by Andrés Barba
In this nighttime video, you can see the boy leaning out the window gradually stop feeling afraid. A sequence of facial expressions confirms this, and then a silly face that seems to be a smile, as though the group of kids has hit upon something both amusing and convincing. The boy at the window disappears and returns a few minutes later with several cans, but the conversation doesn’t end here. He leans over and touches their hair, first one and then another, who is taller than the others and turns out to be a girl. A beautiful girl with a tangle of stringy hair, a miniature lion. I’ve likely watched this footage more than twenty times and in very different situations, but only recently did it strike me how few words are exchanged. How little the children speak. A silent seduction. I wish my wife were alive so that I could ask her why something as simple as this rattles me so.
Until the tenth of March, the city of San Cristóbal limited itself, with respect to the disappearances, to the same reaction it had always shown when cornered: suffer in silence until the problem fades away. But the opposite happened. On March 10, the front page of El Imparcial included a call to arms by Pablo Flores—father of one of the disappeared children—in which he urged the entire city to convene in Plaza Casado at eight o’clock that night. The summons (which, being a columnist at the paper, he’d managed to publish in the metro news section) attempted to persuade the populace to take up the fight, “given the unforgivable negligence on the part of the police and their inability to find our children.” Pablo Flores’s call had the electric charge of a manifesto. It began with a direct, second-person appeal to all San Cristóbal residents: “Look at your son, at your daughter . . .” Then he named that which had been supremely unnamable: “Ever since the Dakota Supermarket attack, people in this city are afraid even to say the word ‘child.’ ” Flores got to the heart of the matter like an expert: “With every minute that goes by, every second, it becomes a little bit harder to find my son.” He signed off with an aggrieved plea: “Help me.”
Even now it’s hard to know exactly what Pablo Flores expected when he issued that open call to meet in Plaza Casado. Most likely (as with Antonio Lara when he’d grabbed me by the collar at the riverwalk a week earlier) it was the simple desperation of an anguished father, but Flores far exceeded the typical profile of a rabble-rouser. An economist by training, forty-three years old and recently widowed, he had returned to San Cristóbal after working in the capital for a decade and was cut from a familiar cloth, that of the highly qualified professional. Clearly, things had not gone well. A few months after his return, a sudden heart attack had ended his wife’s life, and a year later, when he was beginning to get over her death, his son had disappeared without the slightest trace.
The same day that the public notice appeared in El Imparcial—and on seeing how close the situation was to spinning out of control—Mayor Juan Manuel Sosa convened a crisis cabinet and proposed banning the demonstration, at which “anything could happen.” The mayor was afraid—and rightly so—of becoming not only the man politically responsible for everything that had happened since the Dakota attack but also the perfect target for people’s rage. Put in perspective, the meeting could have served as a master class in provincial politics: not only was there a populist mayor accustomed to acting like a cacique, but also an entourage of handpicked officials set against a backdrop of the people’s unsustainable rage.
Juan Manuel Sosa’s chief defect, like that of most provincial politicians, was not malevolence but lack of imagination. To a man like him, Pablo Flores was the quintessential antagonist: still young, talented and class-conscious. Not only was the man a natural enemy, he was also keeping a steady eye on the mayor and threatening him with a deadly stone: the negligence with which he’d handled the entire children’s crisis. Someone suggested that, far from banning the Plaza Casado demonstration, the mayor should participate in an institutional capacity, so as not to be identified as the “official enemy.” The situation was so desperate and the parents so anxious to find their children that any political danger posed by the situation would be defused the moment the people saw clear signs and expressions of apology.
And, against all predictions, at eight o’clock that night, facing a rabid crowd, Sosa climbed up to the podium at which those angling to defenestrate him were scheduled to speak. I could never have imagined the outcome. What happened, I suppose, was that the politician in him came out. He may truly have believed it could all be fixed by a couple of bear hugs and some photos of him kissing kids, but nobody thought to give him a hug and there were no kids there to kiss. The whistling and booing were so loud that his smile froze the moment he got to the stage. One person made as if to hurl a bottle, and for a second you could see the terror on his face, but he quickly regained composure. After all, of the more than four hundred people who attended, thirty were plainclothes police officers forming a human shield to keep him from being lynched.
I stood watching from the back of the plaza. The crowd seemed to be swept up in a kind of energy that incited them, which is why it seems almost miraculous that violence didn’t break out sooner than it did. The mayor’s speech was so preposterous that it enraged people still further; far from averring that the city’s police were already looking for the children, he exculpated himself in pathetic fashion and assured everyone that from that moment on he personally would see to the matter (thus giving the opposite impression—that until that moment he had not done so).
