The Soccer War Read online

  The deciding game of the best-of-three series was held on neutral ground, in Mexico (El Salvador won, three-two). The Honduran fans were placed on one side of the stadium, the Salvadoran fans on the other side, and down the middle sat 5,000 Mexican police armed with thick clubs.

  VICTORIANO GOMEZ ON TV

  Victoriano Gomez died on 8 February in the small town of San Miguel, El Salvador. He was shot under the afternoon sun, in the football stadium. People had been sitting in the grandstand of the stadium since morning. Television and radio vans had arrived. The cameramen set up. Some press photographers stood on the green playing field, grouped around one of the goals. It looked as if a match was about to begin.

  His mother was brought out first. The worn out, modestly dressed woman sat facing the place where her son was to die, and the people in the grandstand fell silent. But after a while, they began talking again, swapping comments, buying ice cream and cold drinks. The children made most of the noise. Those who could not find seats in the grandstand climbed a nearby tree for the view.

  An army truck drove on to the field. First, the soldiers who would be in the firing squad got out. Victoriano Gomez jumped down lightly on to the grass after them. He looked around the grandstand, and said loudly, so loudly that many people heard him: ‘I am innocent, my friends.’

  The stadium became quiet again, although whistles of disapproval could be heard from the places of honour where the local dignitaries sat.

  The cameras went into action: the transmission was due to begin. All over El Salvador, people were watching the execution of Victoriano Gomez on television.

  Victoriano stood near the running track, facing the grandstand. But the cameramen shouted at him to go to the middle of the stadium, so that they could have better light and a better picture. He understood and walked back into the middle of the field where he stood at attention—swarthy, tall, twenty-four years old. Now only a small figure could be seen from the grandstand and that was good. Death loses its literalness at that distance: it stops being death and instead becomes the spectacle of death. The cameramen had Victoriano in close-up, however; they had his face filling the screen; people watching television saw more than the crowd gathered in the stadium.

  After the firing squad’s volley, Victoriano fell and the cameras showed the soldiers surround his body to count the hits. They counted thirteen. The leader of the squad nodded and slid his pistol into his holster.

  It was all over. The grandstand began to empty. The transmission came to an end. Victoriano and the soldiers left in the truck. His mother stayed a while longer, not moving, surrounded by a group of curious people who stared at her in silence.

  I do not know what to add. Victoriano was a guerrilla in the San Miguel forests. He was a Salvadoran Robin Hood. He urged the peasants to seize land. All of El Salvador is the property of fourteen latifundista families. A million landless peasants live there too. Victoriano organized ambushes of Guardia Rural patrols. The Guardia is the latifundistas’ private army, recruited from criminal elements, and the terror of every village. Victoriano declared war on these people.

  The police caught him when he came to San Miguel at night to visit his mother. The news was celebrated on every hacienda. Unending fiestas were organized. The police chief was promoted and received congratulations from the president.

  Victoriano was sentenced to death.

  The government decided to promote his death. There are many dissatisfied, mutinous people in El Salvador. The peasants are demanding land and the students are crying for justice. The opposition should be treated to a show. Thus: they televised the execution. Before a standing-room-only crowd, in close-up. Let the whole nation watch. Let them watch, and let them think.

  Let them watch.

  Let them think.

  HIGH TIME CONTINUED, OR THE PLAN OF THE NEXT UNWRITTEN BOOK, ETC.

  9

  I was thinking of weaving into this book a dictionary of various phrases that take on different meanings according to the degree of geographical latitude, and which serve to define things that have similar names but distinct appearances. Such a dictionary would look more or less like this:

  10

  SILENCE. People who write history devote too much attention to so-called events heard round the world, while neglecting the periods of silence. This neglect reveals the absence of that infallible intuition that every mother has when her child falls suddenly silent in its room. A mother knows that this silence signifies something bad. That the silence is hiding something. She runs to intervene because she can feel evil hanging in the air. Silence fulfills the same role in history and in politics. Silence is a signal of unhappiness and, often, of crime. It is the same sort of political instrument as the clatter of weapons or a speech at a rally. Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take pains to have their actions accompanied by quiet. Look at how colonialism has always fostered silence; at how discreetly the Holy Inquisition functioned; at the way Leonidas Trujillo avoided publicity.

  What silence emanates from countries with overflowing prisons! In Somoza’s Nicaragua—silence; in Duvalier’s Haiti—silence. Each dictator makes a calculated effort to maintain the ideal state of silence, even though somebody is continually trying to violate it! How many victims of silence there are, and at what cost! Silence has its laws and its demands. Silence demands that concentration camps be built in uninhabited areas. Silence demands an enormous police apparatus with an army of informers. Silence demands that its enemies disappear suddenly and without a trace. Silence prefers that no voice—of complaint or protest or indignation—disturb its calm. And where such a voice is heard, silence strikes with all its might to restore the status quo ante—the state of silence.

  Silence has the capacity of spreading, which is why we use expressions like ‘silence reigned everywhere,’ or ‘a universal silence fell.’ Silence has the capacity to take on weight, so that we can speak of ‘an oppressive silence’ in the same way we would speak of a heavy solid or liquid.

