Buying the Night Flight

by Georgie Anne Geyer

  Then one day they came for us. "This is the time," Miguel said with a strange smile, half excited and half wistful. But there was still more waiting. In a small bodega , or bar, they left us for four hours that seemed an eternity. "This is some kind of ruse," Henry kept insisting, suspended between anger and frustration. And in many ways it was this last waiting that turned out to be the most frustrating: Could it be that even now it might not work?

  But I also knew that we had gone too far now to turn back -- and that gave me a strange new feeling of repose. A major rule of dealing with revolutionary movements is this: You put yourselves in their hands and you demonstrate every kind of trust. (This, of course, comes after you have made all your careful calculations.) For all intents and purposes you no longer have any will of your own. In our case our lives and wills were quite simply held in abeyance -- held captive by these fanaticized, inexperienced, idealistic, often cruel, often immensely kind, sometimes crazy young men. Already two Americans, Ronald Homberger and Robert Moran, were known to be dead; they were killed in trying to make contact with these very "boys." One was most probably an innocent scholar, the other probably a Vietnam veteran bent on revenge. We really never knew everything.

  And sometimes it was simply better not to think too far ahead. I called the waiter and asked for another sandwich and beer. And after four hours they came for us.

  ***

  Twenty-nine persons stood up, slim profiles thrown against the sky, with packs on their backs and machine guns thrown casually over their shoulders.

  "The compañera is ready," one of the boys joked. "I'm calling her compañera already." Compañera -- the Spanish term for female comrade. It seemed I was accepted.

  The group fell into line. There was one group of armed guerrillas in the front, another behind, and our "unit" in the center. "Follow the person directly in front of you," they told us. "Make no sound. And show no lights."

  It would have been a splendid idea to follow the person in front of you if you could have seen the person in front of you. But it was midnight and the sliver of a moon was sliding rapidly behind the trees. Somewhat to our surprise -- and soon to our horror -- we found that the guerrillas used no paths or roads. Their idea of going up a mountain was simply going up a mountain. Up the rocks, over the bushes, through the thorns, down into the canyons!

  As absurd as it sounds now, I had on only flat walking shoes. I wore brown pants and a light blouse with a patterned sweater over it. Most of the time I looked simply terrible, and every once in a while I had to creep away and vomit, while Henry, who was very proper about manners, would look at me with an expression that was a mixture of reproachfulness and "I-told-you-so" embarrassment. I was not embarrassed. I was just intent upon getting through the whole thing. But the final absurdity was my black purse. I have always carried a certain type of good, practical black purse with pockets in the sides where I can put my various notebooks and cards. Of course I carried this black purse to the mountains. It was a friendly, familiar thing in this strange new world.

  For the next four hours we staggered, we fell into ditches, we dragged through creeks, we climbed huge rocks and generally suffered for what seemed an eternity. "We had thought of taking you farther into the montaña," Cesar said to me once, with a distinctly ironic twist on his lips, "but we decided the walk would be too hard for you." It struck me that I'd never heard a wiser decision. At 4:00 A.M., just as I was wondering whether I could go any farther, Cesar declared, "All right, we'll stop and sleep here." He motioned toward a grassy place on the side of the mountain; it seemed to bother him not a whit that it was sloped at a forty-five-degree angle.

  He curled up in a checkered blanket with his machine gun in his arms and promptly fell asleep next to Henry. Henry complained later that Cesar's machine gun dug into his ribs all night. I complained that every time I tried to relax on the slope, I began sliding down -- and that directly beneath me was a sixty-foot drop into a canyon with a waterfall. When morning came two hours later, all around my feet were gullies where I had dug into the mountain to keep myself from sliding off of it.

  The next three days that we spent with the FAR were among the strangest of my life. I felt totally suspended in time -- I no longer was sure what or where I was. We spent our days sitting around in the sunlight chattering endlessly in Spanish. Henry took pictures of guerrillas jumping, guerrillas talking, guerrillas posed for battle. All around us were the three thousand troops the army had sent out -- we could hear their shooting all day long. It was we whom they were seeking. The days had a certain rhythm and timing. Three times a day the old peasant man would come. He would deliver the sacks of tortillas and the plastic bags filled with bean paste. Then he would sit back on a rock for a full hour gazing fondly at the young rebels.

  "Tell me," I asked him finally, "why do you help the guerrillas?"

  This time he climbed down from the rock with apparent eagerness and walked over to me. "For humanitarian love," he said. He looked me straight in the eye as he added, "They are the first ones who ever cared about us."

  Cesar, so slim, so sure, so cool, then motioned to another, younger peasant who had come up with the older man. "Tell her everything," he said emotionlessly.

  "Do you have any land?" I asked the younger man, as he scram bled dutifully down to face me.

  "We pay twenty-five dollars a year to the landlord for the land ... " he began. (That was a lot, given their meager incomes.)

  Montes cut in. "The landlord they never see," he added scornfully. "They have just enough land to live on a subsistence level."

  "We're not allowed to live in our village anymore," the peasant began again.

