by Marie Arana
Castro had found considerable success in attracting Panamanian, Venezuelan, Dominican, and Argentine students to his mission—after all, a firm belief in the Marxist world view was taking root among the young in Latin America—and he suspected that Colombia, torn by years of political turmoil, would be fertile ground for a wider revolution. To assist him toward that goal, a group of Colombian university students inspired by his political passions and steeped in Gaitán’s populist vision took it upon themselves to introduce Castro to Gaitán. The scruffy twenty-two-year-old Fidel must have seemed a starry-eyed neophyte to Gaitán, who by then was more than twice his age and a veteran of Colombia’s hard-bitten realpolitik. All the same, when the two met, Gaitán was courteous to the callow revolutionary. In turn, Fidel gushed that the Colombian hero struck him as pleasantly “Indian” in manner, “intelligent, clever, friendly.” He was thoroughly impressed with the man’s brilliance and charm. Gaitán was polite, but demurred from promising Castro outright support, although he agreed to meet with the young man again. Castro was thrilled, confident that the meeting had gone well. All the same, he couldn’t quite shake a strange premonition he had about the general mood of the country. “When I arrived in Colombia,” he would say later, “it struck me as odd that every day there were newspaper notices about thirty deaths here, forty deaths there. It seemed there was a daily massacre in Colombia.” Bogotá was a tinderbox, ready to explode.
Just before Castro was to meet with Gaitán again, Bogotá did just that. It erupted in a war that would last fifty years. Castro was on his way to Gaitán’s office when the shout went up that the man had been murdered. Almost immediately, a biblical mass of protesters ran down the streets roaring with rage, destroying everything in sight. With so much fury about and the capital bursting into flames, Castro didn’t hesitate. He grabbed an iron rod and, like everyone else, joined in the mayhem of destruction. “Bogotá! Another grand adventure!” he exclaimed much later, recalling the sheer thrill of it. This was anger, revenge, primitive justice. In the frenzy of it, he seized a government typewriter a fellow protester was trying to smash and flung it to the ground, shattering it completely. He sprinted to the plaza and wielded his cudgel like any other disillusioned Colombian in a fit of wrath. But this was no revolution as he had envisioned it. This was not what he was after. Killing, if and when his revolution came, he resolved, would have a purpose. A tactical edge, a strategic aim. Of that he was very certain.
WITNESS TO HISTORY
Havana, 1976–1980
Castro was in Angola because Angola was simply one more new and far more extravagant stage on which to fight the United States.
—Georgie Anne Geyer, Guerrilla Prince
Within thirty years, Fidel Castro’s strategic aim was crystal clear. He had won his revolution, rid Cuba of imperialist powers, executed his enemies, and proved that one man could stand against a sea of foes. Shunned by the United States, welcomed into the Communist fold, and eager to engage a restless Latin America, he resolved that aiding the upstart Marxist revolution in Angola would almost certainly send the right message, achieve a wider purpose. He would prove that Cuba, despite its size and isolation, could have a profound influence in world affairs, stand for justice, make a mark in the global politic. Toward that end, he would join forces with the Soviets and engage in a proxy war against the United States.
Carlos Buergos did not know he had been witness to history when he returned from Angola in December 1976. He could not imagine that within a few months, forty-five thousand more Cubans like him would be deployed in Africa to carry on what his little battalion had modestly begun. In truth, he was hardly able to think at all as he stepped onto the tarmac with his head swaddled in a soiled bandage. His head throbbed, his bright-amber eyes were ringed by a deep purple, he had lost twenty pounds in the course of a few months. He was a shadow of the breezy, carefree youth he had been a year before when he flew across the Atlantic shoulder to shoulder with a plane full of boys. He had turned twenty-one in the interim—probably as he waited to be sent into the bush, somewhere on the periphery of Luanda. He wasn’t sure. He realized that his birthday was long past only as he stared up at the clinic’s lightbulb, after the bullet had been dug from his head.
