Days and Nights

Eduardo Galeano

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 1983
• ISBN:
  9781583675120
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique latine et des Caraïbes

Days and Nights of Love and War is the personal testimony of one of Latin America's foremost contemporary political writers. In this fascinating journal and eloquent history, Eduardo Galeano movingly records the lives of struggles of the Latin American people, under two decades of unimaginable violence and extreme repression. Alternating between reportage, personal vignettes, interviews, travelogues, and folklore, and richly conveyed with anger, sadness, irony, and occasional humor, Galeano pays loving tribute to the courage and determination of those who continued to believe in, and fight for, a more human existence. The Lannan Foundation awarded the 1999 Cultural Prize for Freedom to Eduardo Galeano, in recognition of those ""whose extraordinary and courageous work celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry and expression.""

DAYS AND NIGHTS OF LOVE AND WAR

The Windswept Face of the Pilgrim

Edda Armas told me, in Caracas, about her great grandfather. About what little was known, because the story began when he was already close to seventy and lived in a small town deep in the heart of the Clarines region. Apart from being old, poor, and ailing, her great grandfather was blind. And he married—no one knows how—a girl of eighteen.

Every now and then he would run away. He would, not she. He would run away from her and go to the road. There he would crouch down in the woods and wait for the sound of hoofs or of wheels. Then the blind man would walk out to the crossing and ask to be taken anywhere.

That is how his great granddaughter imagined him now: sitting astride the rump of a mule, roaring with laughter as he ambled down the road, or sitting in the back of a cart, covered with clouds of dust and joyfully dangling his bird’s legs over the edge.

I Close My Eyes and Am in the Middle of the Sea

I lost quite a few things in Buenos Aires. Due to the rush or to bad luck, no one knows where they ended up. I left with a few clothes and a handful of papers.

I don’t complain. With so many people lost, to cry over things is to lack respect for pain.

Gypsy life. Things are next to me but then they disappear. I have them by night, I lose them by day. I’m not a prisoner of things; they don’t decide anything.

When I split up with Graciela, I left the house in Montevideo intact. The Cuban seashells and the Chinese swords, the Guatemalan tapestries, the records and the books and everything else. To have taken something would have been cheating. All this was hers, time shared, time I’m grateful for. And I set out for the unknown, clean and unburdened.

My memory will retain what is worthwhile. My memory knows more about me than I do; it doesn’t lose what deserves to be saved.

Inner fever: cities and people, unattached to my memory, float toward me: land, where I was born, children I made, men and women who swelled my soul.

Buenos Aires, May 1975: Oil Is a Fatal Subject

–1–

Yesterday, near the Ezeiza airport, a journalist from La Opinion was found dead. His name was Jorge Money. His fingers were burnt and his fingernails pulled out.

In the magazine’s editorial office Villar Araujo, biting his pipe, asked me,

“And when will it be our turn?”

We laughed.

In the issue of Crisis now on the streets we published the last part of Villar’s report on oil in Argentina. The article denounces the colonial statutes which govern oil contracts in the country today and it relates the history of the oil business, with its tradition of infamy and crime.

“When oil is involved,” Villar writes, “accidental deaths don’t occur.” In October 1962, in a chalet in Bella Vista, Tibor Berény was shot three times, from different angles and in different parts of his body. According to the official report, this was a suicide. Berény was not, however, a contortionist, but a high-ranking advisor to Shell. He was also apparently a double or triple agent for U.S. firms. More recently, in February of this year, the body of Adolfo Cavalli was found. Cavalli, who had been a union leader for the oil workers, had fallen into disgrace. The loss of power had improved his thinking. Of late he had been preaching the virtues of the total nationalization of oil. He had, above all, a great deal of influence in military circles. When they riddled him with bullets in Villa Soldati, he had a briefcase in his hand. The briefcase disappeared. The press reported that the briefcase had been full of cash. Robbery had thus been the motive for the crime.

Villar ties these Argentine cases to other international murders that reek of oil. And he warns in his article, “If you, reader, discover that after writing these lines a bus ran over me as I crossed the street, think the worst and you will be right.”

–2–

News. Villar waits for me in my office, quite excited. Someone has called him by phone and in a very nervous voice said that Cavalli’s briefcase contained not money but documents.

“No one knows what documents these were. Just me. And I know because I gave them to him. I’m afraid. I want you to know too, Villar. The briefcase held …”

And at that moment, click, the line was cut.

–3–

Last night Villar Araujo did not return home to sleep.

–4–

We search high and low. The journalists go on strike. Newspapers from the provinces weren’t out today. The minister has promised to look into this case personally. The police deny having any information. At the magazine we get anonymous phone calls, giving us contradictory information.

–5–

Villar Araujo reappeared last night, alive, on an empty road near Ezeiza. He was left there with four other people.

He had been given neither food nor drink for two days and his head had been covered by a hood. He had been interrogated about the sources for his articles, among other things. He saw only the shoes of his interrogators.

The federal police issued a communiqué about the affair. They say that Villar Araujo had been arrested by mistake.

Ten Years Ago I Attended the Dress Rehearsal of This Play

–1–

How many men will be yanked from their homes tonight and thrown into the wastelands with a few holes in their backs?

How many will be mutilated, blown up, burnt?

Terror stalks out of the shadows, strikes, and returns to the darkness. A woman’s red eyes, an empty chair, a shattered door, someone who will not be back: Guatemala 1967, Argentina 1977.

