by John Gibler
At one point, one of the managers of the parking lot, who asked to remain anonymous, said that during the past 52 days the car had been under surveillance by military intelligence officers. “They prohibited us from saying anything to the media.”
He maintained that on October 28 (two days after combatant Rafael’s capture) military intelligence officers arrived at the parking lot and searched the car. “They took some documents, like guerrilla propaganda, and from that moment they began a strict surveillance of the area surrounding the lot.”
He mentioned that the car was in fact left there on the morning of Friday, October 25, which coincides with the list of events published a few days before by the armed group, which had indicated that after leaving the car there, the rebel then went to Zumpango, where he was captured by military intelligence officers at nine in the morning.
On February 5, 1997, El Sol de Acapulco published a front-page, four-column headline: “Discovery of guerrilla materials.” The accompanying photograph shows a number of men armed with machine and submachine guns guarding the white door of a house. A man in civilian clothes covers his face with one hand, apparently a gesture for the photographers to step back. The article by Celso Castro Castro and Javier Trujillo Juárez features the subheading: “Presumably it belongs to the EPR: explosives, uniforms and propaganda found.”
The opening paragraphs read:
In a joint raid of a private residence yesterday, agents from the Federal Attorney General (PGR) and the State Investigative Police (PJE) secured homemade explosive devices, uniforms, and subversive material, presumably belonging to the armed group known as the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR). No one was arrested.
The commanding officers of the two police forces contradicted each other. Initially the director of the PJE, Francisco Vargas Nájera, informed that officers went to the private residence located at 227 Vicente Guerrero Street inside the “Adolfo López Mateos” apartment complex (better know as Los Palomares) after receiving an anonymous call from a teenager at 13:00 hours, and that said teenager notified the police of the discovery.
Vargas Nájera immediately notified the general supervisor, Tomás Herrera Basurto, who, leading two groups, went to the location indicated by the anonymous source and verified that the residence in question consisted of concrete and asbestos sheets, two garages, and a bedroom where police found uniforms, combat boots, subversive printed materials, and more than a dozen homemade explosive devices.
He said that upon realizing this fell under federal jurisdiction, he informed the office of the Federal Attorney General (PGR). He also notified the office that he had taken necessary steps to secure the building in case it was wired with explosives.
The article continues on page two. The reporters describe the arrival of the Guerrero state delegate and subdelegate of the Federal Attorney General, who refused to provide information and ordered the police to keep anyone from getting near the residence. The article continues:
At 8:30 p.m., Rebeca Sereiz Robles, the owner of the property, arrived and was immediately interrogated by Federal Investigative Police agents; she notified them that the residence had been rented by some people who had not paid the rent and for that reason she had gone to see them yesterday, meeting with the unpleasant surprise that her property had been used for other purposes. She then immediately notified the authorities through a relative.
According to authorities, that’s when the police entered the building. Soon afterward, officials outside the residence told the members of the press that they had found the following:
More than a dozen pairs of boots, uniforms, gray bulletproof vests, 7.62 caliber cartridges (used for AK-47 assault rifles), various manuals with different names, gunpowder, a bag of combined fertilizers, bags of sawdust, guerrilla military instruction books, wooden rifle stocks for AK-47s.
Additionally, masking tape, a book of matches, prepared fertilizers, cigarette lighters, sodium chloride and sugar, homemade climont mines (sic), bags of armonal, electronic activating devices, homemade explosives using car exhaust pipes, slingshots for activating bombs, bomb devices, a Smith & Wesson 9 millimeter pistol, watch batteries, a gun clip, a large pair of pliers, telephone wire, circuitry wires, lamp bulbs, clothespins, soldering irons, welding pastes, hemp thread, iron, fishing line, tweezers, scissors, a box cutter, plastic cables, and a mechanic’s toolbox.
The next day El Sol de Acapulco published an article by Javier Trujillo Juárez with the headline: “Police secure artifacts and propaganda from presumed EPR house.” The subheading reads: “It had been abandoned since October.” The piece appears on the left-hand aide of the front page beneath the fold. The article reports that the objects found in the residence, “including a guitar,” were removed from the building under “heavy police guard.” In the article’s fifth paragraph the writer reports:
Minutes later two military officers arrived, a lieutenant colonel and a colonel; they both entered the house accompanied by immediate response personnel from the National Secretariat of Gobernación (SEGOB). No further information concerning the military officers was provided.
The reporter mentions again that police found explosive materials of an unknown type in the house and then writes:
A neighbor who asked that her name not be published said that for more than a year the house had been occupied by “a family that looked like campesinos that had three cars: a Ram pickup and two white Volkswagen Beetles. They were also a bit strange, because they would enter and leave either really early or really late, almost at dawn, and they didn’t socialize with anyone.
The neighbor maintained that “the man that lived there was with his wife, a woman, and they lived there with two children. The woman even gave birth to one of them here, but since October they had abandoned the place.”
