“Since the beginning of time, the Magdalena River, has run down the length of Colombia, in South America. Riverboats carried passengers to scenic towns along the banks, where tourists danced the nights away. Farmers and fishermen canoed their produce up and down the Magdalena. It’s a beautiful environment, a botanist’s dream, thousands of species of plants and birds, a real paradise.
“Since the 1950s, unscrupulous loggers, miners, and ranchers have turned
the once mighty river into a stream, in places, and the people who live along
the banks of the Magadena call it, the River of Death.
“My driver, guide, and I reached a town called Puerto Berrio. It’s where
I met with leaders of the local ‘Autodefensas,’ often violent civilian militias
protecting, supposedly, their villages from communist insurgents and drug
cartels.”
“Are you talking about after Pablo Escobar?”
“No, before, but that’s neither here nor there. Today, little has
changed. My orders were to report on the situation, to provide evidence that
Marxist rebels are running drugs.”
“And, are they?”
“I’d been around long enough to know everybody was running drugs, but I
had to play along. I asked one militia leader, a crony of a local mayor, chomping
on a cigar and wearing new, starched jungle fatigues. He told me not only were the
rebels selling drugs but the villagers were complicit. They were communist sympathizers,
and, because of their involvement, the communists were gaining strength, with
infusions of money and arms from China.”
“You believed that?”
“No. government-supported militias and leftist rebels all carried AR-15s
and drove American jeeps, but it wasn’t about ‘left’ or ‘right.’ It was about
terror. I knew government militias squeezed the villagers for information about
the rebels, and the rebels reciprocated, demanding information about the
government.
“It turned village against village and neighbor against neighbor, one
informing on the other to save his own skin. Both militias and rebels kidnapped
teenagers and threatened to kill them, and their families, if they didn’t join a
side.”
“Just like Vietnam.”
“Worse when drugs, land grabs, and millions of dollars are at stake. The
people couldn’t even farm without fear of violence if they didn’t pay
protection money. They were living in a feudal system, and as long as Washington kept pouring money, arms, and supplies into the country,
why stop it?
“It's about taking people's land and illegal drugs the excuse. It all moves economies, ours and theirs, in the Magdalena, since the 1970s up until
today. There would be no Miami skyline without it. Every time Johnny Smith, in
Cleveland, takes a snort of cocaine, he’s putting a gun to a villager’s head
and pulling the trigger. It’s also the international banking system that launders billions in
massive profits and invests it in legal businesses.
“A local Indian government official pulled me aside in the Upper
Magdalena, and, with his voice trembling, told me the militias and rebels were taking
the U.S. money and not even fighting each other, just buying homes and cars in
Medellin and Cali, while terrorizing villagers caught in the middle.”
“It’s like El Salvador never ended.”
“Central America was the petri dish, to see how much we could get away
with, how much land we could take and how many politicians we could buy. Anyway,
I stayed a few days. It was a hellish place, no radio or television, no music, people
afraid to talk, foreign interests ready to take their land, like Eden after the fall, no God to help them.
“I was ready to leave, go back to Bogata, file my report, and fly home. I’m
walking back to the truck, my driver and guide waiting. An old man, a villager,
approaches me and says, his lips hardly moving, “They are killing us. Please,
don’t look at me or talk, just listen.
“I’d told everybody I was an American biologist, my undercover identity.
Hell, they knew I was CIA. The old man knew if he was seen talking to me, it
could mean death. As he passed me, he said, ‘Go down to the river and watch the
fishermen. You will see what they are doing to us.’ He kept walking. I didn’t
turn towards him or answer him.
“I walked down to the banks of the river, enveloped in the beauty of the
jungle and the sounds of the flowing water and birds. Fishermen were throwing
out their nets and pulling them in. I could see something flopping as two men
hauled in their catch. I neared. I saw a few fish, but as I looked closer, I
saw the eeriest sight.
“There were arms, legs, a few heads, and a torso among the fish. The men
didn’t look at me, no one did. They pulled their net onto the shore, where
someone had placed a black wheelbarrow. The fishermen lifted the body parts and
placed them gently into the wheel barrow. They took the fish and dropped them into
plastic buckets. Without acknowledging me, they tossed their nets out again.
Another man, wearing a dark cape, a wrestler’s mask, and a ball cap, pushed the
wheelbarrow away, his simple act a death sentence.”
*****
The above
is an excerpt taken from a novel I have been writing. I learned about Colombia’s
Magdalena River from David Wade’s magnificent book, Magdalena, River of
Dreams, the Story of Colombia. The excerpt from my novel in more
non-fiction than fiction, since I borrowed information from Mr. Wade, as he
travelled the length of the Magdalena, spoke and lived among the people who
make their living along its banks.
As I wrote
my novel, I came across a piece by Kelly Lytle Hernandez, in her award-winning
book, Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands, Bad Mexicans.
 |
| Ricardo Flores Magon, San Cristobal, Mx. |
Dr. Hernandez,
a professor of history at UCLA, tells the story of Ricardo Flores Magan, his
collaborators, and his Mexican Liberal Party, who operated on both sides of the
border in the early 1900s, writers and intellectuals, whose words and ideas led
to the overthrow of Porfirio Diaz, the start of the Mexican Revolution, and the
exploits of Zapata and Villa. Professor Hernandez’s book may be one of the
best, and most complete, books on the people and times, explaining, in a language accessible to all readers, why our
grandparents migrated to the Southwest from Mexico, and the injustices they faced on both sides.