He was flown to the military base outside Havana on Friday, December 3, the very day that Premier Castro, who had held undisputed power for seventeen years, assumed the presidency. He would occupy that position as Latin America’s most lasting dictator for thirty-two more years. Carlos was unaware of the change. He was also unaware of Castro’s recent threat, as the United States readied for bicentennial celebrations, that Cuba was fully prepared to be the most efficient terrorist machine, the most persistent thorn in the side of that neighboring leviathan. Oblivious to the global drama in which he had just taken part, the young veteran was herded from airfield to military quarters, lined up and counted along with the other wounded, and then discharged and spit out under the vast, blue sky. He hitched a ride with a sympathetic trucker and pitched his way through the streets of Havana until he reached his father’s tiny apartment by nightfall.
It is unclear what happened after that. Carlos was patently unable to remember much. He drifted, made do. Recovering gradually, he tried to find work but had no luck. There were job shortages, housing shortages; the war in Africa seemed to be sucking all energy from the island. For all the fog of that first year, he remembered all too clearly the following one. There was less and less to eat on the table. He could see his father wasting away, cadaverous. His mother was frantic. Although Cuba was being praised around the world for its high literacy and low poverty rates, there was little to buy in the markets. More precisely, there was a distinct scarcity of meat.
The country’s cattle, copious in the 1950s, feeding the millions, were no longer. The Communist Party was now forced to admit that it would need to criminalize the butchery of cows or risk a vast illegal market. The edict came from on high: anyone caught killing and butchering an animal would face at least ten years in prison. Cubans joked darkly that cows had become as sacred, as inviolable, as any Brahman in India. All the same, appetites were such that if a herd were hit by a train—if lightning struck a barn—Cubans would descend on the carcasses like vultures on carrion. Eventually the ban included horses. Butchering and selling one—even a dead one—might cost a man thirty years of his life, more at times than for cold-blooded murder. Yet for all the injunctions against the consumption of meat, an existential hunger prevailed, demand grew, and the black market spiraled. A spirited trade in horse meat became a viable career opportunity. Carlos, seeing his future in it, began to cast about for horse ranches where he might make a strike.
He found one in Camagüey, not far from the sugar field where he had watched a machete hack open a man’s brow. He had seen far worse, risked far worse, in Angola. He did not hesitate. With a gang of like-minded friends, an improvised knot of small-time thugs—the flotsam of war—he set about plotting the crime. They would steal a truck. They would kill a horse in the dark before dawn. They would butcher it, stash it in tarps, and ferry it to a third location, where one of the men’s brothers—a foreman in a food freezing factory—would store it until all suspicion was past. Eventually the authorities would find the vehicle abandoned in an empty lot. After that, in the fullness of time, Carlos and his little gang would sell the meat on the black market, where it would fetch enough to feed their families for several weeks. They would do this on Saturdays in the wee hours of morning while Cuba slept, giving them enough time to get the deed done, pack up the dismembered limbs, and flee to the outskirts of Havana before sunrise.
It went well. Surprisingly well. As it turned out, horse stables had far fewer guards than cow ranches. The first kill went unobserved, and was remarkably lucrative. Every part of the horse turned out to be profitable: the flesh, the bone, the hide, even the penis and tail were wanted for Santería voodoo rituals. There were several more kills after that. Soon, the little band fell into a p
attern. There was the hunt for the perfect mark. The tracking of careless owners. The dedicated watch to observe workaday habits, dogs, the excitability of the horses. The heist of a suitable truck. The quick, lethal slit of the throat.
