‘The Catholic church saved my life,’ he explains. ‘I went to attend mass, and they fed me, they gave me to eat and to drink. That saved me. Yo soy un católico militante. I’m a militant Catholic.’
But in reality, he is a very peaceful militant. He asks me whether I, too, believe in God. No, I tell him, I don’t; but I do believe that there are many different paths that lead to the same place in the end. Is that a cliché? I don’t care. I’m quite sure that if there should be another side, I will bump into Ambrosio Ainqueó there.
He nods and smiles; I’m not quite sure whether in agreement or indulgently at my unorthodox beliefs.
He wants to know what other parts of Argentina I have seen. Have I been to Bariloche, the famous ski resort?
Bariloche lies a few hours north of Esquel; a stone’s throw by Patagonian standards. I’ve seen pictures of the town nestling at the foot of splendid mountains, on the shores of a huge beautiful mountain lake. It was founded by Swiss and German immigrants in the early twentieth century, and between the mountainous landscape and the architecture, it could easily be somewhere in the Alps.
I have never been to Bariloche. I’ve read about it: it’s a place where several Nazi officials fled in the 1950s; attracted, perhaps, by the strong German presence that was already there on the ground. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Argentina’s sizeable German community had been split down the middle. Socialists battled Fascist sympathisers with newspaper articles and pamphlets and, sometimes, fistfights. But all of that happened in the big cities, most of all in Buenos Aires. Down in the far south of both Argentina and Chile, the German community had a pronounced list to the right.
After the war, Josef Mengele and Klaus Barbie went to Bariloche on skiing holidays. In the fifties, a man named Erich Priebke came to live there. He was a former Gestapo member who had been involved in a massacre of 335 Italian civilians outside Rome at the Fosse Ardeatine in the last days of the war.
Priebke spent over four decades living in Bariloche, openly using his real name even though the Italian police had an arrest warrant for him. They can’t have looked very hard. They didn’t find him until the 1990s. When he was finally about to be extradited to Italy to stand trial, the German Society of Bariloche fully intended to march on the town hall in protest. Only at the eleventh hour were they dissuaded by the mayor, who pointed out that a demonstration of sympathy for a Nazi war criminal might not generate desirable headlines for a place that makes its living mostly from tourism.79
It’s irrational, but that, for me, is Bariloche. That’s why I don’t want to go there. It reminds me of the people in my childhood village who knew what was happening to me and who chose to look away. It reminds me of all that was wrong with Germany.
I feel silly trying to explain this to Ambrosio Ainqueó.
He just nods, accepting my reason.
‘I ask because it’s a beautiful place,’ he says. ‘I think you would like the land – the mountains, the lake. There’s a special light in the air. My people used to live there, once.’ He has a faraway look in his eyes, and there is a longing, a tenderness almost, in his voice. He makes me see Bariloche differently, adds a new dimension. There is more to the place now than ski slopes and tourists and fascists. Perhaps I will go one day to see the mountains and the lake, I tell him.
When I take my leave, with the usual kiss on the cheek, I would like to give him a proper hug. He seems very frail suddenly, after all the memories.
51
I MEET GUSTAVO MACAYO by chance in his father’s bookshop. I buy books everywhere; it’s a compulsion. Until now, I have been spared in Argentina simply because my Spanish wasn’t up to something as complex as a novel. But now I’ve got to the point where I can just about read and enjoy fiction as well.
I’m looking for something local, I tell the bearded man behind the counter, who somehow looks exactly like I imagine a bookseller: learned, a bit shy, a bit stooped, and very bookish.
‘Oh yes,’ he says, ‘we have something new, it only came out about a year ago. A history of the Mapuche of the region.’
At that I prick up my ears. We start to chat, and it turns out that Gustavo Macayo isn’t a bookseller by trade. He’s a lawyer who specialises in cases about disputed land rights.
