Chapter 1

In the Stadium

“There are five thousand of us in this small part of the city. Five thousand of us here. I wonder how many of us --all together in the cities, in the whole country? In this place alone are ten thousand hands, which plant seeds, and make the factories run… Six of us were lost as if among the stars of space. One: dead. Another: beaten, as I never could have believed a human being could be beaten. The other four wanted to end their terror. One: jumping into emptiness. Another: beating his head against the wall. But all of them with the fixed look of death.”                                                             -Victor Jara

“Con permiso, Have you seen my daughter?” The man paced around the arena of the stadium looking for her. He showed different people the picture of his four year-old daughter. No one had seen her. Nobody knew where she was. They didn’t even know why they were there.

He remembered the hot, humid day. He could feel the heat of the sun pressing against his back; his forehead was sweating from a day of walking around Old San Juan. He was gracious for the cool Caribbean breeze that blew on his face when they reached El Morro. As they approached the rolling hills of the mall of this fortification, he could see the military marching out of the fort and into the field. Walls of militiamen closed in on the mass of people gathered around the Plaza de la Revolución, where they commemorated the 3^rd anniversary of the Shift revolution. The militiamen pushed everybody inside a perimeter surrounding the plaza. The militia blocked all surrounding streets around it and wouldn’t allow anybody within it to leave.

He tried to reason with them, telling them they were not a part of the demonstration and they were just heading to the park. The men never responded, they just kept pushing against them and cornering them into the plaza. He struggled to get through the division line with his wife and daughter, but the men were too strong.

He had never felt so confined in his life. There were seven hundred of them contained in and around the plaza. It was a difficult crowd to contain, especially on a day of national celebration like that day. Then the guns started to fire. He told his wife and daughter to bend down and wait until the firing was over. He thought maybe someone was getting a little out of hand with the militiamen so they were forced to fire into the air to control the crowd. After the fire settled, they struggled through the crowd of people to get to the outer edges of the perimeter and try and reason with the army men again.

“Sir, please, we are not involved with this crowd. We were just walking to El Morro to fly our daughter’s kite. This is some sort of misunderstanding. Can you let us through?” The man asked one of the militiamen standing guard on the perimeter controlling the crowd.

“No señor, everybody has to stay within the perimeter. These are direct instructions from the provisional government.”

“¿Qué dijo? ¿Un gobierno nuevo? But we already had The Shift, why is there a new one?”

“No sea estúpido por favor. You know about the coup, right?”

“Were you a part of it?”

“No, I was drafted.”

“Please let us pass”

The militiaman looked at him and his family and thought about it for a second. He answered in a whispering voice. “I can’t. They’ll shoot me if I do.”

“Step back sir,” said another soldier as the man and his family were pushed back into the crowd.

They walked back to the center of the crowd. It’s safer in the middle, he thought. After a stressful 30-minute wait, a flight of army vehicles and three tanks arrived on the scene. A soldier stood on top of one of the tanks and spoke through a loudspeaker.

“We will transport you to a safer dispatch area. Cooperation is required. If you do not cooperate, you will be shot.”

The perimeter of soldiers started moving behind the leading vehicles and the people inside were forced to keep up with the pace of the march.  The man and his family held on to each other’s hands as strong as they could and tried their hardest not to be separated. They were forced to walk faster and faster. In the massive confusion of the moment, the family separated by pushing and trampling people around them. The man lost hold of his daughter, who let go of his hand when she saw a neighbor who was a friend of theirs in the crowd. “Camila, come back here right now!” The crowd kept pushing the man forward while he was trying to reach his daughter who had moved to the back.

After struggling for several minutes, defeated and separated from his daughter and wife, the man decided to just keep walking until he reached the safer dispatch area the soldiers had talked about to look for his family. After a long and excruciating walk, they arrived at the gates of the national stadium. Once inside, the man noticed there were thousands of other people already there. Some of them were being carried in by school buses, and walking out of them handcuffed behind their backs, while other groups of people were also marching in with a military escort like him and his family were.

The stadium was packed full of them. Prisoners of a war waged through centuries of struggle, oppression, and resistance. They all waited impatiently in the halls of the stadium for their final judgment. In these same halls, several years ago, many of them celebrated and shared the ecstasy of change, the magic potion of youth. Music, art, and sport filled the air inside the stadium throughout its existence. The entertainment of the masses was provided for inside these halls. The same halls where the revolutionary forces triumphantly marched into the center stage after the uprising of the Veladoras. When salsa, bomba, plena, and all the other rhythms of the Caribbean resonated through the packed space—penetrating past the walls and windows of the stadium, out into the streets that were streaming like rivers full of people celebrating their long to come, but finally achieved freedom. Now, the center stage did not resonate with songs of hope and change. No music filled the air, only the sounds of anguish, confusion, and pain.

“Con permiso, ¿ha visto a mi niña? Tiene cuatro años. La he estado buscando todo el día.” The man kept asking others inside the stadium. One woman told him she saw the militia locate all the children in a corner of the stadium to which she pointed. The man ran hastily to the children’s section and looked for his daughter. She wasn’t there. He went back to his wife.

“Have you seen her yet?” she asked.

“No, mi amor, nobody knows what’s really going on. It doesn’t seem that bad anyway. She’s probably being taken care of by somebody who knows us.”

“But I already found our friends whom she had walked out to and they told me they lost her too and they were looking for her.”

“Jesucristo todo poderoso, por favor, ayúdanos… We’ll just have to keep looking.”