananas, pineapples, guayabas and maracuyas...
...She sipped water and waved her hand to ask for the oxygen mask...
...It wasn't easy...
...You'll have to tell me when we pass a gas station...
...For the past three weeks I've had palpitations of the heart," he writes, "and I can't do anything about it...
...It made us unbelieving, suspicious...
...I remember that clean, morning-fresh look: the look of people who believe...
...The Right loves abstract ideas...
...How many times an inquisitioner, a censor, a jailer...
...Lazy...
...At first there were silences, remarks in low, funeral-like voices...
...I kissed her...
...It was a difficult decision...
...Nitwits...
...In Chivilcoy...
...They're all young...
...And they flew into a conversation about their lost lands as the train slid towards Paris...
...BUENOS AIRES, OCTOBER 1975: SHE NEVER FADED, THOUGH SHE KNEW SHE WAS LOST Nine-thirty at night...
...Nothing more has been heard...
...No one intervened...
...QUITO, FEBRUARY 1976: I LIGHT THE FIRE AND BECKON IT Evening at the home of Ivan Eguiez...
...I'm not going to give you my hand," he said, "and I don't want to shake yours...
...How many centuries make up this moment I'm now living...
...Buried somewhere in that morning's papers was the news of the death of a militant Vicente had defended...
...Freedom of investment, freedom of prices, freic exchange rates: the freer the businesses, the more imprisoned arc the people...
...We would go to the Police Headquarters with Andr6s Cultelli and Manrique Salbarrey and at the door we would say goodbye just in case...
...The city which I had hated in 31NACLA Report earlier days had treated me to dangers, jubilation, loves...
...And the ugliest...
...I thought that where He was those kinds of things didn't happen...
...And the rich...
...2122 NACLA Report The System The hooded prisoners recognize one another by their coughs...
...I'm leaving...
...The soldiers broke down the door...
...My crotch burns when I walk...
...I was twenty years old...
...So he made the pocket with a razor blade and some safety pins...
...Nobody bothered to look at them...
...Neither does this," they say...
...DREAMS The entwined bodies change position while we sleep, shifting this way and that...
...How many people are shaded by the magnolias of Plaza Francia...
...One day he decided to put an end to the impotence and the pity...
...Another time they were about to execute him and an earthquake split the prison walls and he escaped...
...The sun made greenish flashes on the copper cupolas...
...At any circus in my country...
...The workers were burning railroad cars and the magazine didn't think this was so bad...
...He was a highly respected journalist throughout Brazil and the rest of the Portuguese speaking world...
...That morning Allende would have a secret meeting, there in the hotel, with the top officers in the Navy...
...Every time I asked it for an address or phone number it exploded in my hands...
...The reading lasts all day...
...BUENOS AIRES, APRIL 1976: THE COMRADE WALKS ON THIN ICE Not long ago he received a phone call from a fellow with an imperious voice...
...The door snapped shut behind my back, like a trap...
...Who is free of confusing his brother with a rival and the woman he loves with his own shadow...
...We never knew...
...It was a filthy shed...
...Before the disease entered his throat, Milton spoke to me a few times about the interview...
...The miners call him "Tio" and they have made a throne in each shaft for him...
...and of himself ("I have been mistaken often, but I believe...
...A little light went on and we heard a bell...
...We are going to overthrow that illiterate Filhrer...
...Now, in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, gathered together in a gigantic, borderless campsite, were the older workers for whom Peronism was a vivid memory of dignity, and the young people, who had not lived through the experiences of'46 and '55, and for whom Peronism was constructed more out of hope than nostalgia...
...You walked into that little kid's editorial office and you felt embraced even when it was empty...
...Can this program be imposed on Latin America's best organized workers' movement without paying the price of five cadavers a day...
...It's difficult...
...THE TREE FLIES," SAYS THE POET, "IN THE BIRD THAT LEAVES IT...
...Peld was already a bank director...
...Twvo hours later, they went looking for Zelmar Michelini...
...Even now, in my memory, he's running...
...2 The disease had bitten her lungs when she was 16...
...Jump...
...He is a compatriot of mine who draws with grace and drama...
...They appear, grow, fly...
...Let's go, Vicente...
...2728 NACLA Report BUENOS AIRES, MAY I976: INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL ECONOMY Do the Economic Minister's decrees refer to currency rates, the tax structure, price policies...
...The foreign investment law has been eliminated: the multinationals can take away whatever they please now...
...Eric looks at me furiously and goes into the bathroom...
...The only proof will be that he was here, but he won't remember anything about this...
...They arrived in four Ford Falcons...
...The agrarian reform proved to be worth less than the paper on which it was written, and the loopholes remained open through which the wealth generated by the country could-and still does -drain out...
...I've known few people who have survived the tests of pain and violence--a rare feat--with their capacity for tenderness intact...
...Should I answer or not...
...You have to let the traitors fly, but without letting them rest...
...And wait for Providence to do her work...
...Dodge Dart promised in its advertising campaign: "You will become a member of the ruling class...
...8 I met Mijangos in '67 in Guatemala...
...Machines for lying, for castrating, for drugging...
...1 One afternoon in Montevideo, in the summer of'60 or '61, I discovered I could no longer stand that guy who put on a tie and shiny jacket at the proper time and counted bills and gave out change and good mornings with clenched 30SeptlOct 1981 And he said, "It's not time yet...
...As in Guatemala, friends and relatives make the useless, dangerous pilgrimage from prison to prison, from barracks to barracks, while the bodies rot in the bushes or dumps...
...New trial legislation allows legal disputes between multinational firms and Argentina to be handled in foreign courts...
...I think every night is the last," Marta writes me...
...I shouldn't stay here alone...
...One morning, during the first days of exile, the caudillo had explained to his host in Asunci6n, Paraguay, the political importance of the smile...
...I hear, I see them...
...I don't knbw where I'll go...
...I hear the voice of Elda's best friend, who calls me by name...
...the new generations are invited to abandon History, which is painful, and travel instead to Nirvana...
...But we warn you...
...And I thought, "He will never fail...
...And she said she was bringing me a message from him...
...He talked about all of this and his eyes lit up...
...The song shook the walls...
...There won't be any more rich...
...Then Vicente learned that the man was a police officer...
...The MANO (Organized Nationalist Anticommunist Movement), which worked with the police, placed black crosses on the doors of the condemned...
...This utterly poor country enters the delirium of the millions and gets dizzy...
...How would it feel to be so high up...
...The man said that together they could make a fine pair of clowns and Ariel asked him where, at which circus...
...There are those who meet it arguing or demanding explanations, and there are those who make their way slugging and cursing...
...You have to come, padrecito, you have to come...
...it doesn't lose what deserves to be saved...
...He had gone to Paris, in mid-1975, I think, and I commissioned him to do an interview...
...He was paralyzed...
...One afternoon, Mijangos denounced a fraud in Congress...
...Some cry...
...Like bread to the mouth," he was able to write one woman, "like water to the earth, I hope I'm of some use to you...
...Torres had told him by phone...
