Book review: The Islands by Carlos Gamerro

The Islands, Carlos Gamerro, trans by Ian Barnett in collaboration with the author (2012, And Other Stories, the original, Las islas, published 1998)

This week I read the most extraordinary novel I've come across this year: Carlos Gamerro's The Islands. It's not new, but it is new in English translation, for which it was specially revised. And a tip of the hat to the translator, Ian Barnett, right from the start: the language is amazing, versatile, springy. I haven't read the original so I can't directly compare the two, but to judge from the wordplay that made it into the English version, it must have been a fantastic challenge.

The Islands of the title are the Falklands/Malvinas, and straightaway we see where this book fits into this blog. The protagonist, Felipe Felix, is a veteran haunted by his memories of the conflict. A computer whizz, he is contracted by a megalomaniac businessman to track down the witnesses to a crime, and so starts a delirious romp through Buenos Aires of 1992, with frequent diversions into 1982.

A word of warning: this novel is not for the faint-hearted. It's not realist. It's not tasteful. You name it - sex, drugs, violence, incest, anti-Semitism, torture - it's in here. It was an unusual read for me, and to be honest after I'd read the first chapter I wasn't sure I wanted to go on. But the book drew me in, weaving the story of the legacy of the hopeless war the generals cooked up to bolster their flagging regime.

The farce was over. At that moment a giant hand descended from the sky and lifting up one corner, like someone getting ready to pull off a plaster, it tore off the skin of the city to reveal the desolate heath beneath, the windswept pastures, the streams of stone, the rocks and mud and bogs of the Islands.

Gamerro strips the surface from Buenos Aires and every character in the novel, to reveal their connection to Argentina's traumatic past. Inevitably, this includes a victim of torture (and, if you think the part about her being forced to marry her torturer is just one of the author's flights of fancy, there is at least one documented case of this actually happening*).

If anyone else has read or reads this, I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on it. I suspect this isn't the kind of book to attract mild reactions. For me, I finished it two days ago and it hasn't let me go yet.

*See Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, p. 78.

News round-up

Chile
The former head of the secret police in Chile under Pinochet,  Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, and four other former officals of the DINA have been sentenced to 15 years in prison for the disappearance of a young man in 1975.
Condenan a cinco represores de la dictadura chilena (Agencia Pulsar)

Pinochet regime spied on foreign media correspondents, recently uncovered documentation shows.
Revelan que gobierno de Pinochet habría espiado a corresponsales extranjeros (La Tercera)

Mexico
Experts say post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and acute depression are on the rise in Mexico as a result of the increasing violence seen over the last few years.
Mexico’s Spiral of Violence Causes Spike in PTSD (IPS)

Peru
In the next stage of the furore created by the recent Colina Group ruling, human rights organisations in Peru are planning Friday to present a request to the National Magistrates Council to remove Javier Villa Stein from the presidency of the Supreme Court.
Human Rights Groups Seek To Remove Supreme Court Head (Peruvian Times)

“My father has given up on the idea of a pardon because he knows he is innocent and there are no clear and positive signals on the part of the government,” Congressman Kenji Fujimori said.
Alberto Fujimori Has Given Up On Pardon – Report (Peruvian Times)
Kenji Fujimori: "Mi padre renunció a la idea del indulto" (El Comercio)

Colombia: Scars of Captivity Mark Freed Colombian Hostages

An excellent, if very sad, article from AP about the psychological consequences for freed Colombian hostages - well worth a read.

"At times, one thinks it would have been better to have stayed in the jungle than to leave it and encounter the series of very difficult problems one faces," he said, his voice shaking.

Santiago Rojas, a doctor who has written about stress and mental health, said being held hostage affects a captive's "entire perception of life. It is an open wound that can be healed or can remain open."

