Authors: Jon Lee Anderson
On the day of Castillo Armas’s entry into the city, Ernesto observed that “the people really applauded him.” His army of swaggering, submachine-gun-toting paramilitaries roamed around, savoring their status as the country’s liberators and looking for trouble. Ernesto was anxious about rumors that
Edelberto Torres had been arrested for being a Communist, and he worried about the fate of Torres’s father, the Rubén Darío scholar. (In fact, Edelberto junior was in hiding, but Ernesto’s fears for his father turned out to be well founded. The scholar was soon detained and imprisoned.) Ernesto’s own situation was tenuous, and after being kicked out of the hospital, as he had predicted he would be, he found refuge in the home of two Salvadoran women who had already sought asylum.
Amid the political upheaval, he and Hilda continued their cat-and-mouse romance. She sent him some verses she’d written in which she spoke “stupidities,” as he called them. “What is happening to her,” he wrote in his diary, “is a mixture of calculation to win me over, fictive imagination, and the sense of honor of a free woman affronted by my indifference. I sent her a little animaloid verse:
Surrender yourself like the birds do,
I’ll take you like the bears do,
and, maybe, I’ll kiss you slowly
So I can feel like a man, I who am a dove
.
“I gave her a new ultimatum, but the abundance of these meant that it didn’t have much effect. What
did
affect her was that I confessed about the fuck with the nurse. She still has hopes of marrying me.”
By mid-July, the new regime’s witch hunt had begun in earnest. Everyone connected with the Arbenz regime or suspected of being a Communist was threatened with arrest. Those who had not already fled Guatemala were attempting to do so. Ernesto lost his refuge when his Salvadoran hosts arranged to leave the country. Their house was to be closed, and Ernesto had to find a new hiding place. Helena Leiva de Holst had been arrested, but her aunt took him in. He spent his days going back and forth to the Argentine embassy. According to Hilda, he took advantage of his access to the embassy and the confusion in Guatemala City “to carry out errands for those in asylum at the embassy, to collect some arms, and to arrange asylum for those in difficult positions or those who wished to leave the country.”
Ernesto continued his activities unscathed for a few more days, but then Hilda was arrested. Before she was taken away, the police questioned her about him. It was a warning Ernesto couldn’t ignore, and he too now requested and was granted asylum at the Argentine embassy. “My plans are very fluid,” he wrote, “although most probably I’ll go to Mexico. ... Far or near, I don’t know why but I’m in one of those moments in which a slight pressure from one side could twist my destiny around completely.”
Ernesto joined a large group of people who were already installed inside the walled compound of the embassy. Once there, he quickly became restless and began to fret. “One can’t call asylum boring, but sterile, yes,” he wrote. “One can’t do what one wants, because of all the people there.”
His asthma had worsened. Hilda had been released after several days in custody, as he learned from the newspapers, when she had gone on a hunger strike. He didn’t understand why she hadn’t come to see him, and wondered whether it was “ignorance about where I am or whether she doesn’t know she can visit me.”
Ernesto now seemed intent upon a particular destination. Mexico City was the place where Arbenz and most of his allies who had escaped arrest—as well as many of the Latin American political exiles in Guatemala—were heading. Several of them had taken refuge in the Mexican embassy and hoped to travel as soon as the new Guatemalan regime provided them with
salvocondúctos
. Since Mexico’s own “anti-imperialist” revolution only four decades earlier, the politically tolerant and culturally dynamic Mexican capital had become a sanctuary for thousands of left-wing political exiles from around the world, including significant numbers of European Jews and Spanish Republicans fleeing Fascism in the 1930s and 1940s.
Ernesto considered the possibility that his request for a Mexican visa might be denied, but the prospect did not seem to overly concern him. For now, he stayed put. To pass the time, he began recording his impressions of his companions. The first to catch his interest was the renowned Communist peasant leader Carlos Manuel Pellecer. Ernesto described Pellecer as “an intelligent man and, it seems, brave. He seems to have great influence over the other asylum seekers, an influence that emanates I’m not sure whether from his own personality or because of the fact that he is the maximum leader of the party. ... But he is somewhat effeminate in his gestures, and he wrote a book of verse in earlier years, a sickness very common in these parts. His Marxist formation doesn’t have the solidity of other figures I have known and he hides it behind a certain petulance. The impression he gives me is of an individual who is sincere but overexcited, one of those ambitious persons who might stumble and renounce their faith violently, but are yet capable of carrying out the highest sacrifices at a determined moment.”