...Jover Peralta had written some books and had fought all his life for a free Paraguay...
...12 NACLA ReportSeptlOct 1981 13 He was not a man to sit behind a desk...
...And Michelini had said, "What could be worse, che...
...We're going to kill you, you bastards...
...You don't understand a damned thing...
...No, Eric," I say...
...Surviving...
...Love without pain and peace without war are offered...
...And I would tell you, "In Montevideo he got himself jailed and beaten up several times...
...It is he who has winked his eye at the peasants so they will abandon their crops and bury themselves forever in the shaft...
...Was it, wasn't it...
...He was thrilled by the gaiety of the crowds in the stands, by the celebrations of goals and good plays, the uproar of drums and firecrackers, the showers of confetti...
...I walk down the step, sleepwalking and stumbling...
...According to the agreement, the State would be paid a tip for its efforts while the company would get over a billion dollars...
...we went to soccer games, we shared food, liquor and milongas...
...to suppress them, empty them of the past...
...Midnight passed and the agencies had removed the teletypes, for lack of payment...
...After the military overthrew the Peronist government in 1976, Cmrnpora lived for 31/2 years in the Mexican embassy in Buenos Aires...
...Eric looked out the window of the Boeing...
...Yet his revolution was much more social in character than that of the independence struggles of other Latin American republics...
...She had come to an understanding with it and she didn't lie to herself: she kept her medical history in the closet...
...Old Peralta smelled of urine and he was skin and bones when I listened to him curse for hours...
...Men trained, guided and armed by the United States implemented the extermination plan...
...2 In the winter of 1963 Allende had taken me to the South...
...Salaries increased, but this just proved that the workers were responsible for the crisis...
...His name was Ruano Pinz6n, and he too was, or had been, in the military police...
...In its role as the country's partner, Hanna would pay no income taxes and would be able to make use of the port at half price...
...2 Can national unity be obtained above, through, and despite the class struggle...
...A ban on this news could give rise to slanted interpretations...
...all illusions are allowed in the University, but reality is not possible...
...I write him a letter in jest...
...At any," said the man...
...At Aurora airport they lifted the bags into an Air Force "500...
...The functionaries didn't function, the merchants hoarded, the manufacturers sabotaged and the speculators played with the currency.The Left, a parliamentary minority, debated in impotency, and the military acted on its own...
...He died in exile in Mexico in December 1980...
...The book passes from hand to hand...
...The speaker's name was Juan Jos6 Arivalo...
...How many will be mutilated, blown up, burnt...
...Like the king in the story, they appeared naked before the public eye...
...The agency photos showed his motionless body from all angles...
...One day I called your home and they told me you had moved to Buenos Aires...
...My memory knows more about me than I do...
...Number 50 was accepted as "normal...
...He turned around with his hand on the doorknob and added, "But first tell me the story about the hen, because I'm sad...
...He swelled up...
...And he put his false teeth in the palm of his hand...
...Live without dying, be born without killing...
...I fervently wanted to become a priest, if only for a few minutes...
...Is it not more repugnant to hold people as private property than things...
...Canarinho whistled...
...His eyes drooped shut and he continued to talk and ask questions...
...To be alive, that is: to be capable of joy, despite the goodbyes and the crimes, so that exile will be a testimony to another possible country...
...But he wasn't involved in anything," Eric says...
...We are going to eat them for lunch before they feast on us for supper...
...fear of talking, of listening, of reading...
...We laugh about anything that night, in the "Luna," everything is funny...
...He had died far from his own country...
...He danced with spirit, but in the style of an old-fashioned gentleman, and he bowed to kiss the hand of the girls...
...I had been in Bolivia and Cuba...
...And which is your country...
...Someone, among the 80 million condemned in this land, would be picked by God on Monday morning...
...This 10S.ptlOct 1981 11 concentration camp is the country: this garbage heap, this immense wasteland empty of men...
...It was crazy, but no one objected...
...Sdo Paulo can't stop killing...
...the captain asked...
...And while the small and medium-sized manufacturers went under, the oligarchy, undefeated, displayed itself in rags and gave vent to its anger through the newspapers, radio and television...
...The Buenos Aires oligarchy has ruined our souls...
...In our countries Adam Smith needs Mussolini...
...The little bit of money left over just covered his funeral costs...
...Proof of the existence of God or the magic of solidarity...
...16 NACLA ReportSeptlOct 1981 17NACLA Report 2 We are in the "Luna" when Ary brings the news...
...For months no one really knew what had happened...
...Someone is butchered for a month and then they tell what remains of him that, "It was a mistake...
...For a full hour they methodically sacked the home of Gutidrrez Ruiz...
...How did death manage to catch him...
...LAST VOICE In a patio in Asunci6n, Paraguay, don Jover Peralta raised his fist, which was like a dried branch, against the dictator Stroessner...
...This country is at war, and if we were to meet each other on different terrain, the treatment would be quite different...
...Iwvo weeks later, Letelier was blown to bits on a Washington street...
...I start to talk about Roque Dalton...
...In whose interests do the assassins of people and countries carry out their tasks...
...I left with a few clothes and a handful of papers...
...But they didn't come...
...And tell you, "I wanted to tell you all these things, compafiero Alejo, and give them to you, because they are yours...
...I began to feel the need to talk to someone...
...It was necessary to go back into the subway...
...He opened the letter, read it to himself in front of the bearer, and said, "What your president requests shall be done...
...Black humor in Buenos Aires: "Argentines," they say, "can be divided into the terrorized, the imprisoned, the buried and the exiled...
...Don't let us die...
...Its candidate, Gen...
...would become a national custom...
...Then they looked at one another...
...QUITO, FEBRUARY 1976: A TALK AT THE UNIVERSITY I stood in the yard, my face to the wall...
...The old myth has saved them from the early death the mine reserves for its male workers...
...Once in a while the government would close us down and dawn would find us at the police station...
...STREET WAR, SOUL WAR How many times have I been a dictator...
...RIO DE JANEIRO, OCTOBER 1975: THIS MORNING HE LEFT His HOUSE AND WAS NEVER SEEN ALIVE AGAIN We are in the "Luna...
...Whether official or unofficial, I still don't know...
...To be alive is a risk...
...An unemployed construction worker, a washerwoman, a shoeshine boy...
...The fear lasted for an hour...
...3 I empty my desk drawers, full of my papers and letters...
...It was a warm, serene night...
...Every day, at 9:25, that woman would get off for a minute at a station-always the same one-where a man stood waiting-always in the same place...
...One of them reads aloud, page by page...
...Then the bell rings...
...THE SYSTEM Whoever is against it, the machine teaches, is an enemy of the nation...
...It was one of Paco Espinola's stories...
...He told Vicente it would be best if he vanished for a week...
...Eduardo Frei, a Christian Democrat, was president of Chile from 1964-70...
...Porky" was in no danger from spies or police...
...Marroquin Rojas was furious because the planes had returned to Panama without touching Guatemalan soil...
...From her mouth flows a tiny stream of blood...
...You don't understand anything...
