“The Chicago Boys,” I interrupted.
“Yes, the Chicago Boys. These devout followers of Milton Friedman’s teachings hold powerful positions as ministers of economics, finance and labour. They run the national pension plans, advise the central bank and direct the national budget. In short, they have privatized the Chilean economy.” Soledad pushed her shining mane of hair out of her face and reached for her pack of Camels. Unlike other capitalist systems, she said, in which the state held some power over corporations, this new kind of capitalism was free from government regulation, and Chile had been chosen as the first country in the world to put it into practice.
Rulo jumped back in. “The social cost is huge, and the model is run almost entirely on giant amounts of credit doled out by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. That has raised Chile’s foreign debt to exorbitant heights while multinationals make a killing, answering to no one. Pinochet and his cronies hold the country in a perpetual state of martial law while pocketing millions in government funds and building a $12-million bunker for themselves in case the Russians drop the bomb. The unlimited amount of credit that suddenly became available has driven thousands of Chileans into bankruptcy. But people are still lining up for credit cards at the brand-new department stores selling imported goods. Allende’s socialist Chile—where top-notch university education was free, where there was universal health care, great pension plans, a model literacy campaign, nationalized natural resources, agrarian reform and a huge budget for arts and culture—has been completely destroyed and replaced with an all-out consumer society. According to the propaganda campaign, Chile will now join the First World.” He made quotation marks with his fingers around the term.
“But the South has to be exploited for the North to maintain the standard of living it has. People are being tricked into believing some of this massive corporate profit will ‘trickle down’ to them.”
My uncle Carlos’s new-found wealth in the late seventies made sense to me now, as did the fact that he’d recently lost everything: his house, his car and the private school educations for his children. Mami had told us this, with worry in her voice, and I’d wondered how the Cousin was handling it all. The previous fall, one of my father’s brothers had made a desperate call to Vancouver after being threatened with jail if he didn’t pay his debts. His wages as a high school teacher (under five hundred dollars a month, with prices in Chile not much different from those in North America) would never be enough to get the creditors off his back. Could my father send him some money? Clearly, my uncle was among the many Chileans who refused to believe that most First World exiles were janitors and lived hand to mouth.
Add to all this Chile’s new constitution, Rulo expounded, which gave Pinochet unprecedented powers and included anti-terrorism clauses that legalized the abduction, torture, murder and disappearance of dissidents—usually the poorest of the poor, simply demanding their basic rights—and the situation presented itself as difficult on the one hand, but perfect on the other for a revolutionary outcome. The regrouping of the resistance movement was leading people to mobilize. In spite of martial law, protests attended by thousands in Chile were on the increase, and a general strike was no longer an impossibility. People’s desire to rise up was becoming stronger than their terror. But this time, Rulo said, there could be no mistaking that the people must be armed. The ruling class had a U.S.-backed army to defend its interests, and the people had the right to an army of their own. Allende’s experiment had been the best thousand days in Chilean history, but the coup had proven that the peaceful way to socialism was not possible at this time in Latin America. If the peaceful way were possible, Simón Bolívar’s dream of a united Latin America, in which there was bread and justice for all, would have been realized a long time ago, Soledad chimed in. Bolivia was named after Bolívar, she reminded us, who’d led the South American wars of independence from Spain in the 1800s. Revolution was still the only way to achieve Bolívar’s vision. And for us, that meant being underground.
Our instructors were finally getting to their point. Although Ale and I lived in a privileged neighbourhood, Rulo said, and hung out with a bunch of rich kids in order to hide our beliefs and our reason for being here, we had to be careful to not let our bourgeois tendencies get the better of us. This was all very different from the meetings with Uncle Boris in Vancouver. He’d tell jokes and praise us for how incredibly revolutionary we were, and then reward us with trips to McDonald’s and Playland, the local amusement park.
“Why do you decorate your walls with newspaper?” Ale must have spent the entire time waiting for an opening to ask the question.
“Little comrade, we have covered the walls with newspaper for security reasons,” Soledad replied. “If any of us were to fall into the hands of the secret police, how would you describe this house?”
“Huh?”
