In addition to Cardenal’s poetry, Don gave me a report by Pax Christi, a Catholic human rights organization, which refuted the Church hierarchy’s claims to have been persecuted by the Sandinistas. Pax Christi determined that not only were the Sandinistas not persecuting the Church, but that many Church people, such as Cardenal, were directly involved in making Sandinista policy. The report concluded that the hierarchy should just shut up (my translation) and get out of the way. I found it compelling that a Catholic group would produce such a report.
Alongside Cardenal I read the poetry of American Carolyn Forché, whose book The Country Between Us is infused with grim communiqués from El Salvador. In one entry she recounts meeting a Salvadoran colonel in his fortressed home. He drank fine wine and kept a pistol on the pillow beside him. His wife brought tea while their daughter filed her nails. At one point in the conversation he tired of probing from the norteamericana and disappeared into another room, then “returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table . . . took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air.”
Here was a merciless slice, if you will, of life in a “banana republic” that was propped up, some might say owned, by the United States, an old but largely hidden relationship that emerged in sinister relief during the early Reagan years. Conversely, it appeared that the new Sandinista government of Nicaragua might actually have the interests of its people at heart. This became something I wanted to see up close. What I was reading did not match my mental picture of a banana-republic revolution: literacy, health care, no bloodbath, and at least some tolerance for democratic opposition. The voice inside told me I should go there, but I didn’t want to just buy a ticket and show up cold, without a guide. I didn’t speak the language. I feared I wouldn’t have any understanding of what I was seeing, or any sense of perspective. For some months I cast about, seeking the right way to get to Nicaragua, without success.
In early 1983, just after the release of The Trouble with Normal, the “rhythm of Circumstance” generated a call to Bernie from Oxfam Canada asking if I would join a team they were sending to Central America to witness and report on the situation in the region, specifically their development work and the conditions that made it necessary. Here was the opening I’d sought, a chance to witness rather than be a mere tourist. When I said yes I knew, in the deep place where we know such things, that this would shift the course of my life. The spirit was still coming through.
Away from the river
Away from the smoke of the burning
Fearful survivors
Subject of government directives
One sad guitar note
Echoes off the wall of the jungle
Seen from the air they’re just targets with nowhere to run to
Children of rape
Raised on malnutrition
Men in camouflage
Filled with a sense of mission
Light through the wire mesh
Plays on the president’s pistol
Like the gleam of a bead of sweat in the glow of a candle
Hear the cry in the tropic night
Should be the cry of love but it’s a cry of fright
Some people never see the light
Till it shines through bullet holes
The tropic moon
Bathing a beach fringed with palms
Glitters on shells
And beach tar and coke cans
And on the night-coloured boat
And on the barrels of guns
In the rage in the hearts of these men is the seed of a wind they call
Kingdom Come
Hear the cry in the tropic night
Should be the cry of love but it’s a cry of fright
Some people never see the light
Till it shines through bullet holes
“TROPIC MOON,” 1982
To listen to a sample of this song visit b.hc.com/s/45.
11
In June 2011 the Guatemalan forensic scientist Fredy Peccerelli swabbed a DNA sample from the cheek of a young man named Óscar Ramirez, a Guatemalan national living in Framingham, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. Óscar had illegally moved to the States in 1999, so when a Guatemalan human rights investigator contacted him in connection with a crime in his homeland, Óscar at first balked. Once he learned the severity of the crime, however, and his intimate if bizarre connection to it, he agreed to cooperate.
Óscar was the son of Óscar Ramirez Ramos, a lieutenant in the Guatemalan military—or so he had always believed. It turned out that on December 6, 1982, when Óscar was three years old, Ramirez Ramos had kidnapped the boy from a small Guatemalan village in the northern highlands called Dos Erres. “Kidnapped” is a euphemism in this case, however: Ramirez Ramos was an architect of the Guatemalan government’s massacre of virtually everyone in Dos Erres—more than two hundred people who, one by one, were blindfolded, led to a community well, hit on the head with a sledgehammer, and then dumped into the well, whether or not they were dead. The killing began with a baby who was torn from her mother’s arms and dropped, alive, into the well. Most of the women and girls were raped, often in front of their families, before being dumped down the hole.
