battalions were deployed and Colombian soldiers spent two months struggling up the nearly impassable canyons, cutting new paths painfully as they went. The "agrarian Communists" were finished in those final campaigns.
That night was one of the stranger ones I spent, a harbinger of things to come. As the guest in the hut I was given the "bed" of Tiro Fijo to sleep in. It consisted of four boards jammed together and a piece of leather tied across it. It was freezing cold and even the rough army blanket didn't keep me warm. I didn't sleep, but at least I didn't dream.
My little trip to Marquetalia showed me the very beginnings of guerrilla warfare, albeit in an odd form, and the wellsprings of Marxism ideology and banditry in Latin America, which I was later to see a lot of and understand much better.
"This violence is the outcome of a frustrated revolution," Fals Borda, Colombia's greatest sociologist, told me afterward, in Bogota. "You can't compare it to anything else. It's a new type of violence. It became respectable to use violence. But this went out of bounds. It became something new, amorphous, much more dangerous." These were prophetic words. I was to think of them later, in Santo Domingo, in Cyprus, in Beirut, in Teheran, in El Salvador. I didn't know it then, but I was to live and work through most of the post-World War II new cycles of violence of the twentieth century and often in the most disturbing and incredible firsthand manner-- and my own revolution, the revolution within me as a woman, was to parallel that in strange ways. But everything was not ideological.
While living in Peru, I decided at one point to go up the coast to Chimbote, a wild and woolly frontier-style town where the poor cholos or mixed-bloods were making fortunes in the anchovy trade that rode in with the cooling Humboldt Current. Actually I was going up there only to "look around" (that old simple secret of journalism, looking around) when the Associated Press chief in Lima asked me to do a piece for him on the less-than-thrilling subject of the "sister city program" between Pensacola, Florida, and Chimbote.
Chimbote was sand and millionaires in shabby little huts and brawling bars and raucous women and mysterious ships sailing illegally to sea and ... a half-finished stadium, which "the children of Pensacola are building for the children of Chimbote." I started out doing a freshness-and-light story on this sisterly exchange, thinking it would take a couple of hours.
I paid a visit to the American bishop in charge of the committee. Tall and austere, the bishop assured me the program was "just fine." I paid a visit to the more voluble American-educated mayor. He assured me that the Chimbotans just loved the Pensacolans. I paid visits to local journalists. They hemmed and hawed and hesitated and indicated that there were strange things going on--but none of them knew exactly what they were.
Was something wrong with this project? I talked with Ralph Guzman, the Peace Corps chief; yes, he agreed, something was wrong. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that the local man who had given the land for the stadium was the vice king not only of Chimbote but of the entire coast. Moreover, his biggest whorehouse, "Acapulco," was right across the road from the stadium.
Three, four, five days went by. I was due back in Lima -- what the hell was I doing still in Chimbote? Chicago wanted to know. Finally, with a Peruvian journalist who was helping me, I decided to go directly to the man himself. The journalist kindly arranged it and we found ourselves at one o'clock one desperately hot afternoon drinking a bottle of red wine in the vice king's house.
"GarcÃa" was one of those typical short, squat cholo types: half Indian, half Spanish, and filled with the special guile of each side. He was tough and cunning and I soon saw that he was also notably vain.
"I am giving this land to the children of Chimbote," he was telling us, with a sticky
That night was one of the stranger ones I spent, a harbinger of things to come. As the guest in the hut I was given the "bed" of Tiro Fijo to sleep in. It consisted of four boards jammed together and a piece of leather tied across it. It was freezing cold and even the rough army blanket didn't keep me warm. I didn't sleep, but at least I didn't dream.
My little trip to Marquetalia showed me the very beginnings of guerrilla warfare, albeit in an odd form, and the wellsprings of Marxism ideology and banditry in Latin America, which I was later to see a lot of and understand much better.
"This violence is the outcome of a frustrated revolution," Fals Borda, Colombia's greatest sociologist, told me afterward, in Bogota. "You can't compare it to anything else. It's a new type of violence. It became respectable to use violence. But this went out of bounds. It became something new, amorphous, much more dangerous." These were prophetic words. I was to think of them later, in Santo Domingo, in Cyprus, in Beirut, in Teheran, in El Salvador. I didn't know it then, but I was to live and work through most of the post-World War II new cycles of violence of the twentieth century and often in the most disturbing and incredible firsthand manner-- and my own revolution, the revolution within me as a woman, was to parallel that in strange ways. But everything was not ideological.
While living in Peru, I decided at one point to go up the coast to Chimbote, a wild and woolly frontier-style town where the poor cholos or mixed-bloods were making fortunes in the anchovy trade that rode in with the cooling Humboldt Current. Actually I was going up there only to "look around" (that old simple secret of journalism, looking around) when the Associated Press chief in Lima asked me to do a piece for him on the less-than-thrilling subject of the "sister city program" between Pensacola, Florida, and Chimbote.
Chimbote was sand and millionaires in shabby little huts and brawling bars and raucous women and mysterious ships sailing illegally to sea and ... a half-finished stadium, which "the children of Pensacola are building for the children of Chimbote." I started out doing a freshness-and-light story on this sisterly exchange, thinking it would take a couple of hours.
I paid a visit to the American bishop in charge of the committee. Tall and austere, the bishop assured me the program was "just fine." I paid a visit to the more voluble American-educated mayor. He assured me that the Chimbotans just loved the Pensacolans. I paid visits to local journalists. They hemmed and hawed and hesitated and indicated that there were strange things going on--but none of them knew exactly what they were.
Was something wrong with this project? I talked with Ralph Guzman, the Peace Corps chief; yes, he agreed, something was wrong. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that the local man who had given the land for the stadium was the vice king not only of Chimbote but of the entire coast. Moreover, his biggest whorehouse, "Acapulco," was right across the road from the stadium.
Three, four, five days went by. I was due back in Lima -- what the hell was I doing still in Chimbote? Chicago wanted to know. Finally, with a Peruvian journalist who was helping me, I decided to go directly to the man himself. The journalist kindly arranged it and we found ourselves at one o'clock one desperately hot afternoon drinking a bottle of red wine in the vice king's house.
"GarcÃa" was one of those typical short, squat cholo types: half Indian, half Spanish, and filled with the special guile of each side. He was tough and cunning and I soon saw that he was also notably vain.
"I am giving this land to the children of Chimbote," he was telling us, with a sticky
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