It was at this point that Pablo Flores climbed onstage and shouted, “We have to find our children!” and a roar erupted in Plaza Casado that still shakes me to recall. Considering the peaceful if not dumbstruck nature of most of the individuals there, it seems impossible that their reaction was so sudden. In the footage recorded by Valeria Danas, the sequence is interrupted shortly after that roar of approval, but in real life it went on for five long minutes. Five minutes of applause and shouting. It was as though the duration changed the very nature of the uproar: it began as approval, then who knows what it was. Threat. Rage. The mayor exited the stage quickly. I thought we were in danger. All of us, everyone there—in danger. Pablo Flores himself looked semi-hysterical, his eyes red with desperation and no doubt lack of sleep after three days of fruitless searching. Nothing is more dangerous than the insanity of inherently sane men. Unlike the naturally violent man, the sane man’s violence has a radical, helpless character. Had anyone put Pablo Flores’s son before him at that instant, he may not have recognized him, distress had so clouded his vision.
There was little else he could say. At one corner of the plaza—the one closest to the stage—a fight broke out. The sound on the mike went out. For a few moments it seemed as if things were going to die down, and then out of nowhere the fight turned into a pitched battle. More than thirty people were suddenly involved in a brawl surely provoked by the undercover officers protecting the mayor. The police detail waiting at the edge of the plaza, prepared for any possible altercation, intervened immediately and exacerbated the situation irreversibly.
Fifteen meters from where I stood, I saw Antonio Lara’s easily recognizable neck and tried to approach, but soon lost sight of him. I got out of there as best I could and headed for city hall. Half an hour later I learned that the fight had resulted in twelve injured, none critically, and three arrests, including that of Pablo Flores. I also learned something else: during the fracas that night, three more children had disappeared—two boys and a girl—all of them taking advantage of the commotion in Plaza Casado.
Love and fear have one thing in common: they are both states in which we allow ourselves to be fooled and guided, we entrust another person to control our beliefs and, what’s more, our destiny. I’ve often wondered how the crisis of the thirty-two would have been handled if it had taken place just ten or fifteen years later. The chasm between January 1995 and January 2005 (or 2010) would be irreconcilable. Truth, the superficial spectacle of truth, social media and a few cell phones that can turn a ninety-year-old woman into a reporter, no
ne of this existed in the not-too-distant—and yet astonishingly faraway—year of 1995. The mere meaning of the phrase “This is real” has changed more in the past two decades than in the past two centuries, and the Eré riverwalk on which San Cristóbalites now stroll and snap photos of themselves at dusk is both the same place and an utterly different one. It’s been changed by something more mysterious than the passage of time: the suspension of our belief. Did all of those things really happen? Young people hear the story as if it were some mythical fable, and we—those who saw it unfold with our own eyes—don’t seem much more convinced. The pictures, ultimately, don’t serve for much after all. Having seen the corpses of the thirty-two laid out along the riverwalk has not added a great deal.
I now know that on the night of the demonstration in Plaza Casado part of me stopped being the person I’d been all my life. I returned to city hall as slowly as possible, my body still shaken, trying to devise a plan. A strange determination came over me, and when I arrived I went straight to Juan Manuel Sosa’s office. He was in a meeting with Amadeo Roque and kept me waiting for over fifteen minutes. As I sat in the little vestibule outside his office, my determination took shape, in a detached sort of way.
They called me in. The secretary closed the door. The air in the room was charged. This was the first time I’d been alone with Juan Manuel Sosa in his office. It was as though I could perceive his distress and that feeling of imminence people always give off when they’re afraid. Only then did I realize that he was furious at his Plaza Casado humiliation. For a reason I can no longer recall he was convinced that I had been one of the ones to promote the idea of his appearance before the crowd. He asked me who I thought I was. For a moment it looked as if he was going to get up and lunge at me, but instead he simply gripped the armrests of his chair in an oddly delicate way. More incongruous still was my own reaction: I asked coldly what on earth he’d thought was going to happen. I told him that he had no friends and that nobody at city hall spoke plainly to him. Even as I spoke those words, I wondered what was leading me to such suicidal action, a question that remains a mystery to me. I realized that many of the things I was about to do were reproachable and even actionable, but congratulated myself for having come up with a quick solution beneficial to all: it avoided a popular uprising and put us in a good position to end the crisis.
I told him my plan: manipulate the press, supplying them with an official version of events to reduce the possibility of an uprising the following day, and get Pablo Flores out of lockup and send a search party into the jungle at dawn, a search party comprised of absolutely every police reserve in the city. We had to find the children. Immediately. It would be enough—I told him—to find one. Children are not adults, I said, “children will talk, you simply have to know how to make them.”
The mayor asked me what I meant.
I said I didn’t think it was necessary to explain.