  "For helping us -- they were forced to move here," Montes inserted. "The police burned their houses, and burned down their chapel -- they are Evangelicals."

  The peasant nodded. "And they destroyed our honeybees. I was four months a prisoner."

  "Did they torture you?" the guerrilla commander asked.

  "No," he said, shaking his head. "But my brother--they put that thing over his head and hit him."

  "That thing" was a bag they wrapped over a prisoner's head until he couldn't breathe. Meanwhile they were beating him until he was almost dead, or frightened nearly to death from fear of asphyxiation.

  "My boy, he was eighteen, died of malnutrition while I was in jail. One of my relatives had to pay one hundred fifty dollars to get free. I only had to pay eighty dollars."

  Cesar and his men kept prodding the peasants: "Remember this ... Remember Justo de la Cruz, whom they killed and he didn't even know us ... Think of all the injustices .... "

  It was an effective teaching method, I could see that. Besides, they were organizing the village into political cells, even though the final word came from the directorate general in the capital.

  Most of the guerrillas had been to Cuba for some training, but when I asked Cesar about money from Cuba, he drew himself up proudly and said, "Haven't you read about our bank robberies and our kidnappings? We're entirely self-supporting."

  "Say," Montes went on, "did you know the robbery of the Bank of the Occident was by the FAR? The papers say forty thousand dollars, but we haven't finished counting the money yet." He paused devilishly. "The bank was right in front of the police station," he added, grinning.

  Another time Montes pressed me for what I thought of Fidel Castro. I demurred. I never did believe in expressing my own beliefs while on assignment. Finally he demanded, "Don't you think he's a big egocentric?"

  "Well, frankly, I do," I relented.

  "I do, too," Montes said with a big smile. "But we won't be like that."

  I looked long and hard at him. I didn't say anything more. In years to come I would hear that phrase--"We won't be like that, we will be different" -- so many, many sad times.

  Little by little I drew them out on their acciónes , trying to find out what they really did--and how they justified it.

  There had been an "action" at Jocotales, for i
nstance, a small working-class district of Guatemala City where the guerrillas' "city resistance unit" had attacked that November, killing three of the policemen in ten minutes of steady machine-gunning of the miserably poor adobe section. One of the men killed was a young sergeant, Rigoberto Parazzoli, and he was buried in a military funeral that punctuated the suffering and the senselessness of so much of all that was going on. His body was carried to the cemetery on the shoulders of a police guard while his widow sobbed and tiny barefoot boys sold water in tin cans for the flowers -- five centavos a can.

  He was carried past the tombs of all the assassinated political leaders of the last two decades, for here the cemetery is the Who's Who of Guatemalan politics ... Colonel F. Javier Arana, hero of the Right in the 1940s (assassins never apprehended) .... Mario Mendez Montenegro, hero of the democratic Left until he died mysteriously in 1965 (case never solved)... . The list was endless, the tombs are solid rock, the assassins were in the palace.

  After the funeral, where the sergeant was praised as a man who "defended Guatemala from political restlessness," Henry and I drove out to the police station, seeking out every bit of information and insight. A simple, honest-looking man, Lieutenant Antonio Anselmo Pineda, who was chief of the station, got up from an old wooden table and pointed out the holes in the ceilings and the small caves in the dirt floor where the grenades had exploded.

  "What do you feel about the guerrillas?" I asked him frankly. "Do you feel any hatred for them for doing this?"

  "Hatred?" he repeated, and he blinked his eyes. "No," he said slowly, in words that came to be haunting to me. "We don't know them. They don't know us. We wouldn't have attacked them, but they were attacking us. I don't know why they did it. I don't know what their motives were." He thought for a moment, and raised his eyes questioningly up to me. "Perhaps they know."

  This touched me deeply. So few people could really understand the depths of this tragedy that had grown only more and more desperate over the last twenty years.

  When I asked one of the more sensitive of the guerrillas about the sheer strategic sense of killing poor, ordinary policemen whom, after all, one might expect they were waging the revolution for, he responded by saying thoughtfully, "It is really very complex. If you kill a military officer, usually the people will agree with you. But if you kill a regular policeman, the people resent it. Very often the police are poor people themselves, who work on their days off painting houses and doing odd jobs, so they are well known. Too, we have to keep clarifying things. After we attacked the electric plant, the opposition phoned the firemen and threatened that we would attack them for putting out the fire at the electric plant. This was very clever because the people liked the firemen. We had to put out a statement saying it was not so."

  ***

  The third day the shooting intensified. It was all around us, it was constant, and it was coming closer and closer. A barely perceptible nervous hum seemed to ride through our campsite like a phantom stallion. When I heard Cesar, Miguel, and the others speaking in Spanish about continuing to walk all night deeper into the mountains, I felt distinctly faint.

  I was so exhausted from lack of sleep that I knew neither Henry nor I could do it, so I went over and sat down next to Cesar on the ground. "We've got to get out," I said. He looked at me--a long, harsh look--and shook his head.

