Chasing Che (27 page)

The slums were, along with San Marcos University, the Shining Path’s recruiting ground, the sea in which the fish swam. In 1992 their insurgency controlled perhaps a third of Peru, including many of the young towns ringing Lima. I spent a month in Lima then, and there was bomb attack almost every day I was there. That sounds worse than it really was, because many of the attacks were surprisingly pathetic: one night the guerrillas tied a stick of dynamite to a statue of John F. Kennedy and decapitated it; they launched homemade rockets at the U.S. Embassy but the missiles fizzled and crashed onto the front lawn; and they blew up power pylons, plunging the poor parts of the city into darkness. The
limeños
were somewhat inured to these matters, and wandered the streets full of broken glass, keeping a watchful eye on any Volkswagen Beetle that appeared abandoned—the bug was the car bomb of choice. Not all the attacks on American symbols were so ineffective: near the end of my stay the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Miramar was gutted by a lunchtime car bomb that killed several people. The quiet, personal violence was in many ways more devastating than the splashy propaganda assaults. The Shining Path specialized in assassinating activists who offered the poor an alternative to Maoism—agricultural extension experts in the countryside, priests in the small towns, and, in the city, activists like David Medianero.

Now Medianero cut off the highway and through a series of the increasingly desperate slums. There were piles of garbage in the streets, some of them burning with a greasy stink. Mangy dogs lingered on the corners. The towns piled up the increasingly steep, stony hillsides, with improvised lanes separating insubstantial shacks. Everything—roads, people, clothing, dogs, houses—was coated in a
fine tan dust, a khaki powder so thick that Medianero occasionally ran the bug’s wipers in a vain effort to scrape the windshield clean.

We stopped at the farthest edge of the city. This area was once all farmland, but new slums were springing up, along with a few light manufacturing plants. The local farmers were feeling under pressure, and Medianeros’s first stop was a farm building with a dusty courtyard surrounded by narrow fields of corn that ran between the new strips of shacks. Women worked the maize in traditional felt hats that showed they had not been out of the hills long. Medianero told me to pose as a European if anyone asked. In the same breath he said that there was no danger but that “anti-imperialist” feelings were commonplace. Medianero was trying to convince these semiurban farmers to disband the co-ops and turn their land into private parcels.

Most of the farms and houses in the slums were sitting on seized land, often government land but sometimes private farmland. Families would pour their resources into building a small home, but since they did not legally own the land their lives remained precarious. When some of the older and better organized shantytowns put political pressure on the government, they were successful in getting titles. The result was a kind of economic enfranchisement as the owners poured effort into expanding their crude shacks into two- and even three-story houses. With title, you could demand social services like any other reputable homeowner. Bank loans against the title made it possible to finance repairs or a new business. Homes that were legally owned could be legally sold. An actual real estate market appeared in the slums where people had titles, and a few communities were so developed they looked like lush islands in the sea of shanties.

Medianero dropped off some sample land titles with the co-op leader and then we remounted and went farther afield, a long drive up and over steep hills that had been covered with graffiti made by piling rocks into big letters. There was supposed to be an assembly for three hundred people at another cooperative, but we sat around for two hours and no one came. Then we drove to a roadside stand
and sat in the shade drinking Inca Cola, a neon-yellow soda that tastes like bubble gum and is Peru’s national drink. Medianero sulked for a while.

“Most of the young towns are aligned with political parties of the left,” he said, “like the Revolutionary Block, or the APRA, or the PUM.” Some parties were just organized around a single leader, like the former president, Velasquez. The acronyms and affiliations formed a dizzying political landscape, but Medianero knew the map intimately. For many years he had been an activist in PUM, which stood for United Party of Mariátegui. Mariátegui was an early communist leader in Peru, and his name kept coming up. In 1952 Ernesto had befriended a Lima doctor who was both a noted researcher on leprosy and a friend of Mariátegui, and they had talked about Marxism late into the night (Ernesto apparently remained skeptical). The Shining Path was actually known (to itself) as “the Communist Party of Peru for the Shining Path of José Carlos Mariátegui.”

