by John Gibler
Dawn approaches. You admitted from the beginning what you are: a guerrilla fighter. But you said that you had only just joined, that you didn’t know the leaders or the safe house locations or the meeting points.
Who can endure so much?
You have to do something to rest for a bit from all this. You have to enter another terrain of combat. And so you come to the “confession, a story told to delay death.”5 And you scream. You tell them you’ll take them to the room where you live with two other compañeros.
They begin to plan the operation. You think, you hope, that upon witnessing your detention, your compañeros will not have returned to that room.
They help put your clothes on and take you to a car that is then followed by two others. There is no other option. You guide them through the streets of Chilpancingo toward the room. The neighbors are asleep; the streets are deserted. No one sees you.
Your captors go upstairs. No one is in the room. They take the few things they find there, return to the cars, and then take you somewhere. They throw you on the floor and one of them begins to talk to you:
“You have to tell us how it was that the organization survived, how it re-organized, where the guerrillas hid, what capacity they have, who they are, what weapons they possess.
“Today we have an opportunity with you here and you should tell us everything we want to know. You are the experiment. We have enough time—and time is on our side—to find out your identity. Legally we are not even going to acknowledge who detained you. No one will investigate. We are experienced; we have done this for many years. You bring us back a bit to the 1970s. We’re going to do an update with you.
“I’m just letting you know. There is nothing to hide here. With you we’re going to see if the guerrillas have gotten better in the last twenty-two years. Have you all developed something worthwhile, or are you still a bunch of idiots? They are all going to speak: through you they are going to speak. We have the time and we have the means: tear out your fingernails, castration, needles, electric shocks, water torture, beatings, and strangulation. That’s how we’ll begin the game: every two hours for as long as you like. You decide. Here’s the doctor. Starting today it will be us against you. Starting today you will feel the power of the State against you. Against you, because we have you. And the only way to save yourself will be to have us diminish one of your sessions a bit with what you give us. Beyond that there will be no negotiation. What do you say?”
“I don’t say anything. I’m a prisoner.”
“Do you recognize yourself as such?”
“Yes, yes I do.”
“You are one of them?”
“Yes, I’m one of them.”
“Why did you get into this?”
“It’s a personal decision.”
And they repeat all that they want from you: military plans, safe house locations, guerrilla cells that you know, who was with you in the park, where you all were going, what your rank is, how do the guerrillas find and transport arms, where do they store arms, who finances the guerrillas, who writes the communiqués, which writer or politician is behind you all, and where your central command is located.
Perhaps, without being entirely conscious of it, this interminable list has offended you, and you tell them that not even the President of the Republic has that kind of information. That unleashes the fury of the one who spoke to you and those who follow his orders. They kick and beat your entire body and within seconds you are curled on the floor and bleeding. They pick you up and take you again to the rack. They increase the voltage. They take out their anger on your body for a time that is impossible to measure until a voice tells them to stop for a moment. The pain in your bones, the exhaustion, the thirst.
It all repeats: the questions, the half answers, or the evasive or misleading answers, the pain, the destruction of your body and your emotions. Their language is also an instrument designed to break you, to make you surrender. But their questions don’t seduce you. You think: We do not speak the same language, and I don’t mean the grammar, but the origin.
After a session they tie you so that you can neither stand straight up nor sit down. As soon as you slip into sleep they wake you with kicks, punches, or by throwing water in your face. They do as they say: the sessions are every two hours. And the noun “session” burns, and in its embers lie the verbs break, destroy, fall, lose, and hurt.
They tore you from the world and brought you here naked, bound, and blindfolded to where language crumbles on your tongue. The questions are echoes of the electric shocks; they meld with the cord used to strangle you; they join with the hands used to dislocate your shoulder. When you do not speak, your silence is the instant remaining before your bones shatter. When you speak, the words burrow into your thirst; they bite you and scratch against your throat. Yours is a rat-thirst that breaks into your veins and scurries throughout your body.