...7NACLA Report What happened at Ezeiza was a preview of' what would come later...
...They wanted to make us disappear...
...Formulas for sterilizing consciences have more success than birth control programs...
...3 Women can't enter the mine...
...A million Paraguayans, half a million Chileans...
...The prisoners were all on top of one another, surrounded by guns, and they couldn't move, not even to urinate...
...We were young and eager to do things and speak out: we were happy and stubborn, contagious...
...It had taken place in the Matamoros barracks...
...he cried with his remaining voice...
...Not he...
...Far away, nearby, televisions and motorcycles can be heard...
...to think, a sin...
...Liber Seregni, was arrested by the military in July 1973 and remains imprisoned today...
...She allows herself to be seen for an instant, for an instant she is a goddess, and then she vanishes...
...The violence had begun in Guatemala years before, when, one late afternoon inJune 1954, Castillo Armas' P-47s had filled the sky...
...their footsteps and voices, the light that each one gives off and the vapor that remains behind when they leave...
...The task ahead - building our country - cannot be accomplished with bricks of shit...
...And she says, "That Sunday...
...He proposed the expropriation of the property of foreigners and large landowners and the parceling of land in small, non-transferable plots, to the peasants...
...I had never copied her over into another book...
...Eric raised his hand and pointed to the maternity ward...
...Now I want to see you...
...Before the schools, the hospitals and the factories arrive, the colored televisions come...
...One of the men had been found in a bed in the "Pensidn La Posada" one morning with a knife in his chest...
...He is dead...
...Have I not desired or celebrated, secretly, the defeat of others, I who aloud claimed no interest in success...
...At night they are forced to whitewash the phrases of protest that in other times covered the walls of the city...
...Afterwards we walked arm in arm to the boulevard to wait for the sun...
...And will everything, everything change...
...4 On the eve of our departure, Helena and I ate with Achaval and Carlitos Dominguez...
...In front of him rode a woman...
...I worked for a short time at the magazine, Che, until one morning when I arrived at the editorial offices with Chiquita Constenla and Pablo Giussani and we found the building surrounded by police...
...Radl slept on his balcony...
...Because here, you know, whoever isn't rich is poor...
...Humberto sits down with us...
...I feel the night enveloping the city...
...I talk about Roque and I bring him, tonight, to the home of Ivan...
...others, shrinking away...
...SeptlOct 1981 5NACLA Report In mid-1954 the United States had placed Ngo Dinh Diem on the throne in Saigon and had arranged the triumphal entry of Castillo Armas in Guatemala...
...I hang up and congratulate myself...
...That is why we're here and that is our function in the government...
...At the bottom of San Roque Lake, in C6rdoba, Argentina, bodies sunk with rocks are now appearing, just as in the area surrounding the Pacaya Volcano, Guatemalan peasants found a cemetery full of rotting bones and bodies...
...I open the door...
...Those who close their eyes...
...You have a father who will never slow down and who will never have money...
...he wrote...
...His name was SebastiAn...
...Why did it have to be just this one...
...Drowsiness brings on shudders of pleasure and fatigue...
...HE ENTERED THE NEW YEAR IN AN EMPTY TRAIN Ariel left the home of a Chilean who had just died...
...It's getting late," I said...
...An Uruguayan Economics Minister declared, "inequality in the distribution of income generates savings...
...A dangerous species, the repentant: Arivalo became an ambassador under General Arana, feudal lord, colonial administrator of Guatemala, organizer of the butchery...
...A few days later we dined at his home with Jos6 Tohi,** a nobleman straight from an El Greco painting, and Jorge Timossi...
...4 And later he was president...
...I know things are very bad and that gives me nightmares...
...Do you remember...
...I've always been lucky...
...I thought this had ended...
...I explained it several times...
...Somoza received him in the palace...
...When he leaves, he has lost his job...
...The day I managed to arrange for them to be together in a court in Buenos Aires...
...We all worked out of faith, of which there was an excess: no one got paid...
...Eric gets up, pale, openmouthed...
...A woman's red eyes, an empty chair, a shattered door, someone who will not be back: Guatemala 1967, Argentina 1977...
...He resigned in July, paving the way for Peridn's own election...
...He lifts a live coal to my lips because, bungler that I am, I have let my corn husk cigarette go out again...
...I hear many people, familiar or invented, whistling to me in my head...
...I suggested a play or a movie...
...Ruano Pinz6n was one of the four police who had carried the large, heavy bags to the trucks...
...Vicente said he didn't want any and at this time of morning...
...I haven't let go in a while...
...They had never traveled...
...You know that abroad there are a lot of people with the wrong idea...
...I feel lonely...
...We have a lot to do...
...The firing squad, already in formation, awaited him...
...Paco had restored his family's honor by slitting the throat of a feisty hen which had rejected his advances...
...He wore a black leather jacket and his nerves made his eyes dance...
...Of the men who had carried the bodies, Ruano Pinz6n was the only one left...
...he yelled, and to hear him you had to cock your ear...
...THE SYSTEM Extermination plan: destroy the grass, pull up every last little living thing by the roots, sprinkle the earth with salt...
...Below us spread the deserted fields...
...Z6 announced a banquet, a huge platter of Brazilian-style bass, next Sunday at his house in Niteroi...
...Why don't they ever mention things like life, death or destiny...
...The following year Allende was a candidate to the presidency of Chile...
...A while later, when Arivalo was ambassador, Adolfo Mijangos was a congressman...
...And we'll no longer have to work for nothing...
...They 2SeptIOct 1981 3NACLA Report were all heavily armed, with pistols, machine guns and Itakas...
...A few names truly hurt me...
...The authorities did not permit a new autopsy...
...We moved to another country while we slept...
...Elda was very pale, her forehead was damp, her head rested on a pillow and her hair was parted in the front...
...The universities have been returned to the Middle Ages...
...From there, they watched the television bought on credit...
...The glasses are empty...
...Tell him to come here...
...She is already in the hospital...
...Z6 Fernando proposed an article on the sexual life of bees...
...Censorship truly triumphs when each citizen is transformed into the implacable censor of his own acts and words...
...With one stroke, the rescue expedition for the United Fruit Co...
...Radl Sendic was a founder of the National Liberation Movement (Tupamaros...
...it was flying straight on to Buenos Aires...
...And nevertheless, in spite of the lines and the anger, 800,000 workers marched through the streets of Santiago a week before the coup, so that no one would think the government was alone...
...I ask for more crab, and then more, and they say I'm like a school of piranhas...
...They were going to cross the Andes...
...After discussing the material for an hour, we talked about Haroldo Conti.* "He is an editor of Crisis," we said, "and they have kidnapped him...
...The woman and the man would embrace and kiss until the whistle blew...
...A bullet shattered his spinal column...
...The papers advance, come towards me, close me in...
...Uruguayans who at public ceremonies sing the verse of their national anthem that says, "Tremble, tyrants...
...I made friends with a little mouse...
...Uncontrollable fits of anger and anguish come over me and the final result are these palpitations, which neither leave me nor let me breathe...