‘I just work in the bookshop to earn a bit of money on the side,’ he explains. ‘Practically all of my legal cases are pro bono. Most of my clients are Mapuche-Tehuelche who don’t have any money, so I don’t charge them. I’ve been working on land rights for over ten years now, and I’m still almost the only one in the region who takes on this kind of work. Most of the other lawyers don’t do cases involving Indígenas. I don’t earn much, but I’m happy doing the work I do. It’s very fulfilling.’
Just then, more customers come into the shop, and Gustavo has to go back to work.
‘Why don’t you come round to my place tonight, then we can talk more,’ he suggests. ‘I’ll give you my address and you can take a taxi, it’s at the other end of town.’
I agree, but I feel uneasy. I’m not at all keen to meet a man I essentially don’t know, in his house, at night. It’s not just that I don’t know him; I don’t know anybody who knows him either. Dana’s heard of him; she knows the bookshop, and has bought the odd book from Gustavo. But she doesn’t know him. I’m going to meet a strange man on his own territory.
I don’t know why it doesn’t occur to me to suggest a café instead. Perhaps because Gustavo’s pervading air of skintness has struck a cord with me. At home, I’m a bit of a Scrooge; I don’t have much and I don’t spend much. It’s only in Argentina with its favourable exchange rate (favourable for me) that I have got into the extravagant habit of frequenting cafés with a newspaper or a book, of going out for a meal in the evening.
I don’t have a phone number for Gustavo, because he doesn’t have a phone. He can’t afford one, he told me with engaging frankness. Also he doesn’t need one. Most of his clients live in remote communities with no telephone access, and on those occasions when he has to ring someone, he can use the line in his father’s bookshop. So I can’t phone to cancel.
In the end, I decide to go but to take precautions. I get a taxi to the address that Gustavo has given me, and ask the driver for his mobile number. I will ring him in an hour or two from a phone box to drive me back to Dana’s. And of course Dana knows where I’ve gone. She is bemused by my misgivings, but promises to ‘send out the cavalry,’ as she puts it, if I’m not back by midnight.
When I arrive at half past nine, it’s already dark. Gustavo keeps the usual late Argentinian hours.
I ring the bell and explain that I have come to see Gustavo Macayo.
‘Ah, sí,’ says the woman who opened the door and smiles. ‘Está en la casita en el jardín.’ He’s in the little house in the garden.
She ushers me along a corridor and out of the back door. At the bottom of the garden, its lit windows radiating a warm glow in the descending evening, stands a sort of better class of garden shed. This is where Gustavo lives.
‘It’s cheaper than renting my own,’ he explains and shrugs. ‘And there’s no way I could afford a mortgage to buy a house.’
It’s early summer, but the night is still chilly in the shadow of the Andes. Inside, the garden house is warm and bright. We sit in a kind of combined kitchen and living room, while music drifts across from next door. Through the half-open door, I can see a sleeping bag and a boom box on the wooden floorboards. They seem to comprise the entirety of the furniture in what must be Gustavo’s bedroom.
‘Do you mind if I keep the music on while we talk?’ says Gustavo. ‘I find it calming.’
Is he as nervous about having a stranger in the house as I am about being here?
‘It’s my work,’ he explains while he puts the kettle on to make tea for me. (‘You don’t drink maté, do you?’) ‘In my cases, I have had confrontations with the police, with the army, the navy, with huge multinational companies. They don’t like what I’m
doing.
The estancieros are like the mafia, they are very powerful. I have to be on my guard. I have to watch who I’m talking to in the street, who I’m seen talking to. I can’t do interviews with the local media. I don’t go out at night by myself because it isn’t safe. I used to have a car but I sold it – I was getting too nervous about someone putting a bomb in it. Now I have a bike.’
He laughs.
‘I think I must be the only cyclist in Esquel. Nobody here uses a bike. Everybody has a car. People think I’m mad. But it’s safer, and it’s also cheaper, and it keeps me fit... I have to be vigilant, all the time. I have taken on so many large corporations. I don’t know what they might do.’
