by B. TRAVEN
B. Traven
General from the Jungle
Translated by Desmond Vesey
American Century Series
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1
“Tierra y Libertad!” With this war cry an army of Indians marched out of the jungles in the south of the Republic, in order to overthrow the dictator and secure land and freedom for themselves.
Simple and short though this slogan was, it rang like a paean of triumph to the marching men.
Whatever, in their miserable oppression and their pitiful ignorance, they sensed of poetry, of a desire for beauty, of love for mankind and living creatures, of natural faith in some absolute justice that must be found somewhere, as well as deeply felt sorrow for their comrades who had been horribly murdered or bestially tortured to death—all this, and much more that, unknown to them, slumbering within them, found its expression in that single war cry. Even when, one united mass, impelled by one and the same urge, they raised their clenched fists in unison as if exhorting God not to forget them, and with one voice yelled out their solemn slogan to the universe until it echoed like a mighty wave thundering against the rocks, nevertheless every man in that throng sensed clearly his own individual cry mingling with the others, for in the depths of his being he felt it as his very own, his deeply personal prayer.
Folk songs, jingles, political and patriotic phrases immediately lose their sense and meaning the moment they are soberly considered and logically thought out. And it could well be that even this war cry of the Indians, if examined in cold blood, would evaporate into meaningless words.
When their sufferings, their tortures, their deprivations under their masters in the jungles—the mahogany concessionaires and their underlings—grew so intolerable that they and, extraordinarily enough, almost all the others working at that time in the remotest regions of the tropical forests simultaneously came to the realization that it was better and more worthy of their human dignity to perish in a revolution than to live longer under such humiliations and torments, then they took action. They took action firmly and decisively in order to make an end at last—either an end to their own lives, or an end to the lives of their tyrants.
In spite of their sufferings and humiliations, they nevertheless had within themselves a glimmering of an understanding as to their bitter situation. Seeing the birds of the jungle, and even the millions of insects which all, in freedom and joy of living, came and went at will, they never lost the sense of a longing for freedom.
Timid, fainthearted, uncertain at first, then strong and single-minded, they had at last decided on rebellion.
Once begun, things developed far faster than they had ever believed possible.
The owners, managers, and overseers in the monterías,* who as a result of their power and their brutality were more feared than Almighty God Himself, shrank in the first two hours of the insurrection, as soon as they saw that every vestige of their authority had collapsed, into helpless, pitiful puppets who suddenly seemed to have forgotten how to speak, how to move, and how to take with dignity their long-earned, well-merited deserts.
In a short fight, all who did not side with the rebelling Indians were destroyed.
By this means the revolutionaries were able to secure some weapons. Not many. About fifty revolvers, not all in good order. About twelve sporting rifles, some of them undependable and hopelessly rusted from the humid-hot climate of the jungle. In addition there were a few light shotguns and ten ancient Spanish muzzle loaders. The plunder in ammunition, not much in itself, was as varied in caliber as were the weapons themselves.
Nonetheless, all the muchachos were excellently armed with machetes, bush knives, axes, and hatchets. With these weapons, with these machetes and axes with which they had daily been compelled to fight the jungles, they were better able to fend for themselves than with automatic rifles.
Of course, in contrast to the modernly equipped federal troops and forces of the Rurales, it was absurd to speak of the revolutionary mahogany workers of the jungle as being armed. In the face of the regular troops, their courage, their hatred, their frenzied rage against their oppressors must make up for what they lacked in weapons. Each one of them knew that. And each one of them considered this hatred and rage to be of greater worth to them in battle than a superfluity of ammunition.
Under the dictatorship, no one, apart from the dictator, El Caudillo, was more feared and also more hated than the Rurales.
The Rurales were a mounted police force, the special weapon of the dictator, who at times was none too sure of the officers of the Federal Army. The Rurales, particularly feared by mutinying and striking workers, were an elite troop of men and youths, excellently equipped, superbly drilled, well looked after and well paid. Hundreds of young men had been specially enrolled in the corps on account of their sadistic instincts. For their activities and actions, arrests and executions, their officers were responsible to no judge, only to El Caudillo himself. They were the instrument of terror, by which El Caudillo mercilessly and ruthlessly repressed the slightest resistance or criticism of his authority. When, as happened in several of the textile workers’ strikes, the officers of the army refused to undertake—after the suppression of the strike—a bestial slaughter of the now humbled and conquered men and women workers, as ordered by El Caudillo, a troop of Rurales was marched at top speed to the region. And there what the army officers had refused to do the Rurales carried out with such brutality that in the general massacre no one was spared who had the misfortune to find himself in that quarter of the workers’ town which had been cordoned off by the Rurales. Workers and non-workers, women, children, old people, the sick—no distinction was made between them. And that happened, not during a strike, but days, often weeks, after the strike had ended, when the workers had returned to the factories and the whole district was entirely quiet. It was the law of retribution and vengeance which the dictator invoked as a warning to all those who disagreed with him as to the benefits of the glorious, golden age which he, El Caudillo, had brought to his people.
