by Marie Arana
NICARAGUA
1954–1984
In 1980 the statue of the Virgin of Cuapa began to ooze beads of sweat. The opposition press reported that it was suffering from materialism. A year later it reported that the Virgin had stopped sweating and had begun to cry.
—Dirk Kruijt, “Revolución y contrarevolución”
In Nicaragua, the echo of discontent resounded. And with good reason. A government funded by the United States and sapped by three generations of the Somoza family—a regime that had grown fat on coffee and banana profits—ruled the country with a greedy and stubborn hand. Most of Nicaragua’s children under the age of five were undernourished, stunted. In parts of the countryside, illiteracy reached 90 percent. “I don’t want educated people,” Anastasio Somoza Debayle liked to say. “I want oxen.” By the mid-1950s, by virtue of rampant corruption, the family had built an immense fortune for itself, virtually starving the country’s peons, pocketing public funds, and socking it all away in its private empire of commercial and contraband operations. When an earthquake toppled Managua in 1972, killing 13,000 and displacing 750,000 more, Somoza and his family stole the disaster funds that poured in from abroad to reconstruct the country. Much as they stole the shiploads of cement and machinery. Even the beans and rice.
The outrage about these excesses was such that in 1978, at the crest of Latin America’s revolutionary wave, the Sandinistas—a rebel guerrilla force named after the assassinated liberal hero Augusto Sandino—set off a furious campaign of terror and kidnappings to bring world attention to the injustices. Protests had gotten them nowhere. Here and there, throughout the country, they began to launch bold sorties against Somoza’s far more powerful National Guard. In retaliation, his air force unleashed a punishing, large-scale bombing of Nicaragua’s cities. Suddenly the rebels were garnering international sympathy: Why was Somoza slaughtering his own people for making their will known—for demanding to be heard? Even President Jimmy Carter had to admit that enough was enough; President Somoza was intolerable and needed to be eased out of power. But “easing” was not part of a Latin American guerrilla’s vocabulary. The momentum was such that, at noon on August 22, 1978, the Sandinista vanguard, la frente, stormed the National Palace, captured nearly two thousand people on the premises and held them for ransom. It was the start of a series of major, violent confrontations that would grip the country for the next decade. Eventually, a year later, in July 1979, the Nicaraguan rebel forces sent President Somoza and his mistress fleeing for their lives, and citizens swarmed Managua’s central plaza to declare unequivocal victory for the rebels.
Within two and a half years—with Reagan in power in Washington, Managua in firm alliance with Moscow, and Nicaraguan arms flowing freely to rebels in El Salvador—the tenor of American involvement took a radical turn. In November 1981, the US president signed an order to slip covert funding to the “contras”—the counterrevolutionary force rallying to oust the Sandinistas. Meanwhile, in neighboring Honduras, American armed forces were hard at work training Central American soldiers to beat back Communists wherever they emerged—a progressively harder task in this increasingly volatile region. A few months later, in March 1982, a CIA operation blew up two bridges near the Honduran border and signaled the start of a new war. By the end of it, brother would fight brother, and fifty thousand Nicaraguans would lie dead in the coffee and banana fields. One by one, and for the next forty years, the Mesoamerican nations would cannibalize their own children much as the goddess Coatlicue gobbled her offspring or the great titan Saturn devoured his sons. Almost five hundred years later, that green, fertile funnel of ground—that strategic middle earth that coursed up from Panama, sparked Balboa’s and Cortés’s ambitions, and separated America north and south—was still under dispute. “You’d be surprised,” said Ronald Reagan in a speech to the American people, reporting on his first official Central American trip. “They’re all individual countries.”
PORT OF EMBARKATION
May 1980
I have lived inside that monster, and I know its entrails; my sling is David’s.
—José Martí, about the United States, 1895
Carlos Buergos, eldest son of nine—wiry, hazel-eyed descendant of Spaniards, happy-go-lucky convicted thief—was once more at the mercy of a political wind, although he didn’t know it. He was hardly twenty-five when he was released from Cuba’s Combinado del Este prison, ferried by a ramshackle government bus yet again—this time not to climb the skies to an uncertain future in Africa but to face the open sea. Of all the children who had emerged from his mother’s womb, he was the kind of Cuban Castro did not want. Erratic, balky, perverse, with a big hole in his head and wont to criminal pursuits, Carlos was a disposable quantity.