52
THE DRY PATAGONIAN PLAINS aren’t nearly as infertile as they look. There are vast lakes in the foothills of the Andes that contain a commodity which is soon going to become more and more precious: unpolluted fresh water. Beneath the soil and the rocks lie deposits of gold and silver, copper, zinc, lead and oil. Vegetation is sparse, but as long as you allow enough space per animal, you can graze a good few cattle or sheep or horses in the steppe. Like Benetton’s 300,000 merino.
Have you ever wondered where the wool for all those jumpers comes from? A good 10 per cent originate in the desert, on one million hectares of Patagonian land owned by the Benetton corporation. Benetton is the biggest single landowner in Argentina80, and by no means the only foreign one. The financier and billionaire George Soros paid a reputed US$13 million for the largest luxury hotel of Patagonia, in Bariloche. Actors Christophe Lambert and Sylvester Stallone own vast tracts of the region, as do British billionaire Joseph Lewis and Ted Turner, the founder of news channel C.N.N.81
The problem is this: How do you define ownership?
The Benetton corporation owns tens of thousands of hectares of land in the region around Esquel because it bought the previous owner, the Argentine Southern Land Co., a British company originally formed in London in the 1880s. The Argentine Southern Land Co. owned large expanses of land all over Patagonia, not only in the province of Chubut, but in three of the other four provinces of Argentinian Patagonia as well.82
You can see where this is going. Because who had owned the land previous to the 1880s? Before the so-called ‘Desert Conquest’?
The Tehuelche, Mapuche and Pampas Indians didn’t have documents that proved their ownership of the land. And then they didn’t own it any more, because most of them had been captured and deported or killed. Some caciques collaborated with the Argentine military and were given preferential treatment and lands. A number (by no means all) of the tribes who surrendered were moved to allocated reservations – although some, like the tribe of Sayhueke, had to wait for years to be given some hectares of what was left over after European immigrants had chosen the best land.
A few groups were allocated land decades after the end of the genocide: like Ambrosio Ainqueó’s community in Nahuel Pan in 1908. In all of those cases, there are documents to show that the land was given them. (Which of course doesn’t mean – as the case of Nahuel Pan shows – that they were always respected. In some cases, they aren’t to this day.)
Soldiers who fought in the ‘Desert Campaigns’ were granted pieces of land in payment. Some settled on their new property, many more sold it on to property developers or companies such as the Argentine Southern Land Co. from whom, decades later, the likes of Ted Turner, Sylvester Stallone or the Benetton corporation bought it, presumably in good faith. It would be unjust to demand that those current owners now give up the land which, one could argue, morally does not belong to them. But it’s just as unjust to do nothing, and continue to deprive the Indígenas of the land that should be theirs. Although that’s exactly what is happening.
Which is why Gustavo Macayo has so many cases of disputed landownership on his hands.
‘The thing is,’ he says, ‘the Mapuche-Tehuelche have such a radically different relationship with the land, in a way that the state, the authorities, just don’t understand at all. We’ve made some little headway recently to make people understand that, but god, it’s slow going.’
He sips maté and looks gloomily towards the curtained window.
‘It’s such an ethnocentric system in Argentina: white, western, without allowing for anything else. That goes for politics, education, law, culture – everything. That’s what makes it so hard to get people to look at things differently. We have to fight prejudice every day. There is so much ignorance. People think, and say, that the Indians are lazy, they drink, they steal, they’re work-shy, they’re bad.’
I open my mouth to say that surely it’s not that bad. Then I remember Miguel in the Gaiman museum, and close it again. Gustavo has caught the look on my face.
‘Lots of people think like that,’ he says and gets up to put the kettle on again. ‘A lot of people think exactly that. We have a long way to go.’
He talks over his shoulder from the sink.
‘We have to battle the official version of history. It’s been around for a long time, it’s well established, it’s entrenched. In the official version, the Indígenas only occur in the past tense: “The Indians used to hunt, they used to live here, their culture was like this, they disappeared.” The indigenous peoples of Argentina are always talked about as though they were from somewhere else, not from here, not of this place, not in this time.’
Gustavo’s kitchen seems to do duty not only as living room, but as a study, too. There is a table, a couple of chairs, and another, smaller, table against the wall, covered with a profusion of papers and books and a typewriter.
