Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

Professional actors dramatize the scene. The opening shot shows the astonished faces of the police. Then, we see the beast point his machine gun, which fires two thousand rounds a minute at three times the speed of sound, and the police cruiser explodes. There’s no skimping on special effects: flames dance across the murderer’s smiling cynical face.

Television is judge and jury. Without hearing a word from Marcos Capeta, the small screen sentences him to die. It won’t be easy. Capeta’s gang is vast.

A spectacular manhunt is launched. The forces of order take charge of the execution.

In the following episode, the screen serves up the prize. The audience breathes a sigh of relief and breaks into applause. After a long and arduous battle, society has one enemy less.

Nilo Batista takes the trouble to read the DA’s file and the police report. The outlaw was gunned down in an isolated house. He had no machine gun, never had one, and his gang consisted of a fourteen-year-old boy, who died at his side.

“Tell us the facts as you know them,” the judge orders.

The court reporter, fingers on the keyboard, takes down the response of the accused, aka the Screw, resident of the city of Melo, age, eighteen; marital status, single; profession, unemployed.

The accused doesn’t deny responsibility for the crime he’s alleged to have committed. Yes, he strangled a chicken that did not belong to him. “I had to kill it,” he declares. “My empty stomach had been grumbling for too long.”

And he concludes, “Judge, it was self-defense.”

We were out chasing wine, empanadas, and songs with Perro Santillan, Diablero Arias, and some other friends, when somebody invited Petete, who was deceased, and he joined us for a few drinks.

I’d never met him before, but during our midday binge the pudgy little man and I became friends. He told me he had died because, poor though he was, he had the truly awful thought to get sick. He went into a diabetic coma in the middle of the night, and the Jujuy hospital had no insulin.

In 1984, sent by a human rights organization, Luis Nino visited the prison yards of Lurigancho Penitentiary in Lima.

Luis plunged into a lonely sea of half-naked, ragged prisoners and barely managed to elbow his way through.

Afterward, he asked to speak with the warden. The warden wasn’t in. The chief of medical services received him.

Luis said some of the prisoners were dying, spitting up blood, and many more were burning with fever and covered in sores. And he hadn’t seen a single doctor. The chief explained, “We doctors only come in when the nurses call us.”

“So why don’t they call you?”

“We don’t have the budget for nurses.”

The electric chair was first used on July 30, 1888.

That day the city of New York, always in the vanguard of world progress, did away with the barbaric practice of the gallows and the hooded executioner. Civilization inaugurated an immediate, scientific, foolproof, and pain-free death.

An audience was invited to witness the event.

The prisoner, gagged and bound with heavy belts, received a three-hundred-volt shock. He writhed and moaned but did not die.

They cranked up the generator and gave him four hundred volts. More violent spasms. Still alive.

When they let him have seven hundred volts, his snout exploded in a spurt of foaming blood, and a faint, throaty howl was heard.

The fourth shot did him in.

The prisoner was a dog named Dash.

He had been convicted, without evidence, of biting two people in the street.

According to those in the know, Evilweed got his name from hiding in the greenery, disguised as a tree to fool the Mexican police.

Some say the bandit, who always gave away his loot, never actually lived, but no one denies that he exists. Though he’s no Vatican saint, he has a shrine in Culiacàn, a few steps from the government palace. The government promises miracles. Evilweed performs them.

Pilgrims come to the shrine from the hills and the coast to leave gifts of gratitude: the husk of the first corn from my harvest, my first shrimp of the season, the bullet that did not kill me.

Limes sit on the altar in a row. Each of the faithful takes one. Taken alone, limes cleanse the mouth. Taken in faith, they cleanse the soul and bring good luck.

The shrine stands on the spot where Evilweed fell when they gunned him down. That was many years ago. The funeral was forbidden, and that’s what started the hail of stones. People came from all around to throw them. The authorities were pleased to see the people stone the bandit. A tall pyramid of stones covered Evilweed.

Under the guise of punishment, the people built him a home.

Airplane pilot Jorge Aguilar inhabits in a three-story vault, bathed in eternal light. Behind polarized glass, eagle wings pay homage to his skill and to the memory of this martyr of free trade.

The six-column parthenon of Lobito Retamoza sees no darkness either, illuminated as it is by solar energy.

Dr. Antonio Fonseca, gunned down on the streets of Guadalajara along with his wife and bodyguards, lies in a vast phosphorescent crypt, surrounded by huge images of his loved ones and a color portrait of a pensive Jesus Christ.

Filled with light and marble angels and plastic toys, the sepulchre of the little children of Güero Palma commemorates the innocents who were dropped from a great height in an act of unjustified vengeance.

The drug traffickers and their families reside in a luxurious section of the Culiacàn cemetery, Humaya Gardens. All their monuments feature telephones just in case they ever revive.

Their birthday parties last several days and nights with bands that play round the clock to accompany the drinking. The parties take place without incident. Only once did shots ring out, but that was because one of the musicians, claiming exhaustion, refused to keep playing.

“Since then, the orchestras keep their side of the deal,” explains Ernesto Beltràn, groundskeeper and gravedigger, while he picks up the empties.

The British jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham invented a moral calculus that allowed him to measure Good and Evil.

To combat Evil, he created the perfect prison in 1787. He called it Panopticon. It was a large cylinder of cells, laid out in a ring around a central tower. From the tower, the watchman kept watch, while those being watched could not see the watchman watching them. The penitentiary design could also be used as an asylum, a factory, a barracks, or a school.

Over the years, many countries put this architecture of power into practice intended, as it was, for “punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle.”

When he died, Bentham received his last wish. He had his body stuffed and seated in his usual chair, dressed in black, his cane in his fist. Thus for years to come the tamer of the world’s chaos could continue to watch over the meetings of the board of trustees of the University College of London. “Present but not voting,” as it was noted in the minutes.