Alfredo saw tears shining down Bolivia’s cheeks while she told him how Kurdish people were surviving storms of hatred and betrayal. They were persecuted and imprisoned in Germany, tortured, beheaded, castrated by Turkish security, bombed by the Iraqi government, by troops armed by the same empire. And yet, in spite of it all, in that promised land—the mythical Kurdistan, which did not exist except in the imagination of those who believed it did—people chatted over a cup of coffee, got married, laughed, had children. At first he thought she was crying over how dreadful he looked lying in a hospital bed, his head wrapped in bandages and his right eye buried under antibiotics, cotton pads and gauze. Beside his bed, a metal rack held the clear intravenous fluid feeding plastic tubes inserted in veins on the back of his hand. She may have been crying for him, for the state he was in due to the frenzied insecurity and terror of a few of her fellow Kurds. Or perhaps she was crying for her friends, the human fragments blown up through the air that afternoon in a city shaken by an explosion that would forever echo in her memory. Perhaps she was crying for him and his people, for everyone who had been baptized one way or another by the fire of their patria, persecuted by the harsh shadow of flags and causes demanding rivers, lakes and oceans of foam and blood.
During his convalescence, he noticed his ability to focus on the contour of objects was improving slowly. He didn’t know what day it was or how long he had been in that condition or how Bolivia had managed to find him. She was there, telling him almost in a whisper what had happened during her years of absence in a voice that at times broke with sorrow, trying to contain unstoppable tears.
To tear days out of minutes, abolish the passing of these hours, chisel words out of silence. A violent exercise. Writing these words in his hospital bed, Alfredo realized he was starting on the same path again, the same falls and frustrations due to his incompetence with words. He was witnessing once again the constant exodus of the written word. He believed every verb or adjective he added to his writings moved him a millimetre closer to peace. He imagined the difficult route at the end of which he would find himself facing a stern, frowning guard at the door that separated identity from history, or history from identity, as seen from the other side of the bleak entrance. And even though he couldn’t see what waited on the other side, he was certain there were people behind that door hoping to cross it in the opposite direction. From his bed, he looked towards the door again and saw Bolivia walk in, as she did every morning, bringing him the first apple in history, two smuggled croissants and a cup of café con leche. With no clear plans, Alfredo set off into yet another day of injections and words at the hospital.
During one of their long afternoon conversations at the hospital, Bolivia admitted with a faint embarrassed smile that she had indeed taken his patriotic socks the morning after their first night together, when she left his apartment and Montreal. “I had to say something. I was supposed to explain my activities, inform our local leaders if I’d made contacts that could help our cause. How could I explain to the comrades that I’d just left with you that night because I wanted to sleep with you? I couldn’t tell them I liked you, that from the very moment I saw you walk into that church basement surrounded by fragrant food and loud music, I could already tell something was going to happen between us. I could have told them I’d spent the night dancing with you and later kissing you without caring about what was happening in our Kurdistan right then. But I don’t think that was true. I think it was actually fear. I was just scared and I wanted to be with somebody, I wanted someone to love me, to make me feel I wasn’t dead yet, that I was still part of this world, because I already had my plane ticket to go back to the war that following Monday. I was going to Paris first, and then to Turkey. We had a lot to do in Ankara and I didn’t know if I’d ever come back to this city, if I’d still be breathing a year later, if I’d still be able to see my toes touching the floor while taking a shower. I didn’t know any of that. I was scared to never be able to feel life outside the fight, feel alive in a more human way. And then you came. First you thought I was a Latina. And then you gave in when I asked you to teach me how to dance because I didn’t understand at all what you were saying about your country’s history. The next day I left Montreal and took your socks with me. One of them had a tiny hole on the toe and they were both worn out at the heel. I’d look at them and just laugh because our fight would continue moving forward thanks to a pair of old socks. It was absurd, completely absurd, and I couldn’t stop laughing. The next day I saw my comrades again in a café in Frankfurt. When I saw them it occurred to me all of a sudden that we could make similar socks to both finance our organization and help circulate a political message. This may seem foolish, I know, but when you’re drowning any log floating by looks good. Besides, I couldn’t think of anything better to explain why I’d left with you that night, why I hadn’t helped with other tasks. A week later I found out that the organization had accepted the idea. I couldn’t believe it. So we started looking for ways to make your socks, Alfgedó. You became part of our fight to create a Kurdish nation between the borders of Turkey and Iraq. When I got on that plane at Mirabel Airport, I thought about you as if you were the last man, the last human being in a world that was vanishing into smoke, distance, and our inevitable march towards death, Alfgedó.”
