by Marie Arana
They let him know that his condition was serious—serious enough that he would now be transported to the Americo Boavida Hospital in Luanda and processed for release along with a growing rank of Cuban amputees, bomb and knife casualties, burn victims: the gravely wounded, the mentally unstable. Within weeks, Carlos Buergos was spit back into civilian life in Havana. He had just turned twenty-one.
* * *
Cuba was not alone in putting its young in harm’s way as Latin America moved on from its unfulfilled revolutions and entered the mid-twentieth century. By the 1970s, there was plenty of evidence that the brutality that had traumatized the region for five hundred years still persisted in one form or another, eroding the people’s confidence that their countries might ever achieve the justice and equality that revolutions had promised. Just as Carlos was wending his way back to his father’s rooms in Havana, conflagration tore like a fleet wind through all of the Americas. Other countries, inspired by Cuba, had been lured by Communism—their benighted poor imagining that Marxist dreams promised a sainted justice at last—but the United States had different ideas. Whatever political divisions were deviling America, whatever Democratic and Republican presidents took turns at its helm, the majority of its citizens could agree on at least one thing: Communism was the enemy, and it needed to be eradicated wherever it took root. If that meant sacrificing American lives, so be it.
Intent on maintaining its authority in the hemisphere—and fulfilling a doctrine put in place almost two centuries before—the United States government, under John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon alike, pledged to support any force that would combat nascent Communism (or Socialism) and ensure Washington’s preeminence in Latin America The perverse result was that, in protecting North American interests, violence became endemic in almost every country of Latin America. Guatemala, for one, soon found itself in a crucible of state-sponsored terrorism for that very reason. President Carlos Arana Osorio, a vindictive, corrupt former colonel boosted by hefty military support from the United States, imposed a state of siege, deploying death squads that would eventually arrest, torture, disappear, and execute nearly fifty thousand Guatemalans he considered political undesirables.
In Nicaragua, which at that time was the United States’ major beef supplier, all-out insurgency was under way. Even as Carlos was trying to reenter civil life in Havana, martial law was declared in Nicaragua, and the entire Nicaraguan army—with Washington’s help—began to lock down the country, razing whole villages as it went. Everywhere in these volatile countries, it seemed, as far as the United States was concerned, any whiff of Soviet or Cuban influence needed to be stamped out, supplanted with military control.
In Chile, which had just elected the openly Socialist president Salvador Allende, the disaffected right-wing generals chafed, itching to take back the reins. The president’s first order of business had been to host his good friend Fidel Castro in a lavish and elaborate state visit during which Castro presented Allende with his own Kalashnikov rifle, newly engraved with Allende’s name. “A Salvador Allende, de su compañero de armas, Fidel Castro,” read the shining plaque on the butt end of the rifle: To Allende from his brother in arms. Nothing could have been more roiling to the right-wing Chilean generals than to have Castro bequeath the Cuban revolution’s preeminent weapon to the Chilean president. Not long after, with the full blessings of the Central Intelligence Agency, President Nixon, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the generals began planning a violent coup to take back the country. The deputy director of the CIA wrote in a secret memo: “It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown. . . . It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [US government] and American hand be well hidden.” Nixon had already launched an economic war against Chile, trying to squeeze it into submission by choking off its vital supply line. “Make the economy scream!” Nixon instructed the CIA.
Shortly thereafter, in September 1973, the Chilean air force swept over the capital in a concerted air attack, strafed the presidential palace, and left President Allende dead by his own hand. The weapon he had used to kill himself was Castro’s Kalashnikov. The coup had been surgical, chillingly effective, and it swept into power Augusto Pinochet, Allende’s most trusted general. Never before in this highly democratic country had the military wielded such authority. Indeed, when a right-wing newspaper had suggested the army stage a coup to drive out the Socialists, Pinochet had feigned outrage and threatened to sue the editors, saying, “Such things are not done here.” But such a thing had indeed been done, and Pinochet’s power was absolute. Perceived enemies of the new state were soon rounded up and tortured or killed. The favored technique, so as not to waste bullets, was to force victims to lie on the ground while torturers drove trucks over them, crushing their heads. For the next seventeen years, Pinochet ruled with an iron hand, arresting 130,000 dissidents within the course of two years, exterminating thousands, and driving a quarter million Chileans into exile.
The governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, and Peru all fell like houses of cards in the same period between 1966 and 1973, overthrown in bloody military coups. What was at stake—what had always been at stake in Latin America—was the fundamental instability of a region defined five hundred years before by Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors: the essential exploitation at its core, the racial divisions, the extreme poverty and degradation of the vast majority, the entitlement and wealth of the very few, the corrosive culture of corruption.
