GUATEMALA: LA VIOLENCIA/AT THE BATTERED WOMEN'S SHELTER

Guatemala: La Violencia

     In the late 1980’s, my friend Roger Bunch and I were in southern Mexico, on our way to Guatemala. Roger had been spending considerable time there – often more than a year at a time – and had developed a number of close friendships, including some among the indigenous Mayan people. That gave him a record of acquaintances with people who had known and trusted him since before “la violencia,” which was the name commonly applied specifically to the years 1981-82, and more generally to the entire decade, as continued resistance by leftist guerrillas gave the Guatemalan military an excuse to prosecute a near “scorched earth” campaign in some of the regions primarily occupied by indigenous Mayan people – historically, the poorest people in the country.

     Our idea was to use Roger’s contacts and familiarity with the country to introduce me to people who had stories to tell about the history of systematic killing and repression, particularly under General José Efraín Ríos Montt, the Roman Catholic-cum-Evangelical minister-cum de facto President and trusted friend of, and recipient of military aid and public praise from, U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

     Roger had friends in San Cristobal de las Casas, a lovely Mexican town in the state of Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border. We stayed there for a couple of days, then went off the beaten path to a smaller town – I think it was Las Margaritas - nearer the border, and eventually to a small cluster of thatched makeshift homes of Guatemalan Mayan refugees who had managed to escape across the border during la violencia.

     Roger now asked in the refugee camp for a specific Mayan man, by name. After a few minutes’ wait, a man appeared and approached us cautiously. Roger introduced us and we sat on stools in one of the huts.

     Roger had a photo, several years old, of himself with a Guatemalan Mayan man. By itself, it meant nothing. But both men were readily identifiable, and Roger’s friend, the other man in the photo, had written a note about Roger on the back, and signed it. Roger handed the photo to this man, and sat quietly. The man looked at the photo for a long time. Then he turned it over and read the note on the back for a long time. Then he turned it back over and looked at the picture, again, for a long time. Then he looked up at Roger. His nod was the acknowledgement: I see that you are a friend of someone I trust. His face was now a question: what do you want?

     Roger introduced me again, this time into a human situation that was categorically different from what it had been a few minutes before. He said that I could be trusted. He said I was a writer, a journalist who could get stories published about things that had happened in Indian towns in Guatemala. I could be trusted to name no names, to tell no details, that would endanger the life of the teller of a story, but that I could still tell the story to people in the United States, the same people who elected the presidents who were instrumental in giving military aid to Guatemala. The rest went unsaid; didn’t need to be said. It would have been like telling an Iowa farmer that too much rain at the wrong time might damage his corn crop.

     The man was quiet. His head was bowed. He was sad. His sadness filled the hut. His sadness made us quiet, made us parishioners in the church of his sadness. He took a deep breath, let it out, spoke. I don’t have his exact words. But this is what he said:

     The soldiers came to our village. They gathered the young men who were there at the time. They tied their hands behind. They lined them up in front of the rest of us, their families. They painted them, their hair, their faces, all over, with gasoline.

     Then they lit them... .

     Some of them we could only identify by their belt buckles....

     I have seen – we all have seen, those of us who have been so lucky as to have a few decades of life behind us – a number of American presidents, speaking with utmost sincerity, on national television, appealing to us to believe their explanations of things, of what was happening to all of us, of what must be done in the face of these events.

     I have never seen, on the face of any one of those presidents – Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama - anything that made me believe he was telling the truth as that Mayan man in an unofficial refugee camp near the Guatemalan border made me believe that he was telling the truth.

     I have read numbers from 100,000 to 200,000 Mayans who were killed in this virulent attempt to eliminate “subversivos,” which often came to mean anyone who lived in a village where even one person was suspected by the army, or by any informer, of being supportive of the leftist guerrillas.

                                At the Battered Women's Shelter

     Marshall Sachs called me up and said he was donating some money to the Battered Women's Shelter in Santa Cruz for some improvements they needed, and asked if I'd donate my labor to make and install kitchen cupboards if he bought the materials.

     Like anyone who goes to the shelter, I had to promise not to reveal its location, so none of the husbands or boy friends who had been beating these women ‑ and, in some cases, their kids as well ‑ could find them and finish what they'd started.

     The shelter was just another house in a quiet neighborhood. I worked there for two or three weeks, spreading my sawhorses, tools, and materials out on the concrete driveway beside the house. I'd finish cutting a few pieces, then go in a side door, wind around furniture and kids playing with their toys on the floor, and on into the kitchen to nail up the new pieces. It was on‑site cabinet work, sort of.

     The place was crowded, and my being there made it more so. There was no way around that, but the women tried to leave me as much space as they could, and while they couldn't keep their kids from being fascinated with what I was doing ‑ that always happens ‑ they managed to convince them to heed my admonitions not to touch the power tools or the pneumatic nail gun.

     As I worked among the women in that crowded space, I overheard bits of their stories, and of their conversations with one another about who should go back to her man, who should not. It was all there: it was really my fault, I shouldn't have pissed him off like that when he'd been drinking; no, that's his fault, not yours; I'm going to give him one more chance once he simmers down, he promised not to do it again; no, you can't go back, that's what he says every time....

     One day I was working in the driveway, being watched with wide eyes by two little Mexican girls, sisters about four and five years old. They'd taken a shine to me because I was doing something interesting and because they'd found out I could speak Spanish with them.

     Working on a cabinet in the driveway, I was hammering, either driving nails or assembling something like a mortise and tenon joint. I was trying to pay attention to what I was doing and still talk with the girls.

     At a particularly sharp blow of my hammer, the younger girl flinched and sucked in a startled breath that stopped our conversation. She turned to her sister and asked in Spanish, "Is he going to hit us?"

     The older girl looked at me for a long moment with eyes like some foolproof radar

of the soul, then answered: "No, he's only working."

