by John Gibler
PRAISE FOR TORN FROM THE WORLD
“John Gibler’s powerful recounting of the forced disappearance of Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile unearths the brutal machinery of state-sanctioned torture and terrorism in Mexico today. It is also a deeply lyrical story of survival against the odds, enabled by communities of resistance and solidarity. This book must provoke an outcry. We cannot know this story and see the world in the same way.”
—Sujatha Fernandes, author of Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling
“Once in a long while a brilliant writer happens on a story he was born to tell—a story that in its stark and unremitting horror gives us a glimpse of the world as it is, unvarnished and unredeemed. John Gibler is such a writer and Torn From the World such a story. A wrenching, astonishing tale, brilliantly told.”
—Mark Danner, author of Spiral and The Massacre at El Mozote
“There are things that we would rather not know. Those are precisely the things that John Gibler investigates and comes back to tell us. Here he dwells on the unconscionable and methodic tortures to which the Mexican State submitted Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile. But, also, he tells the story of how this man didn’t let himself be erased by his torturers, preserving his humanity. Torn from the World is the product of a thorough investigation and it is written with rage and humility at the same time. This is the work of one of the most important journalists of our time.”
—Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World
“Not since Rodolfo Walsh’s classic Operation Massacre have I read a work of political and literary journalism as inventive and urgent as John Gibler’s Torn from the World. With courage, empathy, and clear-sightedness, Gibler tackles questions most journalists won’t go near. How to capture in language and via memory practices—torture and disappearance—designed to destroy meaning and erase the past? How to write without complicity or exploitation? How to listen, and to fight? How to take sides with truth? Torn from the World is at once gripping and profound. It is, to borrow Gibler’s phrase, an ‘insurgent embrace,’ hopeful and defiant, a work of outrage and of love.”
—Ben Ehrenreich, author of The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine
“At once harrowing and humane, John Gibler’s wonderful new book Torn from the World shines a light on the darkest corners of the Mexican justice system. We cannot turn away from what we see there. This is a brave, daring book, equal in every way to the extraordinary life it documents.”
—Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles
“John Gibler’s brilliantly written story of the abduction, disappearance, and torture of Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile assembles the personal testimonies of Tzompaxtle, his wife, and his brother, and interviews with journalists, a former guerrilla leader, and human rights advocates to provide an approximation to the truth. Tzompaxtle is but one of the thousands of Mexicans who have been disappeared in recent years by the State, the cartels or a combination of the two. Writing against a proliferation of semi-official reports and denials claiming truth and that raise questions about the veracity of the testimonies and interviews, Gibler faces the phantom of writing violence: the violence one exerts when writing about violence. Can one avoid writing violence? Can memory provide evidence beyond its inevitable subjective anchorings? Anticipating these questions, Gibler’s story of Tzompaxtle’s disappearance includes theoretical reflections on memory and violence. In these times when truth is relativized for the sake of political expediency, Gibler’s is a sobering account that provides readers with the materials from which he elaborates his story of Tzompaxtle. This book offers an implicit response to the denigration of journalism, hence of truth-telling.”
—José Rabasa, author of Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier
“John Gibler has produced a giant of a book. A combination of a political thriller, personal testimony, interviews, and deep, insightful reflection, Torn from the World is a work full of pain. It is also charged with hope—a hope born of the struggle against systemic violence, and of the struggle to survive and to live in a better world, one of equality for all.”
—Joseph Nevins, author of Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid
“In this great work of literary journalism we come to know a life of vertigo in a Mexico still more opaque and unjust than the one we see in the newspapers and social media. This is the shadow Mexico where armed struggle and fierce repression wage a decades-long battle. . . . Torn from the World proves that John Gibler views writing as a form of dissent, of going against the grain. It also shows, through the story of an impossible escape, that in the Mexico of the shadows, every once in a while, one finds a bit of light.”
—Diego Osorno, Más por más
“John Gibler has written a raw and forceful portrait to show the extremes of violence and torture.”
—Juan Carlos Talavera, Excelsior
“With rigor and imagination in equal measure, John Gibler mixes literary metaphor with narrative journalism, testimony with the theoretical essay, the open-ended interview with critical reflection.”
—Andrés Fabián Henao, Palabras al Margen
“Beyond the reporting or the mere description of the events, Torn from the World by John Gibler is a conversation from the shadows of clandestinity that seeks to step away from the power relations that characterize the journalist’s labor. . . . Here one finds a bone-chilling testimony from the school of pain to which men and women with ideals and a thirst for justice are submitted in a country like [Mexico], dominated by autocrats and criminals disguised as public officials.”