On May 9, 1980, one year into his twelve-year sentence, Carlos’s prison threw open its doors and he was taken to the port of Mariel. There, looking out on a flood of humanity and a sea bobbing with boats, he was confused. He had been presented with such mind-altering scenarios before: the blood spraying from the head of a dying cane cutter; or the army knocking on his door just as he was reveling in the arms of a married woman; or winning Africa to Communism until he was shipped home with a shattered skull; or bartering horse meat for drugs until he could ease the storm in his brain. This time he couldn’t quite make out whatever he was meant to see. He had emerged from darkness to light, and the scene before him was dazzling. Stupefying. He could ascertain that there were people—men, women, children—scrambling to board a profusion of small boats, but he hadn’t been told why, and his first impulse was to run.
CHAPTER 9
SLOW BURN
Everybody in the Andes knows, when the devil comes to work his evil on earth, he sometimes takes the shape of a limping gringo stranger.
—Mario Vargas Llosa, Death in the Andes
Even as the United States was embroiled in the Watergate scandal, even as Britain was roughed up by the Angry Brigade, even as the Vietnam War roared into its last, tragic days, Latin America stumbled ahead, surrendering itself to increasingly violent upheavals, overshadowed by seemingly harsher headlines, hardly noticed by the wider world. By now, the revolutionary impulse that had cost millions of Latin American lives in the twentieth century had crept through the continent like a slow burn, fueled by resentments that had plagued it for more than five hundred years. Nevertheless, just as sixteenth-century Spain had grown rich on Latin American silver while the cruelest depredations were being imposed, the Colombian economy now grew handsomely in the twentieth century, piling a formidable body count alongside its profits. Indeed, between 1948 and 1953, even as Colombia erupted in an undeclared civil war called La Violencia, it continued to be the largest exporter of gold in the world.
The shattering riots of 1948 known as el Bogotazo, the repercussions of which had gone on to kill nearly a quarter of a million Colombians in the course of ten years, never really stopped. The violence carried on well beyond that, stacking corpses, creating a culture of violence that seemed to have a pulse of its own. By the time news of Central America’s revolutionary fervor reached the mountain aerie of Bogotá in the early 1970s, Colombians already had a long history with Left-Right violence.
Hiding out in the hinterlands of Colombia, the country’s rebels continued their stubborn resistance to the mano dura. With no security forces to protect them from a seemingly endless war, campesinos began to form armed bands, either to shield themselves from harm or, as criminals, to take advantage of the rampant disorder. Before long, there were more than twenty thousand armed commandos roaming the countryside, establishing their own “independent republics.” In every sense, it seemed a throwback to the wild, lawless days of the revolution a century and a half before, when plainsmen and rural chieftains formed their own fiefdoms and fought scrappy, vainglorious wars. The military raids against those self-appointed rural vigilantes could be harsh and punishing—a killing field unto itself—and Communist insurgents offered to protect them, pledging to
safeguard their rights. So it was that the infamous Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the FARC) was born, and a wider revolution was made. Throughout the 1970s, as the Marxist romance continued to kindle the Latin American imagination, the FARC expanded, recruiting more and more campesinos to its ranks. In the cities, disaffected university students joined forces and created the National Liberation Army (the ELN), a guerrilla movement that focused on random acts of terror meant to rattle the rich and topple their empires. At their height, the FARC and the ELN amassed a formidable infantry of twenty-three thousand, all dedicated to bombing, kidnapping, extortion, shootings, massacres—whatever it took to force the oligarchy to release its grip on the country.