Medianero had gotten his start in activism by organizing a grand, model land invasion. He still glowed with pride as he waved his yellow cola in the air and described the way he assembled the best, handpicked comrades—“We called everyone, even the women, comrade”—late one night. Armed with tools, ropes, building materials, and small wooden stakes, they snuck onto a piece of idle farmland in the darkness and spread out. The plan had been worked out in its smallest details, even to who would be mayor of the new settlement and where the soccer field would go. They drove stakes into the ground to mark where the streets would be, and each comrade claimed a piece of land and built a tiny lean- to out of thatched palm fronds stretched over a simple frame. By dawn there was a town—a somewhat theoretical one, but in Peru theory was fact.

Later, Medianero left the party. I asked him why. “Politics,” he replied. Even the smallest parties were afflicted with endless schisms and feuds. Factionalism simply wore him out. He kept his friends on the left, however, and observed that they were slowly drifting away from radical activism. He’d recently attended the baptism of a child born to a friend who had been a fierce communist. Medianero was
surprised to hear his friend had quit the party, and asked why. “I have a child,” the man replied. “I need a cement floor in my house. I don’t have time for politics.”

After telling me this story, Medianero took a swig of his drink. “It’s too easy to blame the imperialists,” he said. “If a man needs a cement floor, he doesn’t care where it comes from.” The founders of the young towns had always been common laborers, he said, but their children were growing up as small entrepreneurs. This was a grand title for someone who sold things on the street or ran a business out of his shack, but it was a marked change in how people expected to live. Medianero said that life in Peru had changed faster than the vocabulary of politics.

“The farmers are used to old-fashioned ideological talk,” he said. “You have to speak to them in the language of the left. I can talk to them in those terms, but then we make a pilot project to show them that private property is neither leftist nor rightist, just a good idea. You give them examples. People are slow to change their minds.”

The second day was more urban than the first. We stopped at mid-morning at one of the model soup kitchens, called
comedores populares
. This was in Villa Salvador, itself a model slum where people were organized and had elected a local mayor and even a community assembly to speak for them. Two shy women dressed in the multiple petticoats of the Andean native showed me an empty larder. The building was adobe, about twenty feet wide and thirty feet long. It was decorated on one wall with Villa Salvador’s municipal symbol, a picture of two arms crossed, one holding a rifle and the other a shovel. There were a few wobbly benches inside, and three tables. They were hoping that some food donations from the Catholic charity Caritas (which distributes about a million rations a day in Lima) would arrive soon. When they had food, they made a watery soup and charged about twenty cents a bowl. They sat, passive, patient, and hopeful, cleaning the few pots and pans they had. Sometimes they were instructed to read aloud from a pro–Shining Path pamphlet—and they did it, because the penalty for resisting the revolution was death.

A senile beggar woman approached me outside the
comedor
, fetid with poverty and dressed in rags. Medianero spoke to her quietly and led her to a bench. We climbed into the car but he did not start the engine. He waited, looking at the helpless old woman. “There is always this,” he said. “Always.”

We drove farther south, down across a huge flat expanse of shanties, a disorganized and truly new young town that extended for miles. We passed two hundred women waiting in line at the community water tap. They held bright plastic buckets and shuffled slowly up the line, past the usual burning garbage and stray dogs. Still moving south, we passed a soccer field, just a rectangle of rocks lying in the brown dust. Eventually we came to where the slums began to peter out in the sand dunes along the ocean. The last outposts of Lima were those decrepit sheds with no roofs and woven mats for walls. I could crane my neck right over these feeble homes and peer inside like a giraffe. Often, there wasn’t even a cup inside. We climbed the highest dune and surveyed the slums as they ran up the coast toward central Lima. The cold blue ocean seemed impossibly beautiful.

