Silver, Sword, and Stone

by Marie Arana

  The newly elected president, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, as well as everyone else in the bustling capital of Lima, dismissed the guerrillas as an ungainly, unfocused agglomeration of lunatics. Ignoring them with patrician disdain, Belaúnde buried their grievances, thinking they couldn’t possibly affect a wider purpose, and, in the interim, the Shining Path grew. It moved through the countryside, killing the foremen of state-controlled enterprises, earning the respect and loyalty of peasants who virtually had been enslaved by the Lima network that Belaúnde represented. The dissidence may have started in a small way, but soon enough the Path began policing the aureole surrounding Ayacucho—and then the area that encompassed the entire Andean highlands—under the guise of protecting the poor. Not long after, they left a gruesome calling card on the streets of the capital: Lima awoke to find dead dogs hanging from lampposts, suspended on banners that screamed “Deng Siao Ping, Son of a Bitch.”

  At first, the youths who populated the Path were green, unprepared, ignorant of combat techniques or guerrilla warfare. But before long, as success followed success, they became hardened warriors, their raids more pointed, more strategic, their methods more savage. Eventually the force represented a veritable army, cutting a wide swath through the country, killing peasants who didn’t agree with their campaign of terror or didn’t join their forces. The reference to Deng Siao Ping had not been idle: Deng, Mao’s successor, had ended China’s strict Marxist code, opened its possibilities, and renewed its romance with foreign trade. The crude signal of a dog’s carcass became the Shining Path’s way of letting Peruvians know that a brutal extermination would follow if they succumbed to Deng’s capitalist weaknesses. Dogs with slit throats began to appear on the doorsteps of houses, strung up on factory gates, tossed over the walls of military outposts. The signal was clear: as in Mao’s China, the establishment was immediately suspect; the powerful were a walking dead. In a wild spree of bloodletting akin to Communist revolutionary Pol Pot’s horrific genocide in Cambodia, the Shining Path began torturing and executing anyone with the slightest connection to the state—the police, the military, mayors, teachers—and any unfortunate civilians who got in the way.

  In time, the Path made lucrative alliances with drug traders who operated out of the jungle and remote areas of the sierra. The guerrillas would provide security; the narcos would funnel them cash. So it was that the Path needed no outside financiers. It was the first armed insurrection in Latin America that was virtually 100 percent free of foreign support, banking on drug money to train, arm, and run its day-to-day operations. Future terrorist organizations would learn from that example. By the late 1980s, the Shining Path controlled the vast majority of Peru’s countryside in a grip of terror that swept from the northern border with Ecuador to the borders with Brazil and Bolivia.

  This was no campaign of political persuasion. Guzmán’s operatives used brute force to cow the population. If a female guerrilla flirted with a policeman and he responded to her advances, he might well be found with his throat slit and his weapon gone. If a band of guerrillas stopped a car on the open road, it was to crush skulls, gouge out eyes, and stuff dismembered penises into mouths. Children were sent off to blow up banks. Bomb squads leveled electric stations, plunging cities into darkness. Guerrillas attacked waterworks and rendered the neighborhoods dry. Mothers were made to murder their own children if they so much as whimpered and potentially betrayed an ambush. Farmers were forced to silence their dogs with their knives. If anyone objected, she or he would be killed outright. The idea was to move furtively, breed chaos, sow panic, weed out the power structure, bring the entire population under control. We will ford “a river of blood!” Guzmán exhorted his armies. We will hammer the countryside, clean out the pus, leave deserts behind.

  To shatter the old order, guerrillas were trained to swoop into mountain villages and kill whoever was remotely associated with it. As one reporter put it, anyone suspected of ties with the state was a potential mark: “the local mayor; the health post’s nurse; the peasant organizer managing farm cooperatives; the bank security guard; the European agronomist combating sheep fever; the peasant who owned too large a plot of potatoes; the student who went to the airport to pick up a political candidate arriving from Lima.”