*
Of his Cuban acquaintance José Manuel “Che-Che” Vega Suárez, he wrote: “He is as dumb as a piece of rubble and lies like an Andalusian. Of
his previous life in Cuba there is nothing certain except for indications that he was what is called a
jodedor
[carouser], to whom Batista’s police gave a royal beating. ... His behavior before taking asylum was cowardly. Here he is entertaining with his unmalicious exaggerations. He is a big boy, selfish and spoiled, who believes that everyone else should put up with his caprices. He eats like a pig.”
Suffering from asthma and “deeply bored,” Ernesto spent his days in “meaningless arguments and every other possible way of wasting time.” On August 2, there was a revolt by army cadets who had been humiliated at the hands of Castillo Armas’s undisciplined Liberation Army. The revolt ended after Ambassador Puerifoy sent word that the United States expected the Guatemalan military to stand solidly behind Castillo Armas. The situation of the people packed into the embassies, hoping they would be able to get out of the country, was much more tenuous than they realized. Anxious to consolidate the victory over Communism in this first important Cold War skirmish in Washington’s backyard, the CIA had dispatched teams of agents to Guatemala to collect—and, in some cases, to plant—evidence of the pro-Soviet nature of the Arbenz government. The Dulles brothers were also demanding that Castillo Armas arrest suspected Communists and their suspected sympathizers who remained in the country.
Castillo Armas was a willing partner in this campaign and had already carried out the first of a series of repressive measures to shore up his power while rolling back the revolution’s reforms. He had created a National Committee for Defense Against Communism and decreed a Preventive Penal Law against Communism that imposed the death penalty for a wide range of crimes, including “political sabotage.” The committee had broad powers to arrest and detain anyone suspected of being a Communist. Illiterate citizens were banned from voting, which instantly disenfranchised the vast majority of Guatemala’s population. The agrarian reform laws were overturned and all political parties, labor unions, and peasant organizations were outlawed. Books considered subversive were confiscated and burned. The blacklist included novels by Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky, and those by Guatemala’s noted (and future Nobel prize–winning) writer Miguel Angel Asturias, who would even be stripped of his citizenship.
*
Secretary Dulles insisted that Castillo Armas go after the estimated 700 asylum seekers in the foreign embassies. “Dulles feared that they might ‘recirculate’ throughout the hemisphere if they were allowed to leave
Guatemala,” wrote the authors of
Bitter Fruit
, the authoritative account of the overthrow of Arbenz. “His fear soon became an obsession. ... Early in July, he told Puerifoy to instruct the new regime to bring ‘criminal charges’ against ‘Communist’ refugees as a way of preventing them from leaving the country.” Dulles went so far as to propose a plan in which Castillo Armas would grant safe-conduct to Communists on the condition they be sent directly to Moscow. Castillo Armas resisted, apparently feeling that such a breach of international norms would be going too far, even for him. In early August he began approving safe-conduct visas for most of the refugees at the embassies.
By mid-August, the first few safe-conduct passes had arrived, but for Ernesto life was unchanged. He spent his time playing chess, sending notes to Hilda, and writing psycho-political profiles of his companions. He turned his attention to the Guatemalans. Roberto Castañeda, a photographer and dancer, had traveled “behind the Iron Curtain and is a sincere admirer of all of that but won’t enter the Party. He lacks theoretical knowledge of Marxism, and maybe he wouldn’t be a good militant for what we could call these bourgeois defects, but it is sure that in the moment of action he would be up to the task. ... He has practically none of the effeminate mannerisms of a dancer.” Of another, Arana, he wrote, “He is weak and without an ideological base but he is loyal to the Party. Of medium intelligence, he is nonetheless able to realize that the only ideal path for the working class is Communism.”
Hilda twice visited the embassy, which was now under heavy guard, but was prevented from entering. Ernesto’s asthma continued to plague him. He resolved to fast for a day and see if that would help “purge” his system. Hilda sent him a bottle of honey and a letter.
