by Marie Arana
The United States, a natural partner . . . was complicit: A. J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U.S. Police Operatons in Latin America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). The entire book is about US complicity. Langguth was a bureau chief for the New York Times, among several other media organizations.
“however unpleasant”: Kissinger transcript, staff meeting, US Department of State, October 1, 1973, available on George Washington University National Security Archive (legacy online site), accessed March 16, 2019, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB110/chile03.pdf, 26–27.
“take no further action”: Kissinger, in a September 20, 1976, memorandum, George Washington University National Security Archive (legacy online site), accessed February 2, 2019, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB125/condor09.pdf.
the military regime hosted the soccer World Cup: Wright Thompson, “While the World Watched,” ESPN the Magazine, June 9, 2014.
dropped from biplanes and helicopters into the Atlantic or the Paraná River: Vladimir Hernández, “Argentina: viaje al delta donde ‘llovieron cuerpos’ ” [Argentina: Trip to the delta where “bodies rained”], BBC World online, last modified March 24, 2013.
Videla swanned through festivities with Secretary Kissinger: Thompson, “World Watched.”
Nineteen of the twenty-two players didn’t join in the revelry: Ibid.
as many as thirty thousand Argentines: “Obama Brings ‘Declassified Diplomacy’ to Argentina” (Security Advisor Susan Rice’s public announcement in advance of President Obama’s 2016 trip to that country), available on George Washington University National Security Archive (legacy online site), last modified March 18, 2016, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/southern-cone/2016-03-18/obama-brings-declassified-diplomacy-argentina; accessed March 16, 2019. Reuters, Sarah Marsh and Maximiliano Rizzi, “Obama’s Argentina Trip Raises Questions About Macri Rights Record,” March 18, 2016. According to a secret Chilean intelligence report, at least twenty-two thousand Argentines were killed between 1975 and 1978. “On 30th Anniversary of Argentine Coup, New Declassified Details on Repression and US Support for Military Dictatorship,” available on George Washington University National Security Archive (legacy online site), last modified March 23, 2006, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB185/index.htm.
In Chile, we know that a quarter million: Edward Rhymes, “Operation Condor,” TeleSUR online, last modified June 15, 2017.
Paraguayan armed forces disposed of two thousand: Nilson Mariano, As Garras do Condor (São Paulo: Vozes, 2003), 234.
Because of the covert nature of Operation Condor: Ibid.
The human costs of Condor were higher: American death tolls in select wars: Revolutionary War—8,000 combat deaths, 25,000 total US war dead, in Howard H. Peckham, ed., The Toll of Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 131. Vietnam War—47,424 combat deaths, 58,209 total US dead, in John Whiteclay Chambers II, ed., The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 849. American engagements since then—7,788 total combat and war dead, Nese F. DeBruyne, “American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics,” table 2-24, Congressional Research Service online, last modified September 14, 2018, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf. For comparative reference: combat losses in World War I reached 53,000 (116,000 overall, including disease); in the American Civil War, 618,000.
Epigraph; “Let the history we lived”: Personal testimony quoted in D. Rothenberg, ed., Memory of Silence (Tz’inil na ‘tab’al), The Guatemalan Truth Commission Report (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 7, www.documentcloud.org/documents/357870-guatemala-memory-of-silence-the-commission-for.html.
when poverty rates in El Salvador were at 90 percent: Rosenberg, 243.
With the help of $4.5 billion: Ibid., 269.
arms and guns that poured in from Ethiopia and Vietnam: Jorge G. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War, 98.
Mutilated corpses littered the streets: Mark Danner, “The Truth of El Mozote,” The New Yorker, December 6, 1993.
murdering nuns, declaring Jesuit priests enemies: Ibid., 101.
one million were displaced: Mayra Gomez, Human Rights in Cuba, El Salvador and Nicaragua (New York: Routledge, 2003), 101.
seventy-five thousand were murdered: Report of the UN Truth Commission on El Salvador (New York: United Nations Security Council S25500, April 1, 1993), www.derechos.org/nizkor/salvador/informes/truth.html.
controlled the railroads and the shipyards: Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: Norton, 1993), 76–77.
the Central Intelligence Agency . . . masterminded a coup: Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 100–1.
the Guatemalan military . . . stepped in to make demands: The numbers and information relating to the Guatemalan Civil War and genocide throughout these pages are largely from a report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the International Center for Human Rights Investigations. Patrick Ball, Paul Kobrak, and Herbert Spirer, State Violence in Guatemala, 1960–1996 (Washington, DC: AAAS, 1999).
in one month alone, August 1977, they murdered sixty-one: Ibid., 21.
the “internal enemy”: Rothenberg, Guatemala: Memory of Silence, 20.
