Silver, Sword, and Stone

by Marie Arana

  Within months, he had a stiff cocaine habit. By 1987, crippled by pain and dismissed as a cokehead—a washout—he was doing errands for small-time dealers, keeping himself in gold chains and smart clothes, feeding a spiraling addiction. It was during this time that Carlos, now thirty-two, robbed a shop as well as a private house in Ocean City, Maryland, was caught, and served twelve months in jail.

  In the interim, he met Clara, a young Venezuelan woman who was cleaning houses in Bethesda, Maryland. Responsible and hardworking, she tried to instill some order in his life, and, for a while, he was off drugs and working regularly as a drywall hanger. He had moved out of Helen’s house and vowed to make a better life for himself. He and Clara married and had a baby boy in May of the following year.

  In 1988 Carlos became a waiter at a tony Washington country club, commanding the best salary he had ever earned, but the job didn’t last long. He quit in a huff when the headwaiter complained that he was slow and inattentive to the clientele. To take the place of one job, he found two: working room service at a Marriott hotel, and then heading out with his best friend to serve as a waiter in a Baltimore Holiday Inn. “I was getting right,” he says, “trying hard.” But when that friend died of cancer a few years later, Carlos stopped showing up at either job. Soon he was back on cocaine with a vengeance and into the netherworld of freaks and thugs who traded in it.

  When a big-time drug dealer moved into his apartment building on Sixteenth Street, he began running cocaine again. This time for large drops, in spite of high risks. He was not himself. He was summoning nightmares from the African battlefields, feeling anger suffuse him in a murderous slow burn. Before long, his wife checked into a shelter for battered women, and then she moved into a separate apartment altogether, resolving to address the failing health of their three-year-old, who—like some children of addicts—had begun exhibiting signs of acute attention deficit disorder and emotional confusion.

  On his own now, Carlos surrendered completely to his habit. He was pocketing no money, simply getting from one high to the next. Back on the streets, he was like a winter’s leaf, buffeted by the winds of drugs and violence that had traveled north with him, riding a crest of terror he hadn’t even known was there. By the time he landed in Lorton Prison for drug trafficking, he was a ghost of the young blond boy who had marched off to Angola twenty years before—a cadaverous, twitching, 130-pound wreck.

  While Carlos was in prison, his four-year-old son died of heart failure, his wife drifted away. In 2001, Lorton penitentiary shut down to reopen as a community arts center. Correctional authorities were obliged to ship all inmates, including Carlos, elsewhere: to Georgia, South Carolina, Florida. In time, he was released into the American ambit, only to go on to do what he knew best: steal, kick in doors, threaten addicts for nonpayment, pistol-whip goons. He drifted from one town to another, looking for the next trick. And yet, wherever he went, he couldn’t rid himself of certain memories: the sight of a machete landing on a man’s brow; the sea of mutilated flesh on an African battlefield; the sudden black when a bullet hurled through his head; the flash of white as eight more drilled into his stomach; the sight of his wife, fleeing down the corridor with his son; the quick slam of lead invading his flank. It was just the way it was. It was just the way it had always been.

  WAR WITHOUT END

  The conquest has not yet ended, and neither has resistance to the conquest.

  —Juan Adolfo Vásquez, 1982

  It was certainly the way it had been in Cuba. Even after the revolution—even after the tumult of Castro’s takeover and his subsequent political purges—it had continued to be a repressive country. Under the guise of reinventing it for the betterment of all, the Communists had created an Orwellian regime, a bully government, with punitive laws and a vast population of prisoners. Arbitrary arrests, torture, human rights violations were commonplace, as well as a culture of paranoia. All the same, from the 1960s to the end of the century, the Cuban model went on to inspire revolutions elsewhere in Latin America. This hadn’t been difficult to do. Since memory served, the region had been a powder keg, a racial time bomb, waiting to combust. Despotism had become the norm, even in democratically elected regimes, and, with it, an inclination to hard-line absolutism, subjugation, cruelty. Violence became the continent’s default, the modus operandi—simply the way the world worked.

