Chasing Che (30 page)

But there was a problem with the low road, too. First of all, it wasn’t on the west side of the Mantaro River, as my map claimed, but on the east. Second of all, it wasn’t a road anymore because a big section had washed out two days ago. He filled in the names of the little towns along the low road with the lovely, illegible handwriting of an architect. Next to the town of Izcsomethingorother he wrote “
BRIDGE
.” He didn’t know exactly where the landslide was, but it was probably before Ancon or Anro or Acpau or whatever he’d written. None of these places was mentioned on the map, of course—although it was the most recent version available, the mapmakers had somehow not managed to locate these four- and six-hundred-year-old villages. My guidebook offered helpfully that “the military seem to have established control over this route after years of terrorist disruption.”

I folded the sergeant’s little handmade map into a square and carried it in my breast pocket as I set out again from town. It seemed like too sunny a day for anything to go wrong.

A
t least thirty thousand people had died during the most recent of Peru’s bloody guerrilla wars, although the statistics were only guesses. It was a toss-up as to who had done the majority of the killing. The only thing that was clear was that the dead were rarely soldiers for either side. A guerrilla group was, like an official army,
supposed to distinguish between combatants and civilians. Shining Path ignored this distinction and relied on terror tactics that lumped government soldiers and civilians together. The group’s indiscriminant cruelty would have been a weakness, except that the Peruvian army had responded to Shining Path with a perfect illustration of how not to run a counterinsurgency campaign. To begin with, the army was profoundly corrupt. Peru produces the majority of the world’s coca, the leafy plant that is typically refined into a paste and then shipped elsewhere for final processing into cocaine. The lucrative drug trade and the war in the highlands were intertwined at every level. Army privates receiving ten dollars a month in pay and twenty cents a day in ration allowance (enough to buy a bun) turned a blind eye when traffickers paid with loose change from the roughly billion dollars a year their business brought into Peru. Generals who were paid three hundred dollars a month lived in lush houses and kept foreign bank accounts. President Fujimori’s top adviser, a shadowy former army captain named Vladímir Montesinos, managed to have close relations with the CIA, the Cubans, the big cocaine traffickers, and the army leadership all at once. The Shining Path and MRTA were also mixed up in the drug trade, extracting “taxes” per kilo of coca paste that moved through areas under their control. The army spent most of its time sitting in barracks, not out on patrol. Skirmishes between government soldiers and the guerrillas were sometimes just turf fights over particularly lucrative franchises like the landing strip at Tingo María.

When the fighting did get serious, it was not a good idea to be caught in the middle. Shining Path guerrillas typically entered a highland village in this region at night, chasing out any feeble police or “civil defense patrols” who tried to resist (the latter were just local farmers press-ganged by the army and given rifles and one day of training). They would hold a meeting in the schoolhouse or plaza, instructing people about the two antagonistic paths, and then they would slit the throats of the mayor, his assistant, any priests they could catch, and the local teacher if the village was lucky enough to have one. They would even kill the old fellow who held the keys to
the cemetery, because he was obviously a collaborator with the imperialists. The Shining Path would also sometimes massacre an entire village or order children to kill their parents. Blood was the fertilizer of their revolution. Maoists also believe in deepening the contradictions.

After they left, the army would come in and do much the same. Often they would begin with random strafing from a helicopter, followed by daylight infantry sweeps that made no distinction between civilians and enemies. In 1988 the army retaliated for a Shining Path ambush by raiding the town of Cayara, in Ayacucho Department, killing or disappearing thirty-two civilians who appeared to be chosen at random. Peasants consequently deserted the highlands for the shanties of Lima—many villages had lost 50 percent of their populations during the war. The United States fed this cauldron with financial aid, helicopters, light attack aircraft, rifles, uniforms, mortars, and training for the Peruvian army. The CIA began training Peru’s counterintelligence apparatus, too. The war was spiraling beyond control. In 1982 there were five provinces under emergency rule; in 1991 there were eighty-seven. The Shining Path began moving company-size units of troops through the countryside, men equipped with machine guns and rocket grenades. The movement released statements saying that it supported “polarization” and “clarification” of the situation in Peru, which was understood to mean there was going to be another Final Offensive.

In April 1992 President Fujimori responded by throwing what the Peruvians called an
autogolpe
, or a “self-coup,” tossing his own administration out of power. Soldiers took over the streets of Lima; the parliament was disbanded; opposition politicians were jailed, the press muzzled; the judiciary was purged of perceived enemies; death squads began to appear. The Shining Path and the government started sounding the same in the early 1990s: both were against “fictitious forms of democracy” and felt threatened by what was called the “popular sector,” or anybody who got organized for themselves. The prisons in Lima exploded in violence; more than fifty Senderistas were massacred after an escape attempt at Canto Grande,
while another forty mysteriously disappeared from the jail, either dead or free. Two policemen died retaking the Shining Path cell blocks. Almost the entire leadership within B-4 and A-1 was killed.

But poor Peruvians, it turned out, welcomed Fujimori’s dictatorial streak. His popularity skyrocketed after the self-coup, and he easily won an unfair election to another term. He rode around the country opening water taps in slums and handing out tractors. His new nickname, which he adored, was “Chinochet,” the Asian Pinochet. He promised an aggressive fight against the guerrillas and Asian-style free-market authoritarianism. Using wiretaps and careful stakeouts, the counterintelligence men trained by the CIA began rolling up the MRTA and the Shining Path leadership in Lima. The army wiped out MRTA first, and now the Shining Path was taking it on the chin. From a peak of twenty-five thousand fighters in the late ’80s the group was now down to a few thousand by the mid-’90s, mostly in remote provinces or the shantytowns of Lima. Even President Gonzalo had been busted since my earlier prison visit, and he now rotted in a special island jail off the coast of Lima. The truth was that the whole upper zone of the Andes was getting safer every month. It had been several years since a foreigner had been killed up here. Peruvians traveled this route all the time—already today I’d nearly been run off the road by several buses and half a dozen trucks carrying people on top of their cargoes. The towns looked bustling. The mechanic had told me he was getting rich fixing flat tires.

