by Marie Arana
For all Latin America’s propensity to breed dictators (or elected presidents who become dictators), violence is not always doled out by the mano dura. Nor are democratic governments necessarily a salve to the wanton truculence: Colombia, for instance, has not been ruled by a dictator for almost seventy years. No other country in the region (not even Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica, or Venezuela before Chávez) has experimented more vigorously with democracy than Colombia. And yet the country has been racked by bloodshed and is one of the most homicidal nations in the world.
Mexico, too, despite strong democratic advances and constitutionally elected leaders, still suffers bitter cycles of violence, depending on the political winds and its crime-riddled economy. Democracy hasn’t seemed to help this. Indeed, Venustiano Carranza, Mexico’s first constitutional president, the politician who marked the beginning of the nation’s hundred-year history as a democratic nation, was assassinated in 1920. A period of unrest followed, but since 1934, Mexicans have gone to the polls sedulously to elect their governments. And yet the country has been unable to rid itself of its violent propensities. These are primal catalysts, after all; bred in the bone, difficult to overcome.
Like many other Latin American countries, Mexico has been victim of its harsh past. A population that was approximately twenty million in the early 1500s was reduced to barely one million in the 1600s—decimated twice over by Europe’s deadly diseases and Spain’s brutal rule. Some call it genocide; others, a “demographic collapse.” Three hundred years later, during Mexico’s peasant revolution, one out of ten Mexicans died in a civil war unmatched in the hemisphere—one and a half million dead littered the fields, dangled from trees. Whereas that unimaginable catastrophe has made Mexicans wary of outright revolution, Mexico’s rate of atrocities has continued with frightening regularity. We saw terror raise its head most emphatically in 2007 when President Felipe Calderón ordered the military to wage a decade-long guerra al muerte on drug lords, loosing a disastrous wave of bloodshed on his fellow countrymen, butchering the innocent along with the guilty and sending more than two hundred thousand to their graves.
A deeply ingrained impulse to brutality is bound to erupt most catastrophically in the slums, or barriadas, where hard resentments reign. Democracy hasn’t necessarily bought safety to the indigent: in the past half century, precisely during a time when democratic practices have spread and taken hold more firmly, the slums have exhibited an exponential growth in violent crime. This is largely because Latin American cities have experienced a rapid glut in their populations. Rural farmers, mountain folk—fugitives from terrorism, drug wars, and civil unrest in the 1960s and 1970s—began to flock to the urban hearts by the tens of thousands, seeking protection, joining the ranks of the desperately poor and unemployed. The clearest expression of class anger has been in gang violence, which cropped up in the squalid shantytowns that ring the cities, mounted dramatically after the 1970s, and now is a present danger throughout Central America, Brazil, and the drug-addled north of South America.
In the Northern Triangle countries—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—the gang that calls itself Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) numbers seventy thousand angry young men, all dedicated to brutal acts of murder, rape, sex trafficking, kidnappings, extortion, drug violence. It is overwhelmingly responsible for the mass flight and displacement of families that has become so rampant in Central America. Curiously enough, MS-13 had its origins in the mean, crowded slums of Los Angeles during the 1980s and spread south like a virulent plague, overwhelming the countries in which MS-13 gang members had been born. The worst infusions of violence took place between 2000 and 2004, when the United States, fulfilling a get-tough immigration policy begun under President Bill Clinton, pulled twenty thousand gang members from jails around the country—all foreign-born refugees—and deported them to their old native barrios in the Northern Triangle. The convicts, who had little or no affiliation to their countries of birth, had difficulty integrating into the normal order of things. They resorted to what they knew best: gang life. They began recruiting a formidable army of disgruntled youths—boys accustomed to poverty and humiliation; the “born dead,” as they call themselves—who were especially attracted to the status and power that MS-13 bestowed them. They inflicted a hecatomb of murders from the Sonora Desert to Panama City. The judicial systems of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were hardly equipped to deal with the bloodletting that followed: nations that had thought themselves budding exemplars of the democratic process were now forced to live under a de facto state of siege, ruled not by presidents and governments but by deadly gangs.