The turmoil seemed enough to break any nation. Even so, it grew steadily worse. In the 1990s, when the cultivation of coca came to a sudden halt in neighboring Peru, the doors flung open for Colombia’s powerful drug cartels to expand their businesses. The demand for cocaine was at an all-time high in the United States—more than ten million avid American users were making regular buys—and the cartels’ opportunity to grow profits was irresistible. By 1995, the US cocaine market represented a record $165 billion, almost as much as the American agricultural and mining businesses combined. Coca fields began to spring up in the Colombian countryside as drug lords bought up land to fuel their operations, prompting an even more gigantic illegal market that ultimately financed the Left as well as the Right in that country. Billions of drug dollars flowed into Colombia, seducing and compromising the country’s most vital public institutions, including its congress, police, and judicial system. With that staggering bonanza came a fiercer, more random level of violence, as narco-terrorists began to target government officials, journalists, politicians—anyone who got in the way. Two vast drug empires emerged—one in Cali, the other in Medellín—battling to dominate the booty.
Eventually, with cocaine bosses and FARC comandantes operating side by side in the interior, they forged strong alliances. Outlaw rules were now the only ones that mattered. Narcos, guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitary forces fought for control, creating a state of siege in which any citizen might be a mark. There were as many as three mass killings a month, seven kidnappings a day, eleven thousand child combatants in jungle and mountain. Gangland-style executions, beheadings, flayings, rapes, abductions, disappearances—unspeakable acts of barbarity—these were everyday occurrences now. There was hardly a Colombian alive whose family had not fallen victim to some form of violence. Indeed, three million were on the run; they were los deplazados—the displaced, wrenched from their homes, fleeing to protection in the cities. For all the proud history of the Colombian people, for all their storied culture, for all the natural riches of that emerald land, Colombia had become a criminal enterprise with thugs and butchers at the helm.
GONZALO THOUGHT
Everything but the power is an illusion.
—Abimael “Gonzalo” Guzmán
The plague of violence spread quickly, almost as sinister and ruinous as the virulence that had ripped through and scarred the hemisphere a half millennium before in its conquest. Just as the furies of discontent in Argentina and Chile seemed to fly north to inflame Central America, Colombia’s angry fate soon befell Peru, where rancor was ripe and racial grudges had been mounting for generations.
It all began in the Andean region of Ayacucho, one of Peru’s poorest provinces—a sunny valley perched twelve thousand feet in the Andes, where Quechua people are known for their stubbornness, pride, and a staggering poverty. Here, of all places, Peruvians were presented with a sudden efflorescence of educational opportunity. In a concerted push to raise Peru’s literacy rates, a series of governments in the 1960s and 1970s had decided to open schools and universities in the most remote, stick-poor areas of the country. One outcome was the stunning growth of Ayacucho’s Huamanga University, which multiplied its student body fivefold in the course of six years. By 1977, it had grown by 33 percent, so that the university—faculty, students, and staff—now represented more than a quarter of the entire population of Ayacucho.
In a city of poor within a province of poor, where educational options were rare if not nil, this was an extraordinary development. Here was a thoroughly indigenous, highly ambitious, surprisingly egalitarian community of young Andean men and women poised to take full advantage of their unexpected good fortune. And here was a hyperpumped university, in turn, ready to take advantage of its sudden potential. Huamanga’s classrooms were packed with a fresh-faced, impressionable accumulation of youths, fully vulnerable to indoctrination. Far from the insular, bigoted capital—far from “Lima La Blanca” and its privileged whites and gringo capitalists—students proceeded to parse and reparse, as undergraduates are wont to do, the history of their country’s injustices. With a bold, charismatic professor named Abimael Guzmán stirring their passions, the students of Huamanga became the perfect breeding ground for the Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path: one of the strongest—as well as the most violent, fanatical, sectarian, and frightening—guerrilla movements in Latin American history.
Guzmán, the illegitimate son of a reasonably well-off merchant in Arequipa, had been born in a small village outside the port city of Mollendo. He had been raised in modest circumstances in his mother’s house until he was eight, at which point his mother, desperate to start a new life, abandoned the boy to his own fate. An uncle in Callao took custody of the waif, but it was hardly a kindness: he abused him, humiliated him, put him to work as a servant in his house. Although young Abimael hardly knew his father, he wrote to him now, explaining the cruelties to which he was being subjected, pleading to be rescued from his torments. Guzmán senior, an outsized personality who had fathered ten children by numerous women, was not particularly sympathetic, but the heartrending letter fell into the hands of his more charitable wife, who immediately took pity on the boy. The letter was proof of a good mind, she argued; the child deserved a better life. At the age of eleven, Abimael Guzmán was taken into his father’s house in Mollendo and, under his stepmother’s auspices, sent to a good school. He performed so well that he eventually aspired to study in nearby Arequipa, a hub of Peruvian intellectuals.