At 7:00 AM on Wednesday, March 15, 1995, the small alarm clock made him jolt in bed, ripping him out of the dream world from which he was sometimes able to steal the fire of words and bring them into this world. Once awake, the chains of reality kept him tied to Memory Mountain while History Peak devoured his liver. CBC radio news informed that the ex-dictator, gonorrhal Luis García Meza, had been extradited to volibia from Brazil. He didn’t move, decided not to get up, and let the news settle in the thunderous waters of his emotions. Listening to the news report, he felt knotty roots taking over his body and exploding in his abdomen, his nerves dissolved like molten lead and his body fell apart into silent weeping in relief. During the eight o’clock bulletin he was appalled to find out that the press had removed the update from the news block. Just like that. Had it been just an auditory hallucination? Something that had seeped from his imagination into the terrain of reality appearing to be real news on the radio? He got dressed in a haste, his ear pressed to the news. But they said nothing more. “Sonofabitch!” Back in bed, he couldn’t decide what to do. He kept turning over and over like a screw for a good hour, trying to be as quiet as possible. Since he’d come home from the hospital, the few times he’d left the house he’d gone with Bolivia’s help—she’d go out wearing dark sunglasses and a scarf on her head like a character out of a 1970s Italian movie. Since his surgery he needed her even more than before: he only had one good eye since the incident with the Kurds; he’d lost depth perception and his field of vision was now reduced to a dangerously two-dimensional picture. Streets looked like colour photos and he couldn’t tell distances between cars or between pedestrians. To make matters worse—and he hadn’t mentioned a word of this to anyone, not even his doctor—something even more serious was happening. His right eye seemed to have declared itself autonomous and independent. It was functioning all by itself in complete disregard of the onerous task of focusing on shapes and contours that his left eye continued to perform. Choosing their words carefully, the doctors had explained that since his surgery his right eye had stopped working and he would never be able to see out of it again. However, throughout the day, at anytime, no matter where he was, he would suddenly stop focusing on the contour of things, and a movie stored in his memory would be projected, the way a dark room is suddenly lit up by a film on a screen. The beating he’d received in the Kurdish café had turned that abandoned eye orbit into a tiny movie theatre with a loop of thirty years’ worth of images and stories stored in Alfredo’s memory. It was rather disquieting. His irresponsible right eye, aided by his memory as an accomplice, seemed intent on destroying whatever was left of his mental health. It was 7:30 in the morning
and Bolivia was sleeping beside him, her knees slightly bent, face partially covered by her hair. He kept reflecting on the events. He didn’t dare to wake her up to explain the old gonorrhal García Meza’s deserved prison sentence may have caused history to suddenly stop chasing its tail like a frantic dog in a park and moved forward a millimetre-long second. Perhaps now the word “volibia” could take on a new meaning. Perhaps this time history had at last succeeded in biting its tail and was about to devour itself and disappear. He walked out to the street and into the month of March. He headed towards Jean-Talon station, hopped on the metro and headed south to Sherbrooke station, where he walked up the stairs and out to the street. The day was clouded over Carré Saint-Louis—a small square that reminded him of Chuquisaca’s main plaza. The fountain and the tree branches kept a watchful eye on the convalescent pirate walking across the square. He had a leather patch on his right eye, a thick winter coat he’d found at a garage sale, and a scarf about three metres long that looked like a black boa leash on an elephant. He walked down the three blocks of Rue Prince Arthur to Boulevard Saint-Laurent and took a left heading south to the Café des Virtuels. He ordered coffee with milk and drank it dipping an oatmeal cookie—although for the authenticity of the story, it really should have been a croissant, which is also called a medialuna or a pan cuernito. He sat on a bar stool and logged onto one of the public computers. An Argonaut in his quest for Colchis and the three-headed dog, he put a quarter in the slot and dived into the cybernetic mare nostrum looking for something to confirm the news he’d heard on the radio earlier that morning. Five dollars and seventy-five cents later, having crossed multimedia erotic promises, the valley of the hyperwhite Aryans, and the swamp of sadness of Celine Dion’s friends, he finally found a news repository called ‘Bolnet,’ a rather flimsy portal (or rather, a small door, just a tiny mouse hole, actually) in a tiny corner of the Internet. He’d found what he was looking for. He entered a “p” for printing and then tore the news from the printer as if he were beheading three-headed Cerberus. The cable was succinct and uncompromising, written in short sentences. It said nothing about who had written it, but his one good eye was able to read that it had come from La Paz.
A bloody chapter in Bolivia’s history has closed today with the transfer of former dictator Luis García Meza from a Brazilian prison to one in Bolivia, where he will serve a 30-year sentence. García Meza was received at the La Paz airport by hundreds of heavily armed police forces. He was taken to the Chonchocoro high-security prison, approximately fifty kilometres from the capital.
“I am innocent,” he said as he boarded the Bolivian aircraft on Tuesday evening at a military base in Brasilia. A fugitive since 1989, García Meza was arrested in Brazil a year ago. The Supreme Court of Justice of the latter nation ordered his extradition last October 19th, but his attorneys delayed the implementation of the order.
