The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind

by Eduardo Galeano

  In no time word gets around that a position is vacant. Guatemalan exiles, military and civilian, fly to Washington to offer their services; others knock at the doors of U.S. embassies. José Luis Arenas, “friend” of Vice-President Nixon, offers to overthrow President Arbenz for two hundred thousand dollars. General Federico Ponce says he has a ten-thousand-man army ready to attack the National Palace. His price would be quite modest, although he prefers not to talk figures yet. Just a small advance …

  Throat cancer rules out United Fruit’s preference, Juan Córdova Cerna. On his deathbed, however, Doctor Córdova rasps out the name of his own candidate: Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, trained at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a cheap, obedient burro.

  (416 and 471)

  1954: Washington

  The Deciding Machine, Piece by Piece

  Dwight Eisenhower President of the United States. Overthrew the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran because it nationalized oil. Has now given orders to overthrow the government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.

  Sam Zemurray Principal stockholder in United Fruit. All his concerns automatically turn into U.S. government declarations, and ultimately into rifles, mortars, machineguns, and CIA airplanes.

  John Foster Dulles U.S. Secretary of State. Former lawyer for United Fruit.

  Allen Dulles Director of the CIA. Brother of John Foster Dulles. Like him, has done legal work for United Fruit. Together they organize “Operation Guatemala.”

  John Moors Cabot Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. Brother of Thomas Cabot, the president of United Fruit.

  Walter Bedell Smith Under Secretary of State. Serves as liaison in Operation Guatemala. Future member of the board of United Fruit.

  Henry Cabot Lodge Senator, U.S. representative to the United Nations. United Fruit shareholder. Has on various occasions received money from this company for speeches in the Senate.

  Anne Whitman Personal secretary to President Eisenhower. Married to United Fruit public relations chief.

  Spruille Braden Former U.S. ambassador to several Latin American countries. Has received a salary from United Fruit since 1948. Is widely reported in the press to have exhorted Eisenhower to suppress communism by force in Guatemala.

  Robert Hill U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica. Collaborates on “Operation Guatemala.” Future board member of United Fruit.

  John Peurifoy U.S. ambassador to Guatemala. Known as the butcher of Greece for his past diplomatic service in Athens. Speaks no Spanish. Political background: the U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C., where he once worked as an elevator operator.

  (416, 420, and 465)

  1954: Boston

  The Lie Machine, Piece by Piece

  The Motor The executioner becomes the victim; the victim, the executioner. Those who prepare the invasion of Guatemala from Honduras attribute to Guatemala the intention to invade Honduras and all Central America. The tentacles of the Kremlin are plain to see, says John Moors Cabot from the White House. Ambassador Peurifoy warns in Guatemala: We cannot permit a Soviet republic to be established from Texas to the Panama Canal. Behind this scandal lies a cargo of arms shipped from Czechoslovakia. The United States has forbidden the sale of arms to Guatemala.

  Gear I News and articles, declarations, pamphlets, photographs, films, and comic strips about Communist atrocities in Guatemala bombard the public. This educational material, whose origin is undisclosed, comes from the offices of United Fruit in Boston and from government offices in Washington.

  Gear II The Archbishop of Guatemala, Mariano Rossell Arellano, exhorts the populace to rise against communism, enemy of God and the Fatherland. Thirty CIA planes rain down his pastoral message over the whole country. The archbishop has the image of the popular Christ of Esquipulas, which will be named Captain General of the Liberating Brigade, brought to the capital.

  Gear III At the Pan-American Conference, John Foster Dulles pounds the table with his fist and gets the blessing of the Organization of American States for the projected invasion. At the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge blocks Jacobo Arbenz’s demands for help. U.S. diplomacy is mobilized throughout the world. The complicity of England and France is obtained in exchange for a U.S. commitment to silence over the delicate matters of the Suez Canal, Cyprus, and Indochina.