“Who were the other people with you?”
“They were journalists.”
“We already know that. What we want to know is where were you going to take them for the interview.”
You lie to them and they don’t believe you. All of this that can’t fit into words continues.
The questions. Again and again. Day after day. How to explain the terror of them asking you the same questions for days on end? It destroys you. You feel like you’ve done the most exhausting physical labor. Ten or fifteen people asking you the same questions. This is torture, nothing else. “In the modern technology of pain the question is always a component of pain itself. The question is never there for some pragmatic reason, that is, to elicit the revelation of a piece of information. The interrogation is not something that, once resolved to the torturer’s satisfaction, would signify the end of the other’s subjection to torture . . . [The] moment of interrogation is constitutive of the infliction of pain.”6
They tell you that you are responsible for what they do to you because you won’t tell them what they want to know, for not telling them what you know, for withholding the information they want. Yes, you are withholding everything, but you deny it. You say that you do not have the information they’re after. But they don’t believe you. They destroy you and destroy you again while they tell you it’s your fault. From the very first minutes, during the first days, without being able to fully analyze your situation, inside you, inside the screams at the edges of which something true about who you are stands, your origin, your pride, you made the decision to refuse betrayal as an option. You decide to withhold everything and with your silence declare: This is who I am and this is what I want to be. You make the decision to fight.
They bring you food but you do not touch it, both out of hatred for them and out of a desire to step a bit closer to death. You only drink water because the thirst is truly unbearable.
They find the parking lot receipt in your pants and go for the car. You don’t know this yet, but they have already interrogated and threatened the young man who parked your car and gave you the receipt. He said that he didn’t know anything and then went and sought legal protection from a judge. They ask you about the car, a white Volkswagen. You say that you don’t know anything about it. “Then why do you have the parking lot receipt in your pants pocket?” You lie, saying that your compañeros had given you the slip of paper and asked you to hold onto it without looking at it. They don’t believe you, and the sessions continue every two hours.
If you were to think of your own history of pain, if you were to recall all the weariness, the hunger, the thirst, the worst physical exhaustion, the fevers, nausea, illnesses, burns, strikes, falls, cuts and scrapes, broken or dislocated bones, if you were to imagine that all of those pains already lived were combined and imposed upon your body at once, you would realize that not even that approaches what you feel now. And now it comes again.
You open your blindfolded eyes and look into the open throat of death. The shocks to your chest and the scream. You know that this throat is about to consum
e you. They beat your stomach and pour water up your nose. But first you’ll have to pass through something you can only refer to with the word hell. They hit you in the face and blood fills your mouth. The water, the shocks to your genitals, and the scream. You want to find a way to escape, to buy time, to be able to think. They apply the shocks to your head: the explosion inside your skull. You see surrender take shape in your mind, and it scares you. You feel it inside you like invading bacteria. But death does not come. The plain of hell extends. There is no respite.
Five days pass like this. They say to you: “Five days have gone by and no one is looking for you. Why?” You lie. You tell them that you are an unknown, and they don’t believe you. So one of them says to you: “Look, asshole, you’re already fucked. To put it plainly: we’ve already disappeared you. You are one more that disappears.”
And you feel . . .
“Now that we’ve seen how you are, from now on you will have two permanent guards, both officers with machine guns in hand. You’ll remain blindfolded and with your hands and feet bound and chained to a wall. There is no way you can escape. We have the advantage and we’re doing this to you because you won’t talk. Or because you lie to us. The only thing you’ll say now will be that you surrender and that we’re the best. This is the price you’ll pay for having dared to challenge the State. It’s you against us. You have no chance. Have you decided to fight?
“You’re already done for. The time periods during which we could have taken you to jail have passed. We can’t risk the tarnish to our reputation. And so, from this moment forward, you are ours for the time you have left to live. Which will not be much. Nothing can save you, unless you tell us everything we want to know.”
