Torn from the World: A Guerrilla's Escape from a Secret Prison in Mexico

by John Gibler

Overview

"The book that most shocked me this year for its literary quality is called Tzompaxtle, although in English it has another title, Torn from the World. The author is John Gibler, a real outlaw."—Diego Enrique Osorno, author of El Cartel de Sinaloa

Andres Tzompaxtle Tecpile was torn from the world. Abducted off the street, blindfolded and beaten, he was brought to a Mexican military facility and "disappeared." Tzompaxtle, a young member of an insurgent guerrilla movement, was subjected to months of interrogation and torture as the military tried to extract information from him. In an effort to buy time to protect his family and comrades, and to keep himself alive, he lead his captors on fruitless journeys to abandoned safe-houses and false rendezvous locations for four months. Finally, faced with imminent execution, he decided to make what he thought was a suicidal attempt at escape; when he miraculously survived, he was able to return underground.

Gleaned from years of clandestine interviews, Tzompaxtle's story offers a rare glimpse into chronic injustice, underground resistance movements, and the practice of forced disappearance and torture in contemporary Mexico.

"At once harrowing and humane, John Gibler's wonderful new book shines a light on the darkest corners of the Mexican justice system. We cannot turn away from what we see there. This is a brave, daring book, equal in every way to the extraordinary life it documents."—Daniel Alarcon, author of The King is Always Above the People

"Once in a long while a brilliant writer happens on a story he was born to tell—a story that in its stark and unremitting horror gives us a glimpse of the world as it is, unvarnished and unredeemed. John Gibler is such a writer and Torn From the World is such a story. A wrenching, astonishing tale, brilliantly told."—Mark Danner, author of The Massacre at El Mozote

"Torn from the World is the product of a thorough investigation and it is written with rage and humility at the same time. This is the work of one of the most important journalists of our time."—Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World

"John Gibler's powerful recounting of the forced disappearance of Andres Tzompaxtle Tecpile unearths the brutal machinery of state-sanctioned torture and terrorism in Mexico today. This book must provoke an outcry."—Sujatha Fernandes, author of Curated Stories

"Not since Rodolfo Walsh's classic Operation Massacre have I read a work of political and literary journalism as inventive and urgent as John Gibler's Torn from the World. With courage, empathy, and clear-sightedness, Gibler tackles questions most journalists won't go near.”—Ben Ehrenreich, author of The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

"The North American journalist John Gibler not only presents here the guerrilla combatant's story, but also contextualized it within the broader, very troubled history of class relations in Guerrero and the contemporary proliferation of human rights abuses in Mexico, from Ayotzinapa to Ciudad."—Jesse Lerner, author of The Shock of Modernity

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872867529
Publisher:	City Lights Books
Publication date:	09/18/2018
Series:	City Lights Open Media
Edition description:	Translatio
Pages:	260
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

John Gibler lives and writes in Mexico. He is the author of Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt, To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War, 20 poemas para ser leídos en una balacera, Tzompaxtle: La fuga de un guerrillero, and I Couldn't Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa. His work on Ayotzinapa has been published in California Sunday Magazine, featured on NPR's All Things Considered, and praised by The New Yorker.

Read an Excerpt

They tear you from the world

It is nine o’clock at night. Two men stop about five meters in front of you. They start to fight. Another man walks up to them. You and your compañero approach them, wary, to pass them. The third man pulls out a pistol and jumps you. You grab the pistol by the barrel and his hand trying to take the gun. The two of you struggle. Your compañero dodges the other two men and runs. You hear a gunshot and then, in an instant, the other two men take you to the ground. The three of them pin you. They speak into a portable two-way radio. They take off your belt and use it to tie your hands behind you. They blindfold you.

All of this happens in a matter of second.

Your eyes: blindfolded. Your hands: bound. You think: now it’s my turn. You ask yourself if you will be able to endure it, if you will be able to resist, if you will die. You think of your compañera and the treasure she holds in her arms. And you say goodbye.

The first beatings and questions come in the vehicle. Who are you? Are you from the EPR? Who were the others? Where are they going now? Where was the next meeting point? Where? They stop and take you out of the vehicle. You think you must be on the outskirts of Chilpancingo. You can hear the sounds of the highway in the distance. You don’t know this yet, but these first minutes are important for them.

They remove your clothes and wrap you in blankets. They put you on the rack and tie you down with cords and strips of cloth, completely immobilizing you. They only leave your toes and your head uncovered so they can connect the electrical wires there and close the circuit. You are completely wet. They bind your head down against the rack with strips of cloth, immobilizing it. The defense instincts of the body are mutilated.

They beat you without rest using their fists and the stocks of their pistols. There are about eight or ten people beating you now. More of them are giving orders, watching, or waiting their turn. You can’t see anyone, or anything. You don’t know when the blows will hit nor where they will hit. They strike you as if materializing from nothing, from the darkness itself. You cannot move. A man stuffs a wet rag into your mouth. Another man shoots water up your nose. They pour water all over your wrapped body. And then they begin with the electric shocks, first to your feet.

This is not some street fight where you can see your opponent, and that has a serious impact. You cannot see them. You do not know where the blows “will rain down,” as they would say. You don’t know where they’ll hit you: on the mouth, the nose, the genitals, or the hands… If you could open your eyes, maybe you wouldn’t even be afraid of being beaten because you’d be looking at your aggressor. Not here: you are reduced to a bulk, an object that can be beaten at their will. This has a psychological impact. For you darkness is the only thing real. This reduces you to something even more broken. There is no more… you can’t defend yourself.

They work with precision and efficiency on your body. They have come prepared. But you haven’t. A few minutes ago, for example, you did not know what it feels like when you feel like your brain is exploding. You did not know that the pain concentrates in the brain. The torture instruments of antiquity really have nothing on these men. They are so precise; they know how to directly reach the brain and burn it.

And the issue is that these first minutes are important for them.

What can you see? Nothing. Is there any light? You don’t know. Sound is all there is: their demented shouts and, in the background, some loud, monotonous music, a hissing that assaults your ears. It’s as if they had torn you from the world and put you in some other place where you lie bound and lacking. You are a vulnerable being without sight, without feet, without hands. You are not the adult they just grabbed, but a person who, just from this change of worlds, had been utterly mutilated. You have no form, especially in this condition in which they have submitted you. From the beginning this is a state of mutilation.

In only a few minutes, your body feels and feels again more pain than many people will feel in a lifetime. And you can’t scream. Your body contracts, your bones contract, and at any moment everything will explode. Pain and fear. How long will this last? Will you endure? Will they kill you? There is no way to know. They take you to a reality that is not the one you know. The risk is immense and it constricts you and it is not only that you may die, but that they can reduce you; they can change you. They remove the gag from your mouth so you can surrender. They tell you: “help yourself!” But, what is this “help?” It is betrayal.

If they can conquer you in the first minutes then they will have an advantage. If you don’t adjust to this world, if you don’t retain your conscience, if you don’t resist it, they can, in a matter of minutes, change you completely. They have their objective; they have experience; they have been schooled and for many years they have done this.

How long of you been here now? Your notion of time no longer applies. The doctor approaches and checks your vital signs. He says you can take some more but they should let you breathe. You can hear a boss criticizing his workers: that they shouldn’t don’t pour water down your mouth and nose at the same time that they connect the cables because that could kill you too quickly. The boss screams: “Break him! Increase the voltage! Break him into pieces!” This is not to make you afraid: this is to destroy you.

They have medical services here, but not for the right to health: there are no rights here, not even the one to die. There are water and electricity. You even feel like life is flowing out of you, but then you return to pain, to the beatings, that is, to your skin and flesh tearing, to the blood spilling from your mouth and nose.

In a place like this, one views life through a different optic. Someone might say: “It is just an issue of taking it, that’s what you’ve got to do.”

No. You don’t know it you’ll make it. That depends on them, they might even kill you on accident. Many people do not come back from this. Thousands have not come back. This is the force of the State. They themselves say so and brag: “This is the face and the true force of the State.” Yes, without a doubt it is.

And again the questions: What is your name? What is your nom de guerre? Where are you from? What military action were you going to carry out? Where? Who is your contact?

You don’t respond. You know that the questions mean pain and death. If you answer, the information will be used to locate your compañeros and your family and torture them, disappear them or kill them. If you do not answer, then they will torture you more and the moment of your disappearance or death will inch closer. You cannot think it over. You cannot calculate or reflect. They ask; you don’t answer by instinct. The blows rain down. Your body contracts and explodes at the same time. Your nose, broken. Where is your safe house? They remove the gag. Your silence. The electric shocks and the pain.

No word can tell this. No sentence, no story, no metaphor expresses this pain. Pain breaks the words, the language. “Intense pain is world-destroying. Intense pain is also language-destroying: as the content of one’s world disintegrates, so the contents of one’s language disintegrates.” The scream remains, though cut down by the wet rag in your mouth; and your throat cracks dry with your futile effort to expel the pain. Your entire naked body is wet and in pain, but thirst begins to rip at you from inside.

There is no part of your body that is not under attack. But this is only beginning. You are still livid. It is not so easy to reduce you. The pain increases at thirty minutes per second. You want with all your being for them to untie you just for a moment, just for a bit. You think: okay, if you’re looking for a fight, you’ve got it, let’s do it, but with a bit more honor. You tell them to let you up for a second. Sure, they say, and they keep at it. The electric shocks. And they beat you along your spine. No. There is no honor here. They do not know what honor is. The doctor says: bend his hands back; punish his genitals.