INTERVIEW WITH BILL GANDALL

Interview with Bill Gandall

NOTE: I interviewed Bill Gandall March 2, 1988, at the Veterans' Memorial Building in Santa Cruz, California. He gave his dates of service in the U.S. Marine Corps as November 9, 1926, to November 9, 1930.

     I tape‑recorded the interview, then transcribed it myself, editing for brevity only. Here, I have changed the order of some things he said, to spare the reader some of the jumping back and forth that Bill did as he talked. Other than that, this is what he said, the way he said it.

BG: My father was a railroad worker, and I lived in a lot of these towns as a kid, like Savannah, Georgia; Jacksonville, Florida; Louisville, Kentucky; Chicago...and I lived among mostly Catholic Polish people, Chechoslovakian people, other mixtures on the West Side of Chicago. I grew up as a typical midwesterner. I left Chicago after grammar school, and went to junior high in Cleveland, and high school in New York and in Palm Beach. I ran away from home when I was 16.

     And I joined the Marine Corps at 18, not to fight, but I liked those South Sea posters.

     I always thought that all the Marines were bastards. Because the ones I was with, 3,200 of us, were a pretty rough bunch. It was 100% white, and all racist. 70% were from the South, a lot of 'em from Appalachia, with ingrained hatred, built in by the years of attitudes towards considering Indian people inferior, considering Hispanics... calling 'em spics, gooks, and black people were called niggers, and Jews were called sheenies and kikes. And I'm Jewish. But I was so immersed in the Christian culture, by growing up in the West Side of Chicago, that that didn't mean anything to me.

     I had just finished doing duty at the Boston Navy Yard. And I was manning a machine gun at a mass demonstration in front of Charlston Prison, when I was on a roof, with a machine gun, ready to shoot into a 100,000 people that were protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. ...and I was told by my officers that we were gonna 'fry a few wops today,' you know, we were gonna execute 'em, fry 'em.

     And not being educated, I just thought that they were telling the truth, that these were bomb‑throwers, and foreigners who were trying to overthrow the government. And I went along with it until I read about it in high school, and then in universities, that they were really martyrs for labor.

     [In 19]27, '28 I was in Nicaragua.

DM: First of all, I'd like to hear the circumstances surrounding your being sent there. What were you told by your chain of command?

     BG: I was told that we were going to Nicaragua to protect American women and children, who were being threatened by this bandit named Sandino. 'Course, Sandino was a nationalist hero, but we weren't told that. But he was 'endangering American lives and property,' especially, they'd bring in that violin concerto, 'women and children.' I was shipped out on a minelayer; it was the second contingent to land at Corinto.

     Then I met a hotel owner that was a paraplegic, played chess with him, and one day I said, We're gonna catch that bandit Sandino. He said, Bill, he says, You've been brainwashed ‑ that was before brainwashed was a common term ‑ and he said, You have been so misguided, he said, If Sandino gets in, I'm gonna lose my hotel, because I think there'll be a real revolution, to dispossess some of us. But he's still a patriot, because he wants to be free. And he says, So do I. He said, I'm not supporting the American invasion; if I could help Sandino, I would. I said, I'll turn you in. He says, No you won't; fundamentally, you're a good guy. So of course, I never squealed on him, or anything. So he gave me some ideas.

     But I was an animal, and I did what I was told, and I killed a lot of people ‑ innocent people ‑ I committed rape there, with a group... group rape...that was usually out in the boondocks, where nobody could see us, out in remote areas, like around Matagalpa, Jinotega, and other places on patrol. We'd come across a girl swimming, or cleaning ‑ they'd wash clothes by pounding them on the rocks, because they didn't have soap, in the river. And the honcho guy in our group, usually a sergeant, a brute, would attack her, and the rest would follow, it became a mass hysteria thing. Sometimes, you know, you'd just kill the girl, just by overusing her. She'd die from it.

     There was no pity, there was no sympathy. We'd take an alcalde, a mayor of some village, and we'd get him up, and his family, in front, and say, Where's Sandino? They didn't know, most of the time they were just ignorant. They didn't know where Sandino was...and we still thought that they did know, or some stooge would report it, 'cause we offered money, and we'd hang him up by his ankles and cut his throat or his private parts, and torture him until he died. And then if there was any objection, we'd kill anybody who would object. We'd shoot 'em with our...and I would too, you did it, there was no feeling that they were people. They were in the way, kill 'em. There was complete brutality. We were committing genocide, as far as I'm concerned now. But at that time, I didn't have the intelligence or the empathy with people to know it. I was completely brutalized.

     You know, like when I enlisted in the Marine Corps, and the second day on the drill field, the sergeant says, Whaddya think of this problem, and I said, ‘I think...’ being the volunteer type, and he hit me with [the side of] the sword, this heavy saber, right against the cheek, he knocked me to the ground, he hit me so hard. And as I'm lyin' there thinkin', what the hell am I into, he points the saber right at my nose, within an inch, and he says, No sonofabitch thinks in the Marine Corps. You obey. Period. Obey, obey, obey. No thinking. No thinking allowed.

     So I didn't think. I became just an animal responding to stimuli. And the stimuli was all wrong.

     And then we burned villages...everything we did in Vietnam we did there first, but the American people didn't know about it; there was no radio, there were no reporters, and of course there was no television in those days. I'd say that 99 99/100% of the American people didn't know where Nicaragua was, and furthermore, they didn't care.      

DM: Where were you stationed down there?

BG: All over. But mainly Managua. Managua was the center of our operation.

     Calvin Coolidge promised the Nicaraguan people, in 1928, that they would get a fair and open election. And a fair and open election was as follows:

     I was put in charge of the biggest district in all of Nicaragua, 'cause I spoke about 20 words of Spanish ‑ most of which were connected with sex or food. And the colonel in charge said to me, Bill, I want you to run a fair and open election. But just make sure that General [Jose Maria] Moncada wins. Moncada was our candidate. He was a stand‑in for the guy who was most cooperative with us, a guy named Somoza. He was a boyhood friend of Sandino, by the way, and he was completely corrupt.