  History had made it so. The crucible that had created Latin America in the first place had joined two distinctly different and volatile people. Spain had emerged from a rabid war against Arab occupiers as well as a campaign to dominate the slave trade. The Spanish who sailed by the thousands to populate Latin America had been reliant on hermandades—vigilantes, rural police—to keep populations in check, often through brutal means. The indigenous empires they met in that distant land had been well acquainted with wars of conquest. Ritual human sacrifice. Violent repression was not an alien quantity here. Both sides knew the uses of crude savagery, and they relied on it, employed it, were undone by it. It was the natural course of things.

  As history wore on, a pattern seemed to form. There were always juiced-up warriors with little to do, subjugated classes with little to lose. When the Portuguese king set out to populate Brazil, he sent unwanted, hardened criminals; Brazilian natives paid the price. When Spanish soldiers were dispatched to quell Latin American revolutions, they were fresh from a fierce guerrilla war against Napoleon’s invading armies; in response, the rebels in the Spanish colonies mustered an equal violence. When France wanted to collect its debts from Mexico and claim the country in the bargain, it sent steely veterans from the Crimean War—a butchery followed. When, centuries later, foreign corporations in Latin America needed to install security forces, they employed cutthroat veterans of civil wars. Seasoned warriors were precisely what corporations wanted to safeguard their businesses: hard-bitten, unforgiving, and armed.

  It was, as it had been for centuries, “la época del perrero,” the era of the dogcatcher, in which reprisals were claimed and retaliations delivered—in which violations were alleged and retributions met. In Peru, one cannot help but see “a primitiveness, a ferocity” in the fundaments of society, wrote the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, years after abandoning the political life. A Peru that, with so many past injustices and transgressions, could easily be reduced to vileness. But Peru is no different from its neighbors. It is just the way it has been in this calvary of culture shock. It is just the way it has been since time immemorial.

  Vargas Llosa went on to spell out the Latin American malaise further in his Nobel lecture:

  The conquest of America was cruel, violent, as all conquests have been through time, and we must level a critical eye on its legacy, without forgetting that the perpetrator of those crimes and plunder were our own grandparents and great-grandparents. . . . When we gained our independence from Spain two hundred years ago, those who took power in the colonies, instead of redeeming the Indian and atoning for ancient offenses, went on exploiting them with as much avarice and ferocity as the conquistadors and, in some countries, decimating or exterminating them completely. Let’s be clear: for centuries, the emancipation of the indigenous has been entirely our responsibility, and we haven’t succeeded in accomplishing it. It’s an unresolved issue throughout Latin America. There is not one exception to this disgrace.

  Here is the root of the violence, the reason why whites have monitored race so scrupulously—why priests recorded the cast of a newborn’s skin so meticulously in ancient church annals and the powerful still guard it so jealously today. It is why, for so long, the colored have been ostracized, left out, undervalued in Latin America. Many a panegyric has been written about the grand, sweeping mestizoization of the region, and indeed race mixing was widespread from the beginning. There was no choice, as Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors conjugated freely with Indian and black women. All the same, limpieza de sangre has always been an old precept for those of Spanish ancestry: the notion of �
��purity of blood,” of a gene pool that is free of indigenous, Jewish, Chinese, Arab, or black stock—even though “whites” with long histories in the Americas by now have acquired generous strains of each. The prejudice remains, although the reality has changed.

  For a hundred years, limpieza de sangre was law in fifteenth-century Spain, and it required an official certificate, meant to exclude Jews and Arabs. Eventually the concept became more fluid, more corrupt: when Spain was in dire need of money in the early 1800s, it decided to sell cédulas de Gracias al Sacar, certificates that granted a light-skinned colored person in the colonies the same rights as every white: the right to be educated, to be hired into better jobs, to serve in the priesthood, to hold public office, to marry whites, to inherit wealth. In modern-day multiracial Latin America, the notion of limpieza de sangre has become even more fluid, although it remains a useful crutch for prejudice. Whiteness has a sliding scale. “Es muy blanca la novia,” a groom’s proud parents will say—“The bride is very white”—glad that their future progeny will be whiter. It is why, as Bolívar lamented, and so many still insist, the revolution was never quite finished, and true equality, that shining goal of the Enlightenment, was never reached. Plumb the impetus for a crime, or for the deeper reasons for abiding anger, and the triumvirate of race, class, and poverty are almost always at the root of things in Latin America. It is why the culture of violence persists.

