Rebel Mother

by Peter Andreas

  I pulled away from her, tears rolling down my cheeks. “I guess you’ll now have to find the revolution all on your own,” I said to her with a smile. But behind the smile, I was overcome with the most devastating feeling of grief and loss that I had ever experienced. Throughout all the moving around, family crises, and political upheavals over the years, my mother and I had stuck by each other—so much so that I had colluded in her kidnapping of me, fleeing the country, and hiding for years. She was not always the most nurturing and protective mother, in the traditional sense, but she was still my most dependable life companion. I was suddenly terrifyingly aware that I was on my own. The mourning began the instant I walked off that porch.

  As we drove away, I looked at my mother out the back window. We waved until we couldn’t see each other anymore—just like we had in my first memory, when out the back window of my father’s car I had waved to my mother until she couldn’t keep up and eventually disappeared into the distance.

  EPILOGUE

  Defection

  THOUGH I COULDN’T have known it at the time, that day I left for college marked the end of my lifelong allegiance with my mother. She would live for another twenty-one years, past her seventy-first birthday, but much of the rest of her life we would spend struggling to understand and accept each other.

  At first, during my time at Tufts, it looked like we would maintain that bridge, that closeness we’d always felt. I did my work under the large, colorful world map she’d mailed me, which hung above my desk. We had long phone conversations about everything from the syllabus for my Intro to International Relations class (my mother was concerned that Edward Hallett Carr, my favorite author on the reading list, “doesn’t show a very profound understanding of class struggle”) to my frustrations with my rowdy, all-male freshman dorm mates.

  I had felt instantly out of place at Tufts despite—or because of—all my initial expectations. I transferred to Swarthmore my sophomore year. As soon as I got off the train at the bottom of the Swarthmore campus, I knew I’d made the right decision. I hadn’t consulted any of my parents, but none of them seemed to mind: my father and Rosalind considered peace-loving Quakers the next best thing to Mennonites, and my mother must have been pleased about the school’s political activist history—in the 1960s Swarthmore was known as the “Kremlin on the Crum,” though that reputation had certainly faded by the 1980s.

  It was at Swarthmore that I discovered I enjoyed studying politics, especially international politics, and thought maybe I’d even like to be a professor like my mother. But that’s where the commonalities ended: I had little interest in using my role to promote radical political activism. I barely participated in any activism at all, beyond spending one winter break in Sandinista Nicaragua and listening to a long fiery speech by Fidel Castro in Managua, which I then described in proud detail to my mother. Despite my upbringing, after leaving home I attended only one demonstration—a pro-choice march in Washington in the late 1980s, carrying a sign that read GEORGE BUSH’S MOTHER DIDN’T HAVE A CHOICE! (I was trying to impress a girl.)

  The fact was that, as a lot of my college classmates were going through their political awakenings, I was already burned out on activism. Raised by a rebel mother, childhood rebellion meant not becoming too much of a rebel. I had politically overdosed on a childhood full of marches and heated, late-night arguments about Lenin and the “correct political line”; college was my detox. While politics to my mother meant high-intensity ideological combat, at Swarthmore it was more about asking probing questions than having all the answers. And the more questions I asked, the more I began to question my mother’s politics.

  Right after graduation I moved to Washington, D.C., and shamelessly used my mother’s personal contacts to get internships in the policy world. First I served as a part-time research assistant for Richard Feinberg, one of my mother’s old lovers from Berkeley, now an economist and Washington insider who worked at an international development think tank. He chuckled when I contacted him and immediately offered to hire me for the summer. My mother felt uneasy about this. She wrote in her diary: “I worry that Peter is dazzled by Feinberg (a defender of capitalism with a little morality thrown in to keep the masses in line).” I also lined up a part-time internship at National Public Radio with John Dinges, the foreign desk editor, who my mother and I had lived with for a few months in Santiago when he was in the early years of his career as a journalist.