—Lobsang Castañeda, Revista Leemás
“Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile, a member of a guerrilla group in the Mexican state of Guerrero, was abducted by the Mexican military one evening in October 1996, held for four months, and brutally tortured. Gibler, the author of the shattering I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us (2017), presents another devastating but necessary book. Reading this in light of the confirmation of the latest director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, who oversaw ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ in an earlier CIA position, is especially poignant in that this is a powerful reminder of the dreadful cost the use of torture entails, and of the U.S.’ role in perpetuating torture on the American continents. Gibler’s interviews with Tzompaxtle Tecpile provide the marrow for a carefully researched, meticulously constructed, and often excruciating narrative. While honoring Tzompaxtle Tecpile’s story, Gibler honors the reader’s intelligence, nimbly deconstructing the roots and the legacy of torture. This is an important look at the price exacted by the legitimatizing of state-sponsored violence and the concealment of the truth about such operations, and their disastrous consequences for everyone.”
—Sara Martinez, Booklist, Starred Review
PRAISE FOR I COULDN’T EVEN IMAGINE THAT THEY WOULD KILL US: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE ATTACKS AGAINST THE STUDENTS OF AYOTZINAPA
CHOSEN ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2017
BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“Journalist Gibler’s investigative prowess yields a book that uses a chorus of voices—eyewitness accounts of the students and others at the scene—to add depth and clarity to the Sept. 26, 2014, massacre of students in the city of Iguala, Mexico, that left six people dead, 40 wounded, and 43 students missing who have yet to be seen since. It’s an unforgettable reconstruction of a national tragedy.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“[A] raw and vulnerable glimpse into the violence that continues to affect parts of Mexico. . . . Readers interested in learning more about crime and corruption in Mexico, especially from the point of view of the victims, will want to read this book.”
—Li
brary Journal
“This is an essential work of exacting, caring, and memorializing reportage.”
—Booklist, Starred Review
“In Mexico, John Gibler’s book has been recognized as a journalistic masterpiece, an instant classic, and the most powerful indictment available of the devastating state crime committed against the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students in Iguala. This meticulous, choral re-creation of the events of that night is brilliantly vivid and alive, it will terrify and inspire you and shatter your heart.”
—Francisco Goldman, author of The Interior Circuit:
A Mexico City Chronicle
“The hideous Ayotzinapa atrocity reveals with vivid horror how Mexico is being destroyed by the U.S.-based ‘drug war’ and its tentacles, penetrating deeply into the security system, business, and government, and strangling what is decent and hopeful in Mexican society. Gibler’s remarkable investigations lift the veil from these terrible crimes and call for concerted action to extirpate the rotten roots and open the way for recovery from a grim fate.”
—Noam Chomsky
“A powerful and searing account of a devastating atrocity. Gibler’s innovative style takes us on a compelling journey through a landscape of terror and brutality against those whose only crime was to demand the freedom to think.”
—Brad Evans, columnist on violence for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books
“We are fortunate to now have in English, John Gibler’s courageous account and oral history of the 2014 atrocity in Mexico in which 43 students vanished from the face of the earth and remain absent, while six more people (three of them students) were found dead, one of them mutilated. The U.S. ‘war on drugs’ has unleashed decades of unimaginable and hideous terrorism in Mexico, just as the ‘war on terror’ is doing in the Middle East. The cruel viciousness of Ayotzinapa, with the 48 families of all the disappeared, murdered, and critically wounded students insisting on answers from the Mexican government, opens the door to a powerful resistance movement, which also requires U.S. citizens to insist on ending the U.S. war against the Mexican people, which began in the 1820s and has never abated.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’
History of the United States and the forthcoming
The US-Mexican War, 1846−1848
TORN
FROM THE
WORLD
A Guerrilla’s Escape
From a Secret Prison in Mexico
John Gibler
City Lights Books | Open Media Series
Copyright © 2018 by John Gibler
Translated, revised and expanded from the Spanish original by John Gibler.
All Rights Reserved.
Originally published in Spanish as Tzompaxtle: La fuga de un guerrillero by Tusquets Editores (Mexico) in 2014.
Cover design by: Victor Mingovits, [email protected]
The Open Media Series is edited by Greg Ruggiero.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gibler, John, author.
Title: Torn from the world : a guerrilla’s escape from a secret prison in Mexico / John Gibler.
Other titles: Tzompaxtle. English
Description: San Francisco, CA : City Lights Books, [2018] | Series: Open media series | “Translated, revised and expanded from the Spanish original by John Gibler.” | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018007078 (print) | LCCN 2018027884 (ebook) | ISBN 9780872867833 | ISBN 9780872867529
Subjects: LCSH: Tzompaxtle Tecpile, Andrés—Interviews. | Guerrero
(Mexico :
State)—Underground movements. | Ejército Popular Revolucionario
(Mexico)
| Disappeared persons—Mexico—Interviews. | Victims of state-sponsored terrorism—Mexico—Interviews.