The foreman in the processing plant was all too accommodating; he argued for a larger cut of the profits. Carlos’s hawker was skilled at keeping each sale secret, the buyer protected, the hand-off discreet. The little band was soon flush with money, carousing in bars, visiting houses of pleasure, their pockets jingling with coins. The world seemed an easy place. Until the day a police car appeared out of nowhere on the dirt road where they happened to be and flicked its headlights into high beam. It was November 1978. Carlos was arrested, convicted, and, without much ado, thrown into prison. By coincidence, days later, Fidel Castro, responding to President Jimmy Carter’s pledge to drop all travel restrictions from Cuba, announced that the following year he would release three thousand “hard-core” criminals to the open waters facing Florida. They would be political prisoners, Castro said: anti-Communists who had been behind bars since the 1960s.
Carlos didn’t have to wait that long. In June 1979, only six months into his sentence and ten months from Castro’s promised release, he was pulled from his cell, handed a paper bag with his old clothes, and told to go home. When he knocked on this father’s door this time, however, it was made very clear to him that he was not welcome anymore. There were too many children under that roof, his father said—Carlos’s younger brothers, like any ordinary human beings, had fathered babies—and Carlos was nothing but a bad influence. No help to them. No good.
Within three months, he was in jail again; this time for treason. He had tried to escape Cuba. In sheer desperation, he had patched together a raft made of old tires, bound it with hemp, and set out to sea with two other men. The military unit that captured him was not as gentle as the police had been the year before. They threw a lasso around him as if he were a wild animal and broke his arm in the struggle to pull him onto their craft. They roughed him up, brought him ashore, and thrust him into a dank dungeon in the fearsome Combinado del Este prison, just east of Havana and twenty-five miles from Mariel. His two companions weren’t so lucky. They were shot dead as they leapt, terrified, into the watery expanse.
BODY COUNTS
Tierra del Fuego could prove suitable for cattle breeding; but the only drawback to this plan is that to all appearances it would be necessary to exterminate all the Fuegians.
—London Daily News, 1882
“Eat or be eaten, there’s no getting around it,” a character says in Mario Vargas Llosa’s stark, brittle, and exquisitely brutal La Ciudad y los Perros. The novel, translated into English as The Time of the Hero, describes, among other things, how a Peruvian youth in a military academy who would rather write love letters than learn the ways of war will be expected to crawl on his belly, kill on command. One might say this is the goal of any warrior’s education, except that in the Latin American context, the militarization of the young brings with it a good dose of extracurricular instruction: a boy, in the course of being a soldier, will learn the ways of corruption, the material benefits of military power; the handy peacetime uses of brute force. And, quite naturally, when this belligerence is loosed upon a population, the response—if people are brutalized enough—will be to respond in kind.
To most of the world, reading about extreme distemper in Latin America—as prone to exaggeration as that notion might be—might be to assume that the region is overwhelmingly, numbingly homicidal. Surely there is plenty of evidence for that: the hard-boiled, repressive dictators, the assassinations, the disappeared, the culture of corruption, the delinquency, the death squads, narcos, terrorists, gangland pandilleros; not to mention the barbed, electrified wire that sits atop our city walls. The images are constant in the media. Who can forget the past sixty years in the history of Mexico, Argentina, Honduras, Peru, Colombia, El Salvador? The mutilated bodies, the pot-clanging widows, the blank-eyed children? Right now, in any major city in the United States of America, or any number of urban neighborhoods of Europe, there are plenty of murder rates to compete, but the difference is that in those cities, violence always seems to surprise. It is largely a product of chance and misfortune. There is no surprise in the Latin American version. And, even if numbers fluctuate—if, for some reason, in any given year New Orleans can count more murders than Ciudad Juárez or San Salvador or Natal—the underlying calculus is undeniable.
Sometimes the murderousness can be chilling in its premeditated cruelty: in the late 1800s, in the southern swath of Chile and Argentina known as Tierra del Fuego, the Selk’nam people were declared “dangerous obstacles” to progress. Europeans had poured into the area, lured by a gold rush, and the indigenous who resisted the influx were deemed a nuisance. Despised, dismissed as less than human even in that advanced age, they were subjected to a campaign of vilification. Especially when the English recalled how repelled Charles Darwin had been by Fuegians when he visited Patagonia years before:
These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant and their gestures violent. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world. It is a common subject of conjecture what pleasure in life some of the lower animals can enjoy: how much more reasonably the same question may be asked of these barbarians!