...My cigarettes turn up instead...
...Ardvalo had begun in Guatemala the cycle of' social reforms which Jacobo-Arbenz was to extend and which Castillo Armas drowned in blood...
...He worked at my side and I knew something about him, though not too much...
...The boats depart full of young people fleeing from prison, the grave or hunger...
...Children are interrogated as to the whereabouts of their parents: the parents are strung up and given electric shocks so they will reveal the location of their children...
...To prevent this man from robbing him of power or women, Castillo Armas sent him on a secret mission to Managua...
...He liked to sing, to drink good liquor, to embrace life...
...About all of this, and other things, we have talked today...
...Agustin told us...
...They had been in prison two years without seeing one another...
...Don Jover could only move his lips, but indignation made his hands and feet tremble...
...You made them feel the rain and smell the violent fragrances of the earth and the night...
...Later he said he wasn't tired...
...Roque's poetry was like him: loving, mocking, combative...
...An old myth says they bring bad luck...
...I'm taking you and you can't even object...
...It is late...
...How are you doing...
...CHRONICLE OF A FLIGHT OVER THE PURPLE LAND The clouds formed a prehistoric turtle...
...The dictatorship turns barracks and police stations, abandoned railroad cars and unused boats into prisons...
...They have drugged her so she won't suffer or know she is suffering...
...A short time passed and my exile began...
...I beg you...
...But it wasn't this...
...She walked out into the fresh air, happy to have been saved...
...The last time Elda didn't say, "When I come out of this will you take me to your house...
...Later a gust of wind collapsed the patio roof and nobody ever put it up again...
...and a new Petroleum Law, translated from the English, was passed...
...The Tfo is the true owner of the mine: he supplies or denies veins of tin, arranges that those SeptlOct 1981 9NACLAI he wants to destroy get lost in the labyrinth, or reveals hidden veins to his favorite sons...
...Ariel was also far from his country and the coming daybreak in France would be meaningless to him...
...But the train still didn't come and it was getting late for work and then people began stamping nervously and saying, "But why couldn't she have thrown herself across another train line...
...Don't you see...
...I confirmed that during these years the person who had died and been born several times was I. BUT I PREFER THE RADIANCE OF PEOPLE 1 "Traitor," I said...
...You don't have to read or write to listen to a transistor radio or to watch television and receive the daily message that teaches you to accept the domination of the strongest and to confuse your personality with an automobile, dignity with a cigarette and happiness with a hot dog...
...and it is with this expression that he remains in my memory...
...To the roots...
...The compafieros have left a few hours - or months - ago...
...I said, "Yes...
...Of course not...
...Several times they had seen napalm explode in the sky above neighboring mountains...
...I knew the scene well...
...In the end, we are accustomed to grief...
...Clothes with psychodelic patterns are SeptlOctl 981 2324 NACLA Report sold to the cry of, "Free Yourself," and big business floods the Third World with music, posters, hairstyles and apparel that reproduce the aesthetic models of drug hallucinations...
...After a week, the man disappeared as well...
...We received the news with more relief than indignation...
...The group leader is a professor of about 60 who has spent a long time in prison...
...I felt afraid as I entered...
...They drank together...
...In the morning I get everyone together and talk to them...
...When people were watching the evening news, he was already dead...
...I shut the cash box, and made out the 3 balance sheet, signed it and told the bank manager, In mid-'76 there was nothing to do but leave...
...By the end of the year we'll drink mate together in Montevideo...
...You brought them the sea and the roar of the waves breaking against the keel of a boat and you showed them the throbbing of the sky at daybreak, and they couldn't keep reading this...
...As soon as Ivan opens the door Humberto says, without receiving any explanation or asking anything, "It was a dissident faction...
...I walked home...
...For fear the other would say, "Yes...
...I present myself, I explain everything, and I come home...
...But now he put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger...
...The blue nightgown looked quite good on her, and I told her so...
...She was suffocating...
...Laziness, I said-but it was fear...
...Since then his wife brings or sends me things he had written and which she keeps finding...
...Per6n had given body to this collective illusion...
...3 My hands sink into my pockets...
...I craned my neck...
...I get up to steal some matches...
...He bought a newspaper and paid with a 100 cruzeiro bill...
...He was the only living witness to the killing of some 20 political leaders on the eve of the elections...
...They dressed her, they combed her hair...
...He remembered everything, word for word...
...A whistle from his chest escapes after every sentence...
...No," said the newspaper man...
...He was taken prisoner in a battle with police in September 1972...
...The Death Squad's mutilated victims turned up in the Baixada Fluminense...
...THE SYSTEM There is only one thing which is free: prices...
...Do they think they can shut us up...
...They hate the young...
...The union bureaucrats, the political bosses and the agents of those in power had revealed their bankruptcy in the fields near Ezeiza...
...He began to lose the little energy he had left and he also began to lose his voice...
...I'm just telling you to hide for a week...
...Around the tables in Chile there were empty chairs and the survivors were raising their wine glasses and just beginning to celebrate the end of a lousy year...
...With the truth we're going to overthrow those traitors...
...Do you have any complaints against us...
...I thought, "He has failed...
...Josi Luis had been an iron-willed militant...
...It was the largest political demonstration in the entire history of Latin America...
...He offered me coffee, he slapped my back and looked at me with tenderness...
...He grabbed my arm...
...3 Three years later, my eyes were glued to the front page of the papers...
...I order more beer and ask them to fill our plates...
...They could have landed, at the very least...
...During his government, he told us, he had survived 32 coup attempts...
...We will die learning, if we want to live heedless of death...
...We walked, slowly, through the Plaza de Mayo...
...planes, flown by U.S...
...Allende told us that the plan to nationalize the copper mines couldn't get through Congress...
...We talked and drank a lot, during the long Punta Arenas nights, while the snow fell on the other side of the windows...
...Vicente and I had gone...
...it has been promised that in ten years Ecuador will have as much income as Venezuela...
...I didn't ask him why he didn't leave so he wouldn't ask me why I didn't...
...Fear of losing one's job, of not finding work...
...I had to work...
...You can treat me with the change...
...My generation began its political life with that mark on its forehead...
...We're flying over your country," Eric said...
...Then a rock hit his - I - T l I- 1 1, U A a i. er, a ott e ure y a suspcous erwards, the kicks of the Salvador24 NACLA ReportSept/Oct 1981 ean military, who didn't understand his passion for Marxism-Leninism...
...And I would say to you, *Carpentier, one of Cuba's most famous novelists and writers, died in April 1980...
...But tonight I let myself stay, I hung around, doing nothing or opening the little doors to my imagination or my memory...
...A contract was shortly signed whereby Hanna would exploit, in partnership with the State, the nickel, cobalt, copper and chrome deposits on the shores of Lake Izabal...
...My wife is having a baby in that building...
...Especially because I control Providence...
...4SeptIOct 1961 5 ARE ANY OF THE BOYS I MET BACK THEN IN THE MOUNTAINS STILL ALIVE...
...STREET WAR, SOUL WAR I pursue the enemy voice that has ordered me to be sad...
