I crossed the bridge and headed out into this, the true Lima. These communities were called pueblos jóvenes, or “young towns,” and it was impossible for a stranger to navigate them. Only the oldest neighborhoods from way back in the 1950s had named streets, and the farther I rode out from the bridge the younger the community, the lower the buildings, the worse the materials, the fewer the landmarks and street signs. A blue VW Beetle rocketed from behind a bus and nearly crushed me. I asked directions continually and followed vague instructions to “go past the tower” and “make a left in five minutes” and “look for the restaurant.” After half an hour of circling I finally stumbled onto the gate in a tall wall that I had been seeking, drove straight in, and killed the engine. There were a dozen buildings inside the wall, mostly small cabins and a few barracks-style buildings that were empty. Old medical supplies and rusting equipment were scattered around. Dogs wandered in profusion.
I had not even dismounted in the dusty courtyard before I was surrounded by children shouting questions. Their faces were bright and they wanted to know where I was from, and then if America was “the last country.” They wiggled their thumbs and asked if I had a Nintendo set on board; was it true that in my country you could rent Nintendo? What kind of cargo was I carrying? And would I like to see where Che Guevara had lived?
The children were the offspring of the lepers Guevara had come to see. The two Argentines arrived here at the Hospital Guía leper colony in 1952, eager to touch the untouchables. Although they had exaggerated wildly in telling the Chilean newspapers that they were international experts with “three thousand patients” in five different leper hospitals, the truth was impressive enough. Granado had worked for years in various leper colonies, and Guevara genuinely intended to do likewise when he graduated from medical school.
Guevara’s interest in medicine was a chronicle of lost hope. He’d been chasing cures since his own asthma kicked in at the age of four. The first cures were, like those he came to at the end of his life, driven by force of will. The constant sensation of suffocation drives many young asthmatics to develop an almost violent urge to live; according to Dolores Moyano, one of Ernesto’s childhood friends, this explained the young man’s ferocious determination in all physical pursuits. Little Ernesto loved dangerous stunts like walking along fence posts, and had taken up rugby, a British imperial sport, where he earned another of his innumerable nicknames, the Sniper. He was known for playing to the point of collapse, as if willing his body to fail. The psychological effect was the reverse of the physiological one: constantly pushing the limits imposed by his lungs, Ernesto overcame the crippling fear of death that accompanies near suffocation. Testing himself became a habit; pushing back against death a means of validating life. This aggressive response is so common among sufferers that it is sometimes called the asthmatic personality.
His own suffering informed Ernesto’s decision to enter medical school, but it was not the only factor. There was his mother’s cancer, which had prompted him to those gruesome basement experiments on guinea pigs. But he had also inherited an aristocratic idealism from her, a kind of noblesse oblige that required him to address injustice. He enrolled in medical school in Buenos Aires at the age of eighteen, which is normal in Argentina, and raced through his studies with precocious speed, which is not. He made and kept a public promise that he would return from the motorcycle trip and finish his medical degree.
But his rolling research had awoken something in Guevara that doomed the pursuit of medicine. He never practiced after graduation, except informally. He later said that the leper colonies of Peru had taught him that “the highest forms of human solidarity and loyalty arise among lonely and desperate men,” but his search for that very loyalty led him away from medicine, toward the desperate solidarity of combat. Although he had joined Castro’s invasion of Cuba as the team doctor, he trained with rifles, was a superb shot, and abandoned medicine as soon as he could. On their very first day of battle the rebels were routed and had to run for it. Guevara had to choose in that moment between carrying the medicine or carrying the ammunition, and he chose the latter. He mentioned this anecdote often in speeches to make sure everyone understood what he was saying: he had put down the bandages and picked up the bullets. Violent revolution was just as noble as the healing art—indeed, it was a form of healing if it was administered to a sick society by a trained specialist. This was Guevara’s own Life of Guevara.
In a letter home from Lima, Little Ernesto was still recommending less rigorous cures. Writing to his father, he explained that one of the most powerful treatments for leprosy was a firm handshake. He sat with the lepers, took their hands confidently, and played soccer and ate with them. They saw that he had no fear. “This may seem pointless bravado,” he wrote, “but the psychological benefit to these poor people—usually treated like animals—of being treated as normal human beings is incalculable.…”
The same courage was hard for me to summon. The first adult I met was named Serafino, and when we shook hands I blanched visibly at his thumbless grip. He’d lost only the tips of his other fingers to the disease. Like many lepers, Serafino also had a slightly “crazy” expression, the result of nerve degeneration in his face. His eyes were frozen in a permanent squint, and his mouth was locked in a half smile, as if he was letting me in on a joke that I couldn’t get.
Even when Ernesto came here there were medicines to arrest the disease, but poverty is its own illness, and Serafino had grown up untreated. Born in the high sierra sometime in the 1950s—he didn’t know when—he was first exiled to the San Pablo leper colony in 1961, when he was “the same size as them,” he said, pointing at the cloud of little boys surrounding us. In 1968 he was transferred to Lima to live in the Hospital Guía colony. Although leprosy is not a particularly contagious disease—only a tiny portion of people are susceptible to it—fear, rumor, and a long tradition of discrimination surrounded the lepers as surely as any wall. Leprosy was a life sentence to prison back then.