There are scarcely more violent societies than those of Central America, Brazil, and the vast territory of South America gripped by corruption and the drug trade. Most disturbing, perhaps, is the way gang violence seems to mimic the past: the severing of heads, so prevalent in Mesoamerica a thousand years ago, is ubiquitous today in El Salvador and Honduras. The gouged eyes and tongues, the ripping out of an enemy’s heart—all these are eerily similar to ancient practices of pre-Columbian civilizations. The testimonials to this are legion. In 1983, for example, in the midst of the Shining Path terror in Peru, a mother named Angélica Mendoza de Ascarza went looking for her son. For twenty years, she peered into every mass grave, followed every possible clue. She searched for him in the reeking garbage dumps that line the roads on the periphery of Lima; she picked through bodies with no heads, heads with no eyes, broken jaws, dismembered fingers. In 2017 she died with no answers.
Thousands of miles away in Colinas de Santa Fe, a tiny suburb near Veracruz, the bustling port founded by Hernán Cortés, another mother, named María de Lourdes Rosales, went hunting for her child. Finding no trace of him, she marched with the mothers of the disappeared—protesting the two hundred thousand that had gone missing in Mexico in the murderous decade between 2005 and 2014. During the march, a mysterious man got out of a car to slip the women a hand-drawn, primitive map. It showed the location of an undiscovered mass grave. When María got to the site, the stench was overwhelming; the rotting, deracinated heads, unidentifiable. It was a grim, hallucinatory scene, one that might easily have been witnessed four hundred years before, during colonial times, in the pits of the dead, beside the mercury mines of Santa Barbara. Or just last year, in the killing fields of Mato Grosso, Brazil, where men lusting for land are still invading indigenous territories and cutting down every tree, man, and woman in their way. History has a way of slipping fitfully into the future.
There are other striking parallels between present and past. Today Mexican gang leaders are called palabreros, the men who carry the word, just as Montezuma and his ancestors called themselves tlatoani, the men who are allowed to speak. In the crime-riddled city of Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, it is not uncommon to find a flayed corpse or a body bristling with thirteen knives—ritual killings that hark back to bygone ceremonies. In the mountain villages of the Andes—in towns such as Juan Ochochoque’s vertiginous gold mine in La Rinconada—miners will sacrifice one of their own in a calculated murder, and then deposit the body in a mine shaft to feed the god of the underworld, much as their ancestors did before them. In Miami, where Carlos Buergos eventually returned after his criminal peregrinations, and where life among drug hoods is all too cheap, men wear trophy ears dangling from gold necklaces, just as their forebears slung shrunken heads on their belts.
Ask any coroner in any murder capital of Latin America, and he or she will tell you: in this part of the world, anthropology is a teacher. The flint was displaced by the sword, and the sword was replaced by the gun. The old is made new again.
PART THREE
STONE
How is it, sir, that having persuaded me to trust our friendship, you then chose to destroy me, your friend and brother? You gave me the cross as a defense against my enemies, and then, with it, you tried to annihilate me.
—Casqui, a tribal headman, ca. 1520
CHAPTER 10
Is it possible that the great God who fills Heaven and Earth would choose to be born in a stable among animals, then die on a cross among thieves? Is there anything that inspires more horror and admiration?
—Fr. Luis de Granada, ca. 1554
It did not escape Xavier Albó, a tall, lanky, bright-eyed novice with the Society of Jesus—the Catholic order of Jesuits—that he was arriving in the Americas much as his priestly forebears had done five hundred years before. Like them, he was young, ignorant of the world into which he had come, but charged with an urgent mission: to win souls to the Christian faith. His immediate impressions were four as he strode down the plank of the ship L’Auguste and out onto hard land: the abandoned port, the shuttered shops, the weeping women in the streets, and then the surging mass of humanity as he entered the heart of Buenos Aires. It was early August 1952, and Eva Duarte Perón, the much-loved first lady of Argentina, had just died after a very public struggle with cancer. Three million people had poured into the nation’s capital to weep beside her casket. The grief over “Santa Evita”—a towering, charismatic force in the country—was acute, palpable. Xavier had never seen such a roiling sea of souls, never witnessed such fervent worship for a mere mortal. Except for the trip from the hills of Catalunya to his school in Barcelona, he had traveled no more than a few miles from where he’d been born. He had just turned seventeen.
