Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

In Colombia, the hired hands call him Don Sata. He gives them machetes that cut sugarcane on their own, hands-free. He goes drinking with them, and all have a grand time, with not the slightest whiff of sulphur or fear of getting scorched.

In Bolivia, the miners call him Uncle. In exchange for cigarettes and liquor he leads them through the bowels of the mountains and shows them the very best veins.

In Argentina, the north belongs to him during carnival. But on Ash Wednesday, the possessed are dispossessed; they bury the lord of the fiesta, he who never drinks water, and they bid him a tearful farewell until next year.

At parties in Brazil’s crowded slums, they sound their drums to call this special guest, infamous avenger of the humble. They beg him to do them the disfavor of coming to live in the world, which is just like Hell only the climate is better.

José Maria Escrivà de Balaguer, who watches out for us from Heaven, is a saint, practically an angel.

In life, this pious servant of God preached love of war, denounced reds and libertines, hated homosexuals and Jews, scorned women, and founded Opus Dei.

Long before the pope made him a saint, Generalisimo Francisco Franco made him a marquis, in compensation for his services. While Franco went about exterminating the Spanish Republic and annihilating heretics, Escrivà sang hymns of praise and tended to the state of his spirit.

Along the path to divine grace, he worked many miracles.

His most astonishing miracles occurred in 1996. Escriva was deceased by then and not yet a saint, though he was getting close, and from Heaven he came to the aid of victims of common crime. In Guadalupe, Mexico, one follower begged his little Escriva medal for help, and the very next day his stolen pickup was found. A short while later, several of the faithful prayed a novena in Milan, Italy, and six stolen cars, the latest-model luxury sedans, were miraculously recovered by their owners.

He was the foundation of his home, his mother’s cane, his sisters’ shield.

Deep within his house, at the end of a long corridor, was an altar to the Virgin. There, he plucked his bullets, duly prayed over, from a bowl of holy water and tied the scapular to his breast, before heading out to do a job. The mother and sisters remained before the altar on their knees, counting rosaries hour after hour, bead after bead, pleading with the Miraculous One to lend the young man a hand.

His professional skills won him fame and respect in the streets of Corinto and in other towns and cities of the Cauca Valley. His reputation did not spread to all Colombia, only because the competition was fierce.

He lived by plugging people, and he died being plugged.

Except for the four bullets for his wife, which were his own affair, he always killed for hire. He pulled the trigger for businessmen, generals, heirs, and husbands.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he’d say. “I do it for the money.”

At the end of every month, General Arturo Durazo, chief of the Mexico police, collected the wages of two thousand officers who had died or never been born. He also charged a commission for every gram of cocaine or heroin that passed through the country, and anyone who played forgetful paid with his wares or his life. To round out his revenue, the man responsible for public safety also sold positions on the force: it cost a million and a half pesos to become a colonel, but for his favorite singers he gave out captains’ stripes as gifts.

In 1982 he received an honorary doctorate, and the papers published a picture of him dressed in cap and gown.

By then, with savings from a lifetime of dedication, General Durazo managed to achieve the dream of owning his own home. Actually he owned several, in Mexico and around the world. Of his Mexican estates, one featured furniture from France, another had an English racetrack and a New York discotheque, a third was a faux chalet from the Alps, and where would he be without an exact replica of the Parthenon, complete with swimming pool?

He ended up in jail for the crime of exaggeration.

In 1999, according to the Times of India, a new educational institution was finding great success in the city of Muzaffarnagar, in the western part of the state of Uttar Pradesh.

The school specialized in skills training for teenagers. The educator Susheel Mooch taught the most advanced course, which covered, among other topics, kidnapping, extortion, and execution. The two other directors took care of more conventional subjects. All the courses included fieldwork. For example, to master highway robbery, the students learned to crouch out of sight and throw a metal object at a car. When the impact startled the driver into stopping, they would proceed to rob him — under the professor’s supervision, of course.

The school emerged in response to clear market demand, and it fulfills a useful social function. As those in charge explained, the market insists on ever higher degrees of specialization in the field of crime, and criminal education is the only professional training that guarantees young people a shot at well-paid permanent employment.

To succeed in life, even beggars need an education.

From glimpses of television in bars and store windows, they learn pointers from the masters of the craft: Latin America’s presidents, who pass the hat at international conferences and practice the art of pleading during their periodic pilgrimages to Washington.

That’s how beggars are inspired to embroider their pitch. A pro never asks for spare change for a drink. Never. He puts his hand out for a few bucks to take his mother to the hospital or to buy the casket for the child he just lost, waving all the while the prescription or the death certificate in his other hand.

From the small screen, beggars also learn to give something in return. Their country is the street, so they have no lands or mineral rights or state companies to offer. But they can repay charity with a reserved seat in the Great Beyond: “Don’t make me steal, Jesus also begged, the Bible says so, may God repay you, may God hold you in his Glory, you’ll go to Heaven for sure…”

One hundred and thirty-five years after his death, Abraham Lincoln was spotted on the streets of Baltimore, Annapolis, and other cities in Maryland.

Lincoln would walk into a store, any store. Touching the brim of his top hat, he’d make a slight bow. Then, stroking his graying beard without mustache, he’d survey the panorama with his unmistakable, mournful eyes, and from his black frock coat he’d pull a Magnum 357. In his direct style, that of a man who never beats around the bush, he’d say, “Your money or your life.”

During the month of May in the year 2000, Kevin Gibson, dressed as Abraham Lincoln, held up eleven stores before the police caught him.

Gibson will be in prison for quite a while. He wonders why. After all, don’t the country’s most successful politicians don Lincoln’s mantle to do precisely the same?