Now they make you feel the closest signs of death. What it feels like to die. They are showing that to you now. This brings forth a different kind of fear. You think: yes, I’m pretty tough, but I don’t want to die. Do they threaten to kill you? No. They are not threatening you; they are telling you. This is their work. They don’t want to scare you.

Again the questions: What is your name? And you speak. But you remain on guard. You speak to get a respite. You give them a name that is two-times false. And they beat you. And you go on. The respite is infinitesimal and you need and long for another. Questions and answers. Here, with your body tied to the rack. “The question, whatever its content, is an act of wounding; the answer, whatever is content, is a scream.” Are you one of them? Yes, yes I’m one of them. Who is your contact? You don’t answer. They box your ears. Strangle you. They hit your head, your muscles. They tell you they are going to castrate you, that they are going to rape you with an Iguana’s tail. Water and the electric shocks. They take you to the true scene of pain. They make you live the maximum human pain, the height, the threshold. And this threshold is the thread that divides life and death.

Death also seduces you. You fear it and want to avoid it. But there are moments when, in order to not surrender to them and not have to endure any more, you want to give yourself to death. There are moments when the anguish is so terrible that you’d rather die, in fact death becomes the refuge, the hope. The pain is so… so indescribable, so unbearable, that it’s better to die. And death is not your desire, but in this moment death signifies refuge, the sensation of rest. That’s why you look for it, you seek it, not because you really want to die, but because this other reality is worse.

But no. They are not going to kill you yet. That’s why the doctor is here. They want to care for your life so they can better administer your death. They don’t want you to rest: they want you to come apart; they want you to break. You are the experiment. You are the first guerrilla fighter captured in the state in more than twenty years. After the death of Lucio Cabañas in a massive army operation in 1974 and up to the public appearance of the EPR in 1996, you are the first.

When they say that you’re the first, they are being honest and clear with you. They took off your clothes. They tied you to the rack. You are blindfolded. This is your body beneath the electric light you cannot see, here in the middle of the room. They surround you. Some giver orders and others follow them. A doctor studies you and gives advice to the men who administer the electric shocks and beat you. They all act together. This is not an improvised scene and they are not novices. Some of them even brag about their studies abroad as if they were speaking of a graduate degree in engineering: Guatemala, Fort Benning, Panamá. They are proud and, you must admit, they know their work. They are rigorous; they follow through with what they say to you. And at this moment they tell you they are going to make you an invalid, that they are going to break your spine, that they are going to rape you, that they are going to pull everything your hiding out of you and then they will kill you, or perhaps mutilate you and leave you blind.

Dawn approaches. You admitted from the beginning what you are: a guerrilla fighter. But you said that you had only just joined, that you didn’t know the leaders or the safe house locations or the meeting points.

Who can endure so much?

You have to do something to rest for a bit from all this. You have to enter another terrain of combat. And so you some to the “confession, a story told to delay death.” And you scream. You tell them you’ll take them to the room where you live with two other compañeros.

They begin to plan the operation. You think, you hope, that upon witnessing your detention, your compañeros will not have returned to that room.

They help put your clothes on and take you to a car that is then followed by two others. There is no other option. You guide them through the streets of Chilpancingo towards the room. The neighbors are asleep; the streets are deserted. No one sees you.

Your captors go upstairs. No one is in the room. They take the few things they find there, return to the cars, and then take you somewhere. They throw you on the floor and one of them begins to talk to you: “You have to tell us how it was that the organization survived, how it re-organized, where they were, what capacity they have, who they are, what weapons they possess.

“Today we have an opportunity with you here and you should tell us everything we want to know. You are the experiment. We have enough time—and time is on our side—to find out your identity. Legally we are not even going to acknowledge who detained you. No one will investigate. We are experienced; we have done this for many years. You bring us back a bit to the seventies. We’re going to do an update with you.

“I’m just letting you know. There is nothing to hide here. With you we’re going to see if the guerrillas have gotten better in the last twenty-two years. Have you all developed something worthwhile, or are still a bunch of idiots? They are all going to speak: through you they are going to speak. We have the time and we have the means: tear out your fingernails, catration, needles, electric shocks, water torture, beatings, and strangulation. That’s how we’ll begin the game: every two hours for as long as you like. You decide. Here’s the doctor. Starting today it will be us against you. Starting today you will feel the power of the State against you. Against you because we have you. And the only way to save yourself will be to have us diminish one of your sessions a bit with what you give us. Beyond that there will be no negotiation. What do you say?”

“I don’t say anything. I’m a prisoner.”

“Do you recognize yourself as such?”

“Yes, yes I do.”

“You are one of them?”

“Yes, I’m one of them.”

“Why did you get into this?”

“It’s a personal decision.”

And they repeat all that they want from you: military plans, safe house locations, guerrilla cells that you know, who was with you in the park, where were you all going, what is your rank, how do the guerrillas find and transport arms, where do they store arms, who finances the guerrillas, who writes the communiqués, which writer or politician is behind you all, and where is your central command.

Perhaps, without being entirely conscious of it, this interminable list has offended you and you tell them that not even the President of the Republic has that kind of information. That unleashes the fury of the one who spoke to you and those who follow his orders. They kick and beat your entire body and within seconds you are curled on the floor and bleeding. They pick you up and take you again to the rack. They increase the voltage. They take out their anger on your body for a time that is impossible to measure until a voice tells them to stop for a moment. The pain in your bones, the exhaustion, the thirst.

It all repeats: the questions, the half answers, or the evasive or misleading answers, the pain, the destruction of your body and your emotions. Their language is also an instrument designed to break you, to make you surrender. But their questions don’t seduce you. You think: We do not speak the same language, and I don’t mean the grammar, but the origin.

After a session they tie you just that you can neither stand straight up nor sit down. As soon as you slip into sleep they wake you with kicks, punches or by throwing water in your face. They do as they say: the sessions are every two hours. And the noun “session” burns and in its embers lie the verbs break, destroy, fall, lose, and hurt.

They tore you from the world and brought you here naked, bound, and blindfolded to where language crumbles on your tongue. The questions are echoes of the electric shocks; they meld with the cord used to strangle you; they join with the hands used to dislocate your should. When you do not speak, your silence if the instant remaining before your bones shatter. When you speak the words burrow into your thirst; they bite you and scratch against your throat. Yours is a rat-thirst that breaks into your veins and scurries throughout your body.

“Who were the other people with you?”

“They were journalists.”

“We already know that. What we want to know is where were you going to take them for the interview.”

You lie to them and they don’t believe you. All of this that can’t fit into words continues.

The questions. Again and again. Day after day. How to explain the terror of them asking you the same questions for days on end? It destroys you. You feel like you’ve done the most exhausting physical labor. Ten or fifteen people asking you the same questions. This is torture, nothing else. “In the modern technology of pain the question is always a component of pain itself. The question is never there for some pragmatic reason, that is, to elicit the revelation of a piece of information. The interrogation is not something that, once resolved to the torturer’s satisfaction, would signify the end of the other’s subjection to torture (…), the moment of interrogation is constitutive of the infliction of pain.”

They tell you that you are responsible for what they do to you because you won’t tell them what they want to know, for not telling them what you know, for withholding the information they want. Yes, you are withholding everything, but you deny it. You say that you do not have the information they’re after. But they don’t believe you. They destroy you and destroy you again while they tell you it’s your fault. From the very first minutes, during the first days, without being able to fully analyze your situation, inside you, inside the screams at the edges of which something true about you are stands, your origin, your pride, you made the decision to refuse betrayal as an option, the decision to fight. You decide to withhold everything and with your silence declare: this is who I am and this is what I want to be.

They bring you food but you do not touch it both out of hatred for them and out of a desire to step a bit closer to death. You only drink water because the thirst is truly unbearable.

They find the parking lot receipt in your pants and go for the car. You don’t know this yet, but they have already interrogated and threatened the young man who parked your car and gave you the receipt. He said that he didn’t know anything and then went and sought legal protection from a judge. They ask you about the car, a white Volkswagen. You say that you don’t know anything about it. “Then why do you have the parking lot receipt in your pants pocket? You lie, saying that your compañeros had given you the slip of paper and asked you to hold on to it without looking at it. They don’t believe you and the sessions continue every two hours.

If you were to think of your own history of pain, if you were to recall all of the tiredness, the hunger, the thirst, the worst physical exhaustion, the fevers, the nausea, the illnesses, the burns, the strikes, the falls, the cuts and scrapes, the broken or dislocated bones, if you were to imagine that all of those pains already lived were combined and imposed upon your body, you would realize that not even that approaches what you feel now. And now it comes again.

You open your blindfolded eyes and look into the open throat of death. The shocks to your chest and the scream. You know that this throat is about to consume you. They beat your stomach and pour water up your nose. But first you’ll have to pass through something you can only refer to with the word hell. They hit you in the face and blood fills your mouth. The water, the shocks to your genitals and the scream. You want to find a way to escape, to buy time, to be able to think. They apply the shocks to you head: the explosion inside your skull. You see surrender take shape in your mind and it scares you. You feel it inside you like an invading bacteria. But death does not come. The plain of hell extends. There is no respite.

