The Same Techniques and the Same End

The abuses that absolute and omnipotent power have committed over the span of history repeat themselves, as if eternal return was not only a theory but a certainty in the world in which we live.   And so, often the histories and biographies of those who have wielded supreme power escape from the pages of the books and mingle with our own lives, bringing fear to the center of our existence.

The persecution of the boys who participated in the Walk for Nonviolence has been constant ever since the sixth of November.  Two days ago it peaked and some were kidnapped by State Security.  Kidnapped, because although the National Revolutionary Police accompanied the incognito comrades of the DSE, they had no Official Citation as required under the Penal Code.  So these boys, most of whom are under twenty, saw with their own eyes – in a rundown room at the police station on 21^st and C – the scenes seen in documentaries about those who were once at the mercy of other political police: Chilean, Polish, Czech activists…

The most terrible thing of all is the exact repetition of the script, with a chilling crescendo of violence:

-- Convince you.

-- Buy you or get you to commit yourself.

-- Discredit your friends.

-- Make you feel you’re alone.

-- Take your things (cellphone, laptop, discs or flash memories) without any documents of confiscation.

-- Threaten your future, your family, and your physical safety.

They, State Security agents, have studied at a pitiful university: The Technical Institute of Coercion and Repression of the Citizenry.  We, the civilians, face them without the slightest ABCs in how to survive the tsunami of power.  However, we have the one thing that – in the end – will be the most powerful weapon: our conscience.  Something they have lost because they are graduates of the “Arbiter of Injustice,” the first thing you have to pass in the subject of “Amnesia of Civic Values.”

Fear is a double edged sword.  Today my friends have doubts and they don’t want me to write their names, although they might change their minds.  I think that trying to hide when those who are looking for you are the only ones who know where you are doesn’t make any sense.  The wheel of fate always turns and the repressed memory is not erased: tomorrow it will be the security agents who cannot avoid – like my friends – the publication of their names and faces.