On February 10, 1997, El Sur published a four-paragraph article without a byline. The piece appeared in the corner of page six with the headline: “Now I wouldn’t call the EPR to talks: Aguirre.” The article reports that during a press conference, Governor Ángel Aguirre Rivero rejected the possibility of establishing talks with the EPR. Afterward, in the last paragraph, the article states:
Then, regarding the fact that the armed group had written in one if its communiqués that the governor had acknowledged the detention of its combatant, in contrast to the Army which denies any participation in the capture, Aguirre said: “I never said that I acknowledged that that person was apprehended; I said that I had learned about the supposed detention of the combatant Rafael in the press.”
* The term “Dirty War” used in the EPR communiqués and press reports refers to the practices of State terrorism—namely the systematic use of torture, murder, and forced disappearance of members of armed insurgencies, suspected members of or sympathizers with armed insurgencies, people involved in unarmed social struggle, people living in regions with active or suspected insurgencies, or people simply labeled enemies of the State—carried out in Mexico roughly between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, though—as Tzompaxtle’s torture and disappearance show—the practices were never discontinued.
THEY TEAR YOU FROM THE WORLD
IT IS NINE O’CLOCK AT night. Two men stop about five meters in front of you. They start to fight. Another man walks up to them. You and your compañero approach them, wary, to pass them. The third man pulls out a pistol and jumps you. You grab his hand and the barrel of the pistol trying to take the gun. The two of you struggle. Your compañero dodges the other two men and runs. You hear a gunshot and then, in an instant, the other two men take you to the ground. The three of them pin you. They speak into a portable two-way radio. They take off your belt and use it to tie your hands behind you. They blindfold you.
All of this happens in a matter of seconds.*
Your eyes: blindfolded. Your hands: bound. You think: now it’s my turn. You ask yourself if you will be able to endure it, if you will be able to resist, if you will die. You think of your compañera and the treasure she h
olds in her arms. And you tell them goodbye.
The first beatings and questions come in the vehicle. Who are you? Are you from the EPR? Who were the others? Where are they going now? Where was the next meeting point? Where? They stop and take you out of the vehicle. You think you must be on the outskirts of Chilpancingo. You can hear the sounds of the highway in the distance. You don’t know this yet, but these first minutes are important for them.
They remove your clothes and wrap you in blankets. They put you on the rack and tie you down with cords and strips of cloth, completely immobilizing you. They leave only your toes and your head uncovered so they can connect the electrical wires there and close the circuit. You are completely wet. They bind your head down against the rack with strips of cloth, immobilizing it. The defense instincts of the body are mutilated.
They beat you without rest using their fists and the stocks of their pistols. There are about eight or ten people beating you now. More of them are giving orders, watching, or waiting their turn. You can’t see anyone, or anything. You don’t know when the blows will hit or where they will hit. The strikes impact as if materializing from nothing. You cannot move. One man stuffs a wet rag into your mouth. Another shoots water up your nose. They pour water all over your wrapped body. And then they begin with the electric shocks, first to your feet.
This is not some street fight where you can see your opponent, and that has a serious impact. You cannot see them. You do not know where the blows “will rain down,” as they would say. You don’t know where they’ll hit you: on the mouth, the nose, the genitals, or the hands . . . If you could open your eyes, maybe you wouldn’t even be afraid of being beaten because you’d be looking at your aggressor. Not here: You are reduced to a bulk, an object that can be beaten at their will. This has a psychological impact. For you darkness is the only thing real. This reduces you to something even more broken. There is no more . . . you can’t defend yourself.1
They work on your body with precision and efficiency. They have come prepared. But you haven’t. A few minutes ago, for example, you had never felt like your brain is exploding. You did not know that the pain concentrates in the brain. The torture instruments of antiquity really have nothing on these men. They are so precise; they know how to directly reach the brain and burn it.
And the issue is that these first minutes are important for them.
What can you see? Nothing. Is there any light? You don’t know. Sound is all there is: their demented shouts and, in the background, some loud, monotonous music, a hissing that assaults your ears. It’s as if they had torn you from the world and put you in some other place where you lie bound and lacking. You are a vulnerable being without sight, without feet, without hands. You are not the adult they just grabbed, but a person who, just from this change of worlds, has been utterly mutilated. You have no form. This is a state of mutilation, and has been from the beginning.
In only a few minutes, your body feels more pain than many people will experience in a lifetime. And you can’t scream. Your body contracts, your bones contract, and at any moment everything will explode. Pain and fear. How long will this last? Will you endure? Will they kill you? There is no way to know. They take you to a reality that is not the one you know. The risk is immense and it constricts you and it is not only that you may die, but that they can reduce you; they can change you. They remove the gag from your mouth so you can surrender. They tell you: “Help yourself!” But, what is this “help”? It is betrayal.
If they can conquer you in the first minutes then they will have an advantage. If you don’t adjust to this world, if you don’t retain your conscience, if you don’t resist it, they can, in a matter of minutes, change you completely. They have their objective; they have experience; they have been schooled and they have done this for many years.