An encounter with half a battalion of these Rurales while on the march must, according to the honest judgment of any sensible man, mean the certain defeat of the rabble of rebellious jungle workers, and with their annihilation the swift end of the revolution in the jungle regions.
Even though the war cry of the muchachos who had taken upon themselves to overthrow the dictator seemed clear and simple when it was yelled out with full enthusiasm, all of them would have fallen silent had anyone asked them what they really understood by the “Land” and “Liberty” for which they had determined to fight.
Every single one of them bore within himself a different, entirely individual conception of Tierra y Libertad; because to each of them “Land” and “Liberty” meant something different, according to his desires, sorrows, circumstances, and hopes.
Many, who had been sold as contract workers in t
he monterías—because of their own debts, or for their fathers’ debts, or for non-payment of police fines, or as surety for relatives who had been unable to pay and had died—many of these owned in their native villages a tiny plot of land they loved and would exchange for no other piece of conquered land, even had it been better and richer. For these people the battle cry had apparently no meaning because they already possessed land. But the freedom to exploit it and to enjoy the fruits of their labor in peace and quiet was denied them.
And they were denied freedom from the thousands of corrupt officials of all kinds, great and small, who flourished under the dictatorship in order to guard it and maintain it, and who had to be fattened up so as not to be dangerous to El Caudillo. If it happened that the activities of these officials stank too grossly, they were promptly excused for having acted thus out of overzealousness in the interest of the welfare of the State and in devotion to their beloved El Caudillo.
Whoever was relieved of these parasites could say with justice that he now knew what freedom meant.
For others, Tierra y Libertad meant unrestricted freedom to be able to return to their parents, to their wives, their children, their betrothed, their friends and relations, their native villages.
Others again saw in Tierra y Libertad the simple right to be allowed to work where they pleased and for whoever treated them well and for a wage which they considered fair.
To the majority of these Indian mahogany workers, who were ninety percent agriculturalists, the conception of Libertad was nothing more than the clear, simple wish to be left in peace from everything connected with government, State welfare, increased production, economic development, capture of markets, obedience, duties without rights, docile submission to the national destiny, and whatever other such senseless and idiotic virtues as were pumped into them by the dictatorship in order to bewilder the brains of the common people and prevent them from looking where the roots of all evil flourished.
When they shouted for Libertad, the muchachos hoped that after they had won their battle for freedom they would be allowed to lead their lives in their own ways, untroubled by men in whom they could put no trust because they could not understand their needs and sorrows and took no pains to try to understand them, but simply came again and again with forms that had to be filled in for money to be paid. The liberated wanted to be allowed to enjoy alone the results of their heavy labors; and they had no desire to be robbed from a hundred directions of all or a considerable proportion of these products of their labors, for purposes which they could not understand and did not appreciate and which solely served to provide El Caudillo with further opportunities and means to bolster the supremacy of his golden age.
But however unclear in detail the conceptions of land and freedom might be to the rebels, they nevertheless felt instinctively and rightly what they wanted. And what they wanted was: no longer to be dominated, no longer to be commanded. Any wish to share in the great wealth and culture of modern civilization—such as the program of the industrial proletariat in civilized nations always demands—was alien to them. They could not have understood such a desire, even had one attempted to explain it to them for days and weeks. They knew nothing of democracy, socialism, organization. And had anyone suggested that they should demand a seat in Parliament or in the nation’s Congress, they would have regarded him who suggested this as a traitor who only wanted to confuse them, and they would doubtless have replied, “What has Parliament and Congress to do with us? We want to be left in peace, damn you; that’s all we want. And now get out, you swindlers!”
The vile, disgraceful, and cruel treatment which they and all their class had been compelled to suffer throughout the long years of the dictatorship had fundamentally and thoroughly changed the characters of the rebels.