  Gear IV The dictators of Nicaragua, Honduras, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic not only lend training camps, radio transmitters, and airports to “Operation Guatemala,” they also make a contribution to the propaganda campaign. Somoza I calls together the international press in Managua and displays some pistols with hammers and sickles stamped on them. They are, he says, from a Russian submarine intercepted en route to Guatemala.

  (416, 420, and 447)

  1954: Guatemala City

  The Reconquest of Guatemala

  Guatemala has neither planes nor antiaircraft installations, so U.S. pilots in U.S. planes bomb the country with the greatest of ease.

  A powerful CIA transmitter, installed on the roof of the U.S. embassy, spreads confusion and panic: the Lie Machine informs the world that this is the rebel radio, the Voice of Liberation, transmitting the triumphal march of Colonel Castillo Armas from the jungles of Guatemala. Meanwhile, Castillo Armas, encamped on a United Fruit plantation in Honduras, awaits orders from the Deciding Machine.

  Arbenz’s government, paralyzed, attends the ceremony of its own collapse. The aerial bombings reach the capital and blow up the fuel deposits. The government confines itself to burying the dead. The mercenary army, God, Fatherland, Liberty, crosses the border. It meets no resistance. Is it money or fear that explains how Guatemala’s military chiefs could surrender their troops without firing a shot? An Argentine doctor in his early twenties, Ernesto Guevara, tries in vain to organize popular defense of the capital: he doesn’t know how or with what. Improvised militias wander the streets unarmed. When Arbenz finally orders the arsenals opened, army officers refuse to obey. On one of these dark ignoble days, Guevara has an attack of asthma and indignation; on another, one midnight after two weeks of bombings, President Arbenz slowly descends the steps of the National Palace, crosses the street, and seeks asylum in the Mexican embassy.

  (81, 416, 420, and 447)

  1954: Mazatenango

  Miguel at Forty-Nine

  As soon as the birds started singing, before first light, they sharpened their machetes, and now they reach Mazatenango at a gallop, in search of Miguel. The executioners are making crosses on a long list of those marked to die, while the army of Castillo Armas takes over Guatemala. Miguel is number five on the most-wanted list, condemned for being a red and a foreign troublemaker. Since his arrival on the run from El Salvador, he has not stopped for an instant his work of labor agitation.

  They sic dogs on him. They aim to parade his body hanging from a horse along the roads, his throat slit by a machete. But Miguel, one very experienced and knowing animal, loses himself in the scrub.

  And so occurs the tenth birth of Miguel Mármol, at forty-nine years of age.

  (222)

  1954: Guatemala City

  Newsreel

  The archbishop of Guatemala declares: “I admire the sincere and ardent patriotism of President Castillo Armas.” Amid a formidable display of gibberish, Castillo Armas receives the blessing of the papal nuncio, Monsignor Genaro Verrolino.

  President Eisenhower congratulates the CIA chiefs at the White House: “Thanks to all of you. You’ve averted a Soviet beachhead in our hemisphere.”

  The head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, assigns to a Time journalist the job of framing Guatemala’s new constitution.

  Time publishes a poem by the wife of the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala. The poem says that Mr. and Mrs. Peurifoy are optimistic because Guatemala is no longer communistic.

  At his first meeting with the ambassador after the victory, President Castillo Armas expresses his concern at the insufficiency of local jails and the lack of necessary cells for all the Communists. According to lists sent from Washingt
on by the State Department, Guatemala’s Communists total seventy-two thousand.

  The embassy throws a party. Four hundred Guatemalan guests sing in unison “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  (416 and 420)

  1954: Rio de Janeiro

  Getulio

  He wants to erase the memory of his own dictatorship, those bad old police-state days, and so in his final years governs Brazil as no one ever has before.

  He takes the side of the wage earner. Immediately the profit-makers declare war.

  To stop Brazil from being a colander, he corks up the hemorrhage of wealth. Immediately foreign capital takes to economic sabotage.

  He recovers for Brazil its own oil and energy, which are as national a patrimony as anthem and flag. The offended monopolies immediately respond with a fierce counteroffensive.

  He defends the price of coffee instead of burning half the crop, as was customary. The United States immediately cuts its purchases in half.

