MAMista (21 page)

‘I asked you if there was any truth in it.'

‘State put a NIACT cable to the ambassador but he knows nothing.'

‘You dragged him out of bed in the night to ask him if the CIA are putting agents into the hinterland of Spanish Guiana?' He touched his face and his finger came away
bloody. ‘They are not going to leave a memo on his desk are they?' he shouted angrily.

John Curl had learned how to face such wrath with silent equanimity. He knew it was only because the President kept touching that damned nick on his chin.

The President said, ‘I'm asking you, John: is this one of your little capers?'

‘No, sir.'

‘Just some political pundit's fancy imagination. Is that it?'

‘Could be, Mr President.'

‘Because I don't want any more of your damned spooks in there goosing this Spanish Guiana situation. It's too damned delicate.'

‘I understand, sir.'

The President was to some extent mollified by Curl's sincere tone. ‘This is not going to be like that other administration we both know about. Those guys across the river can forget all their fun and games. I'll not be used like a rubber stamp.'

Curl picked the President's clean white shirt off the hanger and held it for him while he put his arms through the sleeves, craning his neck to be sure no specks of blood got near his collar. He tucked his shirt into his trousers and then picked a tie from the rack inside his closet door. It was a dark blue club tie with black and grey stripes. The President's voice was soft and conciliatory when next he spoke. ‘We will just wait and see, John. Maybe we'll give Benz time to make a deal with the oil people. That will stave off any demands for devaluation until the new field is producing.' The President tied his tie and tightened it in a gesture that might have been self-punishing.

‘I don't think so,' Curl said. The President raised an eyebrow. Curl went on, ‘No oil company will go in there while the guerrillas are as strong as they are. And you can be sure that no company will lay bread on the line in advance.'

‘You talked with them?' the President was fumbling with his cuff-links, but Curl by this time had learned to watch out for these trick questions.

‘Of course not, Mr President. But we see the minutes from the boardrooms of every oil company in the world. We put that stuff on our games table to see what kind of decision they would come to.'

‘And it was negative?'

Curl held the President's waistcoat for him and then his jacket. ‘Very negative. Negative all the way down the line, Mr President.'

On the table the valet had arranged his silver pen, notebook, keys and handkerchief. Beside them a small vase of freshly cut flowers stood next to a copy of the
Wall Street Journal
. While he put his things away in his pockets, the President looked at a small sheet of memo paper his personal secretary had prepared. It listed the day's appointments. After a meeting with the chief of staff in the Oval Office at nine there was the 9.30 security briefing where Curl – without revealing anything about this early get-together – would go through other, less touchy, developments with selected senior staff. Then there was a brief conference with the speech writers, a photo opportunity with the leader of Belgium's opposition party, a plaque presentation for outstanding personnel of the ‘Say No to Drugs' campaign, and then a champagne reception for California party workers. With that consigned to his excellent memory, he screwed up the memo and threw it away. Then he looked at himself in the full-length mirror.

That was the wrong tie! He needed something optimistic and youthful. The California party workers would be in a fidgety mood listening to his schedule for the visit to their home state next month. Some constituents always had to be disappointed. There would be questions about the new aerospace cutbacks. He chose a floral pattern: green leaves with large white asters. He changed the tie and waited for
Curl to make some polite comment. When none came he said, ‘Okay, John. Let Benz read the IMF report; that will sober him up a little. Forget any idea of giving him military aid: the liberals would roast me alive and the anti-narcotics lobby would join in. Right now I can't afford to give my enemies a common cause.'

He intended this as a joke, but Curl did not acknowledge it as one. The President said, ‘We'll just have to wait and see if Dr Guizot rises from the dead to attend that front meeting next week.'

The President plucked at the
Wall Street Journal
for only as long as it took to read the Dow Jones. It was down again. ‘And don't forget what I said about that Saint Valentine's Day your boys were planning for the frente. No sale!'

‘It's solely an internal security matter for Spanish Guiana,' Curl said solemnly.

The President tucked in his tie, buttoned his vest and suddenly worried in case they were planning to serve French champagne this morning. With the present mood in California he'd need no more than that to have the wine lobby join in the howl for his blood.

 

The fine red dust of Spanish Guiana is what visitors remember long after the palm-lined beaches, the casino and the Blue Lady waterfalls. Great pink clouds of it greet the incoming airliners and follow the take-offs, reaching after each departing plane for a hundred feet into the air and remaining suspended across the airfield until the plane is out of sight.

A Cessna O-2A, a small twin-boom aircraft, took off in such a dust cloud. It climbed steeply, banked and then headed out over the sea. The machine was painted khaki, so the dust did not leave a mark upon its paintwork. The same dull matte finish was on every surface and, unlike all the other planes lined up at Tepilo, this one had no markings nor even a serial number.

