Well. . Canelo had entered Chile secretly. Toward the end of the seventies he had been one of the founders of the Red Ax movement, which gradually absorbed groups from the Elenos,1 from Organa,2 from Bandera Roja, from Espartaco and other far left groups. They were all convinced that an unarmed revolution would never be a revolution. They were part of what was known as the “revolutionary pole,” the ones Rafa used to criticize, the ones who wanted to create one, two, three Vietnams. . There aren’t many who want to remember the infighting of those days. Canelo didn’t avoid the issue that first day.
For the brothers and sisters of Red Ax, Allende’s “legal path” had only been the opening act. You said you wanted historical facts, here’s one, the kind people don’t like to hear anymore: Fidel, Ho Chi Minh, they were also ambivalent in the beginning. Shortly after the military coup, Canelo left Chile and headed for Cuba. One of his teachers was the legendary Benigno, who fought in Bolivia until the end at Quebrada del Yuro, where they captured Che. Benigno escaped into Chile, wounded, with a fever of 104 degrees. The bullet had entered his shoulder and lodged near his spinal column; they extracted it in Santiago.
Later, Canelo would fight as one more Cuban soldier under the orders of General Ochoa in Ogaden, Africa. His unit, made up of Ethiopians and Cubans, crossed undetected through the mountains and took up a position behind the Somali troops who were defending the Mardas Pass, in order to attack them in a cunning pincer movement. Jijiga fell within two days, and all the other towns fell quickly one after another like dominos. In a month, Siad Barr, who was receiving support from the Yankees — this was, don’t forget, the middle of the Cold War — ordered his troops to retreat to Somalia. Ethiopia won. The eighteen thousand Cuban soldiers with their six hundred Soviet tanks turned out to be decisive in the war. And Canelo was there. Later he joined the FMLN. He fought for three years in the guerrilla war in El Salvador.
I’m telling you about ancient, epic times, times of war aristocracies that live for death and honor. Nothing that would make any sense to you today, right? Che Guevara was an “international partisan,” a man with a Bolivarian vocation, a knight errant. The stuff of legend. Everywhere you looked in Latin America back then there was another fabulous Amadís of Gaul, a Palmerín, a Tirant lo Blanc or Florismarte, who all wandered the earth in search of adventure with their swords at the ready, to set right every wrong, to succor the needy and destitute, redress iniquity, and amend injustice. But, of course, this time there were also ladies errant, and they did not lag behind the knights in courage or derring-do. We all wanted to recover that happy age to which the ancients gave the name of golden, because they that lived in it knew not the two words “mine” and “thine”! In that blessed age all things were common. . It wasn’t only happening in Latin America, either. Here in Europe, for example, you had the Brigate Rosse and the Rote Armee Fraktion, or Baader-Meinhof Komplex. Back then we lived confidently, auguring and weaving the future. And all the while at our backs, history, tight-fisted, dirty, vulgar history, was preparing to wash right over us like the giant wave of a tsunami.
He had short, light-colored hair, small, alert eyes, lips that were too thin. He wore a tie and a light gray suit. No long, sloppy hair or beard; no pipe or Cuban cigar, no poncho or leather jacket. Nothing that would suggest the combatant who had fought so bravely in the Ogaden desert or on Guazapa hill in El Salvador, where he slept in a dugout. He could have been a lawyer or an insurance agent. He told us about our commander, about his story.
Joel Ulloa was a simple teacher of history and geography at a high school in Valdivia. At that time Che was moving deeper into the jungle in the mountains along the Ñancahuazú River in Bolivia. Joel Ulloa abandoned his routine of blackboards and test correcting. He was disgusted, he said, by the hypocrisy of Chile’s staid, bourgeois democracy. To make the Andes into the Sierra Maestra of the Americas: that was the goal. Canelo showed us a photo: glasses and black hair combed away from his face. Shaved beard, Asiatic eyes, ample nose and mouth. His mission was to lift up the Mapuche people and take back their land. Canelo told us how the Mapuches, who were used to revolutionaries with long hair and a shaggy, bohemian look, were impressed by this schoolteacher who showed such great practical sense when it came to organizing a battle, and later, too, with the work in the fields they occupied by force. They said he had never known lincanquén, fear.
And his triumphs began. At first, there were bank robberies to gather funds. This taciturn people subjected to the huinca, the white man, turned overnight into ferocious aucayes, into rebels. Commander Joel and his Mapuche peasants managed in a couple of years to gain control of almost all the forest ranches and livestock farms in that valley. We must plunder the plunderers. The ministers of that shoddy democracy, as he called it, vacillated between negotiation, turning a deaf ear, and reprimanding them. There were beatings and shootings and some injured Mapuches and police. Sometime later, during Salvador Allende’s presidency, the organization grew stronger and more professional. “The criticisms came from the conventional left then, from inside the house of government, from Allende himself, who looked at us sympathetically but did not agree with our methods.”
“They called us ‘ultras,”’ said Canelo, “they called us extremists, they called us ‘pistol heads”’. . Commander Joel’s answer was: armed conflict is inevitable. His contact in Santiago was Bone. And that was the first time I heard his name, Bone, a nickname he’d been given by the Cubans, I found out later. Sometimes, in the Mapuche nguillatune celebrations, frenetic natives swollen with corn chicha liquor and galvanized by the mournful sound of the trutruca horn, the threatening rhythm of the cultrún drum, devoured their bosses’ Hereford bulls. These things happen in a revolution. Commander Joel’s fame grew quickly.
And then, one September day in the year of the Devil, at daybreak, the military came for him. It was never learned what went wrong with their defense, because the soldiers should have been fired down on at the entrance to the canyon in Panguicui, which means “Lion’s Bridge,” and which was closed off by a barricade of enormous, centuries-old coihue tree trunks. There were a lot of those military bastards. Commander Joel hid out in the old storehouses on the Pucatrihue ranch. There was a shootout among the piles of sawn planks, and some twenty peasants died. When he realized he was lost, Joel jumped out a window and threw himself into the Pillanleufú River. The military gave him up for dead. No one knows how he managed to float down in the Pillanleufú’s current, escape through the mountains, reach Santiago, find Bone, and reorganize the armed resistance.
“Ours is a risky bet,” Canelo explained to us, with his particular blend of confidence and serenity that dispelled all doubt and fear. “Allende’s government didn’t have a majority in Parliament to approve the laws that structured his program. Simple arithmetic. A revolution on paper wasn’t possible. Unless,” he said, “unless it was just an initial phase. That’s what his adversaries quickly figured out, with that ruthless realism they have on the right. ‘It would be extremely stupid and absurdly utopian,’ as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin said, ‘to suppose the transition from capitalism to socialism is possible without coercion and without dictatorship.’ A Franciscan illusion is dead,” he said. “Legal revolution — which President Allende put an end to with his heroic death — leaves us in the vanguard.”