     So I had six Marines, a detachment, to help me. They had rifles, and I had a .45. And I walk in, my Marines are outside, sitting on a bench, I walk in, I throw my campaign hat down, you know what it's like, a Boy Scout hat...

DM: Smokey the Bear.

BG: ... and I'm in khaki, and I've got a lanyard attached to my pistol, and I detach it, and I pull it outta my holster, and slam it on the table, as I look at the [election] Board ‑ there's five of 'em there; two were absent. I says, "Es la ley." It's the law. And they look amazed, you know, at my absolute stupidity for sayin' that, when I'm runnin' a 'free and open election.' They'd believed the President [Coolidge]. Unbelievable that they should believe him, after all the rapes and....

     And I says, Furthermore ‑ I picked up the gun and I pointed it at each one individually, and said, in broken Spanish and English, If any of you bastards cross me, you're dead. As I pointed the gun at 'em.

     And they shook their heads in amazement. And one guy, a big peasant with immense shoulders and a great big walrus mustache, he leaned back and said to the little guy next to him ‑ they were from different [political] parties ‑ and he says to him,  " Es loco, no...?" and the guy shook his head dolefully and he says, "No es loco. Es muy loco."

     And they went about their business, and they ran a fair and open election. Every voter had his hand dipped in mercurochrome, so he wouldn't be able to vote twice, as if it made any difference....

DM: So was it a free and open election?

BG: Are you kidding? You must be kidding, I mean, we ran nothing fair. When the election results were in, we counted 'em, and I verified it, but I didn't sign the statement. What I did was I took the 72% that the Conservative candidate [got; he] really won the election. Moncada only got a few votes; all the other candidates got more votes than he did.

     So I just took those [conservative] votes, and transferred them to the [Moncada] column, and then verified it, for General Moncada. And I told my group to take the majority of the ballots, that were for the Conservative candidate, who was a fairly decent guy...he owned a lotta coffee fincas, and he wanted some benefits for his people, he didn't want all the profits to go into the banks of the United States.

     So I told 'em to take those boxes fulla ballots that were against us, and dump 'em into Lake Managua, which was nearby. And Lake Managua is a freshwater lake, and it's got freshwater sharks, which is unusual. And the [laughs] ballot boxes didn't sink, even though they were loaded with paper, and I said, Well, I'm in charge here, so you guys go in and get those boxes.

     So they timidly went in with poles, got the boxes, and burned 'em, so there was no evidence to show.

     So that's one of the great things we did. The other terrible thing we did was ruin their cemetery, desecrated it. One night ‑ all of us were pretty drunk. Liquor was very cheap there, wonderful Scotch liquor by the bottle for a few pennies.

     ...we hadda march down, after busting open the graves and distributing the bones as if it were a bowling alley, knocking off the heads of statues ‑ a lot of those statues were done by the civilization ...Quintana Roo, in Guatemala, what is the race...

DM: Maya?

BG: ...Mayan. There were Mayan statues in there, in a Catholic cemetery; they had mixed their own myths with Catholic saints. These were irreplaceable. There is no record now of these Mayan statues; they were just knocked about by us. We destroyed every statue in the whole cemetery, and opened the crypts, and insulted the whole people. To the Nicaraguan people, who had this theology, and this history, of worship of ancestors, and revering the dead, and the afterlife, and all that ‑ this was the most horrible thing we could do.

     And we marched, 300 of us, from Campo de Marte, in the dust, up to our knees, got down there, we had to kneel down, and present arms. That's very difficult to do, when you're kneeling...and our general spoke, and asked...we were apologizing for our terrible insult to the Nicaraguan people.

     And you know what the 300 of us were doin'? Muttering under our breaths: What are we apologizing to these gooks for? Let's shoot 'em. And including that general. We were ready to shoot the bastard, is the way we put it, because he's makin' us apologize to these inferior....     

DM: Your own general?

BG: Yeah. We were ready to shoot him. And I think if we'd had a leader that was stupid enough, we woulda shot him. Because we were animals. Here he's makin' us apologize to these inferior gooks, these nothings, and...we really resented it, so we went out and did another pillage of some kind. We burned a village just for the hell of it, because of that. We were rankled. Our manhood, or machoism, was being insulted. We were being made to feel shame, and we didn't feel shame. We felt anger, at these stupid college guys tellin' us what to do.

     So it was a horrible thing, and I didn't understand it, and didn't care. I didn't have any conscience or any feeling about it; I just was getting drunk most of the time, carousing around, tryin' to get laid, counting the days when I would go back home in rotation.

     We trained [the Guardia Nacional] in brutality, just like the Marine Corps, it was like a Parris Island, or a Camp Pendleton down there. We brutalized them; they mistreated the Indians....

DM: Were you hearing, in the early '30's, Smedley Butler going around and talking about...he also had a change of heart about the Marine Corps.

BG: Yeah. Oh, yeah, that helped me...after [Butler] got out, he issued some terrific statements, about bein' a collection agency and a gangster for American banks, how we coulda taught Al Capone a thing or two, he only operated outta three districts outta Chicago; we operated outta three continents. I thought he [Butler] was one of the great heroes of our time. Little man, real little, but a lotta guts.

     [Much later] I picketed a lotta Marine Corps recruiting offices, calling for the court‑martial of Colonel [Oliver] North, and they came out, all of 'em, and said, Good for you, boy, we wish he would go to jail.

GUNS IN COSTA RICA

                                               Guns in Costa Rica

     In Costa Rica, I started with a map, with the bits of information I'd picked up reading and listening, and with my own hunches about how military operations, and secret ones in particular, work. First, the border-jumpers would need roads. And, because they were working with Americans, they'd need airstrips, preferably close to roads which were passable in all seasons yet not too heavily traveled.

