“But tell me why…” He always began his sentences with those words, and the workers nicknamed him that, Tell-me-why. Tell me why Mohán carries girls off to the bottom of the river if he could make love with them more comfortably and without getting wet on the shore?
“Míster has already started with his tell-me-why’s,” they would laugh. “Well, because he lives down there and that’s where his sumptuous palaces are.”
“But tell me why Luz-de-la-Ciénaga eats little children when there are so many pigs and chickens and fish…”
“Because if he doesn’t eat children he’s not scary, míster Brasco, and his stories wouldn’t interest anyone, not even you.”
According to the testimony of old workers at the Troco who took active part in the rice strike and with whom I have been able to discuss the events, Brasco was the only one of the company managers who at the hour of the ruckus didn’t take refuge in the golf club, which besides having green lawns was also, and above all, an authentic concrete fortress designed for these eventualities, although it had been camouflaged beneath the warm color of the bougainvilleas.
“We’re not going to do anything to you, míster Brasco, we just want you to taste this garbage, to see what you think,” said one of the men that surrounded him, corralling him into a corner.
“Okay, I’ll taste it, but don’t push me or touch me,” he told them. “You’re right, it’s pig slop, from now on no more rice balls,” he promised, and the workers applauded as they returned to their places to continue their lunch now that the uproar was over. The last few uninspired projectiles flew overhead. Pajabrava stood on top of a table to harangue, taking advantage of the opportunity to add followers to his anti-masturbatory crusade. Others played soccer, and the matter wouldn’t have gone any further — one more among so many harsh moments without serious consequences that occurred daily in the midst of the work stress at Campo 26—if at that moment a spokesman for the management hadn’t communicated over the loudspeakers that law enforcement officers were already on their way to the camp, that if the revolt didn’t cease there would be reprisals against the instigators, and that the workers should immediately liberate Mr. Brasco, who was being criminally detained as a hostage, or the company would have no choice but to respond with force.
The festive air of a few minutes ago froze with the stridency of the declaration, and the mere mention of reprisals and the presence of uniformed officers burned their spirits triple what the rice balls had. Frank Brasco, who had already left the dining hall, was the first to be surprised by the inopportunely timed threats and was on his way to the golf club to report that the incident was already over and that he was safe and sound when he was detained by the same maintenance men who had corralled him earlier.
“You’re not going anywhere, míster Brasco. Nobody wanted to take you as a hostage, but now they have forced us to. You heard for yourself that it was their idea, and since things are the way they are, we have to listen to them, because you have become our only guarantee.”
“At that moment I felt afraid. For the first time in the two years that I had been working at the 26 I was afraid,” Frank Brasco tells me as he shovels the snow from the entrance to his cabin in Vermont, where I have come to interview him. “The men from operations were decent and proper and I felt safe with them, but there were some barbarians among the men from maintenance. They had a reputation for being unpredictable in fights with the bosses, and it was precisely one man, Mono Nieves, and another they called Caranchas, both radicals from maintenance, who were taking me hostage. It was to my disadvantage that they had found me at a particular moment when I was behind the dining hall where the others couldn’t see us, and I knew that being caught between those two irrational parties was going to be difficult, on one side the managers and on the other Mono Nieves and his men, who had just been handed on a silver platter the perfect opportunity to start an imbroglio.”
“Don’t worry, boys. I’m going to the office to tell them there’s been a misunderstanding. You’ll see, with a little goodwill everything will be cleared up,” Brasco tried to say, but at that point Mono Nieves and his men had already hatched plans in their heads.
“But tell me why you have to do this,” Brasco began.
“There is no tell-me-why that can save you,” interrupted Nieves. “You come with us and forget about asking questions.”
Meanwhile, in the dining hall, the tension had become unbearable for the more than two hundred men who knew they were cornered in a building that would soon become a trap with no way out. From the loudspeakers came threats of the siege of the camp if the workers didn’t release engineer Brasco at once, “deliberately captured as a hostage by the group of rebels in the dining hall.”
“Where is Tell-me-why?” Lino el Titi Vélez started shouting, trying to take control, but the engineer had disappeared and nobody knew where he was.
They tell me that traditionally in critical situations like this, with the imminence of disaster, the old union spirit for fighting is reborn. It had been dormant for a couple of years after a slew of debilitating strikes that ended in deaths and massive layoffs, and the old leaders, among them Lino el Titi, came out of their slumber to roar again like shaggy beasts, and their roars were recognized by the multitude. They declared themselves in permanent assembly and set midnight as zero hour to declare the strike. Someone produced a pen, another a sheet of notebook paper, and five veterans, swept up by the sudden enthusiasm and already having forgotten the punishment that had previously paralyzed them, sat around a table. Minutes later, one of them, nicknamed Bollo de Yuca because his mother had been selling balls of yuca at the entrance to the camp for years, read out loud the sheaf of petitions they had just improvised, which began with the demand for the immediate withdrawal of law enforcement officers.
The second demand got right to the heart of the matter and centered on the rice: “The workers of Campo 26 are fed up with the abominable quality of the food that the Tropical Oil Company provides for us, in particular the abhorred and inedible greasy rice balls, which we demand be replaced by decent, good-quality rice, and which should be accompanied by a portion of meat or vegetable, and in no case shall rice again be accepted by the workers as the sole lunch ingredient, as has happened so often in the past.” To this stipulation they added a detailed list of the daily humiliations that had been poisoning the men’s spirits for a long time, demanding potable water in the camp to halt intestinal infections, diarrhea, and dysentery; clothes-washing facilities near the barracks, because the men had nowhere to scrub their clothes; a section in the cemetery in Tora so that the workers’ mortal remains would have a Christian burial and wouldn’t be just dumped into any clearing in the wild jungle; and lastly, a sufficient number of latrines, because the existing ones, numbering one for each fifty men, forced them to make lines that were so long that the majority chose to relieve themselves behind the bushes, creating unclean and unhealthy conditions.
Over the loudspeakers, the management threatened to intervene if engineer Brasco wasn’t delivered to the front door of the hospital within the half hour. But how were they supposed to return him if they didn’t know his whereabouts? Then Mono Nieves, Caranchas, and the rest of the maintenance crew leadership appeared and confessed to the strike committee that they were holding Brasco and they would free him in exchange for the demilitarization of the area.