Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa

his gut in a pestilential stream and cursing his stomach, when he heard them. They kicked the door open and shouted his name. He knew who they were and what they wanted. He had been waiting for them ever since the provincial subprefect practically forced him to become lieutenant governor of Andamarca. Without bothering to pull up his trousers, Don Medardo threw himself to the ground, crawled like a worm to the cemetery, and slithered into a grave that had been dug the night before, pushing away the slab that served as a tombstone and then pulling it back into place. He spent the morning and afternoon huddling on the ice-cold remains of his cousin, Don Florisel Aucatoma, not seeing anything but hearing a good deal of what happened in that village where he was, in theory, the highest-ranking political official.
    The members of the militia were familiar with the town, or had been well informed by their accomplices among the residents. They posted guards at all points of egress while synchronized columns walked along the five parallel streets of shacks and cottages spread in rectangular blocks around the church and town square. They wore sneakers or Indian sandals, a few were barefoot, and their steps could not be heard on the Andamarca streets: they were all either dirt or asphalt except for the main thoroughfare, Lima Avenue, which was paved with rough cobblestones. In groups of three or four they went directly to where those on the list were sleeping and pulled them from their beds. They captured the mayor, the justice of the peace, the postmaster, the owners of the three stores and their wives, two men who had been discharged from the army, the pharmacist and moneylender Don Sebastián Yupanqui, and two technicians sent by the Agrarian Bank to instruct the campesinos in the use of irrigation and fertilizers. They shoved and kicked them onto the square in front of the church, where the rest of the militia had assembled the village.
    By then day had broken and, except for three or four who still wore balaclavas, their faces were uncovered. Older boys and men predominated in their ranks, but there were also women and children, some of whom could not have been older than twelve. Those who did not carry machine guns, rifles, or revolvers had old shotguns, clubs, machetes, knives, slingshots, and sticks of dynamite on bandoliers, like miners. They also carried red flags with the hammer and sickle, which they raised over the bell tower of the church, on the flagpole of the town hall, and at the top of a pisonay tree with red flowers that overlooked the village. While the trials were being held—they did this in an orderly way, as if they had done it before—some of them painted the walls of Andamarca with slogans: Long live the armed struggle, the people’s war, the Marxist-Leninist guiding principles of President Gonzalo, Death to imperialism, revisionism, the traitors and informers of the genocidal, anti-worker regime.
    Before they began, they sang hymns to the proletarian revolution, in Spanish and Quechua, proclaiming that the people were breaking their chains. Since the Andamarcans did not know the words, they mingled with them, making them repeat the verses and whistling the melodies for them.
    Then the trials began. In addition to those on the list, others, accused of stealing, abusing the weak and the poor, committing adultery, and engaging in the vices of individualism, had to face the tribunal composed of the entire village.
    They took turns speaking, in Spanish and in Quechua. The revolution had a million eyes, a million ears. No one could hide from the people and escape punishment. This scum, these dogs, had tried and now here they were, on their knees, begging for mercy from those they had stabbed in the back. These hyenas served the puppet government that murdered campesinos, shot workers, sold the country to imperialism and revisionism, and labored day and night to make the rich richer and the poor