Torn from the World

by John Gibler

  As an eighteen-year-old Nahua man from the Zongolica mountains, a descendant of those who survived the War of Tenochtitlán, you found the survivors of the war against Lucio Cabañas and the Party of the Poor and you went with them and joined the guerrilla movement. At first those were enthusiastic, even impulsive times. You believe in this; it is what you want; it is your life; you make it your life, not in some fanatical act, but in an act of conscience from which you continue to learn by completing tasks, forging yourself.

  You would say that later one realizes the stigma that the State deploys to condemn this social struggle. Because that is what we are, we are fighters for justice, nothing else. We’re not fighting against hunger anymore, but against the war of extermination, the war of invasion, the war disguised in many forms: as education, as politics, as culture, as repression. So one supposes that given all these characteristics of extreme poverty, of malnutrition, of no standing before the law, of no schools existing, well, then one supposes that those who haven’t died yet have survived in order to live through an early death. So if you struggle and become something, it is twice the shock. First, because you didn’t die, and that’s a challenge. But, well, according to the State, you should be there without any capacity for critical thought. That’s another challenge—for them—that we continue to live and think on our own. They say: “How is it possible that they haven’t died but they still haven’t lost the capacity for thought?” But, in addition to thinking, one decides to do something, one decides to fight.

  In a context such as yours, to struggle is to be, to live.

  Let’s recall: The lands known now as the Americas were violently invaded. The invaders declared themselves conquerors and built the institutions necessary to administer the success of their invasion. You would say: The history of our country is a history of plunder. The fundamental and constitutive act of those institutions was to decree that all the original human inhabitants of these lands, and the human inhabitants from afar later captured and brought to these lands, would be defined and treated as slaves, animals, property. The logic of that decree was articulated through the creation and murderous imposition of racial categories. Those institutions have been many times modified, but they have never been dismantled. The simultaneous ontological, epistemic, and corporeal violence of the invasion, racism, and slavery is at the root of the institutions that today we call the State, law, capitalism.8 They continue to massacre the massacred, shielding themselves in something they call the law. State power may be exercised through a court, a legislature, the police, the army, but it is always a power that constructs supremacy through invasion, racism, patriarchy, and slavery. Just as one’s bones hold one’s parents’ DNA in the cells’ architecture, contemporary political institutions code the violence of genocide and slavery in the architecture of their power.

  Up to our present day, millions of human beings navigate daily through societies and institutions that deny their humanity, their names, their languages, their lands, their histories, their visions of the world, their longings, their lives. You would say: We are nothinged. We are poverty statistics, squalor statistics. We are not citizens, we are not good consumers. To struggle also means not accepting these things. In addition to thinking, one decides to do something, one decides to fight.

  And this is what you were doing, a young Nahua guerrilla fighter carrying out the task of leading a group of well-known journalists to the mountains for an interview with the state commanders of the EPR. Your ranking officers told you to go unarmed so that the journalists would not report seeing you with weapons, and thus give government officials a pretext for saying, “Look how violent they are.” This was a strange strategy, considering how those same leaders had planned the armed attacks of two months before.

  But you and your compañero, both combatants, obeyed your orders. The journalists had spent two days going from one place to another. Acapulco, Tierra Colorada, Chilpancingo. They had not seen either of you before and would not have been able to recognize you in public. In each place someone approached them and gave them a piece of paper with a map and directions for the next meeting place. The rules of clandestinity were rigorous and tedious, and you all did not trust the reporters. Sometimes distrust can lead to excess: By being so careful you end up being careless.

  The journalists did not pass through Tierra Colorada on their way back from Acapulco. You had been waiting there, hidden, to make sure no one was following the reporters. You did not suspend the interview when the reporters did not follow this security protocol. You and your compañero went to Chilpancingo and parked your car there. You put the parking lot receipt in your pants pocket and took a taxi to Zumpango del Río, some twenty kilometers from Chilpancingo.

  You saw the journalists walking in circles, confused, in the plaza. They had been told to look for “a man in a baseball cap near the kiosk.” That man would pass close to the journalists and they would then follow a few meters behind him. The problem was that on that October 25, there were a number of men with baseball caps near the kiosk. While the journalists looked for the contact—who walked right by them several times—you saw three men sitting on the fence in a corner of the plaza. They seemed odd to you, but you didn’t say anything.

  At last the journalists recognized the contact and followed behind him. You and your compañero were in the rearguard position, following behind the journalists. You realized that someone was following you, one of the three men you saw sitting on the fence. You stopped and pointed him out to your compañero. You even asked: “Is he one of ours?” “I don’t know,” your compañero answered, “let’s let him catch up to us.”