“Exactly. You can’t describe it. Not its whereabouts, nor what it looks like inside or out.”
“Oh,” said Ale.
She had no clue what Soledad was talking about, I could tell. Yet Ale was great at keeping secrets. Our rehearsed lies rolled off her tongue like the latest rock lyrics. As for me, I’d decided I didn’t like Soledad. She was condescending. Also, I wondered many things. Why were we holding our meetings here, when they knew where we lived? We could have met at Sunnyland, doing away with the whole Plaza Murillo/dark glasses/newspaper-covered living room rigmarole. Wasn’t it dangerous that they knew our address and names? What about the car they came to work on at night? Bob was away often now, sometimes for weeks on end, as was Mami, though she left for shorter stretches. I was suddenly exhausted by how much work a revolution entailed.
A SCRAWNY BOY in a leather jacket and Ray-Bans inched his desk up next to mine and stuck his hand out by way of introduction. He was a classmate at my new school: the Northern Institute. Having pulled many strings to get us in, Mami had finally enrolled us, a few days into the school year. So now I went to the same liberal school as Lorena, a few blocks up from the Higher University of San Andrés, where there were protests every week. My other classmates had introduced themselves via notes and winks while the mathematics teacher filled the board with formulas.
Now this boy was shaking my hand.
“Luis García Meza Jr.”
“What?” I said.
“Luis García Meza Jr.”
The teacher saved me from having to reply. “Mr. García Meza Jr, I understand that your dark glasses are of utmost importance to you. However, I suggest you have them off by the time I turn around.” She tapped her long burgundy nails on the blackboard for effect.
At first recess I found out from Félix, a flamingly gay guy I already loved like a long-lost brother, that yes, Luis was indeed García Meza’s son, and that Torrelio’s daughter was in our class, too. Torrelio, as in the dictator himself? “That’s right,” Félix said. “She’s the fat one who dresses like her mother. But don’t call her dad a dictator in these circles,” he corrected me. “And don’t worry about the bodyguards—you’ll get used to having them in the class.” Oh, so that’s what the four men with guns sitting in the back of the room had been doing. Guarding the dictator’s and the ex-dictator’s children.
The father of our classmate German was Luis Arce Gómez, Félix confided, the former minister of interior renowned for carrying out García Meza’s dirty work. The most gorgeous guy in the courtyard, Juan Jose de la Cruz, was the son of one of Bolivia’s biggest cocaine men. Juan Jose clearly came from millions, and his shiny, brand-new motorcycle proved it. “He’s cramming in all the good times now,” Félix explained, “because as soon as school’s done he’ll marry the daughter of another Santa Cruz clan. It’s already been arranged.”
Lorena and her posse joined us in the courtyard just as Silvio Rodríguez’s song “El Rey de las Flores” (The King of the Flowers) started to blast from a loudspeaker placed on a top-floor windowsill of the school building. I looked around, flabbergasted.
Rodríguez, an international superstar and one of the founders of the Cuban New Song Movement, was banned in Bolivia. Everyone listened to him at low volume in the privacy of their own homes, but this was a different matter altogether. The last time some young members of the New Song Movement had played in La Paz, they’d been arrested mid-concert and held for two weeks before being deported.
As the song ended, two guys wearing black berets with red stars stuck their heads out of the window. One of them spoke into a megaphone while the other dropped pamphlets.
“Comrades, welcome to the Northern Institute 1982, and to our Rebel Radio program, which will transmit every day from this very windowsill.”
He paused for effect.
“General Torrelio, U.S. puppet and state terrorist, does not scare us. We will continue to resist the ferocious censorship campaigns by exercising our freedom of speech, whatever the cost may be.”
Some kids continued with their regular courtyard lives, talking and necking, but most were listening intently, and some people clapped and whistled. I glanced over at Luis. He stood chewing his gum with his arms crossed, flanked by his bodyguards, sunglasses still covering his eyes.
“And now, comrades, to finish off this recess, we will play one of Silvio’s more recent hits, ‘Vamos a Andar.’”
