Mirrors (82 page)

For half a century, Uruguay has not won a single world soccer championship, but during the military dictatorship the country won other titles: relative to its population, it had the most political prisoners and the most victims of torture.

“Libertad” was the name of the biggest jail. Perhaps inspired by the name, imprisoned words sometimes broke out. Through the bars slid poems written on tiny cigarette papers. Like this one:

Sometimes it rains and I love you.
Sometimes it’s sunny and I love you.
The prison is sometimes.
I love you always.

DANGER IN THE ANDES

The fox was on his way back from the heavens when parrots pecked through the rope he was sliding down.

The fox fell onto the high peaks of the Andes and burst apart. The quinoa in his belly, stolen from celestial banquets, sprayed everywhere.

Thus the food of the gods came to be planted in this world.

Ever since, quinoa lives in the highest lands, where it alone can withstand the dryness and the cold.

The world market ignored this useless Indian feed until two researchers at Colorado State University learned that the tiny wholesome grain, which grows where nothing else will, is not fattening and builds resistance to several diseases. And in 1994, they obtained U.S. patent number 5304718 for it.

The farmers were furious. Quinoa’s patent-holders assured them they would not use their legal rights to stop them from growing it or to charge them a fee, but the farmers, indigenous Bolivians, responded:

“We don’t need some professor from the United States to come here and donate to us what is ours.”

Four years later, the scandal was such that Colorado State University had to give up the patent.

DANGER ON AIR

Radio Paiwas was born in the heart of Nicaragua on the eve of the twenty-first century.

The early morning program attracts the largest audience.
The Messenger Witch,
heard by thousands of women, frightens thousands of men.

The witch introduces women to friends they have never met, including one named Pap Smear and an old lady named Constitution. And she talks to them about their rights, “zero tolerance for violence in the street, in the home, and in bed too,” and she asks them:

“How did it go last night? How did he treat you? Did it feel good or was it a little forced?”

And when men rape or beat women, she names names. At night, the witch flies house to house on her broom, and before dawn she rubs her crystal ball. Then she reveals on-air the secrets she has learned:

“Angel? You’re out there, I can see you. Beating your wife, are you? That’s awful, you scumbag!”

The radio receives and broadcasts the complaints the police ignore. The police are busy chasing cow thieves, and a cow is worth more than a woman.

BARBIE GOES TO WAR

There are more than a billion Barbies. Only the Chinese outnumber them.

The most beloved woman on the planet would never let us down. In the war of good against evil, Barbie enlisted, saluted, and marched off to Iraq.

She arrived at the front wearing made-to-measure land, sea, and air uniforms reviewed and approved by the Pentagon.

Barbie is accustomed to changing professions, hairdos, and clothes. She has been a singer, an athlete, a paleontologist, an orthodontist, an astronaut, a firewoman, a ballerina, and who knows what else. Every new job entails a new look and a complete new wardrobe that every girl in the world is obliged to buy.

In February 2004, Barbie wanted to change boyfriends too. For nearly half a century she had been going steady with Ken, whose nose is the only protuberance on his body, when an Australian surfer seduced her and invited her to commit the sin of plastic.

Mattel, the manufacturer, announced an official separation.

It was a catastrophe. Sales plummeted. Barbie could change occupations and outfits, but she had no right to set a bad example.

Mattel announced an official reconciliation.

ROBOCOP’S CHILDREN GO TO WAR

In the year 2005, the Pentagon disclosed that its dream of an army of automatons is coming true.

According to spokesman Gordon Johnson, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been tremendously valuable for the robots’ progress. Now robots equipped with night vision and automatic weapons are able to locate and destroy enemy emplacements with practically no margin of error.

No trace of humanity diminishes their optimum efficiency:

“They don’t get hungry, they’re not afraid, they don’t forget their orders,” Johnson said. “They don’t care if the guy next to them has just been shot.”

CAMOUFLAGED WARS

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Colombia suffered through a thousand-day war.

In the middle of the twentieth century, the war lasted three thousand days.

At the outset of the twenty-first century, the days of the war have become too numerous to count.

But this war, fatal for Colombia, is not so fatal for Colombia’s owners:

the war feeds fear, and fear turns injustice into an inescapable fate;

the war feeds poverty, and poverty supplies hands that will work for little or nothing;

the war drives peasants off their land, which then gets sold for little or nothing;

the war lines the pockets of arms smugglers and kidnappers, and grants sanctuary to drug traffickers for whom cocaine remains a venture in which Americans up north invest their noses and Colombians invest their dead;

the war murders so many labor activists that trade unions organize more funerals than strikes, and they stop bothering companies like Chiquita Brands, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Del Monte, or Drummond Limited; and the war murders those who point out the causes of the war, making the war as inexplicable as it is inevitable.

The experts, known as violentologists, say Colombia is a country in love with death.

It is in the genes, they say.

A WOMAN ON THE BANKS OF A RIVER

It rains death.

In the deathmill, Colombians die by bullet or by knife,

by machete or by club,

by noose or by fire,

by falling bomb or by buried mine.

In the jungle of Urabá, on the banks of the Perancho River or the Peranchito, in her home made of sticks and palm leaves, a woman named Eligia fans herself to chase off the mosquitoes and the heat, and the fear as well. And while her fan flutters, she says out loud:

“Wouldn’t it be great to die a natural death?”

LIED-ABOUT WARS

Advertising campaigns, marketing schemes. The target is public opinion. Wars are sold the same way cars are, by lying.

In August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson accused the Vietnamese of attacking two U.S. warships in the Tonkin Gulf.

Then the president invaded Vietnam, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity sky-rocketed. The Democrats in power and the Republicans out of power became a single party united against Communist aggression.

After the war had slaughtered Vietnamese in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, confessed that the Tonkin Gulf attack had never occurred.