  The Shining Path took its inspiration, in a larger sense, from Tupac Amaru II’s full-tilt war against Spanish rule that had paralyzed the colony two hundred years before. That rebellion, which bloodied Peru from 1780 to 1783, eventually surpassed the death toll for the American Revolution, scattering a hundred thousand corpses through the Peruvian sierra. There is little doubt that Tupac Amaru and Abimael Guzmán shared a vision as well as a strategy: theirs would be a zero-sum war between oppressed and oppressor, brown versus white, mountain against city. But whereas Tupac Amaru’s goal had been to kill Spanish corregidores and slaughter the whites, the Shining Path was slaughtering anyone who wouldn’t join its ranks, including the very population to which it had promised justice: the indigenous.

  “La cuota,” Guzmán called it: killing innocents was part of the larger quota of blood that Peru would need to pay to rid itself of its capitalist poisons and usher in a more just age. If Shining Path guerrillas would die by the thousands in this bloodbath, then so be it; la cuota would demand a strict code of self-sacrifice, an unwritten willingness to die. The rebels would sow the wind and welcome the whirlwind. Indeed, the Shining Path quickly became the most radical expression of a desperate revolutionary body driven to extremes. La guerra al muerte—war to the death—was what Bolívar had called a very different revolution a century and a half before, but the message was almost identical. A purifying war. Against Spain, against the petrified hierarchy of Lima—a pitched revolution by an anarchist force that had nothing to lose. On the contrary, it had everything to gain. If the nation imploded, so much the better. As far as the Path was concerned, it was going to champion the trampled, the disdained—the very butt end of the country—and it would bite off the head of a power that had held them for five hundred years.

  Unlike Tupac Amaru’s army, Guzmán’s insurgents managed to penetrate far corners of Peru and find their way into the very heart of the capital, wreaking havoc in rich neighborhoods and corridors of power, establishing offices in downtown Lima. But it didn’t leave the poor alone. It cut through the shantytowns, killing the civic leaders, the priests, the social workers. The idea was to relay that there was only one way, and that way was the Path. The Peruvian Armed Forces added to the mayhem by fighting a rabid, unconditional war against the guerrillas, marauding the countryside and executing anyone who was remotely complicit—often killing at whim. Indeed, the military ended up being every bit as sadistic and genocidal as the revolutionaries, exterminating a large swath of the peasantry and rounding up equivalent numbers for torture and incarceration. Lima’s prisons were so packed with suspects that when inmates rose up in one particular riot in 1986, 250 were slaughtered like sheep inside the penitentiary walls. When that furious, blood-soaked decade was over, Guzmán’s revolution had cost Peru 70,000 souls. The displaced rural population, fearing for its life and pouring into the capital for protection, built shacks wherever it could—on sand and slope—creating rings of squalid shantytowns around the center of Lima. A city of 800,000 became a city of 7 million. By 1990, one out of every two Lima residents lived in a slum. Life was cheap, suffered in dread. No one was surprised when a cholera epidemic erupted a year later, sickened 322,000, and cut down a thousand more.

  La cuota was being paid liberally on both sides now. In 1992, two days after a bombing that blasted a quiet plaza and killed forty civilians in the suburb of Miraflores, the Peruvian Armed Forces raided a university on the outskirts of Lima on the presumption that all institutions of higher education were hatcheries of trouble. Twenty-five students and teachers were abducted, tortured, massacred, decapitated or torched, and dumped in a ditch. Not one was a member of the Shining Path or any other terrorist group. But, by now, wanton violence seemed t
o be the only rule.

  In 1995, three years after Guzmán was arrested in his hiding place above a children’s dance school in a quiet corner of the capital, the head swung back to bite the tail: Lima took revenge on the mountain people. Deciding to stem the growth of an unwanted, indigent population and boost Peru’s economic profile, President Alberto Fujimori ordered the forced mass sterilization of indigenous women in the Peruvian sierra. In a scourge of violence cloaked as a health measure and supported by $36 million from the United States, more than 350,000 frightened Quechua and Aymara women were herded into makeshift clinics without explanation, drugged without their consent, and subjected to surgery that took knife to groin and severed any possibility of reproduction.