  And it does persist. Of the fifty most violent cities in the world, forty-three are in Latin America. Of the twenty-five countries that boast the highest murder rates, nearly half are south of the Rio Grande. Today in Trujillo, Peru—Pizarro’s proud city on the Pacific, my childhood home—for $100 or less, you can hire a sicario to shoot a creditor, dispatch an irritating neighbor, eliminate your wife’s lover. It’s as easy as going to Facebook or a digital marketplace called “Qué Barato!”—“How Cheap!”—to find exactly the right killer at the right price. You can do this in Cali, Colombia, too; indeed, no country at peace has registered Colombia’s extreme levels of violence. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, it may cost you more—$10,000 is the going rate for a quick, efficient, premeditated murder this year—but it can be done. As one journalist has said, sicarios have done for murder in Latin America what the transistor did for the radio. The barbarity is protean, pervasive, and it permeates the very fabric of the region in other ways. In Maturín, Venezuela, today, for instance, a street criminal may lop off your hand if he takes a fancy to your watch; he may kill you outright for a good pair of shoes. It is the product of a numbing spiral of righteous violence that began in Latin America in the 1960s and went on to spur a frenzy in which rulers and rebels alike felt no moral or psychic constraints to their basest impulses.

  In 2018, every day with stupefying regularity, more than a dozen Salvadorans were cut down in gang warfare. On a bad day, forty-five were flung onto trucks and hauled off to the morgue. At the time, El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world—108 homicides per 100,000 people—more than one hundred times the rate of the United Kingdom, more than twenty times higher than in the United States, and more than ten times the global average. When, on January 17, 2017, an entire day went by without a single murder in that calamitous country, the news was reported as far away as Russia and New Zealand. Yet Salvadorans are not alone in this carnage. Latin America as a whole, a region that accounts for a mere 8 percent of the world’s population, is responsible for 38 percent of the world’s criminal killings. According to the magazine the Economist, the butcher’s bill in this part of the Americas came to 140,000 murders in 2017, more than the casualties that have been perpetrated in all wars to date in the twenty-first century. Were we to count the maimed, the wounded, the raped, the tortured—those who may have survived the bloodbath—the numbers would be too staggering, too incomprehensible. And this in a world in which crime is generally on the decline and murder, rarer.

  Where outright violence is less evident, political factions and criminal gangs have found other, more subtle ways to inflict cruelty: the foiled assassination attempts, the kidnappings and extortion, the arson, the stoking of public fear, the paranoia, the psychological tolls, the social wreckage, the starvation and displacement. In Venezuela in the twenty-first century, we have seen all these. Here, since 2014, when President Hugo Chávez’s corpse was installed in a grand mausoleum, and his former bodyguard Nicolás Maduro took up the reins, street crime has been king, hunger and malnutrition rampant, corruption endemic, and it has launched a great wave of desperate Venezuelan refugees, taking off across Latin America, fleeing for their lives. We will never know the level of gore they are escaping: the Venezuelan government stopped reporting homicides in 2005.

  Even in nations fortunate enough to have low crime rates, or drastically reduced incidences of assault—Costa Rica, for instance, or Panama—citizens end up reaping a profit from the mayhem all around them. The trade route for drugs making their way up the hemisphere courses through those more peaceful countries, after all, enriching them in the process and binding them to the overall misery. And whereas a country with a violent past may be far safer today—in Argentina, for example, or Ecuador, or Chile—history has shown that political climates in these volatile nations could flip, demagoguery could return, and the people would be sent barreling through the cycle again.

  Latin America’s inability to deal assertively with violence—the murders that go ignored, disappearances that are never prosecuted, assaults that remain unreported—is evidence of its acute judicial failures, and it is all too conspicuous in the corruption that is so widespread today. Fraud, bribery, extortion, which were flagrant and widespread during Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule, are still rampant today, so deeply a part of the culture that they have proved exceedingly difficult to curb, much less eradicate. Indeed, in most Latin American countries, even those claiming to be liberal democracies, bribes are such an accepted practice that business depends on them.

