63.

   As she led us through the streets, I asked her a question. “What am I supposed to do about all this misery you’ve been showing me, be ashamed?”
   “What happened to my mother in Chile became an industry in Argentina. Hundreds of women were forced into premature labor then thrown from airplanes into the Rio Plato.”, Claudia winced. “Their children were raised by the people who murdered them. What is the burden a child must bear when he discovers that his parents were murdered by his parents? To not know what has been done in your name is shameful. You will tell your countrymen what you have learned and pray they will believe you.”
   We entered a plaza filled with somber women wading silently through a carpet of pigeons rustling and cooing at their feet. When they saw Claudia, they nodded their heads and made room for us in their procession. Claudia spoke in a whisper. “Tens of thousands of people simply disappeared during the Dirty War. These Mothers of the Disappeared will never know what happened to their loved ones. You may look at us as a sad collection of banana republics, but the seeds from which this horror sprang lie in fallow ground in your own country: Extraordinary Rendition, The Patriot Act, The Military Commissions Act, Guantanamo. You think you are immune to fascism and tyranny but how many of you remember the fact that there was a large and powerful Nazi Party in America before World War II? Fascism is a cancer in every country that is never cured. It merely lies dormant waiting to awake and metastasize. That woman over there spent twenty years in prison. That woman lost her entire family, all her friends, all their friends, everyone she ever knew.”

 

64.
   The Argentine sun pressed on my shoulders. The air was thick with the whispers of the dead. It was hard to breathe. I broke from the crowd and wandered away.I collapsed on a bench in front of a church. Pigeons roosted on the bench and settled at my feet. The bells of the church began a melancholy serenade. Claudia stood over me with a concerned look on her face. “You look ill.”                                                                         The dogs joined me on the bench. Nanette looked up at Claudia with pressed lips. “What do you expect? You have been laying it on awfully thick.”                                                                                               “I know things have been bad.”, I said. “ I’m not naive and I’m not a ‘My country right or wrong.’ kind of guy but it’s all been a bit much - an American School of Assassins, corporate omnipotence, torture, murder, rape...”                                                                                                                                                        Claudia looked away. She sat down next to me and hung her head. After a few minutes she turned to me and took my hand. “Forgive me, Oliver. My feelings for you have come so suddenly, they scare me. I lecture you like a child, but I am hiding behind a facade. I have not been considerate. I have not been honest about my feelings for you.” She leaned over to me and kissed me. “I can only hope you feel the same for me, but I will not ask you if you do.” She looked down forlornly.                                                          “Are you kidding? You are the most wonderful women I’ve ever...” I paused, speechless. “I’ve ever touched. I am most impressed with you. I am completely impressed with you. You are as far away from me as I can imagine yet I feel I have always been where ever you are taking me. The sunset wraps itself around you. The moon crowns you. I will do anything to keep you. I feel at home with you, and I have never felt at home anywhere.”

65.

   Claudia blushed. “I owe you a drink, Shakespeare and I know a man with a bar.” She took my hand and pulled me to my feet. “I’ve known Boris forever.” A look of affection graced her face. “He used to feed me wine and fairy tales on his knee when I was very young. How he managed to survive the dirty war is probably a secret I’d rather not know but I love him. I know he will like you. How could he not?”
   She led us down an alley lined with carved doors mounted with ornately cast hardware. We stopped in front of a large sign depicting a well-endowed bull with the words ‘Los Huevos’ scrawled across it. It swayed in the breeze above a humble store front.
   Claudia rang the bell. The door swung open and a large, florid man wearing an electric yellow shirt and the reddest pants I had ever seen stepped out. A thick black mustache twirled into rings crawled over his lips. Wide sideburns equally curled at their ends stretched across his cheeks. He embraced Claudia then turned to me. His dark eyes stared deep into mine. “Hello, handsome. I am Boris.” He put one arm around me and the other around Claudia.
   Claudia kissed him on the cheek. “These are my thirsty friends Pat, Nanette and Oliver.”
   He lowered his girth down to the dogs. He cradled their heads in his beefy hands. “Hello, my friends. Come in and drink with me.” Then he sprang up and took me in his arms. He kissed me on each cheek and held me at arm's length lifting me to my toes. “Aren’t you the lucky one, my daughter.”, he said, rolling his eyes at Claudia.

66.
   Boris ushered us in and opened bottles of wine. He sat us down under yet another portrait of Pablo Neruda. Claudia contemplated a glass of wine in her hand. “Boris, Oliver is on a journey of illumination. He has heard a great deal of our sad story but now he needs a rest.”