He was a graduate of the Colegio San Ignacio, a sprawling, neo-Gothic brick monolith that still straddles the heights of Barcelona. Traveling to Bolivia with two other novices—friends since childhood—he was to form a novitiate in Cochabamba, spend two years in dedicated prayer, and then go on to ten more years of study, after which he would help bring Jesus to the rural poor. Xavier was a sunny, fresh-faced youth with a ready smile and close-cropped chestnut hair. In his trim, black cleric’s shirt and starched white collar, he was the antithesis of a footloose boy on a world adventure, and, indeed, his arrival was a formal enterprise, the fulfillment of an obligation. The padre maestro who had seen him off had said in no uncertain terms: “Bid farewell to your families for good.” It had been a sobering reminder. He had hardly begun to shave.
He was born in 1934 in La Garriga, a tiny resort surrounded by tall, leafy oaks in the heart of Catalan country. For years, this verdant little paradise had been a summer refuge for the wealthy of Barcelona. From the front door of his house on a clear day, he could see the magnificent church on Mount Tibidabo and imagine its perch over the city and its view to the shimmering sea. Life in that sleepy little exurb might have been an idyllic existence for a young boy with dreams. But it was not. From the moment Xavier saw his first light of day in that turbulent corner of Spain, his world had been choked by hostility, ready to burst with ill will. Days before his birth, the coal miners of Asturias had gone on strike, and the Spanish army had loosed a fierce military rout that left two thousand protesters dead, three thousand wounded, and thirty thousand more in prison. Street violence, political killings, and a viral anger had erupted throughout the countryside, and La Garriga, situated at the heart of Catalan and Basque resistance, braced itself for a restless future.
Two years later, in 1936, the populist fervor in Spain was such that a coalition of liberal, Socialist, and Communist parties—the Popular Front, known to conservatives as the “Reds”—swept to power in a surprising outcome in the national elections. The old, moneyed class of industrialists and landowners, as well as the Catholic Church, were outraged. In response, the head of the armed forces, General Francisco Franco, staged a violent coup to win back control. Ultimately, that military insurrection led to the Spanish Civil War, a bloody, harrowing conflagration between Republicans and Nationalists that ended up littering the country with corpses, spurring international fury, engaging Nazi and Soviet war machines, and serving as a rehearsal for the Second World War. Half a million lives would be lost in the process; half a million more spit out as refugees.
Xavier’s father, who owned a small business in La Garriga, was one of the town’s first casualties of war. As Xavier tells it, he was killed by Reds—landless, hungry, and desperate Spaniards—who marauded the landscape, killing conservatives, taking over their businesses, setting fire to churches, and trying to take back control of the government. Xavier, barely a few months old, was not old enough to remember his father’s murder, but his sisters were: they watched as Communist rebels frog-marched him from their house, dragged him to a dark alley, and dispatched him with a bullet to the back of his head. His grandfather, a baker in La Garriga, was killed weeks later, leaving Xavier’s mother both widow and orphan, forced to raise five children alone. In a nation paralyzed by rampant brutality, Señora Albó decided to keep her brood safely at home and commandeer their educations. Xavier became her pupil in all things, religious or secular. Three agonizing years later, in 1939, just as Hitler’s armies overtook Poland and swarmed into France, just as Spain’s Civil War sputtered to a close, ten Savoia-Marchetti warplanes from Franco’s Nationalist forces roared overhead and, in a lesson lost on no one, rained bombs on Xavier’s neighborhood and destroyed the heart of La Garriga.
