by Marie Arana
easy as going to Facebook or a digital marketplace called “Qué Barato!”: “Sicarios trujillanos se promocionan en página web de anuncios,” Trujillo Informa (Trujillo, Peru), January 20, 2014; “Sicarios de Trujillo que se promocionan por Facebook,” El Comercio (Lima), May 11, 2013.
no country at peace has registered Colombia’s extreme levels: Hudson, Colombia, 337.
In Buenos Aires, Argentina: Gabriel DiNicolaand Germán de los Santos, “Sicarios: mandar a matar en la Argentina puede costar $10,000,” La Nación (Buenos Aires), January 29, 2017.
As one journalist has said, sicarios: Rosenberg, 34.
the product of a numbing spiral of righteous violence: Eric Johnson, Ricardo Salvatore, and Pieter Spierenburg, eds., Murder and Violence in Latin America (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 269.
more than a dozen Salvadorans were cut down in gang warfare: “Shining Light on Latin America’s Homicide Epidemic,” Economist, April 5, 2018.
108 homicides per 100,000 people: Homicide Counts and Rates, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) online, 2000–2013, www.unodc.org/documents/gsh/data/GSH2013_Homicide_count_and_rate.xlsx; https://www.unodc.org/documents/gsh/pdfs/2014_GLOBAL_HOMICIDE_BOOK_web.pdf. General data and statistics on global crime, 2013–17, www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/statistics.html.
a region that accounts for a mere 8 percent: “Shining Light Latin America’s Homicide Epidemic.”
Venezuelan government stopped reporting homicides in 2005: Miriam Wells, “Venezuela Government Admits Keeping Crime Figures Secret,” InSight Crime online, last modified July 15, 2013.
buying off dozens of presidents and government officials: Among them, Brazil, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala, Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, Chile. See also “Odebrecht Case: Politicians Worldwide Suspected in Bribery Scandal,” BBC News online, last modified December 15, 2017, www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-41109132; Anthony Faiola, “The Corruptions Scandal That Started in Brazil,” Washington Post, January 23, 2018.
kickbacks totaling $800 million: Michael Smith, Sabrina Valle, and Blake Schmidt, “No One Has Ever Made a Corruption Machine Like This One,” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 8, 2017.
According to the anticorruption activist organization Transparency International: Karen McVeigh, “Bribes for Public Services Rife in Latin America,” Guardian (UK edition), October 10, 2017.
If history holds, the people’s fury will be followed by rebellion: For this and the commentary and specifics that follow, I owe a large debt to the excellent anthology of scholarship in Johnson, Salvatore, and Spierenburg, Murder and Violence, 269.
The people may even long for it: Anthony Faiola and Marina Lopes, “Stop and Search? This Poor Community in Rio Says Yes, Please,” Washington Post, March 25, 2018.
the plague that has held Latin America fast since: Corruption, which has deep roots in Spain and Portugal, spiraled on an intense and virulent scale during the reign of Philip III, who ruled in Lisbon as well as in Madrid (1598–1621). Government posts were for sale, the courts could be bought, and bribery was rampant. Latin America did not invent its corruption. Fuentes, 166–67.
the most hardheaded conservatism: Ernesto Sabato, “Inercia mental,” in Uno y el universo, 90.
No other country in the region: Enrique Krauze, “In the Shadow of the Patriarch,” New Republic, October 23, 2009.
A population that was approximately twenty million: Tim Merrill and Ramón Miró, eds., Mexico: A Country Study (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1996), 91.
Some call it genocide: Johnson, Salvatore, and Spierenburg, Murder and Violence, 244.
sending more than two hundred thousand to their graves: Nina Lakhani and Erubiel Tirado, “Mexico’s War on Drugs,” Guardian (UK edition), December 8, 2016. “Since 2007, almost 200,000 people have been murdered and more than 28,000 reported as disappeared. . . . The US donated at least $1.5bn” to this initiative by 2016. To put things in perspective, the United States has spent more than $2.5 trillion on the war on drugs between 1973 and 2016.
the slums have exhibited an exponential growth in violent crime: Salvatore, in Johnson, Salvatore, and Spierenburg, Murder and Violence, 236.
began to flock to the urban hearts: “Shining Light.”
Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) numbers seventy thousand: Steven Dudley et al., “The MS13,” InSight Crime and Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University online, last modified February 2018.
pulled twenty thousand gang members from jails: Ibid.
hardly equipped to deal with the bloodletting that followed: Jose Miguel Cruz, “The Root Causes of the Central American Crisis,” Current History 114, no. 769 (February 2015): 43–48.
a mother named Angélica Mendoza de Ascarza went looking: Phil Davison, “Activist Protested Peruvian Government to Get Answers About Missing People,” Washington Post, September 10, 2017.
another mother named Maria de Lourdes Rosales: Ioan Grillo, “The Paradox of Mexico’s Mass Graves,” New York Times online, July 19, 2017.
Or just last year, in the killing fields of Mato Grosso: Chris Arsenault, “Politics of Death: Land Conflict and Murder Go ‘Hand in Hand’ in Brazil,” Reuters, June 26, 2017.
gang leaders are called palabreros, the men who carry the word: Dudley et al., “MS13.”
PART 3: STONE
Epigraph; “How is it, sir, that having persuaded me to trust our friendship”: “¿Cómo, señor, es posible que habiéndome dado la fe de amistad.” Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés reports this testimonial from Casqui, an evangelized Tainan cacique who traveled to Barcelona on Columbus’s return trip from the Caribbean. Oviedo, 2:118, 179–80.
CHAPTER 10: THE GODS BEFORE
Epigraph; “Is it possible that the great God”: Fray Luis de Granada, Obras del VP Maestro Fr. Luis de Granada [Collected works of the venerable father priest Luis de Granada] (Madrid: Antonio Gonçalez de Reyes, 1711), vol. 21, pt. 5, tratado 4, para. 20.
It did not escape Xavier Albó: All the information on and descriptions of Xavier Albó’s life, career, and opinions are taken from a series of interviews I did with him in the Jesuit House in La Paz, Bolivia, from February 20 to February 27, 2016, including correspondence before and after, as well as his very thorough autobiography, Un curioso incorregible, published in Bolivia in 2017.
Society of Jesus: The Jesuits (Societas Iesu, SJ), established in Loyola in 1534. It is known in Spanish as Compañía de Jesús, the original name given to the order by Ignatius of Loyola and his first six companions. They also called themselves Amigos en El Señor. “Society” derives from the Latin translation.
the coal miners of Asturias had gone on strike: “La Revolución de Asturias, octubre de 1934: La Revolución minera,” Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory online, last modified October 5, 2017, www.radiorecuperandomemoria.com
Half a million lives would be lost: Adam Hochschild, Spain in Our Hearts (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2016), 343. Historians estimate that, outside combat, the Nationalists killed 150,000 opponents between 1936 and 1939, and Franco’s regime executed an additional 20,000 more after coming to power. Many more were arrested and tortured, or maimed for life. But the Republicans committed their share of atrocities, killing about 49,000. The rest were civilian deaths (James McAuley and Pamela Rolfe, “Spain Plans to Exhume Franco,” Washington Post, October 20, 2018).
ten Savoia-Marchetti warplanes from Franco’s Nationalist forces roared overhead: Josep María y Joan Villarroya Solé i Sabaté, España en llamas: La guerra civil desde el aire (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2003), 239.
Epigraph; “Who could conquer Tenochtitlán?”: “Cantares Mexicanos,” quoted in David Carrasco, Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 150.
Cortés himself had reported: Cortés, Cartas de Relación (1993), 232–48. Quoted in Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés, 4.
What stands
as recorded history, after all, isn’t history at all: This concept is lucidly and amply explored in the erudite and well-argued book When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History, by Pennsylvania State University historian Matthew Restall.
Often it is charged with telluric power: James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 82.
the most impressive empire builders of their day: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Civilization (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 390–402.
The transition between seasons—when the Milky Way streamed: James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans 83.
Mines in the time of the Incas were considered sacred: Tripcevich and Vaughn, 3–10.
the indisputable germ at the heart: Catherine J. Allen, “When Pebbles Move Mountains,” in Creating Context in Andean Cultures, ed. Rosaleen Howard-Malverde (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 73–83.
“the form is constant, the interpretation is variable”: Franz Boas, Primitive Art (1927) (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 128. Cited in Krista Ulujuk Zawadski, “Lines of Discovery on Inuit Needle Cases, Kakpiit, in Museum Collections,” Museum Anthropology 41, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 61–75, https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15481379/2018/41/1.
The Florentine Codex . . . emissaries of Montezuma: Sahagún, 12:13.