The doors had been removed. The three men inside had an unobstructed view of the sea and then of the jungle, as, still banking, the Cessna turned and crossed the coast again to head due south. Two of the men inside were members of the PSS, the secret police force that reported to Papa Cisneros. The third man occupied the right-hand seat up-front, the seat normally used by the co-pilot. It was Chori. He was huddled in pain and breathing heavily due to internal injuries. His feet and wrists were bound. Looking out he could see the traffic on the highway as they flew along at one thousand feet.

In the basement of the Police Wing of the Ramparts building Chori had been confronted with his father, who was also beaten. At that time Chori agreed to identify the place where the frente was to hold its meeting this weekend. He would have done anything to stop the pain for himself and for his beloved father. Now perhaps he should have been regretting his weakness. He should have been throwing himself to death through the open door. Instead he was too weak, physically and psychologically, to do anything but relish the flow of cool air, hug himself and thank God for a few minutes' respite from his torturers.

Chori had told them to fly south along the big highway far beyond both mountain ranges. They might have to refuel. It would take hours yet and he was comforted by that thought. Perhaps when they neared the residencia he would be able to summon some of his former courage and strength and defy these men. Meanwhile he would rest his body. All along he had played for time. He had convinced his interrogators that he couldn't understand maps or read the place-names printed on them. Because he couldn't describe the place where the frente would meet they had been forced to depend upon his recognition of it from the air. After flying steadily for half an hour or so the PSS men also relaxed somewhat. Confident of Chori's cooperation, they even gave him a cigarette.

THE RESIDENCIA MEETING
.
‘Do not ask a condor to fight alongside the fishes.'

It was called ‘la residencia': a grand country mansion in the old Spanish style. Around its inner yard stretched a colonnade of ornate arches, like the ones still to be seen in Andalucía. The best rooms faced on to this courtyard, where a man was watering the potted plants. A fountain splashed into a tiled pool. Puddles of spilled water made the terracotta shine bright red.

An intricately carved wooden grille divided the cloisters from the yard. Sunlight streaming through it made sharp patterns upon the stone floor of the grand room in which the meeting was taking place. The revolutionary organizations had shared the security arrangements. There was a smartly dressed armed sentry in the corridor, one in the courtyard and others on the roofs. Big Jorge's technicians – all Indians – manned a radio on the high ground to the west. Ramón had brought some of his best men. By common consent their platoon leader was Santos, a quiet reflective man who never smiled. Everyone called him ‘Sergeant' Santos, despite the way in which the guerrilla armies were supposed to have abandoned such relics of the old system. He and his security unit guarded the path that led down from the house to the river. For this was a
meeting of the
Frente del Dos de Mayo
and honour was at stake.

The revered Dr Guizot had presided at the inaugural meeting of this committee. Its name promised the post-Labour Day paradise that most of them thought was about to begin. It was pathetic now to read the agenda of that first meeting. ‘Item one: a congress of the soldier soviets' – but the soldiers had not even joined the general strike. While Dr Guizot had been reading his proclamation over the radio, an armoured-car company had rolled down the highway to join the infantry and fight the students who'd occupied the radio station.

The frente continued to hold the annual meetings but they were no longer the big assemblies of the old days. Gone were many of the old-time trade unionists, the Trotskyists, anarchists, Castro-communists, splinter socialists and the two crackpot liberals who'd written a book about collectivized coffee-farming and tried to start a political party on the strength of it. Now there were a dozen delegates, but the real power was in the hands of only three people. Ramón – dressed today in perfectly pressed camouflage fatigues and a clean black beret – represented his armed MAMista. Big Jorge was the coffee farmers' hero. Professor Doctor Alfonso Marti led the ‘Moscow communists' who were doing everything they could to ignore the reality that communists in Moscow were now an endangered species.

Paradoxically this year the delegates met to discuss the sins of materialism in an impressive house. It was one of several such lovely houses owned by the Minister of Agriculture. Officially he did not know that the revolutionaries had taken over his mansion. Unofficially he gave tacit consent to such uses of his property from time to time. He considered it a concession made in order to have no guerrilla activity near his fruit estates in the western provinces. This was a land of paradox. MAMista patrols exchanged greetings with priests as they went through the villages
preaching violent revolution. Guerrillas crossed themselves before throwing a bomb. A $100,000 grant from a European Church charity had paid for Ramón's 750 second-hand Polish AK-47 rifles.