  The man passed you both; he even said hello. Then the other two men passed you both. You two began to walk again. A bit further along, the fight started, the third man took out his pistol, you struggled with him, your compañero took off running, and then all three men took you down. The other guerrillas and the journalists all escaped. Only you remained behind with the three men. Their trucks arrived shortly thereafter.

  They take you to Acapulco handcuffed, lying on the floor of a vehicle you recognize as a van or a Suburban. Upon arriving they sit you up in the seat, with a pistol to your head. You show them the room. A number of them get out and take up positions around the different exits of the apartment building. They keep you inside the vehicle, at gunpoint. You listen to the operation over the radio they use to communicate. They ask you what name you use with the men who live in this room. You tell them a false name. After a short time they all come back, furious. The room was empty. They spoke to the owner of the building who told them that the renters in that room had moved out that very day, at around one in the afternoon; that is, just a few hours ago.

  If you had told them about the room yesterday, or even earlier this morning, two of your compañeros would now be torn from the world.

  They come back enraged and begin to beat you there in the vehicle. They tell you they’re going to take you to a “branch office” they have here on the outskirts of Acapulco to reinitiate your sessions.

  They tell you: “You gave us the room knowing that they had already left it.” They tie you to the rack and begin again: electric shocks using cables connected to a car, beatings, strangulation, suffocation, blows to your spine. You want to die. One of them squirts water up your nose and you spit it back at him, to provoke him. You try not to scream, hoping thus to faint, to take a step toward death. You’ve decided. Soon you feel something so, so comfortable, a lovely sound. You begin to rest. You see a colorful field and then feel a punch to your face and hear a voice that screams: “Wake up motherfucker! We’re torturing you! Throw water on him. He’s dying, for fuck’s sake. We don’t want him to die. Let him rest.”

  They take you off the rack. Your legs can’t hold you and you fall to the floor. They tell you to put on your clothes. You can’t. They stand you up, dress you, handcuff you, bind you with a heavy chain and throw you in a corner. For the first time in five days they
let you sleep.

  You wake to pain. You feel like you are dying, like you cannot move. Two hours go by and your body stays the same.

  They begin again. Now they go after you with a single objective: They want you to physically describe the men who lived in the room. They are focused. They only repeat that question. The electric shocks, the blows to your spine, to your head. The pain. And you give. Again with the shame eating at you from inside, and pain as the only and implacable reality: You give. But not entirely. You give, but without completely surrendering, without relinquishing your decision to fight: Once again you deliver a story to hold back death. So you mix real features—assuming that they would already have some physical description from having asked the owner of the apartment building and the neighbors—with false features. You make up a scar for one of them, and a necklace for the other.

  After that they bring you a complete meal three times a day with meat, beans, tortillas, orange juice, bread, and water. You don’t trust them and so you eat the minimum: the bread and the tortillas. They insult you and threaten you. They continue with the sessions.

  Two weeks after your disappearance they ask you for the first time: “Who is commander Rafael?” From that question a certain relief emerges: Your compañeros must be demanding that the military deliver you, alive and publicly, to the civilian authorities. But you, by instinct, by brute reflex, you tell them that you don’t know who that is.

  “You are commander Rafael.”

  And, yes, you are. That is your alias, even though you do not have that rank, but you respond: That’s not me.

  “Well then, why are they calling you that?”

  “I guess they have to invent a name. It’s logical. I haven’t gone back, haven’t appeared. That’s not my name. If the description of the events, the place, and all that coincide, then yes, it’s me, but that name is something they’re throwing out. That’s not me.”

  You know very well that they don’t believe you. You know that your response is futile, and that it will bring you suffering, and still you do it on purpose. They also lie. They tell you that the EPR communiqué calls you a commander. You don’t believe that. Your compañeros would not give you that rank, knowing that it would bring you harm. The communiqués always identify you as a “combatant,” but the perpetrators of your suffering say something different. They say that you are a “commander” and you deny it—in this case truthfully—you deny the rank.

  One of them says: “We’re going to work you over more now because you were deceiving us. And you’ve got a rank, here it is. Look, tell me, how many days have you been here? You’ve been here many days now. What is the difference between you, a nobody—you yourself say you’re a nobody—and a commander? There’s no difference. They’re the same.”

  You’re able to say, “No,” and he cuts you off saying: “For us that’s what you are. That is the problem. And that’s what we’re going to call you from now on.”

  You think: Well, if only others would honor me and not these idiots.

  For the enemy, no matter what you do, even if you are just a sympathizer, you are a guerrilla. In fact, they can even blow it all out of proportion and say, “You are the biggest badass of all,” or “You are the best.” For them there is only one level: They’re all the same. You can’t just put on a stupid face and hope they say, “Ah, this one doesn’t know much, let’s take it a little bit easier on him.”