I caught the patrol a mile down the road and they waved, perhaps relieved that I was clearing their way but also fairly relaxed despite their arms. I suppose it was better that these soldiers in black were winning their war than losing it, but I wouldn’t want to be between them and the guerrillas. I’d been thinking about what the madman in the desert had said about Chile—that there were only two categories of people there, the innocent and the living. Here in the Red Zone, even the dead were judged retroactively guilty.

W
herever the road cut into a hillside—which was almost everywhere—there was erosion. The worst spots were the inside bends where the road undulated with the ridges. Streams gathered naturally at the bends, and if there was a drainage ditch or a culvert under the road it was almost always inadequate, but there was rarely either of those. The little streams simply ran down onto the road, across it, and then down the mountain again. They took much of the road with them as they went. Time and again I had to push through a deep mud that had been ground up by the trucks roaring up and down the route. There was only one dirt lane to begin with, and the erosion often cut it to a half lane with a steep drop on one side. The trucks would come barging down a mountain and wheel around the blind outside curves at ludicrous speeds. The curves were so sharp that only short-bed trucks could even fit around them—there were no eighteen-wheelers here—and as I followed one along I watched it repeatedly scrape against the hillsides. The rule of the road here was that might made right, and the trucks did not yield to anyone. This left me at the absolute bottom of the pecking order, where even bus drivers felt free to wing around an oncoming curve, pushing me to the extreme outside edge, where I could watch a shower of rocks slide down a steep hillside into the dusty valley scattered with cactus plants.

At mid-morning I passed through a narrow gorge where the river was spanned by an extraordinary stone bridge, just as the sergeant’s map said (“Izcuchaca” turned out to be what he had written, which is Quechua for “stone bridge”). Built by the Incas and rebuilt by the Spanish in the eighteenth century, the bridge still arched over the water, but traffic now flowed on an ugly steel structure laid alongside it. I paused for a while to watch the river and admire the bridge. Some old men in fedoras wandered over and looked at the bike and asked if I had ever been to Lima. After they left a bus driver waiting for passengers scoffed at their ignorance and turned to me for sympathy. I rode away immediately.

The truckers and bus drivers were a special class of people in Peruvian society. They always carried more passengers than they
were allowed, and they decorated their vehicles on the inside with pictures of naked women and the Madonna. On the outside they covered everything in bright colors and slogans (
LOVE IS BLIND
or
HERE I COME GIRLS
or
GOD PROTECTS ME
). Since these vehicles were usually the only communication with remote towns in the mountains, the drivers held positions of great prestige. Among the poor peasants, they seemed like astronauts. Nobody at NASA ever got drunk on the way to the moon, however, and it was a plain fact that many professional drivers did drink. Liquor was not considered an impediment to their work—in fact, it was a sign of your machismo and skill to navigate the road after a good bout with the bottle. Between the bad roads; the overloaded, undermaintained vehicles; and the custom of drinking on the job, the accident rate was tremendous. Peasants crossed themselves with gratitude when they debarked successfully.

Guevara had his own startling encounter with this phenomenon. Hitching through the mountains he discovered that the driver of the truck in whose cab he and Granado were riding was not drunk, as they routinely assumed, but legally
blind
. The man had suffered an accident that hurt his eyes; as long as he kept driving the same route that he knew, he could remember where the turns were. As he failed to see and then struck one object after another in the middle of the road, the two Argentines protested that this was insanely dangerous for both the driver and his passengers, but the man replied that it was the only job he could get, that he was paid well, and that he had invested too large a bribe in his driving license to give it up now.

One after another I forded seven rivers that day. The Peruvians called them rivers, but they were really creeks, shallow but sometimes hundreds of yards across. The water was silty and difficult to read. A few times I watched others cross—a truck smashing confidently toward me or a pair of Peruvian peasants wading barefoot—and at other points I simply barged in. The bike slipped and slid and nearly dumped me, and the hot engine yelped and threw off clouds of rusty steam when it was dunked in the deeper parts. My boots filled with water twice, but it was a beautiful day.

Whenever I could I asked about the landslide, and I was told that the road was completely blocked, that it was open again, that it was buried by rocks, that it was washed away by rain, that it would be reopened in a week or a day, that a person could get across on foot, that a motorcycle could get across, that it had been cut for two days or three, that it would be easy to bypass or impossible. At another police checkpoint an officer patted the bike’s gas tank and asked, in broken Spanish, “Many fast is?” He ordered me to go back and take the high road, and I said yes, and then when he wasn’t looking I continued on the low road.

The seventh ford was narrow but muddy, hiding its depth and bottom. I dismounted. To the left, across a thousand yards of muddy flat, a pair of mountain flanks squeezed close together with only enough room left for the stream. The muddy water swirled out of this gap, braided down through the mudflats, and came together again just in time to hit the road at its weakest point, the elbow of a deep bend. The road was being eaten away as I watched. The downstream end of the ford was a waterfall dropping several feet down to the eroding hillside. Someone had attempted to contain the damage with a dose of cement ten feet wide, but this infrastructure was no more than a gesture by now. The water gushed over the broken paving, carved under it, and simply melted it away. In a month there would be nothing left of this section. The mountains always won their struggle with the roads.