That year had been officially declared the “year of peace” in Guatemala. But no one fished anymore near the city of Gualán because the nets brought up human bodies. Today the tide washes up pieces of cadavers on the banks of the Río de la Plata. Ten years ago bodies appeared in the Rio Motagua or were found, at dawn, in gorges or roadside ditches: featureless faces which could never be identified. After the threats came the kidnappings, the attacks, the torture, the assassinations. The NOA (New Anticommunist Organization)—which proclaimed that it worked “together with the glorious army of Guatemala”—pulled out its enemies’ tongues and cut off their left hands. The MANO (Organized Nationalist Anticommunist Movement), which worked with the police, placed black crosses on the doors of the condemned.

At the bottom of San Roque Lake, in Córdoba, Argentina, bodies sunk with rocks are now appearing, just as in the area surrounding the Pacaya Volcano, Guatemalan peasants found a cemetery full of rotting bones and bodies.

–2–

In the torture chambers the torturers eat lunch in front of their victims. Children are interrogated as to the whereabouts of their parents: the parents are strung up and given electric shocks so they will reveal the location of their children. Daily news item: “Individuals in civilian attire, faces covered by black hoods … They arrived in four Ford Falcons … They were all heavily armed, with pistols, machine guns, and Itakas … The first police arrived an hour after the killings.” Prisoners, pulled out of jail, die “attempting to escape” in battles in which the army reports neither wounded nor killed on its side. Black humor in Buenos Aires: “Argentines,” they say, “can be divided into the terrorized, the imprisoned, the buried, and the exiled.” The death penalty was incorporated into the Penal Code in mid-1976, but each day people are killed in this country with benefit of neither trials nor sentences. The majority are deaths without bodies. The Chilean dictatorship has wasted no time in imitating this successful procedure. A single execution can unleash an international scandal: for thousands of disappeared people, there is always the benefit of the doubt. As in Guatemala, friends and relatives make the useless, dangerous pilgrimage from prison to prison, from barracks to barracks, while the bodies rot in the bushes or dumps. The technique of the “disappeared”: there are no prisoners to claim nor martyrs to mourn. The earth devours the people and the government washes its hands. There are no crimes to denounce nor explanations to give. Each death dies over and over again until, finally, the only thing your soul retains is a mist of horror and uncertainty.

–3–

But Guatemala was the first Latin American laboratory in which the “dirty war” was carried out on a large scale. Men trained, guided, and armed by the United States implemented the extermination plan. The year 1967 was a long St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.¹

The violence had begun in Guatemala years before, when, one late afternoon in June 1954, Castillo Armas’ P-47s had filled the sky. Later the land was returned to the United Fruit Company and a new Petroleum Law, translated from the English, was passed.

In Argentina, the Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) made its public debut in 1973. If in Guatemala the “dirty war” was unleashed to brutally stamp out the agrarian reform and then expanded to erase this reform from the memories of the landless peasants, in Argentina the horror began when Juan Domingo Perón, from the seat of power, dashed the hopes he had raised among the people during his long exile. Black humor in Buenos Aires: “Power,” they say, “is like a violin. It is held by the left hand and played by the right.” Afterward, at the end of the summer of 1976, the military returned to the presidential palace. Wages are now worth half of what they were. The unemployed have multiplied. Strikes are banned. The universities have been returned to the Middle Ages. The big multinational firms have regained control over fuel distribution, bank deposits, and the sale of meat and grains. New trial legislation allows legal disputes between multinational firms and Argentina to be handled in foreign courts. The foreign investment law has been eliminated: the multinationals can take away whatever they please now.

Aztec ceremonies are held in Argentina. To which blind god is so much blood offered? Can this program be imposed on Latin America’s best organized workers’ movement without paying the price of five cadavers a day?

The Universe As Seen Through a Keyhole

Valeria asks her father to turn the record over. She explains that “Arroz con Leche” lives on the other side.

Diego chats with his friend inside him, whose name is Andrés, and who is a skeleton.

Fanny explains how today her friend was drowned in the river at school, which is very deep, and that from down there below everything was transparent and you could see the feet of grownups, the soles of their shoes.

Claudio grabs one of Alejandra’s fingers. “Lend me your finger,” he says, and he sinks it in the can of milk on the burner, because he wants to see if it is too hot.

From the other room Florencia calls me and asks me if I can touch my nose with my bottom lip.

Sebastian suggests we escape in a plane, but he warns me to watch out for the lights and the propeller.

Mariana, on the terrace, pushes the wall, which is her way of helping the earth to rotate.

Patricio holds the lit match between his fingers and his son blows and blows the little flame that will never go out.

Are Any of the Boys I Met Back Then in the Mountains Still Alive?

–1–

They were very young. City students and peasants from country provinces where a liter of milk costs two full days of labor. The army was on their tail and they told dirty jokes and roared with laughter.

I spent a few days with them. We ate tortillas. The nights were quite cold in the high Guatemalan jungles. We slept on the ground, hugging one another, bodies glued together for warmth and to keep the early morning freeze from killing us.

–2–

There were a few Indians among the guerrillas. Almost all the enemy soldiers were Indians. The army nabbed them when their festivals ended. When the effect of liquor wore off they were already in uniform and carrying guns. And then they marched off into the mountains, to kill those who died for them.

–3–

One night the boys told me how Castillo Armas had rid himself of a dangerous aide. To prevent this man from robbing him of power or women, Castillo Armas sent him on a secret mission to Managua. He carried a sealed letter for the dictator Somoza.

Somoza received him in the palace. He opened the letter, read it to himself in front of the bearer, and said,

“What your president requests shall be done.”

They drank together.

At the end of a long, pleasant chat, Somoza accompanied him to the door. Suddenly Castillo Armas’ emissary found himself alone, with the door shut behind him.

The firing squad, already in formation, awaited him. The soldiers all fired at once.

–4–

Conversation I either heard or imagined during those days:

“A revolution from sea to sea. The whole country up in arms. And I intend to see it with my own eyes …”

“And will everything, everything change?”

“To the roots.”

“And we’ll no longer...