  "It will be very hard right now," he said thoughtfully, his eyes narrowed. "But do you really think you must?" I argued forcefully. After talking with some of the others, he returned to tell me, "We'll send two scouts back to see if we can get your car for two o'clock tomorrow morning. That means -- if we can do it -- that you'll have to start out about eight. We'll have to get you to the car so our men can get back here before dawn. It means ... " He paused, and gave me another one of those looks. "It means going through the army lines twice."

  Suddenly I awoke from the torpor and from the relative safety of those three strange days. Suddenly everything was again deadly serious. I realized that part of me feared going back, that in only those few days the side of that hill had come to be home, a protection, roots. Leaving was a new uprooting, a ripping up of a strange new security. There were no farewells; we shook hands with a hushed gravity. We all knew we would never see one another again, and I knew that for all the days of talk and interviewing I would also never really know who or what these young men really were or would be or do.

  The walk out was even more grueling than the walk in. Once we had to pass within sixty feet of the outskirts of a village, Gallo, where we knew army troops were entrenched. As our little group of twelve passed by, a mangy horde of dogs in the village set up a resonant cacophony of baying. "Down," someone whispered, and the word traveled like a stone thrown through the column. For five or six minutes we all lay on our stomachs in the mud and waited. Although I had lost faith in any protective God some years before, I whispered a fervent prayer. We are all basically so weak.

  No one came, and we crept by, phantoms in the charged night.

  An hour later, after we had been pulling ourselves up the steep, often nearly vertical mountainsides by grabbing the dried, bristling stalks of the corn, the boy leading us admitted, "Miren, compañeros ... look, comrades, I must be honest... we've lost our way."

  He didn't need to say it. We had literally been going around in circles in the mountain; we were all exhausted, and the time for getting us out and getting them back was rapidly running out. At one point Henry was so worn out he sat down and said, "I'm staying here until morning."

  I told him, "If you do that, the guerrillas will kill you. And if they don't, I will."

  Gasping for breath and feeling our legs would not hold us, for four more hours we wandered on the stark, fall-away sides of that damnable mountain. More times than I care to recall, I asked myself, "Can I make it?" Could I even take another step? By the end when we finally got back in that opaque blackness to the "path" (whatever in God's name that was), one of the bigger guerrillas was literally pulling me up and over the rocks and another was pulling Henry, who, however, doggedly refused to let them carry his beloved cameras!

  My heart was pumping so hard that my breath came in spasms. Time after time I thought I could not take another breath. Occasionally we would stop and our guide would make a strange birdcall in the endless darkness of this hostile universe we had entered, to be sure we were not lost also from the rest of the group. Luckily, they always answered in the same call. Occasionally we would overhear someone in the darkness giving the code words: "Guerra del Pueblo -- People's War."

  Some ancient Mayan god must have led us, not much before 2:00 a.m., back to the same little road and to our little Salvadorean Volkswagen. I nearly cried for joy when I saw the squat, practical little car standing there, waiting, with that Germanic deliberation. Two well-dressed students were waiting there, and they drove us back to Guatemala City. It was over. The next day we drove out to El Salvador.

  ***

  What came out of it all? Was it really all worth it?

  Professionally the whole series was an incomparable success. It was printed all over the world, even in the Rumanian paper Scinteia, and I felt enormously gratified by the journalistic recognition. It also laid the basis for doing many other such things.

  But I understood clearly the limit of our work. Ethically I was disturbed by the sheer impossibility of reporting the entire situation; I simply had to accept the fact that there was very little I could do about this. Of course I had found out a good deal about the Guatemalan government and military forces beforehand, but there was no further way, once I had been to the mountains, to report directly on activities of that side. I was a marked woman so far as they were concerned, and I still remain so.

  The episode also taught me that you never really can outgrow your image. Roy Fisher, the Daily News editor and a man I admired immensely, wrote in his column at the time, "Hollywood couldn't imagine a foreign correspondent like Georgie Anne Geyer, our man in Havana. She would be better
cast as a pretty school teacher than as a cool, nerveless foreign correspondent who thrives on hazardous assignments." Editor & Publisher did an article on "Gee Gee Finds a Revolution," and repeated the schoolteacher part; they cast me as "your child's seventh grade teacher."

  All my life I had tried to outlive my image as wholesome, blond, smiling girl next door. What more could I do than I now had done? I guess it all just goes to show that one is eternally stuck with oneself.

  I did not return to Guatemala for several years. When I did, I contacted no one in the government and was very, very careful. Then I went back on vacation with my mother and some friends. By then I thought I had been forgotten and I gained what in retrospect was a foolish confidence. So I went back a third time, in 1972. That was the mistake.

  One evening I was returning to the Camino Real Hotel after dining with one of my closest and dearest friends, the former Bolivian diplomat, Julio Sanjines. Julio is a unique spirit. He is a tall man of fine features and matching manners and intelligence whose aristocratic Spanish-Bolivian family had large land holdings in Bolivia before the revolution there in 1952. "We thought that by giving them the land right off, we could save the machinery," Julio used to joke. "But they took the machinery, too."

  Julio and I had and have a special friendship that has prevailed across the years. We have always helped each other whenever one of us was in trouble. Each called the other and something just always happened to make things right again. It is an enormously precious thing.