By the time Xavier marked his fifth year of life, Generalísimo Franco had rid the country of Reds, clamped a steel vise on Spain, anointed himself “El Caudillo,” the boss, and begun the business of executing or torturing four hundred thousand political prisoners in concentration camps around the country. Throughout that campaign, El Caudillo enjoyed the steadfast backing of the Catholic Church. For all his pugnacity, he was a devout believer (with a Jesuit confessor to boot). Pledging to keep Spain free from atheism, he promised the Church a central role in Spain’s future. The Albós hung a large portrait of Franco in their living room alongside the portrait of Xavier’s beloved father. Five years later, when Xavier turned ten and Spain was locked into a thirty-nine-year romance with the mano dura, Señora Albó packed up Xavier’s things, hoped for the best, and sent him to Jesuit school in Barcelona.
It well may be that he had been destined for life in the New World. As a boy attending mass in La Garriga’s main church, Xavier had prayed before an image of Saint Stephen that had hung there since 1492, the very year Columbus sailed to America. Having been born into the realities of a cruel and senseless war, he was determined to dedicate himself to peace, to the betterment of things, to social justice and human understanding. Toward those ends, Xavier was willing to go wherever the Jesuits decreed and pledge himself to a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Part devotion, part love of adventure, that tireless drive—a rare combination of curiosity and surrender—would light his way for the rest of his life.
Seeing the cult of Evita in its fullest expression, seeing that Spain was not alone in its petulant, pendulum swings, in its militarism and idolatry, Xavier felt he was entering a world that, for all its stark differences, resonated profoundly with his own. As he traveled north to Bolivia on a lumbering train, he viewed the majestic world unfolding before him—poor, backward, crippled, yet inexpressibly beautiful and infinitely kind—and his convictions deepened. He was entering a dynamic universe, witnessing a country that was on the verge of taking hold of its fate, changing the course of its future.
Bolivia had just emerged from a historic revolution. Four months before, in April 1952, Bolivian tin miners had risen up against a repressive oligarchy—much as the Spanish coal miners of Asturias had—but unlike them, the Bolivians had prevailed. Moreover, the populist Left of Bolivia had won in a democratic election, but, unlike its Spanish counterpart, it had gone on to retain that power. Bolivia was putting into place a number of radical reforms that gave peasants their rights, nationalized the mines, and won universal suffrage for women. And they were doing so seven years before Cuba would win greater fame for equivalent victories. Xavier was entering the country at a pivotal moment in its history. It was what the Indians called Pachacuti—a turning of the earth, a realignment of the stars—and the Church was being presented with a momentous cho
ice. Would it protect the old, moneyed power base and the mano dura, as Spanish bishops had done during the Civil War? Or would it live by its precepts and side with the rights of the poor?
THE FOUNDATION OF HEAVEN
Who could conquer Tenochtitlán? Who could shake the foundation of heaven?
—“Cantares Mexicanos,” Aztec songs, ca. 1560.
Xavier found very quickly that, despite the half millennium that had passed, the spirituality he was discovering in Bolivia was probably somewhat like the one his priestly forebears had encountered in the time of Pizarro. From what he could observe, the faithful of this “New World” were vastly more attuned to nature, their cosmic orientation tied keenly to the land beneath their feet, the sun overhead, the rains in between. When Spanish conquistadors and their priests had burst into these remote lands, they had come with lessons about sins and saints, abstract notions of redemption, and a ritual that demanded strict adherence to a written text. It had been a strange, asymmetrical junction. Deities in the New World were explanations, not questions—concrete correspondents to life on earth. The God of the conquistadors was something else entirely—a proposition, a puzzle, recorded in incomprehensible code. Cortés himself had reported that the universe he had entered was “so wondrous as not to be believed.” The sprawling metropolis of Tenochtitlán had been filled with such mind-boggling novelties that “we here who saw them with our own eyes could not understand them with our minds.”