Eighteen thousand Guatemalans fell victim: Ibid., 12.
Using techniques taught them by foreign advisors: Ibid., 42. The aforementioned reports identify the advisors as Israeli and Argentine military personnel.
“Methods of violence became ever more gruesome”: Ibid., 40–41.
President Ronald Reagan’s administration portrayed the regime: Ibid., 42; Greg Grandin, “Guatemalan Slaughter Was Part of Reagan’s Hard Line,” New York Times online, May 21, 2013; Elisabeth Malkin, “Former Leader of Guatemala Is Guilty of Genocide Against Mayan Group,” New York Times online, May 10, 2013.
He’s “a man of great integrity”: Grandin, “Guatemalan Slaughter,” May 10, 2013.
as many as two hundred thousand dead or disappeared: Associated Press, April 29, 1999; Rothenberg, Guatemala: Memory of Silence, 13. The population in 1982 was about six million.
Epigraph; “In 1980 the statue of the Virgin of Cuapa”: Dirk Kruijt, “Revolución y contrarevolución: el gobierno sandinista y la guerra de la Contra en Nicaragua, 1980–1990,” Desafíos 23, no. 2 (July–December 2011): 67.
Most of Nicaragua’s children under the age of five: Rosenberg, 279.
“I don’t want educated people”: Ibid.
When an earthquake toppled Managua: Ibid., 279–80.
on August 22, 1978, the Sandinista vanguard, la frente, stormed: “Así contó La Prensa el asalto al Palacio Nacional hace 39 años,” La Prensa (Managua), August 22, 2017, www.laprensa.com.ni/2017/08/22/politica/2283511-el-asalto-al-palacio-nacional-1978.
brother would fight brother, and fifty thousand Nicaraguans: Rosenberg, 288; Gomez, Human Rights, 10.
“You’d be surprised”: Lou Cannon, “Latin Trip an Eye-Opener for Reagan,” Washington Post, December 6, 1982.
Epigraph; “I have lived inside that monster”: José Martí to Manuel Mercado, 18 May 1895, Campo del Rios (English translation), HistoryofCuba.com, accessed March 16, 2016. In this letter, Martí was actually referring to the United States as the monster.
CHAPTER 9: SLOW BURN
Epigraph; “Everybody in the Andes knows”: Mario Vargas Llosa, Death in the Andes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 127.
Britain was roughed up by the Angry Brigade: The Angry Brigade was a leftwing revolutionary group that led a number of terrorist bombings between 1970 and 1972 in England.
a formidable body count alongside its profits: Business boomed during Colombia’s La Violencia. Between 1948 and 1953, when the violence was at its peak, the country’s growth rate was 6.2 percent. Rosenberg, 41.
> Colombia . . . continued to be the largest exporter of gold: Colombia: The Colombian Economy (World Bank report, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Eastern Latin American Division, March 25, 1948), http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/582941468247471820/pdf/L31000Colombia000The0Colombian0economy.pdf.
more than twenty thousand armed commandos: Hudson, Colombia, 327.
a formidable infantry of twenty-three thousand: twenty thousand FARC at its height; three thousand ELN. Juan Guillermo Mercado, “Desmovilización, principal arma contra las guerrillas,” El Tiempo (Colombia) online, last modified September 22, 2013. Also, Contribución al entendimiento del conflicto armado en Colombia [Contribution to the understanding of the armed conflict in Colombia] (Havana: Comisión Histórica del Conflicto y sus Víctimas [Historical commission of the conflict and its victims], February 2015), 50–65.
more than ten million avid American users: “The Global Cocaine Market,” in World Drug Report 2010 (Geneva: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, June 2010), 30, www.unodc.org/documents/wdr/WDR_2010/1.3_The_globa_cocaine_market.pdf.
a record $165 billion: Ibid., 69. The agricultural and mining businesses in the United States in 1995 totaled about $200 billion in profits. US Department of Commerce, Survey of Current Business 79, table B-3, https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/SCB/1990–99/SCB_071999.pdf.