   Boris looked into my eyes with sad resignation. “I’m afraid there is no time for you to rest, Oliver. There is no time for any of us to rest. The horror that tortured our continent is stronger and more insidious than ever. What was once a vicious, covert army has grown into a voracious institution that picks at the bones of the poor and the helpless. Its tentacles reach across the world wrenching countries from their citizens and enslaving them. It is taking your country away from you, Oliver and it is enslaving your people.”
   Boris stood up and pointed to the portrait above him. “Claudia has told you about the great Chilean poet, I have no doubt, a soldier in the blood bath of South America. In 1954 another soldier tried to throw off Corporate America’s colonial yoke in Guatemala. 90% of the land was owned by a few families and the United Fruit Company. Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president enacted his own Homestead Act, opening only unused land to the peasants and compensating its owners according to the land’s worth. For this, the CIA overthrew him. For the next thirty years, CIA installed dictators murdered 100,000 Guatemalans. The ferocity of these murderous rampages inspired a new concept of permanent dominance.”
   Oh God, more of the same, I thought, swallowing my glass of wine and pouring another.

67.
   Boris must have caught the flash of cynicism in my eyes. To bring his point home, he grabbed me and stood me up. A tango swelled on the jukebox. He swept me around the room. “This new concept was a purging of every person who would challenge the elite, every person who would think about challenging the status quo, every person related to that person, every person who knew that person. A genocide raged throughout the continent that locked us behind an Iron Curtain the Soviets would have been proud of, but even that was not enough for the elite. As political refugees flooded out of country after country, the School of the Americas graduates and their CIA masters came up with a plan to follow them. It was called Operation Condor. They assassinated people all over the world no matter what country they fled to. Allende appointed Orlando Letelier as ambassador to the United States in 1971. In 1973, he was serving in Chile as Minister of Foreign Affairs when Allende was assassinated. He was tortured for a year before international pressure resulted in his release. He moved his family to Washington DC and became the leading opposition in exile to the Pinochet regime. Many of the murderers who carried out assassinations for Operation Condor were on the payroll of the CIA. Some were caught and convicted but pardoned by United States presidents. The Doctor was well aware of Operation Condor but refused to stop Pinochet from assassinating Letelier and his assistant with a car bomb in 1976. The man who planted that bomb worked for the CIA before carrying out the killing for Pinochet’s assassination squad. It was all one big, ugly family, Oliver and the family has gotten bigger and uglier and much, much more efficient.”

68.
   Boris pressed his face close to mine. “Those adolescent days of torture and assassination are being replaced by the bureaucracy of The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Why kill a country’s leaders and replace them with an unreliable dictator when you can saddle it with parasitic loans? Banks, not tanks, Oliver. Banks, not tanks.The money pays off the oligarchy that agrees to the loans and builds the infrastructure the corporations need to steal the resources they want. The loans come with ‘structural adjustments’ that privatize the government, the water, the power. They are flooded with cheap food and cheap goods that destroy their ability to produce anything on their own. Haiti is a good example. In ten years, its people went from being self-sufficient to eating dirt. Haiti’s starving farmers poured into the cities and became sweat shop slaves producing plastic trinkets for Disney. Imagine, Oliver, nations and nations of slaves. Today it’s the best of both worlds. A third world country pays for the plundering of its resources and its people are turned into slaves who produce the products that global corporations sell to the first world. It’s much more efficient than the old days when you had to go to all the expense of capturing and transporting slaves to your country. Now when you are through pillaging, when you have used your slaves up, you just leave them to starve and move on.”

   The tango on the jukebox came to an end. Boris sat me down, whipped out his glasses and unrolled a map. “But my time is short. Someone else will continue the story. You must visit the Giant of the Atacama. This map will show you to the way.”
  

69.
   The wine had got the better of the dogs. “The giant of the Atacama?”, slurred Pat. “What the hell is that?”
    “You’ll know it when you see it.” He turned to me. “You have very far to go indeed.”, he whispered as he rolled up the map. “Where this will take you will teach you much more.”

   “Is the giant a good giant or a bad giant?”, mumbled Nanette.
   Boris slowly opened my collar and slid the map down my shirt. “There was one more link in the chain the plutocrats who run your county needed, Oliver. You Americans had been convinced by your masters that in your great struggle to save the world from Communism it was necessary to commit many of the same crimes your enemy committed. When the Soviet Union fell, your enemy was defeated. There were no more excuses to train terrorists to topple democratically elected governments and install dictators, no more excuses to keep the incredibly lucrative war machine running. Then America suffered her own September 11th and a new enemy sprang up, an enemy that was everywhere and nowhere, an enemy you must fight forever in an endless war, a perfect enemy. Your masters had yearned for, in their own words, a ‘Pearl Harbor Type Event’. Your own intelligence warned you that terrorists were going to hijack passenger planes and fly them into skyscrapers but you did nothing and three thousand people were killed. You then conquered two countries and bombed a third. It’s as though you were waiting for an excuse to unleash yourself upon the world.