Reminiscence of Peru

 AyacuchoI!

I was there radicalizing student, giving literature. We carried pamphlets inside rice sacks because nobody checked food on the buses. The students were mostly boys pretending not to be afraid. At night they argued about poetry and revolution like the police weren’t already taking names.

My comrades were massacred before sunrise. The police entered the campus like an invading army, boots crashing against classroom doors, rifles pointed at boys who still carried ink stains on their fingers. They dragged students down staircases by their hair and collars while professors screamed their names from behind broken windows.

I remember one officer laughing while firing into a room already full of smoke. Another kept kicking a wounded man in the ribs because he would not stop reciting slogans through his blood. Pamphlets we spent nights printing were scattered across the courtyard, soaked red under the rainwater flowing through the drains.

I managed to run towards uphill without a single scratch along with me were few injured comrades. Since i was unharmed i was carrying a 7 seven year old kid "jose arcardo", his mom (our Professor) was also injured she was being dragged by less injured comrades.

After finding a safe spot we all stayed there. At around 3 in the morning jose died in my arm while his mom losing blood from bullets she got while covering her son; was asking me "is my son is ok?"

I told her he is fine, she died with a smile on her face thinking she saved her son...

Then i moved to Huallaga Valley

Major hub for cocaine production

After the massacre, the city stopped feeling real to me. Every motorcycle sounded like surveillance. Every knock on the door made hands reach for hidden pistols before bread or water. Those who survived scattered into safe houses across the country. Some disappeared entirely. A few were found later floating in rivers with their wrists tied behind their backs.

Three weeks after the raid, a courier arrived at night carrying a folded cigarette pack with a name and location written inside. No signatures. No explanations. That was how instructions traveled by then. You did not ask questions unless you wanted everyone around you arrested.

We left before dawn in the back of a produce truck with sacks of potatoes piled over us to avoid checkpoints. The mountains slowly gave way to thicker forests, heavier air, and roads that looked half-swallowed by mud. By the time we reached the valley, even the rain smelled different. Sweet, rotten, tropical.

Huallaga was nothing like the university circles. There were no debates there about theory or philosophy. Men carried rifles older than themselves. Children could identify helicopters by sound alone. Entire villages survived between coca fields and military patrols, trapped between armed groups, traffickers, soldiers, and hunger.

The first thing I noticed was how openly everyone spoke about coca. Not proudly. Just practically. Like wheat or rice. A farmer once laughed when I called it “drug production.”

“You think the people in Lima eat ideology?” he asked me. “Coca feeds children.”

One night near a cooking fire, I finally asked a senior comrade the question that had been growing in my mind since arriving there.

“How much of this are we involved in?”

He stayed quiet for a long time before answering.

“More than we admit. Less than they accuse us of.”

He poked the fire with a stick while speaking, eyes fixed on the flames.

“Revolutions need medicine, bullets, radios, routes, informants. None of that falls from the sky. The state calls every peasant here a criminal while foreign men in suits grow rich from the same powder.”

Three days later I got malaria

I almost died i remember. One night i thought i was dying then I felt someone was around me I was in my hammock, I thought it was death here to take me. I had 104°F fever, they'd removed my clothes and were putting wet fabric on me entire day but my temperature didn't drop a single bit. As I was accepting death and remembering what short life i had lived, I felt someone entering in the hammock.. a so colder than me that with its touch i froze. 

It was a woman. She was colder than ice. My lifeless body gathered some strength and clung to her body, as if letting go would make me fall into the abyss of death. Her body was soft like clouds. My hands, shaped by battle, had not felt something so gentle in a long time. It reminded me of the dough my mother used to make for baking flatbread. That night, I never let go of her, and soon our temperatures leveled...

After that I kept on improving i don't know what happened i never got to know who she was.

Before I had fully recovered, they told me I was being moved to Colombia. My fever had gone down, but my body still felt hollow. Some mornings I woke up drenched in sweat, hearing helicopters that were not there. The woman from the hammock still returned in fragments inside my sleep. Sometimes I remembered her face. Sometimes only the coldness of her skin.

The order came after the operations in Lima and Callao. Those attacks changed everything. The government responded with raids so aggressive that entire neighborhoods began sleeping in shifts to warn each other when the police arrived. Safe houses vanished overnight. Students disappeared at checkpoints. Anyone carrying books, pamphlets, or even unfamiliar phone numbers risked detention.

The movement needed routes outside Peru now. Colombia already had older networks, jungle corridors, contacts for medicine, forged documents, and people experienced in surviving long wars. Compared to us, they moved like ghosts. Peru had become too hot, too watched. Every bus station carried faces of wanted men. Every border crossing felt like a trap waiting to close.

We crossed in pieces instead of together. Small groups. False names. I traveled with a man who claimed to be a textile merchant, though his hands carried scars no factory worker gets. During checkpoints he joked with soldiers like old friends while I sat silent beside sacks of cheap clothes hiding ammunition underneath.

Colombia felt different from Peru immediately. The war there was older, more professional, almost routine.

By then I had started telling myself the movement had lost its way. That we were drifting from Marxism- Leninism- Maoism, from the people, from everything we once promised.

But if I speak honestly now, I do not know how much of that was conviction and how much was exhaustion. Fear changes ideology faster than books do.

I had not slept properly in months. Every loud sound felt like another raid beginning. Faces of the dead started appearing in ordinary places. Bus windows. Rivers. Crowded streets. Sometimes I caught myself studying exits in restaurants before sitting down. Sometimes I woke up unable to remember which country I was in.

Deep inside, I think I already wanted a reason to run.