“There’s so much to be done in Tierra del Fuego!” a London newspaper proceeded to editorialize breathlessly, but to accomplish it, one would need “to eliminate the Fuegians.” And that is precisely what the colonizers did. They paid Chilean and Argentine mercenaries to hunt and kill the Selk’nam. Armed thugs were compensated according to how many severed ears or testicles they could produce to prove the kills. More was offered if a pair of ears belonged to a pregnant woman and was accompanied by a human fetus. Sheep were doused in strychnine in hopes that the Selk’nam would feed on them. A steady extermination took place, just as the London paper had called for it. The locals were engaged to carry it out. By the time the killing was over, thousands of Selk’nam were dead, and the few hundred who were left were herded onto reservations, where disease finished them off. Several years later, Argentina invited and admitted its largest European influx—almost two million immigrants of a whiter race.
As Tina Rosenberg’s heartbreaking 1991 book Children of Cain puts it:
Quantity is not the whole issue. Violence in Latin America is significant in part because so much of it is political: planned, deliberate, carried out by organized groups of society against members of other groups. It is used to make a point. It is committed by the institution entrusted with the protection of its citizens. And it is justified by large numbers of people. It is different from the purposeless, random, individual violence of the United States. It is more evil.
And it is still there.
HIT MEN, GUERRILLAS, AND TORTURERS
A single person killed is a tragedy, but a million people killed are a statistic.
—Joseph Stalin, 1943
Sometime in June 1976—the precise moment is not known—the word disappeared took on new currency in Latin America. The verb suddenly morphed from passive to active: a death squad could disappear a person; that person was el desaparecido, the disappeared. The word came to vivid life on the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires when hundreds of men and women began to congregate in slow, somber walks around the plaza’s La Estatua de Libertad, carrying signs that bore witness to those who had suddenly disappeared in their families: the missing children, spouses, or grandchildren who had been dragged from their homes, tortured, summarily executed, or dropped into the big, blue sea, never to be seen again. It was a terrible coda to the civil war that had raged through Argentina after the death of President Juan Perón two years before.
The power vacuum in 1974 had been acute. Before expiring, Perón had installe
d his third wife, Isabel Perón, as vice president, and now, as Argentina’s sovereign—as the first female in the world to hold the title of “president”—she had proved patently unprepared to fill the role. Isabel sorely lacked the grand, populist appeal of the former first lady—now dead for twenty-two years—Evita Perón.
Isabel had been a nightclub dancer in Panama City when Perón met her: a pretty, but distinctly shallow and unprepossessing woman with a fifth-grade education, whom he had married only because the Church had insisted on it when it learned he was cohabiting with a mistress. With Perón dead, all Isabel’s shortcomings came into play, as well as her strange dependence on the police commissioner José López Rega, a former security guard in the presidential palace, who was fascinated, as she was, by occult divination and fortune-telling. She had promoted López to minister of social welfare but eventually relied on him as her de facto prime minister. Under his auspices, a secret death squad called the Triple A (Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance) was formed to liquidate increasingly pesky leftists. Within a year, he had killed 1,500 of them. The truculence was contagious. Right-wing paramilitary groups rushed out to battle Communist guerrillas in the streets, prompting a bloody conflict that seemed to have its own fiendish momentum. The leftist guerrillas, the Montoneros and others—largely university students and Catholic liberation theologists—answered with bombs or arson, kidnapping businessmen to fund their campaign and collecting some of the largest ransoms on record: $14 million for the abduction of an Exxon executive; $60 million for the Argentine grain moguls Jorge and Juan Born. By March 1976, a military coup had ousted Isabel Perón, established a government under General Jorge Rafael Videla called “The Trial”—eerily reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s novel of the same name—and begun a reign of terror as murderous as any conquistador’s rule.