  In Brazil, journalists and politicians of all colors and areas join the scandalized chorus.

  Getulio Vargas has governed with dignity. When he is forced to bow down, he chooses the dignity of death. He raises the revolver, aims at his own heart, and fires.

  (427, 429, and 432)

  1955: Medellín

  Nostalgia

  It is almost twenty years since Carlos Gardel burned to death, and the Colombian city of Medellín, where the tragedy occurred, has become a place of pilgrimage and the focus of a cult.

  The devotees of Gardel are known by their tilted hats, striped pants, and swaying walk. They slick down their hair, look out of the corners of their eyes, and have twisted smiles. They bow and sweep, as if in a constant dance, when shaking hands, lighting a cigarette, or chalking a billiard cue. They spend the night leaning against some suburban lamp-post, whistling or humming tangos which explain that all women are whores except mother, that sainted old lady whom God has taken to his glory.

  Some local devotees, and certain visiting cultists from Buenos Aires, sell relics of the idol. One offers genuine Gardel teeth, acquired on the spot when the plane blew up. He has sold more than thirteen hundred at an average of twelve dollars apiece. It was some years ago that he found his first buyer, a tourist from New York, a member of the Gardel Fan Club. On seeing the souvenir, how could the customer help but burst into tears?

  (184)

  1955: Asunción

  Withdrawal Symptoms

  When he commits the unforgivable sin of promulgating a divorce law, the Church makes the missing sign of the cross over him, and the military begin to conspire, in full daylight, to overthrow him.

  The news is celebrated in drawing rooms and mourned in kitchens; Perón has fallen. Offering no resistance, he leaves Argentina, for Paraguay and exile.

  In Asuncion, his days are sad. He feels beaten, old, alone. He claims that by his act of renunciation a million deaths have been avoided. But he also says that the people didn’t know how to defend what he gave them, that the ingrates deserve whatever misfortunes befall them, that they think with their bellies, not with their heads or hearts.

  One morning Perón is confiding his bitterness to his host, Ricardo Gayol, when suddenly he half-closes his eyes and whispers: “My smile used to drive them crazy. My smile …”

  He raises his arms and smiles as if he were on the palace balcony, greeting a plaza filled with cheering people. “Would you like my smile?”

  His host looks at him, stupefied.

  “Take it, it’s yours,” says Perón. He takes it out of his mouth and puts it in his host’s hand—his false teeth.

  (327)

  1955: Guatemala City

  One Year after the Reconquest of Guatemala,

  Richard Nixon visits this occupied land. The union of United Fruit workers and five hundred and thirty-two other unions have been banned by the new government. The new penal code punishes with death anyone who calls a strike. Political parties are outlawed. The books of Dostoyevsky and other Soviet writers have been thrown onto the bonfire.

  The banana kingdom has been saved from agrarian reform. The vice-president of the United States congratulates President Castillo Armas. For the first time in history, says Nixon, a Communist government has been replaced by a free one.

  (416 and 420)

  1956: Buenos Aires

  The Government Decides That Peronism Doesn’t Exist

  While shooting workers on garbage dumps, the Argentine military decrees the nonexistence of Perón, Evita, and Peronism. It is forbidden to mention their names or their deeds. Possessing images of them is a crime. The presidential residence is demolished to the last stone, as though the disease were contagious.

  But what about the embalmed body of Evita? She is the most dangerous symbol of the arrogance of the rabble who have sauntered the corridors of power as if in their own homes. The generals dump the body in a box labeled “Radio Equipment” and send it into exile. Just where is a secret. To Europe, rumor has it, or maybe to an island in mid-ocean. Evita becomes a wandering body traveling secretly through remote cemeteries, expelled from the country by generals who don’t know—or don’t want to know—that she lies within the people.

  (311 and 327)

  1956: León

  Son of Somoza

  Santa Marta, Santa Marta has a train, sing the musicmakers, dance the dancers, Santa Marta has a train but has no tram; and in the middle of the song and the fiesta, Rigoberto López Pérez, poet, owner of nothing, fells the owner of everything with four bullets.

