Children of the Days (9 page)

Einstein once said, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination . . . no more men!”

He said it to a few friends.

The friends laughed.

He did not.

Now it turns out there are fewer and fewer bees in the world.

Today, on Earth Day, let us acknowledge that this is not happening due to God's will or the Devil's curse, but rather because of:

the murder of natural forests and the proliferation of farmed ones;

monocropping for export, which limits plant diversity;

poisons that kill pests and with them everything else;

chemical fertilizers that fertilize money and sterilize the soil;

and radiation from the machines people buy because advertising tells us to.

Today, World Book Day, it wouldn't hurt to recall that the history of literature is an unceasing paradox.

What is the most popular scene in the Bible? Adam and Eve biting the apple. It's not there.

Plato never wrote his most famous line: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

Don Quijote de la Mancha never said: “Let the dogs bark, Sancho. It's a sign we are on track.”

Voltaire's best-known line was not said or written by him: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel never wrote: “All theory is gray, my friend, but green is the tree of life.”

Sherlock Holmes never said: “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

In none of his books or pamphlets did Lenin write: “The ends justify the means.”

Bertolt Brecht was not the author of his most oft-cited poem: “First they came for the Communists / and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Communist . . . “

And neither was Jorge Luis Borges the author of his best-known poem: “If I could live my life over / I would try to make more mistakes . . . ”

In the year 2004, for once the government of Guatemala broke with the tradition of impunity and officially acknowledged that Myrna Mack was killed by order of the country's president.

Myrna had undertaken forbidden research. Despite receiving threats, she had gone deep into the jungles and mountains to find exiles wandering in their own country, the indigenous survivors of the military's massacres. She collected their voices.

In 1989, at a conference of social scientists, an anthropologist from the United States complained about the pressure universities exert to continually produce: “In my country if you don't publish, you perish.”

And Myrna replied: “In my country if you publish, you perish.”

She published.

She was stabbed to death.

During this week in 1951, Mohammad Mossadegh was elected prime minister of Iran in a landslide.

Mossadegh had promised to take back Iran's oil, which had been given away to the British.

But nationalizing oil could lead to the sort of chaos that helps the Communists. So President Eisenhower gave the order to attack and the United States saved Iran. The coup d'état of 1953 put Mossadegh in prison, sent many of his followers to their graves and gave forty percent of the oil Mossadegh had nationalized to US companies.

The following year, far from Iran, President Eisenhower gave another order to attack and the United States saved Guatemala. A coup d'état toppled the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz because he had expropriated the uncultivated lands of the United Fruit Company. Expropriating land could lead to the sort of chaos that helps the Communists.

Guatemala is still paying for that act of kindness.

It occurred in Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986.

It was the worst nuclear catastrophe the world had ever suffered, but the only ones to learn of the tragedy from the first moment were the birds that fled and the worms that dug themselves into the ground.

The Soviet government ordered silence.

Radioactive rain fell over much of Europe and the government continued denying or refusing to speak.

A quarter of a century later, in Fukushima, several nuclear reactors exploded and the Japanese government also remained silent or denied “alarmist versions.”

The veteran British journalist Claud Cockburn was right when he suggested, “Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.”

The Conservative Party was in power in Nicaragua on this day in 1837 when women won the right to abortion if their lives were in danger.

One hundred seventy years later, in the very same country, legislators who claimed to be Sandinista revolutionaries outlawed abortion “in any circumstance,” and thus condemned poor women to prison or the cemetery.

Today, on World Day for Safety and Health at Work, it's worth noting that these days nothing is as insecure as a job. More and more workers awaken each day wondering: “Am I about to become excess baggage? Who is going to hire me?”

Many lose their jobs and on the job many lose their lives: every fifteen seconds a worker dies, murdered by what they call “workplace accidents.”

Insecurity is the politicians' preferred topic when they want to unleash the hysteria that wins elections. Danger, danger, they declare, on every corner there's a thief, a rapist, a murderer. But those politicians never decry the dangers of working,

or the dangers of crossing the street, since every twenty-four seconds a pedestrian is killed, murdered by what they call “traffic accidents”;

or the dangers of eating, since whoever is safe from hunger may well be poisoned by the chemicals in their food;

or the dangers of breathing, since in cities clean air is like silence, a luxury item;

or the dangers of being born, since every three seconds a child dies before reaching the age of five.

Who knows all the shortcuts through Africa's jungles?

Who knows how to evade the menacing approach of ivory hunters and other wild predators?

Who can read her own tracks and the tracks of all others?

Who preserves the memory of all and sundry?

Who emits signals that humans can neither hear nor decipher?

Signals that frighten or assist or threaten or greet from ten miles distant?

It is she, the elephant elder. The oldest, the wisest. The one who walks at the head of the herd.

This afternoon in 1977, fourteen mothers of disappeared children met for the first time.

From then on they searched as a group, as a group they knocked on doors that would not open. “All for all,” they said.

They said, “All for our children.”

Thousands upon thousands of children had been devoured by the Argentine military dictatorship, and more than five hundred children had been kidnapped and given to officers as war booty. The papers, radio, TV breathed not a word of it.

A few months after their first meeting, three of those mothers, Azucena Villaflor, Esther Ballestrino and María Eugenia Ponce, also disappeared, just like their children, and like them they were tortured and murdered.

But by then the Thursday meetings were unstoppable. Their white kerchiefs moved round and round the Plaza de Mayo and around the world.

The technology of shared flight: the first goose to take off opens the way for the next, who clears the path for the third, and the strength of the third raises the fourth, who then helps the fifth, and the impulse of the fifth pulls along the sixth, who offers wind to the seventh . . .

When the lead goose tires, he goes to the back of the line and leaves his spot to another, who moves to the apex of the V the geese form in the air. Each takes a turn, forward and back, and none of them believes he is supergoose because he flies first or that flying last makes him a loser.

Geronimo led the Apache resistance in the nineteenth century.

This chief of the invaded earned himself a nasty reputation for driving the invaders crazy with his bravery and brilliance, and in the century that followed he became the baddest bad guy in the West on screen.

Keeping to that tradition, “Operation Geronimo” was the name chosen by the US government for the execution of Osama bin Laden, who was shot and disappeared on this day in 2011.

But what did Geronimo have to do with bin Laden, the delirious caliph cooked up in the image laboratories of the US military? Was Geronimo even remotely like this professional fearmonger who would announce his intention to eat every child raw whenever a US president needed to justify a new war?

The name was not an innocent choice: the US military always considered the Indian warriors who defended their lands and dignity against foreign conquest to be terrorists.

At the end of 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan.

The official justification was to defend a secular government trying to modernize the country.

I was a member of an international tribunal in Stockholm that took up the case in 1981.

I will never forget the dramatic climax of those sessions.

A leading religious figure, representing the Islamic fundamentalists known at that time as “freedom fighters” and now called “terrorists,” was giving testimony.

The elderly man screamed, “The Communists have sullied the honor of our daughters! They taught them to read and to write!”

In 1937 Noel Rosa died at the age of twenty-six.

A musician of the Rio de Janeiro night, who in his short life saw the beach only in photographs, he wrote and sang sambas in the bars of the city that sings them still.

In one of those bars a friend bumped into him at the nocturnal hour of ten in the morning.