     And, since the real energy behind the push against Nicaragua came from Americans rather than Hondurans or Costa Ricans, there would have to be places for the secret-war types to hang out, get drunk, get laid, and otherwise indulge themselves in the neo-colonial niceties that were part of the reason they lived the lives they lived. (Some of us began referring to people from the United States as "North Americans," feeling that people from Central and South America were as much "Americans" as we were.) The usage never seemed to take hold in the U.S., but it is common in South America, where many (not all) people see North Americans’ habit of seeing themselves as the only “Americans” as just another example of our national arrogance.

     I went to the office of the Tico Times, Costa Rica’s respected English-language newspaper. People there, including the proprietor, were helpful. But when I asked a reporter who had written about the Nicaragua situation if he cared to accompany me to the border area, I got an emphatic "no." He went further, saying that he very much doubted that I would find a journalist in Costa Rica who would be willing to go there, not now. It was because of La Penca.

     In May of 1984, the contra leader Edén Pastora, who was leading a group of contras raiding across the border, had held a press conference just inside Nicaragua at La Penca. Someone disguised as a journalist had set off a bomb, gravely wounding Pastora and killing three of the journalists present and wounding over a dozen. A reporter from the Tico Times was one of those killed.

     During the three or four days I hung around San Jose trying to get my bearings and to get the lay of the land from journalists working in the country, I prowled the streets of the capital at night, sniffing for the spoor of the covert-operations types I knew must be flocking to the tiny, neutral, anti-military country Mickey had told me was becoming a fogón of military activity.

     One of the first watering holes I wandered into was Nashville South, a hole-in-the-wall country and western bar that was a habitual stop for all manner of U.S. expatriots, including being something of an "in" place for the more adventurous among the American Embassy crowd. The place was lined with barn wood and wooden shingles, had a lot of Jimmy Buffet and Willie Nelson on the jukebox, and a green and white flag with the words CALIFORNIA REPUPLIC in bold letters, a dead replica of the original Bear Republic flag, except that it had two bears instead of one, and they were fucking.

     Good a place as any to start, I thought.

     The covert war was definitely present in Nashville South, but I didn't get very far in penetrating it. Military people wear civilian clothes in a way that lets you know it's a change from how they normally are, even when they're trying not to. When such types would be cloistered at the bar in what appeared to be a particularly focused conversation, they always quieted when I sauntered by. I guess I was as obvious to them as they were to me. I did see a couple of different Latinos, obviously just in from the boonies, hurriedly stash military rucksacks in the back. The closest I came there to getting useful information was several conversations with a young German woman who worked for a U.S. agency that administered aid to people in outlying towns. She said that her boyfriend, a Texan, was working on a massive construction project, a wide road with over-strength bridges up near the border that she was sure had something to do with planned operations against Nicaragua. She herself was adamantly against the contra effort, as much for its attempt to militarize Costa Rica as for its targeting of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

     I asked for her help. Could she talk to her boyfriend? Get me facts, numbers, names of contracting companies, documents? She thought it over, agreeing that a military move by the U.S. against southern Nicaragua could trash the fragile Costa Rican democracy. But finally she said helping me would jeopardize her job. She backed off.

     Another place I went to a few times was Key Largo, decorated with posters of Bogart and Bacall from the movie of the same name. It was known as a pick-up joint, and openly worked by prostitutes. Still, with its dark hardwood bar and old palms growing just outside the windows, it had a certain sleazy class about it. I got in a couple of long conversations with a young Costa Rican who was a member of a folk-dancing troupe. He deplored the U.S. attempt to militarize Costa Rica. He said that he didn't have direct personal knowledge of what was going on in the border areas, but could probably find out, as it was common knowledge among "Ticos," or Costa Ricans. But it turned out that the main reason he talked to me was that he wanted to go to bed with me, and when that failed, so did his willingness to help. He'd get in trouble, he said.

     There was a restaurant called the Varadero, or Traveler, (also the name of a well-known beach in Cuba) where people weren't so timid. It was run by Cuban exiles. The food was good, and cheap. A glance at the menu told you where these people were coming from: a featured item was pollo a lo Reagan.

     I'd already noticed people in civilian clothes carrying concealed pistols. I seemed to have a knack for that since the time in Colorado Springs when I'd yelled out in the restaurant, "Hey Dave, look! Those guys are all packin' guns!" and the three feds, or whoever they were, had melted away. Once when I was eating dinner in the Varadero I looked up to see a muscular forty-ish Cuban man emerge from a back room, talking in a loud voice to someone over his shoulder. He was carrying a pozo like Shooter and Flaco had carried in Tegucigalpa, and my eyes were immediately drawn to the pendulousness with which it hung from his hand.

     As quickly as I noticed that, he noticed that I'd noticed. He stopped next to my table on his way to the door and stared down at me and gave me a hard smile - one that reminded me of Perico's smile at me when he'd showed us the garrote in the contra camp in southern Honduras - and raised his eyebrows as if to say, "Well?" I nodded, gave what must have been a sickly grin, and turned back down to my food. He walked on out the door, leaving me thinking that the difference in pure balls between these guys and the gentle, conscionable people like the young German woman and the young Tico who so opposed what guys like this were doing but would take no risks to oppose them, said a lot about why the militarists were succeeding. I hoped that his arrogance also said that he and his kind must ultimately fail, but just now that hope seemed thin.

     I began to spot them on the streets of San José. I remember one particular night when I was just hanging out, people-watching, on a well-lit, crowded square. A man in his late twenties or early thirties, dressed in a tropical suit, looking quite like a gringo of the U.S. type by his skin color, haircut, and manner, walked by a few yards from me. My attention immediately homed in on him, but the weapon wasn't the first thing I saw. It was the excitement visible in his step, in the jerky movements of his head as he looked around him, trying for all the world to pass himself off as just another person walking through a crowd, yet with the deeper longing even more visible, at least to me: the need to be someone who lived a life that required, or allowed, him to carry a gun; to be someone apart, "special;" to know that he, alone in the crowd, carried such power with him.

     Then I looked at his waist, saw the bulge. His head, jerking about like a radar antenna gone amok, found me looking at him. His hand involuntarily clutched at his coattail and pulled it around front, as if he'd been caught with his fly open.