Billions of drug dollars flowed into Colombia: Hudson, Colombia, 329.
a fiercer, more random level of violence: Contribución al entendimiento, 56–64.
as many as three mass killings a month: Hudson, Colombia, 34–38.
Epigraph; “Everything but the power is an illusion”: Abimael Guzmán, also known as “Gonzalo,” the leader of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru. Fernando Salazar Paredes, “Salvo el poder todo es ilusión,” La Opinion, Pagina Siete (La Paz), May 4, 2016.
a sudden efflorescence of educational opportunity: I owe these insights and much of what follows on Huamanga University and the Sendero Luminoso to Jorge G. Castañeda’s superb Utopia Unarmed, 98–125.
Ayacucho’s Huamanga University: This is more formally known as the National University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga.
one of the strongest—as well as the most violent: Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed, 120.
Guzmán, the illegitimate son of a reasonably well-off merchant: These details of his childhood are from Juan Carlos Soto and Giuliana Retamozo, “La Madre Chilena de Abimael Guzmán,” La República (Arequipa, Peru), March 22, 2008.
He ruled with all the absolutism of an iron-fisted dictator: His plan, as laid out in Shining Path documents, intended to be (1) violent: power would be seized through violent means and would be held by a dictatorship; (2) thorough: it would obliterate the imperialists as well as the feudal-minded underdogs; (3) long: the engagement would consist of a prolonged, massive, total war; and (4) new: it would engage masses—not armies as previously conceived—and it would transform the Path into a new, never-before-seen populist force. Guzmán’s philosophy is clearly laid out in a paper by the Peruvian historian Nelson Manrique, “Pensamiento, acción y base político del movimiento Sendero Luminoso,” available on Historicizing the Living Past in Latin America, www.historizarelpasadovivo.cl.
cross national borders and spark world revolution: El Diario (La Paz) interview, quoted in C. Kistler, “PCM: To Defend the Life of Chairman Gonzalo is to Defend Maoism!” Redspark (an international Communist Party publication), last modified October 25, 2107, http://www.redspark.nu/en/imperialist-states/to-defend-the-life-of-chairman-gonzalo-is-to-defend-maoism.
taken every opportunity to penetrate that system: Gustavo Gorriti, Shining Path: A History of the Millenarian War in Peru, 84; Dora Tramontana Cubas, “La Violencia Terrorista en el Perú, Sendero Luminoso,” Revista Persona, nos. 25, 26, Argentina, 2004.
Lima awoke to find dead dogs hanging from lampposts: Lucero Yrigoyen MQ, “Sendero Luminoso y los perros,” Semanario Siete (Peru), September 10, 2012.
At first, the youths who populated the Path: Gorriti, 86.
It was the first armed insurrection in Latin America: Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed, 127. The Path’s financial arrangement with the drug trade may well have been a precursor to and model for the FARC’s collaboration with Colombian drug lords. See also Manrique, “The War for the Central Sierra,” in Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995, ed. Steve J. Stern, 215.
If a female guerrilla flirted with a policeman: Rosenberg, 146.
stuff dismembered penises into mouths: Anne Lambright, Andean Truths, Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2015, 158–59.
“a river of blood!”: Carlos Iván Degregori, “Harvesting Storms: Peasant Rondas and the Defeat of Sendero Luminoso in Ayacucho,” in Stern, Shining and Other Paths, 128.
hammer the countryside: Ibid.; PCP-SL (Communist Party of Peru document), December 1982, quoted in Gorriti, 283.
“the local mayor; the health post’s nurse”: Rosenberg, 146.
surpassed the death toll for the American Revolution: Charles F. Walker, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016), 277.
“La cuota,” Guzmán called it: Gorriti, 282.
the most radical expression of a desperate revolutionary body: Rodrigo Montoya, “Izquierda unida y Sendero, potencialidad y limite,” Sociedad y política, August 13, 1983.