Ricardo Magon and
his colleagues, known as “precursors,” wrote the words Emiliano Zapata made
famous, “Land and Liberty,” and “It is better to die on your feet than live on
your knees,” a call to revolt against a corrupt government that took its people's land, sold it to American titans, and forced the Mexican people to work as servants on their own land. Foreigners, not only Americans, owned the majority of the best arable land in Mexico. The title, Bad Mexicans, is what Mexican dictator, Porfirio Diaz, called his opponents, as Dr. Hernandez said in an interview, much like Donald Trump's "Bad Hombres." The moniker was in contrast to the "Good Mexicans" who supported Diaz, did as they were told, knew their places, and turned a blind eye to his vile dictatorship.
Where Colombia’s Magdalena River and Dr. Lytle Hernandez’s book connect, for me, is a section I found in the Introduction. I often thought of the Rio Grande, or as Mexicans call it, the Rio Bravo, as the river separating Mexico from the U.S., a watery barrier Mexican must cross to reach the U.S., going back to the 1800s, more geographical than metaphorical, or as Mexican writer, Carlos Fuentes, called it, "A scar," which I took to mean more political than anything else.
Many governments and people expose the terror and violence perpetrated against them in their own histories. Ken Burns, recently, in his documentary the Revolutionary War, showed viewers the explicit violence the British inflicted on the American colonists during the war for independence. Yet, when Mexicans, Indians, or other exploited people attempt to tell their history, others cry "foul," some, often, their own people, who prefer not to rock the boat, and to turn a blind eye.
Bad
Mexicans begins with the lynching, mutilation, and burning of Antonio
Rodriguez, a Mexican living in Texas, accused by Anglos of killing a white
woman, but he was never charged nor convicted. He was killed by a group of
vigilantes who took the law into their own hands.
It’s no
secret. Mexicans and Indians had been hunted down and lynched in the borderlands by some Americans, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when the rush to take Mexican lands was on. It was the same when Mexicans came north to take away Indian lands. As I read the Rio Grande in Bad Mexicans, it reminded me about the Magdalena. Dr. Hernandez writes, “Historians William Carrigan and Clive Webb have documented that at least 547
Mexicans and Mexican Americans were lynched between 1848 and 1928.” It was the following
sentences that really got me to thinking. “They estimate that thousands more
were killed without record. Bodies were dumped in the Rio Grande to be swept
into the Gulf of Mexico; corpses were left in the brush to be picked at by
crows; bones were left on the plains to be buried by windstorms. The 1910
killing of Antonio Rodrigues in Rocksprings, Texas, was the 448th
such murder on record. No one was arrested.”
Mexicans weren’t slaves, so, they couldn’t be bought and sold or their land taken, legally. What struck me in Dr. Hernandez' meticulously researched book was the terror campaign inflicted on the Mexican citizenry, many who had lived on the land for generations. Some so-called “settlers,” among them white supremacists, crazed for land, and willing to kill for it, took the law into their own hands, while law enforcement and the courts protected their violence.
It was the first I heard that thousands of Mexicans were lynched, burned, or executed, in so many other ways. It wasn't an anomaly I, and I'm sure many, had thought. So, was the movement westward, then, a reign of terror on the people of the Southwest, worse than we'll ever know? Was the Rio Grande, like the Magdalena, a river of death? Afterall, Anglo, Chinese, and Mexicans had been running illegal drugs and booze across the Rio Grande, going back to the 1800s, during Prohibition, a violent period, and still today, much longer than the Magdalena. Could the violence and terror along the banks of the Rio Grande have been worse than we ever realized?
If so, has
the true history of the Southwest been buried? Was Americo Paredes’ story of Gregorio
Cortez just a glimpse into de facto "vigilante justice" rather than a full picture?
What about the stories of Joaquin Murrieta, Toribio Vasquez, and other Mexicans, myth or truth, that have come down to us through history and literature? Will anybody ever uncover the true
story of Manifest Destiny and America’s march west? No doubt, native Americans
know, but, in California, even that history is practically unknown.
In his 1990 essay, “The Ballad of Hooty Croy,” David Talbot writes about Hooty Croy, an Indian accused
of murdering a sheriff and ultimately found innocent. Croy's attorney, the famed San Francisco orator Tony Serra, argued in court “The story begins…not in 1978, but back in the goldrush
days, when thousands of frenzied miners swept into the valleys of northwest California,
killing and enslaving the Indians who stood in the way of their claims. It is a
horrible story…one not widely known…of vigilante groups marching from Yreka and
other mining towns, flying banners…exterminate; of local governments paying
50-cent bounties for Indian scalps and heads; of Indian boys and girls being
kidnapped and sold to miners as sexual slaves…; of Indian babies whose brains
were dashed out against tree trunks. ‘The Indian was an impediment to the white
man’s Manifest Destiny…. Get rid of him, like the coyote.’”
It isn't a pretty history, but it is our history. There is no use hiding from it or burying it. Like a cancer, it can't be treated unless it is exposed and treated, with what we call "knowledge," just as the Germans have done with their history. Sadly, the discrimination continues, against many people, in many parts of the world. No matter how many try to deny it, history also shows there are those who stand up to fight it.
