Chasing Che (4 page)

“Twenty thousand,” Doretti said when I asked. “Maybe even thirty.”

Then came the pursuers. It began with the mothers, as it usually does. The ordinary women of Argentina began to protest the disappearance of their sons and daughters. The Dirty War was still in full swing when they began meeting on Thursday afternoons in front of the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. They held up signs with pictures of their missing children and marched in a circle. They tended to wear black, and since they were old women the military rulers did not dare do much about them. The greater the death toll, the stronger the opposition. By 1982, the junta in charge of the country was under domestic and international pressure to answer the charge, leveled by a group of old women in black, that the professed defenders of the nation were, in fact, its murderers.

As cowed men with guns are wont to do, the generals overreached. Desperate for some credibility with their countrymen, they fixed on an obscure nineteenth-century territorial dispute—the Falkland Islands—and launched a surprise attack. This is an oversimplified account of modern Argentine history, certainly, but in many ways the forensic work here in the cemetery was made possible by Britain’s Royal Navy. Argentina’s speedy and humiliating defeat in the Falklands destroyed the credibility of the military regime; the leaders were arrested, and their replacements agreed to elections and a restoration of democracy.

In a frenzy of exposure, some mass graves were ripped open with bulldozers, destroying any chance at identifying the dead. To avoid more such mistakes, Doretti and a few others had founded the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, receiving training from the American scientist Clyde Snow in the technique of uncovering and identifying bodies. One room in the shed was now filled with boxes full of bones, each box labeled with the date of its discovery. A skull, a femur, a tibia, and a few shards were laid out on a long, high table as
though an autopsy were in progress. Instead of taking a body apart, however, a couple of other grad students were putting this one together. There was no doubt about the cause of death here: they rolled the skull over and showed me a bullet hole in the back.

Outside, there were two large pits in the ground. One by one, the three hundred and forty-three victims had been led into this small rectangle of dirt, forced to kneel at the edge of the pit, and then snuffed with a pistol shot. Sometimes the bullet made a tiny hole on the way in but blew out large chunks of the face as it exited, but the killers refined their methods with steady practice. Done properly, a shot down through the neck was cleanest.

I climbed into the pit, which came up to my shoulders. The soil was black. The remains had all been skeletonized by now. Doretti and her colleagues worked in silence all morning while I watched. They excavated inch by inch, took photographs, isolated individual bones in the dirt and noted their location, type, and surrounding material on clipboards. The dead had been dumped one atop the next in chaotic fashion, and it was vital to preserve the integrity of each skeleton, to observe the way bones had fallen together like cards in a disordered deck. The edges of a few bones were visible, and I brushed at the black soil with my fingers until it occurred to me what this crumbling black earth clinging to my hands was: human flesh. It had been composted by worms and bacteria and time into something unrecognizable, but its origin was clear. I climbed out and stood alone in a corner of the yard.

I waited there, uneasy, hoping to see something in the pits that was worth seeing. There are those who claim that the dead are somehow abstractly beautiful, and others who find some cold and material lessons in mass killing. I have seen enough mass graves, and find them uniform in their sordid plainness. The slaughter is always done in some out-of-the-way place, behind a factory or a fence. The space is always small and claustrophobic. The soil always seems in ferment, warm and busy with the steady work of converting one form of carbon into another. Often there are fragments of bone—teeth in a neat row, or shards of something bleached white by the sun. The graves
collect rainwater and are usually soggy and bubbling with gasses. My reaction to these sights is much the same, regardless of where on earth I stand: I have found that the sorrow is cumulative and that hardness eludes me. I have not learned any lessons from the dead.

For some reason, I felt sorry for the men who had done this killing night after night. It was too easy to demonize them, to attribute this burst of evil to a few particular actors, or to simply blame the political ideology of the killers for what had happened. The fact is that Latin America in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s was one long bloodbath, a southern version of the “ancient boneheap” that Orwell saw in Europe, “where every grain of soil has passed through innumerable human bodies.” It was hard to assign some particular meaning to these acts when the hemisphere was covered with graves fresher than this one.