I picked up one of the dropped pamphlets on the way back in. In it, the two beret-wearing guys referred to themselves as the Altiplano (Highlands) Kings. The pamphlet included the words to several of Silvio’s songs and a call to join the San Andrés university students at an upcoming protest.
“Do you prefer artsy politico types like the Altiplano Kings or rebel rich boys like Juan Jose de la Cruz?” Félix asked me as we climbed the stairs to our classroom.
“Oh, Juan Jose de la Cruz. By far.”
“Yeah, me too. But look, darling, if you want any guy’s attention we’re gonna have to do something about your nails. There’s no excuse for a girl walking around with nude nails. We’ll go to the pharmacy after school and get you some pink polish. I’m an expert at applying it.”
I loved my new school, with its cacophony of sounds and smells drifting into the classroom: diesel, tear gas, the spray of water cannons, protest songs, slogans and drums reaching us from San Andrés university and chili peppers being ground in nearby courtyards. We held hankies over our noses as we took dictation. Ale and I attended the morning shift. Our classmates were mostly ruling-class kids, but the school handed out full scholarships to dozens of lower-income students as well; one of my classmates was a full-blooded Aymara Indian boy who worked as a servant at a mansion the rest of the time. This was the school where artists with money, intellectuals, doctors and lawyers sent their kids, and there were also the children of politicians, ranging from the outlawed Communist Party leaders to the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (which, despite its name, was largely right-wing). The afternoon shift was public, so working-class kids passed us on our way out.
The courtyard was where it all went down: hookups, breakups, make-out sessions. The Altiplano Kings played banned music and took requests for romantic ballads while Luis Jr. compiled his list. Rumour had it that during García Meza’s rule several left-wing kids had been picked up thanks to Luis Jr. Some of these kids had never come back to school; others had returned with harrowing stories of torture. These stories reached me as a murmur here, a whisper there. Some claimed they were a bunch of lies, others swore they were true. At recess, vendors came into the school courtyard to peddle their wares. Cholitas made the rounds selling salteñas, four-year-olds peddled Chiclets, Aymara Indian gentlemen fresh from the highlands sold packages of roasted peanuts. We bought ice cream from young guys carrying Styrofoam coolers on their backs. Lorena, Félix, my new friends Liliana and Fatima, and I held court arm in arm as Roberto Carlos crooned in Portuguese over the loudspeakers.
I’d broken up with Ernesto during carnival, after a girl knocked on our door at Sunnyland and told me he’d been necking with someone else at one of the many parties happening around town. He’d denied it, unable to believe I’d trust a stranger’s word over his, but I broke up with him anyway. For the rest of carnival I’d turned into a slut again, kissing boys who came by the house to throw water balloons at us, then breaking up with them after a week. Why bother with the everlasting-love thing? If I’d been meant to have eternal happiness, I’d have been in Chile living a homeland life, fighting for my rights with the other teenagers who shook Chilean high schools and were a force to contend with. If I’d been meant to have it all, I’d have been someone else, not this girl who was told every two seconds that what she wanted was petit bourgeois. Rulo and Soledad had grown more and more critical of us. Now every meeting opened with a self-criticism session, in which Ale and I were supposed to condemn our behaviour. Mami and Bob seemed at their wits’ end having to deal with two teenage girls, a toddler, their full-time jobs and their underground activities. It was hard to look them in the eye, knowing we’d let them down so badly. The least I could do, I figured, was walk around with a broken heart.
12
“THIS IS JUST like London.”
The pronouncement came from Liliana, who had never been to London, or anywhere other than La Paz, until now. The four of us huddled in our ponchos on the plaza bench, Lorena, Fátima, Liliana and me, enveloped in the evening fog that had just rolled into Coroico.
It was mid-June, winter break, and Lorena had invited us to her family home in this jungle village, where a band played in the plaza every night and the kerosene street lamps were lit by torch. Leaving La Paz before dawn, we’d settled in the back of the bus and sung along to Radio Chuquisaca, which played all the number-one hits: the Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” Loverboy’s “Everybody’s Working for the Weekend.” My assertion that Loverboy was from Vancouver had been met with sidelong glances among my friends. My school friends in Canada had reacted the same way when I talked about stadiums being used as concentration camps in Chile and Bolivia. No matter where I went, my friends thought I was a liar. That was true, though not in the way they believed. But Lorena and Fátima also came from homes where secret things happened, and this recognition, never spoken, made us fiercely loyal to each other.