  To my mother, the mere fact that I was “in Washington” meant that I was failing to fight the system. I tried to tell myself that I was fighting it from the inside, but the truth was, she was right. The more fluent I became in muted “policy speak,” the less I spoke my mother’s language. In the D.C. world, it was all about “U.S. interests” and “policy choices” and “improving diplomatic relations” and “strengthening ties” and “enhancing cooperation”; it was not about promoting revolution, exposing U.S. imperialism, and subverting capitalism. The long phone chats we had enjoyed in college now became less frequent and more tense. Much to my mother’s dismay, I also had no interest in hearing about her latest love affairs. “Peter,” she noted sadly, “is baffled by my promiscuity.” We were losing patience with each other: “I feel like being with Peter, but if he were here he’d be insufferable.”

  It didn’t help that the intellectual community within which I was trying to prove myself couldn’t speak my mother’s language either, and vice versa. I winced at dinner parties at the inevitable exclamations of “That’s your mother?” My mother had published her controversial book sympathetic to Sendero Luminoso in 1986, When Women Rebel: The Rise of Popular Feminism in Peru. Part of the book was about why the radical Maoist group was so attractive to rural women in Peru, including having a striking number of women as its top commanders. In Washington, to sound even remotely “pro Sendero” was like saying you supported the Khmer Rouge. As a kid just out of college trying to be taken seriously in Washington policy circles, I did my best to defend my mother when people asked, but more and more I just changed the subject.

  At first I tried to argue with my mother, pleading for her to tone down her message and to distance herself from Sendero for the sake of her own credibility, but she resented it when she felt I was “preaching” at her about her extremism. I tried to get her to read the latest Americas Watch human rights report about Peru, which condemned atrocities committed by both Sendero and the government, but she scoffed that Americas Watch wasn’t a real defender of human rights because “they do not defend the right to revolution.”

  It got harder to have long, honest phone conversations together the way we used to, and I didn’t see her in person much, either, though we did rendezvous in Peru in early 1988. My girlfriend, Robyn, came with me on a four-month trip across Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. I had long wanted to revisit some of the places I had lived as a kid. I had not been back to South America since I was eleven, more than a decade earlier. We connected with my mother for a few weeks in Cuzco, the old Inca capital, where she was taking Quechua lessons, the native language of Peru’s indigenous population. My mother went with us to visit Machu Picchu and hike the last part of the Inca Trail, tourist activities she had never done with me when we lived in Peru.

  But she hadn’t changed most of her habits: when she insisted that we squeeze into the crowded public bus in Cuzco like the locals, by the time we got to our hotel my wallet had been stolen right out of my front pocket. She laughed at my anger. “Oh well, maybe the problem is you’re too much of a soft gringo now. When you were living here you would never have allowed your wallet to be stolen so easily. Maybe this is a good lesson for you, you know?”

  With my mother at Machu Picchu, January 1988

  I just gritted my teeth and rolled my eyes. Robyn thought I was overreacting. She liked my mother.

  In Lima, Robyn and I visited Comas and Villa El Salvador, which had developed and grown dramatically. Familiar as they were, I could never imagine living there again. We also t
ook the train from Lima over the Andes to the Mantaro Valley, the same train that had derailed the first time I took it with my mother back in December of 1973, some fourteen years earlier. In Jauja, we found the family that my mother and I had stayed with shortly after we arrived in Peru. They still lived on Junin Street, not far from the main plaza. Angelica remembered when I was an eight-year-old street kid following her to weekend movies and helping her pass secret notes to her boyfriend.

  Robyn and I found Raul in Huancayo, where he was running the little hole-in-the-wall downtown restaurant he had opened after getting out of prison. My mother had told me how to find him, since they had always kept in touch. She said Raul was now known in Huancayo—either affectionately or disdainfully—as El Loco (the Crazy One). We sat at a table near the door, where I quietly sipped my soup, watching Raul intently and wondering if he’d recognize me on his own. We must have stuck out, since it was not the type of place that attracted foreigners. Raul hurried around the restaurant with authority, barking at his employees; it seemed like he enjoyed being the boss. I motioned for him to come over to our table.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  Raul looked at me, his expression blank.