The delegates sat round the table. There were big earthenware jugs of iced water on the table but most of the men had other drinks too. Ramón had beer, Big Jorge had Spanish brandy and Professor Marti had freshly squeezed lemon juice. Ramón apologized for Dr Guizot's absence. He was suffering from a recurrence of his malaria and had sent his good wishes to them all. Thus Professor Doctor Alfonso Marti accepted the chair as his rightful due as secretary-general of the communist party of Spanish Guiana. He was an august old man with a white beard and gold-rimmed glasses. For many years he had been a minor literary figure. Still he was frequently to be seen at conferences and other gatherings where publishers, and those who write intermittently, get together over food and drink. His long book on the history of Latin America, seen from the party's point of view, was still used in Russia's schools. He was an urban intellectual: a theoretical extremist. Well to the left of the followers of Dr Guizot, he was better able to re-fight the struggles of Bolshevik, Trotskyist and Menshevik than to take arms against a modern police force and army. Perhaps this was why he'd so readily accepted the honorary professorship, and found ways to coexist with successive right-wing governments who allowed his Latin American history book to be published (although the chapters concerning the Guianas had been discreetly edited). The regime brought him out and dusted him off to show visiting liberals how much political freedom the citizens of Spanish Guiana enjoyed.

Professor Dr Marti's communists were permitted their comfortable trade union jobs, their orderly meetings and their glossy news-sheet. They quoted Marx with the glib ease of scholars – ‘to demand that men should abandon
illusions about their conditions, is to demand that a condition that needs an illusion should itself be abandoned.' Thus Marti's members clung to their cherished illusions that they were the vanguard of the working-class struggle. Their concessions to the Benz regime were simply that their meetings should not recruit, their slogans be unheeded and their news-sheets too esoteric to appeal to either peasants or workers. Last year Professor Doctor Marti had infuriated Ramón by denouncing MAMista violence. It was, said Marti, ‘… inappropriate, since a revolutionary situation does not yet exist'. Said Ramón, apparently without rancour, ‘By Marti's interpretation it never will.'

Seeing the two men together at this meeting it would not have been easy to guess that Ramón and Marti regularly enjoyed more vituperative exchanges. Ramón was tired, and now he listened more than he spoke.

Ramón was the sole name he used. Even the police posters, their smudgy photo of him snapped at a long-ago conference in Havana, called him only Ramón. The police files provided no reliable information about his origins. Because of this, and because his Spanish was precise and measured, rumour provided him with an obscure background of guerrilla schooling in Managua and in Moscow. He was credited with masterminding violence in all corners of Latin America. Ramón was the mystery man that chaos and revolution always attracted. No one knew where he had come from. Or if they did, they kept very quiet about it.

Ramón nodded as Professor Dr Marti explained that his was the only true faith. He quoted Lenin as an archbishop might explain the words of Saint Paul to a congregation of lapsed Catholics. Always Ramón watched the eyes of the third of the ‘big three' at the conference: Big Jorge.

How many armed Pekinistas Big Jorge had hidden there in the coffee and coca plantations of the northwest was the subject of endless speculation. From Ramón's point of view it hardly mattered. All he wanted was a token strike
in the capital by Professor Dr Marti's transport workers plus one small armed raid, by identifiable Pekinista units, anywhere in the
provincia de la Villareal
before the end of the year. Those two events coinciding would divert the Federalistas. That would take the pressure off Ramón's winter quarters in the south. But if the rumours were true, if Marti and Big Jorge intended to sit still while the army staged its jungle sweeps, then Ramón was going to get badly mauled.

Big Jorge smiled and drank his brandy. He'd noticed that there was a full bottle of it on the sideboard. Big Jorge could drink a lot of brandy without getting drunk. Not so many years before, he had been the senior foreman on a small coffee estate in Villareal. The childless owner had virtually promised to leave the land to Big Jorge. But the prospect frightened Big Jorge. How could he become a landlord when he had spent his life railing against them? A deeper fear was the responsibility that such ownership would bring to a man who was semi-literate. When the violencia came Big Jorge solved his problems in the way that so many other men had solved their problems before him: he marched off to war.

Big Jorge recruited the men of the small farms, their drivers, clerks and foremen too. The man who had renounced a legacy to become a guerrilla was hailed as a hero, but it was the sudden drop in coffee prices that made Big Jorge a political leader.

There is a theory that the decline in world coffee prices did more than anything else to create Latin America's communist revolutions. Most of the serious fighting took place in the coffee-growing regions. The coffee farmers were mostly tenants on
minifundios
. When crop prices tumbled, those smallholders still had to pay their exorbitant rents and watch their families go hungry. But coffee grows on hilly land that is difficult to police. Such land is the home of the armed struggle. Castro's struggle was centred in the
Sierra Maestra, which is directly comparable to Big Jorge's province, socially, climatically and economically.