  The word ‘silence’ most often joins words like ‘funereal’ (‘funereal silence’), ‘battle’ (‘the silence after battle’) and ‘dungeon’ (‘as silent as a dungeon’). These are not accidental associations.

  Today one hears about noise pollution, but silence pollution is worse. Noise pollution affects the nerves; silence pollution is a matter of human lives. No one defends the maker of a loud noise, whereas those who establish silence in their own states are protected by an apparatus of repression. That is why the battle against silence is so difficult.

  It would be interesting to research the media systems of the world to see how many service information and how many service silence and quiet. Is there more of what is said or of what is not said? One could calculate the number of people working in the publicity industry. What if you could calculate the number of people working in the silence industry? Which number would be greater?

  BLACK. In the Congo, in Stanleyville, there is an old barracks in a side-street that looks something like a smalltown fire station. Every Sunday a Kimbangist service is held there. When you walk into the dark interior you feel you have entered the Pechorska Lavra in Kiev because the holy faces in the old icons in old orthodox churches are dark or even, some say, Negro. In the Kimbangist churches the divine faces in the paintings are also black, Negro. The Kimbangists believe that Jesus came into the world as a Negro. So their prophet, Simon Kimbangu, taught them. Kimbangu was born among the Bakong tribe at the ehd of the last century. On 18 March 1921, he had a vision. He began wandering around the Congo and teaching. He said that he had been sent by God to raise the dead, multiply the loaves and fishes and save the world—that world of jungle and savannah. But God was not white. He was black. The whites had stolen God and for that they would suffer eternal damnation and everlasting torment. This teaching was revolutionary. Kimbangu said: ‘Don’t listen to Caesar: heed the Word of the Lord!’ Kimbangu spoke the language of the Bible because that was all he knew, and h
is whole programme was served up in an exalted messianic phraseology. At the end of 1921 the Belgians arrested the prophet and sentenced him to death, a sentence which was then commuted to life imprisonment. The persecution of the Kimbangists began. But the stronger the repression, the stronger the movement became. Simon the Prophet had a little church in the jungle. At its opening, he had brought in a bowl of paint. The paint was black. Divine images had hung in the church, and Simon the Prophet went from picture to picture staining the immobile faces of the saints. He changed the bright colours of their foreheads and rosy cheeks, thickened the lips and kinked the hair. When he was finished, the saints had become black, in the image of Simon and his faithful. That was the first revolutionary gesture in the Congo: smearing pictures with a paintbrush.

  SPIRITS. In Africa, many people are still sceptical about the effectiveness of firearms. Every report that someone has been shot to death is received with incredulity. In the first place, no one has ever seen a bullet in flight, so how can it be proved that somebody died because somebody else fired a rifle? Second, there are always methods for reversing the trajectory of a bullet. Various kinds of ju-ju, for instance, are more impervious than steel armour. The former premier of western Nigeria, Chief Akintola, was executed not against a wall, in the usual manner of a firing squad, but in the middle of a large veranda, because his executioners knew that Akintola’s ju-ju would have made him impregnable against bullets if he ever managed to touch a wall. Europeans were shocked by reports from the Congo about the desecration of corpses. These were not, as some alleged, acts of sadism. That act of destroying the corpse results from the conviction that a human being consists of not only a body but also the spirits that fill it. Many white people believe in a body and a soul, but their faith in one soul is merely a primitive simplification of a complicated feature of human existence: in reality a person’s body is filled by many spirits proper to the various parts of the human organism. It would be naive to believe that this complicated world of spirits, alive in the recesses of the human body, can be liquidated by a single bullet. The body is only one element in a person’s death: full death occurs only after the spirits have been destroyed or expelled, and they are expelled in the same way that air is expelled from a balloon: by pricking it. Hence the necessity of destroying the corpse, particularly if the corpse belonged to an enemy whose spirits can later avenge him. There is no cruelty in this—for someone who is forced to fight against the dangerous and omnipresent world of spirits, which may be invisible but are hot on the heels of the living, it is simply self-defence.

  HIERARCHY. In Accra, in the buildings of the ministries, the hierarchy of position corresponds to the hierarchy of floors. The higher the personage, the higher the floor. This is because there is a breeze higher up, while down below the air is static, petrified. The petty officials are stifling on the ground floor; the department directors are starting to feel a draught: and at the very top the minister is cooled by that wished-for breeze.

  LOCKED UP. Why do guerrillas kidnap diplomats?

  The answer is in the context of the Latin American political prisoner’s situation. Namely: Whoever protests or fights against the regime is locked up in prison.

  The prisoner is not accused of anything. Since he has not been accused, there can be no trial. Since there can be no trial, there is also no verdict. And thus there is no proper sentence. There is no prosecutor, no defence counsel, no appeal, no amnesty. There is no testimony, no indictment, nothing. A witness can be found guilty; the guilty can become innocent, except that this is impossible as there is no court to find anyone not guilty. The situation of the prisoner can be reduced to a simple formula: why is he in prison? Because he has been locked up.