  Over these past few days they have kept looking in Acapulco for the compañeros from the room. The building owner told them that the renters left in a moving van. They went to all the small moving companies in the neighborhood until they found the driver who had taken them. They made the driver take them to the building to which the compañeros had moved. They set up a surveillance operation, but they didn’t know which apartment the compañeros had moved to: the driver had not gone inside the building and didn’t see the apartment.

  They take you out in the pre-dawn hours. You go down the twenty-three stairs and they take you to a steep street. They put you in a truck with tinted windows and take you to a street in a working-class neighborhood. They take off your blindfold. At first you can’t see well at all and you tell them so. Don’t worry, they say, your eyes will adjust. And indeed, little by little, your vision improves. Four of them stay in the truck with you. They also have people on the street corners and beside all the building exits. They point out a large black doorway and tell you to watch carefully all of the people who come out through that doorway. One of the men in charge, one who has administered your pain for approximately two weeks, tells you not to let him down. He tells you that as soon as they grab the others they are going to let you go, because “you’ve already suffered a lot.” And he pats you on the back a few times.

  Dawn is breaking but your eyes have yet to grow accustomed to the light. You have difficulty seeing into the distance. You see someone exit the black doorway and walk toward the corner and you think it might be the compa you know, but you can’t see him well. You don’t say anything. Two hours later the same man returns and enters the building. After just a bit a man exits, running, with a black briefcase in hand. You don’t recognize him; you don’t say anything; and they don’t move. The man with the black briefcase takes the first cab that passes by and leaves. You think that it might have been someone from the organization, or someone visiting the people you know who detected the operation and took off running. You really don’t know who he was.

  Around noon you see your compañero—the same man you thought you had recognized in the early morning—as he exits the building again. He is wearing shorts, a Selena T-shirt and the tennis shoes that you had given him a few weeks before. The compa is about a meter away as he walks by, and the guy is as calm as can be.

  “Some guy’s leaving.”

  “I can’t see,” you say, and you lean toward the window seeing quite clearly, but you repeat: “I don’t know, I can’t see well.”

  He comes back, but then almost immediately leaves again.

  “Look, he’s leaving again.”

  And he is leaving again. When he walks by again you think: This is the second time he’s passed by, they are baiting me with him. They already have him, they’re just making him walk by on purpose to see if I’m really collaborating or just playing the fool. Well, if that’s the case, so be it. I’m never going to point him out. If they’ve already got him, then they’ve got him, but not because of me.

  He walks to the corner and stops. He crosses to the other corner and stops again. You look off in another direction. Fear rises up and surges inside you. In your peripheral vision you see the compañero take off running and they don’t do anything, waiting for the order from the man sitting next to you in the truck. They don’t pay the compa any mind and he leaves.

  Minutes later they give the order to return. You don’t know if they’ve become tired or if they realized that the compañeros have already left. They go back to the base. They take you up the twenty-three stairs. One of them says to you: “Well, that would have saved you. We had them in our hands, but you didn’t want it. You let them leave. You’ve let everyone escape from the places you’ve taken us.”

  You think: obviously, asshole, that’s the point. And then, again the beatings, the electric shocks, the suffocation, the threshold. But now the parameters of the combat have been established. Now the laboratory of pain is the given, the air you breathe. The fight will not involve wires or fists. It will be something other. You will fight with facts and lies and their infinite possible combinations. This is the only recourse you find.

  You have been reduced to nothing, but inside there is pride, arrogance. The reality of your body no longer obeys you, but this idea of the fight . . . You think: I’m now a part of this world, this is my world, this fucking hell, and it is up to me how it will all finish. But if you get clumsy even for thirty seconds, I’m gone, I’ll surprise you, I’ll take you. I will choose my end. How and when.

  You decide thi
s. It has nothing to do with hope. Hope can be a fantasy, a lie, a sedative, but hope can also lead to its opposite. It is better to prepare daily for the worst. Here dignity rejects hope.9 You seek refuge in the darkness behind your blindfold where you will manipulate them, where you will beat them. It becomes an obsession: escape. Not to wait for them to free you. Not to wait for anything from them. This is up to you. Escape.

  But then comes the hour of the rack, the hour of the questions, when they repeat: You must realize that the only thing you have is the time left before you die.

  And then faced with the pain you think: Fuck, man, this is reality, and it is theirs. Your body is the realm over which they try to exhibit their domination, their control. And yes, “the physical evidence goes against you, you’re so weak, so sick and so tormented you think, if you can think . . . I am these stinking wounds; I am this festering sore. That is what you have to fight with. And it’s goddamn difficult; because whenever they feel like it, they replenish the physical evidence that goes against you.”10 But all right, you think, I’ll take refuge in what I’m imagining.