G-2

    When he moved, it was with two sticks, which he used to drag his twisted legs forward, in a most wretched fashion. His scared face was not able to show the anguish and physical pain he felt, and his eyes were too clouded to evince a cognizance of same.

    Two men saw him, but only knew who he was, while the other took some coins from his pocket and put them in the hand-weaved bag he had around his neck.

    ¨Poor guy. I wonder how he got like that...¨Jorge, the uninformed one asked.

    ¨I know, because we were in the army together, ¨Roberto, the other man volunteered.

    ¨Really?¨Jorge asked with surprise.¨What happened? I'd really like to know.¨

    ¨It's a long story...¨Roberto replied, shaking his head with regret.

    ¨Ok, I'll buy you a beer to hear it..¨Jorge offered, as they stood in front of a cantina...

    Roberto didn't need any convincing, so soon they were seated at a rustic, wooden table, with two cold beers in front of them. Roberto put lemon and salt into his beer and without looking at anything, he began: ¨It was during the time, of early years of the civil war, when the army needed more soldiers. They used to come and kidhap us when we were working in the field. The guy's name is Pedro Pac and he came from the same village as me. We were both kidnaped and thrown into trucks, without even being able to warn our parents where we were going. It was a bad time for everyone, but especially for the Indians, like me.¨ Roberto admitted, hugging the bottle with distraction...¨Anyway, Pedro and I adapted to that kind of life and Pedro did so well that he became a sergeant and that was the highest an Indian could go. We stayed together and eventually were sent to the Military Zone, which was the largest in the western part of the country. It was the center of what they called Intelligence. That's what they called it, but really it was the center for torture. That's what they did in order to extract information about who was involved in their ranks and what their plans were. The section was called G-2 and they used select soldiers to carry out the torture. It is difficult to imagine someone to be able to do that, but Pedro became one....It was a good position because you got many special privileges' and more money than a regular recruit....The G-2 occupíed a rear portion of the Milirary Zone and was supposed to be far enough away so as not to hear the sound of the screams...¨Roberto reflected with remorse...¨It was assumed there was a hidden graveyard somewhere...Anyway, they knew  most of the guerrillas came from the national university, so they decided to kidnap the president of the student union, who was named Pepe Morales....There's a bust of him, in the martyr's hall on the campus there...They never found the body...¨A voluntary respite ensued. as each of them sipped his beer and contemplated man's inhumanity to man.......¨What they would do was to go through different levels of torture, that they learned from other countries that also had intelligence centers...It would begin with something simple like death by drowning. What you do is have a barrel of water there and you keep ducking the head under it, until he feels like he's drowning, but, you always pull him back before that. It gets to the point that the guy really wants to drown and get it over with!...Then comes the burns on all parts of the body, with a red hot, metal póker...That's before the extracting of the finger and toe nails...All of this precedes the worse of the electric shocks on the genitales. No-one ever survived all that...At least none I ever heard of...¨Roberto admitted...¨So, the guerilla, university students had to get revenge, for their leader. They had spies on their side, just like we had our own. They were called ears and they found out it was sergeant Pedro Pac who carried out the execution, so he became their marked man....They caught him one day, right here in this town. He was looking for someone to take back to the Military Zone and that's when they grabbed him and left him like you saw him today. They didn't want to kill him, but leave him so that he'd rather be dead...I don't know...What do you think Jorge?¨ Roberto asked, as he finished off his beer.

    ¨Well...one has a bust of his memory on the university campus, and the other the curse of a life worse than death.¨