Five days pass like this. They say to you: “Five days have gone by and no one is looking for you. Why?” You lie. You tell them that you are an unknown and they don’t believe you. So one of them says to you: “Look, asshole, you’re already fucked. To put it plainly: we’ve already disappeared you. You are one more that disappears.”

And, well, you feel…

“Now that we’ve seen how you are, from now on you will have two permanent guards, both officials with machine guns in hand. You’ll remain blindfolded and with your hands and feet bound and chained to a wall. There is no way you can escape. We have the advantage and we’re doing this to you because you won’t talk. Or because you lie to us. The only thing you’ll say now will be that you surrender and that we’re the best. This is the price you’ll pay for having dared to challenge the State. It is you against us. You have no chance. Have you decided to fight?

“You’re already done for. The time periods during which we could have taken you to jail have passed. We can’t risk the tarnish to our reputation. And so, from this moment forward you are ours for the time you have left to live. Which will not be much. Nothing can save you, unless you tell us everything we want to know.”

This word: disappeared. They have so many ways of erasing you, “of trying to make you doubt the truth of your own life.” After five days, after every two hours, after only having felt a world of pain with no horizon, it is a word that breaks you, that wounds you inside, right to your identity. It unmakes you.

The human body cannot receive such violence and not scream. And your scream is this: you say you’ll take them to a room in Acapulco where you live with two compañeros. They begin to mobilize in that instant. They tell you to put on your clothes, but you can’t even stand up on your own. They have to help you get dressed. They take you to a vehicle to drive you to Acapulco.

You feel like a coward. The scream that, in the most minimal way, tried to alleviate your pain, now hurts you. You feel ashamed for having told them something true. It is a room in Acapulco and it has been five days since you were abducted. Once the words were said you hope that your compañeros have left the room. They are supposed to do so within forty-eighth hours. You gave them five days. That is a rule: house are meant to be given to the torturers.

But now, standing before the terrain opened by the word disappeared, in this place of pain and shame, you make a decision: you don’t want to kill me. You make me fight. Let’s fight.

You chose this. You knew that there were risks, but the risks did not dominate you. With that pride, in the good sense, you said: no one will stop me. And this isn’t some act of romanticism, you know. I want this; I’m going to do it; I will achieve it.

What was this? You weren’t after blood, nor were you necessarily looking for war. It was struggle—luchar—a worn verb now trivial in many ways, essential in others. For you it was and remains a verb of origin, of survival, and as such, indispensable.

You were born in one of the poorest regions in the country. One supposes that these were the places where our ancestors sought refuge after the defeat of August 13, 1521, in the war of Tenochtitlan. Your name contains your history: Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile. In other towns people asked you: “Why do you have that name, that surname?” And your response was instinctive: “Well, yes, I have this name because I was not conquered. I have not been colonized and thus I have my language, my name, I retain my surname, my tradition.”

You were born on November 10, 1966 in Astacinga, Veracruz, one of eight brothers and sisters living in one-room wooden house that your parents built by hand. You worked from early childhood and you enjoyed labor, your hands in the earth, taking care of the livestock. It was neither punishment nor exploitation. Your family ate what it produced. Work was always a factor. The first activities you did were what your body would allow, like bringing water from the river or gathering firewood. The first things you have are your hands. You can’t wield work tools like the machete yet. If you see the adults working, your father, your mother, for the same reasons you’ll have to do so as well. First as play, later as a matter of education. And so, you would say, for us the earliest education is this work, from as soon as you can walk. You with your smallest pail going for water. Work is not suffering. Just like everyone eats, everyone has things to do.

During your early childhood you’ve never seen this thing they call modernity. There are no highways, no electricity, nothing like that. No kindergarten. Once you were bigger, about seven or eight, you’d have to walk for an hour to reach the nearest school, or the nearest thing they call a school. You’ll have to walk to do anything. You were raised walking and running barefoot. Your first huaraches would have come around the age of ten. Yes, certain material things were lacking, certain technologies, or medicine. You all did not know what a check-up, a doctor, a pill, or anti-parasite medications were. But no one went hungry in your house. This love of work, this respect for things, for corn, for beans, it forges your values. What you have to do is have principles. All that you should achieve will be the fruit of your efforts, not from seeing where you’ll be given things, where to seek gifts, where to go asking. All this starts making you responsible, proud.

But at school the teachers would tell you: you must learn to speak Spanish, that is the first step in bettering yourself, in getting ahead. Bettering oneself? What is wrong with us like we are? What is wrong with Náhuatl? Before going to the school you had always spoken your native language, you’d never even heard Spanish.

But you were just a child. And that’s how you went to the sports tournament in San Juan Texhuacan. You were thirteen years old when you saw the children crying. Not one, but several. You and your compañeros approached them and asked them: why are you crying? Did you all lose, or what happened? The children from Tehuipango told you how just the day before their families had been massacred. That was the first shock. At first you don’t understand. Why would they kill so many people? Then, this was close to your town. The question that assaults you is: what is to be done? In other words: we must avenge them. How? I don’t know. But the idea is there. They must be avenged. What they did to them was unjust. It is not okay.

You still did not know anything about October 2, 1968, or June 10, 1971 in Mexico City. You didn’t know anything about what was happening in Guatemala, El Salvador, or Nicaragua. How could you have known if one didn’t have even the slightest idea where those places were located. What you had heard a bit about were the histories and myths about the Guerrero teachers Genaro Vázquez and Lucio Cabañas. That was something that did have an impact. One way or another, one learns of the existence of such groups. And at thirteen years old, upon hearing of that massacre, you first feel the call to seek out Lucio the teacher. You had heard about him for the first time when you were six or seven years old: a government official had taken a photograph of Lucio Cabañas to your town with the ambition of being able to arrest him were he to make an appearance there. But what the mayor did was instead of saying we need to find him, he took the photograph, put it in a frame and hung it behind his little desk.

Young, at the age of eighteen, you made you decision, you said: I want this. And you didn’t base your decision in books or films, in the histories of Che or Ho Chi Minh, in the images of the piled bodies in Tlatelolco, or in the arguments of long-dead Germans or Russians. From the age of thirteen you’d had the idea of looking for Lucio Cabañas, someone with whom you could join to avenge the crimes that had been committed. Lucio was the refuge that you could seek out without knowing where Guerrero is.

Why struggle? Why risk one’s life in the armed struggle? This question does not look out upon the same horizon when asked in Spanish in Mexico City, Monterrey, Guadalajara, or Acapulco as when asked in Náhuatl in the Zongolica Sierra or in Ñu savi in the Costa Chica. It is never the same question twice. It is always a social question; it always has social veins inside its solitude. Because it is a question with a great deal of solitude in it. It is an intimate question, profoundly intimate. And it is not the same question in 1968, 1988, 1996, or 2014. But the time differences between when one asks the question do not cut the roots of time inside the question. It shares histories even inside its solitude.

“Why struggle?” The question will never have a definitive answer, a pre-established answer, or a correct answer. The question must be faced afresh and in its full dimension every time it is articulated. And whomsoever confronts the question may have to do so many times over the course of life. The question will always be intimate and social at the same time. This double, or multiple nature of the question invites conversation, which is another way of joining the solitary and the social, assuming that the one who opens the question why knows how to listen.

And so, why? It is difficult to explain, of course, but you would say that we were never going to accept submission just because. Our idea has not been colonized. We’re as decolonized as we’ve always been. We have memory. So it was not some political influence, but rather this tradition of resisting subjection, of continuing to rebel. It becomes a characteristic, a tradition, and that is something that perhaps many people do not understand. They, far from thinking of all this, ask: “Where is the manual you learned from?” “Which school did you go to?” But there are no manuals, no schools, there is only life, nothing more.

Life. Tradition. Omeyocan, toltecáyotl, tlachinollan. Our duality, our philosophy, our blood. We are aware, you would say, of our history. Others came before us. Today we are here but tomorrow there will be others. We want to live well. But, what does live well mean to us? To live well means to live in harmony with nature. To live well means not contaminating our rivers and oceans, not deforesting. It means eating well and without so many chemicals. To produce our food. Exchange our food. We don’t want palaces and buildings, nor to fill everything with concrete and contaminants. It does not mean to live by looting. We don’t want to live accumulating and amassing. We don’t want to exploit others. We don’t want to destroy the land because it is our life. We don’t want to damage it more than what they have already done. We want to live well; we want to conserve the land because part of the life of that land is us. Our thought is different; it is not the same. In this plan of saving many things, the species itself is saved. And even despite everything they do, they themselves are saved; their lives are safe. That’s why we are doing this. For all these values: for this dignity, for this decency, for this feeling. More than thought, it is feeling. More than ideology, it is humanism.

As a young Nahua man, 18-years-old, from the Zongolica Sierra, child of many sons and daughters of the survivors of the war of Tenochtitlan, you found the survivors of the war against Lucio Cabañas and the Party of the Poor in the mountainsides and you went with them and joined the guerrillas. At first they were enthusiastic, even impulsive times. You believe in this; it is what you want; it is your life; you make it your life, not in some fanatical act, but in an act of conscience from which you continue to learn by completing tasks, forging yourself.