In the late 1950s, Guzmán became a law and philosophy student at the National University of Saint Augustine, a venerable Catholic institution in Arequipa, the most Peruvian of cities. Graduating with a strong academic record and a solid membership in the ever-expanding Communist Party in Latin America, he was recruited in 1962 to teach philosophy and politics at the University of Huamanga, high up in the Andes, in the sleepy mountain city of Ayacucho. Shy, portly, enigmatic, and puritanical, Guzmán may not have cut the figure of a charismatic revolutionary—and Ayacucho might not have been the obvious cradle for one—but he had concrete ambitions for Peru and the will to bring them to life.
It was there in that mountain redoubt that the rector of the university eventually heard out Guzmán’s radical vision: having visited China on numerous fellowships, the young professor had come to admire what Mao Tse-tung had achieved with a massive, lumbering peasant society. Chairman Mao had proved that revolution did not have to begin in an urban center; the spark and fire could come from a rural movement. The rector was impressed: this was philosophy in action, ideology with muscle, and he encouraged his starry-eyed subaltern to proceed with his quest. Mao’s achievements were Guzmán’s ideal, his goal for a nation he felt had abandoned its Andean roots and been seduced by outside forces. He became convinced that the young, promising Quechua Indians under his tutelage—the progeny of generations of neglect—had the wherewithal to rise from centuries of abuse, honor their ancestors, and reclaim Peru for their children. What was needed was nothing short of a violent, catastrophic revolution: what the Incas called Pachacuti, turning the world on its ear. The new would have to level the old—the colonialism, the foreign imperialism, the wanton corruption, the cruelly imposed caste divisions—just as China had purged its past under Mao. Taking the rector’s encouragement
as carte blanche, Guzmán began to think beyond mere theoretical goals and put his political convictions into play. With Huamanga University as his factory of transfiguration and Mao’s principles as his bible, he taught his disciples to renounce history, turn society upside down, start the country anew.
By the mid 1970s, Guzmán’s Communist Party of Peru, founded and nurtured at Huamanga University, had become a formidable guerrilla army of men and women willing to wage war against a government they claimed was ruled by avarice and manipulated by foreign interests. With a trusted cohort of commanding officers, Guzmán eventually left the university and established a paramilitary garrison, committed to training that army to violent insurrection. He ruled with all the absolutism of an iron-fisted dictator, calling himself Comrade Gonzalo, demanding that recruits sign a strict oath of loyalty not to the Shining Path but to him, and inculcating “Gonzalo Thought,” which he claimed would cross national borders and spark world revolution. He was, according to a burgeoning brigade of fanatical followers, the Fourth Sword of Communism, after Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao.
The Shining Path could not have found a more fertile territory for its brand of terror. Peru, from 1968 to 1975, had been governed by Juan Velasco Alvarado, a moderate Socialist president intent on forging ties with Castro’s Cuba and Allende’s Chile. By the time the military staged a coup d’etat in 1975, Guzmán’s Shining Path agents had taken every opportunity to penetrate that system, establish strategic posts within it, and learn the way it operated. The Path peppered the lower echelons of government with propaganda. It infiltrated the police and military, targeting neophytes with pamphlets and arming them with liberal supplies of dynamite pilfered from the region’s mines. It encouraged soldiers in heavily armed garrisons to desert and take ammunition with them. By 1980, the Path was ready to activate its network. In May, on the eve of Peru’s presidential election, it struck. Comrade Gonzalo’s guerrillas stormed the election polls in the mountain town of Chuschi, burned the ballot boxes, and declared their larger ambition to overturn the Peruvian government and exterminate the ruling class.