Gustavo makes me another mug of tea and goes next door to nudge the music up a little. It sounds like Pete Seeger with a Latin twist: a sonorous voice accompanied by a guitar. Gustavo beams when I ask about the singer.
‘Atahualpa Yupanqui. He took an Inca name to remind us Argentines of our indigenous roots. Atahualpa and Yupanqui were the names of two Inca kings. He was from the north of Argentina, from a region that had been part of the Inca empire.’
It’s only by chance that I look at my watch and realise it’s gone half eleven. If I’m not back at Dana’s in half an hour, she might set the police on Gustavo. Actually, I don’t think she will. Esquel is a small place. Things work differently here. She has bought books in Gustavo’s father’s bookshop; she wouldn’t set the law on him. Also, the Argentine police are not the most trustworthy or best-trained in the world. It’s more likely that, should she really get worried, she herself might turn up. So I’d better get a move on.
Gustavo insists on accompanying me to the phone box on the corner to ring for my taxi. But the driver’s mobile is switched off. Perhaps he has gone home for the night.
Esquel at night is dominated by the vast sky, and by the mountains. They surround the city like a ring of giants holding hands, their breathing so slow it’s almost imperceptible.
All of a sudden I find that I’m not the least bit afraid any more. ‘Don’t worry,’ I say to Gustavo, ‘I’ll walk to the main road and pick up a cab from there.’
But he insists on walking with me. ‘It’s safer,’ he says.
The main road is just a stone’s throw away, and there’s a taxi cruising down it. On the stroke of midnight, like Cinderella, I’m back in Dana’s house among the soughing pine trees.
53
IN 1994, ARGENTINA PASSED an amendment to the constitution which acknowledges ‘the ethnic and cultural pre-existence of the indigenous peoples of Argentina and guarantees to respect their identity and their rights to a bilingual and intercultural education... and the communal property of the land which they had traditionally occupied.’83
It’s a wonderful law, exceeding by far the rights enjoyed by indigenous peoples in countries like Mexico, Venezuela or Chile. The problem is that it’s so very rarely put into practice. Despite the right to education now enshrined in the constitution, a recent UNESCO report states that a staggering 56 per cent of Mapuche children in Argentina don’
t receive any schooling. At all.84 Mapuche communities have had to take on landowners and even the armed forces to get access to schools on disputed land.
Which is something I find hard to believe when I first hear it from Mauro Millán. Mauro is the spokesman of an Esquel-based community organisation called Organización Mapuche-Tehuelche 11 de Octubre. The organisation owns a small plot of land a little outside the centre of Esquel, along one of the straggling gravel roads. A narrow track leads from the road through knee-high grasses and weeds to a small whitewashed house set back from the street. This is the brand new community centre of the Organización 11 de Octubre. The interior is lit by a naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. On the bare white wall hangs a flag with three horizontal stripes: blue, white and yellow; a stylised blue arrowhead in the centre. It is the same flag I saw in Oscar Payaguala’s museum in Comodoro Rivadavia: the banner of the Tehuelche and Mapuche of Chubut. Next to it, a kultrung, the Mapuche drum. Mauro and I sit on wonky chairs that are placed against the walls of the single room. They represent the only furniture. An old plastic kettle is plugged into the wall. It’s obvious that the Organización isn’t rolling in money.
Mauro is a silversmith by profession. For centuries, the Mapuche have been well-known for their splendid silver jewellery. (All the tourist shops in Esquel sell ‘Mapuche’ earrings, but they are mostly cheap, factory-made copies.) Mauro occupies the bulk of his time with his unpaid work, that of spokesman for Organización 11 de Octubre.
Where does the name come from, I ask him. Is it the date the organisation was founded? It’s the first of several gaffes I make in my conversation with Mauro.
‘For us, 11 October is the last day of freedom,’ he tells me. ‘Not just for the Mapuche, but for the entire American continent. For us, 12 October 1492 marked not simply the arrival of another race of people, another culture, but of another ideology which has been dominating the continent to this day.’
Beyond the Pampas Page 20