In 1976 a military government had breached the walls and allowed the lepers to leave if they wanted. There were still eighteen families here. They remained victims of popular loathing outside and knew little of making their way in the world. Here they had a doctor on call, some free food, and no rent for shanties that were as good as most outside the walls.
Despite missing both thumbs and the rest of his fingers past the knuckles, Serafino wielded a mean rake and had a stunning garden to prove it. He grew tomatoes and Chinese onions, and showed me a high sierra corn strain that he was experimenting with. “You have to work or you go crazy,” he said, picking at weeds with his rake. “That’s a big problem here. Not many work. Some go outside to work but most just stay here. I was a carpenter until someone stole my tools, my saw and hammer and so on. That was four years ago, the sons of bitches. Since then I just work on the garden and with my birds.”
There were a half dozen hens, some ducks, and several caged fighting cocks. The cock of the walk was an immense macho of Spanish-Chilean stock with black feathers tinged in iridescent green. He had survived six fights to the death and retired to father almost all the other chickens in the little cluster of wire-and-scrap hutches that Serafino tended.
“El Che was here,” Serafino suddenly said. “He slept right over there.” He pointed a half-formed digit toward a blue shack, solidly built but tiny, just a plain square of four walls. I told Serafino that yes, I had heard that Che had spent a week or two here.
“Longer than that,” he replied. “He was here for months, at least three. He lived right over there in that blue house. He worked in the hospital all day, in the lab, doing research. He only went out at night to meet with people. You know what kind of people. He was organizing his groups for Bolivia. Meetings.”
Every detail of this story was wrong: Ernesto was in Lima for only a couple of weeks; he spent his days touring museums; he wasn’t a guerrilla strategist yet; and he only visited the Hospital Guía briefly as a
medical tourist, not a researcher. In the mind of Serafino, however, the story was true because it had to be true. For millions of the dispossessed all over Latin America, there were no other heroes. Che was a necessity, not a possibility; if he hadn’t existed, they would have invented him anyway, and often did. The point of the legend was always the same, and as powerful as it was simple: Che lived and died for us.
We marched over, Serafino trailing his rake in the dust. He opened the front door of the shed, which proved to be empty and clean. It was the size of a cargo elevator. “There was a photo of him on the wall for years, but they took it down in ’72 or ’74,” he said. Yes, I replied, it certainly wasn’t safe to keep a photo of Che on display during those reactionary times. “No,” Serafino countered, “they had to paint the place.” With his frozen expression it was impossible to tell if he was kidding or not.
Dusk had fallen and I thanked the lepers and left in a hurry. I didn’t want to pick my way back through the twisted streets in the dark. On the way to the motorcycle, kicking up clouds of dust with my boots, I looked up. There, gleaming on a hillside in neon splendor, was a statue of Jesus of Nazareth, arms outstretched, gazing down upon the city as champion of the humble.
After my prison visit I had to know if the Shining Path would win its battle. The future of Lima lay in the shantytowns, and I spent two days riding through them with a young leftist who agreed to show me his own revolution in the making. Our vehicle was less heroic than the motorcycle-Rocinante: David Medianero picked me up at the guest house in a dented blue Volkswagen Beetle belching smoke and lacking a speedometer, gas gauge, or radio, although it did have a tape deck on which he played Zamfir. Medianero was a lapsed communist who had found employment as a field worker for a Peruvian think tank called the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, which is where I had met him while researching an article. I liked the ILD because it was adept at siphoning the coffers of conservative American foundations by talking about free enterprise, then turning around and spending the money on Marxists. On our way out of the city that first morning we stopped at a market long enough to fill the back seat with bananas and the tank with gasoline.
Medianero was in his thirties, a man of the streets who had a poor person’s obsession with neatness and wore a short-sleeved polyester shirt. We headed out toward a rural zone on the far outskirts of Lima, where he was negotiating with some farming cooperatives. The road went out of the city center, passing a thousand more old Volkswagens exactly like our own. We kept the Río Rímac on our left and rode out a highway named for Tupac Amaru, an eighteenth-century rebel who resisted the Spanish. The Movimiento Revolucinario Tupac Amaru, or MRTA, had taken his name, but few spoke it anymore. Following Guevarist tactics, the group was steadily burning out in a series of spectacular defeats. The last of these was a 1996 attack on the Japanese ambassador’s residence during a Christmas party, where the guerrillas slipped into the event disguised as waiters carrying canapés and took more than four hundred hostages. During the long siege the guerrillas issued statements via their web page and spent most of their time watching soap operas. They allowed the hostages to conduct self-improvement seminars on topics like the benefits of kidnapping insurance, and even permitted a noted pollster—himself a captive—to survey the hostages on the first floor (surprisingly, only 87 percent felt that security at the party was “inadequate”). Their postmodern tactics collided with Peru’s premodern realities: one morning the army burst into the building and killed every single guerrilla. Their leader’s immortal last words—“We’re screwed!”—accurately described MRTA’s prospect these days. The siege eliminated the bulk of their military force, and MRTA took a back seat to the Shining Path, the Maoists who ridiculed Guevarism from the safety of their jail cells.