You would say that later one realizes the stigma that the State invents to condemn this social struggle. Because that is what we are, we are fighters for justice, nothing else. We’re not fighting against hunger anymore, but against the war of extermination, the war of invasion, the war disguised in many forms: as education, as politics, as culture, as repression. So one supposes that if all these characteristics of extreme poverty, of malnutrition, of no standing before the law, of no schools exist, well, then one supposes that the ones who haven’t died yet have survived in order to live through an early death. So if you struggle and become something, it is twice the shock. First, because you didn’t die, and that is already a problem. But, well, you should be there without any capacity for thought. That’s another problem—for them—that we don’t die and then we think. They say: “How is it possible that they haven’t died but they still haven’t lost the capacity for thought?” But, in addition to thinking, one decides to do something, one decides to fight.

In a context such as yours, to struggle is to be, to live.

Let’s recall: the lands known now as the Americas were violently invaded. The invaders declared themselves conquerors and built the institutions necessary to administer the continuation and wellbeing of their invasion. You would say: The history of our country is a history of plunder. The fundamental and constitutive act of those institutions was to decree that all the original human inhabitants of these lands and later the human inhabitants of other lands shipped across the ocean to these lands were property, slaves, animals. The logic of that decree was articulated through the creation of racial categories: “racism is the father of race, not the son.” Those institutions have been many times modified, but they have never been taken down. The simultaneous ontological and corporeal violence of the invasion, racism, and slavery economic is rooted in the entrails of the institutions that today we call State, law, economy. They continue to massacre the massacred shielding themselves in something they call the law. State power may be exercised through a court, a legislature, the police, the army; it is always a power that holds invasion and slavery inside as a part of its very construction. Just as one’s bones hold their parents DNA in the cell’s architecture, our political institutions contain the violence of genocide and slavery in the architecture of their power.

Up to our present day, millions of human beings navigate daily through societies and institutions that deny their humanity, that deny their names, their languages, their lands, their histories, their visions of the world, their longings, their lives. You would say: We are nothinged. We are poverty statistics, squalor statistics. We are not citizens, we are not good consumers. To struggle also means not accepting that. In addition to thinking, one decides to do something, one decides to fight.

And this is what you were doing, a young Nahua guerrilla fighter carrying out the task of leading a group of well-known journalists to the mountains for an interview with the state commanders of the EPR. You commanders told you to go unarmed so that the journalists would not see you with weapons, publish that and give government officials a pretext for saying: “Look how violent they are.” This was a strange logic considering how those same commanders planned the attacks of two months before.

But you and your compañero, both combatants, obeyed your orders. The journalists had spent two days going from one place to another. Acapulco, Tierra Colorada, Chilpancingo. They had not seen either of you before and would not have been able to recognize you in public. In each place someone approached them and gave them a piece of paper with a map and direction for the next meeting place. The rules of clandestinity were rigorous, tedious, and you all did not trust the reporters. Sometimes distrust can lead to excess: by being so careful you end up not being careful.

The journalists did not pass through Tierra Colorada on their way back from Acapulco. You had been waiting there, hidden, to make sure no one was following the reporters. You did not suspend the interview when the reporters did not follow this security protocol. You and your compañero went to Chilpancingo and parked your car there. You put the parking lot receipt in your pants pocket and took a taxi to Zumpango del Río, some twenty kilometers from Chilpancingo.

You saw the journalists walking in circles, confused, in the plaza. They had been told to look for “a man in a baseball cap near the kiosk.” That man would pass close to the journalists and they would then follow a few meters behind him. The problem was that on that October 25, there were a number of men with baseball caps near the kiosk. While the journalists looked for the contact—who walked right by them several times—you saw three men sitting on the fence in a corner of the plaza. They seemed odd to you, but you didn’t say anything.

At last the journalists recognized their contacts and followed behind them. You and your compañero were in the rearguard position, following behind the journalists. You realized that someone was following you, one of the three men you saw sitting on the fence. You stopped and pointed him out to your compañero. You even asked: “Is he one of ours?” “I don’t know,” your compañero answered, “let’s let him catch up to us.”

The man passed you both; he even said hello. Then the other two men passed you both. You two began to walk again. A bit further along, the fight started, the third man took out his pistol, you struggled with him, your compañero took off running, and then all three men took you down. The other guerrillas and the journalists all escaped. Only you remain behind with the three men. Their trucks arrived shortly thereafter.

They take you to Acapulco handcuffed, lying on the floor of a vehicle you recognize as a van or a Suburban. Upon arriving they sit you up in the seat, with a pistol to your head. You show them the room. A number of them get out and take up positions around the different exits of the apartment building. They keep you inside the vehicle, at gunpoint. You listen to the operation over the radio they use to communicate. They ask you what name you use with the men who live in this room. You tell them a false name. After a bit of time goes by they all come back, furious. The room was empty. They spoke to the owner of the building who told them that the renters in that room had moved out that very day, at around one in the afternoon; that is, just a few hours ago.

If you had told them about the room yesterday, or even earlier this morning, two of your compañeros would now be torn from the world.

They come back enraged and begin to beat you there in the vehicle. They tell you they’re going to take you to a “branch office” they have here on the outskirts of Acapulco to reinitiate your sessions.

They tell you: “You gave us the room knowing that they had already left it.” They tie you to the rack and begin again with this that breaks language: electric shocks using cables connected to a car, beatings, strangulation, suffocation, blows to your spine. You want to die. One of them squirts water up your nose and you spit it back at him, to provoke him. You try not to scream, hoping thus to faint, to take a step towards death. You’re decided. Soon you feel something so, so comfortable, a lovely sound. You begin to rest. You see a colorful field and then feel a punch to your face and hear a voice that screams: “Wake up motherfucker! We’re torturing you! Throw water on him. He’s dying, for fuck’s sake. We don’t want him to die. Let him rest.”

They take you off the rack. Your legs can’t hold you and you fall to the floor. They tell you to put on your clothes. You can’t. They stand you up, dress you, handcuff you, bind you with a heavy chain and throw you in a corner. For the first time in five days they let you sleep.

You wake to pain. You feel like you are dying, like you cannot move. Two hours go by and your body stays the same.

They begin again. Now they go after you with a single objective: they want you to physically describe the men who lived in the room. They are focused. They only repeat that question. The electric shocks, the blows to your spine, to your head. The pain. And you give. Again with the shame eating at your from inside and pain as the only and implacable reality: you give. But not entirely. You give, but without completely surrendering, without relinquishing your decision to fight: once again you deliver a story to hold back death. So you mix real features—assuming that they would already have some physical description from having asked the owner of the apartment building and the neighbors—with false features. You make up a scar for one of them, and a necklace for the other.

After that they bring you a complete meal three times a day with meat, beans, tortillas, orange juice, bread and water. You don’t trust them and so you eat the minimum: the bread and the tortillas. They insult you and threaten you. They continue with the sessions.

Two weeks after your disappearance they ask you for the first time: “Who is commander Rafael?” From that question a certain relief emerges: your compañeros must be demanding your presentation. But you, by instinct, by brute reflex, you tell them that you don’t know who that is.

“You are commander Rafael.”

And, yes, you are. That is your alias, even though you do not have that rank, but you respond: That’s not me.

“Well then, why are they calling you that?”

“I guess they have to invent a name. It’s logical. I haven’t gone back, haven’t appeared. That’s not my name. If the description of the events, the place, and al that coincide, then yes, it’s me, but that name is something they’re throwing out. That’s not me.

You know very well that they don’t believe you. You know that your response is futile, and that it will bring you suffering, and still you do it on purpose. They also lie. They tell you that the EPR communiqué calls you a commander. You don’t believe that. Your compañeros would not give you that rank, knowing that it would bring you harm. The communiqués always identify you as a “combatant,” but the authors of your suffering say something different. They say that you are a “commander” and you deny it—in this case truthfully—you deny the rank.

One of them says: “We’re going to work you over more now because you were deceiving us. And you’ve got a rank, here it is. Look, tell me, how many days have you been here? You’ve been here many days now. What is the difference between you, a nobody, you yourself say you’re a nobody, and a commander? There’s no difference. They’re the same.”

You’re able to say, “No,” and he cuts you off saying: “For us that’s what you are. That is the problem. And that’s what we’re going to call you from now on.”

You think: well, if only others would honor me and not these idiots.

For the enemy, no matter what you do, even if you are just a sympathizer, you are a guerrilla. In fact they can even blow you out of proportion and say, “you are the biggest badass of all,” or, “you are the best.” For them there is only one level: they’re all the same. You can’t just put on a stupid face and hope they say: “Ah, this one doesn’t know much, let’s take it a little bit easier on him.”

Over these past few days they have kept looking for the compañeros from the room in Acapulco. The building owner told them that the renters left in a moving van. They went to all the small moving companies in the neighborhood until they found the driver who had taken them. They made the driver take them to the building to which the compañeros had moved. They set up a surveillance operation, but they didn’t know which apartment the compañeros had moved to: the driver had not gone inside the building and didn’t see which apartment they had taken.

They take you out in the pre-dawn hours. You go down the twenty-three stairs and they take you to a steep street. They put you in a truck with tinted windows and take you to a street in a working-class neighborhood. They take off your blindfold. At first you can’t see well at all and you tell them so. Don’t worry, they say, your eyes will adjust. And indeed, little by little, your vision improves. Four of them stay in the truck with you. They also have people in on the street corners and beside all the building exits. They point out a large black doorway and tell you to watch carefully all of the people who come out through that doorway. One of the men in charge, one who has administered your pain for some two weeks, tells you not to let him down. He tells you that as soon as they grab the others they are going to let you go because “you’ve already suffered a lot.” And he pats you a few times on the back.