  He might be released in a year or in ten years, or he might never be released. Many of these prisoners are let out when the president who locks them up leaves office. Every president has his own prisoners, and their fate is tied to his. A new figure moves into the president’s office, and new prisoners fill the cells. That is why certain groups of people—his personal enemies—regularly emigrate with each accession to office of a new president. Otherwise they know they will end up behind bars. Such liberal conditions obtain only in those Latin American countries that have some form of democracy; in the countries ruled by dictators the prisoner has no hope of regaining his freedom or of staying alive.

  Take the case of Guatemala. Someone is locked up and tortured. If he survives the torture, he is thrown into prison. There is another series of tortures and an epilogue: a corpse is found in a ditch.

  There is no way to defend or rescue a prisoner legally. The law does not extend to him. Liberating a prisoner by force is in fact impossible: the political prisons of Guatemala are located on barracks grounds, and one prisoner is guarded by dozens of armed soldiers, tanks, cannons.

  Only one method remains: to kidnap an enemy and exchange him for the prisoner. The action is not carried out haphazardly; they do not kidnap the first person they come across. The target is established after long deliberation, after discussion.

  FORTRESS. This is an imposing building, erected in Accra at a cost of over twenty million dollars (at a time when it was hard to buy bread in the city) for the sole purpose of hosting a four-day meeting of African leaders in 1966. After the conference the structure was locked up and now stands empty, falling into disrepair. In the tropics, an unused building turns into a ruin in a few years.

  The idea of putting up this edifice, called State House, was Nkrumah’s. The architects drew up plans—aimed at creating a building that would combine the height of monumentality with blinding modernity and maximum security. They realized their intentions. State House is gigantic. It stands twelve storeys high. Its annexes contain an enormous meeting hall and an enormous reception hall, and the main building is divided into sixty suites. Each chief of state and each foreign minister has one suite, and each suite consists of ten rooms, with two bathrooms, foyer, etc. The suites are furnished in the most refined splendour.

  Even more striking is the security system. Once inside, you find yourself protected by a wall wherever you go, wherever you stand. It is laid out on the model of the toy called the ‘Russian grandmother’. In the biggest grandmother there nests a smaller one, and inside the smaller one an even smaller one, and so on. This is the same. Behind the first wall there is a second wall, and behind the second wall a third wall, and in the middle is the suite. In this way, the leaders are protected against attack. Hand weapons would do nothing. A bullet would ricochet off the walls, as would light and medium artillery and mortars up to 160mm. Nothing less than naval artillery or mass aerial bombing could make a dent in the fortress of State House. But such an eventuality was also provided for. Below State House are massive underground shelters with passageways connecting to the rest of the building. The shelters have electricity, lighting, running water, ventilation, etc. Here the leaders are safe even from bombs.

  Unless somebody dropped an A-bomb.

  In recognition of the fact that sieges can drag on, sufficient food supplies are furnished so that the leaders could not be starved out. In the right wing of State House there is an enormous refrigerated chamber in which enough food to last several months can be stored. Supplies of medicine, water and drinks are also stockpiled. State House has two independent energy sources (a power station and its own generators), as well as independent telephone cables connecting it to important world capitals.

  One hardly need add that State House has its own pool, its own cafés, bars and restaurants, its own printing press, central air conditioning, a post office and television. A system has also been devised to protect it against an attack from within, in case of some fifth column uprising, and, in anticipation of this the corridors are neither straight nor interconnected, but winding, broken up, ellipsoidal, descending, zigzag, semi-circular, curved. In this way no attacker could ever take in a whole floor in his sights because a victim would need only to jump around the corner to be safe.
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  For security reasons it is forbidden to photograph State House, either close-up or from a distance and, if you did, the police would lock you up. Nor is it permitted to stop in front of State House and look at it for long: your papers would be checked and you would be chased away.

  STATE VISIT. In 1862, during his expedition in search of the source of the Nile, Speke reached Uganda, where he visited the Baganda king, Mutesa. Alan Moorehead writes:

  Speke set up his chair in front of the throne, erected his umbrella and awaited events. Nothing happened. For an hour the two men sat gazing at one another …

  At length a man approached with a message: had he seen the King?

  ‘Yes,’ Speke answered, ‘for full one hour.’

  When this was translated to Mutesa he rose and walked away into the interior of his palace.’

  LIFE. The dictatorship of General Abbuda in the Sudan lasted six years. His regime fell on 21 October 1964. It was a harsh but superficial regime, with no mass support. Someone I met in Khartoum told me what happened after 21 October:

  It was an extraordinary spectacle. Within three days Khartoum looked exactly the way it had looked the week before Abbuda took power, the way it had looked in 1958. All the old political parties reappeared immediately. Exactly the same parties, under the same names, with the same people. The same newspapers as before began to appear, with the same titles, the same typefaces and editorial stances. The janitors returned and started cleaning the parliament buildings on their own. The politicians immediately resumed the quarrels that had been broken off six years earlier in mid-sentence. Everything looked as if those six years of Abbuda’s government had never occurred. Those six years were only an interruption of something that is still continuing, whose thread has been picked up again and is being woven anew.