We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution

Three. Birth of the ‘‘Tupamaros’’

Three. Birth of the ‘‘Tupamaros’’ The verses of the people can be flowers or bullets, the bullet that defends them, or the bullet that kills them. —Alí Primera From Ñangaras to Tupamaros They were called Ñangaras. As the Metropolitan Police flooded up the Avenida Sucre and surrounded the first blocks of the Monte Piedad neighborhood of 23 de Enero, which perch strategically on a blu√ overlooking the ostensible seat of Venezuelan political power, the young residents of Block 5 were prepared. They crept swiftly up the dark and narrow stairway, grimy from decades of disrepair, and onto the roof of the hulking, thirteenstory structure. As a police helicopter shuddered toward the building, the young Rodríguez brothers produced a makeshift rocket launcher, which they quickly attempted to stabilize, aimed, and fired. These three brothers —Ricardo, Carlos, and Sergio, the last of whom would be martyred but a few short years later—were known a√ectionately in the neighborhood as los cepillini because their short, flat-top haircuts resembled nothing so much as the bristles of a broom. The projectile flew wide, missing the helicopter, but 68 chapter three this was not all that had gone wrong: in the commotion, Ricardo had lost half of his thumb. It was painful, certainly, but more dangerous than the blood spurting from his damaged artery was the unmistakable evidence of a political crime. Ricardo rushed down to his apartment, where he quickly attempted to bandage the wound, but within a few short minutes, having received word of the botched attack by the Ñangaras of Block 5, police stormed the building. Given their history of militancy, the Rodríguez brothers were automatically the prime suspects and so the first to receive a visit. Ricardo had no other option than to lie because the truth would see him in the gulag of Venezuelan democracy at best, and in the torture chamber of the nearby Metropolitan Police outpost at worst.∞ He had been feeding his newborn, he explained, with his bandaged thumb concealed behind the frightened creature and pain concealed behind his calm façade. Even many years later, relief is still visible on his face as he recounts this close brush with the forces of neoliberal order: ‘‘if they had found me, I might have been disappeared for good!’’ Ricardo holds the remains of his mangled thumb close to my face, as if to emphasize the severity of the injury as well as the exceptionality of his fate: all were not so lucky, although under such conditions luck is, at best, a relative measure. Many were permanently disappeared, and many, like Ricardo’s brother Sergio, were shot down in plain view (see chapter 4). Members of the Block 5 Collective tell me of people being shot execution style and thrown o√ the roof of the building as a warning to others, reminiscent of the Southern Cone’s Operation Condor but a forceful reminder that such atrocities were not limited to formal dictatorships. Many more su√ered an intermediate fate. As Ricardo tells me his story, an older Afro-Venezuelan man looks on quietly before volunteering the information that he had been disappeared for two months at one point, and that this had not been his only brush with the violence of the state; he spontaneously lifts his shirt to show bullet wounds in his side to match those on his chin and arm. His name? He’d rather not say. Can we take a picture? ‘‘If you want my picture, ask the disip,’’ the notorious state intelligence service. Did they consider themselves ‘‘Tupamaros’’? My question evokes a contemporary term of both celebration and condemnation, one that reveals as it shrouds, and for which I am given only partial (and inevitably multiple) explanations. One onlooker, scarred physically by state repression and emotionally by the period of addiction that followed in its wake, puts it bluntly: ‘‘We’re the real Tupamaros. Look, I don’t have a belt! My apartment is full of cockroaches! This is the life of a revolutionary!’’ birth of the ‘‘tupamaros’’ 69 Fuego en el 23 ‘‘Hay fuego en el 23, en el 23 . . .’’ When legendary Puerto Rican salsa combo Sonora Ponceña recorded their epic 1969 hit ‘‘Fuego en el 23,’’ they would have had little idea what revolutionary aims their words would eventually come to serve in distant Venezuela , despite the fact that the late leader of the Machetero independence...