Dawn is breaking but your eyes have yet to grow accustom to the light. You have difficulty seeing into the distance. You see someone exit the black doorway and walk toward the corner and you think it might be the compa you know, but you can’t see him well. You don’t say anything. Two hours later the same man returns and enters the building. After just a bit a man exits, running, with a black briefcase in hand. You don’t recognize him; you don’t say anything; and they don’t move. The man with the blackbrief case takes the first cab that passes by and leaves. You think that it might have been someone from the organization, or someone visiting the people you know who detected the oprtation and took off running. You really don’t know who he was.

Around noon you see your compañero—the same man you thought you had recognized in the early morning—as he exits the building again. He is wearing shorts, a Selena t-shirt and the tennis shoes that you had given him a few weeks before. The compa is really walking by about a meter away and the guy is as calm as can be.

“Some guy’s leaving.”

“I can’t see,” you say and you lean toward the window seeing quite clearly, but you repeat: “I don’t know, I can’t see well.”

He comes back, but then almost immediately leaves again.

“Look, he’s leaving again.”

And he is leaving again. When he walks by again you think: this is the second time he’s passed by, they are baiting me with him. They already have him, they’re just making him walk by on purpose to see if I’m really collaborating or just playing the fool. Well, if that’s the case, so be it. I’m never going to point him out. If they’ve already got him, then they’ve got him, but not because of me.

He walks to the corner and stops. He crosses to the other corner and stops again. You look off in another direction. Fear rises up and surges inside you. In your peripheral vision you see the compañero take off running and they don’t do anything, waiting for the order from the man sitting next to you in the truck. They don’t pay the compa any mind and he leaves.

Minutes later they give the order to return. You don’t know if they’ve become tired or if they realized that the compañeros have already left. They go back to the base. They take you up the twenty-three stairs. One of them says to you: “Well, that would have saved you. We had them in our hands, but you didn’t want it. You let them leave. You’ve let everyone escape from the places you’ve taken us.”

You think: obviously, asshole, that’s the point. And then, again the beatings, the electric shocks, the suffocation, the threshold. But now the parameters of the combat have been established. Now the laboratory of pain is the given, the air you breathe. The fight will be other. The fight will not involve wires or fists. You will fight with truth and lies and their infinite possible combinations. This is the only recourse you find.

You have been reduced to nothing, but inside there is pride, arrogance. The reality of your body no longer obeys you, but this idea of the fight… You think: I’m now a part of this world, this is my world, this fucking hell, and it is up to me how it will all finish. But if you get clumsy even for thirty seconds, I’m gone, I’ll surprise you, I’ll take you. I will choose my end. How and when.

You decide this. It has nothing to do with hope. Hope can be a fantasy, a lie, seductive but leading ultimately to its opposite. It is better to daily prepare for the worst. Here dignity rejects hope. You seek refuge in the darkness behind your blindfold where you will manipulate them, where you will beat them. It becomes an obsession: escape. Not to wait for them to free you. Not to wait for anything from them. This is up to you. Escape.

And then it is the hour of the rack, the hour of the questions, when they repeat: you must realize that the only thing you have is the time left before you die.

And then faced with the pain you think: fuck, man, this is reality, and it is theirs. Your body is the domain over which they try to exhibit their strength, their control. And yes, “the physical evidence goes against you, you’re so weak, so sick and so tormented you think, if you can think… I am these stinking wounds; I am this festering sore. That is what you have to fight. And it’s goddamn difficult; because wherever they feel like it, they replenish the physical evidence that goes against you.” But alright, you think, I’ll take refuge in what I’m imagining.

And now it begins. You invent meetings that you had scheduled where some of your compañeros—assuming they had not heard of your disappearance—might show up. Neither the meetings nor the people exist. They plan their operations, gathering their guns, spreading out in the streets, stationed in their different cars. They wait. And you inside the truck with a gun to your head, but with your eyes making contact with the light and without electricity coursing through your body. On the one hand you half wait, you hold on to a fantasy that someone passing by randomly on the street could recognize you through the tinted windows and tell your compañeros, who could then denounce your being held incommunicado and use the media to put pressure on the government to present you. A fantasy. But on the other hand, it refreshes you to see them invest their resources and move all over the city pursuing ghosts you create for them while at the same time diminishing the pain a little. Such are your small victories. Even though your return, always without prisoners, they take out their frustration on your body, your being. And like the water drops falling on the bound prisoner’s face: the questions. The quantity of things they repeat. That they could say to you a hundred times, for example, “Tell me your name?” And it’s not a matter of hours, but days, and weeks, and months.

Until one day, some two months after your capture they come in triumphant to the room where you are handcuffed, tied and blindfolded.

“At last, asshole: now you’re really fucked.”

You think: what do you mean “now,” it has been quite a while…

“Your lies are over, asshole. You’re done. Because now… now we know who you are. And we have something here that will interest you,” he pauses and then continues, “we’ve got your wife and also your kids.”

The impact is so overwhelming that really no… You tremble and feel like, yes, now you are truly fucked. You think: how did they find out about them? How could they have found out? What happened? But your immediate reaction is to deny everything: “No, I don’t have a wife and kids.”

“Are you going to tell us the truth, yes or no?”

“Well, what? I don’t know.”

“Look, I went to a human rights organization and spoke with a woman who is your wife. She’s not in trouble, she’s not mixed up in this. We know that. But since you haven’t been home, she’s looking for you and asking for help there with human rights. She wants to find you. I spoke with her and she told me she’s looking for you.

You think: Yes, they could do something like that, but she wouldn’t. What would have led her to do that? Who might have suggested it to her? I don’t know. But knowing how murderous these people are, they wouldn’t wait one second to bring her here in front of me. I don’t think they have her. No, they don’t have her. Perhaps something is happening. They know something, but they don’t know everything. If they did know, they’d have my wife and kids right here, right now, and they’d torture me together with them. There is no doubt about that. If I admit I have a wife and children, I could harm them.

Everything is a fight, war. You insist that you are not married and do not have children.

“So, you’re saying I’m a liar?”

“No, I’m not saying you’re lying, but I can’t accept something that doesn’t exist.”

“Ok. Then, tell me, why is this woman saying you’re her husband?”

“Well, let’s think of the possibilities.”

“Ok. Tell me.”

“One possibility is that the organization is looking for me. They haven’t found me. Let’s say that a woman in the struggle or some volunteer pretends to be my wife to see if that way I get presented. It could be that.”

“Sure, it could be something like that. But, what are you if you’re not a man?”

“No. I’m a man, but I’m not married.”

“Well, just in case, so there isn’t any doubt about whether or not you are her husband, I’m going to bring her here. We’re going to bring her and see if she recognizes you.”

“Ok. Sure.”

But she wouldn’t do that. And if she did it was stupid. And if someone advised her to do it, then they were stupid. Imagine seeing your child tortured. If it feels awful when they do it to someone else, with your child… No, no, I can’t imagine it.

You think: They don’t have her. The organization must have made something public, but they don’t have her. Because, honestly, if they had her, they wouldn’t waste a moment. They’ll use everything they can.

But the impact of the moment when they told you they had your family wrecked you. You think: and to top it all off, I’m alive.

Someone comes to tell you that you have suffered a lot. That he even thinks the government is behaving poorly, that he’s thinking of looking for a contact with the EPR so he can help them. He says that he is studying law and this is just a day job in the meantime. He offers to take any note or message you write to someone in the organization or your family, so that they’ll know you’re still alive.

Another tells you that they’ll be taking you somewhere else. He admits that they have tortured you, “but with moderation.” He says that it is his job, his obligation. He’s worried about you. He says: “I’ve been your buddy and haven’t mistreated you too much, but the ones who will substitute me, they are some true killers.” You listened to him curled on the floor, handcuffed, tied, blindfolded, wearing the same clothes they abducted you in and accompanied by a choir of incessant pains all over your body, all over your being. He says: “If you go before them you’ll realize that what we did to you amounted to gentle caresses. But if what I’ve just told you matters to you, you can tell me what you’ve been hiding. If you collaborate with me I’ll take you where no one can touch you.”

You thank him for his kind offer and then tell him: “Unfortunately, I’m not hiding anything.” But inside you, his proposal and his calm tone of voice, as insidious as it may be, awoke in you the longing for someone to defend you, to help you. Just a longing that signals what is not there, precisely that which is furthest away from you. No, you are not saved. You are his enemy and about this there is no uncertainty. They can use you for a bit, wring you out, but you’ll never matter to them unless you become one of them. That’s why you’d have to prove your conversion with acts and not just proclaim it in words. That is, only if you started to lead them to people.

And thus, they destroy you.

You think: for us there is no honor in that. That is something for cowards. That is not for me. Maybe it’s not so bad crawling on all fours. But no. That’s not in my language. That is not within the conditions that I can accept. I have a very different concept of life, of how to be, and they aren’t going to change that just because they want to, because they try to impose a change on me. That would make me a puppet, an object to be controlled, a domesticated individual to be programmed. They could say, say this, and I’d say it; do this, and I’d do it. And thus, what would such an individual be made of if not to be one of them, without identity, without conscience, without dignity. Such an individual, even when they do not die, would have just received their death, paradoxically, even though they say their alive. That is the difference. Yes I want to live. But not like that. I love life, profoundly, but not at that price.