García Meza, who is 64 years old, led the 1980 military coup that overthrew a democratically elected government, dissolved Congress, and banned political parties. The former general led the coup with support from cocaine traffickers, war criminal Klaus Barbie, and foreign mercenaries who assassinated, tortured and persecuted union leaders, politicians and journalists. At least 100 people were disappeared or assassinated during the coup. In 1981, he was forced to step down after the United States and other countries withdrew their economic aid.
The Bolivian Supreme Court judged him in absentia for 37 charges. According to the documents of the Supreme Court, he was found guilty and sentenced in 1993 for sedition, crimes against the constitution, genocide, fraud, extortion and murder along with 52 former members of his cabinet and regime collaborators.
He hadn’t finished reading the last paragraph when his rebel eye started making whirring noises. He was still sitting at the café. Light filled his right eye and a projected image took over the entire field of vision in his left eye: a scene with soldiers marching from one side to the other in an enormous courtyard. Someone inside his head adjusted the sound, and a voice he hadn’t heard for 15 years began to read a poorly written script peppered with impressionistic comments: “… and in accordance with the Political Constipation of the Bolivian State, I was enrolled in compulsory military service—an absurd requirement that should disappear and be erased from the nation’s laws—in the Air Force Security and Defence Unit, an air force battalion stationed in El Alto, a few kilometres from La Paz. No experience is more brutal for a seventeen-year-old than being recruited by the Bolivian army.
“The morning of July 17, 1980, after a period of training in local combat, our company became a service company and was supposed to learn how to make adobe bricks. The garrison walls were made of adobe, requiring a continuous production of blocks to repair damages caused by constant erosion and soldiers’ nightly tactics needed for sneaking out. Approximately at 10:00 AM, those of us fortunate enough to own a radio heard the news report about the uprising of a battalion in the Riberalta navy unit, in eastern Bolivia. In previous occasions, a state of emergency had been declared at our garrison, undoubtedly in preparation for this day. As it tends to happen in those circumstances, the perpetrators started the coup in small remote units in order to gauge the reaction of larger military units and assess the potential effect on civilians. Only then would a critical mass of the country’s major military units be sent out to the streets.”
Alfredo had stopped moving. He was watching what was happening inside his right eye orbit: in his inner eye the text was synchronized with the images in a movie he found both familiar and foreign. While mechanically lifting his coffee cup to his lips, he tried to convince his left eye to pay more attention to what the other eye was showing—it seemed more interested in reading the headlines on the newspaper a woman next to him was reading. “Lidia Gueiler’s democratic government was undergoing tumultuous times due to the terror campaign the army had unleashed on the country. The climax of the period preceding the coup d’état was the brutal kidnapping, torture and murder of Luís Espinal Camps, a Jesuit priest and director of the weekly Aquí who was brutally hung up and tortured in the Achachicala slaughterhouse.”
Stunned by the images in the movie, Alfredo dropped his empty cup on the table when he saw the Jesuit’s slight figure running around Plaza San Francisco, wearing a woollen chompa and carrying his journalist’s briefcase full of humanist ideas. It wasn’t clear if the film narrator was aware that Luís Espinal had held mass in a small church in the outskirts of Villa San Antonio, that he’d given first communion to a group of teenagers who innocently believed in god in the midst of yet another military dictatorship and its war tanks. Alfredo recalled Luís Espinal in a classroom at Colegio San Domingo Savio, explaining the ideological mysteries of film to him and a group of film enthusiasts. The narrator’s voice continued as the film ran twenty-four frames per second in his empty eye socket: “In the parliament, socialist writer Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz attempted to create a judicial precedent, seeking to put an end to decades of military impunity and corruption by prosecuting dictator Hugo Banzer Suárez, whose contribution to national history included nearly 300 Bolivian citizens killed in three days of combat in the resistance against the August 1971 coup. According to those seeking justice for the years of terror, 14,750 people were detained, tortured and exiled between 1971 and 1977, 84 murdered, and 69 disappeared, in addition to squandering the national economic surplus. During those years, members of the Banzer family serving as diplomats were expelled from Canada by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on drug trafficking charges.”
