Indians killed, 1,723.
Spaniards killed, 3.
Portuguese killed, 1.
February 11. NO
While the year 1962 was being born, an unknown musical group, two guitars, bass, and drums, auditioned for a record company in London.
The boys returned to Liverpool and sat down to wait.
They counted the hours, they counted the days.
When they had no nails left to bite, on a day like today, they received a response. Decca Recording Company told them frankly, “We don’t like your sound.”
They went further. “Guitar groups are on the way out.”
The Beatles did not commit suicide.
February 12. WORLD BREASTFEEDING DAY
Under the sagging roof of the Chengdu station in Sichuan, hundreds of young Chinese women smile for the camera.
All wear new aprons.
All are freshly washed, combed, groomed.
All have just given birth.
They are waiting for the train that will take them to Beijing.
In Beijing they will breastfeed the babies of others.
These milk cows will be well paid and well fed.
Meanwhile, very far from Beijing, in the villages of Sichuan, their own babies will be fed powdered milk.
They all say they do it for their babies, to pay for their education.
February 13. THE DANGER OF PLAYING
In the year 2008, Miguel López Rocha, who was fooling around on the outskirts of the Mexican city of Guadalajara, slipped and fell into the Santiago River.
Miguel was eight years old.
He did not drown.
He was poisoned.
The river contained arsenic, sulfuric acid, mercury, chromium, lead and furans, dumped into its waters by Aventis, Bayer, Nestlé, IBM, DuPont, Xerox, United Plastics, Celanese, and other companies from countries that prohibit such largesse.
February 14. STOLEN CHILDREN
The sons and daughters of the enemy were war booty during the Argentine military dictatorship, which not so long ago stole more than five hundred children.
But many more, over a much longer period, were stolen by Australia’s democracy, with consent from the law and applause from the public.
In the year 2008, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized to the aboriginal communities that had been stripped of their sons and daughters for more than a century.
State agencies and Christian churches had kidnapped the children and placed them with white families to save them from poverty and crime, and to civilize them and distance them from savage customs.
“To whiten the race,” people used to say.
February 15. MORE STOLEN CHILDREN
“Marxism is the worst form of mental illness,” ruled Colonel Antonio Vallejo Nájera, psychiatrist supreme in Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Spain.
He had studied Republican mothers in prison and proven that they harbored “criminal tendencies.”
To defend the purity of the Iberian race, threatened by Marxist degeneration and maternal delinquency, thousands of newborns and infants, children of Republican parents, were kidnapped and plopped into the arms of families devoted to the cross and sword.
Who were those children? Who are they, so many years later?
No one knows.
Franco’s dictatorship falsified the records to cover its tracks and ordered everyone to forget: it stole the children and it stole their memory.
February 16. THE CONDOR PLAN
Macarena Gelman was one of the many victims of Operation Condor, the common market of terror that linked South America’s dictatorships.
Macarena’s mother was pregnant with her when the Argentine generals sent her to Uruguay. The Uruguayan dictatorship oversaw the birth, killed the mother and handed the newborn daughter to a police chief.
Throughout her childhood Macarena was tormented by the same inexplicable nightmare: she was being chased by several men armed to the teeth, and night after night she would wake up crying.
The nightmare stopped being a mystery when Macarena discovered the true story of her life. That was when she realized she had been dreaming her mother’s real panic: while Macarena was taking shape in the womb, her mother was fleeing the military witch hunt that caught up with her in the end and sent her to her death.
February 17. THE CELEBRATION THAT WAS NOT
The peons on the farms of Argentina’s Patagonia went out on strike against stunted wages and overgrown workdays, and the army took charge of restoring order.
Executions are grueling. On this night in 1922, soldiers exhausted from so much killing went to the bordello at the port of San Julián for their well-deserved reward.
But the five women who worked there closed the door in their faces and chased them away, screaming, “You murderers! Murderers, get out of here!”
Osvaldo Bayer recorded their names. They were Consuelo García, Ángela Fortunato, Amalia Rodríguez, María Juliache and Maud Foster.
The whores. The virtuous.
February 18. BEREFT OF HIM
When Michelangelo learned of the death of Francesco, who was his apprentice and much more, he took a hammer and smashed the marble he was sculpting.
A short while later, he wrote that such a death:
. had been God’s will, but it caused me grave harm and infinite pain. The saving grace lies in the fact that Francesco, who in life kept me alive, by dying taught me to die without sorrow. I had him for twenty-six years. Now only infinite misery remains. Most of me went with him.
Michelangelo lies buried in Florence, in the church of Santa Croce.
He and his inseparable Francesco used to sit on the steps of the church to enjoy, in the vast plaza below, the duels fought with kicks and blasts of the ball that we now call soccer.
February 19. PERHAPS THIS IS HOW HORACIO QUIROGA WOULD HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT HIS OWN DEATH
Today I died.
In the year 1937 I learned that I had a cancer that was untreatable.
I knew that death, after me always, had caught up with me.
I confronted death, face to face, and I told him: “This war is over.”
I said: “You win.”
I said: “But when is my choice.”
And before death killed me, I killed myself.
February 20. WORLD DAY OF SOCIAL JUSTICE
At the end of the nineteenth century, Juan Pío Acosta lived near Uruguay’s border with Brazil.
In those lonely parts, his work kept him on the road, moving from town to town.
He traveled by stagecoach, along with eight other passengers in first, second and third class.
Juan Pío always bought a third-class ticket, which was the least expensive.
He never understood why there were different prices. Everyone had the same seats, whether they paid more or paid less: jammed in, eating dust, jolted relentlessly.
He never understood why until one bad winter day, when the wagon got stuck in the mud. The coachman ordered:
“First-class, stay where you are!”
“Second-class, get off!”
“And those in third. start pushing!”
February 21. THE WORLD SHRINKS
Today is International Mother Language Day.