Cold War or Cali Cartel’s Operation Sofia

By Michelle Primeau


I want so much to write something beautiful and to be a good Christian,
but a journalism peer sits slumped over her pen. Outside a blizzard glares white.
Her lip twitches over a puddle of drool while the Ixil witness goes on, a sweet
voice-over of his village in Quiché falling under the weight of the hills Marxist guerrillas, her teeth grind,
deprived of water through the churning of the Xalala hydro-electric dam and displacing thousands
of indigenous into the plundered forests and farmlands. His father decapitated, mother and sister raped,
their skirts pulled over their heads and suffocated under the hot breath of the Kaibilies, Confradias,
Zetas all taking turns at thrusting into the gaping cavity of the exhumed remains, her nose whistles,
scorching the mother and earth before the witnesses young eyes. Mining concessions granted
to transnational gold, silver, nickel, and zinc companies to displace the rural communities as if massacre
wasn’t enough to fire them into U.S. evangelical funded New Life refugee camps. The new life existing
under tin roofs supported by logs which do burn like their homes, but protected from the aerial bombs
the refugees outran to escape the death squad dossier logbook in which their names might appear.
Where the bodies of 200,000 might not, but rather disappear into the mass graves, a reprieve from
torture, detention, and execution of the unarmed Mayan collaborators and sympathizers, the villagers,
the whole Ixil peasant population are pro-EGP guerillas and must be controlled through
counterinsurgency and psychological operations. The girl, still dreaming sugarplums and skulls in pink
scarves and brightly woven threads who haven’ t lost their brilliance in 27 years, her mouth goes slack.
She is cutting telephone lines and constructing sandbag roadblocks with her grandparents and little
sister and watch their removal, illegal elements under Romeo Garcia and Efrain Montt, whose own
daughter is in bed doing lines of coke with her husband, a U.S. Rep and friend to silent
Clinton. The girl wipes her creased face and flips her ponytail as she changes sides to hear the witness
with her other ear before the Spanish National Court tries her on counts of sleeping off genocide.
I will not fall under the cloak of the p-o-e-t now I lay me down to sleep jive.