Only three people who were in Dos Erres that day survived: an eleven-year-old boy who escaped into the bush, and two toddlers who were taken and raised by the killers. Ramirez Ramos kept Óscar for himself and gave the boy to his mother, who had always wanted her son to have children. It wasn’t until the late nineties that Guatemalan human rights activists learned from soldiers who had been in Dos Erres that day that two toddlers were taken. More than a decade later, an investigator located Óscar in the United States.
As recounted in 2012 by the nonprofit ProPublica news site and the radio show This American Life, the DNA swab proved that Óscar was the son not of Ramos but of Tranquilino Castañeda Valenzuela, a man from the village who, incredibly, survived the massacre because he happened to be away. (Castaneda’s pregnant wife and eight other children died in Dos Erres.) In 2012, after thirty years, father and son were reunited.
The Dos Erres massacre occurred around the same time we were mixing The Trouble with Normal, and just before the call from Oxfam Canada. Although at the time we couldn’t have known specifically about Dos Erres, it was clear to anyone paying attention that Guatemala had become a killing field. Between 1978 and 1983 the Guatemalan military, using weapons, money, and training from the United States and Israel, destroyed 626 Guatemalan villages and murdered more than two hundred thousand villagers, most of them Mayan farmers—campesinos scratching out a meager living on marginal lands that had somehow escaped acquisition by the country’s major landowning families. (According to the Land Tenure Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in 1979 Guatemala had the highest concentration of farmland ownership in Central America, with 2.6 percent of the farms controlling 60 percent of the arable land. Those estates mostly produced coffee, sugarcane, and other export crops. In 1984, fully 84 percent of Guatemala’s rural population was “landless or near landless.”)
One of the most obvious indications of atrocity was the more than one hundred thousand Guatemalans crowded into a number of refugee camps in southern Mexico, along the Río Lacantún, which constitutes about one hundred miles of the border between Mexico and Guatemala. (By 1983 there were more than one million internally displaced Guatemalans as well.) Oxfam proposed sending me and another Canadian songwriter, Nancy White, along with interpreter Rick Arnold, a Canadian who’d grown up in Venezuela, to southern Mexico to visit a couple of the refugee camps, then on to Nicaragua to witness the revolution. The point was to observe, attempt to understand, and then share our findings and impressions with the Canadian public.
; In several sessions over a few days the Latin American Working Group, a Toronto-based nonprofit information centre, briefed Nancy, Rick, and me on the history and recent politics of Latin America in general and Central America in particular. From the Monroe Doctrine to the CIA-Contra connection, from the Argentine Dirty War to the selling of Guatemalan children for their body parts, we heard the sorry stories of Latin Americans suffering the lash of wealthy nations seeking cheap labour and natural resources. In February 1983 we departed for Mexico.
Mexico City is shockingly large. Today megacities dot the globe, having metastasized furiously over the past three decades as impoverished rural regions empty out into urban commerce zones. But in the early eighties Mexico City stood out as an anomaly, a single megalopolis containing some twenty million souls, nearly the population of Canada at the time. It was one thing to know a number, quite another to see what it meant on the physical plane. In a commercial jet soaring at whatever rapid rate those things go on approach to airports, we flew over mile after mile of suburbs, single-story buildings the colour of the surrounding dust giving way to larger and more substantial ones and eventually to high-rises, for half an hour before landing.