No one had to tell Big Jorge that he would never be a Fidel, nor even a Ché. He was a worker as different from the accommodating old Professor Marti or the astringent Dr Guizot as any man could be. Big Jorge's success was based upon his personality. His cheerful disposition and large muscular frame formed a combination to be found in prosperous butchers. He liked to wear what he was wearing today: a stetson, a smart suede jacket with fringes, pink-tinted glasses and a fine pair of tooled cowboy boots. He boasted that he'd worn this outfit from Tsingtao to Canton. Few believed him. His visit to China had been a brief one. It had occurred at a time when relations between Moscow and Peking were at a very low point and the Chinese sought friends from wherever they were to be found. Big Jorge's time in China was marked by high banquets and low bows. All he brought back with him was that shy smile, the big si-si, two extra inches on his waistline and an indefatigable skill at keeping his forces intact by doing nothing.

Big Jorge's years on the plantations had granted him a faultless fluency in a half-dozen Indian dialects. These had enabled him to recruit from tribes of hunters and fishers, as well as from the seasonal workers who came for the coffee harvest. Nothing could better demonstrate the communist axiom that labour is at the root of all wealth, than to see the authority that Big Jorge had acquired as his numbers grew. He spoke to Ramón as an equal, and to Professor Dr Marti as to a wealthy, senile uncle. And neither of those worthies was bold enough to remark that a large proportion of Big Jorge's fiefdom was now growing the coca crop, and that he was paid a substantial fee for every kilo of coca paste that went out of those ‘laboratories'.

Professor Dr Marti continued with his opening address. Big Jorge's smile, more than anything else, convinced him that his political points were not going unheeded. Marti
shifted his weight so that his chair – one leg of it short – swung back a fraction. A loose floortile rattled each time he did it. He stopped the movement by putting a toe to the floor. He said, ‘Of course, Dr Guizot is revered by everyone … by me
more
than revered. But Dr Guizot is not a strategist.' By the measured authority of his delivery, Marti was able to imply that he was a strategist of some renown. It is a state of mind readily adopted by historians accorded the unlimited confidence that comes from impartial hindsight. ‘When Dr Guizot called for the General Strike, the workers, the students and the intelligentsia responded.' He paused. ‘I responded; you responded; everyone. But that was not enough; he needed a disaffected soldiery to blunt the efficiency of the army and the Federalistas, as a weapon of the government …'

Marti looked around. Big Jorge nodded. Ramón didn't nod. Ramón had hoped that by coming here with the news of a beloved Dr Guizot, suffering from a slight ailment and weary after his ordeal, the meeting would agree to anything that Dr Guizot asked. That was not the way it was going. Ramón looked around the table. Had they guessed the secret? Did they know that Guizot was dead and buried in some forgotten piece of stinking jungle? When Marti looked hard at Ramón, Ramón nodded too. For the time being he didn't want to upset anyone: he desperately needed help.

Marti poured iced water into his lemon juice, added a spoonful of sugar, stirred it vigorously and then sipped some. He said, ‘For your support, Ramón, the students are already planning a big demonstration. My members will be there in the front line of protest.' He was talking about the college lecturers and schoolteachers.

‘We need more than that,' said Ramón.

Big Jorge said, ‘We all know about the students, Professor.' Big Jorge, who had never been to school, was always caustic about the students. ‘They make an impressive sound when they are all chanting for freedom in Liberation Plaza. But
each year a third of them graduate, and settle down into cosy middle-class jobs and start families in the suburbs.'

Professor Marti chuckled. It was a chuckle calculated to acknowledge that Big Jorge was talking, not only about the students, but about the whole of Marti's communist party of Spanish Guiana. But the chuckle was not so lengthy that it sounded like agreement, nor so sincere that it gave Big Jorge a chance to elaborate on his thesis.

Marti dabbed his soft white beard to knock away a dribble of lemon juice. He said, ‘But we must remember that it has always been the flamboyant capering of the students – of which many round this table disapprove – that has made headlines in the foreign press, and gained support from overseas.'

‘And frightened the peasants, and antagonized the soldiers and provoked the police,' Ramón added. ‘And what for? I agree with Big Jorge: the students are neither effective as a fighting force, nor effective economically in the way that factory workers, plantation workers and miners can be.'

Big Jorge wheezed musically. Marti took another sip of lemonade.

Ramón continued, ‘Dr Guizot is not asking anyone at this table to take his orders. He wants only one small favour: a token of working-class unity.'