On the plane I read a news article on state-sponsored terrorism in Guatemala, “Heritage or Fate?,” penned by an influential columnist. I clip the article and mark this passage in red ink:

Exasperated and exalted by the paradise that common criminals and organized crime enjoy at their leisure, the highest echelons of Security and the Guatemalan State have always opted for efficiency and pragmatism and have proceeded to organize death squads composed of police officers and professional hitmen hired to kill criminals. These extrajudicial practices are popular causes, as the vast majority of Guatemalans are vulnerable and defenseless against crime and are convinced that for ruthless criminals there is no other way than to give them a taste of their own medicine. In other words, despair and fear among the citizenry ends up granting a certain legitimacy to this variation of state-sponsored terrorism.

I wonder if the columnist counts himself among those who believe that this “variation of state-sponsored terrorism” does, in fact, have any legitimacy.

No one will ever know with certainty—he continues, and now seems to want to revise the most recent history—who, among the thousands fallen during three decades of war, was guilty or innocent, nor how many were slain by the insurgency or by the counterinsurgency.

“What about forensic medicine?” I wonder.

“Why don’t you tell him to look at the work of Clyde Snow or Michael Ondaatje?” said an old Mexican poet when I told him about this in the arid outskirts of Oaxaca.

From the Internet: “Clyde Snow was appointed by President George Bush (senior) to be part of the Human Rights Commission at the United Nations in 1991. Considered an “international popular hero” in forensic anthropology, Snow has selected paradigmatic cases of Guatemalan massacres to establish precedents in cases of ‘atrocities’ against human rights. According to his reports, more than one hundred thousand people were killed by members of the Guatemalan army between 1960 and 1996, and about ten thousand by the various guerrilla groups in the same period.”

Sunday, in Oaxaca.

Yesterday afternoon, reading of my stories in San Agustín Etla in an old textile mill converted into a cultural center, in the middle of a wild landscape of gray mountains and dark blue sky. By late afternoon, incredibly drunk on mezcal. At night, a rush of visions and memories.