...For several days now Elda has not said, "When I come out of this," or "When I'm cured...
...What does it matter...
...Do you remember...
...On that night she loosened her gag with her teeth and yanked her wrist binds off and yelled and ran in the darkness...
...The upper class played statistics, the middle class the stock market, the lower class bet on sports...
...In July 1970 he told me, choking with laughter, the story of the pig, and he showed me an album of comics about the feats of the famous Dalton brothers, movie screeen gunslingers, who had been his ancestors...
...I spent a few days with them...
...We stood for a long time in the middle of the plaza without looking at one another...
...Who would wake up a millionaire on Monday morning...
...If in Guatemala the "dirty war" was unleashed to brutally stamp out the agrarian reform and then expanded to erase this reform from the memories of the landless peasants, in Argentina the horror began when Juan Domingo Per6n, from the seat of power, dashed the hopes he had raised among the people during his long exile...
...I loved that fat shambles...
...It was during the days of the railroad strike...
...He listened to the echo of his own footsteps and looked for some other human being in the empty train cars...
...In Ariel's country it was another time, Chilean time...
...When they leave, they drape colored streamers around his neck...
...The murderers wore no gloves and their fingerprints were left everywhere...
...You're paid...
...They had often discovered the foam's red hot footprints: trees scorched to the roots, animals burnt to a crisp, rocks blackened...
...We didn't bother with the belts...
...He picks him up, takes him to the terrace, shows him the plants...
...She smiled, sadly, and I drew nearer and saw the first signs of death on her face...
...I was 14 years old and the impact of that moment never was to fade...
...How can this inequality be maintained if not through jolts of electric shock...
...Peronism had its Tryrians and its Trojans, its workers and its bosses...
...I met her the day Villar Araujo disappeared...
...Then they said goodbye, with raised fists...
...Is not the crime of hope worse than the crime of the people...
...Those who killed Roque Dalton...
...In times of crisis, don't the liberals become conservative, the conscrvatives fascist...
...He didn't want to stay out late in the city because it was sad riding the trains alone at daybreak...
...I'll have to tell him, "Look, don Alejo, I think you have probably never heard of Mingo Ferreira...
...This is how our last meeting with the military went...
...Nineteen sixty-seven was a long St...
...I must see you," she said...
...The tenth person to die of torture barely made the papers...
...3 Once she had told me a dream which pursued her since childhood...
...The papers published it the next (lay...
...their hearts give out and they fall to the ground...
...To the young people who want to flee from hell, tickets to limbo are offered...
...Eric was Vlado's friend and he knows what Vlado had done and all that he was going to do and couldn't...
...She had been fighting for eight years and she seemed undefeated, but her body had been fiercely punished by the cobalt and the operations and the doctor's mistakes...
...I have become friends with this man I never knew...
...I can see Juan now, the morning he dropped a package wrapped in newspaper and tied up with a string on the table...
...His children were grown and didn't need him much...
...It is aswarm with people...
...Vicente said he thanked him and he didn't know how to...
...The clean air gives you shivers and swells your chest...
...We didn't talk...
...Coming...
...Juan knew it by heart, but still choked with laughter every time I told it...
...Then it left my body...
...The colonial war had ended during those days...
...3 But Guatemala was the first Latin American laboratory in which the "dirty war" was carried out on a large scale...
...Every day at nine in the morning Acha got on the train to go to work...
...I don't know how Epoca made it to the streets every morning...
...With the money from the sale of his house, Carlitos' father was able to buy a tiny apartment and nothing else...
...I could find what I needed in her effortlessly...
...Du Pont, Dow Chemical, Shell and Standard Oil cried out from pages and screens, "We Believe in Brazil...
...Remember...
...3 One night the boys told me how Castillo Armas had rid himself of a dangerous aide...
...I don't guarantee to save your life or anything...
...From a table in the back, Canarinho, a regular of the Rio bars, attacks the world...
...He's been with me for years in successive newspaper, magazine and book adventures...
...We all fall silent, listening to the rain hitting the window...
...3 I saw him for the last time shortly before he became president of Chile...
...6 I had heard it from the guerrillas...
...Her body shakes in violent convulsions, despite the bombardment of sleeping pills and tranquilizers...
...The subway train jumped off the tracks and kept moving, crushing the SeptlOct 1981 1314 NACLA RODOrt people on the platform...
...He had been in the whirlwind of the Bolivian revolution and in the death throes of the Guatemalan revolution - and not as a tourist...
...Can you love the out-of-doors without hating jails...
...We go to the "Lamas" to say goodbye...
...For scratching "Long Live Liberty" on a wall or tossing a leaflet into the street, people can remain in jail, if they survive the torture, most of their lives...
...THEY BURIED HIM ALIVE IN A HOLE It must be a nerve, tenderness...
...He spoke about you as if you'd been his lifelong friend...
...I had given her a short letter of introduction for Salvador Allende...
...Later he died...
...His mother never got to know her new neighborhood...
...The machine teaches you to accept horror as you accept the cold of winter...
...She looked and looked, but found nothing...
...He draws close through the words he left...
...I wanted to tell you, don Alejo, that the prisoners chose to read El siglo de las luces [Explosion in a Cathedral] and couldn't...
...We lived near one another...
...Her nose had become more pointed, the skin a bit tight against her gums...
...This is why God doesn't know or love you...
...My shoes are white from talcum powder and my friends want to convince me you put the talcum on first...
...They pulled him out of his house in Huangeulhn at daybreak and then threw him on the road five kilometers away, his body riddled with bullets...
...What...
...20 NACLA ReportS Vpt/Oct 1981 Juan says it's hard for him, but he can open up and give of himself...
...The banana age has come to an end...
...You have to come with me, Father...
...I know he had arranged a meeting with Vlado and that Vlado had neither arrived at the meeting place nor called...
...If they give me another order to kill you later and I find you, I'll kill you...
...In November 1956, a handful of revolutionaries, led by Fidel...
...They were dragged through the yard...
...How many people have I sentenced because they committed the crime of not being me...
...There the money performs a circus trick, returning to the country magically converted into very expensive international loans...
...This multitude was empty-handed...
...I rolled around in my bed day and night, a puddle of perspiration and sadness, kept awake by the yells and the doors slammed and the couples who groaned through the walls...
...I don't want every Cuban to wish he were a Rockefeller," he said...
...2 In the torture chambers the torturers eat lunch in front of their victims...
...Traitors fly like sparrows...
...teeth...
...One morning she didn't come and, at 9:25, Acha saw, through the window, the man waiting on the platform...
...he wrote from far away, with the left hand or with the right, giving ever contradictory orders to the men who risked their lives...
...the monopo1516 NACLA Report lies were nationalized and the agrarian reform began to break the back of the oligarchy...
...Waiting for him was a huge sow with her newborn piglets...
...The men here are condemned to die before the age of 35, their lungs reduced to cardboard by silica powder...
...6 Vlado Herzog* showered, shaved, kissed his wife...
...What comes out of him are pictures, not words...
