Silver, Sword, and Stone

by Marie Arana

  from every far corner of Cuba: Ibid.

  Animals perished without fodder: Fidel Castro himself admitted this. Castro, public speech, July 26, 1970, quoted in Gall, Ibid.

  Epigraph; “The chief says burn everything”: UNITA General Arlindo Pena’s nom de guerre in the Angolan wars was “General Ben Ben” after the Algerian revolutionary leader, Ahmed Ben Bella. After the 1992 Halloween Massacre in Luanda, General Ben Ben was shown on television shouting these words into his radio. Peter Polack, The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War (Philadelphia: Casemate, 2013), 84–85.

  Cuba would pour half a million men: J. H. Williams, “Cuba: Havana’s Military Machine,” Atlantic, August 1988.

  A decade later, it would be more than seventy thousand: Luis Cino Álvarez, “Valió la pena la muerte de miles de cubanos en Angola?,” Blogs Cubanos, Radio Televisión Martí, November 2015.

  almost 350,000: Jamie Miller, “Castro in Africa,” The Atlantic, December 3, 2016.

  He found himself armed with an AK-47: The following events were described to me in numerous interviews with Carlos Buergos, Lorton Prison, September 1995 through July 1996.

  “What have they done to us?”: “Qué han hecho de mi pueblo? Qué han hecho de nosotros?” António Lobo Antunes, En el culo del mundo [The land at the end of the world] (Madrid: Debolsillo e-book, 2012), Ch. G. Antunes was drafted into the war in Angola as a Portuguese soldier in the early 1970s, before Portugal’s revolution in 1974.

  Cubans were using flamethrowers: “Absolute Hell over There,” Time, January 17, 1977.

  fulfilling a doctrine: The Monroe Doctrine, the US policy to oppose any foreign power trying to meddle in the hemisphere, began in 1823, just before Latin America achieved complete independence, although it was not called by this name until more than twenty-five years later. President James Monroe was its author.

  arrest, torture, disappear, and execute nearly fifty thousand: Paul Lopes, The Agrarian Crises in Modern Guatemala (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1985), 46; Amnesty International Annual Report 1971–1972 (London: AI Publications, 1972), 45; Amnesty International Annual Report 1972–1973 (London: AI Publications, 1973), 6. President Arana had been known to say, “If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so.” James Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus (London: Verso, 1988), 691.

  “A Salvador Allende, de su compañero de armas”: José Miguel Larraya, “Fidel Ante la Tumba de Allende,” El País (Madrid), November 11, 1996; “Allende se suicidó con un fusil regalado por Fidel Castro,” Libertad Digital SA, last modified July 20, 2011.

  Not long after, with the full blessings of the Central Intelligence Agency: Peter Kornbluh, “Chile and the United States: Declassified Documents Relating to the Military Coup, September 11, 1973,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 8, George Washington University National Security Archive (legacy online site), accessed February 1, 2019, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm. Also: Kristian Gustafson, “CIA Machinations in Chile, 1970: Reexamining the Record,” Studies in Intelligence 47, no. 3 (2003).

  “It is firm and continuing policy”: Kornbluh, “Chile and the United States.”

  “Make the economy scream!”: Ibid.

  “Such things are not done here”: Tina Rosenberg, Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America, 338.

  force victims to lie on the ground: Ibid., 334.

  The government response was merciless: Juan Forero, “Details of Mexico’s Dirty Wars from 1960s to 1980s Released,” Washington Post, November 22, 2006.

  students and political sympathizers were executed on the spot: Kevin Sullivan, “Memories of Massacre in Mexico,” Washington Post, February 14, 2002.

  Almost a thousand were subsequently disappeared: Forero, “Details of Mexico’s Dirty Wars.”

  a staggering count of two hundred thousand dead: “Mass Atrocity Endings: Colombia—La Violencia,” World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School online, last modified December 14, 2016.

  “agreeable to the United States”: John Adams to John Jay, London, 28 May 1786, in E. Taylor Parks, Colombia and the United States: 1765–1934 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1935), 36.

  “those People”: Ibid.

  “What could I think of revolutions?”: John Adams to politician James Lloyd, 30 March 1815, Quincy, MA, in The Works of John Adams (Boston: Little Brown, 1856), 150.

  “if the poison of unrest . . . infect”: Richard Nixon, voice recording, Nixontapes.org, 735–001, June 15, 1972.