They bring other prisoners and torture them in front of you, or in the next room. This frightens you and rips at you in a different way, even though you’ve been through the same. It feels even worse when they do it to someone else because you don’t hear yourself. But the act of listening to the other… and then they do it to you… That is an effective method, it scares you.

Maybe they don’t even know what to do with you. They give you blank pieces of paper and tell you to write your history with the guerrillas, to name the opposition politicians and intellectuals behind the EPR, to confess which military operations you participated in, and to write that you regret it all. They say that they are going to film you and play the recording on television and the radio. We’re going to help you, they say.

“If you already have it written, you can make it public,” you tell one of them.

“No. No, you have to write it and appear in the video.”

“I can’t. That doesn’t suit me; that’s not me. You make a mistake in choosing me. That’s not who I am.”

“Then you’ll be fucked.”

“Well, here I am. I’ve been here for a long time now. That’s nothing new.”

But it is part of the fight. Afterward you tell him yes, you’ll write, and you write about events that already appeared in the news. But you write precisely about the events in which you did not participate. It is all part of the fight: they tear up the sheets of paper, they give you new ones and tell you to do it again.

They come for you one day. They untie you, lead you out of the room, and take you to a large vehicle, a van or Suburban. They do not speak to you. After a bit the vehicle starts to travel at high speed. You’re on a highway. Are they taking you on another operation? Are they taking you somewhere to kill you? They exit the highway and come to a stop. They don’t take you out of the vehicle. You do not know where you are. Time moves in slow motion in the darkness of the blindfold. They get back in, start the vehicle and get back on the highway. After a while they repeat the same thing. This time you hear a large gate opening, but they do not drive through the gate. They get back in and start off again, driving for about two hours. They stop again, at a tollbooth it seems. You can hear the constant noise of car engines. You tell them you need to go to the bathroom. They neither answer you nor take you to a bathroom. They keep driving and after a while you can hear city sounds. They stop a lot and you think it must be for traffic lights. Could they be taking you to some jail? You’ve gone through the southern part of Mexico City, but perhaps they are going to North Jail. But no. They leave the city. You think: Almoloya? Well, even that would be an improvement.

Then they come to a cold place. They stop and one of them gets out and speaks to someone. You hear a large gate opening, the vehicle drives through it and seems to go around in circles a few times, going over speed bumps before stopping. They take you out of the car and lead you about twenty meters. You hear the sound of water in a canal. They open a door and put you in an extremely cold room where you can hear the sound of an air conditioning unit. They sit you down and tie your handcuffs to a metal structure. You think you might be in Almoloya. But that thought does not last ling. The door opens and an older man—gauging by the sound of his voice—come inside.

He tells you: “We brought you here to kill you.” But he offers to save you if you tell him what you’re hiding. He tells you that he’s been doing this for more than twenty years, that he fought against Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez and now you’re “one more.” He says that he respected Lucio Cabañas because Cabañas showed his face, but the EPR doesn’t, doesn’t show its face.

“You’re in our hands now, so you’ll start to tell us everything.”

“Well, I’ve already said everything.”

“Oh, come on. I can save you; I can help you.”

And you think: if they presented me today, even if they freed me, it would be humiliating. Why am I here? Why so many months? What have I missed? Surely another in my shoes would have done things better. Maybe even escaped already. Me… since the moment of my abduction they’ve won every battle. They’ve had every advantage. I haven’t talked, but they have won. What I need to do now is something that hurts them. But, how? What do I have? I don’t have shit. I have nothing, no advantage.

You start listening to everything. The different sounds of animals: roosters, burros, dogs. You are outside of any city limits. You hear explosions sometimes in the afternoons, perhaps dynamite or something like that. You think there may be a gravel mine nearby. Sometimes you can hear the shouts of children playing: could there be some kind of apartment building near? But above all you listen to them. The ones who sleep in the room next to yours, the ones you guard you day and night. One of them snores. Another always flips through the television channels. Another leaves the television on when, it seems, he has fallen asleep. Another screams at you anytime you make a sound. Another who either doesn’t realize it when you make sounds, or doesn’t say anything.

When you are alone in the room you lift up the blindfold just a little bit with your finger. You don’t know if there is a video camera in the room, so you do it little by little. You let in just a bit of light and start to see the room in pieces: there is one small window and another window with Persian glass panes. You begin to toy with the handcuffs, all the time. Night and day. Here they have you handcuffed one hand to a metal grid. You become obsessed with being able to pull your hand out of the handcuffs. Pulling and twisting against the handcuffs becomes the physical reflex corresponding to the word that haunts you now: escape, escape, escape; that word.

They’ve isolated you here. The sessions are no longer every two hours, but sporadic. You go days without speaking. You exercise your jaw, but even so when they interrogate you your mouth feels clumsy and painful. You exercise your body by contracting and releasing your muscles, one by one. You exercise by pushing against the wall with the fantasy that one day it will fall down, but that is just a fantasy. But when they see you, you exaggerate your physical degradation. They give you water and you grab the bottle with trembling hands. They take you blindfolded to the bathroom and you bump into the walls on purpose and they berate you for not learning how to walk. They speak to you and you pretend to be asleep until they hit you. Now they only give you bread and water, even though they leave plates of food nearby, perhaps to see if you try to reach the food, or just to make you suffer with the smells of cooked meals.

You fight with the handcuffs until one night you’re able to pull your hand out. You stand up. You approach the window and in that instant a car pulls up. You throw yourself back on the floor and stick your hand back through the handcuffs. It is hard to get your hand back through. One of them comes in and asks you what you’re doing. You pretend to be asleep. He jerks the chain of your handcuffs, walks around the room and then leaves.

One night you are listening to the seven o’clock news with Lolita Ayala. They are talking about the case of General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, Mexico’s first “drug czar” who was accused of and sentenced for drug trafficking. Then they announce that, after “exhaustive investigations” the police found an EPR safe house in Acapulco. A strange chill hits your bones. Ayala says that the police did not arrest any members of the EPR but confiscated military uniforms, boots, “subversive instruction films” and other things. And you think: that is the house for which I was responsible. Moreover, the house where you lived with your wife and small children. The chill clenches down on your bones. That house, you think, was the symbol of my life, I made it into the symbol of my life. I traded that house for my life. Because if I had given them that house, then I think they would have presented me; that would have been a serious blow against us, against the EPR. They would have presented me before the media if I had given them that house. But I wouldn’t have done it and I didn’t do it. And so, what was all this time, all this suffering for if they left the goddamned house with everything in it? It is only a matter of hours before I’m subjected, again, to all the interrogation.

With the chill comes your anger against your own compañeros. What happened? Why didn’t they clear out the house? Why didn’t they remove everything? How did the police find the house?

And you think: The police didn’t find it. I didn’t give them any indication of that house. The only possibility is that the compañeros did abandon the house. The went and then left it. I had three months of rent paid in advance. The owner must have gone to ask for the rent for the fourth month. After the three months had passed, she must have gone inside and seen everything that was there. And then the most logical thing is that she’d call the police. She has witnesses who can testify that she rented the house to others. The owner, it was her; she turned in the house. The police didn’t find it.

The next day they come and take the blindfold off your eyes. They are not wearing masks.

“Do you have anything to tell me?”

“Um, okay. Yes, I’ll tell you something.”

“What?”

“Well, the house that they just found in Acapulco, I did know about that house. I didn’t want to give it to you because I thought it would be empty. As you know, when someone is taken prisoner, the least the compañeros can do is take everything out of the house. I didn’t turn it over because I thought if you all were to find it empty, you’d think I was mocking you. And, well, that wouldn’t bode well for me. If I’d known that they weren’t going to clear it out, I would have turned it over, and maybe that would have saved me. But, well, it’s too late now.

“How do you know that we have the house?”

“Well, you do have it.”

“Let’s suppose we have it. What was in that house?”

You tell them that the house had uniforms, a television set, a video camera, a typewriter, boots, and two 9mm pistols.

“Who used the house?”

“I don’t know. They had protocols so that I wouldn’t see them.”

“And why didn’t you ever take a look?”

“Because it was against the rules, no? I didn’t have any reason to break the rules.”

“You obey the rules?”

“Fuck. Okay, well, like you’ve just said: we didn’t even get that right. I know that there is no… but, I want you all to know that… maybe that was what I was hiding. And it’s okay; I know I’m done.”

“Whom did you live with there?”

“Well, I lived with the young woman who pretended to be my wife, but she wasn’t. That was just a cover.”

“And this photo?”

He shows you photographs of your family. How was this damn photo there?!

“It’s your wife.”

“Yes, it’s my wife.”

“Why didn’t you confess this before?”

“Because it’s not her fault, she was just accompanying me.”

“Where can we find her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think she’s still with them?”

“I doubt it. The most likely thing is that she got frightened and went to look for work in another city.”

“And do you know why I took off your blindfold? Do you know why I’m not wearing a mask?”

“I don’t know, but I can guess…”

“What?”

“Well, it’s the end.”

“Yes, it is the end. I mean, all the time you had us running around like fools, all that time is over. This is the consequence.”

“No worries.”

“Really?”

“No, no problem.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re on different sides and usually when it comes to the end one doesn’t get the chance to talk about it. This is one of those chances, or at least that’s how I see it.”

He even gives you his hand to shake.