Tiny brick-and-cobblestone Coroico was one of a bunch of towns in Los Yungas, a stretch of forest that was basically a paradise on earth. Butterflies the size of your hand, flocks of bright yellow and red birds, bursts of fuchsia flowers, the jungle so green that it made your eyes hurt. To get there, our bus had had to navigate the Highway of Death, a dirt road so dangerous that one wrong move would send you careening into the abyss below. We’d been covered in sweat like the rest of the passengers when we arrived, having come from the freezing highland dawn to the tropics, the scenery changing from snow-covered purple peaks to banana-tree forests and coca-leaf plantations within the span of three hours.
The passengers had inexplicably started running as soon as they got off the bus, leaving their bundles on the roof. The four of us followed. After a few blocks, winding passageways had opened up to a valley that blinded us with its beauty: an explosion of green and cobalt blue. At the bottom of the valley was a dirt field with basketball hoops at either end. Everyone had gathered around the edges, craning to get a glimpse. Led by Lorena, we’d elbowed our way to the front.
A man carrying a machete stood at the centre of the field. Young and muscular, he wore a white undershirt that exposed his powerful arms. He’d walked in a circle, taking us all in, then raised his machete to the sky. My heart pounded in my eardrums. Clearly, basketball was not the name of this game. A sound broke the silence, and a furious bull came running out, raising a cloud of dust. Another man with a machete had appeared behind the bull. Just like that, he grabbed its tail and cut it off. As he spun it in the air like a lasso, blood gushed from the wound, turning the dust into crimson mud. In one swift move the first guy slit the bull’s throat, then stuck his hand deep inside the animal’s chest to pull out the heart. H
e’d held it high, like an offering, blood dripping down his arm. People gasped in admiration as the bull lay down to die. Once the trance was broken, the spectators had started talking and stretching, yawning and kissing friends on the cheek while they formed a line, old newspapers tucked under their arms, waiting for their ration of meat.
We’d trudged back up to the bus, pale as ghosts. Lorena nodded her head at the villagers sitting out on their stoops. A lot of them were black. It was confusing, because they were dressed like Aymara Indians and they spoke in Aymara, but Lorena explained that their ancestors had been slaves. I’d had no clue there had been African slaves in Bolivia.
I’d heard Lorena speak so much about the Coroico dwelling where her mother was born and raised that I was taken aback when I saw it. After the butchering of the bull, we’d retrieved our bags and walked down narrow passageways just off the main square, stopping at a makeshift door hanging off a frame and bordered on both sides by dense foliage. Lorena had knocked once, then let herself in, and we’d followed. A girl about eighteen was baking bread in a clay oven. The large cement floor was sheltered by a tin roof held up by four posts, but there were no walls. Way at the back I could see an outhouse. To our right there was a sink. In the open air stood a long wooden slab that served as a table, and some stumps and old chairs. A dozen barracks-style cots had been lined up in two rows under the tin roof, some bare, the rusty metal uninviting, others topped by burlap mattresses stuffed with hay. I heard a voice in my head say, “Not up to your middle-class standards?” It belonged to Bob, and it cut me to the quick.
The freckle-faced bread-baking girl came running with kisses and hugs. In her straw hat and dungarees, she was a dead ringer for Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island, her smile all dimples. She was Lorena’s cousin Dunia, who’d lived here all her life. We dropped our bags on our cots and used the outhouse and the sink; an hour later we were eating fresh bread from the oven with slabs of cheese. Before falling into a deep siesta, I’d watched Dunia wash her hair in the sink, rebraid it, then pack her bag with books of poetry by Gabriela Mistral, Alfonsina Storni and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, reaching the door just as her boyfriend arrived. Over lunch, she’d explained that she was a poet who had great admiration for other women writers. She was also one of the village schoolteachers. She planned to finish writing her third book of poetry over the holidays.
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