  ADRIFT IN EL DORADO

  America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.

  —George Santayana

  Carlos Buergos felt as if he were being born again as he approached the ghostly landform he knew only as Cayo Hueso: bone reef, hard-nosed, Key West. The sun was merciless, blinding, making it difficult to see the world into which he was being delivered. He had been in a dungeon long enough to favor the dark, and he strained now with both hands shielding his brow to make out the sliver of sand beyond the shimmering sea. As shouts rose, “América! Bendito Dios!” he, too, wanted to yawp with joy, although he could only manage a croak. Who would have imagined that butchering horses and breaking laws would bring him such good fortune? He was barefoot, shirtless, exactly as he had been when they opened the prison gates and shoved him onto a truck. His shoulders and arms were scorched. His lips were parched. His head pounded from his old wound. Someone punched him on the arm and pointed to shore. “Fulas, papaya, y wisky, compay!” Dollars, pussy, and whisky, my friend! He laughed. His appetites were more basic. He hadn’t eaten for days.

  He was but one of more than 125,000 desperate specimens of humanity—ragged, bedraggled, with little to identify them apart from their word. Even though efforts were made to discourage Americans from trying to rescue the masses that Castro called “human refuse” and “scum,” President Jimmy Carter promised to welcome them “with open arms.” Americans chartered motorboats, sailboats, shrimp boats, cargo ships, and rushed to Cuba’s shores to save lives, sometimes using their accumulated savings to do so. US government flyers were tacked to walls of the receiving halls in the Florida Keys in advance of the Marieitos’ arrival:

  To the Cuban refugees:

  This great nation is offering you the opportunity of a new life, ample and full liberty, security and the guarantee of a peaceful, orderly life; we also offer you the chance for a rebirth and to be considered as a person. With all inalienable human rights before God and the people.

  When the prison truck bearing Carlos and a few more convicts had arrived at Mariel, the hatch had swung open, releasing them to the port. Carlos had staggered toward the nearest cargo boat but was pushed back by a frenzied throng. Eventually he managed to board one, slipping behind what seemed like a large, agitated family. There were men in suits, dissidents in rags, malcontents, desperados, dreamers, homosexuals, the mentally handicapped, and the mentally ill—Cubans Castro no longer wanted. He glanced around but didn’t see anyone he recognized. There were no army veterans, no thieves from Combinado del Este, no fellow convicts had made it aboard. Hours later, he was whisked through a processing center in Key West with thousands of others and put on a flight to Pennsylvania.

  There they took him to Fort Indiantown Gap, a National Guard training center where tens of thousands of Marielitos were being held behind barbed wire as US government officials tried to decide what to do with them. Eventually he was shooed onto a bus headed for Fort Chaffee, a military base in Arkansas. Of the thousands of Cubans who went through that human thresher, fifty-five had criminal records, many of those as political prisoners. In the group arriving at Fort Chaffee’s detention facility with Carlos, however, it seemed to him he was the only one. All the same, the people who inhabited the small town near the fort believed, as Cubans poured in, that Castro’s word was true: here were criminals, reprobates, dangers to their community. Protests would follow, prison riots, and, in some cases, accusations of cruelty on the part of American jailers. And then suddenly, five months later, after a long bus trip, Carlos was in Washington, DC, free to wander the city streets.

  At the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the heart of Washington, the staff did three things for Carlos: They found him a job as a busboy in American University’s cafeteria at minimum wage, no tips. They gave him a monthly stipend of $150 until he was settled into the routine. And they rented a room for him in a crowded boardinghouse in a rough quarter of the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. No one asked whether he had been incarcerated before. No one told him he would be living in one of the most vibrant crack cocaine neighborhoods in the country, in the center of America’s murder capital, in a city whose mayor himself, Marion Barry, was a flagrant cocaine user.