This word: disappeared. They have so many ways of erasing you, “of trying to make you doubt the truth of your own life.”7 After five days, after every two hours, after only having felt a world of pain with no horizon, it is a word that breaks you, that wounds you inside, right to your identity. It unmakes you.
The human body cannot receive such violence and not scream. And your scream is this: you say you’ll take them to a room in Acapulco where you live with two compañeros. They begin to mobilize in that instant. They tell you to put on your clothes, but you can’t even stand up on your own. They have to help you get dressed. They take you to a vehicle to drive you to Acapulco.
You feel like a coward. The scream that, in the most minimal way, tried to alleviate your pain, now hurts you. You feel ashamed for having told them something true. It is a room in Acapulco and it has been five days since you were abducted. Once the words were said you hope that your compañeros have left the room. They are supposed to do so within 48 hours. You gave them five days. That is a rule: houses are meant to be given to the torturers.
But now, standing before the terrain opened by the word disappeared, in this place of pain and shame, you make a decision: You don’t want to kill me. You make me fight. Let’s fight.
You chose this. You knew that there were risks, but the risks did not dominate you. With that pride, in the good sense, you said: No one will stop me. And this isn’t some act of romanticism. I want this; I’m going to do it; I will achieve it.
What was this? You weren’t after blood, nor were you necessarily looking for war. It was to struggle—luchar—a verb now trivial in many ways, essential in others. For you it was and remains a verb of origin, of survival, and as such, indispensable.
You were born in one of the poorest regions in the country. One supposes that these were the places where our ancestors sought refuge after the defeat of August 13, 1521, in the War of Tenochtitlán. Your name contains your history: Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile. In other towns people asked you: “Why do you have that name, that surname?” And your response was instinctive: “Well, yes, I have this name because I was not conquered. I have not been colonized and thus I have my language, my name, I retain my surname, my tradition.”
You were born on November 10, 1966, in Astacinga, Veracruz, one of eight brothers and sisters living in a one-room wooden house that your parents built by hand. You worked from early childhood and you enjoyed labor, your hands in the earth, taking care of the livestock. It was neither punishment nor exploitation. Your family ate what it produced. Work was always a factor. The first activities you did were what your body would allow, like bringing water from the river or gathering firewood. The first things you have are your hands. You can’t wield work tools like the machete yet. If you see the adults working, your father, your mother, for the same reasons you’ll have to do so as well. First as play, later as a matter of education. And so, you would say, for us the earliest education is this work, from as soon as you can walk. You with your smallest pail going for water. Work is not suffering. Just as everyone eats, everyone has things to do.
During your early childhood you never saw this thing they call modernity. There are no highways, no electricity, nothing like that. No kindergarten. Once you were bigger, about seven or eight, you’d have to walk for an hour to reach the nearest school, or the nearest thing they call a school. You’ll have to walk to do anything. You were raised walking and running barefoot. Your first huaraches would have come around the age of ten. Yes, certain material things were lacking, certain technologies, or medicines. You all did not know what a check-up, a doctor, a pill, or anti-parasite medications were. But no one went hungry in your house. This love of work, this respect for things, for corn, for beans, it forges your values. What you have to do is have principles. All that you should achieve will be the fruit of your efforts, not from seeing where you’ll be given things, where to seek gifts, where to go asking. All this starts making you responsible, proud.
But at school, the teachers would tell you: You must learn to speak Spanish, that is the first step in bettering yourself, in getting ahead. Bettering oneself? What is wrong with us as we are? What is wrong with speaking Náhuatl? Before going to the school you had always spoken your native language, you’d never even heard Spanish.
But you were just a child. And that’s how you went to the sports tournament in San Juan Texhuacán. You were thirteen years old when you saw the children crying. Not one, but several. You and your compañeros approached them and asked them: Why are you crying? Did you all lose, or what happened? The children from Tehuipango told you how just the day before their families had been massacred. That was the first shock. At first you don’t understand. Why would they kill so many people? Then, this was close to your town. The question that assaults you is: What is to be done? In other words: We must avenge them. How? I don’t know. But the idea is there. They must be avenged. What they did to them was unjust. It is not okay.
