Vladimir Padrino, Venezuelan Defense Minister, during a press conference this April 5 in Caracas.MANAURE QUINTERO / Reuters
One of the most captivating Latin American novels that I have read in recent decades is
Los armies
(Premio Tusquets, 2006), by the award-winning and controversial Colombian author Evelio Rosero.
Set in San José, a fictitious Colombian town and at the beginning of this century, the events narrated in
Los armies
are, however, plausible to the point of painfully sensory.
Ismael, a retired teacher, now in his seventies and also a voyeurist, assiduously spies on his young neighbor who, naked, tends to gild in the sun in her garden.
His wife rebukes without much emphasis what she considers a venial perversion of decrepitude.
This is how the days go by in the quiet town.
On San José, however, suddenly, all the evils of war are precipitated.
Without invoking acronyms or even stopping to comment on declared or hidden political purposes, Rosero tells with elegant detail how the combatants of the FARC, the ELN, the paramilitary groups and the Colombian Army kill and disappear the townspeople in the course of terrifying campaigns, including the teacher's wife and the nudist neighbor.
I comment on all this without having the copy that remained in Caracas at hand, so the good readers of Rosero - and Rosero himself, of course, if he were to read this trifle! - will be able to excuse any inaccuracies, but I still remember that for something similar to a truce, after a mad shooting, the teacher Ismael looks fearfully out into the street from his hallway.
A combatant, of which of the armies ?, plays a macabre joke on him in passing: he squeezes the handle of a fragmentary grenade, ostensibly removes the ring that activates the timer, and softly throws the grenade at the professor.
Like someone who throws you a succulent friendly mango saying "shortcut".
Chance "that condemns or redeems", embodied in the damaged merchandise of the clandestine arms trade, incredibly provides that the grenade does not explode in the teacher's hands.
The master rushes to get rid of her by throwing her into a wasteland at the edge of town.
The timer of the artifact remains, however, active in the back room of the reading mind for the rest of the novel until some children, playing, find the grenade ...
In Rosero's story, a genuine prodigy of conciseness and shocking evocative power, the exodus of the terrified inhabitants of San José responds to the crimes against humanity that all, absolutely all belligerents commit indiscriminately against them.
They are the same reasons for the thousands of displaced Venezuelans and Colombians living in the Apure State who have crossed the Arauca, fleeing the war.
A cruel paradox hits a not small portion of Venezuelan opposition politicians and spokespersons, inside and outside the country.
It is represented by the fact that the high command of the Bolivarian army, from whose pronouncement against Nicolás Maduro so much wanted to wait for the unsuccessful policy of “maximum pressure” advocated by the López-Guaidó coalition since 2019, has ordered sustained bombings on the hurried population in support of tactical officer of one of the armed drug trafficking gangs that dispute control of Venezuelan territory.
And was it with Vladimir Padrino and his murderous pilots that Guiadó and his people counted on to put an end to the dictatorship?
The protervous extermination squads of the FAES have already realized, as in San José de Rosero, entire families from the plains, victims of a narco-terrorist campaign of territorial eviction such as had not been seen so far in my country.
All this happens when the pandemic records numbers of contagion and deaths that Venezuela has already made for many months, without a health system worthy of the name, without public services and without a universal vaccination plan, a death camp.
Fourteen years ago, still in Caracas, I was able to read
The Armies
with nothing but admired relish because the dehumanizing potential of drug trafficking, its armies and its wars was still for many Venezuelans only a political hypothesis.
The bloody news that has been arriving for weeks from the banks of the Arauca, on the Colombian-Venezuelan border, enlivened in me the memory of this beautifully cruel and singularly instructive book.
A friend, an old high school teacher, retired like Ismael de San José and as wounded as me, summed up the situation in Arauca via WhatsApp with these words: "Brother, Rosero's armies are already here."
And for all that we now know, with the Bolivarian Army already undisguisedly constituted in a murderous cartel of our people, it will be for a long time.
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