American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [42]
I am recalling that story now because it has everything to do with links and connections. Just as Eddie understood that he had been called to Virginia to learn an essential lesson about his anger, I was called to Antonio to learn a lesson I absolutely would need to know. It was a question only the leyendas could answer: Where does the evil go?
6
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POLITICS
La Politica
WHERE DO THE poisons go? If it was a question for the spirit, it was one for the real world, too. The rage of the Second World War—the blood lust, the hatred, the killing—stopped, but its black light continued. Like amperage moving along the earth’s surface, it galvanized air, tripped minds with a different fervor. In Peru there was an eerie escalation. The new president, José Luis Bustamante y Rivero, had legalized the long-vilified leftist party, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, and a socialist zeal quickened the air. Prices rose. Tempers mounted. The Peruvian military, which the Aranas and Cisneroses had always been wary of—which, from time immemorial, had seen itself as the guardian of prosperity—began clanking its guns.
By late 1948, Peruvian soldiers were taking to the streets to tamp down the leftist euphoria. It had not been the first time. In an uprising in Trujillo sixteen years before, the APRA had massacred a group of army officers and the military had struck back, arresting or executing anyone they could identify as communist. The liberal tone of Bustamante’s presidency had the army on edge again. Unions were making demands. Inflation was spiraling. Grim-faced men in uniform began to be seen outside the presidential palace, on street corners, chasing “left-wing hooligans” down streets. As Mother returned from the United States with Vicki, George, and her violin in tow, she noted the graffiti on the road from the airport: Hay un bobo en el palacio! the red letters screamed. An idiot has broken into the palace! Who was it? The president himself.
By October 1948, the military had seen enough. General Manuel Odría stomped into Lima’s Plaza de Armas and announced an end to the socialist foolishness. No one so much as blinked an eye. Coups d’état were not new in Peru. Since the turn of the century, the country had seen more military coups, in fact, than democratic elections. General Odría sent Bustamante packing, moved himself into the presidential palace, and announced that he would give Peru a proper election. But seven years later, when I was standing on an empty crate, declaiming mythology to Antonio, the general was still there. The communists and anarchists had fled to the hills, or out of Peru. Their leader, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, had taken asylum in the Colombian embassy in Lima, and the general’s soldiers were clomping up and down with submachine guns to make sure that he stayed inside.
The fever did not abate. The early 1950s were boom years for red dreams: Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were weaving guerrilla visions in Latin American jungles, and the Peruvian left was champing at the prospect of overturning a grim and oppressive cycle. There was a long tradition of exploitation in Peru. It had begun under the Inca with the mita, a system in which peasants were made to contribute years of labor to the state. They were told their work would bring glory to the empire of the sun. When the Spaniards conquered Peru, they adopted the same practice,