The days dragged on. Ernesto helped out in the kitchen but complained that the effort was tiring. The weariness of his muscles showed how out of shape he was. His descriptions of the other inhabitants of the embassy had become more caustic. He was especially critical of the large number of young Guatemalan leftists who also claimed to be poets. The verse of the eighteen-year-old student Marco Antonio Sandoval—an “energetic admirer of himself”—was “plagued with meditations upon death.” When the poet Hugo Blanco escaped from the embassy by leaping over the fence, Ernesto wrote that he was “a bad poet. I don’t even think he is an intelligent person. The inclination that seems to accompany them all is compassion. The good boy’s smile accompanies the poet.”
Safe-conduct passes continued to trickle in, and news came that Perón had agreed to grant asylum in Argentina to those in the embassy, along with their families. For those he respected, Ernesto issued some informal
salvocondúctos
of his own, in the form of notes addressed to his family and friends.
The fugitive Communist leader Víctor Manuel Gutiérrez sneaked into the embassy one night by climbing over a wall. Gutiérrez was high on Castillo Armas’s wanted list, and the situation caused a clash between the Argentine ambassador and Guatemalan officials, but Gutiérrez was granted asylum and placed in a room with his comrade Pellecer. Soon afterward, Ernesto was confined in the embassy garage along with twelve others who were viewed as troublesome Communists. They became known as the “Group of Thirteen.” According to Ernesto’s less than explicit notes, the extreme measure was taken after Humberto Pineda, Myrna Torres’s boyfriend, had created a disturbance. They were threatened with force if they did not cooperate, and were prohibited from talking with the other asylum seekers. In the Group of Thirteen’s first night in detention, however, Humberto Pineda and his brother Luis Arturo both escaped to join in the underground resistance activities being planned by the Communist Party against the new regime. In her memoirs, Hilda says that they took their action at Ernesto’s urging. In his diary, Ernesto simply lauds the two as having “a lot of balls.”
He was now focusing his descriptive profiles on the men in the garage. “Ricardo Ramírez is perhaps one of the most capable leaders of the youth movement,” he wrote. “His general level of culture is high and his manner of facing problems is much less dogmatic than that of other comrades.”
*
August was coming to an end, and everyone’s patience was wearing thin. The group in the garage was placed under even stricter confinement after Che-Che Vega “raised a ruckus with a whore who is a
mucama
, a cleaning girl.” Tensions eased somewhat when 118 of the asylum seekers at the Argentine embassy—including Pellecer and Gutiérrez—were evacuated on five planes sent from Buenos Aires. Ernesto was offered passage home, but, adamant about going to Mexico, he declined. Since the ambassador could not force anyone to seek repatriation, he reluctantly allowed Ernesto to leave the embassy grounds.
A friend of Gualo García’s had come in on one of the evacuation flights, bringing Ernesto $150 sent by his family, as well as “two suits, four kilos of
yerba
, and a mountain of stupid little things.” He wrote to thank them for their gifts but said that he was forging on to Mexico and
might not take along the clothes. “My slogan is little baggage, strong legs, and a fakir’s stomach.”
When Ernesto left the embassy, the first thing he did was to look for Hilda. Since her release from prison on July 26, she had been living in limbo, lonely and frightened, having been refused a passport at the Peruvian embassy. She was now awaiting clearance from Lima. In a bizarre audience with Castillo Armas at the presidential palace, to which she had been summoned at his request, Hilda had been assured she would not be rearrested. Since then she had lived quietly in a rented apartment in the center of town, waiting anxiously for Ernesto.
They met in a restaurant where she usually took her meals. “He appeared there one day while I was having lunch,” Hilda recalled. “Everyone in the restaurant studiously ignored him, except for my good friend the proprietress, who invited him to come and eat anything he wished. And when we walked through the downtown streets after lunch, everyone who knew us looked at us in surprise and were afraid to speak with us; they wouldn’t even wave. They doubtless thought we were being watched by the police.”
Deciding that there was nothing concrete that could be held against him, Ernesto turned his passport in to the immigration authorities so that he could get an exit permit, the first step toward receiving a Mexican visa. While he waited, he went to Lake Atitlán and the Guatemalan highlands. Within a few days, he returned to Guatemala City, picked up his passport, and finally obtained the Mexican visa.