The Eagle's Throne

17. GENERAL CÍCERO ARRUZA TO GENERAL MONDRAGÓN VON BERTRAB

General, my friend and my superior (although never superior to the president himself, whose office makes him the commander in chief of the armed forces), hear me out because I smell a rat. Something fishy is going on.

You and I both know that there are times when the deployment of armed forces is our only option. The army intervention in San Luis Potosí against strikers who are causing trouble for the Japanese and acting like real-life samurai made it very clear that around here foreign investment is respected — why, if it weren’t for the cheap labor they wouldn’t have come here in the first place, and where would that have left us? Twiddling our thumbs. I commend you for executing such a clean, swift operation, General. Anyway, I’m glad that these shows of force are your responsibility. As the saying goes, in Mexico we like our deals crystal clear and our hot chocolate thick, but all too often we end up with watery chocolate and shady deals. What I mean is that, historically speaking, they’ve always slipped a little goat’s meat into our tamales, if you know what I mean. You know well enough, General, that there’s always been a big difference between officers trained at military academies, like you, and those of us who’ve risen up through the ranks. I’m not saying that one is better than the other. You yourself know that our great general Felipe Ángeles came out of the Saint-Cyr Academy in France and went on to win the battle against his former fellow soldiers in the Federal Army in 1914. But our general Pancho Villa was a fugitive rancher, a man who had killed his sister’s rapist, an out-and-out bandit, a rustler, a cattle thief, and so on, and one fine day he found his calling and put together a rural army of eighty thousand men, almost all of them peasants, joined later by ranchers from the north, merchants, and even writers and professionals. And Villa accomplished everything that Ángeles accomplished, but he hadn’t attended any fancy foreign academy — he didn’t even know how to read and write! Even so, he beat the Federal Army. What I’m trying to say, General, is that I’m not checking up on you, nor should you underestimate me. Deal? We are— oh, what’s the word — complementary, like salt and lime to a good tequila, wouldn’t you say? You win the big national battles, and I take care of the little local skirmishes. You finish off the car workers striking in San Luis Potosí. But I’m not allowed to beat the shit out of those snot-nosed sons of bitches at the university. They claim it’s because the university’s autonomy can’t be violated. But didn’t those little savages already violate it themselves by destroying the science labs and pissing on the dean’s chair? You’ll tell me, General, that I already have my hands full in a city plagued by fear, express kidnappings, extortion, robbery, murder. . You know the problem well enough. Say I decide to clean up the police force. So I get rid of one or two thousand crooked policemen. What do I accomplish? I end up swelling the ranks of the criminal rings by a thousand, two thousand. Ex-cops go straight into kidnapping, drug dealing, or robbery. Nice one. So I find another two thousand boys, young kids, clean, idealistic. Can’t be accused of not trying, and you know it. But I’m so unlucky. When will I get a break? Within a year all my men are corrupt, because how can my five-thousand-peso salary compete with the five-million-peso sweetener that my crooked policeman gets for doing a single job for some well-known drug dealer? I’m not lacking in goodwill, General. I’m one of those men who’d gladly kill a thousand innocent people to keep one guilty man from going free. And speaking of policemen, don’t forget that I wasn’t trained like our dear Cantinflas in that movie, walking the beat and seducing maids to get a free plate of beans (but allow me to share a little joke with you: When it comes to maids, first you wash them, then you screw them, and then, as a reward, you send them to the brothel). What I’m really trying to say here is that I got my education fighting guerrillas, rebels, and insurrectionist groups that have existed in Mexico for as long as I can remember — one day in Morelos, another day in Chiapas, another day in Guerrero. . And what did I learn from all that, General? One glaring truth: The night is worth a million recruits. That’s why I hate mysteries — they’re like the night. It’s in the darkness that all those invisible armies are born and, one fine day, without even having to show their faces, they’ve got us fucked. But in the fight against the guerrillas, General, we have the advantage of being able to break all the rules, because that’s exactly what the enemy does. General, the best way to get your troops to love you is to let them pillage what they want and then blame it on the enemy. To go out to kill for food — tell me, can there be anything more appealing to a poor Mexican soldier, one of those crew-cut recruits who are the usual cannon fodder since we don’t have blacks like they do in the U.S.? Tell me, you who went to a German academy. Oh, how good it is to give orders like you do, my general, from afar, like in a computer game, knowing that your enemies are a fortress that must be attacked with military might, by discovering their weak side, breaking through their lines, scaring civilians, since all successful rebellions have plenty of civilian support, don’t they? Do you think I don’t feel some longing, even nostalgia, for the days when I was a line commander, face-to-face with demanding, tough, challenging enemies? Well, just look at me now, using kindergarten stunts to keep things in order — break up the protest, General Arruza, they tell me, let rats out into the auditorium, drop plastic bags full of piss from the upstairs balconies. . Every night I still dream of our beautiful countryside, of the dogs barking at the stars, of dead bodies hanging from posts, the wind whistling in their wide-open mouths. And now, General, all of a sudden I spot an opportunity and I very loyally communicate it to you, because its execution will be your responsibility, although the information may come to me first. And if so, we’ll have no choice but to join forces, my good general. Some things we feel with our skin, others we see with our eyes, and still others just beat away in our hearts. To cut a long story short, there’s a secret, General. A very well-kept secret at the San Juan de Ulúa fortress. Yes, right at the entrance to the port of Veracruz. How do I know this? Because a spy told me. Or, if you will, a little bird. An affectionate little lady bird who is not only mine. . or in other words she’s the very lovely cage where my own little birdie sings. Ulúa, cage, castle, and prison. You may be wondering how this could possibly be connected with all the other issues we face now — whether the president will rise to the occasion, the matter of the gringos who’ve threatened and isolated us, the question of who will become the next president, the matter of the students, the peasants, the factory workers. .

There are a thousand threads in this fabric, General, and yet my old soldier’s intuition keeps on asking: Ulúa, Ulúa, what’s going on in Ulúa?