Eduardo Galeano - The Memory of Fire Trilogy - Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind

In no time at all, the Workers’ Party has grown and won the elections and stuck its black-and-red flag over city hall. Juan Escudero — tall, thick sideburns, pointed mustache — is the new mayor, the socialist mayor. In the blink of an eye he turns the palace into a headquarters for cooperatives and unions, launches a lîteracy campaign, and defies the power of the three companies that own the water, air, ground, and grime of this filthy Mexican port abandoned by God and the federal government. Then the owners of everything organize new elections, so that the people may correct their error, but the Workers’ Party of Acapulco wins again. So there’s no way out but to call in the army, which promptly normalizes the situation. The victorious Juan Escudero receives two bullets, one in the arm and the other in the forehead, a mercy-shot from close range, while the soldiers set fire to city hall.

But Escudero survives, and continues winning elections. In a wheelchair, mutilated, hardly able to talk, Escudero conducts a victorious new campaign for deputy by dictating speeches to a youngster who deciphers his mumblings and repeats them aloud on campaign platforms.

The owners of Acapulco decide to pay thirty thousand pesos so that this time the military patrol will shoot properly. In the company ledgers these outlays are duly entered, but not their purpose. And finally Juan Escudero falls, very much shot, dead of total death you might say, thank you, gentlemen.

(441)

Urviola

His family wanted him to be a doctor. Instead he became an Indian, as if his double-humped back and dwarf stature were not curse enough. Ezequiel Urviola quit his law career in Puno vowing to follow in the footsteps of Túpac Amaru. Since then he speaks Quechua, wears sandals, chews coca, and plays the quena flute. Day and night he comes and goes, inciting revolt in the Peruvian sierra, where the Indians have proprietors like the mules and the trees.

The police dream of catching the hunchback Urviola; the landlords pledge it; but the little shrimp turns into an eagle flying over the mountains.

(370)

Mariátegui

A ship brings José Carlos Mariátegui back to Peru after some years in Europe. When he left he was a bohemian nighthawk from Lima who wrote about horses, a mystical poet who felt deeply and understood little. Over in Europe he discovered America. Mariátegui found Marxism and found Mariátegui, and this was how he learned to see from afar the Peru he couldn’t see close up.

Mariátegui believes that Marxism means human progress as indisputably as smallpox vaccine or the theory of relativity, but to Peruvianize Peru one has to start by Peruvianizing Marxism, which is not a catechism or the tracing of some master plan, but a key to enter deep into this country. And the clues to the depths of his country are in the Indian communities, dispossessed by the sterile landowner system but unconquered in their socialist traditions of work and life.

(321, 277, and 355)

Snapshot of a Worker-Hunter

He peruses the firearms catalogs lasciviously, as if they were pornography. For him the uniform of the Argentine army is as beautiful as the smoothest of human skin. He likes skinning alive the foxes that fall into his traps, but prefers making target practice of fleeing workers, the more so if they are reds, and more yet if they are foreign reds.

Jorge Ernesto Pérez Millán Temperley enlisted as a volunteer in the troop of Lieutenant Colonel Varela, and last year marched to Patagonia for the sport of liquidating any strikers who came within range. Later, when the German anarchist Kurt Wilckens threw the bomb that blew up Lieutenant Colonel Varela, this hunter of workers swore loudly to avenge his superior.

And avenge him he does. In the name of the Argentine Patriotic League, Jorge Ernesto Pérez Millán Temperley fires a Mauser bullet into the chest of Wilckens as he sleeps in his cell, then has himself immediately photographed for posterity, gun in hand, striking a martial pose of duty done.

(38).

Traven

A phantom ship, an old hulk destined to be wrecked, arrives off the coast of Mexico. Among its crew, vagabonds without name or nation, is a survivor of the suppressed revolution in Germany.

This comrade of Rosa Luxemburg, fugitive from hunger and the police, writes his first novel in Tampico and signs it B. Traven. With that name he will become famous without anyone ever knowing which face or voice or footstep is his. Traven decides to be a mystery, so that no bureaucracy can label him. All the better to mock a world where the marriage contract and inheritance matter more than love and death.

(398)

Pancho Villa Reads the Thousand and One Nights ,

deciphering the words out loud by candlelight, because this is the book that gives him the best dreams; and afterward, he awakens early to pasture the cows with his old battle comrades.

Villa is still the most popular man in the fields of northern Mexico, and officialdom doesn’t like it a bit. Today it is three years since his men turned the Canutillo hacienda into a cooperative, which now has a hospital and a school, and a world of people have come to celebrate.

Villa is listening to his favorite corridos when Don Fernando, a pilgrim from Granada, mentions that John Reed has just died in Moscow.

Pancho Villa orders the party stopped. Even the flies pause in flight.

“So old Juan died? My old pal, Juan?”

“Himself.”

Villa half believes and half not.

“I saw it in the papers,” Don Fernando says, excusing himself. “He’s buried over there with the heroes of the revolution.”

Nobody breathes. Nobody disturbs the silence. Don Fernando murmurs: “It was typhus, not a bullet.”

And Villa nods his head: “So old Juan died.”

Then repeats: “So old Juan’s dead.”

He falls silent. Looking into the distance, he finally says: “I never even heard the word ‘socialism’ until he explained it to me.”

All at once he rises, and extending his arms, rebukes the silent guitar-players: “And the music? What happened to the music? Play!”

(206)

The People Donated a Million Dead to the Mexican Revolution

in ten years of war so that military chieftains could finally take possession of the best lands and the most profitable businesses. These officers of the revolution share power and glory with Indian-fleecing doctors and the politicos-for-hire, brilliant banquet orators who call Obregón the Mexican Lenin .

On this road to national reconciliation there is no problem that can’t be overcome by a public-works contract, a land concession, or the sort of favor that flows out of an open purse. Álvaro Obregón, the president, defines his style of government with a phrase soon to become a classic in Mexico: “There’s no general who can resist a salvo of fifty thousand pesos.”

But Obregón gets it wrong with General Villa.

Nothing can be done with him except to shoot him down.

Villa arrives in Parral by car in the early morning. At the sight of him someone signals with a red scarf. Twelve men respond by squeezing triggers.

Parral was his favorite city. “ I like Parral so much, so much …” And the day when the women and children of Parral chased out the gringo invaders with stones, the horses inside Pancho broke free, and he let out a tremendous yell of joy: “I just love Parral to death!”