Modernity surprised me throughout Mexico City. I didn’t have any particular expectations, but my mind turned out to be awash in unexamined stereotypes. I was expecting a backwater of sombreros and serapes, which speaks loudly to the educational benefits of travel. When my guitar failed to turn up on the baggage carousel, I shrugged to myself and said, “Of course,” but it was delivered to our hotel in the art deco Zona Rosa neighbourhood in a most efficient fashion. Here was a modern, throbbing metropolis of unexpected beauty and concentrated wealth contrasting sharply with limitless poverty. Mexico City is the world’s eighth-richest city, with a gross domestic product of around $400 billion. More important to me, then and now, the place is home to diverse and spirited communities of artists, musicians, intellectuals, and dissidents, some of whom I would meet during our brief stay.
One night we attended a party at the apartment of a film director, which featured a screening of his newly completed documentary on the tango. I knew virtually nothing about the music other than cheesy stereotypes, but in the film the tango came alive, rich and sophisticated. Like the earliest jazz, it was an outgrowth of the underclass traditions of the African diaspora, in this case as manifested in Argentina.
I had made it clear to Oxfam, and stressed to people we met along the way, that I wanted to understand what was going on and not be propagandized to. We arranged meetings with Central American political activists who were exiles from various countries, including Guatemala. At one of these, a spokeswoman for the main element of Guatemala’s anti-government guerrilla movement provided accounts of government troops committing atrocities against unarmed peasants.
“Forgive my ignorance,” I said, “but how do you know it was the army doing this? How do people know it wasn’t some guerrilla faction?”
She looked at me blankly for a moment and then answered, without condescension, “They came in helicopters.”
It was embarrassing, but it wasn’t a totally misplaced question. It’s just that the answer was so glaringly obvious, at least to the victims. Later, in 1999, the Guatemalan Report of the Commission for Historical Clarification found that 93 percent of human rights abuses in Guatemala during the seventies and eighties were committed by the Guatemalan military. The report also disclosed that 83 percent of those killed were Mayan, and that the United States’ funding, training, and directing of the Guatemalan military and intelligence units “had significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation.” The units in question did the hands-on work. For the United States, it was just another Indian war.
I made a lot of notes during our three weeks in Mexico and Nicaragua, and they help paint the scene.
* * *
The Kinks on the radio driving along Avenue of the Insurgents—“You really got me now.” Climb up two flights of stairs in a bare art deco building. Knock, looking for X. X is a Baptist pastor who used to share an office in San Salvador with a Jesuit priest on an ecumenical education project. X was sent to Puerto Rico for a World Council of Churches meeting. On arrival, he called home to tell his wife he was okay. She told him not to come back. Soldiers had taken the priest away. No, they were not in uniform but as they left, one said to the other, “OK, major.” So the pastor came to Mexico, eventually to be joined by his family. Three years later they have a life here. But he wants to go back to El Salvador, and I ask him how he can think of going back, meaning where does the courage come from? He misunderstands and talks about planes, false papers, and the underground. I lamely wish him good luck and ask, “By the way, what happened to the priest?” “After some days his body appeared in the dump, burn marks on his eyelids, the mark of the beast.”
* * *
During our couple of days in Mexico City, Nancy and Rick went out and bought six suitcases, which they filled with medical supplies, including much-needed penicillin and painkillers—you can buy anything over the counter in Mexico—to be distributed at the refugee camps on behalf of Oxfam Canada. We then flew to Oaxaca and rented a car, making our way through the rugged terrain of what would later be the Zapatista stronghold of Chiapas to the old colonial city of San Cristóbal de las Casas. The Catholic archdiocese there had quietly arranged for a pilot to meet us in the nearby hamlet of Las Margaritas, just thirty miles from the Guatemalan border. (The government of Mexico had, for reasons known only to them, chosen to deny that there were any refugees. No outsiders were permitted into the camps, not even representatives of the United Nations. The Church provided the only source of support for the Guatemalans, and even that had to be covert. It wasn’t nearly enough.)
