Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

the women and little kids in an abandoned house

we were about six hundred people

they put us men facedown and tied our hands

and again they asked us about hidden weapons

and since we didn’t know anything the next morning they began to kill us

they cut off the heads of the men in the church with

machetes

one after the other

so we could see what was in store

then they dragged the bodies and heads to the sacristy

a mountain of heads looking without seeing

and when they got tired of cutting off heads

they shot the rest of us outside

leaning against the red bricks and beneath the red

roof tiles of the school

that’s how hundreds of men died

the women they marched to Cruz Hill and Chingo Hill

and fucked them

over and over and over again

and then they hung them stabbed them

set fire to them

the kids died crying hard

the soldiers said the kids that are left are very cute

maybe we’ll take them home

but the commander said no

either we kill the children or they’ll kill us

the children screamed as they killed them

kill all the bastards kill them good so they can’t holler anymore

and soon there were no more screams

my grandmother hid me in her skirts

we saw the slaughter from the trees

I swear that when the Atlácatl Battalion passed

the trees moved to protect

my grandmother and me

then it was known all over the region

that the soldiers of the regular army

came back to clean up El Mozote

from the farmhouses you could smell rotting flesh

they took the bodies out of the Church of the Three Kings

and buried them all together

but it still smelled of sweet corpse

pigs walked around eating the ankles of the dead

that’s why the soldiers said don’t eat that hog it ate human flesh

nobody picks up the dolls, the decks of cards, the side combs, the brassieres, the shoes scattered

all over the village

nobody prays to the bullet-ridden virgins in the church or to the heads of decapitated

saints

in the confessional there’s a skull

and on the wall an inscription

the Atlácatl Battalion was here

here we shit on the sons of bitches

and if you can’t find your balls

tell them to mail them to you at the Atlácatl Battalion

we’re the little angels of hell

we want to finish off everybody

let’s see who imitates us

me and me and me and me and me and me

the mara, the gang?

the children of the soldiers of ’81

the children of those slaughtered in ’81

nothing is lost in Central America

the slim waist of a continent

everything is inherited

all the rancor goes from hand to hand

When General Marcelino Miles marched into the Guerrero Mountains, he knew very well what ground he was walking on. He was in command of the Fifth Infantry Battalion, and his mission was clear: to finish off the so-called Vicente Guerrero Popular Army, named in honor of the last guerrilla of the Revolution for Independence, shot in 1831. “His lesson was ours,” General Miles muttered at the head of the column struggling up the slopes of the Sierra Madre del Sur.

He had to persuade himself under all circumstances that the army obeyed, that it did not revolt. For over seventy years this standard had established the difference between Mexico and the rest of Latin America: The armed forces obeyed civilian authority, the president of the republic. That was clear as day.

But this morning the general felt that his mission was clouded: At the head of the rebel group was his own son, Andrés Miles, in armed rebellion following Mexico’s great democratic disillusionment. From the time he was very young, Andrés had fought for leftist causes, within the law and in the hope that political action would achieve the people’s goals.

“A country of one hundred million inhabitants. Half of them living in dire poverty.”

It was Andrés’s mantra at supper, and his brother, Roberto, gently took the opposing view. Social peace had to be maintained at any cost. Beginning with peace in the family.

“At the price of one delay after another?” Andrés protested, sitting on his father’s left, naturally.

“Democracy makes slow progress. Authoritarianism is faster. It’s better to settle for a slow democracy,” Roberto said with an air of smugness.

“Fastest of all is revolution, brother,” Andrés said irritably. “If democracy doesn’t resolve matters by peaceful means, the left will be forced to take to the mountains again.”

General Miles, the mediator between his sons, had a longer memory than they did. He remembered the history of uprisings and bloodshed in Mexico, and his gratitude for seventy years of one party and peaceful successions that in 2000 had allowed it to achieve a democratic alternation.

“Alternation, yes. Transition, no,” Andrés said energetically, refraining from banging the teaspoon against his cup of coffee as he turned toward his brother. “Don’t close the doors on us. Don’t badger us with legal trickery. Don’t underestimate us in your arrogance. Don’t send us back to the mountains.”

Andrés was in the mountains now, at the head of an army of shadows that attacked only at dawn and at sunset, vanishing at night into the sierra and disappearing during the day among the men in the mountain villages. Impossible to pick out a rebel leader from a hundred identical campesinos. Andrés Miles knew very well that to city eyes, all peasants were the same, as indistinguishable as one Chinese from another.

That was why they had treacherously chosen him, General Miles. He would be able to recognize the leader. Because the leader was his own son. And there is no mimetic power in the gray, thorny, steep, trackless, overgrown tracts of land — the great umbrella of the insurrection — that could disguise a son in an encounter with his father.

Under his breath, General Marcelino Miles cursed the stupidity of the right-wing government that had closed, one after the other, the doors of legitimate action to the left, persecuting its leaders, stripping them of immunity on the basis of legalistic deceptions, encouraging press campaigns against them, until they had the leftists cornered with no option except armed insurrection.

So many years of openness and conciliation ruined at one stroke by an incompetent right, drowning in a well of pride and vanity. The growing corruption of the regime broke the chain at its weakest link, and Andrés declared to his father:

“We have no recourse but violence.”

“Be patient, son.”

“I’m only one step ahead of you,” Andrés said with prophetic simplicity. “At the end of the day, when we’ve run out of political options, you generals will have no choice but to take power and put an end to the passive frivolity of the government.”

“And along the way I’ll have to shoot you,” the father said with severity.

“So be it,” Andrés said and bowed his head.

Marcelino Miles was thinking of this as they climbed the foothills of the Sierra Madre del Sur. He would do his duty, but it was against his will. As the troops advanced, using machetes to cut their way through lianas in the impenetrable shadow of amates and ficuses intertwined with papelillo trees and embraced by climbing vines, in his mind, love for his son and military duty similarly fought and were entwined. Perhaps Andrés was right, and once again, the sacrifice of the rebel would be the price of peace.

Except what peace? General Miles thought (since one had to think about everything or nothing to triumph over the arduous ascent of an unconquerable mountain, watchword and symbol of a country as wrinkled as parchment) that Mexico didn’t fit into the closed fist of a mountain. When it opened its hand, out of the wounded skin poured thorns and quagmires, the green teeth of nopal, the yellow teeth of puma, streaked rock and dried shit, acrid odors of animals lost in or habituated to the sierras of Coatepec, La Cuchilla, and La Tentación. At each step, always within reach, they sought the intangible — the revolutionary army — and what they found was something concrete: the excessive, aggressive evidence of a nature that rejects us because it is unaware of us.