The Uruguayan historian Eduardo Galeano had met Che during the heady, early years of the Cuban revolution, and he recounted Guevara’s intimate familiarity with the details of poverty like this. Guevara could recite statistics on illiteracy, on infant mortality, on inoculation rates. Galeano had reverently placed Guevara’s 1951 motorcycle journey in this context: “On this journey of journeys,” he wrote in a review of Guevara’s diary, “solitude found solidarity,
I
turned into we.” The emotional basis for Guevara’s politics, then, was here in the slums he had seen, among the untouchables that he had touched. This was where an individual had surrendered himself to the necessity of the plural, a noble vision of solidarity that had produced some very dubious results in practice, whether here or in Havana.

On the surface David Medianero had done the opposite—he had turned from the “we” of group action and party politics to the “I” of ownership and individual struggle. Perhaps the truly revolutionary
act was to discard the cloak of doctrinal certainty and dare to accept the individuality of human beings again.

The battle of these slums was a struggle between paradigms—one dedicated to Marx, the other to markets. Yet both sides were on the left. The only idea coming from the right was austerity in one guise or another, which always means less for the poor. Only the left cared enough to come into the townships at all.

You could see all the way to Miraflores from on top of the dunes. Whichever way things were going, it was still a very long way.

I
fell profoundly ill, as much from my hatred of Scorch as from the pathogens that inevitably crept up my intestinal tract. Lima could fell anyone. I sent my brake pads out for a recoating and spent four days lying in the guest house evacuating my innards into the toilet, first from the top and then from the bottom. I sipped rehydration solution (water, sugar, and salt) and read a book I’d found lying around,
The Secret Life of Alejandro Mayta
. It was by Peru’s most famous author, Mario Vargas Llosa. Mayta was a fictional revolutionary, less charismatic and decisive than Che Guevara but similar in his faith that a tiny vanguard of guerrillas could change the world. The book’s narrator was a contemporary writer, an obvious stand-in for Vargas Llosa himself, who was digging through the 1950s, looking up old revolutionaries and conspirators, interviewing fellow travelers and old friends, all in the search for Mayta’s “precursory character.” Back then Mayta sounded a lot like the young Ernesto Guevara of the 1950s, an unsullied intellectual still dwelling in “that adolescence in which politics consists exclusively of feelings, moral indignation, rebellion, idealism, dreams, generosity, disinterestedness, mysticism.”

While I malingered in the bathroom, turning the pages, Mayta went to his death in a small town in the Andes, leading a failed insurgency and followed only by a blind man. Che was less naïve, but knowing the sordid nature of revolutions did not protect him from the same fate in the end.

There were two Australians in the guest house who spent a lot of time watching satellite television in the little corridor outside my room. They were a cute, perky couple with a manic need to change channels every few seconds. I sat with them one night, watching the rest of the world flick by in two-second bursts of comedy, tragedy, and spectacle.

“Stop!” I burst out. I made them back up and saw that I was not having visions: there was Che on television. It was a show broadcast live from Buenos Aires on the twentieth anniversary of the military coup that had initiated the Dirty War. A vast public square was filled with tens of thousands of people chanting “Never again!” Rock bands played, and in between songs old ladies dressed in black took to the microphone to urge their children to disobey authority. These had to be the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the only mothers who considered rebellion the highest virtue.

While the crowd sang along with an anthem by Charlie García, a South American Bob Dylan, huge banners of Che were brought forward through the crowd, tall red flags that swung over the sea of heads. There were a dozen of them, each sporting the same image of Che as always. It was the black-and-red iconic portrait, eyes fierce and uncompromising, blazing into the future—this future.

An hour later the Australian couple knocked on my door. They didn’t speak Spanish and wanted help arranging a taxi for the airport, so I placed the call. Out of gratitude they handed me a little paper bag containing all their leftover cocaine. After they were gone I flushed it down the toilet. I needed to test the new brake pads, so around midnight I rode Kooky into town—without a helmet, for
some reason—and circled the
ovalo
. Scorch didn’t look so bad now that I was leaving. I kept driving, a final tour that lasted an hour, and for once all the avenues were clear.