Colombia was becoming more dangerous by the week. The border routes were collapsing under pressure from the military, informants were everywhere, and rumors spread constantly about people disappearing after internal interrogations. Nobody trusted anyone fully anymore. Men who once spoke about solidarity now spoke mostly about infiltration, punishment, discipline.

I told myself I was leaving because the revolution was changing.

But another truth existed beside that one: I was tired of death.

The contact who arranged my escape was an old Venezuelan linked to Bolivarian circles near the border. I never learned his real name. Everybody called him “El Maestro” despite the fact he looked more like a retired mechanic than a revolutionary courier. He carried forged papers inside a Bible with the center cut out.

He listened to me for two nights before agreeing to help. Mostly he watched me silently while I spoke. At one point he interrupted and asked,

“Do you still believe in the cause?”

I answered too slowly.

He noticed.

We crossed into Venezuela through routes used by smugglers and migrants. No dramatic border crossing. Just mud, insects, exhaustion, and men with rifles pretending not to see us after receiving cash. The safe house near Maracaibo was full of people from different wars and failed movements. Colombians, Peruvians, a few Central Americans. Some still believed completely. Others looked spiritually dead already.

Chávez’s people were not officially helping men like me. At least not openly. But the Bolivarian networks had sympathizers everywhere in those years. Doctors, local organizers, retired soldiers, trade union men. Quiet assistance moved through personal loyalty more than paperwork. A bed here. Documents there. Transport without questions.

Months later, I was moved again, this time to Cuba.

I expected Havana to feel triumphant. Instead it felt tired. Proud, but tired. Like an old boxer still standing out of stubbornness alone.

I did not meet Fidel immediately. Men like him existed behind layers of security, bureaucracy, and myth. First came interviews with officials, intelligence people, party cadres wanting reports about Peru, Colombia, the coca routes, the condition of the left across the continent. Everybody smoked constantly. Every room smelled of coffee, sweat, and tobacco.

When I finally met him, the thing that surprised me most was not his authority but his patience. He listened far more than he spoke. I had imagined a historic figure. Instead I found an old man asking precise questions while wrapped in olive-green fabric.

He wanted details.

How were students reacting?

Were peasants still sympathetic?

Had fear become stronger than ideology?

Were the Americans directly involved or only advising?

I gave him everything I knew. Or everything I thought I knew.

At one point he asked me quietly:

“And you? Why did you leave?”

I started answering politically. About deviations. Corruption. Loss of direction.

But halfway through speaking, I stopped.

Because for the first time I realized how rehearsed my answer sounded.

The old man kept staring at me without interruption.

Finally I said the truth instead.

“I think I was afraid I would die there.”

He nodded once after that. Not disappointed. Not surprised.

Just tired.

Cuba changed me slowly. Not through speeches or slogans, but through routine. For the first time in years I lived somewhere people slept without expecting gunfire before dawn. I studied medicine there under men and women who treated healing almost like revolutionary discipline. They believed saving a single life carried as much dignity as carrying a rifle once had.

At first I struggled badly. My hands had learned destruction more easily than precision. During anatomy classes I sometimes froze staring at blood for too long, remembering jungles, raids, bodies on concrete floors. Sleep remained unreliable. I still woke at night reaching for weapons that no longer existed beside me.

But Cuba gave me structure when my mind was collapsing into memory. Lectures in the morning. Hospital rounds in the afternoon. Endless coffee. Humid nights beside old buildings that looked permanently exhausted by history itself. The island felt poor, proud, stubborn. Like a man refusing to kneel despite arthritis in every bone.

Medicine changed the way I saw suffering. In war, death arrives loudly and all at once. In hospitals it comes quietly. Through lungs filling slowly. Through old women dying alone. Through fathers pretending not to be afraid in front of children. I began understanding that violence was not only bullets and massacres. Poverty itself was violence. Isolation was violence. Disease was violence.

When COVID spread across the world, many of us were sent abroad as part of the medical brigades. I was assigned to Italy. The irony did not escape me. After surviving jungles and insurgencies, I found myself fighting death inside overcrowded European hospitals.

Italy during those months did not feel like Europe people imagine in photographs. It felt broken. Ambulances screamed through empty streets day and night. Doctors slept in chairs. Patients died without families beside them because nobody was allowed near the infected wards. I remember holding phones beside dying people so relatives could say goodbye through screens. Some nurses cried in bathrooms between shifts so patients would not see them collapse.

The smell of disinfectant still reminds me of those days.

Since then, I remained in Italy. Partly because life kept moving forward. Partly because I no longer knew where else I belonged. Peru felt haunted. Cuba felt distant. India felt like a country belonging to a younger version of myself.

Then in 2021, Chairman Gonzalo died.

I never met him personally. For years I had imagined I eventually would. In movements like ours, leaders stop feeling human after a while. They become symbols carried through whispers, pamphlets, prison stories, songs.

I still believe he was a man who genuinely wanted liberation for the poor. But wanting liberation and building it are different things. Somewhere between ideology, war, fear, and power, the movement lost itself. Maybe history cornered us into brutality. Maybe we betrayed ourselves willingly. I still do not know.

What I know is simpler and harder. Too many people died. Some deserved it. Some deserved remembrance. Some deserved apologies. Most deserved lives larger than the graves they received.

Even now, after all these years, sleep does not come easily to me.

Sometimes I still see that woman from Ayacucho lying beside me with her dead son in my arms, blood soaking through her clothes while she kept asking whether her son survived. I lied to her until the very end.

She died smiling because she believed her child was alive.

I have spent years wondering whether that lie was an act of mercy or cowardice.

And every time I close my eyes, I see that smile again.