Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa Page A

poorer. Hadn’t this excrement gone to Puquio to beg the authorities there to send the Civil Guard, supposedly to protect Andamarca? Hadn’t they incited their neighbors to betray the Revolution’s sympathizers to the military patrols?
    They took turns and patiently explained the crimes, real and inferred, that these servants of a government drenched in blood, these accomplices of repression and torture, had committed against each and every one of them, and their children and their children’s children. They instructed them, they encouraged them to take part, to speak without fear of reprisal, for the armed power of the people protected them.
    Little by little, breaking out of their timidity and confusion, spurred on by their own fear, by the atmosphere of exaltation, and by darker motivations—old quarrels, buried resentments, silent envy, family hatreds—the townspeople began to speak. It was true, Don Sebastián was mean to anyone who couldn’t pay for medicine in cold hard cash. If you didn’t pay that same day, he kept your security no matter how you begged and pleaded. Once, for example…By midday, many Andamarcans had found the courage to walk to the middle of the square and present their complaints and recriminations and point the finger at bad neighbors, bad friends, bad kin. They grew impassioned as they made their statements; their voices trembled when they recalled the sons and daughters they had lost, the animals killed by drought and disease, and how every day brought fewer buyers, more hunger, more sickness, more children in the cemetery.
    They were all condemned by a forest of hands. Many relatives of the accused did not raise their hands when it was time to vote, but they were frightened by the fermenting anger and hostility and did not dare to speak out in their defense.
    The sentence was carried out by forcing them to kneel and rest their heads on the low wall around the well. They were held down while a line of neighbors filed past, smashing them with stones taken from the construction site next to the village hall. The militia did not take part in the executions. No gun fired. No knife stabbed. No machete hacked. Only hands, stones, and sticks were used, for were the weapons of the people to be wasted on rats and scorpions? By taking action, by participating, by carrying out the people’s justice, the Andamarcans would become conscious of their own power. This was a destiny they could not avoid. They were no longer victims, they were beginning to be liberators.
    Then came the trial of bad citizens, bad husbands, bad wives, social parasites, degenerates, whores, faggots, the shame of Andamarca, putrefying garbage that the feudal capitalist regime, supported by North American imperialism and Soviet revisionism, encouraged in order to still the combative spirit of the masses. This, too, would change. The purifying wildfire of the Revolution would burn away egotistical bourgeois individualism, and the collectivist spirit and class solidarity would flourish.
    The townspeople seemed to listen more than they really listened, to understand more than they really understood. But after the events of the morning they were agitated enough, confused and bewildered enough, to take part with no hesitation in this second ritual, which they would remember, and their children and grand-children would remember, as the stormiest in the history of Andamarca.
    Señora Domitila Chontaza, encouraged by the exhortations of the succession of armed women and men who took turns speaking, was the first to point an accusing finger. Every time her husband took a drink he kicked her across the floor and called her “devil’s shit.” Her husband, a hunchback with hair like a porcupine’s, swore it wasn’t true. Then he contradicted himself and whined that when he drank, an evil spirit took possession of his body, the anger came, and he had to get rid of it by beating her. The