But the descendants of the Incas interviewed by Gamboa: Rostworowski, Historia del Tawantinsuyu, 46–47.
Stone, to the ancient indigenous of the Americas, was transubstantial: Carolyn Dean, A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock, 5.
A thrall in stone was deeply embedded: Lars Frühsorge, “Sowing the Stone,” Estudios de Cultura: Maya, vol. 45 (México, DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico [UNAM], 2015): 72–189.
their word for stone, tun, also means “time”: Ibid.
Like the Quechua word pacha: Tamara L. Bray, ed., The Archaeology of Wak’as: Explorations of the Sacred in the Pre-Columbian Andes 25–27.
the living could coerce the spirits: David Stuart, “Kings of Stone,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 29/30 (Spring/Autumn 1996): 148–71.
“Huacas are made of energized matter”: Frank Salomon, The Huarochirí Manuscript (Austin: University of Texas, 1991), 19. The italics are mine.
“Jungle dwellers live in a forest of eyes”: Richard K. Nelson, “The Watchful World,” in Readings in Indigenous Religions, ed. Graham Harvey (London: Continuum, 2002), 345.
Bartolomé de las Casas . . . told of Mesoamerican: Las Casas, in Apologética Historia Sumaria, ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela (Madrid: Editorial Atlas, 1958), 527.
a random piedra cansada: Dean, 50. A tired stone. These were originally reported by Guaman Poma in El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno [The first new chronicle and good government], in which he describes six thousand workers hauling huge boulders to the site of Sacsayhuamán using “great cables of hemp and rope,” and—sometimes unable to haul them all—leaving some randomly on the landscape.
shamans treat sick children: Frühsorge, “Sowing,” 72–189.
the three original stones that marked the beginning of time: David Freidel, Linda Schele, and Joy Parker, Maya Cosos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path (New York: Morrow, 1993), 67; Matthew G. Looper, To Be Like Gods: Dance in Ancient Maya Civilization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 116.
the age-old practice of “sowing the stones”: Frühsorge, “Sowing,” 72–189.
descendants of the Mayans or Aztecs will insist: Matthew G. Looper, The Three Stones of Maya Creation Mythology, Wired Humanities Projects, University of Oregon Mesoamerican Archives, quoted in Dr. Frances Karttunen, “Why Always Three Hearth Stones?,” Aztecs at Mexicolore, accessed February 3, 2019, www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/ask-experts/why-always-three-hearth-stones.
“We are this stone”: John Janusek, “Of Monoliths and Men,” in Bray, 335–36. The italics are mine.
The pyramid at Cholula . . . grander than any that the Egyptian king Cheops built: The Cholula structure, which is known as Tlachihualtepetl (“man-made mountain”) and built about 300 BC, has a base four times larger than Giza’s and nearly twice the volume. Josh Hrala, “The World’s Largest Pyramid Is Hidden Under a Mountain in Mexico,” Science Alert, last modified August 25, 2016, https://www.sciencealert.com/the-world-s-largest-pyramid-is-hidden-under-a-mountain-in-mexico.
the Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello discovered ruins: preface, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History (New York: AMNC, Board of Trustees, 1944–45), 39:5.
According to one Andean legend: This was recorded by one of Pizarro’s cohort, Juan de Betanzos, a Spaniard married to Atahualpa’s cousin (who was also a former concubine of Pizarro’s). Narrative of the Incas, 7–10.
Epigraph; “Go and make disciples of all nations”: Matthew 28:19–20.
presented itself to him with such physical force: “Pope Francis and Saint Matthew,” Today’s Catholic, September 15, 2015.
controlled 92 percent of the cultivable land: Maria Luise Wagner, “The Sexenio (1946–52),” in Bolivia: A Country Study, ed. Rex A. Hudson and Dennis M. Hanratty (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1989).
the country had sacrificed sixty-five thousand lives: Matthew Hughes, “Logistics and the Chaco War: Bolivia Versus Paraguay,” Journal of Military History 69, no. 2 (April 2005): 412.
178 popular uprisings: Guillermo Yeatts, The Roots of Poverty in Latin America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 53.
even eat them—in ritual sacrifice: Rubén Mendoza, “Aztec Militarism and Blood Sacrifice,” in Chacon and Mendoza, 47–48.
Aztec codices describe these religious rites: See Codex Magliabechiano, fol. 70, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, Italy, www.art.com/products/p11726751-sa-i1352276/a-human-sacrifice-from-the-codex-magliabechiano.htm.