The slums were, along with San Marcos University, the Shining Path’s recruiting ground, the sea in which the fish swam. In 1992 their insurgency controlled perhaps a third of Peru, including many of the young towns ringing Lima. I spent a month in Lima then, and there was bomb attack almost every day I was there. That sounds worse than it really was, because many of the attacks were surprisingly pathetic: one night the guerrillas tied a stick of dynamite to a statue of John F. Kennedy and decapitated it; they launched homemade rockets at the U.S. Embassy but the missiles fizzled and crashed onto the front lawn; and they blew up power pylons, plunging the poor parts of the city into darkness. The limeños were somewhat inured to these matters, and wandered the streets full of broken glass, keeping a watchful eye on any Volkswagen Beetle that appeared abandoned—the bug was the car bomb of choice. Not all the attacks on American symbols were so ineffective: near the end of my stay the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Miramar was gutted by a lunchtime car bomb that killed several people. The quiet, personal violence was in many ways more devastating than the splashy propaganda assaults. The Shining Path specialized in assassinating activists who offered the poor an alternative to Maoism—agricultural extension experts in the countryside, priests in the small towns, and, in the city, activists like David Medianero.
Now Medianero cut off the highway and through a series of the increasingly desperate slums. There were piles of garbage in the streets, some of them burning with a greasy stink. Mangy dogs lingered on the corners. The towns piled up the increasingly steep, stony hillsides, with improvised lanes separating insubstantial shacks. Everything—roads, people, clothing, dogs, houses—was coated in a fine tan dust, a khaki powder so thick that Medianero occasionally ran the bug’s wipers in a vain effort to scrape the windshield clean.
We stopped at the farthest edge of the city. This area was once all farmland, but new slums were springing up, along with a few light manufacturing plants. The local farmers were feeling under pressure, and Medianeros’s first stop was a farm building with a dusty courtyard surrounded by narrow fields of corn that ran between the new strips of shacks. Women worked the maize in traditional felt hats that showed they had not been out of the hills long. Medianero told me to pose as a European if anyone asked. In the same breath he said that there was no danger but that “anti-imperialist” feelings were commonplace. Medianero was trying to convince these semiurban farmers to disband the co-ops and turn their land into private parcels.
Most of the farms and houses in the slums were sitting on seized land, often government land but sometimes private farmland. Families would pour their resources into building a small home, but since they did not legally own the land their lives remained precarious. When some of the older and better organized shantytowns put political pressure on the government, they were successful in getting titles. The result was a kind of economic enfranchisement as the owners poured effort into expanding their crude shacks into two- and even three-story houses. With title, you could demand social services like any other reputable homeowner. Bank loans against the title made it possible to finance repairs or a new business. Homes that were legally owned could be legally sold. An actual real estate market appeared in the slums where people had titles, and a few communities were so developed they looked like lush islands in the sea of shanties.
Medianero dropped off some sample land titles with the co-op leader and then we remounted and went farther afield, a long drive up and over steep hills that had been covered with graffiti made by piling rocks into big letters. There was supposed to be an assembly for three hundred people at another cooperative, but we sat around for two hours and no one came. Then we drove to a roadside stand and sat in the shade drinking Inca Cola, a neon-yellow soda that tastes like bubble gum and is Peru’s national drink. Medianero sulked for a while.
“Most of the young towns are aligned with political parties of the left,” he said, “like the Revolutionary Block, or the APRA, or the PUM.” Some parties were just organized around a single leader, like the former president, Velasquez. The acronyms and affiliations formed a dizzying political landscape, but Medianero knew the map intimately. For many years he had been an activist in PUM, which stood for United Party of Mariátegui. M
ariátegui was an early communist leader in Peru, and his name kept coming up. In 1952 Ernesto had befriended a Lima doctor who was both a noted researcher on leprosy and a friend of Mariátegui, and they had talked about Marxism late into the night (Ernesto apparently remained skeptical). The Shining Path was actually known (to itself) as “the Communist Party of Peru for the Shining Path of José Carlos Mariátegui.”
Medianero had gotten his start in activism by organizing a grand, model land invasion. He still glowed with pride as he waved his yellow cola in the air and described the way he assembled the best, handpicked comrades—“We called everyone, even the women, comrade”—late one night. Armed with tools, ropes, building materials, and small wooden stakes, they snuck onto a piece of idle farmland in the darkness and spread out. The plan had been worked out in its smallest details, even to who would be mayor of the new settlement and where the soccer field would go. They drove stakes into the ground to mark where the streets would be, and each comrade claimed a piece of land and built a tiny lean- to out of thatched palm fronds stretched over a simple frame. By dawn there was a town—a somewhat theoretical one, but in Peru theory was fact.
Chasing Che Page 20