In Argentina, however, it was a particularly intimate form of cruelty that had filled these holes. The Argentines had avoided the race-tinged wars of Peru or Guatemala, where a brown underclass fought against a social order controlled by whites. The Mexicans and Brazilians had suffered, but across divides of class. The rich in Nicaragua lost their money, the poor their lives. But here the killers and the killed were somehow one. The most racially homogeneous, middle-class society in Latin America had murdered itself.

Was any group more responsible than others? Certainly the individuals who ordered this and the ones who carried it out had to be punished (a few leading military officers had been imprisoned, but the ranks of the police and armed forces were still filled with men who had participated in one way or another). But to describe these acts as political—as the results of policies set by groups with calculated agendas—seemed inadequate. Responsibility for the killing was amorphous and shared, a product of individual actors, of Argentine history, of ambition, of human nature itself. The military had not launched
el proceso
in a vacuum. During the 1960s and ’70s, Argentina was besieged by a series of guerrilla movements directly inspired and often supported by Che. The scale of these guerrilla movements defied precedent: by 1976, Argentina was home to the
largest guerrilla army ever assembled in Latin America, larger even than the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The guerrillas earned more than $60 million from kidnapping Argentine businesses, and they controlled an enormous Wall Street investment portfolio that disbursed funds to other guerrilla groups across Latin America. Convinced that they had decoded history, the guerrillas embraced their own version of
el proceso
, eagerly filling up their measure of horror and shameful deeds. In the memorable phrase of Jacobo Timerman, a journalist who was himself disappeared by the military for a while, all these guerrillas achieved with their bombs and assassinations was “to grease the wheels of the killing machine.” The guerrillas acted and the police and military reacted, each action resulting in retribution and a cycle of violence that lost all meaning as it gained its own, self-perpetuating rhythm. Even though the great majority of the killing had been done by the right-wing military, blame could not be apportioned out like some mathematical formula.

All the hunters of utopia believed equally in the cult of action and the need for heroes. The left had sown seeds that the right propagated, and this black soil was the result.

D
espite the occasional war, Argentines adore the English, and, back in the center of Buenos Aires, the man in tweed proved himself no exception. When he learned I was American his scorn was ill concealed. We sat in the basement of the Richmond, riven by the increasingly empty board, until he announced the final verdict, “
Heke-mahtay
,” the local pronunication of “Checkmate.”

I went upstairs, ordered an éclair and foamy, milk-fed
cortado
, and then sat by the window watching the pedestrains watch each other. The Calle Florida was a place of display and ornament: tiny shops with glazed fronts, marching citizens in their finest, the air washed by the smell of bougainvillea. B.A. was a city of talk, a hyper-analytical labyrinth of words. It was a nocturnal society that assumed its full animation only under cloak of darkness. Like New York it was
defined by how it spoke, and it birthed bilingual writers from the amniotic fluid of endless chatter. The conversations began famously late, usually after midnight. I got lost once near the port around 11
P.M
. and slaked my thirst in an empty bar. I finished my glass of Mendoza wine at 11:30 and rose to pay my bill; another customer came in. I decided to have one more. By 12:30 the place was packed and a trio of Brazilian jazz musicians banged away on rumpled instruments. Four hours later I was locked in a debate about Che Guevara with a truck driver who smuggled goods over remote Patagonian passes. When I wandered home toward the glass house, I stumbled in the darkness with Julio Cortázar:

There were dinner parties with high-ranking police intelligence officers and diplomats and twenty-three-year-old doctors in miniskirts. Society offered a collective thrill in the act of language, in the cultivated B.A. accent and the Italianate flourishes of their own argot, called
lunfardo
. The chatter was partly defensive; whether it is true or not, Argentines loved to claim that there were more therapists per capita in B.A. than anywhere in the world, a class of professionals paid to listen much like the stylish young men in the parks were paid to walk dogs. Night concealed unmet aspirations, squandered talents, and stymied hopes. The unsuitable reality was overpainted where possible: plastic surgery was covered by the national health plan and therefore ubiquitous, while anorexia was epidemic and bulimics vomited up their tensions in private, the inevitable self-loathing of a society that celebrated the tummy tuck and Sigmund Freud.