They flood your room and the chill hits your bones. They come back the next day and tell you that they have your wife. The fear hits your bones. You are blindfolded again. You hear the sound of high-heeled shoes. You hear someone walk into the room, perhaps a woman for this person wears high-heels and walks well in them. You hear them lead her into the room and then back out. Is it your compañera? No, it’s not her. And you think: it is the owner of the house. They must have brought her here from Acapulco to confirm whether or not you are the person who rented her house. She would have told them yes. Or could they have just led a woman in high-heels into the room so that you would think they have your wife?

This leaves you pensive. You feel a lack of will, of initiative, for not having tried to escape yet. And not some bullshit of throwing yourself at the door, but something where you really have some advantage. But, what advantage? You don’t know where you are, nor in what kind of facility. You don’t want to keep going like this. You think of killing yourself, but that seems cowardly. The other option is to provoke them into killing you. But one thing is clear to you: I am not willing to stay like this any longer. I will not live like this, for this is not life, it’s not right. I too can decide how this ends. In fact, I will be the one who decides. Let’s accelerate this end then. That’s what I will do; I have no other choice; I can’t see any other possibility. I think I’ve lacked will; I’ve been struck by cowardice. It is as if I were waiting for an opportunity, but a comfortable one, like if the door were to open toward a tunnel leading out of here. But, well, that’s not possible. So let’s play the final hand, let’s end this.

You choose this end. It is not suicide: it is combat.

You’ve eaten little and today decide not to eat. You haven’t defecated in three days and you want to avoid it now. If they were to take you off to the toilet then they would have to remove and replace your handcuffs and you’d run the risk of them putting them back on tighter. Right now they are being a bit lazy. You’ve been testing them constantly. But you can’t hold back the need to urinate so you grab the bottle they use to bring you water and urinate in it. Someone walks in and sees you.

“Why are you pissing…”

“I didn’t want to bother. It is just piss. I’ll throw it out the next time I have to go.”

He asks you if you need to go now. You say no. In response he hits you a few times and leaves. You sweat, but not because of the punches. The punches don’t hurt; you’ve grown accustom to them. You sweat from the fear that they’ll tighten your handcuffs.

That night you try to sleep in lapses. In the predawn hours you try to listen to the television. It has been a while since anyone has changed the channel. You make a quiet sound. No one shouts at you. You think: I’ll use the most minimal carelessness in my favor. You try to remove your hand from the handcuffs. It gets stuck between the bones of the wrist and thumb. You pull and pull until it comes out all of a sudden, tearing off a pieces of skin. You lift up the blindfold and walk toward the bathroom and start to remove the glass panes from the window. And then, again, you see a vehicle approach.

You throw yourself to the floor and try to put your hand back in the handcuffs, but you can’t. As hard as you try, your hand gets stuck. You put your blindfold back on and lie on the floor, lying over your hand, holding onto the cuffs. One of them comes in and screams at you. You pretend to be asleep. He kicks you and you curl up and wince, exaggerating the pain. He kicks you a few more times and then leaves. You wait a few long minutes. There is no turning back. If he comes back in, what will you do? You could tackle him. You could jump through the window. You could provoke him into killing you. All the options lead to the same ending.

Your body is hot. You stand up again, shaking. You take another two panes out of the Persian window, place them on the floor, and jump out. Neither your legs nor your arms have the strength to break your fall and you hit your head. That does hurt. But you don’t make a sound. No glass broke. It is a movement so perfect that you’d never have been able to achieve it if you’d trained to do so.

You stand up and begin walking. It is still dark, but they have just played the reveille. You see a wire fence, possibly electrified. You see a number of buildings and realize that you are not in a little house, nor a neighborhood, nor an apartment building, nor a police base. You are in a military base. That’s why they were so confident. You walk and see a soldier approaching. You raise up your hands in pure reflex, but they soldier does not raise his weapon, he does not seem to pay any attention to you. You keep you arms up, as if you had been stretching, out for morning exercise. The soldier passes and greets you, good morning. You look around. There are a number of residential buildings and playing fields. You see two civilian dressed people walking across one of the fields, towards the fence. They arrive to a place where it is easy to jump over the fence, and they jump over it. You follow them.

The Silences

“This isn’t a dead man’s book,” Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile told me one day. “This book is about someone alive. The book won’t tell the whole story.” When he said that I understood that the book would not tell the whole story but also that Tzompaxtle would not tell me his whole story. In another moment he told me: “It is indescribable. I can’t understand nor remember everything that happened to me.” And in another moment he told me that he always tells the story differently: “I think that every time I tell the story some things from the hidden damage will come out, things that represent the permanence of that hidden damage, or perhaps the healing of it…”

Before beginning to write, the writer faces two fields of inaccessible information: one blocked by an act of will, the other blocked by trauma and the inevitable and unpredictable fractures of human memory. At least there was no doubt about this: many things would remain unknown. Thus uncertainty was accompanied by honesty from the beginning.

When it comes to investigating acts of injury, especially State acts, a certain careful uncertainty—in the latter case made and protected by State institutions—becomes an essential element for guaranteeing impunity. During a conference at the Guadalajara International Book Fair in 2012, Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder, said: “Impunity is the freedom of expression of the killers. If you aren’t afraid that someone will grab and punish you, then you can plan and carry out a murder like a theatre production.” The work of one who seeks to solve a case, one who seeks justice—especially concerning a State act of injury—is, by definition, that of clarifying all uncertainties, of dismantling the killer’s staging. Who, where, when, how, and why? These questions must be asked and be answered as clearly and precisely as humanly possible. One must do so in spite of the disinformation traps, the destruction of evidence, and the lies told by the architects of the violence. In such an endeavor, uncertainty is an enemy to be defeated.

But, what about investigating in the other direction. That is, when interviewing the person who suffered the injury. One supposes that this person’s testimony is the fundamental element for clarifying the uncertainty, that such testimony is precisely what the “freedom of expression of the killers” seeks to erase, destroy, ridicule, or annihilate. So, when facing such a testimony, should all uncertainty be seen as an enemy to defeat? Should one allow, out of respect for the person giving the testimony’s pain, the omission of certain information? How does the unsaid affect the trust one places in the testimony?

The decision to not tell everything presents the one who writes with a dilemma. This dilemma, for me, is not one of whether or not to continue with the writing, nor much less to try and convince the person who suffered the violence to tell it all. The dilemma is other. It is a methodological, and hence, philosophical dilemma. It is not a matter of responding yes or no, but how.

The British poet John Keats mentioned, just once in a letter, a concept he called “negative capability.” He defined it like this: “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This quality, according to the poet, is necessary for literary work: to be amidst uncertainties. To be able to live within and navigate through mysteries. Amongst other things, this is a quality that promotes humility: from the beginning one must recognize that one does not no and will not know everything. In our present case, the situation is a bit different. Here it is not an issue of deciding between mystery and reason, nor to think that they are incompatible. The challenge is: how to write within the uncertainties, the mysteries and doubts while seeking out all the information possible. How to make the silences present?

Let’s consider for a moment the two fields of uncertainty present here: that of the will and that of trauma and memory. The parameters of the uncertainty of the will present here are themselves clear. Tzompaxtle told me directly: “This isn’t a dead man’s book. This book is about someone alive. The book won’t tell the whole story.” And by “the whole story” he is speaking of his life after returning to clandestinity and to any and all information that could be used to locate and identify him now. The other field, itself contains two overlapping dimensions: that of trauma and memory. The fragility of memory, like that of the body, is something most people experience on a daily basis. Most people have had the experience of remembering in absolute clarity something that never happened. It is quite common. Memory fails; memory leaves traps. That is why we seek verification: we consult other people, check our notebooks, look in the dictionary, or—with increasing frequency and vexing results—look on the Internet. And this is in cases where one’s memory is in perfect health. What happens when someone tries to recall events related to profoundly traumatic experiences?

If some wicked being were to develop a procedure to dismantle one’s memory, soon they would arrive at the most common practices of torture: blows to the head, provoking the overproduction of stress-related hormones, malnutrition, lack of sleep, depression, physical pain in general. All of these experiences affect memory. How then can one reliably document torture? The tortures usually do not give interviews nor—with some recent exceptions—publish photographs of their torture sessions. The survivor’s testimony is the essential evidence. And here it is necessary to note that the uncertainty that arises from the failures of memory does not block nor damage the truth of the testimony. Survivors tend to make mistakes recalling details regarding dates, time, numbers of people present in certain moments, some specific characteristics (were they police or soldiers?) and details related to the most traumatic experiences, such as rape. But the survivor does not make a mistake about having been tortured or not, having been disappeared or not. The studies agree that mistakes do not justify mistrust: “Current research on memory shows that stories can change for many reasons and the changes do not necessarily indicate that the narrator is lying.”

Dori Laub writes about the story of a genocide survivor and witness to an up-rising in Auschwitz and her testimony. The witness told, in the midst of a long testimony, how she saw four chimneys explode in flames and people running. Laub describes a conference with historians, psychoanalysts and artists in which the historians tried to discredit the woman’s entire testimony because she had the number of chimneys wrong. Laub responded: “She had come, indeed, to testify, not to the empirical number of the chimneys, but to resistance, to the affirmation of survival, to the breakage of the frame of death.”