     A news report had mentioned the town of Los Chiles. I found it on the map. It was at the end of the highway north out of San José, Costa Rica's capital. There was an airstrip nearby. And Los Chiles was one kilometer - just over half a mile - from the Nicaraguan border.

     I hired a taxi driver to take me to Los Chiles. After a drive of several hours, he dropped me at the town square and headed back to San José. I stayed in the tiny town the better part of a week. It was a zillion miles from anywhere, with the exception of its being a short walk from the border. It was also near, or even adjacent to, land owned  and/or managed by John Hull, the expatriot rancher from Indiana who critics of Reagan Administration policies in Central America had charged was aiding the contras by allowing his land and airstrips to be used as staging areas for cross‑border raids against the Sandinistas, and for resupply flights to contras inside Nicaragua. It was also charged that aircraft carrying drug shipments to help finance the contras were using the area.

     Knowing by the look of the tiny town that any accommodations would be primitive, I asked for the "best hotel in town." I was directed to the Hotel Río Frío, a little ways downstream from the town's boat landing. My "room" at the hotel consisted of three thatched panels which formed a small rectangle against the outer wall of the single‑story building. The walls went only up to about head height, to allow ventilation to pass between them and the roof. I had a narrow bed, and the lady of the house furnished me a mosquito net to drape over it.

     One evening, I got to drinking beer in a cantina with a young man named Enrique Millón. He was a member of the Guardia Civil, a lightly armed part-time police force, and quite proud of it. After we'd gotten acquainted a little, he said he wanted me to hear a certain song. He stepped to the beat-up jukebox and punched "C7", and the scratchy record began with a military fanfare and a dramatically spoken introduction: "NIcaRAgua! 1978!" The song was “Comandante Zero”, and recounted the exploits of Edén Pastora, Sandinista revolutionary hero turned contra leader, as he directed the taking of Nicaragua's National Palace by Sandinista insurgents in 1978, the year before Somoza was finally defeated. Millón said "Comandante Cero" was his favorite song ‑ both because of Pastora's former Sandinista identity and his current contra status.

     Enrique was a recent graduate of the US Special Forces infantry training course at Murciélago, in northwestern Costa Rica. With his rounded, boyish face and decidedly unathletic physique, he bore a striking resemblance to Liberace. But he was clear about why he volunteered for the US training: "I like the military," he said, making a chubby fist. "Soy hombrón: I'm a real man." Millon's outfit was a company of the Guardia's Batallón Relámpago, or Lightning Battalion. The battalion's shoulder patch consisted of M16 rifles crossed over a lightning bolt, a near replica of the US Special Forces (Green Beret) patch.

     The unit was responsible for maintaining the integrity of Costa Rica's northern border with Nicaragua. That responsibility included enforcing Costa Rica's official policy of neutrality towards all Central American armed conflicts.

     Los Chiles, a half hour's walk from the Nicaraguan border, was in an area where the presence of contra camps was such an open secret that no one even pretended it was a secret. Yet members of Millón's company told me that they were on guard "to keep the piricuacos from coming up the river (the Río Frío, which flows past Los Chiles into Nicaragua)." Piricuacos was the derogatory term for Sandinistas used by the US military and contra groups; it meant something like "yapping dogs," which I always took for a reference to the Sandinistas' penchant for shouting slogans.

     Two young men from the company, Victor Ávila and José Manuel Esquivel, talked as they lounged on duty overlooking the Río Frío. It was one of them who had made the comment about piricuacos. They wore new US‑supplied fatigues and combat boots, and communicated with a US field radio. They were armed with three US automatic weapons between the two of them: an M60 machine gun, an M16 rifle, and the deadly M203, which consists of an M16 automatic rifle with a 40mm grenade launcher mounted under its barrel. The weapons were laid across a parapet of new olive drab nylon sandbags.

     Members of the Guardia company at Los Chiles were openly pro‑US and anti‑sandinista. This gave me the idea that their training by U.S. Special Forces troopers didn't stop at weapons and tactics.

     One night when I was asleep in my cubicle in the hotel, I was awakened at 1:20 in the morning by the sound of a multi‑engine aircraft circling low overhead. It landed at the strip near town. A half hour after the sound stopped, the front door of the hotel opened and several young men, talking in loud voices in Spanish, came in and went to bed in "rooms" a few feet down the hall from mine. One of them took the room next to mine, with nothing but a thin thatched partition between us.

     There was an airstrip shown on the map at Los Chiles. It may or may not have been owned or used by John Hull. But it was just an airstrip, with no facilities that could be said to constitute a passenger, or even a freight, terminal. Certainly there were no landing lights, no tower. There was no passenger service to Los Chiles; I had checked to see if I could come that way. No charter flight would have arranged to drop in there in the middle of the night.

     Yes, I was scared. To begin with, I was alone. As the young men bounced noisily around the hotel - including past the thin front wall of my cubicle - in the manner of men who have no reason to be respectful, let alone afraid, of anyone nearby, I feigned sleep and wondered if the journalists back in San Jose I'd dismissed as timid knew something I didn't. 

     The next day, Enrique Millón, the guardsman who lived in Los Chiles, invited me home to meet his wife and mother‑in‑law. It was a tiny one‑room place on the edge of town. While we were talking I asked Millón about the airplane noise the night before. He said he hadn't heard it. The two women looked at him in disbelief, then at one another. They'd certainly heard it, they said. I asked all three what they thought a large airplane was doing landing at Los Chiles in the middle of the night. Enrique shrugged, said he didn't know. The two women looked at each other again, saying with their eyes, it seemed to me, that they didn't believe their husband/son. Their manner also suggested to me that they didn't approve of his military adventures, that he was involved in them more because of some personal need to prove himself than because of any national exigency, and that there was little they could do or even say about it because they were women and he was the man of the house.