Classification: LCC F1286 (ebook) | LCC F1286 .G5313 2018 (print) |
DDC
972/.73—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007078
City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133
www.citylights.com
CONTENTS
Prologue to the English Edition
The Journalists
The News Reports
They Tear You from the World
The Silences
The Interview
A Piece of Being
Writing and Violence
The Social Worker and the Lawyer
An Incredible Escape
The Brothers
Tzompaxtle and Nube
The Disappeared
Endnotes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile:
More than an effort to tell your story,
this is an effort to honor your story.
For all who struggle such that there be no
more stories like this.
In memoriam: Edwin B. Allaire (1930–2013)
And, unfortunately,
pain expands in the world all the time,
it grows thirty minutes per second, step by step,
and the nature of pain, is twice the pain
and the condition of misery, carnivorous, voracious,
is twice the pain . . .
—César Vallejo, “The Nine Monsters”
In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened.
—Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman
It’s more than true, it actually happened.
—Gogol Bordello, “Inmigraniada”
Art, he said, forms part of the particular history long before forming part of art history as such. Art, he said, is the particular history. It is the only particular history possible. It is the particular history and at the same time the womb of the particular history. And what is the womb of the particular history, I asked. Immediately afterward I thought he would respond: art. I also thought, and this was a courteous thought, that we were drunk and it was time to go home. But my friend said: the womb of the particular history is the secret history.
—Roberto Bolaño, “The Dentist”
We only wanted the opportunity to tell a little bit of all the truth, of so much truth that exists.
—Estela Ríos González, interview
PROLOGUE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION
TORN FROM THE WORLD IS a book about Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile and his struggle to survive torture and forced disappearance, about the logics, techniques, and infrastructure of torture and forced disappearance, about social struggle and armed anti-colonial insurgency, and about writing. While I worked on the first Spanish edition of this book between 2011 and 2013, I was terrified to see how the State practice of forced disappearance had been incorporated into the tactics used by the entrepreneurs of kidnapping and extortion, how there was a kind of steroid-fueled resurgence of forced disappearances happening under the guise of the so-called War on Drugs. Those forced disappearances continue unabated. No one knows how many people are now disappeared in Mexico, but the only and almost certainly understated official federal number is more than 30,000.
Some six months after this book’s original February 2014 Spanish-language publication in Mexico, more than 100 municipal, state, and federal police as well as non-uniformed armed men attacked the students of Ayotzinapa in Iguala, Guerrero, killing six people, wounding dozens, and forcibly disappearing 43 students. Those students are still being disappeared as I write these words. The present tense here is important, for reasons I discuss in I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa, published under a different title in Spanish in April 2016 and in English in November 2017.
As I worked on this book in 2013, I never even imagined that on September 26, 2014, the State would forcibly disappear 43 socially committed and combative college students appr
oximately 57 miles away from where undercover military agents disappeared Tzompaxtle on October 25, 1996.
This books screams, or tries to. I have sought to share this with you. It should not be pleasurable. The screams are all around us and within us, and not listening to them makes it too easy to acquiesce, to accept a thinly veiled participation in the machinery that produces the screams of horror. This book aspires to combat such acquiescence, to fight against that machinery and those who operate and benefit from it. And because the screams are not only those of horror and pain, but also those of uprising—confrontation, survival, and struggle.
The structure of this book may seem frustrating to some. I try to share, in a way, the investigator’s task with the reader. I show you things, share with you things I’ve found, but do not alert you to what I believe to be mistakes in different people’s memories or reporting, or not, even though I am continually trying to show several things that I believe. But I do not tell you what is true in this story beyond that I believe in the truth of Tzompaxtle’s story, and am sharing with you the reasons why. I share here what various people—several journalists, a lawyer, a social worker, a guerrilla, a brother, a partner—told me, what newspapers printed at the time, and most important, what Tzompaxtle himself told me.
This book is also concerned with the combat that different kinds of truths must face, particularly the ways in which states and courts and lawyers and laws will try to undermine the truths and the truth-telling of people who have suffered—often at the hands of the State, or in a way sanctioned by the State—by seeking out and attacking “errors” in their testimonies. One ambition of this book, in both content and form, is to disarm such strategies of delegitimization and re-victimization by showing how discrete mistakes in memory do not challenge or undermine the truth of traumatic memories, and what is more, often the “mistakes” of memory reveal truths of a different order.