...They must have blamed the Russian Revolution on him...
...But Guatemala won't have any more people then...
...Now we're even," said the man...
...I remember that he laughed, we laughed...
...To colonize consciences, suppress them...
...Be in me like wood in the twig...
...You know I'm very dumb when it comes to gasoline...
...Eric walked out into the street...
...Leading men is a technique, an art...
...The ambush had been planned by Peronists against Peronists...
...2 Letter from Juan Gelman, from Rome...
...A cow soon was worth less than a pair of shoes...
...Times of great changes and fervor arrived, and the Right launched its dirty war...
...Not long ago Eric's boy was born...
...Bolivian dictator from 1966 until his death in 1969...
...Your heart disappears, your blood disappears, everything sways and disappears...
...He couldn't stand to have a roof over him...
...That year had been officially declared the "year of peace" in Guatemala...
...The Chilean dictatorship has wasted no time in imitating this successful procedure...
...Wipe out all testimony to the fact that in this land there ever existed anything other than silence, jails and tombs...
...14 NACLA ReplortSeptlOct 1981 yanked children out of their mothers' arms to take them to Moscow...
...We even had a fire that wrecked our shop machinery...
...The cargo section was stuffed with empty suitcases which would return to Rio or Sao Paulo bulging with leatherjackets and other trophies from the hunt...
...His 1964 campaign against Allende was financially supported by the United States...
...And I thought: Will this land of mine remember me...
...We can't stop talking," he says, and he whistles...
...Jorge Timossi, an Argentine journalist, covered Chile for the Prensa Latina agency from 1970-1973...
...In Argentina, the Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) made its public debut in 1973...
...Who could forget those lovely fellows...
...THE SYSTEM A half million Uruguayans outside their country...
...Prisoners, pulled out of jail, die "attempting to escape" in battles in which the army reports neither wounded nor killed on its side...
...He told me your stories about pirates and dictators, one by one, filled with details about the customs and small voices of two or three centuries past...
...Padre...
...Elda couldn't get out of bed anymore...
...The conversation jumped, like a ping pong ball, from one subject to the next...
...Strikes are banned...
...BUENOS AIRES, JULY 1975: THE MEN WHO CROSS THE RIVER Today I discover that once a month, the day the magazine comes out, a group of men cross the Rfo Uruguay to read it...
...Who knows of wealth that is innocent...
...Nothing else to do...
...And now, who should we hate...
...There are few children in the Bolivian mines...
...I knew just a few people in Buenos Aires, but I thought I could manage...
...Mijangos lifted his voice in protest...
...Supper is announced, it'll get cold...
...You tell us he hasn't been detained and the government doesn't have anything to do with it...
...I see Radl out-of-doors, in the countryside, seated on a cow's skull - which became his law office's sole chair...
...At midnight the siren sounded...
...A few days later they put me in a car...
...The big multinational firms have regained control over fuel distribution, bank deposits, and the sale of meat and grains...
...He called the waiter...
...We'd entered an air pocket...
...To be alive: a small victory...
...They had tied him to a metal bed by his wrists and ankles and had administered electric shock...
...The ch'alla functions as a political university...
...The prosperity of a few is everyone else's curse...
...Some time ago he became a marked man...
...I write, that is, I prophesize, navigate, beckon...
...The govenment of Htctor CAmpora* was short-lived as a lily...
...I want to seem firm and talk hopefully, but sadness escapes through my pores...
...THIS AFTERNOON I BROKE "PORKY" AND THREW THE PIECES AWAY "She had been everywhere with me...
...They harass them with sticks and don't let them land, until the birds die in the air...
...His name is Felipe...
...He told me about a maid who had hidden her only dress in the home of her employer in case the Left won and came to take it away...
...We were too young to regret ourjoy...
...When I was small they gave me lots of beets...
...to eat, a miracle...
...a voice ordered us to adjust our seatbelts...
...Prisoners passed behind me...
...That's how he'd been left, he said...
...I can't find my'handkerchief...
...With him I saw snow for the first time...
...This desk is a pigpen...
...But in the mines, the Devil does not reign in February alone...
...Allende didn't trust the nationalist Bolivian military, though he knew he would need them...
...She was there and the train was almost on top of her...
...It is forbidden to remember...
...The first one never flowered...
...5 And now the summer of 1974 was over, the Moneda Palace had been razed six months ago, and this woman was seated before me, in my office at the magazine in Buenos Aires, and she spoke to me about Chile and Allende...
...It's been a year now since they finished him off...
...Tell him I send for him.' " "When was this...
...I propped the window open a bit to smell and hear the sea...
...We have tried to break the lie-machine...
...Do you want to see my smile...
...It's the Jose Rucci Commandos from the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance...
...And they then marched off into the mountains, to kill those who died for them...
...All we would have to do was to go out on the balcony and wait for a love drama to unfold on the streetcorner, but we didn't have film for our cameras either...
...Her gaze, listless, was lost in space...
...For a long time I looked at his smile - ironic and tender at the same time--and bits of that 1964 dialogue came to my mind...
...After he died his compafiera, Claudine, went through all his papers looking for the interview notes...
...In the "Ramos" at midday, Manolo would toss peanuts onto the wood floors...
...Just ten days, a few weeks...
...But how many people are in exile within the borders of their own country...
...Che Guevara gave himself away, like everyone does, through his eyes...
...It's what the economists call the "Development Plan...
...Now I understand," I said, "why airplanes carry puke bags...
...he sits down again...
...I, who had been in the mountains with the guerrillas until the week before, didn't understand anything...
...It wouldn't be the first visit...
...I was fourteen and an illustrator at El Sol, the socialist weekly...
...She had lost her wire spiral and her pages had come loose...
...The Army was on their tail and they told dirty jokes and roared with laughter...
...Castro, left Mexico for Cuba in a small boat named "Granma...
...I didn't ask him why he didn't leave...
...They were armed with cameras and flash equipment and home movie cameras...
...Socialism had meaning to the extent that it purified people, moved them beyond egoism, saved them from competition and greed...
...He hopped on a plane and escaped by the skin of his teeth...
...I ask for Elda...
...He is small and thin and alone and very drunk...
...That woman sat in front of him, but Acha never heard her voice...
...The country, I mean...
...I see big black starfish," she said...
...Nor put up with being treated like animals...
...We have also talked today about the importation of a false "protest culture" in Latin America...
...he's always been poor...
...He fell from his wheelchair, his body full of lead...
...Sticking out among the papers is the letter from Marta, the widow of Rodolfo Gini...
...Thvey werc later canceled...
...The man insisted they drink imported whiskey...
...But they have not been able to, because we are alive, and that is the main thing...
...We slept on the ground, hugging one another, bodies glued together for warmth and to keep the early morning freeze from killing us...
...We are proud of them...
...How many airs form the air I breathe...
...And I went to Buenos Aires for the first time...
...The public security chief of Slo Paulo declared, "This is a crude war, a naked war, and it is a war in which we have to use the same techniques as our enemies if we don't want to be defeated...
...I am the country, says the machine...