  “Latin America doesn’t matter”: Richard Nixon to US ambassador to NATO Donald Rumsfeld, quoted in James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (New York: Viking, 2004), 16.

  “People don’t give a shit about the place”: Nixon phone call with H. R. Haldeman, October 20, 1971, George Washington University National Security Archive (legacy online site), accessed February 1, 2019, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB95/mex18.pdf, conversation 597-3, cassette 1293.

  “What happens in the south has no importance”: Henry Kissinger, quoted in Seymour Hersh, “The Price of Power: Kissinger, Nixon, and Chile,” Atlantic, December 1982.

  Infantilizing the region’s people, dismissing them as irresponsible: Kissinger: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” Meeting of the “40 Committee” on covert action in Chile (June 27, 1970), from Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Knopf, 1974). See also Seymour Hersh, “Censored Matter in Book About CIA Said to Have Related Chile Activities; Damage Feared,” New York Times online, September 11, 1974).

  “America’s backyard”: Walter Hixson, American Foreign Relations: A New Diplomatic History (New York: Routledge, 2016), 310.

  CHAPTER 8: THE RISE OF THE STRONGMAN AND THE DRAGONS ALONG THE WAY

  Epigraph; “Barbarians who resort to force”: José Martí, “Los bárbaros que todo lo confian a la fuerza y a la violencia nada construyen, porque sus simientes son de odio,” cited in Eduardo Palomo y Trigueros, Cita-logía (Sevilla: Punto Rojo, 2013), 295. (My translation.)

  I fought for liberty with all my heart”: José García Hamilton, El autoritarismo y la improductividad en Hispanoamérica (Buenos Aires: Ed. Sudamericana, 1998), digital version.

  “We have tried everything under the sun, and nothing has worked”: Simón Bolívar to Urdaneta, Buíjo, July 5, 1829, in Daniel Florencio O’Leary, Memorias de General O’Leary (Caracas: Imprenta Nacional, 1879–88), 23:416–18.

  “A democratic system, far from rescuing us”: Bolívar, “Letter from Jamaica,” addressed to “un caballero de esta isla,” Kingston, September 6, 1815, in Vicente Lecuna, Simón Bolívar, Obras (Caracas: Ediciones de la CANTV, 1983), 1:161.

  reduced the Latin American populace by more than 25 percent: Scheina, Latin America’s Wars, vol. 1, 173.

  Epigraph; “My grandfather, as he drank his coffee”: Octavio Paz, “Intermitencias del Oeste,” from Canción Mexicana, Collected Poems of Octavio Paz (New York: New Directions, 1987), 222. (My translation.)

  each time burying and reburying: Fuentes, 268–69.

  sold off or lost vast tracts of land to the United States: Santa Anna lost North Texas to the United States as well as the whole northern area of Mexican territories, including Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, California, and parts of Utah. Most of this was part of the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, in order to facilitate the building of the railroads.

  Díaz was all too reliant on ruthless: Stuart Easterling, The Mexican Revolution: A Short History, 1910–1920 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013), 34–40.

  Díaz had all the chieftains of the Yaquis and the Mayans: Thirty thousand people were deported. Along the way, the men were forced to marry Chinese farmhands and forget all previous alliances. Fuentes, 286.

  One prominent
Mexican historian reckons that no fewer than seven hundred thousand: Enrique Krauze, “In Mexico, a War Every Century,” New York Times Opinion online, September 14, 2010.

  the pro-Catholic Cristero rebellion of the 1920s: Ibid.

  Epigraph; “The war will come, my darling”: Lines from Gioconda Belli’s “Canto de guerra,” 1948, in Belli, De la costilla de Eva (Managua: Editorial Neuva Nicaragua, 1987). (My translation.)

  invaded by British forces in 1847: Data on Nicaragua from “Timeline: Nicaragua,” Stanford University online, last accessed, February 2, 2019, https://web.stanford.edu/group/arts/nicaragua/discovery_eng/timeline.

  “chronic wrongdoing”: The Roosevelt Corollary (1904) to the Monroe Doctrine (1823) masked US strategic interests in the rhetoric of neighborly aid: “Chronic wrongdoing or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.” As quoted in Gaddis Smith, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 25.

  as many as fifty thousand Nicaraguans had been murdered: David Boddiger, Tico Times (Costa Rica), July 22, 2014.

