Jose Vasquez Mirobal lived in the small village of Guasimalito hidden in the northern Andean foothills, 150 kilometers south of Medellin. He was 84 years old. His family had been here as long as any of them knew and life had not changed as long as any of them could remember. They owned a small swatch of land, carved out of the rugged, wooded slopes, where they grew coffee, by hand, hiking the five kilometers up from the village each day during the growing season to tend the plants and carrying the yield down on their backs at harvest. With his craggy, brown skin and stooped posture, Jose looked like he had been whittled from the stock of one of the plants he tended. On Sundays, he went to mass at the village church, Nuestra Senora de la Asuncion, lit candles to the Virgin and prayed to be blessed with favorable weather.
At his age, Jose couldn’t help much on the farm - and nobody expected him to. Still, each day, while the coffee was maturing, he would hike up to the fields and walk among the plants and inspect their progress, picking a bean here and bean there, rolling them in his hands and pressing them to his face to inhale the aroma. Whatever opinion he formed of the development or quality of the crops in the course of his inspection, he never passed it along to anyone. In fact, he never spoke at all.
On this particular day Jose, taking his cue from the sun low in the sky, began his journey back down to the village. Through the woods at the south end of the fields, he picked his way between the rocks and trees and fallen moldering branches and leaves splashed by the late day sunlight, the steamy aroma of rain and flowers strong in his nostrils, vines like snakes reticulated in the green-draped canopy overhead. At the clearing, he could see down the hill to the village set against more lush hills and far in the distance the mountain peaks, snow-covered even at this time of year. He removed his cap and mopped the sweat from his forehead. Smoke from a hundred cooking fires spiraled up and hovered low over the houses of the village and in the tall trees nearby. He hobbled on, down a path worn in the wildflower-laden grass, to the stream. The stream was the last obstacle before the village road and he crossed it each day with care. The year before he had fallen at the ford and split his head open on a rock, forfeiting the next day’s trip up to the groves.
While it may be tempting to find his life appealing in its simplicity, Jose and his fellow villagers live hard, almost unbearable, lives. Beyond the threat of disease and injury common in their environment, many endure dull pain from toothache, parasitic infections and bones and muscles ground down by the constant work required to survive. Then, of course, there were the troubles that seem to punctuate the entire history of their country. When Jose was a young man he had lived through the series of civil wars known as La Violencia, that took his father and an uncle, and later the reign of the cocaine cartels, first Medellin and then Cali, each taking the lives of relatives, the former his only son. Like rural peoples in similar areas of the world, the villagers of Guasimalito don’t look to science or sociology to explain their problems, they find more satisfactory explanations in religion and the secret wisdom of their cultures. And so it would be with the new trouble about to start.
Jose shuffled his way down the main street of his village and stopped outside the public house where the men of the village gathered at the end of the day. All the chairs on the patio outside were taken so he took a seat on a wooden crate on the dusty outskirts of the gathered group of men deep in conversation smoking and sipping beer and aguardiente.
“Good evening, Jose,” someone said. Jose looked up and smiled but did not reply.
“It was as if whatever did it wanted those parts in particular. I hear they were removed as if by someone who was very skilled with a knife.”
“I’m telling you… those are the most beneficial parts to eat. The liver and the heart. It’s sure to mean that whatever did this, did it for sustenance.”
“So we’re supposed to believe they were eaten?”
“How else is it to be explained?”
“You are the most extraordinary ghoul! Only a madman could speak this way. Eating the remains of the dead! One should be more delicate when discussing such matters. Remember that the family are old friends of my family.”
“But there are evil spirits in the forest.”
“Certainly.”
It was the same topic as the night before and the night before that. Jose settled into his seat, reached into his pocket and retrieved a wad of paper folded around several leaves of his beloved Nievo tobacco. He rolled a cigarette from a portion sparingly chosen, placed it in his mouth and lit it.
“To me, it’s clear that this was done as a warning or a punishment, by the cartels or the revolutionaries.”
“Nothing has been heard from them in this area for years. But I have heard that one of the victim’s mother was a fortune-teller. Perhaps a witch and a whore. Although I don‘t know what man would want a whore that looks like her.”
“I would want a whore that looks like Maria Estelle…”
Some of the men laughed. Most remained disdainfully quiet, causing the young man who made the comment to blush deep red.
“Didn’t I hear that she could be hired to make incantations on people as revenge?”
“It is sad. Young people always suffer when their parents become involved in such things.”
“Foo! The buñuelos here do not taste as good as they used to.”
“And besides that village did not contribute as it should have to the fiesta of St. Fermin. In general, their young people do not attend mass and several of their groves were hit by the blight last year.“
The young daughter of the man who owned the public house brought a glass of beer to Jose. He gave her a coin.
“But what about San Esmeralda? They had a victim there and they have the most beautiful church in 100 kilometers and their priest lives like a rich man.”
“A priest should not live as a rich man. That’s a sin in itself.”
Jose took a deep draught of the beer and a deep drag of the Nievo.
“A priest should devote himself to doing good, organizing the fiestas and visiting the sick. So that men like us can concern ourselves with making money.”
“I‘m suspicious of ordinary men who ‘do good‘. Look at the missionaries who came to the village this morning. Spending their own money to give the children injections of medicine and taking blood from so many people. Just to study them? To prevent sickness? There is nothing free. What is the real reason they do this?”
“There’s not much money in what we do anymore. The big coffee plantations hog too much of the market and the politicians line their pockets with the profit.”
“You say that every night. Stop talking about it and light a candle to St. Fermin at the church. That will keep your crops healthy. Is that not true, Jose?”
He’d heard enough. Jose got up, smiled, put his glass down, wiped the corners of this mouth with the back of his hand, placed his cap back on his head and started toward home.
“Good Night, Jose.”
In the morgue at police headquarters in the city of Medellin, Detective Lieutenant Lino Pinzon, stood next to the city coroner over a slab holding the cold body of a young man. The young man’s body had been opened neatly from crotch to throat. He’d seen violent death before but he knew this was different. This was the ninth victim he’d seen in this condition. How many more were there that hadn’t been found? People were always disappearing in this country and lately, the blame had been reflexively placed on the revolutionaries using terror tactics to keep potential sources of intelligence to the police quiet.
He stood lost in thought. There were two central facts in the case that he hadn’t put together yet - mostly because there were few people who would talk to him and the ones that did gave him the same distraught tales of forest demons and unlit candles. The two central facts were: a group of missionaries would visit a village providing medical care and testing to the villagers and then young people would disappear and turn up in the same condition as the young man lying before him.
By the time he put the two facts together, it would be too late for Jose’s village.
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