You still did not know anything about the Army massacre of students on October 2, 1968, or the paramilitary massacre on June 10, 1971, both in Mexico City. You didn’t know anything about what was happening in Guatemala, El Salvador, or Nicaragua. How could you have known if one didn’t have even the slightest idea where those places were located? What you had heard a bit about were the histories and myths about the Guerrero teachers Genaro Vázquez and Lucio Cabañas. That was something that did have an impact. One way or another, one learns of the existence of such groups. And at thirteen years old, upon hearing of that massacre, you first feel the call to seek out Lucio the teacher. You had heard about him for the first time when you were six or seven years old: a government official had taken a photograph of Lucio Cabañas to your town with the ambition of being able to arrest him were he to make an appearance there. But instead of saying we need to find him, the mayor took the photograph, put it in a frame, and hung it behind his little desk.
At the age of eighteen, you made your decision. You said: I want this. And you didn’t base your decision on books or films, the histories of Che or Ho Chi Minh, the images of the piled bodies in Tlatelolco, or the texts or theories of long-dead Germans or Russians. From the age of thirteen you were driven by the idea of looking for Lucio Cabañas, someone with whom you could join
to avenge the crimes that had been committed. Lucio was the refuge that you could seek out without knowing where Guerrero is.
Why struggle? When asked in Spanish in Mexico City, Monterrey, Guadalajara, or Acapulco, this question does not look out upon the same horizon as when asked in Náhuatl in the Zongolica mountains or in Ñu Savi in the Costa Chica. It is never the same question twice. It is always a social question. Profoundly intimate, it always has social veins within its solitude. And though asking it is not the same in 1968, 1988, 1996, or 2014, the differences between moments when the question is posed do not cut the roots of time inside the question. It shares histories even inside its solitude.
Why struggle? The question will never have a definitive answer, a pre-established answer, or a correct answer. It must be faced afresh and in its full dimension every time it is asked. And whosoever confronts the question may have to do so many times over the course of their life. To ask it will always be intimate and social at the same time. This multiple nature of the question invites conversation, which is another way of joining the solitary and the social, assuming that the one who opens the question “why?” knows how to listen.
And so, why? It is difficult to explain, of course, but you would say that we were never going to accept submission just because. Our idea has not been colonized. We’re as decolonized as we’ve always been. We have memory. So it was not some political influence, but rather our tradition of resisting domination, of continuing to rebel. It becomes a characteristic, a tradition, and that is something that perhaps many people do not understand. The State, far from thinking of all this, asks: “Where is the manual you learned from?” “Which school did you go to?” But there are no manuals, no schools, there is only life, nothing more.
Life. Tradition. Omeyocan, toltecáyotl, tlachinollan. Our duality, our philosophy, our blood. We are aware, you would say, of our history. Others came before us. Today we are here, but tomorrow there will be others. We want to live well. But, what does live well mean to us? To live well means to live in harmony with nature. To live well means not contaminating our rivers and oceans, not cutting down our forests. It means eating well and without so many chemicals. To produce our food. Exchange our food. We don’t want palaces and buildings, nor to fill everything with concrete and contaminants. It means to live without looting. We don’t want to live accumulating and hoarding. We don’t want to exploit others. We don’t want to destroy the land, because it is our life. We don’t want to damage it more than they already have. We want to live well; we want to conserve the land because part of the life of that land is us. Our thought is different; it is not the same. In this plan of saving many things, the species itself is saved. And even despite everything they do, they themselves are saved; their lives are safe. That’s why we are doing this. For all these values: for this dignity, for this decency, for this feeling. More than thought, it is feeling. More than political ideology, it is humanism.