  A North American plane carries off the dying Anastasio Somoza to a North American hospital in the North American Panama Canal Zone, and he dies in a North American bed. They bury him in Nicaragua, with the honors of a prince of the Church.

  Somoza I held power for twenty years. Every six years he lifted his state of siege for one day and held the elections that kept him on the throne. Luis, eldest son and heir, is now the richest and most powerful man in Central America. From Washington, President Eisenhower congratulates him.

  Luis Somoza bows before the statue of his father, the bronze hero who gallops motionlessly in the very center of Managua. In the shadow of the horse’s hoofs he seeks advice from the founder of the dynasty, guide to good government, proliferator of jails and businesses, then covers the monumental tomb with flowers.

  Evading the vigilance of an honor guard, the hand of somebody, anybody, everybody, has hurriedly scrawled this epitaph on the marble tomb: Here lies Somoza, a bit rottener than in life.

  (10, 102, and 460)

  1956: Santo Domingo

  In the Year Twenty-Six of the Trujillo Era

  his likeness is sold in the markets, among the little engravings of the Virgin Mary, Saint George, and other miracle workers.

  “Saints, cheap saints!”

  Nothing Dominican is beyond his grasp. All belongs to him: the first night of the virgins, the last wish of the dying, the people and the cows, the air fleet and the chain of brothels, the sugar and wheat mills, the beer factory and the virility-potion bottling plant.

  For twenty-six years Trujillo has occupied God’s vice-presidency. Every four years, this formula has been blessed by democratic elections: God and Trujillo, proclaim all walls.

  In her work Moral Meditations, which earns her the title of First Lady of Caribbean Letters, Do–a María de Trujillo compares her husband to El Cid and Napoleon Bonaparte. Plump Doña María, who practices usury during the week and mysticism on Sundays, has in turn been compared with Saint Teresa de Jesus by local critics.

  With El Cid’s sword or Napoleon’s hat, Trujillo poses for statues. Statues multiply him in bronze and marble, with a chin he doesn’t have and without the double chin he does. Thousands of statues: From high on their pedestals, Trujillo straddles the most remote corner of every city or village, watching. In this country not a fly shits without his permission.

  (63 and 101)

  1956: Havana

  Newsreel

&nb
sp; The Cuban army has thwarted an armed expedition from Mexico, surrounding the invaders, machinegunning and bombing them at a place called Alegría de Pío in Oriente province. Among the many dead are Fidel Castro, leader of the gang, and an Argentine Communist agitator, Ernesto Guevara.

  After enjoying a long stay in the city of New York, Dr. Ernesto Sarrá and his very attractive and elegant wife, Loló, figures of the highest rank in this capital’s social circles, have returned to Havana.

  Also arriving from New York is Bing Crosby, the popular singer who, without removing his topcoat or beaver hat, declared at the airport: “I have come to Cuba to play golf.”

  A young Havanan, on the point of winning the grand prize in the “TV School Contest,” fails to answer the next to last question. The final question, which remained unasked, was: What is the name of the river that crosses Paris?

  An exceptional lineup will run tomorrow at the Marianao Racecourse.

  (98)

  1956: At the Foot of the Sierra Maestro

  Twelve Lunatics

  They go a week without sleep, huddled together like sardines in a can, vomiting, while the north wind toys playfully with the little boat Granma. After much seesawing in the Gulf of Mexico, they disembark in the wrong place, and a few steps ashore are swept by machinegun fire or burned alive by incendiary bombs, a slaughter in which almost all of them fall. The survivors consult the sky for directions but get the stars mixed up. The swamps swallow their backpacks and their arms. They have no food except sugarcane, and they leave its betraying refuse strewn along the trail. They lose their condensed milk by carrying the cans holes down. In a careless moment they mix their little remaining fresh water with sea water. They get lost and search aimlessly for one another. Finally, one small group discovers another small group on these slopes, by chance, and so the twelve saved from annihilation join together.