In Mexico, the generation that grew up with Carlos erupted in protest in Mexico City in 1968, voicing a spirited objection to the vast sums of money being spent on the 1968 Summer Olympics, as opposed to addressing the very real necessities of the people. The government response was merciless, and the repression lasted for fourteen years. Three separate Mexican administrations from the late 1960s until 1982—in an ever-mounting spiral of violence—killed, tortured, or disappeared dissidents, political rebels, and anyone else they suspected might have had a hand in sowing discontent. They rounded up villagers, burned down houses, punished suspects with inhuman cruelty. Hundreds of students and political sympathizers were executed on the spot in what became known as “the Tlatelolco massacre,” when soldiers and police fired into a plaza filled with ten thousand protesters. Almost a thousand were subsequently disappeared; two thousand more were tortured. The bad blood would bubble up many years later in surprising ways.
In Colombia, which had emerged from a decade of bitter civil war, the sixties and seventies were a jittery, high-wire crossing. La Violencia, which had dominated Colombia for much of the 1950s, had produced a staggering count of two hundred thousand dead in the murderous rage between the conservative rich and the liberal poor, and the wounds had hardly healed. Just as Carlos was bumbling through adolescence, laboring alongside his father in the sugar fields of Matanzas, a celebrated World War II lieutenant general, William P. Yarborough, father of the Green Berets, visited Colombia and laid out a “team effort” to train collaborators from every social class in tracking and rooting out Communists. If all went well, in Yarborough’s estimation, those clandestine forces—peasants, workers, and professionals—would represent a formidable source of secret information; a counterinsurgency army they could call up at any time. Fidel Castro’s success in Cuba and the danger it represented for American interests in the hemisphere worried the Washington pooh-bahs and the large corporations that stood to lose ground. The threat needed to be snuffed out. Harshly, if necessary.
It was, yet again, a time for violent reckoning. The proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union in Angola was but a reecho of what was taking place in dozens of outposts south of the Rio Grande. One hundred fifty years after the most bitter wars of independence the world had known, fragile governments were toppling, reconstituting themselves, and toppling again. Washington, DC, intent on maintaining the hemispheric preeminence it had claimed emphatically with the Monroe Doctrine, was
hard at work on “containment”: stalling the Communist tide, preserving its hold on its interests. And yet, for all the very real chaos and suffering being felt in coups and revolts throughout the Americas, the US public was hardly aware of its government’s role in the troubles—hardly cognizant of the turmoil it engendered. Latin America continued to be ignored by the greater American population. It was physically close, yet Europe seemed more simpatico, more approachable. Latin America was, to many of its northern neighbors, chaotic, enigmatic, and in need of a complete overhaul. That attitude was nothing new. When John Adams had been an ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in 1786, he held that revolution in South America would be “agreeable to the United States” and that North Americans should do all they could to promote it. Once he became the second US president, however, he wanted little to do with “those People.” Asked what he thought about lending a hand to South American independence, he had only this to say: “What could I think of revolutions and constitutions in South America? A People more ignorant, more bigoted, more superstitious, more implicitly credulous in the sanctity of royalty, more blindly devoted to their priests, in more awful terror of the Inquisition, than any people in Europe, even in Spain, Portugal, or the Austrian Netherlands, and infinitely more than in Rome itself.”
Almost two centuries later, in 1973, the perception in Washington was no different. Nixon insisted that “if the poison of unrest and violent revolution” continued in Latin America, it would eventually spill up the hemisphere and “infect the United States.” To him, the southern Americas were little more than a dangerously diseased appendage to be kept at bay. There was no risk that the United States doing as it willed in those latitudes would come back to haunt. “Latin America doesn’t matter,” he said. “People don’t give a shit about the place.” Henry Kissinger agreed. It was irrelevant. Less than trifling. “What happens in the south has no importance,” the secretary of state asserted—a pronouncement he held to, except, of course, when the south got unruly and US assets were at risk. Infantilizing the region’s people, dismissing them as irresponsible, he added that there was an essential weakness of character in “America’s backyard.” Half a millennium after Columbus unleashed a scourge on the New World, things hadn’t changed much. Latin America was still a gold rush for conquistadors, a combat zone for predators, a wild frontier for the taking.
CHAPTER 8
THE RISE OF THE STRONGMAN AND THE DRAGONS ALONG THE WAY
Barbarians who resort to force and violence are incapable of cultivating anything. Hatred makes for a bad seed.
—José Martí, 1877
If Inca and Aztec emperors were ruthless and authoritarian—if Spanish conquistadors answered in kind—their descendants, the leaders of Latin America, would eventually follow example. The enlightened sought to forge democratic nations; others, beset by the challenges, resorted to extraordinary powers. Many found their keenest expression as strongmen. With Spain gone, the scramble for dominion became endemic; tin-pot generals and local warlords scrapped with one another for a parcel of land, a fiefdom to rule. Governing became far more difficult than anyone had imagined. Even the liberators—Antonio López de Santa Anna in Mexico, Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina, Bernardo O’Higgins in Chile, Bolívar in much of South America—forsook their liberal ideals to apply dictatorial powers, claiming that the chaos they had inherited could be tempered only by an iron hand. “I fought for liberty with all my heart,” said Santa Anna, “but I soon saw my foolishness. Even one hundred years from now, the Mexican people will not be ready for liberty . . . despotism is the only viable government.”