“With the news of the Riberalta uprising, tension invaded the El Alto air force battalion. No one understood what was happening outside. The atmosphere was tense. Anxious groups of soldiers congregated to listen to updates on battery-operated radios. Only a year prior, in 1979, Bolivians had survived another brutal military coup led by Colonel Alberto Natusch Bush—so successful that he was never held accountable, thanks to support from civilian sector
s represented by his minister of foreign affairs Guillermo Bedregal, a vulture, a politician of the most sinister ilk. The army had caused almost 200 dead and several hundred wounded. Civilians in city centres had been shot from tanks and helicopters. Despite the carnage, the Bolivian Workers’ Union had succeeded in paralyzing the country with an indefinite general strike. Heavy participation of the peasant population in the resistance against the military coup was the final blow to Colonel Natusch’s regime, which crumbled within sixteen days after appointing General Luis García Meza as general commander of the army. This victory over gorilismo—the country’s experience before 1980—had created a sense of security in the population that an attempt against the government could never happen again. We started hearing the first voices denouncing the coup on the radio. University leader Henry Oporto was calling for the resistance to organize and asking soldiers not to obey the orders of the perpetrators. Ten or fifteen minutes later, our superiors confiscated our radios. We were isolated. We had no idea what was happening but it was already too late for everyone. After the failed 1979 attempt, this time the Bolivian army was carrying out a different type of coup, relying instead on paramilitary attacks commanded by Klaus Barbie, a Nazi war criminal who had served in the Banzer regime. The colononel recognized his service by granting him Bolivian citizenship and even a military rank as assimilated personnel within the thanta Bolivian army. Using methods perfected by Germany’s Schutzstaffel, paramilitary groups moved quickly in ambulances and stormed the Bolivian Workers’ Union in the centre of La Paz, where political and union leaders were gathering to organize the resistance. Several were shot and killed, among them Quiroga Santa Cruz, one of the most brilliant politicians in contemporary Bolivian history. Survivors were taken, hands behind their head, to the Palacio Quemado at Plaza Murillo. The first wave of the coup carried out arrests, attacks and raids in various cities. At noon, officers in our unit disappeared to hold an emergency meeting. The uprising of a navy unit in a remote village in the eastern jungle had grown and was devouring the entire country. Hours later, the military garrison of the second largest city—the eighth army division in Santa Cruz—had surrendered, which created a domino effect among the different military units. One by one they joined ranks with the perpetrators. At 5:00 PM that July 17th, our battalion commanders declared a state of emergency in our unit as a couple of Austrian war tanks reached our gates, sent as reinforcement from the Tarapacá armoured battalion, about five kilometres from the Air Base. The rattled officers and commanders of the seven companies resurfaced in the courtyard. In each block, officers summoned their respective squadron commanders. No one used the word ‘coup d’état’—it was a ‘state of emergency.’ The armouries were opened and FAL Belgian rifles and 200 7.62-mm cartridges were handed out to each soldier. We swapped our kepis for metal helmets donated by the United States military, and squadron commanders were ordered to improvise backpacks with bandages and other first aid supplies. Companies received box after box of standard ammunition, special ammunition for tracer missiles, and war grenades. By 7:00 PM, troops from the Tiquina Naval Force had joined to stifle growing resistance in urban areas. All branches of the Bolivian army seemed to be keeping each other under surveillance: first two tanks from the armoured cavalry, followed by entire companies from the naval unit. In the name of esprit de corps, the Bolivian ersatz generalcy stabbed the civilian population on the back with yet another coup. The air force courtyard was filled with army forces wearing green burlap fatigues, naval soldiers in black burlap fatigues; ours were blue. We all wore combat fatigues for combat against a city, against a country, against an unarmed, outraged population. That afternoon gunfire bursts started echoing constantly and intensifying after dark. In the days that followed, we lived and contributed to the horrors of the coup—generous, indiscriminate shooting, raids, seizing factories. We heard rumours of dead soldiers. According to our superiors’ version, civilians had offered the nervous Bolivian soldiers poisoned oranges. The University was turned into a giant military base for officers and paramilitaries to carry out the painstaking looting of everything they deemed valuable. My company followed orders to quell any gathering of civilians, to take over public squares and storm churches where flyers were being printed to mobilise the resistance. We were cut off from any possible avenue of dissent, and superiors watching our backs didn’t put down their pistols and machine guns for a second. We’d heard rumours of soldiers shot on the back for refusing to shoot a population whose impotence roared as they witnessed the assault of their liberties. We were under surveillance. City parks and squares became military encampments. At night we would go out in military trucks to patrol the streets, arresting cholitas, drunkards, beggars and partygoers, anyone who happened to be out on the street during curfew hours, while on other streets unmarked Ministry of the Interior vehicles circulated freely, no questions asked. Someone would simply roll down the window and shoot civilians to death. Even during the day, machine gun attacks were carried out against civilians from unmarked vehicles, such as the one at Villa Copacabana—it was the government’s way to intimidate and stamp out any resistance from the population. Our company commander gathered a contingent of soldiers who knew the geography of mining areas. Many years later, in Montreal, I would learn that in those days of July of 1980, the planes we’d been keeping under close surveillance—planes that roared as they took off, heavy with point-fifty ammunition for their machine guns, each under-wing rocket launcher loaded with half a dozen bombs—went straight to attack mining centres, where locals had organized a tenacious resistance fuelled by dynamite and courage.”
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