In Peru, during Inti Raymi celebrations: Guaman Poma, 2:38.
They called it capacocha: Qhapaq hucha, in Quechua, “royal sins.” The rite is well explained in Valerie Andrushko et al., “Investigating a Child Sacrifice Event from the Inca Heartland,” Journal of Archaeological Science 38, no. 2 (February 2011): 323–33. See also Maria Constanza Ceruti, “Frozen Mummies from Andean Mountaintop Shrines: Bioarchaeology and Ethnohistory of Inca Human Sacrifice,” BioMed Research International 2015, article ID 439428 (2015): 12 pages, http://www.dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/439428.
Blood was never shed in these sacrifices: Martín de Murúa, Historia del orígen y genealogía real de los reyes incas del Perú (1590), 2:263–64.
In 1892 an excavation on Ecuador’s Isla de la Plata: Richard J. Chacon, Yamilette Chacon, and Angel Guandinango, “The Inti Raymi Festival Among the Cotacachi and Otavalo of Highland Ecuador: Blood for the Earth,” in Chacon and Mendoza, 123.
in 1995, the remains of a twelve-year-old mummified Inca girl: Johan Reinhard: “Peru’s Ice Maidens,” National Geographic, June 1996, 62–81.
In 2018, the skull of a boy: Natasha Frost, “Grisly Child Sacrifice Found at Foot of Ancient Aztec Temple,” www.history.com, July 30, 2018. The discoveries in the archaeological dig led by Leonardo López Luján and taking place now in Templo Mayor, under the heart of Mexico City, have been astounding, including the unearthing of skull racks and skull towers numbering hundreds of victims.
when Arequipa’s volcano Misti erupted: Murúa, Historia General del Perú, 16:48.
a number of children were buried alive: Colin McEwan and M. Van de Guchte, “Ancestral Time and Sacred Space in Inca State Ritual,” in The Ancient Americas: Art from Sacred Landscapes, ed. R. Townsend (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1992), 359–71; Gordon McEwan, The Incas: New Perspectives (New York: Norton, 2006), 150.
They prepared the captives for weeks by fattening them: Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, “Comentarios,” Relación y comentarios, ch. 16, 558.
Historians recount the discovery of child sacrifices: Elizabeth Benson and Anita Cook, 2–3.
up to the time of the conquest—and, some say, years after: Chacon, Chacon, and Guandinango,
“Inti Raymi Festival,” 120–25.
CHAPTER 11: STONE TRUMPS STONE
Epigraph; “The sword and the cross marched together”: Galeano, 20.
The god of the night sky or high wind: Guilhem Olivier, Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God: Tezcatlipoca, “Lord of the Smoking Mirror” (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003), 14–15.
One of the first edicts Cortés proclaimed: Acosta, vol. 4, ch. 4.
When Christians took over Athens: Linda Jones Roccos, “Athena from a House on the Areopagus,” Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 60, no. 3 (1991): 397–410.
a church dedicated to Saint John the Baptist: Alan Rowe and B. R. Rees, “A Contribution to the Archaeology of the Western Desert IV: The Great Serapeum of Alexandria,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Manchester 39: (1957), 485–520, https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:1m1914&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS-DOCUMENT.PDF.
Later, during the Byzantine era, when the Parthenon: John Pollini, “Christian Destruction and Mutilation of the Parthenon,” in Athenische Mitteilungen, 122 (2007), 207–28. When Athens subsequently fell to the Ottomans, the conquering Muslims used the Parthenon’s sacred halls as a gunpowder arsenal.
those who rejected the cross would “pay with their life and blood”: In AD 380 the Roman emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica. This established Christianity as the official state religion; all other sects were declared heretical. Five years later capital punishment for nonadherents began. Ibid. Also: Sidney Zdeneck Ehler and J. B. Morrall, Church and State Through the Centuries (Cheshire, CT: Biblo-Moser, 1988), 6–7.
The emperor obliged, taking him on a personal tour: Díaz, Historia verdadera de la conquista, 145–47.
Montezuma’s high priests were lulled into believing: Wright, 145.
Aztec gods might have been demanding, ravenous: Ibid.
“the yellow metal and the white”: Cozticteocuítlatl, “yellow metal” in Nahuatl; iztacteocuítlatl, “white metal.” León Portilla, Visión de los vencidos, 149.