  Epigraph; “The fukú ain’t just ancient history”: Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead, 2007), 3.

  he ordered the massacre: Robert Crassweller, The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 156.

  he met his undoing via American pragmatism: “I Shot the Cruellest Dictator in the Americas,” BBC News online, last modified May 28, 2011, www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-13560512. The BBC confirms the CIA involvement and adds: “In a letter to his State Department superior in October 1960, Henry Dearborn, de facto CIA station chief in the Dominican Republic, wrote: ‘If I were a Dominican, which thank heaven I am not, I would favour destroying Trujillo as being the first necessary step in the salvation of my country and I would regard this, in fact, as my Christian duty.’ ”

  Epigraph; “It’s the sound of things falling”: “Es el ruido de las cosas al caer desde la altura, un ruido interrumpido y por lo mismo eterno, un ruido que no termina nunca.” Juan Gabriel Vásquez, El ruido de las cosas al caer (Madrid: Alfaguara, 20011), 87. (My translation.)

  As many as 130,000 Colombians died: “La Guerra de los Mil Días,” Encyclopædia Britannica online, January 5, 2018.

  Not until the Peruvian president: This was Luis Sánchez Cerro, even as he reviewed troops being sent to the undeclared war.

  Gabriel García Márquez, who was witness to the deed: Gabriel García Márquez, Vivir para contarla (Barcelona: Mondadori, 2002), 332–63.

  “They’ve murdered Gaitán!”: “Matarón a Gaitán!” Georgie Anne Geyer, Guerrilla Prince (New York: Little, Brown, 1991), 77.

  strewn with more than three hundred thousand corpses: The three-hundred-thousand figure comes from a number of sources gathered by Erna von der Walde and Carmen Burbano, “Violence in Colombia: A Timeline,” North American Congress on Latin America online, last modified September 2007, https://nacla.org/article/violence-colombia-timeline. See also Rex A. Hudson, ed., Colombia: A Country Study, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2010), 326. This study puts the figure at more than two hundred thousand.

  blamed variously on the CIA: Hudson, Colombia, 43. Gloria Gaitán, the politician’s daughter, who was eleven years old at the time, suggested that it was the CIA. A contemporary Colombian politician named Álvaro Leyva Durán has suggested that a jilted suitor of Gaitán’s lover—a hostess at the nightclub El Gato Negro—might have been the killer. Otty Patiño, Historia (privada) de la violencia (Bogotá: Debate, 2017), 300.

  forcibly displaced three million souls: Rosenberg, 142. Rosenberg refers to Chileans who fled from the countryside into the cities. A more conservative figure, two million, perhaps focusing on the ensuing Chilean diaspora, is given in “Mass Atrocity Endings: Colombia—LA Violencia,” World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School online, last modified December 14, 2016, https://sites.tufts.edu/atrocityendings/2016/12/14/colombia-la-violencia-2.

  “Trujillo was there!”: This is from the account Castro gave when interviewed by Katiuska Blanco Castiñeira for Fidel Castro Ruz: Guerrillero del tiempo (Panamá: Ruth Casa Editorial, 2012), vol. 1, ch. 9.

  “Indian” in manner, “intelligent, clever, friendly”: Ibid.

  Gaitán was polite: Ibid.

  “When I arrived in Colombia”: Ibid.

  Castro was on his way to Gaitán’s office: Ibid.

  Epigraph; “Castro was in Angola because Angola”: Geyer, Guerrilla Prince, 339.

  stand against a sea of foes: Indeed, Castro mustered the strongest per capita fighting force in Latin America: Cuban Armed Forces and the Military Presence (Special Report no. 103) (Washington, DC: US Department of State, August 1982), www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a497385.pdf.

  Buergos did not know he had been witness: Again, these accounts, for a front-page feature in the Washington Post, July 9, 1996, are taken from my 1995–96 interviews with Buergos during his incarceration in Lorton Prison.

  forty-five thousand more Cubans like him: John Darnton, “Castro Finds There Are Risks as the ‘Policeman of Africa,’ ” New York Times online, November 12, 1978.