Scars of Captivity Mark Freed Colombian Hostages (AP, via ABC)

Argentina: Children of disappeared sent to home

Pagina/12 carries a desperately sad interview today with María Ramírez, who was sent with her siblings to a children's home in 1977, aged four, after her mother was detained by the armed forces. Her father was in prison at the time, and despite the fact that an aunt wanted to take the three children, judge Marta Pons (now deceased) said "They're the children of a Paraguayan montonero who challenged the national constitution and doesn't deserve to get them back".

The children were then sent to a home, where their names were changed and they were ordered to call the couple that run the place "mum" and "dad". Ramírez tells a horrific story of the seven years of "hell" that followed, with insufficient food, inadequate education and sexual abuse by the home owner and his son. Eventually, she was found by the aunt who had wanted custody, emigrated to Sweden and was reunited with her father. But this is not a "happy every after" story. She speaks clearly of the terrible, and ongoing, pyschological consequences of her childhood - there could hardly be stronger proof that the crimes of the dictatorship are not finished, but ongoing.

“Era un infierno y yo me sentía enterrada viva” (Pagina/12)

I did a bit of searching for the judge involved in the case and found some other, equally damning, testimony about her complicity with the regime. A former assistant related that two of the founding members of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo came to visit Pons, trying to find out what had happened to Emiliano Ginés, a nine month old with Down's syndrome.

"It was the old women," the assistant, María Felicitas Elías, heard Pons saying to Buenos Aires police chief Ramon Camps. "I told them I didn't know anyone about the boy they were searching for". She then ripped up the documentation the Grandmothers had left and threw it away. The baby was kept in the hospital Sor María Ludovica and died there some months later.

Las complicidades de la jueza Pons (Pagina/12)
Denuncian a una jueza (La Nacion)

Guatemala: Legacy of the civil war

The recent long jail sentence for Pedro Pimentel Rios for his role in the massacre of 201 people has been widely reported, but I just wanted to highlight two articles that go a bit deeper into the aftermath of the violence for English-speaking readers.

IPS does its usual sterling job at discussing the issue of reparations.

"The programme distributed 576 housing units here in 2011, but they were only half-built," another survivor, Manuel Tay, told IPS from the northwestern province of Chimaltenango. "We had to buy cement and steel, pay a builder, and even haul in construction materials to finish the houses."

Tay, who lost five of his siblings during the conflict, said the houses are made of such "simple materials that some of the houses weren’t even three months old and the floor was already cracked."

Victims of war, victims of oblivion (IPS)

Meanwhile, the BBC turns its attention to the pyschological consequences of the war with the story of former guerrilla and pyschologist Maria Tulia Lopez Perez.

"Judicial justice is the best form of compensation for victims, much better than money or anything else," says Maria, but she says too few people have been tried.

[...] But she says there in post-war Guatemala there has not been enough focus on healing people's psychological wounds.

"We must liberate the victims from all this weight they are carrying which stops them from living normal lives."

Healing Guatemala's emotional scars from the civil war (BBC)

Peru Round-up (I): Shining Path at San Marcos

The University of San Marcos was the scene of a pro-Shining Path demonstration on Monday with some students demanding the release of Abimael Guzman. Apparently it was pretty small, but clearly, such an occurrence would trigger a lot of uncomfortable memories.

“The scenes that were recorded Monday night in [San Marcos] university seem to come from the dark history lived by the university when, at the end of the 1980’s, the terrorists walked by as if it were their home and welcomed new students,” the article said.

Indeed:
These shots by Jaime Razuri and Vera Lentz are part of the archive of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

University Administration Says Pro-Shining Path Demonstration Organized by Outsiders (Peruvian Times)

Guatemala: Reopening Old Wounds

People in the town of Ixcán in northwestern Guatemala could relive the pain of the country's 36-year civil war if the army reopens a military base in the area, where more than 100 massacres of indigenous villagers were committed during the armed conflict.
[...]
"Seeing them (the soldiers) on the streets again brings back everything that happened," he added.

The town and surrounding rural villages of the frontier municipality of Ixcán, which is bordered by the Mexican state of Chiapas to the north, were among the areas that bore the brunt of the 1960-1996 armed conflict.