...the media multiply and spread Western, Christian democracy together with violence and ketchup...
...A squadron of U.S...
...I felt lonely and persecuted by the crowds and the heat and the lack of money...
...They place candles on the Tfo, upside down, and offer him cigarettes, beer and chica...
...The schedule for calling in threats, sir, is from six to eight," I answer...
...Dawn was on its way...
...I don't know whether it's self-defense or the urge to avoid - not pain itself--but talking about it...
...And I think that Huillca was right...
...At night I heard screams...
...Tattered backdrop, ship, make-shift circus...
...One time he was jailed for several months, close to a year, I think, and when he got out he told me that in the place they were locked up they could read aloud...
...I stretch my legs...
...I'm not afraid for myself, but for the children...
...As a lawyer Vicente had helped him a few years back-some mess with a bounced check...
...Your head on my chest, my thigh on your belly, and as the bodies turn, the bed turns and the room and the world turn...
...Then he told us part of the conversation he had had with the top Navy officials in Conc6n that morning while I slept in the next room...
...The doctors fold their arms: there is nothing they can do...
...Then Marroqufn Rojas explained that Newbery, the brother of the famous Argentine aviator, had been his great friend during his youth and that I was his spitting image...
...Around the bedside were relatives and friends I didn't know...
...What could happen, worse than death...
...Memory...
...I look at my watch...
...A few years later, during a military maneuver, Roque was running, gun in hand, bayonet fixed, when he fell into a hole...
...I'm in the special operations command," the man said, "and I've received an order to kill you...
...In the fields near Ezeiza airport and all along the highway, more than two million people had gathered, with children and drums and guitars, from all parts of the country...
...I thought all this had ended," he says...
...First a piece of brick hit his nose when he was playing soccer, the result of a doubtful penalty call...
...They don't let them rest on tree branches...
...Vicente said...
...He had been tortured in the Cite Ameziane...
...In Madrid in the Fall of 1966, Per6n told me: "Do you know how the Chinese kill sparrows...
...9 Hidden in a store in the suburbs, I awaited the man most wanted by Guatemala's military police...
...Chucha...
...Acha raised his glass of wine and toasted, "To better times," he said...
...This gave us four...
...There are a lot of us around whose capacity to love has been damaged, but you need to have courage to bring it out, flaws and all...
...I showed him the clipping from a Cuban paper...
...Behind the rallying cry of "copper for Chileans," the Popular Unity was going to break through the constraints of bourgeoise institutionality...
...Those in power in Argentina, as all over Latin America, tuck their fortunes safely away in Zurich or New York...
...He entered, mounted on a white horse, and rode down the main street of Oruro...
...At first Vicente did not recognize him...
...Soon there will be electric floor waxers in dirt-floored homes and electric refrigerators in hamlets illuminated by kerosene lanterns...
...When I learned this,I had long since lost my innocence, but I felt like a cheated little boy...
...4 At the newspaper Epoca, in Montevideo, it was the same...
...The body had been found in a swamp, together with that of his small son...
...I want him to say that this time never existed...
...There a caudillo in a frayed poncho had decreed the first agrarian reform in Latin America more than a century and a half ago.* Reference to this is forbidden in the schools today...
...I know how you feel," Carlitos would say, "but I don't know how it is done...
...Then, a mysterious beating on a corner of the Ma1i Strana, in Prague...
...I knew how to decipher her stain by stain and piece by piece...
...The mood was festive...
...You know what the happiest day of my life was...
...She wanted to come home with me...
...At the end of a long, pleasant chat, Somoza accompanied him to the door...
...Yes," he said, "but I am sad...
...They all listen and discuss the material...
...We have come to denounce the crime...
...2 Chatting with him, you couldn't forget that this man had come to Cuba after a long pilgrimage throughout Latin America...
...I close my eyes and again see Radl in front of a campfire, on the banks of the Rio Uruguay...
...He sold his house - a large one - in order to buy an apartment and a car...
...Black humor in Buenos Aires: "Power," they say, "is like a violin...
...The plane would not stop in Montevideo...
...Ra6l had just bought a suit, in the store owned by the Turk who sold used clothes, in the Ciudad Vieja, and he felt quite elegant inside that brown serge bag with matching stripes...
...She didn't get up to see him to the door...
...The people's happiness, contagious beauty, embraced me, lifted me up, gave me faith...
...And in early '73 Fico Vogelius placed me in charge of a magazine that was to be called Crisis...
...The theories of Milton Friedman gave him the Nobel Prize...
...He defended himself by saying he hadn't been born that way...
...To which blind god is so much blood offered...
...he had asked...
...The guards allowed the book in, but the prisoners couldn't read it...
...Then the prisoners began to whistle, softly, as if blowing on the walls...
...City students and peasants from country provinces where a liter of milk cost two full days of labor...
...They met in a cafe...
...I select some lines that describe how lovely sudden anger can be...
...We just made it to a taxi...
...I crossed the river and vowed never to return...
...In the country, Eric climbs trees so Felipe can see how it's done...
...Can you...
...The refrigerator stopped working...
...Now I'll have to wait a year...
...he complains...
...But as time passed the barriers began to drop and he told me his story- fierce tears of triumph after seven years of struggle...
...The friend promised to be there in half an hour, but fell back asleep and never arrived...
...it wasn't bad...
...His small body was lying still beneath the leafy tree...
...And he whistled...
...I've come to give you an invitation," he said...
...His face was crooked...
...We got together at the "Tol6n" or the "Ramos...
...You don't understand," he says...
...Later they took him to the submersion tub...
...Prisoners are organized into work gangs...
...At last I managed to get them together, under a legal pretext...
...All this was hers, time shared, time I'm grateful for.'And I set out for the unknown, clean and unburdened...
...The Tfo finishes the cigarettes and empties the glasses...
...We have a brotherhood based on history and culture...
...Look at this wall...
...A new jail is inaugurated each month...
...Everything depended upon Perdn's blessings and curses, thumbs up, thumbs down, and from the letters *H&ctor CAmpora was elected president of Argentina in March 1973 as a candidate of the Peronist party and a stand-in forJuan Per6n, who was not permitted to run...
...I pass my hand over my brow...
...This country is quickly becoming a part of civilization, that is: part of a world in which flavors, colors, smells, as well as words and ideas, are mass produced, and in which the word "Liberty" is the name of a jail, as in Uruguay, and in which an underground torture chamber is called "Dignity Colony," as in Chile...
...The next day her ten year old son looked at the crucifix and asked, "Mama, when those men came in, was He here...
...he said...
...Then she would break away and return to the train...
...That's the second jasmine we've had in four years...
...We have always treated you correctly...
...After the threats came the kidnappings, the attacks, the torture, the assassinations...
...Times gone by, airs blown past: years and air kept in me and from me, multiplied when I sit down and put on my magician's cape or captain's hat or clown's nose and I grip the pen and write...
...Dog barks, human voices: someone teases, someone protests...
...The telephone went dead...
...The technique of the "disappeared": there are no prisoners to claim nor martyrs to mourn...