     Then I said that I thought that the flight must have had something to do with the contras, and the two women nodded in agreement. I think they felt they could publicly agree with me because, after all, I was a man too. They seemed to hope that I might have some influence on Enrique. I didn't, both because I was there as a reporter rather than a protagonist, and because he wouldn't have listened anyway: "Me gusta lo militar; soy hombrón," as he had put it earlier.

     Back in San Jose a few days later, I went again to the Tico Times office. I spoke to the same reporter who had told me I wouldn't find anyone to go to the border with me. I asked him what possible explanations there might be for a multi‑engine aircraft landing at Los Chiles at 1:20 am. It had to be guns or drugs, he said. Or both.

     A few days later, I drove in a rented four-wheel drive Suzuki to Upala, another small Costa Rican town near the Nicaraguan border, but farther west. I pulled up in front of the Buena Vista Bar and Restaurant. It seemed to be the only one in town, and I was hungry. It was an inviting place with a thatched-roof veranda overhanging the Río Zapote. I walked in, sat down, ordered a beer, and began reading the menu.

     A stocky young Latino in his early thirties walked directly up to my table. I had literally not been in town five minutes. "I am Comandante Charro," said my uninvited guest, then continued: "I am the leader of a column of combatants from the anti‑Sandinista group UNO‑FARN, led by Comandante Negro Chamorro. I formerly fought with Comandante Edén Pastora, but now I am with UNO‑FARN. I like Americans very much. I work with la Cía. My advisor is known as 'Mister Jones.' You look a lot like him. Are you with la Cía?"

     So another of my hunches had turned out to be accurate; my first minutes in Upala already had me hoping that I hadn’t landed in a situation I wasn’t equipped to handle, a situation that justified the Costa Rican journalists’ refusal to even go near the border area.

     UNO was the Spanish acronym for Unity of Nicaraguan Opposition, the umbrella organization that had recently been created to unite the groups attempting to overthrow the Sandinista‑controlled government of Nicaragua. FARN was the  Nicaraguan Revolutionary Armed Forces, a group of perhaps two hundred contras led by Fernando "El Negro" Chamorro. La Cía was, and is, the common Latin American term for the US Central Intelligence Agency.

     The young contra, without waiting for an answer, continued to talk about himself, launching into an account of his participation in the 1983 attack on the southern Nicaraguan border station at Penas Blancas. Having just driven five hours to Upala from San José and not knowing a soul in the little border town, I had to interrupt.

     "No. I'm not with the la Cía. I'm a reporter."

     "Oh," the young man replied, still smiling. "In that case, would you like an interview?"     

     Charro unhesitatingly showed his cédula, or Costa Rican national identity card, listing his real name as Gerardo Acuña Gonzalez (he said he was also known as Gerardo Noguera Acuña). He sat down at my table and exhibited recognizable scars from bullet wounds on both lower legs, describing in detail which bones had been fractured. He also spoke knowledgeably about weapons and tactics.

     The next day, Arturo Ruíz, one of the proprietors of the Buena Vista, came and sat down at my table. I asked him if there were any contras around, and if so, how he and other people in the town felt about them. "I help them (the contras) often," he said. "They come in here, and if they don't have any money, I give them free meals, transportation...." Ruíz also operated what appeared to be Upala's only taxi, a red Toyota jeep. He seemed, as did other Upala residents, totally unworried about disclosing information about contra activities in "neutral" Costa Rica to a reporter from the US. Most of the people there seemed to assume that anyone from the US was in favor of Reagan policies. He did, however, insist that nothing he said about helping the contras, or about their activities, be published in Costa Rica. Other sources in Upala spoke freely, but tried to impose the same conditions.

     Several times during one conversation, Ruíz would indicate a young man who had just entered the restaurant ‑ usually dressed in jeans, US‑made combat boots, and a civilian shirt ‑ and say, "He's a combatiente," meaning a contra fighter. And at another point, he said that four jeeps which had just passed the restaurant were contra vehicles. The restaurant owner said that there was a contra camp near the village of San Antonio, about four miles north of Upala near the Nicaraguan border.

     The tall, rather chubby Ruíz also smilingly pointed out the house of "Tamuga," the local UNO‑FARN representative, which was across the street from Ruiz' restaurant and about three doors north, next to Upala Sport, a sporting goods store. Tamuga's house, obviously known to everyone in town as a contra meeting place, was also just a few doors south of a post of the Guardia Rural, a more countrified version of the Guardia Civil. Both guardia groups were supposed to be enforcing Costa Rica's neutrality. But I saw uniformed guardia personnel standing and talking in the street a few feet from where members of the contra group UNO‑FARN were lounging on Tamuga's porch.

     "Lots of people around here support them (the contras)," Ruiz continued. "Half of the people around here are Ticos [Costa Ricans], half are Nicas [Nicaraguans], and the other half are half‑and‑half," he joked. "But most of us are anti‑Sandinista."        "Comandante Charro" was one who said he was half Costa Rican and half Nicaraguan.

     There seemed to be a feud between Tamuga and Charro. Tamuga said that Charro was a "former combatant," but was no longer with UNO‑FARN; Charro said that the two hated each other "to the death," and that Tamuga was a non‑combatant and "a thief who joined only to steal money." Charro's story was supported by restaurant owner Ruiz and other people in Upala, but Tamuga's status with FARN was confirmed by reliable sources in San Jose.

     "Charro" was not the only person in the Upala area to mistake me for a CIA operative. After offering rides to a young man and, a little later, to a campesino family north of Upala nearer the Nicaraguan border, the woman in back asked the young man in the front passenger seat, who was dressed in combat boots, jeans, and a civilian shirt, if I was "in charge of the fighting." The young man's answer was a curt "No!"

     Another day, Charro led the way down one of Upala's few dirt streets to the house of his friend, a high‑school teacher named Figueroa. Charro had stayed with Señor Figueroa's family while he was in Upala being treated at the local Social Security hospital for a wound in his back caused, he said, by firing a 60mm mortar over his shoulder. Inside the small, low‑ceilinged house where a space had been partitioned off for Charro, the two men pulled camouflage fatigues out of a hiding place, and Charro put them on and led the way out back to a grove of cacao trees where I photographed and interviewed him.