Bolívar was even more pessimistic. Plagued by squabbles in every republic he left behind, he was convinced that a bloody-minded era would follow. He lamented to a friend, “We have tried everything under the sun, and nothing has worked. Mexico has fallen. Guatemala is in ruins. There are new troubles in Chile. In Buenos Aires, they have killed a president. In Bolivia, three presidents took power in the course of two days, and two of them have been murdered.” No one knew more than he how erratic his brethren could be and how imperfect the aftermath of liberation had been. Independence had been achieved—freedom, equality, and justice fought for—but, one after another, the new nations emerged with the same, entrenched system of castes and an even fiercer sense of white entitlement.
Surveying their fledgling Latin American republics, liberators quickly understood that the principles of Enlightenment, which had quickened revolution in the first place, would have to be abandoned, at least for the time being, in favor of the mano dura—the all-too-familiar hard hand. They themselves would apply it. There was too gaping a difference between poor and privileged, ignorant and educated, brown and white. There was too much opportunity for insurrections and race wars. In his “Letter from Jamaica,” written during his exile in the Caribbean, Bolívar had brilliantly distilled Latin America’s political reality. His people were neither Indians, nor mulattos, nor Spaniards, nor Europeans, he insisted, but an entirely new race. Monarchies had become abhorrent to them, and democracy—Philadelphia-style—could never function for a people so congenitally backward: a population that had been cowed and infantilized by three hundred years of persecution and slavery. “A democratic system, far from rescuing us, can only bring us ruin,” he claimed. “We are a region plagued by vices learned from Spain, which, through history, has been a mistress of cruelty, ambition, meanness, and greed.” In his view, neither kings nor constitutional congresses could tame these unwieldy Americas. But a firm authoritarian government might, especially if it were bolstered by a robust military. Overshadowed by a more immediate need for social order, social justice thereby took a back seat in Latin America, where it would lurk precariously for two hundred years.
So it was that even though the colonies were dead, the spirit of colonialism remained very much alive. Absolute power still beguiled. New republics became as oppressive, insular, and isolated as Spain had encouraged its colonies to be. Latin America’s culture of violence, nurtured by wars of independence that had raged for fourteen years—a prolonged carnival of killing, unparalleled in the hemisphere—seemed to morph, almost overnight, into a culture of intimidation, with the landed gentry acquiring an ever sharper aptitude for cruelty, and a pumped-up military that never seemed to stand down.
In all this, order became an elusive prize. The hard-won wars that had reduced the Latin American populace by more than 25 percent simmered on in far corners of the hemisphere in a lingering belligerence: the patriot’s cry became the political spat, the intrigue, the feuds, the assassinations, the border disputes, the heavy reliance on armed muscle. Every postcolonial Latin American country, except for Brazil, suffered this volatility, moving from lawlessness to rank despotism and crystallizing its class divisions along the way. One after another, they slid into civil wars. One after another, they institutionalized a devastating poverty. Coups and ruptures became ordinary, all-too-familiar consequences of a fundamental inability to cohere.
MEXICO
1860–1920
My grandfather, as he drank his coffee, spoke to me of Juárez and Porfirio . . . and the tablecloth smelled of gunpowder.
My father, as he drank his brandy, spoke to me of Zapata and Villa . . . and the tablecloth smelled of gunpowder.
—Octavio Paz, “Mexican Song”
Within a few years of winning its independence, Mexico was swinging manically from one president to another. Santa Anna won and lost the presidency eleven times in the course of twenty years, each time burying and reburying—with full military honors and the archbishop’s blessing—the amputated leg he had lost in war. He had been an unfortunate choice to lead a budding republic. Erratic, deeply corrupt, wildly autocratic, and all too reliant on brute force, Santa Anna arrogated public funds to his own pockets, sold off or lost vast tracts of land to the United States, and declared himself dictator-for-life, insisting his minions refer to him as “His Serene Highness.” Eventually, once he was for
ced out of power and exiled, Mexico broke out in a bloody civil war between constituencies that remain at odds to this very day: the conservatives, who wanted power to remain with the Church, the military, and the old white elite; and the liberals, who wanted a more representative government that defended the rights of the lower class, the darker race. When the war was over, Mexico’s first indigenous president, Benito Juárez, was given the task of picking up the pieces. The lawyer and former secretary of education had been exiled for his passionate objections to Santa Anna’s corrupt government. He had been living in New Orleans and working in a cigar factory when he was called back to political activism.
As president, Juárez tried to establish some semblance of a democracy and cut back the vast, landed wealth of the Catholic clergy as well as the lingering power of the military. He moved to defend against the predatory advances of France, Spain, and Britain, which threatened to invade Mexico to reclaim its unpaid debts. But for all his egalitarian intentions and achievements, Juárez ultimately presided over a disastrously unruly decade. Springing to take advantage of the disorder, Napoleon III’s troops invaded Mexico in 1861, ousted Juárez, and installed a teetering monarchy led by an Austrian prince, Maximilian I, and his wife, Princess Carlota. This, too, would founder before long.