...I wonder if he could have...
...After that, the promises lagged behind reality, until they dropped out of sight altogether...
...We stand for a long time, face to face, silent, looking at one another...
...A canary whistle...
...29NACLA Report We entered a cafe, to have a drink, and neither of us dared say, "This means that Haroldo is dead, doesn't it...
...There are no crimes to denounce nor explanations to give...
...How many people have I used, I who thought myself so marginal to the consumer society...
...Autumn was arriving in Montevideo...
...They were very young...
...Then it helps me to remember what chief Huillca said in Peru, speaking before the ruins...
...We've seen the worst...
...No poor, no rich...
...Ruano Pinz6n came that night and I was able to talk with him at length...
...Leafing through Taberna I fail to find a poem I perhaps imagined, but which he could well have written, about the fortune and beauty of being born in America...
...At my side, she had put up with bad weather, physical abuse and falls...
...The first police arrived an hour after the killings...
...Wages are now worth half of what they were...
...I explain that neither Fico nor Vicente nor I have made the decision...
...Your house, my house: the sea is over there, it can't be seen anymore because of those damn new buildings, but I smell it, shellfish smell, war of the waves, and I know that someday she will swallow me and take me away, she, the sea, gluttonous goddess in white...
...She asked me to take her out of there...
...The child whistles loudly as he walks past the cemetery gates...
...I have them by night, I lose them by day...
...The first person killed by torture triggered a national scandal in Brazil in 1964...
...Bartholomew's Night massacre...
...I ran out of gas again today...
...Then I can talk to you in Spanish...
...He took out a flask of whiskey...
...I had to go, you know...
...INTRODUCTION TO THEOLOGY Seven years ago I was slowly crossing the cold plaza in Llallaguea [Bolivia], my hands sunk in a black jacket with a high collar...
...Our lands are fertile terrain...
...During 18 years, for or against him, Argentine politics revolved around this man...
...When I split up with Graciela, I left the house in Montevideo intact...
...It broke apart shortly before the caudillo died...
...At the police station, no information on the crime was accepted, despite the fact that Gutidrrez Ruiz had been president of the Uruguayan Chamber of Deputies and Michelini had been a senator for many years...
...Jos6 Tohi, Allende's Interior and, later, Defense Minister, died while jailed in a military hospital in March 1974...
...With my finger I caress the telephone that had brought me friendly voices and threats...
...He came with me while I bought long underwear...
...They took everything from his place as well...
...5 Felipe is in the crib and Eric tells him things...
...He was the editor of the magazine [Crisis...
...When the time came, when Peronism returned to power, it exploded into pieces...
...I'll talk to him about the friends who are dead and in prison and about how hard life was in our countries, and I want him to look in my eyes and not believe me and tell me I'm lying...
...The dictatorships of El Salvador, the little country which was his land and which he carried tattooed all over his body, could never handle him...
...You must let Providence act...
...Will we be out today...
...Today the tide washes up pieces of cadavers on the banks of the Rio de la Plata...
...Soon it will be demolished and there will be no place to breathe this mixed aroma of fruit and tobacco and times gone by...
...I'll get the old lady out of the kitchen," he said, "and we'll enjoy life...
...But if they come, will you jump...
...No one makes Crisis bow down: we will bury her erect, just as she lived...
...Panic turns anyone into an Olympic champion...
...How could I help him now, so far away...
...TALE OF Vov6 CATARINO'S DONKEY AND How ST...
...Rainladen clouds flee...
...General Barrientos'* dictatorship displayed its great trophy to the world...
...Chile recovered its copper, iron, nitrate...
...The night they let me out I heard murmurings and distant voices and sounds of metal clanking while I walked through corridors, a guard at either side...
...For a week I didn't see anyone...
...Gypsy life...
...It's a trap," I thought, for the pleasure of thinking myself important...
...At times I feel that joy is a crime of high treason, and I am guilty of the privilege of being alive and free...
...In the 1964 elections, the popular front * was defeated...
...And he thinks, "And if tomorrow he thinks the world has not gone astray...
...My memory will retain what is worthwhile...
...The War of the Triple Alliance (1865-1870) was fought by Paraguay against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay and resulted in the death of the vast majority of Paraguayan mien...
...I'm going out to look...
...As you can see, it's hard for me when it comes to loving...
...Not long thereafter, in Geneva, the Uruguayan ambassador to the Human Rights Commission said, "Regarding the links between Argentina and Uruguay, of course they exist...
...He ran a rather bombastic newspaper, and at his office door two fat men carrying machine guns kept guard...
...I hung up the phone and stared at the closed door...
...Some of us, in silence, walking on tiptoe...
...I heard the commotion, the insults, the excitement of the pack of hounds as it lunged off to the manhunt...
...We took short steps, resting every yard or yard and a half...
...I couldn't keep on working...
...4 The telephone rings and I jump...
...Be-tween A and Z, "Porky" contained 10 years of my life...
...By the dim glow of the only street light anyone could read the desperation in that boney face...
...The book was full of people who were dead, and also of those who were alive but had ceased to mean anything to me...
...I presented myself to the police alone...
...The earth devours the people and the government washes its hands...
...They could have landed, don't you think...
...Death took its revenge on this fellow who had so often mocked it...
...He had seen them arrive at the barracks, badly beaten up, and he had seen the Defense Minister personally commanding the operation...
...I learned that the week before Picasso had died...
...And he whistled...
...Take care of my things...
...The same as the country...
...Little by little her lungs were dying...
...Like thousands of Uruguayans, Michelini wasn't able to obtain his passport from the authorities...
...Things are next to me but then they disappear...
...He was * The Frente de Accidn Popular (FRAP) was essentially a coalition of the Chilean Communist and Socialist Parties...
...I think about Elda...
...And he asked for you...
...She said she had met me in 1971, in the "Sportman" cafe in Montevideo, on the eve of her departure for Chile...
...Inside me faces and words cross and mix together...
...I answer...
...We have received you, we have listened to you...
...At his feet, the miners sprinkle a few drops of brandy, and this is how drink is offered to the earth goddess...
...The dictators have forbidden it...
...Tourists...
...I feel like Chinese food and wine...
...they were thrown onto the ground...
...It was sunny outdoors, and the afternoon light filtered through the curtains...
...He hadn't charged him anything...
...They feel protected, they give each other hope and courage...
...But the suit didn't have a small pocket in the trousers, so necessary for change...
...And I intend to see it with my own eyes...
...I'm stuck to the chair...
...We are no longer there...
...Radl Sendic* was one of those people...
...Padrecito...
...And he could ask her, "Your feet walk in my feet, your feet...
...I was buried in a "hotel/rooming house," as they call it there, where they didn't request identification papers or ask questions...
...circumstances have decided...
...Every day one of the prisoners stood up and read to the others...
...In the morning they leave Paysandd and cross over to Argentine soil...
...They drank imported whiskey...
...In Mexico the press said...
...He received me in his home, no questions asked, when I came down from the mountains to the city...
Vol. 15 • September 1981 • No. 5
