Something Fierce (36 page)
Latin America, like the rest of the world, was overrun by neoliberalism in the early 1990s. Argentina and Bolivia were sold off to multinationals. But on January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico, was occupied by an armed indigenous movement called the Emiliano Zapata National Liberation Front. The Zapatistas announced they had no interest in taking over the state: why bother? Deregulated capitalism had made sure governments no longer had any power. Instead, the Zapatistas had seized control of their rightful lands in Chiapas, calling these areas “liberated zones.” Subcomandante Marcos, their spokesman, denounced the New World Order, warning that the consequences for the majority of the earth's population, the poor, would be the most dire the world had ever seen. The actions of the Zapatistas and the manifesto they'd created caused ripples around the globe. Just when it had seemed that the empire of the North would triumph, they proposed a completely different way of doing things.
By the end of the 1990s, Latin America was in the midst of a second liberation, the Bolivarian revolution. Two hundred years earlier, Simón BolÃvar had led the continent to freedom from Spanish colonial rule. This time around, people rose up against an economic model violently imposed by the United States in tandem with corrupt local elites. Today, more than ten years into the new millennium, Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador and Nicaragua are all practising, to varying degrees, what has been called the new socialism. Its basic tenet, based on BolÃvar's vision, is the integration of Latin America through solidarity and cooperation.
Chile, for its part, has continued to embrace the neo-liberal model, at huge social cost: the disparity there between rich and poor is one of the most extreme in the world. Pinochet was arrested in England in 1998 by Interpol and charged with human rights violations against European nationals in Chile during the dictatorship. Efforts to extradite him to Spain failed. His dictatorship had come to an end, but Pinochet maintained his post as commander-in-chief of Chile's armed forces for years afterward and held a seat in the Senate until his death in 2006 at the age of ninety-one. He was never tried for crimes against humanity in his country, because the constitution he had installed in 1980 forbade it. Mainstream Chileans still consider it in poor taste to mention Pinochet's bloody dictatorship in public.
Strolling with Peti through the streets of Buenos Aires, I encountered a city full of joy and pain, of life. In the popular revolt of 2001, its citizens toppled Coca-Cola billboards and set fires in doorways of banks. The Plaza de Mayo was taken over by thousands of protesters chanting “Que se vayan todos!” (They must all go!) Argentina's people demanded no less than a new economic model, and they threw president after president out of office until they got it.
Toward the end of my visit, Peti and I met Alejandro for lunch at a local eatery. It was thirteen years since I'd been south and seen him. He'd stayed in Neuquén and become a commercial airline pilot, flying in and out of Chile on a regular basis. He'd married a woman he met at the skydiving club, an architect who spoke English fluently and designed her own clothes and furniture. The two of them had a teenage son.
We hadn't talked about our time in the resistance during our first reunion. Maybe the experience had still seemed too raw. But now I had some questions for him. The three of us settled into our seats in the restaurant, typically Argentinian with its mirror-lined walls, waiters in starched white jackets and solid wood bar.
Alejandro leaned across the table. “It's so strange to be sitting here with you, Skinny, and to be talking about all of this in a public place. Do you realize you're the only person who knows the other me? How do you tell a fourteen-year-old boy who's lived a life of privilege that the Chilean resistance paid for his father's pilot training? How does a balding, middle-class guy like me, who goes to Houston every year to upgrade his pilot's licence, tell his wife that until five years ago there were goods stashed in the walls of our house?” He stopped to take a sip of his wine. “Both of them know I'm on the left, of course. In the late nineties, when the shit was hitting the fan in Argentina, our airline was privatized and downsized. I ended up organizing the unemployed pilots in Neuquén. Some of the airline's planes had been abandoned, so we formed a co-op and started a Patagonian air ambulance. It was a dark kind of joke to see these middle-class guys coming together because they'd lost everything. These were guys used to going to Disneyworld every year and flashing gold credit cards. So my family knows something of my politics, but they have no idea I was ever part of a revolutionary movement.”
The dark-skinned waiter refilled our bread basket after taking our order.
“Do you think you'll ever tell them?” I asked.
Alejandro took a moment to reply. “I'm afraid to articulate my experience with those close to me, with people who might think I went too far. Because whenever I wonder about that, I always conclude that I didn't go far enough.” His eyes were dark with pain, in a way I recognized from our years together. “I wonder if it would be easier to have the conversation if I'd been a Sandinista, riding into Managua in the back of a truck the day they won. We lost so badly in Chile. Maybe we threw in the towel too soon.”
I looked outside at the lazy summer afternoon, at the trees offering shade to the passersby on the cobblestoned street.
“There was nothing more we could have done,” I said. “But when it was all over, there was nobody to talk to about it. Everyone dispersed, took cover. We mourned our losses alone, weeping in corners.”
Alejandro nodded. “There's nothing lonelier than watching the world being taken over by the enemy you fought so hard against. But I'm proud of our continent, proud to feel that my little grain of sand contributed to the changes taking place.”
“How did you deal with the fear in those days?” I asked him.
“I didn't feel afraid.”
“I don't believe you.”
“ReallyâI didn't feel it. But it comes out now, I suppose. In my depression.”
“It's all I felt,” I admitted. “Fear. Terror. Paranoia.”
“You never talked about it.”
“I worried that if I did it could break me, us, the little world of facades we'd built to keep going. I knew what they were capable of if they caught us. But what was required was absolute commitment, body and soul. I wonder if that's one of the reasons we lost, the reason so many struggles are lostâthe inhuman demands placed on those who are fighting for the dream. We lived in a state of terror, and it was unrevolutionary to feel it, let alone speak of it. I tried to be a hero, but I was just the opposite: a teenager fucking up all over the place who wanted to give everything to the struggle.” I turned to Peti. “Your generation seems to understand that you don't have to let your beliefs consume you. You have your loves and your lives and your activism, and you don't let anybody dictate to you what you can do.”