Aside from cheap beef, Argentina provided meager sustenance
to its people. Only speech was free, so anyone could afford as much as he wanted, and like the Italian clothing people wore it was put on to conceal the poverty of sidelined idealism. They were relieved merely to be alive, to have escaped a nightmare, and denial was sometimes more necessary than we outsiders cared to admit. The local comedian Enrique Pinti pedaled an exercise bicycle on the stage of the Liceo Theater eight times a week, spewing out a venomous history of the nation at such an incredible clip that even the
porteños
could not understand him. They roared with laughter, but his bitter words washed over them, as if the enactment of self-examination was all that mattered. Like his nation, Pinti pedaled faster and faster and yet never went anywhere or, as he liked to point out, lost any weight.

Now in broad daylight the
Calle Florida
was full of kiosks selling newspapers, and I bought three. They were filled with Che.
Clarin
, the
New York Times
of Argentina, ran an entire Che page with a photo of the man they called the “First Commander” in battle fatigues, quotes from the war diary he wrote during the Bolivian campaign of 1967, and a history of the various
Guevarista
guerrillas who fought in the north of Argentina in the 1960s. After the 1959 victory of the Cuban revolution, Guevara had quickly looked toward his native Argentina, eager to spread his doctrine of Marxist revolution. “We mustn’t be afraid of violence,” he said then. “Violence is the midwife of the new societies. But it must be loosed at exactly the right moment, when the leaders of the people have found the most favorable conditions.”

Coincidentally, he was the leader and the moment was now. By 1960 the first cell of Argentine guerrillas was in action in Tucumán Province, in the north. The group, called Uturunco, was wiped out within months. In 1963, an Argentine journalist who had covered the Cuban revolution launched, with Guevara’s support, the People’s Guerrilla Army in Salta Province. The journalist called himself “Second Commander” and planned to turn the budding revolution over to the First Commander,
El Che
, but the People’s Guerrilla Army was wiped out long before this could happen. The few guerrillas who escaped that failure are believed to have starved to death in
the Andes, but this gruesome fate did not deter many more pretenders. A third guerrilla group, the Peronist Armed Forces, established a base in Tucumán in 1968 and was captured within weeks. Another group rose from the ashes of that defeat, taking the name Montoneros—Mounted—to reflect Che’s doctrine that a mobile guerrilla force could outfight any conventional army.

Che was no hypocrite. He was willing to face the consequences of his ideology, and in the Cuban war he had led from the front lines and been wounded repeatedly. He was shot in the left ear once; another bullet entered his neck and exited at his shoulder; another struck him in the chest but bounced off, spent; and he was wounded in the foot in the Sierra Maestra Mountains in December 1957. (He also shot himself in the cheek when he dropped his pistol during the Bay of Pigs invasion, but nobody is perfect.) His love of combat was paired with a seductive eloquence. He spoke about creating a “New Man,” an idealized, revolutionary citizen who would be motivated by morality and justice rather than paychecks. Yet always, war came first. He called for “two, three, many Vietnams,” and lit the fuse of revolt in country after country. When his surrogates all failed, Che led his own campaign in Bolivia. He died there in 1967 with his hands tied, executed by a sergeant reeking of beer.

The repeated failures of the rural strategy pushed guerrilla warfare into the cities by the late ’60s. The specific doctrines Che taught were modified or set aside after his death, and a hundred doctrinal schisms appeared within the guerrilla movements across the continent, yet Che’s most important contribution was intact: the myth of the heroic guerrilla shooting his way into power. The Montoneros began attacking in the urban centers of Argentina, using assassinations and bombings to destabilize the military-civilian regime. The war moved from the pleasant abstraction of mountain ambushes to the bitter reality of neighbor executing neighbor.