     He began the taped interview by saying that we were "somewhere in Nicaragua," which is typical of contras in both southern Honduras and northern Costa Rica, where both countries officially deny allowing contra groups to use their territory. Reporters sometimes play the game to get the interviews they need. Charro posed for photographs in his camouflage fatigues with a US flag proudly displayed on his left shoulder.

    Sr. Figueroa also introduced me to Upala's alcalde ‑ a politically appointed combination mayor and circuit court judge ‑ who was a slim, dark‑haired young lawyer named Rafael Calderón. Rafael Calderón was also the name of the Social Christian Party's candidate for President in Costa Rica's coming elections, but Upala's mayor of six months said he wasn't related to the presidential candidate.

     Asked for his assessment of the politico‑military situation in and around his jurisdiction, Calderón gave the impression that it was his job to know nothing. "The problem," he said, "is that the [Costa Rica‑Nicaraguan] border is ill‑defined near here. There is no clear marker. And the Government of Costa Rica allows no private land use within two kilometers of the border, so we have no way of knowing if there are armed groups operating within those two kilometers of Costa Rican territory." This seemed a strange statement coming from the mayor of a tiny town, especially at a moment when several young men who had just been identified as contra combatientes, posted at tables around the thatch‑roofed veranda like Apache sentries in an old Western movie, were listening intently to the conversation.

     He continued with a shrug, "The people around here may know more than I do. But I'm just the mayor. Who's going to tell the mayor anything?"

     As the conversation drew to a close, a fierce‑looking young man at the next table dressed in jeans, combat boots, and a civilian shirt made a stern finger‑to‑the‑lips gesture to me.

     As the group got up to leave, Figueroa tugged on my right arm and tried to say, in poor English, "Don't tell him [the mayor] about the comandante."

     Another member of the group, a local photo shop proprietor named Señor Marín, pulled on my left arm and shouted (he was a little drunk): "Aguas que no has de beber, déjalas correr." Or: "Any water which you don't need to drink, better let it run." In Spanish, it's a pungent, rhyming piece of folk wisdom about staying clear of forces that are bigger than you are.

MERCENARY 2

Free website hitcounter

Mercenary 2

     I got my film from the Rus Rus trip developed - nearly thirty rolls of 35mm - and invited Mickey up to the house to look at the pictures. When he came into the cottage Annie and I shared, he took off the rain jacket he was wearing. He immediately noticed that I'd noticed how he handled the jacket, and how it looked: he'd shucked his arm out of the left sleeve first, then slid the right sleeve off more carefully. The bottom right coat pocket hung heavily toward the floor; that was what had caught my eye. Mickey smiled, almost appreciatively. He said something like "Yes, there is something heavy in there," meaning, of course, his pistol.

     He was visibly surprised by my photos: the Miskito and Sumo fighters with their M16s and AK47s and G3s and assorted uniforms; the incongruous, sweaty Texans, the visible tension in the bodies of the youthful warriors as they clambered out of the dugout canoe ahead of me on the Nicaraguan bank of the Río Coco, the carefully arranged skulls at Tulin Bila.

     I saved the recognizable photo of Flaco for last. "Recognize this guy?" I asked. Mickey smiled: "What's he calling himself these days?" 

     "Colonel Flaco. So you know him?"

     "Oh, yeah. Flaco and I go way back."

     ”What's his real name?" Mickey just smiled again and shook his head. Then: "Dean, you'd have made a hell of a soldier."

     Mickey and I continued talking every few weeks for another year or so. A story unfolded about the junior-high school son of the woman Mickey was living with. I never met the boy, but I heard about him repeatedly from what became two sides of a struggle for his soul. He'd grown up mostly without a father, and suddenly there appeared in his life this cocksure figure, Mickey, who was wildly fluent in the manly arts: he could take anything apart, explain its workings, fix it, build it, destroy it, blow it up, kick the shit out of it, or shoot it.

     Especially shoot it. The boy, of course, went for that immediately. So Mickey, liking the idea of being a hero to the kid, soon had him out in the woods with pistols and rifles, burning up ammunition. But, Mickey told me, there was little of the breathe-in, breathe-out, hold 'em and squeeze 'em accuracy that I'd been taught by my stepfather and uncle and Marine marksmanship instructors. No: what Mickey taught the boy was combat shooting, two hands on the pistol, crouch, aim quickly with the entire body at the center of mass of your target, shoot rapid-fire until the man was down, then quick! on to the next target.

     A simultaneous attempt was being made to make an opposing claim on the boy's future. Mary Duffield, a peace activist who lived near Santa Cruz, owned a large sailboat and was a serious ham radio operator. She would organize local and longer-distance sailing trips for youngsters, as well as providing instruction in ham radio operations and equipment. Sometimes she would combine the two. The ax she had to grind was international peace. She felt, and taught, that getting children from different countries to talk with, and to meet, one another was one way to lessen the violence in the world. Mickey snorted at that idea, but the boy happened to be infatuated with ham radio as a hobby, and his mother apparently encouraged him to spend at least some of his free time with Mary.

      Many months later, in 1986 or '87, I would get a worried call from Mary. Mickey, the woman and the boy had disappeared suddenly and without leaving a hint of where they had gone. She was worried about the boy, and asked if I'd see if I could locate them. I tried, but had no luck. Dropping out of sight was one of Mickey's professional skills. All we heard was a rumor that the three of them had been witnesses to "something really awful," and had had to disappear. After still more months had passed since Mary's call, she got a cryptic note from the boy, with no return address, saying that he wouldn't be in touch anymore but wanted her to know that he was all right. None of us ever heard from them again.

     Before that last episode, I asked Mickey for a favor. I'd done him a few smaller ones, like getting him a free appointment with my wife, a dermatologist, to treat a fungus he'd brought home from one of his adventures in Central America.