  Disoriented, struggling with the English language, Carlos tried to better his circumstances. After a few months, he landed a second job washing dishes for Ridgewells, an upscale party caterer, to augment his meager salary. But life in this town turned out to be a perilous business. Coming home late one night from that second shift, he was robbed by three street toughs and shot in the stomach. For months, he nursed eight perforations in his intestine. Carlos underwent a colostomy, but he grew thinner, more gaunt and wasted, hardly able to eat.

  He was well acquainted with shootings; had survived worse before. What he didn’t know quite yet was that he didn’t have to take the INS’s counsel; there were faster ways to make money in America. Big money. He was learning from American junkies in his building that a spirited flow of crack cocaine was pouring into those streets. The city’s leaders didn’t seem to care. It was coming up from the Andes—grown in Peru, processed in Colombia, slipped north, and shipped through Mexico—all fueled and protected by terrorists. The Crips and the Bloods, the most truculent gangs in Los Angeles, were dealing directly with the Colombian cartels, funneling tidy bricks of the stuff by the truckload to Washington. The drug lord who facilitated it was working the very neighborhood where Carlos lived.

  Recovering from his wounds, he started in on a carousel of short-lived jobs: waiting tables, bartending, hanging drywall for a construction company. But it was all with a difference now: he was determined to find out more about the drug world, the cash that flowed so easily around him. Everywhere he looked, it seemed, there were smooth talkers, sharp dressers, slick cars. This was not Havana, not Matanzas. Not Luanda or Mozambique. He began to be fascinated by it, drawn irresistibly to the nightly allure of the drug dealers, the discos, the high life, the fast women. He began snorting cocaine with friends, and before long, dealers were asking him to translate whoever was yammering in Spanish on the phone, or inviting him to accompany them to a Santería voodoo shop, a salsa club, a burrito place, a grocery store, to help them score deals. He would do this for a few grams, a quick high. He had never taken hard drugs before, and the rush seemed a revelation: the euphoria—that inexpressible feeling of immortality—the seductive flush of well-being. It was like nothing he had ever known, a balm for his pounding head, a distraction from his damaged gut. Soon he could think of little else.

  Could it be so simple, after all, the good life in America? Sell some drugs, pack a weapon, make connections, rough up a few people. This wasn’t so unfamiliar after all. He had been trained to wield a gun, brandish a knife. He wasn’t averse to stealing, if necessary—none of this was new to him. He had cohabited with convicts, consorted with thugs, befriended killers. Was this, then, his most marketable skill in this land?

  The slide into felony was gradual. Carlos met an older American woman at a mambo club: a fiftyish blonde with a good job, a daughter his age, and a nice enough apartment. Helen liked the way he danced, his funny English, his sense of humor, his nervous energy, his youth. She invited him to her bed and then, shortly thereafter, told h
im he could move in and make himself at home. It was a comfortable enough life, so much so that in time he began to skip work. Eventually, carousing with fellow junkies, he fell into misdemeanors, rowdy nights, drunk arrests. Official documents show that Carlos was apprehended by police in 1982 and 1983 for carrying a concealed weapon. “I was with a group of Cubans both times,” he recalls, “and we were a little high in a 7-Eleven parking lot, maybe. We got rough. It got out of hand. The weapon was my drywall knife.”

  One day in 1984, he was offered several days’ pay to deliver a suitcase of cocaine across town. Before long, he was taking packages here and there, over state lines, for anyone who asked. The capital had become prime crack country now—it was awash in drugs—and a new, charismatic nineteen-year-old kingpin, Rayful Edmond III, was running the show. On September 24, 1984, one of Edmond’s henchmen sent Carlos off with several thick stacks of $100 bills to make a score in Springfield, Massachusetts, but as things unfolded, everything went wrong. When Carlos and his Mexican traveling companion checked into their motel room, the Mexican pulled a pistol, shot him in the back, and ran off with the money. Rushed to the emergency room, Carlos was hospitalized for weeks. The bullet is still lodged in his left hip.