Resisting Fascism – Remembering 9/11/73
I remember where I was standing in the common room of our college apartment when I first heard the news of the U.S. overthrow of the Allende government on that September day in 1973. Little did I know then that ten years later I would join the harvest brigades in Nicaragua along with thousands of other international brigadistas. We chose to stand in solidarity with the Nicaraguan people in protest of the Reagan regime’s war making, assisting Nicaraguan students and campesinos to bring in the cotton and coffee harvests, threatened by U.S. backed contras.
On February 3, 1984 I wrote this first stanza of a poem from the Pacific coast cotton fields of Punta Nata, Chinadega, near the Honduran border.
“El Fuego de Punta Nata”
5AM
the ember glow of breakfast fires
the soft parade to the latrine
the rooster’s raucous chant
signal a rising
into the precious cool of predawn
standing, my gaze falls to the horizon
shark tooth lights puncture the dawn
the U.S. frigate and its piranha boat fleet
burn crosses on the sea
betraying the pacific waters
on which they trespass
6AM
cotton fields rise white and drifting
through the solid sky or morning
in the background, Volcan Cosiquina
grandmother of these fields of dust and cotton
her fire long since spent
at peace now with her children beneath
from the clear sky
beyond the silent mountain
thunder rolls, the earth trembles
eyes and ears question the morning
no answers forthcoming
7PM
night surrounds the ancient ceiba tree
centerpiece of the village
overseer of these gentle paths
tortillas on the fire
shadows dance to a Latin beat
children’s laughter rolling with their hoops
into this soft collaboration of the senses
an urgent call – “Barricada! Barricada!”
the evening paper arrives
dos centavos into a tiny palm
the headlines recall the thunder of the morning
“Agresiones deterioran perspectivas de paz”
“Attacks damage prospects for peace”
Manzanilla, Chinandega
at 6AM on the morning of February 3
I face the sun with beans and rice
four Push and Pull fighter-bombers
army green, unmarked
flying from Honduras
violate Nicaraguan airspace
they bomb a unit of the EPS
beyond this mountain
leaving seven Nicaraguans wounded
several fuel deposits destroyed
the previous evening’s target
we thought we saw fireworks in the distance
a radio installation of the
Ministry of Agricultural Development and Agrarian Reform
four Nicaraguans dead, four more wounded
my paycheck delivers
the Internal Revenue Service
the Federal Treasury
the Central Intelligence Agency
the Honduran military
the blood of fifteen Nicaraguan citizens
I realize now that my gradual turning toward those cotton fields actually began on September 11, 1973, the beginning of my awareness of the long history of U.S. interventions in Latin America. In the aftermath of Nixon and Kissinger’s destruction of Chilean democracy I began to listen to the cultural workers of the other Americas. I attended the concerts of Quilapyun and Inti Illimani, the exiled Chilean musicians of the New Song movement, and I listened to the recordings of Violeta Parra and Victor Jara. I read the reporting of Eduardo Galeano, the novels of Isabel Allende and the poetry of Pablo Neruda. These bright lights pointed me backward in time to the Spanish Civil War, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and its sister brigades of the struggles against the forces of fascism in the 1930s. And then they turned my attention to the news reports of President Carter’s support for the Salvadoran military’s attacks on its own citizens followed by Reagan’s covert war on the Sandinistas.
What do I learn from these memories today? Perhaps simply that international solidarity in the face of emerging fascism is a critical part of our history as activists and as people who want to remember what it means to be human in relationship with a living earth. How do we honor and join that lineage today in the face of these same forces – the patriarchs of fascism and the sisters and brothers of our resistance? | A guest post by
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