  To wit, between 2004 and 2016, Brazil’s gargantuan construction company Odebrecht was able to facilitate $3 billion of profit by buying off dozens of presidents and government officials with kickbacks totaling $800 million. The imposing statue of Christ that stands atop the brown hump of Chorrillos in the bay of Lima, Peru—an exact copy of the statue that spreads its arms over Rio de Janeiro—was a gesture of gratitude from Odebrecht’s “corporate relations department” to President Alan García. Five out of the last six Peruvian presidents, including García, stand suspected of accepting bribes. Some have been reprimanded; two went to jail. Pedro Pablo Kuczinski was impeached due to clear evidence. García put a bullet through his brain. But most have gone unpunished. Government officials from Panama to Argentina have walked away with tens of millions of dollars at a time, many of them having insisted, ironically, that they made solid advances against corruption. Two recent Brazilian presidents have seen their demise over similar denunciations.

  Odebrecht’s sprawling scandal has laid bare the greed and venality of Latin America’s political and business elite, but to ordinary citizens and the wider public, it has also hardened the belief that transparency and justice are distant goals in this part of the world. Corruption is simply a part of everyday life. According to the anticorruption activist organization Transparency International, one out of every three Latin Americans paid a bribe in the past year to police, doctors, or educators. It is precisely this arrogance, this sense of entitlement among those in authority, that feeds the fires of discontent among the vast, furious masses of the poor.

  If history holds, the people’s fury will be followed by rebellion, and rebellion will be followed by despotic rule. The people may even long for it; military dictatorships are decidedly efficient at quelling the chaos of revolution. Democracies may follow, but rank corruption—the plague that has held Latin America fast since conquistadors cheated the Crown and Spain cheated the New World in turn—will simply ramble ahead and ignite the fury all over again. Poverty, dependency, exploitation, revolutio
n, graft, and then back to the iron hand. We have seen the cycle at work when liberators who promised a better future resorted to dictatorial rule, claiming it was for the good of the republic: General José Antonio Páez, a rough-riding hero of the revolution, made himself dictator in newly liberated nineteenth-century Venezuela; the great liberator Bolívar donned the dictator’s mantle in Colombia and Peru; Mexican liberation brought two consummate despots, Agustín de Iturbide and General Santa Anna; Argentina’s liberation brought the flagrant tyrant Juan Manuel de Rosas—and so on throughout the continent. We saw the cycle reborn in the regimes of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Alberto Fujimori in Peru. As the Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato warned, revolutions can bring on the most hardheaded conservatism. That stubborn dictatorial streak reemerged in Castro’s Cuba, Chávez’s Venezuela, Perón’s Argentina, all of them after vibrant, hope-filled, populist revolutions and after seemingly open, democratic elections. In every case, violence—or the threat of it—was a strongman’s most potent weapon.

  The impulse to violence was there at work in Chile, when General Pinochet’s military cohort rained bombs on the palace of La Moneda in 1973 and annihilated Salvador Allende’s presidency. It surfaced again a decade later in Guatemala when President Efraín Ríos Montt, claiming to save his people from terrorists, unleashed a campaign of extermination, costing the country hundreds of thousands of Mayan lives. This is not the pugnacity of random criminals in Europe or the United States; it is collective violence with a public and ritual character. We have seen it when the government of Peru exterminated 250 Shining Path inmates held in Lima’s prisons, in what constitutes the deadliest massacre of political prisoners in modern Latin American history. We saw it in Argentina, when thousands of “political suspects” were herded off to concentration camps, and torture, murders, and disappearances became quotidian fare. We see it now in Brazil, with a right wing that wants to stem the tide of liberalism and corruption and bring back the old, conservative values—at whatever cost. We have seen it from Left and Right, in every possible stripe of the political spectrum, as terrorists and government officials resort to equivalent mayhem; as drug lords and soldiers dispatch mutilated corpses to one another as warning.