  Latin America’s most lasting dictator: Fidel Castro led Cuba for five decades and was the world’s third-longest-serving head of state, after Britain’s Queen Elizabeth and the King of Thailand. He temporarily ceded power to his brother Raul in July 2006 after undergoing intestinal surgery. The handover of power became official in 2008. Reuters, “Castro Among Longest-Serving Leaders, Known for Long Speeches,” Voice of America online, November 26, 2016, www.voanews.com/a/fidel-castro-obituary-facts/3612417.html.

  the most efficient terrorist machine: “Fidel Castro Proclaims Himself a Terrorist,” Fidel Castro, speech at the fifteenth anniversary of MININT, the Republic of Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior, June 1976.

  The country’s cattle, copious in the 1950s: Gary Marx, “Cubans Have Beef with Chronic Cattle Shortage,” Chicago Tribune, March 18, 2004.

  Eventually the ban included horses: “Por qué Cuba sanciona con tanta severidad el sacrificio de ganado?” [Why does Cuba sanction cattle slaughter so severely?], BBC World online, last modified September 12, 2015.

  he would release three thousand “hard-core” criminals: Reuters, “Castro Would Free 3,000,” New York Times online, November 23, 1978.

  Epigraph; “Tierra del Fuego could prove suitable for cattle breeding”: London Daily News, 1882, as quoted in Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 1993), 86.

  “Eat or be eaten, there’s no getting around it”: “O comes o te comen, no hay más remedio,” Mario Vargas Llosa, La Ciudad y los Perros (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2005), 33.

  the region is overwhelmingly, numbingly homicidal: Rosenberg, 8.

  “dangerous obstacles”: Martín Gusinde, Los indios de Tierra del Fuego (Buenos Aires: Centro de Etnología Americana, 1982), 143. See also Jérémie Gilbert, Nomadic Peoples and Human Rights (New York: Routledge, 2014), 23–24.

  “These poor wretches were stunted in their growth”: Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1845; London: Wordsworth Classics, 1997), 198–99.

  “There’s so much . . . to eliminate the Fuegians”: London Daily News, 1882, in Taussig, Mimesis, 86; Jérémie Gilbert, Nomadic People and Human Rights, 24.

  Several years later, Argentina admitted its largest European influx: More than 1.6 million immigrants from Europe were welcomed in 1914. Hundreds of thousands had flowed in during the previous century. Fuentes, 282.

  “Quantity is not the whole issue. Violence in Latin America”: Rosenberg, 8.

  Epigraph; “A single person killed is a t
ragedy”: The phrase in Russian is translated variously as “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic” or “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” See Elizabeth Knowles, Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 736.

  the word disappeared took on new currency: Rosenberg, 79.

  a secret death squad called the Triple A: Ignacio González Jansen, La Triple A (Buenos Aires: Contrapunto, 1986), 7–38.

  collecting some of the largest ransoms: $14 million would be equivalent to $69 million today. This was Victor Samuelson, a refinery manager for a subsidiary of Exxon. Brian Berenty, “The Born Legacy: Kidnappings in 1970s Argentina,” November 4, 2015. www.livinglifeinanopensuitcase.wordpress.com. The Born brothers ransom of $60 million would be equivalent to $293 million today. Gus Lubin and Shlomo Sprung, “The Largest Ransoms Ever Paid,” Business Insider, last modified September 7, 2012.

  “The Trial”—eerily reminiscent: This was El Proceso de Reorganizacíon Nacional (National Reorganization Process), which, when shortened became El Processo, or The Trial, the name given to General Videla’s regime. Rosenberg, 82.

  Almost seven thousand more Argentines went missing: Lubin and Sprung, “Largest Ransoms.”

  “Who is a disappeared person?”: “Pregunta a Videla sobre los desaparecidos,” uploaded to YouTube by CADALTV on April 25, 2013, 5:24, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A1UCjKOjuc. Videla’s answer: “Es un incognito. Es un desaparecido. No tiene identidad. No está ni muerto, ni vivo. Está desaparecido.”

  (supported by Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela): “Perú: Socio de Condor,” John Dinges online, accessed February 2, 2019, http://johndinges.com/condor/documents/Peru%20and%20Condor.htm.

  under the auspices of General Videla: At the time, Videla was the senior commander of the Argentine army. He rose to the presidency in March 1976.

  methods they might use against “subversives”: “Lifting of Pinochet’s Immunity Renews Focus on Operation Condor,” George Washington University National Security Archive (legacy online site), last modified June 10, 2004, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB125. Two excellent sources are John Dinges’s The Condor Years (New York: Free Press, 2005) and Peter Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File (New York: Free Press, 2003).