Las Margaritas is at the eastern edge of a vast tropical wilderness spread across much of southern Mexico and northern Guatemala. Although logging, ranching, road building, and oil exploration have made a deep impact on this critical island of biodiversity, it remains one of the wildest and most beautiful places in the Western Hemisphere. Surrounding cloud forests still nurture endangered species such as the horned guan and the resplendent quetzal, Guatemala’s national bird. It was in the middle of this wilderness, on the western, Mexican side of the Río Lacantún, where we would find the Guatemalan refugees, impressive in their own way for being alive against the odds. They were eager to connect.
The Mexican government’s denial of the existence of a refugee problem was odd, as if the longest-running war in the Americas and tens of thousands of desperate camp dwellers sprawled along a major river could be ignored. The Guatemalan civil war had begun in 1960 and would not end until 1996. The genesis of the war was the 1954 coup that ousted the democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. The CIA, acting on behalf of the United Fruit Company, armed, funded, and trained coup leaders to reestablish Guatemala as a feudal state in fealty to foreign businesses. At the time United Fruit owned 42 percent of the arable land in Guatemala—the largest single land holding in the country—but the company was slated to lose 40 percent of it to Árbenz’s Decree 900, which sought to redistribute farmlands to allow campesinos to grow food and become self-sufficient.
United Fruit had a couple of key allies in the U.S. government—the Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster, who designed and implemented the coup. At the time, Allen was director of the CIA and also on the board of United Fruit; John Foster was secretary of state and his law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, represented United Fruit. These guys were, and their modern-day protégés remain, startlingly brazen in their self-serving wars—their greed knowing no bounds, their shame never acknowledged. That a democratically elected government could be overthrown and an entire nation brutalized in the service of just one corporation reveals more about Western economics (and about the mechanics of “democracy”) than anything you’re likely to find in The Wall Street Journal.
In Las Margaritas, Rick located the man who would fly u
s to the refugee camps. The pilot was a slightly paunchy but fit-looking man of middle age, with longish hair framing a face lined and stubbled, mouth permanently set in a sneer. When he noticed the gold loops in my ear, he started addressing me disdainfully as “Alice Cooper.” He flew a battered single-engine Cessna with no passenger seats. Where the seats would have been, he’d piled a number of fifty-pound bags of rice. Our man’s livelihood came mainly from supplying the large farms in the area, the fincas, with food, fuel, furniture, whatever—if it would fit in his plane, he would fly it in.
Nancy was invited to sit in the copilot’s seat. Rick and I climbed onto the rice and piled the medical supplies and our personal things at our feet. I did a double take and chuckled at the dashboard: where you would expect to see navigational gear, there was just a fuel gauge, an altimeter, and a battery-powered transistor radio jangling out ranchero music. Otherwise, the panel was an array of variously shaped holes. The pilot cranked the engine over and taxied us, roaring and bouncing, down the grassy field. As we picked up speed, he looked over his shoulder with a grin and shouted in a perfect Pancho Villa accent, “You know, I never took a flying lesson. Now I own my own airline. How do you like that, Alice Cooper?”
I asked where he learned to fly. He said, “Well, I used to hang around the pilots and they showed me what to do. Eventually I managed to get hold of an airplane.” He learned by apprenticing, the way people in traditional societies do. It was novel to see that applied to a job we think of as so high-tech, but, lessons or not, he got us where we wanted to go. Soon enough, we landed on a dusty, rutted strip at a camp called Puerto Rico, a few miles from the border. Our man would come back and pick us up to fly us to our other destination, a camp called Chanjul, in a couple of days.
* * *
We carry medical supplies to the Guatemalan refugee camps. Remote. Sad, tired faces. Pathetic smiles of welcome. The airplane the only contact with civilization and its casual gifts of aid on which they almost survive. The little boys along the dirt runway hold toy planes made of scraps of wood. Our medicine is all that they have—six full suitcases for 8,000 people. They feel that we, and those like us, are their only hope. Someone to tell their story to the outside world.
Rumours of Glory Page 21