Between 1979 and 1988, 102 massacres were committed in Ixcán, with a total of 2,500 victims, and a full 96 percent of the population was forcibly displaced from the municipality, according to the United Nations-sponsored Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH).

Town that Suffered Military Terror Fights Reopening of Base (IPS)

Chile News

Two new dictatorship-related books: "The Pinochet File" and "Londres 38, London 2000".

Plus,

On his death bed in a Santiago prison hospital, the 88-year-old German child molester, weapons trafficker, torturer and sect leader Paul Schafer still refuses to say what happened to the only U.S. citizen who disappeared during Chile’s military dictatorship.

A disappeared American (Dirty Wars and Democracy)

The possibility that human rights violators may be included in a general pardon next year is revealing how far Chile is from healing the wounds of its past of torture, executions and disappearances.

A question of justice (Dirty Wars and Democracy)

Colombia: Health Effects of War

This fascinating article relates to Colombia, but I don't see why it isn't relevant to many other countries.

Much has been written about the psychological trauma of living through war, being displaced, torture, having a disappeared relative, etc. But how much do we hear about the physical effects?

A study has shown that survivors in Colombia have higher rates of cancer, coronary heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, gastritis and ulcers, and headaches, backaches and neckaches. When you think about it, it's hardly unknown or astonishing that prolonged, severe stress has repercussions on the body, but this source of further suffering is rarely given much consideration.

Apparently, 25% of the population shows symptoms of mental disorders such as severe depression and posttraumatic stress, but among displaced people (of whom Colombia has the highest number in the world) this rises to 75%. Moreover, significant incidences of alcoholism, drug abuse and suicides are also noted.

Anecdotally, victims' groups report high rates of cancer among their members.

This kind of research is important because it indicates a further aspect in which victims of conflict may require resources and support.

El conflicto armado aumenta el riesgo de cancer, asma, hipertension y diabetes entre las victimas (Cambio)

Peru: 3 April 1983, Lucanamarca

There are words in Peru that conjure up the memory of violence. Gaping wounds in the collective consciousness of the nation. Accomarca, Tarata, La Cantuta. Other things happened and happen in these places but people remember the iconic events that define them, the multiple killings, the trauma. Uchuraccay. Lucanamarca.

On 3 April 1983, Shining Path columns entered the village of Lucanamarca in Ayacucho and murdered 69 people with machetes. Children were among the victims. The attack was directed from the very top of Sendero: Guzman ordered it as a punishment because there had been resistance to guerrilla activities in the area. It was to serve as an example: you resist the Shining Path, you die. He said as much himself:

Frente al uso de mesnadas y la acción militar reaccionaria respondimos contundentemente con una acción: Lucanamarca, ni ellos ni nosotros la olvidamos, (...) ahí fueron aniquilados más de 80, eso es lo real; y lo decimos, ahí hubo exceso (...) en algunas ocasiones, como en ésa, fue la propia Dirección Central la que planificó la acción y dispuso las cosas, así ha sido... (...)ahí lo principal fue hacerles entender que éramos un hueso duro de roer, y que estábamos dispuestos a todo, a todo(...).

"In the face of the reactionary operations of the military we replied forcefully with our own operation: Lucanamarca, neither they nor we will forget it. (...) "More than 80 people were wiped out there, that is a fact, and we admit it there were excesses there...on some occasions, such as this, it was the Central Directorate which planned the operations and gave the orders...the main thing was to make them understand...that we were prepared for everything."
(Spanish taken from the CVR report, pp. 44-45, which is quoting from Guzman's interview in El Diario in 1988, English translation from the BBC)

Just look at the agony etched on the faces of these women whose relatives were an 'example' to any who dared to resist the Shining Path. Of course, not resisting the Shining Path could well have earned you the wrath of the armed forces, whose treatment would be no better. The indigenous highlanders truly were caught 'between two fires'.