  “It’s me, Peter, Carol’s son,” I said, getting up from the table and extending my hand.

  Raul’s eyes grew wide behind the cracks in his glasses and his jaw dropped. He flashed a huge smile and gave me one of his old familiar backslapping bear hugs. He sat down with us, and couldn’t stop beaming and smiling, hands folded across his potbelly, still not quite believing that I was actually sitting there. He ordered beers for the table and lit a cigarette. He saw my surprise; I had never seen him smoke or drink before.

  Raul wouldn’t let us pay for our meal, and he insisted we visit the next day to meet his young daughter, Andrea, and her mother, who was a revolutionary herself. Raul had sworn off radical politics, so he teased and laughed at his girlfriend when she proudly brought out the red-colored homemade bombs with string fuses that she had made as a member of Peru’s MRTA guerrilla group, a Cuba-inspired Marxist insurgency. In many ways she was the opposite of my mother: she talked very little but put her life much more at risk.

  “Silly woman,” Raul teased her, “she still thinks there will be a revolution.”

  She also showed us the red bandana that she used to disguise her face, like other MRTA guerrillas. It was an uncomfortable moment for me, being handed homemade bombs to admire, but I was also impressed that she trusted us enough to show us. I wondered how she felt about her daughter being named after my mother, and I also wondered, perhaps cynically, if Raul had chosen the name simply to encourage my mother to keep sending money. After that visit I never saw Raul again.

  Beyond being the last time my mother and I would be in South America together, and a sharpening of so many of my childhood memories, that trip would shape my life in another way, in the form of an encounter with an elderly woman on a bus. As we crossed the border from Peru to Bolivia, a friendly old lady sheepishly asked me to store a bag full of toilet paper under my seat. I didn’t understand until the border guards arrived and began confiscating smuggled toilet paper from the passengers. The toilet paper demand came from the Bolivian cocaine industry, where it was commonly used to dry and filter coca paste, which was then transported to remote jungle laboratories to be refined into powder cocaine. Most of this would eventually end up in the noses of American consumers.

  A few weeks later, Robyn and I caught a ride on a cargo boat traveling down the Amazon River from Iquitos, Peru, to Leticia, Colombia, a bustling jungle town at the convergence of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, which owed much of its existence to smuggling. Some of our fellow passengers were pisadores (coca stompers) with distinctive scars on their feet from exposure to the chemicals used to make coca paste. In Iquitos, late at night before our departure, I watched as several dozen drums of chemicals were quietly loaded onto our boat, and then off-loaded in the middle of nowhere before we reached Leticia.

  I would later find out that many of the chemicals used by the Andean cocaine industry were actually imported from the United States and ended up on the black market. America’s rapidly escalating “war on drugs” was so focused on stopping the northward flow of cocaine that it had largely overlooked the equally important southbound flow of U.S. chemicals needed to cook the coke.

  This turned into a lifelong interest in studying cross-border smuggling and the politics of policing it. Though the story of the old woman and her toilet paper is the one I’ve always told myself was where this interest came from, it’s possible those roots are deeper, reaching back to the days in which my mother used me to smuggle money and propaganda across borders, or my own kidnapping and clandestine border crossings, or maybe that seventh-grade paper about illegal drugs that my science teacher was so impressed by.

  * * *

  After that trip to South America, I took a series of jobs in the Washington policy world. I worked at a foreign policy journal and a liberal think tank, and helped draft a report on U.S. antidrug initiatives in South America for a congressional committee. I convinced myself that I was doing my part, however small, to challenge the Washington establishment, yet, all that time, in the back of my mind I could hear my mother telling me I’d become the establishment. She chastised me for not critiquing the drug war through the lens of capitalism and imperialism.

