Something Fierce by Carmen Aguirre Read Free Book Online Page A

the San Francisco open market, almost killing ourselves on cobblestones. The hills in La Paz were so steep you couldn’t help breaking into a run as you headed down. People had screamed when they saw us coming and jumped out of the way. A couple of mules had followed us, elbowing each other and laughing, perplexed as to why we hadn’t just piled the chairs onto their backs.
    Our new home in Miraflores, a lower-middle-class neighbourhood with the national stadium at its centre, was at the end of an alley off one of the great boulevards that criss-crossed this part of town. We’d found the house through Tammy’s connections. Tammy was from Wyoming, but she’d lived here since the sixties, which was when Bob first met her. They’d both been hitchhiking through these parts and ended up volunteering at a hospital in the highlands. Tammy’s hairy legs indicated to me that she was On the Left. But when I announced how excited I was to live in the country where Ché Guevara had died a mere twelve years earlier, a fact I remembered from one of my uncle Boris’s stories, Bob pulled me aside and said sharply: “Don’t do that. Tammy’s not a revolutionary. She’s a pacifist. She has no idea what we’re really doing here.” The loneliness I’d been feeling off and on since we’d begun our underground life dropped like a stone into my gut and stayed there.
    Our house consisted of two rooms separated by a little staircase. We slept on the floor of the upstairs room in our sleeping bags. Both rooms were spacious, though, and there was a bathroom off the upstairs room and a kitchen off the downstairs one. We shared our courtyard with the landlords: Señora Siles, a matriarch in pearl earrings and a housecoat; her daughter Liliana, a woman in her thirties with a Dorothy Hamill haircut and wobbly high heels; her younger son, Juan, a playboy who rode a motorcycle and had papered the walls of his room with pictures of butt-naked women; and Liliana’s eight-year-old son, Pedro. They were part of a clan that stretched back to the time of the Conquest, a prominent family of politicians ranging from the far right to the left, and they liked to tell us as often as possible that they were of full-blooded Spanish descent.
    Bob and my mother filled us in on the details. Señora Siles’s father, Hernando Siles, had been president of Bolivia from 1926 until 1930. Her brother, Hernán Siles Zuazo, had taken part in the 1952 revolution that led to the nationalization of Bolivia’s most important mines and to major agrarian reform. Siles Zuazo became vice-president after the revolution had triumphed, and then president. During the Second World War South America had flourished, Mami explained, because the United States was otherwise occupied. But by the mid-fifties, the U.S. had turned its full attention back to the South, and during Siles Zuazo’s term as president, Bolivia was pressured to adopt economic programs that were to the benefit of the United States and the local bourgeoisie. In 1971, General Hugo Banzer, who had trained at the U.S. Army’s infamous School of the Americas, was installed by Richard Nixon after a military coup overthrew the left-leaning president, Juan José Torres. Banzer had Torres killed, and during his rule, thousands of Bolivians were imprisoned and tortured. Many disappeared, and hundreds were murdered. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank poured millions in credit into Bolivia as the country’s natural resources were handed over to multinational corporations. Half a year before we arrived, Banzer had called elections to calm the volatile political climate. Through massive fraud, a general of his own choosing was elected, even though Siles Zuazo, the leader of a coalition of left-wing parties, had actually won. Now a conservative politician named Walter Guevara was serving as interim president. Bolivia was a