From peace-loving farmers, woodcutters, charcoal burners, potters, hut weavers, basket-makers, leatherworkers, mat weavers, who wanted nothing else in life than to be allowed to work unhindered, to cultivate their land, to raise their cattle, to bring their wares freely to market, to found families, to have children, to celebrate a feast now and then, and once or twice in the year to make a pilgrimage to the great ferias in the state, and then, grown old, to be able to die in peace and quiet surrounded by their good friends and neighbors—from such as these the dictatorship had succeeded in turning them into savage creatures of vengeance, obstinate, eternally mistrustful, quarrelsome, hypocritical, addicted to strong drink. For this reason, and this reason only, these savages thought of nothing else, once the rebellion had begun, than of destroying everything in their path and of mercilessly annihilating all and everyone who wore a uniform or even had a uniform cap on his head, and all those who from position or profession were regarded by them as their tormentors and oppressors.
They had been treated like childish slaves, who might open their mouths only when spoken to. And in the manner of such slaves, whose chains had suddenly broken, they were now behaving.
They had been tortured, beaten, humiliated, struck on the mouth by beasts with human faces. And like beasts they now set forth to ravage the country and to kill everyone who did not belong to their own kind.
When they had one day destroyed and desolated everything that El Caudillo had created from their blood, their sweat, their want, their cares, their tears—the golden age of the Republic—then they would return home, sated with vengeance, back to their houses, villages, settlements, and huts, and from that time on lead a peaceful life.
It was only to be foreseen that the Scribes and Pharisees of all countries would, in their accounts and histories, ascribe such bestialities as were practiced to the savage natures of the perpetrators who had no understanding of the great age in which they lived.
And it was equally to be foreseen that the dethroned and the tyrants and their sycophants here and everywhere upon earth would announce to the listening world, when all was over, that now anyone could see and understand why the dictatorship had been right in treating these savages as they had been treated under the dictatorship, and why dictatorship, an iron and merciless dictatorship, was the only form of government that could rule to their own benefit a people consisting of slaves and having only the mentality of slaves. Down with the demoralizing democracy! Viva the vital and rejuvenating dictatorship!
The rebel horde numbered almost six hundred men. No one had counted them exactly. It would indeed have been difficult to arrive at a precise number.
Every day during the march through the jungle they were joined on the paths by small groups or by escaped individuals who, long before the general insurrection in the monterías had begun, had deserted from the remotest corners of the jungles where they had worked. Even peons, who had fled from their fincas and then remained hidden in areas close to the jungle, took the opportunity of permanently freeing themselves from their debt-slavery and joined up contentedly with the army, happy to have met the revolution about which only vague and unclear rumors had reached those regions.
On the terrible march through the great jungles many were lost. Some were drowned crossing rivers; some sank in swamps and morasses; others were carried off in twenty-four hours by violent fevers; several were bitten by snakes and stung by poisonous insects; and others again were kicked by terrified horses or mules when following narrow mountain tracks, and these fell into the ravines. There were also many who died of wounds that they still bore on their bodies from work or torture and that could not be healed by their comrades. Thus the numbers of the people fluctuated from day to day.
With the troop marched a considerable number of women and girls and probably a dozen or more children, family dependents of the laborers who had been sold into the monterías. These women and children had been unwilling to leave their husbands, fathers, brothers, and nephews, and had gone with them voluntarily into the jungle.
The army was led by a young fellow, twenty-one years old, called Juan Mendez—or, rather, he called himself that, for to all the other muchachos he was simply
“General.”
He had belonged to the little group of workers who had started the rebellion. Since he had had some military training, it was quite natural that to him should be entrusted the supreme command of the army.
By race he was a Huasteca Indian, with an admixture, to judge by his appearance, of some Spanish blood. At the age of sixteen he had joined the army as a volunteer. He progressed rapidly until, at nineteen, he was promoted to sergeant.
He had persuaded his favorite brother, some years younger than himself, also to become a soldier and to join the same battalion. In the course of his duties the younger boy committed some act of negligence of no great importance. In normal circumstances his offense would have been punished with two days’ arrest or a few unpleasant hours of extra guard duty. A friendly disposed lieutenant would have given the boy a sharp dressing-down, and the matter would then have been forgotten. Under the dictatorship, however, superior officers in the Federal Army, and still more in the Rurales, had been gradually exalted to the status of infallible saints who represented God on earth. The inferior soldier vis-a-vis his betters possessed no other right than that of blind obedience and silent acceptance of whatever was demanded of him. So it happened that an officer, who was probably still drunk, punished the boy for his remissness by ducking his head in a pail of water and keeping him under water with his boot until he was drowned. The murderer was not punished, but instead he was commended in the orders of the day for having acted in the interests of discipline, as was his duty—for discipline was the highest sacrament.
The sergeant had not yet been wholly indoctrinated with the ways of the dictatorship, probably because he was more an Indian than an obedient soldier. Therefore he forgot for an hour the godlike nature of the officer and stabbed him to death, without being able to feel the least regret for his deed. This made it necessary for him to desert and to leave the army.