  My mother also kept trying to get me to discuss Peru politics and Sendero with her, but I’d had enough. In the spring of 1991, I wrote to tell her that we had too many “philosophical differences,” and that we should “call a moratorium on talking with each other about Peru.” I ended the letter pleading with her not to “join the revolution” in Peru. As had been true since I was a child, I still worried she’d end up getting herself killed for a radical political cause. Long gone were the days of my childhood where I would have blindly followed my mother anywhere. Finding the revolution no longer sounded “fun.” But I still worried about her safety, as I always had.

  Not long after that, it became clear that we should avoid talking about politics altogether. The idea that I no longer shared my mother’s political beliefs was devastating for her, and she took my political rejection as a personal one: “Peter’s defection, which I’ve been trying to deny for years, means I’ve lost a big battle that I should have known could never be won. For him, it’s not defection, it’s who he is, caught irrevocably between two worlds (or 3 or 4 worlds?), and determined above all else not to be a ‘loser.’ Unfortunately, he now has to define me as a ‘loser,’ and that hurts.” My mother felt that I had not only turned my back on her but also on the cause for which she had spent her life fighting. In a late-night diary entry in April 1991, she wrote that she was having trouble sleeping because of “Peter’s betrayal of class struggle.”

  She also assumed that as my bond with her grew less pronounced I was becoming closer to my father. But if she had understood my father better it would have been clear that he had a hard time getting close to anyone. He was as stable as a rock, but just as difficult to penetrate. It often seemed as if Rosalind was the only thing standing between him and an isolated life in the woods. After he retired, it became harder and harder to even get him out of the house.

  I had never doubted that my father cared about his sons: when we were growing up, he had offered each of us comfort and security, even long-distance. And he had kept fighting to get me back all those years, against my stubborn whirlwind of a mother. But there’s no denying how deeply that fight scarred him, in ways that also scarred our relationship. A week before my twenty-sixth birthday, when my girlfriend of two years left me for the suave NPR producer who I had introduced her to at a party on the roof of our Washington apartment building, my father’s only response was “Well, Peter, that’s what you get for shacking up and playing house before getting married. It’s no surprise another man raided your bedroom.” Shocked and hurt, especially given the history of his own marriage to my mother, I tried to e
xplain to him that I’d been looking for more sympathy and support. What I got back was a long, typed letter expressing his lament that I had been raised by my mother and had therefore adopted her “loose morals” and “alternative lifestyle,” in which there is no respect for marriage, family, and commitment. He pointed to the superiority of his own morals, evident in his lasting relationship with Rosalind.

  “Where Are the Students Studying Mao and Lenin?”

  I MOVED TO Ithaca, New York, in the fall of 1992 to enter Cornell’s PhD program in government. I had wanted to be a political science professor ever since Swarthmore. I hoped that getting away from Washington would help ease the political tensions with my mother, but the fact that I had chosen academia as my career path created new heartache because I was not, and would never be, the kind of radical activist academic she had hoped. A few months before I began my graduate studies, my mother wrote in her diary:

  Part of me thinks that when he [Peter] studies more theory, becomes a student again, he will become “enlightened,” take a revolutionary point of view, but that’s not logical, because it’s just as likely he will take the “practical” approach to graduate school (i.e. become an opportunist, go with the flow, please his professors, and get published). Exactly where are the students studying Mao and Lenin, for instance? Never mind that they led the most successful struggles against capitalism and imperialism.

  By my second year in grad school, my mother’s worst worries were confirmed. An August 1993 diary entry read: “Peter is not merely misinformed. He is consciously misinformed and I have to accept that he is no revolutionary. I do need to deal with my grief over this.” Another entry a month later: “He [Peter] says I’m simply grounded in faith and conviction, incapable of carrying on rational discourse. I said I would like to read the papers he’s writing, but I’m not sure he will send them to me.”