Nora Strejilevich, a survivor of torture during the military dictatorship in Argentina, proposes that one must understand that the survivor’s testimony will always have absences, silences, and contradictions. She writes: “Memories of horror are not accurate, and witnesses who testify in front of a jury have to reshape their traumatic recollections to fit the requirements of the law, which demands precision. A truthful way of giving testimony should allow for disruptive memories, discontinuities, blanks, silences and ambiguities; it should become literary.”

The essence of knowledge about torture is different from other forms of knowledge. Its roots lie in the memory of an experience, a trauma that breaks and evades linguistic expression. Torture is an extreme act of rupture and isolation. The impossibility of communicating pain and the breaking of language within the experience of pain both imposed through the studied and refined cruelty of torture cut off and isolate the person being tortured. The interrogation, a return to language, is the effort to reunite the tortured person with the torturers through language, but in a relation of absolute submission. The interrogation in an essential element of torture and amplifies the psychological dimension of the horror: they destroy your language, they isolate you from the world only to bring you back to language bound to them in a relation of domination and humiliation. Over and over again.

One of the things that Tzompaxtle most emphasized in his memory of torture was the incessant repetition of the same questions and how the only terrain in which he could combat them was precisely that of language.

We always say what we want to say. This is a kind of tautology. We are responsible for what we say precisely because we say what we want to say, what we decide to say. Torture seeks to violate this tautology: it seeks to force a human being to say what he or she profoundly does not want to say, and it does this by subjecting the person to the very experience that breaks language: pain. The torturer inflicts indescribable pains while demanding that the person being tortured say what the torturer wants. What is more, the torturer blames the person suffering for all that they suffer and relates the experience of pain to the demand to speak: you suffer because you don’t speak; if you would speak you would seek to suffer. This is the official logic of torture, even when it is always a brutal mystification of the acts and the responsibility for the acts of torture.

How to understand what it means to resist such horror? I don’t know. But trying to, approaching the possibility, making some kind of effort to listen to Tzompaxtle and others like him, to acknowledge what they suffered, what they achieved, and through such acknowledgement participate in some way in the collective resistance to the persistence of that pain. To enter a conversation.

Table of Contents

The Journalists

The News Reports

They Tear You From the World

The Silences

The Interview

A Piece of Being

Is it Possible to Write Without Violence?

The Brothers

Tzompaxtle and Nube

The Disappeared

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Praise for the Mexican (Spanish-language) edition:

"In this great work of literary journalism we come to know a life of vertigo in a Mexico still more opaque and unjust than the one we see in the newspapers and social media. This is the shadow Mexico where armed struggle and fierce repression wage a decades-long battle. Tzompaxtle: This Is Not a Dead Man's Story proves that John Gibler—a Mexican infrarealist—views writing as a form of dissent, of going against the grain. It also shows, through the story of an impossible escape, that in the Mexico of the shadows, every once and a while, one finds a bit of light.—Diego Osorno, Más por más

"John Gibler has written a raw and forceful portrait to show the extremes of violence and torture."—Juan Carlos Talavera, Excelsior

"John Gibler mixes, with as much rigor as imagination, literary metaphor with narrative journalism, testimony with the theoretical essay, the open-ended interview with critical reflection."—Andrés Fabián Henao, Palabras al Margen

"Beyond the reporting or the mere description of the events, Tzompaxtle by John Gibler is a conversation from the shadows of clandestinity that seeks to step away from the power relations that characterize the journalist's labor. Here one finds a bone-chilling testimony from the school of pain to which men and women with ideals and a thirst for justice are submitted in a country like ours, dominated by autocrats and criminals disguised as public officials."—Lobsang Castañeda, Revista Leemás

Editorial Reviews

05/14/2018
Journalist Gibler (I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us) presents a raw and stirring portrait of Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile, a member of the Popular Revolutionary Army, a guerrilla group in Guerrero, Mexico, who survived kidnapping, imprisonment, and torture by the Mexican army. In October of 1996, Tzompaxtle was kidnapped and taken to a secret prison, where for four mouths he was beaten and repeatedly tortured by electric shocks in an effort to coerce out of him information about his group’s whereabouts. Drawing from numerous interviews with Tzompaxtle and his family, as well as others involved in Mexico’s underground resistance, Gibler constructs an account of the entire ordeal including Tzompaxtle’s unlikely escape, which he presumed was a suicide mission, and his continued clandestine fight “against a criminal state” in the years since. In his telling of Tzompaxtle’s story, Gibler reflects on the economically and politically deprived state of Guerrero, the decades-long struggle between armed resistance and Mexico’s repressive government, and to what extent he can write about violence without perpetuating it. Gibler’s fervent glimpse into Mexico’s underground succeeds in his goal to bring to light the struggles of the oppressed and traumatized people there. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"In these times when truth is relativized for the sake of political expediency, Gibler's is a sobering account that provides readers with the materials from which he elaborates his story of Tzompaxtle. This book offers an implicit response to the denigration of journalism, hence of truth-telling."—Jose Rabasa, author of Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier

"John Gibler has produced a giant of a book. A combination of a political thriller, personal testimony, interviews, and deep, insightful reflection, Torn from the World is a work full of pain. It is also charged with hope—a hope born of the struggle against systemic violence, and of the struggle to survive and to live in a better world, one of equality for all."—Joseph Nevins, author of Dying to Live: A Story of U.S. Immigration in an Age of Global Apartheid

"Journalist Gibler (I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us) presents a raw and stirring portrait of Andres Tzompaxtle Tecpile, a member of the Popular Revolutionary Army, a guerrilla group in Guerrero, Mexico, who survived kidnapping, imprisonment, and torture by the Mexican army. In October of 1996, Tzompaxtle was kidnapped and taken to a secret prison, where for four mouths he was beaten and repeatedly tortured by electric shocks in an effort to coerce out of him information about his group's whereabouts. Drawing from numerous interviews with Tzompaxtle and his family, as well as others involved in Mexico's underground resistance, Gibler constructs an account of the entire ordeal including Tzompaxtle's unlikely escape, which he presumed was a suicide mission, and his continued clandestine fight 'against a criminal state' in the years since. In his telling of Tzompaxtle's story, Gibler reflects on the economically and politically deprived state of Guerrero, the decades-long struggle between armed resistance and Mexico's repressive government, and to what extent he can write about violence without perpetuating it. Gibler’s fervent glimpse into Mexico's underground succeeds in his goal to bring to light the struggles of the oppressed and traumatized people there."—Publishers Weekly

"Andres Tzompaxtle Tecpile, a member of a guerrilla group in the Mexican state of Guerrero, was abducted by the Mexican military one evening in October 1996, held for four months, and brutally tortured. Gibler, the author of the shattering I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us (2017), presents another devastating but necessary book. Reading this in light of the confirmation of the latest director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, who oversaw 'enhanced interrogation techniques' in an earlier CIA position, is especially poignant in that this is a powerful reminder of the dreadful cost the use of torture entails, and of the U.S.' role in perpetuating torture on the American continents. Gibler’s interviews with Tzompaxtle Tecpile provide the marrow for a carefully researched, meticulously constructed, and often excruciating narrative. While honoring Tzompaxtle Tecpile’s story, Gibler honors the reader's intelligence, nimbly deconstructing the roots and the legacy of torture. This is an important look at the price exacted by the legitimatizing of state-sponsored violence and the concealment of the truth about such operations, and their disastrous consequences for everyone."—Sara Martinez, Booklist Starred Review

"An important story that needs to be told. Gibler does Tecpile justice in sharing his experience eloquently and truthfully. This work will hold wide appeal for anyone interested in social activism, civil rights, and Mexican history."—Library Journal

"Like Gibler’s previous book on Mexican disappearances (I Couldn’t Even Imagine that They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa, 2017), this is a work of advocacy journalism, one that dispenses with any pretense of objectivity in pursuit of a deeper truth. Even more provocatively, the author recognizes that in matters involving torture, the whole story may never be known. The experience transcends language and short-circuits memory, and it can’t be captured in the words of a cohesive narrative."—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2018-05-01
An account of a guerrilla prisoner's torture in—and eventual escape from—a secret Mexican prison.Like Gibler's previous book on Mexican disappearances (I Couldn't Even Imagine that They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa, 2017), this is a work of advocacy journalism, one that dispenses with any pretense of objectivity in pursuit of a deeper truth. Even more provocatively, the author recognizes that in matters involving torture, the whole story may never be known. The experience transcends language and short-circuits memory, and it can't be captured in the words of a cohesive narrative. "Torture is an extreme act of rupture and isolation," writes Gibler before continuing to explore "the impossibility of communicating such pain, and the disconnection from language within the experience of pain." The testimony of the captured guerrilla and the torture he experienced provides the heart of the narrative, rendered in the second person: "You don't know if you'll make it. That depends on them, they might even kill you by accident." The author provides contextual elaboration for the direct quotes as well as accounts from journalists and officials, some of whom were skeptical of the veracity of the account, particularly of the prisoner's ability to escape. Some of his former comrades feared that he'd cooperated with his captors, providing sensitive information and naming names. Gibler clearly believes his subject, but his inclusion of so many other perspectives suggests the difficulty of reporting on a subject so fraught with secrecy, where even crucial information from the man who is the subject of the book must be shielded to protect him. "This isn't a dead man's book," says the escaped guerrilla. "This book is about someone alive. The book won't tell the whole story."The reasons why this book can't tell the whole story—and how the stories it tells conflict—are fascinating tales in their own right.

Kirkus Reviews