     It was late 1985. News reports were coming out about contra raids in southern Nicaragua. Apparently a "second front" was being opened, to force the Sandinistas to divide their resources and relieve some of the pressure on the main contra units operating out of Honduras in northern Nicaragua. This meant to me that contra groups must be operating out of Costa Rica, raiding into southern Nicaragua, then jumping back across the border for sanctuary. Yet Costa Rica's policy of neutrality forbade the use of its territory for any such activities. There seemed a good opportunity to break significant news here, but major news organizations had done next to nothing about it.

     What I asked Mickey for was information about contra base camps in northern Costa Rica, and crossing points the raiders used to get into Nicaragua.

     Now, this is an interesting thing to try to describe. Mickey and I were just flat on opposite sides. Mickey was a mercenary, an admitted CIA operative - contract, not career - a "professional soldier," as he called himself. I was a veteran with a chip on my shoulder, a small-time crusader against the very type of operations by which he made his living. Yet we had, after a fashion, become friends. This was, in part, because we had a soldierly respect for one another in matters of nerve and heart and experience, which at times matter more deeply among men than does what separated us: that is, conscience.

     There was something else to it. I was never able to put my finger on it until a couple of years later, when Doyle McManus (of the Los Angeles Times' Washington, DC, bureau) and I were in Miami doing interviews to follow up the story of the Rangers allegedly having parachuted into Nicaragua. Doyle and I were driving in a rented car on our way to an interview, and talking about the quirks involved in chasing down stories about covert military operations. We had both found sources, a couple of them very good, within the covert operations community who had been willing to talk, on a limited basis, about what they knew. And the reason they'd talk was because we already knew things which we weren't supposed to know. We agreed that there was a certain gamesmanship involved here, which made how much you knew more important than which side you were on. It amounted to a form of cooperation among enemies, perhaps even in the interest of richening the experience of the fight itself.

     I asked Mickey for the help over a beer in one of those places that was so crowded and noisy a dozen people could meet and plot a terrorist bombing and nobody'd be the wiser. He got quiet, and looked at me for a long time with the soberest expression I ever saw on him. It was clear that he was looking into me, trying now to see past all our war stories and repartee, trying to see my very bones, who I was down deep.

     Then he leaned over the table, onto his elbows, halving the distance between our faces. "What are you prepared to do?" he asked.

     "Huh?

     "Costa Rica es un fogón," he said, Costa Rica was a furnace of covert operations activity.

     "It's gotta be," I said. There was no other way they could do those raids, repeatedly, on the Sandinistas' own ground, without getting caught.

     "So. Can you help me?"

     Mickey shrugged, then sighed, having come to his decision. He said he would call Langley (Virginia: CIA Headquarters), give his account number, and ask that a courier be sent with information about camps and border crossings. It wouldn't be all of them, he said, only a few, maybe only one or two.

     "But it won't mean shit unless you follow through," he said.

     "What does that mean?"

     Mickey looked at me in a way that told me, as no form of documentary evidence could have, that he was who he said he was: a serious player in a deadly game.

     He told a story. He'd been on an operation in the Dominican Republic in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines ashore there. He and a partner had been flown inland in a C47, and told to hang loose for a few days, near the airplane, until they were contacted. That evening, they got bored, decided What the hell, we're Latinos, we can find our way around, let's walk down to that little town. They passed three peasants on the road. All nodded, said good afternoon, walked on. As they passed, Mickey and his partner looked at each other and simultaneously concluded that their operation was compromised. Without a word, both turned, pulled their pistols, and killed the three men. "Pah, pah, pah," Mickey said, imitating the shots, and shrugged. "They're only peasants."

     He asked the question again, this time parsing out his words and sliding each one along the conduit between our eyes: "What...

are...you...prepared...to do?"

     His words, borne upon that look, made me shudder. "What do I have to do?"

     "I will give you the name of a hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico. You will go there and wait in the room. When the man comes, you stand behind the door, knock him in the head, take what he brought you, and split."

     I thought for a long moment. I did believe in what I was doing, believed that many human beings would live or die depending on the quality and quantity of information to reach the mainstream press about covert operations in Central America, believed that the work was not being thoroughly done, that I could contribute. I also believed that, if I so much as nodded in this moment, Mickey would do what he said he'd do, or at least try it. And I believed that the chance of a breakthrough story about illegal covert operations, involving agents of the U.S. Government or private U.S. citizens, compromising the neutrality of Costa Rica, was worth some serious risk. It might even be worth fighting for.

     I spread the thing out in my mind. Most of my friends, I knew, saw me as someone who'd lived an eventful life, done difficult and dangerous things, was capable of doing such things, if perhaps a little nuts for having done so many. I treasured, in myself, that part of me that had pulled the old woman from the canal in Klamath Falls while I was still a teenager, as everyone else looked on; the same part which had run across the clearing by the well in Tho An with my automatic rifle because the First Sergeant had called for such a rifle, and I was the only man present who had one; the same part that had caused me to be instrumental in hauling the anchor in Shelter Cove.

     But Mickey was from a different world. In his world, the man coming through the door was an impediment, to be removed. But what if he were very alert, very strong? I didn't have the skill to be sure of knocking him out, without killing him. But wasn't he an enemy, a bagman for people who ruined families and nations for fun and profit? Wasn't I on the right side? But what if I had a moment of moral hesitation? I could be killed, then and there. The man coming through the door would be more like Mickey than like me.

     He had asked the right question. I wasn't prepared to do that.

     He'd told me his real name, even showed me his driver's license. At first I wondered why he'd done so. But by the time our association ended, I understood that part of his communication to me had been unspoken, had been contained between the lines of his stories, in the expression on his face when he said certain things, in the fact that he was always armed and that using his weapon was the core of his way of being in the world. Put into words, that part of his communication would have been something like this: You know what world I live in. You understand its basic rules, and the penalties for breaking them.

     I do. That's why his real name is not used here.