How long have you been here now? Your notion of time no longer applies. A doctor approaches and checks your vital signs. He says you can take some more but they should let you breathe. You can hear a boss criticizing his minions: that they shouldn’t pour water down your mouth and nose at the same time as they connect the cables because that could kill you too quickly. The boss screams: “Break him! Increase the voltage! Break him into pieces!” This is not to make you afraid: This is to destroy you.
They have medical services here, but not for the right to health: There are no rights here, not even the right to die. There are water and electricity. You feel like life is flowing out of you, but then you return to pain, to the beatings, that is, to your skin and flesh tearing, to the blood spilling from your mouth and nose.
In a place like this, one views life through a different optic. Someone might say: “It is just an issue of taking it, that’s what you’ve got to do.”
No. You don’t know if you’ll make it. That depends on them, they might even kill you by accident. Many people do not come back from this. Thousands have not come back. This is the force of the State. They themselves say so and brag: “This is the face and the true force of the State.” Yes, without a doubt it is.
And again the questions: What is your name? What is your nom de guerre? Where are you from? What military action were you going to carry out? Where? Who is your contact?
You don’t respond. You know that the questions mean pain and death. If you answer, the information will be used to locate your compañeros and your family and torture them, disappear them, or kill them. If you do not answer, then they will torture you more and the moment of your disappearance or death will inch closer. You cannot think it over. You cannot calculate or reflect. They ask. You don’t answer by instinct. The blows rain down. Your body contracts and explodes at the same time. Your nose, broken. Where is your safe house? They remove the gag. Your silence. The electric shocks and the pain.
No word can tell this. No sentence, no story, no metaphor expresses this pain. Pain breaks the words, the language. “Intense pain is world-destroying. Intense pain is also language-destroying: As the content of one’s world disintegrates, so the content of one’s language disintegrates.”2 The scream remains, though cut down by the wet rag in your mouth, and your throat cracks dry with your futile effort to expel the pain. Your entire naked body is wet and in pain, but thirst begins to rip at you from inside.
There is no part of your body that is not under attack. But this is only beginning. You are still livid. It is not so easy to reduce you. The pain increases at thirty minutes per second. You want with all your being for them to untie you just for a moment, just for a bit. You think: Okay, if you’re looking for a fight, you’ve got it, let’s do it, but with a bit more honor. You tell them to let you up for a second. Sure, they say, and they keep at it. The electric shocks. And they beat you along your spine. No. There is no honor here. They do not know what honor is. The doctor says: Bend his hands back; punish his genitals.
Now they make you feel the closest signs of death. What it feels like to die. They are showing that to you now. This brings forth a different kind of fear. You think: Yes, I’m pretty tough, but I don’t want to die. Do they threaten to kill you? No. They are not threatening you; they are telling you. This is their work. They don’t want to scare you.
Again the questions: What is your name? And you speak. But you remain on guard. You speak to get a respite. You give them a false name. And they beat you. And you go on. The respite is infinitesimal and you need and long for another. Questions and answers. Here, with your body tied to the rack. “The question, whatever its content, is an act of wounding; the answer, whatever its content, is a scream.”3 Are you one of them? Yes, yes I’m one of them. Who is your contact? You don’t answer. They box your ears. Strangle you. They hit your head, your muscles. They tell you they are going to castrate you, they are going to rape you with an Iguana’s tail. Water and the electric shocks. They take you to the true scene of pain. They make you live the maximum human pain, the height, the threshold. And this threshold is the thread that divides life and death.
Death also seduces
you.4 You fear it and want to avoid it. But there are moments when, in order not to surrender to them and not to have to endure any more, you want to give yourself to death. There are moments when the anguish is so terrible that you’d rather die, in fact death becomes the refuge, the hope. The pain is so . . . so indescribable, so unbearable, that it’s better to die. And death is not your desire, but in this moment death signifies refuge, the sensation of rest. That’s why you look for it, you seek it, not because you really want to die, but because this other reality is worse.
But no. They are not going to kill you yet. That’s why the doctor is here. They want to take care of your life so they can better administer your death. They don’t want you to rest: they want you to come apart. They want you to break. You are the experiment. You are the first guerrilla fighter captured in Guerrero state since the massive Army operation that killed Lucio Cabañas in 1974. The first.
When they say that you’re the first, they are being honest and clear with you. They took off your clothes. They tied you to the rack. You are blindfolded. This is your body beneath the electric light you cannot see, here in the middle of the room. They surround you. Some give orders and others follow them. A doctor studies you and gives advice to the men who control the electric shocks and beat you. They all act together. This is not an improvised scene, and they are not novices. Some of them even brag about their studies abroad as if they were speaking of a graduate degree in engineering: Guatemala, Fort Benning, Panama. They are proud, and, you must admit, they know their work. They are rigorous; they follow through with what they say to you. And at this moment they tell you they are going to make you an invalid, that they are going to break your spine, that they are going to rape you, that they are going to pull everything you’re hiding out of you and then they will kill you, or perhaps mutilate you and leave you blind.