It cut through the shantytowns, killing the civic leaders: Jo-Marie Burt, “The Case of Villa El Salvador,” in Stern, Shining and Other Paths, 270–71.
had cost Peru 70,000 souls: “Abimael Guzmán,” Encyclopædia Britannica online, www.britannica.com/biography/Abimael-Guzman.
The displaced rural population: Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed, 125.
one out of every two Lima residents lived in a slum: Ibid.
sickened 322,000: Marcus Cueto, El regreso de las epidemias: salud y sociedad en el Perú del siglo XX (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2000), 175. Cueto’s figure is 322,562.
cut down a thousand more: James Brooke, “Cholera Kills 1,100 in Peru and Marches On,” New York Times online, April 19, 1991.
Twenty-five students and teachers were abducted: Also, “Confirman que restos de víctimas de La Cantuta fueron quemados” [It is confirmed that the remains of the La Cantuta victims were burned], El Mercurio (Santiago), August 18, 2008, www.emol.mundo.
Not one was a member of the Shining Path: “Victims of the Barrios Altos and La Cantuta Massacres Were Not Terrorists,” El Comercio (Lima), April 7, 2009, http://archivo.elcomercio.pe/politica/gobierno/victimas-masacres-barrios-altos-cantuta-no-eran-terroristas-noticia-270253.
supported by $36 million: This money was provided by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an independent agency that provides civilian foreign aid and development assistance, https://newrepublic.com/article/151599/dont-talk-perus-forced-sterilizations. Support for the Peruvian armed forces also came from the American military in the form of counterinsurgency training at Fort Gulick in Panama (Manrique, “War for Central Sierra,” 193). The figures are from Françoise Berthélémy, “Stérilisations forcés des Indiennes du Pérou,” Le Monde diplomatique, May 2004.
Epigraph; “America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences”: The Works of George Santayana, vol. 5, bk. 6, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp Jr. and William G. Holzberger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 423.
Castro called “human refuse” and “scum”: David Piñeiro, “The Exodus of Mariel,” Una Breve Historia, accessed March 16, 2019, www.unabrevehistoria.com/exodo-desde-mariel.html.
“To the Cuban refugees: This great nation”: Mariel boat lift flyer, “The Cuban Experience in Florida,” image number, PR30565, Florida Memory: State Library & Archives of Florida.
he was whisked through a processing center in Key West: Arana-Ward, “Three Marielitos.”
fifty-five had criminal records: “Cuban Refugee Crisis,” The [Online] Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture, last modif
ied March 12, 2015.
All the same, the people who inhabited the small town: “Cuban Refugee Crisis.”
At the Immigration and Naturalization Service: Arana-Ward, “Three Marielitos.”
The city’s leaders didn’t seem to care: Robert Pierre Pierre, “DC Anti-Gang Efforts Marked by Frustration,” Washington Post online, March 9, 1997.
“I was with a group of Cubans both times”: Arana-Ward, “Three Marielitos.”
“I was getting right”: Ibid.
He drifted from one town to another: These more recent details were gathered in the author’s follow-up reporting on Buergos’s whereabouts in 2017–18.
Epigraph; “The conquest has not yet ended”: Juan Adolfo Vásquez, 1982, quoted in Wright, 52.
The Spanish . . . had been reliant on hermandades: Kamen, Spain, 21–22.
he sent unwanted, hardened criminals: John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians. 1500–1700, 40.
“la época del perrero”: Moreno Parra, Héctor Alonso, and Rodriguez Sanchez, Etnicidad, resistencias y políticas públicas (Cali, Co.: University del Valle, 2014), 102.
“a primitiveness, a ferocity”: Mario Vargas Llosa, El Pez en agua (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2006), 520.
could easily be reduced to vileness: “Vargas Llosa dice que descubrió la literatura latinoamericana en París,” La Vanguardia (Barcelona), May 1, 2014. These are not Vargas Llosa’s words, but the reviewer’s.
“The conquest of America was cruel, violent”: Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel lecture, December 7, 2010, Stockholm.
For a hundred years, limpieza de sangre was law: María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 10–12.
cédulas de Gracias al Sacar: Bethell, History of Latin America, 3:30.
Of the fifty most violent cities in the world: Macias and Engel, “50 Most Violent Cities.”