There came a silence and again he stroked the armrests of his chair. Night had fallen, and we sat in the darkness of that room like two bats. He turned on a light and asked me my name. It was then that I realized that until this point I’d been speaking to someone totally divorced from the most basic understanding of reality. He hadn’t recognized me but was staring at me the way a drunkard stares at the wife he despises—with a twisted, belligerent sneer. He demanded that I spell out my plan, and I did so. You could almost hear his crude but efficient brain begin to work.
“If I go down, you go down,” he said finally, and when I didn’t respond right away, added, “If I go down, you all go down.”
I tried to concentrate on his face, shocked to have so imprudently tied my fate to this political corpse.
“So it seems,” I replied.
“If I go down, you all go down.”
In certain situations, what one is supposed to feel is so obvious that not to feel it seems unreal. The reasons for this don’t dull the pain, but they do explain it; the urgency of what’s real fades and there appears a halo of fictionality, as though someone else has made the decision on our behalf. I see the image of myself there before the mayor, and it’s as if it were some other person, external and foreign. I remember what I looked like at the time, but the feeling that led me to speak those words (with all of their implicit violence) is intact; it looks like me, but there is something perverse and distorted inside it, as though suddenly I went to blink, and my eyelids had been turned inside out.
Other times I’m more reasonable—more indulgent, perhaps—and think that the whole performance was akin to a very common occurrence: a boy testing his father over the course of several days until finally the father loses patience. There comes the moment of blind rage when he slams a hand down on the table and rises to punish his son, the second prior to physical violence when it is only mental violence. Is something not at stake in that moment? And the expression on the child’s face as he turns toward his father and realizes that he’s crossed the line—is it real or still just looming, something yet to happen, something not yet real? The thirty-two had crossed that line, and the city of San Cristóbal had slammed a hand on the table, but between rage and real violence there was still some distance.
It didn’t take much to bribe Manuel Ribero, editor of El Imparcial. All I did was follow the instructions Sosa had given me. I said that I was speaking on the mayor’s behalf and that the following day he was not to publish a single word about the last three children to disappear or the fight that had broken out in Plaza Casado if he wanted the city to keep the contract that enabled the paper to make its crippling loan payments. There came a sad and ominous silence that led me to suspect this was not the first time a comparable scene had played out, albeit with different actors. Again my composure surprised me.
“We don’t want a popular revolt on our hands,” I continued. “We have to focus on the search for the children and must not compromise their safety.”
Safety, that magic word, an invocation capable of suspending the most basic logic. Manuel Ribero took some time in responding. He told me he would agree not to print anything about the most recent disappearances but that it was impossible not to publish what had happened in the plaza: there were too many witnesses, and he already had a staff writer assigned to the piece. I told him to turn the piece into a letter to the editor, that the paper’s official position was to be that the event at Plaza Casado had transpired with utmost normalcy, that I myself would write the piece and send it to him in an hour.
It’s surprising how quickly and efficiently people buckle when confronted with abusive behavior in crisis situations. This was the first (and last) time I had bribed anyone in my life. I’d anticipated feeling Manuel Ribero’s resistance as well as my own disgust, and although both of these did occur, the particular urgency of the situation, what led him to accept and me to bribe, was manifestly outside the expected framework. At no point did I think we’d both feel the same unanticipated and almost simultaneous fear—as though the bribing of one and the humiliation of the other constituted some sort of common ground—and certainly not that this fear would unite us in such an odd way, as if an involuntary response were protecting us both. A private act.
I asked him if he had children. He told me three.
“There is nothing pleasant about this,” he said.
“But it won’t go on much longer,” I replied.
“It will go on as long as people like you and me keeping doing things like this.”
That was a discreet lesson. One that took me some time to understand, because the urgency of that night would never have let me see that what he said was no personal attack; I took it as such and responded with arrogance. He said nothing more, simply hung up the phone and has not spoken to me since. Twenty years have gone by since that night, and each time I’ve run into him and tried to approach, he has very clearly turned his back. Had he let me speak on any of those occasions for even half a minute, he’d have known that all I wanted was to thank him for that remark.
Before going home, I stopped in to see Amadeo Roque, the chief of police, who was in his office meeting with his team to plan the route for the dawn sweep. Contrary to what many believe, Roque was basically a good guy. Irritating and thin-skinned, to be sure, but ultimately a good guy. His dour face and incipient hair loss were poorly suited to his wide, almost feminine hips, but he’d learned to make up for it by always moving briskly. With him were four other people, bent over a large map of the outskirts of town. Roque was speaking somewhat louder than usual, and his team looked slightly cowed. To me it seemed that the entire affair had overwhelmed him to an anxiety-producing degree; it was as though the unpredictability of what might happen had caused a short circuit in the strict logic he used to process his thoughts. It wasn’t just that he’d had his knuckles rapped more than a dozen times by the mayor, or that his job was on the line; this was deeper, more fundamental—something he was having a hard time relating to, something that was making him rashly overreact to trivial stimuli.