“Remember, Skinny, when Michael Jackson came to town?”
I smiled at the recollection. “The Thriller concert at bc Place stadium in Vancouver, 1984.”
“I had just arrived from Argentina, and I wanted to go so badly.”
“Me too. And yet neither of us said anything to the other. It would have been unacceptable to admit we liked something so blatantly commercial.”
Peti spoke up, her voice filled with emotion. “It's incredible to listen to you two. It's how I imagine my parents would be talking if they were still alive.”
The sun dropped in the west. It was time to say goodbye. Alejandro and I embraced by the side of the road, cried together for a minute. Then he climbed into a taxi and was gone. The next morning I'd fly back to Canada, but first Peti and I were heading off to see Boca Juniors play a soccer match in La Bombonera, their home stadium. It would be a religious experience, chanting with thousands of neighbourhood boys and then running with them through the streets.
In November 2010, Evo Morales, president of South America's poorest country, announced that 82 per cent of his country's resources were now in Bolivian hands. Bolivia's gross domestic product had doubled over the previous five years, along with the average yearly income per person. A literacy campaign had reached all corners of the country, and there was now universal access to health care. Amazingly, even the army had declared itself anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, socialist, in the service of community and Mother Earth.
The previous month, the world had held its breath as the thirty-three miners trapped in Chile's Atacama Desert were rescued after spending sixty-nine days underground. Simultaneously, thirty-two members of the Mapuche nation were in the midst of an eighty-two-day hunger strike they'd staged in jail; they were facing terrorism charges for vandalizing trucks owned by the logging companies that were destroying their ancestral lands in southern Chile. They would eventually get what they wanted: to be tried in a civil court, not a military one. The thirty-three miners, dubbed heroes by the Chilean state, had almost starved to death because of dangerous working conditionsâthe privately owned mine had failed to meet international safety standards and should not have been operating at the time of the accident. Luis Urzúa, the last miner to be brought to the surface, a man whose father and stepfather had been union activists who were murdered during Pinochet's dictatorship, uttered these words to Chilean president Sebastián Piñera the minute he saw him: “May this never happen again.”
The struggle continues. Hasta la victoria siempre. Until the final victory, always.
I
WOULD LIKE TO thank Peter Campbell, Marcus Youssef, Camille Gingras and Don Hannah for reading the first drafts of what became Something Fierce. Thanks to Michael Helm for editing an early version of chapter 1 and publishing it in Brick magazine, and to Scott Steedman, who signed the book up for publication. Those participating in the 2006 Banff Playwrights' Colony, which I was attending as an actor, gathered once a week for four consecutive weeks to hear me read from the book's early chapters. I am deeply grateful for the support of those playwrights, dramaturges, directors, translators, producers and actors, whose numbers grew every week, as word of my informal readings spread. That was encouragement enough to keep writing. I would also like to thank the Playwrights' Theatre Centre in Vancouver for hosting a public reading of the first two chapters of the book.
Thank you to Zool Suleman, Adriana Paz, Mariza GarcÃa, Eva Urrutia, Jorge RodrÃguez, Fernando Frangella, Sarah Neville and Barbara Czarnecki. And to all my friends, near and far, for being generous enough to be my chosen family.
Thank you to Gioconda Belli and Gillian Slovo, who agreed to meet for coffee and share their experience of writing memoirs with similar themes. Their books,
The Country under My Skin and Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country,
inspired me, and I was humbled by their generosity.
I am deeply grateful to the British Columbia Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for their individual writing grants.
There are not enough words to thank my editor, Barbara Pulling. Her keen eye, gentle prodding and utterly open mind gave this book its shape. She demanded nothing but the best from me, asking tough questions, insisting that I go deeper, be more specific and more truthful. Without her I'd still be lost in a maze.
I would like to thank my mother for teaching me that we were put on this earth to give. I would like to thank her, a fellow writer, for her unconditional support of this book and her blind trust in me. She has allowed me to write my version of the story, and in so doing to reveal her secrets. She has taught me everything I know about passion, courage, strength, conviction and integrity. She is a woman who could have spent her life in comfort but chose to give up her privilege for a greater cause. I had the good fortune of being raised by a revolutionary, and for that I am eternally grateful.
I would like to thank Bob Everton, my late stepfather, for urging me to write this book in the months before he died. A true internationalist, he fought for causes locally and globally until his last day on earth. To quote Bertolt Brecht, “There are men who fight for a day and they are good. There are men who fight for a year and they are better. There are men who fight many years and they are better still. But there are those who fight their whole lives: these are the indispensable ones.” Bob's exemplary life leads me in my decisions every day.
I am grateful to my sister, Ale, a very private person, for accepting my writing of this book, even if her version of the story is completely different. Thank you to my brother, Lalito, who when asked if he wanted his name changed, responded, “It's an honour to be in your book.” I would like to thank my father for his trust and faith in me, for supporting and championing my choice to follow my calling as an artist, and for agreeing not to read this book. The information in it would be too much for his weary heart to bear. I would like to thank my cousins, aunts and uncles, who lent their quiet support to this book.
Thank you to my grandmother Carmen, who passed away in 1993, and whose spirit has been with me through the writing of this book. It is only recently that I learned she was a helper of the resistance, providing her services as a messenger. Thank you to my uncle Boris, who passed away in 1995 and whose spirit is also always with me.