Carlos Fuentes - The Campaign

Baltasar Bustos reached Upper Peru during the interregnum between Spain and independence. The Spanish forces had immediately executed patriot officers, and the patriots had shot the royalist officers. But the revenge grew: the colonial administration offered more and better candidates for the firing squad — quartermasters, wardens, judges (standing and circuit court), even lawyers, notaries, and mere scribes had been shot without a trial in the Potosí plaza. In La Paz, “unhappy and barbarous city,” explosions, pillage, libertinism, and desertion were the norm. The women opted for the most fiery party, joining the ranks of independence as a “pretext to abandon religion and modesty, and to give themselves over to pleasure with the utmost wantonness.”

“You must impose order,” Dorrego wrote him. “The army of the revolution should not sacrifice its prestige by committing or condoning crimes.” Order? Me? Baltasar Bustos burst into a bitter guffaw, as he sought a praiseworthy avenue for justice amid this chaos: the walls of Upper Peru were stained with the blood of creoles and Spaniards — white men like him, Baltasar wrote to our friend Dorrego — who were the officers and captains of the three armies — the Spanish, the guerrilla, and that of the Buenos Aires junta. The great mass of the soldiers were of mixed blood, and the Indians were the beasts of burden in all three armies. Even his myopic eyes perceived this, but he was in no position to mete out justice no matter what they’d seen.

The whites ran the war — the wars, the guerrilla wars — and killed one another off. The mestizos died in battle, and the Indians provided food, labor, and women. Everyone exploited, everyone recruited, everyone pillaged. When he reached the plateau, Baltasar Bustos repeated incessantly: Only justice can save us all, justice means order without exploitation, equality before the law. He was seeking a tribunal from which to proclaim his truth and set up the words, and also the acts, of justice against the chaos of blood spilled — and this he only reluctantly accepted — in order to allow the birth of a new world.

Arms captured from the Spanish forces entered the plaza of Santa Cruz de la Sierra at dawn, disturbing the coolness of the mountains. Horses released from the corrals invaded the streets of Suipacha at midnight, altering the rhythm of the planets. In the Cuzco marketplace, the guerrilla fighters of Ayopaya exchanged a confiscated crop of coca leaves for rations to be used by the guerrillas. The ranches abandoned by the rural oligarchy were occupied by the guerrillas and turned into barracks for the local warlords, petty chiefs who, from every mountain peak, canyon, and almost from every promontory on the road, seemed to proclaim their independence, their micro-republics, as Baltasar Bustos called them from his ridiculous calvary, his ascent to the roof of America.

There he was, under orders from the revolutionary, enlightened port of Buenos Aires to establish relations with a series of cruel, haughty, audacious, smilingly fraternal, egoistic warlords, who all felt they had a right to take anything — ranches, lives, women, crops, Indians, horses, stagecoaches and stagecoach routes — in the name of independence. But, as the caudillo José Vicente Camargo, who controlled the route between Argentina and Upper Peru, said to him: “Our goal is to free ourselves from the laws and the oppression of Spain, not to exchange them for the laws and the oppression of Buenos Aires.” And that is how it was in those years between 1813 and 1815. To bring Baltasar up to date, I wrote to him, “Every one of the valleys that spill their waters into the Pilcomayo River, every chain of mountains, every ravine, is a petty republic, a center of permanent insurrection.”

However, it wasn’t necessary to explain a thing. Between Tarija and Lake Titicaca, between Suipacha and the Sipe-Sipe River, Baltasar Bustos was made to feel that he was the representative of a new power as distant and despotic as Spain. The vindictive Miguel Lanza in the micro-republic of Ayopaya, the brave Juan Antonio Alvarez de Arenales on the Mizque and Vallegrande roads; the subtle and slightly mad Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas to the north of Lake Titicaca; the grand, generous patriarch Ignacio Warnes, who welcomed those who entered his impregnable refuge in the mountains; the reckless couple, Manuel Ascencio Padilla and Juana Azurday de Padilla — each declared his own independence, his own micro-republic, his own power against two equally vicious and distant powers: Spain and Buenos Aires.

All of them confiscated crops and cattle, recruited mestizos from the towns and Indians from the mountains, sacked ranches, raped women, but they also cut the Spanish Army’s communication lines, deprived the army of supplies, attacked it at night here and there, unexpectedly; incapable of defeating it in a frontal attack, they bled it with small, constant, cruel, and sudden wounds. And they opened the road, provided rest areas, food, and supplies for the liberating army, which, without the micro-republics, the local warlords, and their troops of guerrillas, would have died of hunger at the very start, lost in the hallucination of that plateau so similar to the perpetually hidden face of the moon. There were also the Spanish counterattacks. Without food or communications, without replacements, incredibly far from their Buenos Aires base, the army in which poor Baltasar Bustos commanded two hundred recruits from Argentina’s northern provinces wouldn’t have lasted a single night if it hadn’t been for the local warlords. But they rejected everything Baltasar Bustos brought to Upper Peru, as he sought, with a neophyte’s impatience, the opportunity to proclaim it.

The moment was finally supplied by Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas in the fortified plaza of Arecaja on the northern shore of Lake Titicaca. The other caudillos wouldn’t brook Baltasar’s revolutionary rhetoric; their decisions, so implacable they seemed irrefutable, were made on the spot even if they were the result of long planning. They always knew what they wanted: horses, a crop. Unless their orders were carried out immediately, the war would be lost; it was that simple. Victory was the name of their satisfied demands. Having their orders carried out immediately: the souls of the guerrilla warlords seemed to be what independence was. Baltasar, speaking with them, watching them in the wake of the whirlwind these men stirred up, could not find in them that tiny crack necessary for doubt; and, without doubt, there is no discourse for justice.

“Round up a hundred Indians to move supplies,” Manuel Ascencio Padilla would order on the road to Chuquisaca. “Shoot the whole administration of Oruro,” Miguel Lanza would dictate from his jungle throne between Cochabamba and La Paz. “Drive all the cattle off of B—’s ranch and bring them down to my place,” José Vicente Camargo, on the road to Argentina, would say, imposing his will. “Open the mountain trails to all wounded guerrillas who come to Santa Cruz,” Warnes the magnanimous would order. “I want a woman,” said Father Ildefonso de las Muñecas, clasping his hands and squeezing his lively eyes shut, “but I can’t; it would violate my vow of chastity…”

Baltasar saw him arrive on a mule, like a vision out of Cervantes on a stage that resembled the central plateau of Spain: dry, high, somber, and wrinkled. Spain was reiterated in its colonies: the Andalusian Caribbean, the Mexican Castile, Extremadura so like Cuzco. Ildefonso de las Muñecas also looked like his Spanish and American land, but if he was Castilian in physique, he was definitely Andalusian in gesture and eyes. A revolutionary priest: Baltasar smiled with shock, not his own but the shock he thought our Jacobin friend Xavier Dorrego would feel. Bustos’s glance did not escape Father de las Muñecas.