Emilio was correct—the media focused mainly on the threats posed by the guerillas. “The private armies of the Autodefensas only protect the wealthy,” Emilio was saying. “Some of you may even know those who fund the AUC. But we must stand against them as well as the guerillas.” Military patrols had cut through our hacienda on their way into the mountains, and Papi invited them to stay for dinner, spend the night. The soldiers who had shown up last year—hadn’t Fidel been one of them? He’d been in uniform when he asked Papi for a job after returning from their mission; Papi even addressed him as Captain. Had the troops been military or paramilitary, and what had been the lettering on their uniforms? Was Fidel, with his Virgin Mary figurine on the dashboard, capable of slitting a bus driver’s throat for giving a guerilla a ride? Maybe Papi had just been polite in housing them—or they didn’t give him a choice. Emilio said the Colombian army and paramilitaries were one and the same, that the paras simply carried out the dirty work of human rights abuses that the army wanted “taken care of” but didn’t want to be responsible for.
Manuel leapt up. “How much longer will it be before the Church toughens its stance against both insurgencies?” he asked. “Archbishop Duarte states that it is his personal duty to take on the risks himself in trying to protect his people. Why don’t the rest of us do the same—isn’t it our right?” But his words only met a silent room, with heavy looks exchanged over clasped hands and the creak of chairs. No one agreed with or challenged him, not even Emilio.
After the meeting’s close, Emilio walked toward us. The two brothers exchanged a quick embrace. “What’re you doing up there, Professor? Trying to put the audience to sleep?” Manuel said, brushing his brother’s shoulder in a playful jab. Emilio, grinning, shook his head and clicked his teeth. “You just better stick to building cabinets.” Their easy way with each other made me yearn for a sibling. Manuel introduced us, and when Emilio’s lips brushed my cheek my stomach flipped. I hoped Emilio had not felt anything.
Emilio ushered us over to a table and folding chairs in the corner, away from the young people chatting in clusters—a small relief. Dampness chafed my underarms. Ana waved, exiting the tent behind Carlos. Manuel disappeared and returned a moment later, handing us each a cup of lukewarm water; I managed a few tiny sips, the water too chlorinated for my taste. A street lamp lit the worn face of the courtyard Virgin, her robe and feet hidden by roses, in full bloom and deepest red. “So tell me what it is you do again,” I said to Emilio. “Besides studying to be priest. Since you don’t build cabinets.”
“Cabinets, no,” Emilio said. He and Manuel exchanged small smiles, and Manuel chuckled in his throat. “Only one of us is handy with a saw, I’m afraid. Hmm, what to call my current duties? A peacekeeper, of sorts?”
“More like a go-between,” Manuel said, adjusting his seat. “Right? A liaison.”
“That’s it.” Emilio nodded, sipped some water. “I’m a representative for the diocese between the guerilla leaders and the government. So I have access to diocese records going way back. The Church is rather excellent at keeping records. Among other things.” He rolled the cup, light now, in his slender fingers; his hands lacked the musculature of Manuel’s.
“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.
Emilio removed a folder and legal pad from a backpack, placed a document before me. Even in the dull light, the seal glimmered; an ink smudge marked the tail end of a signature. He said, “I don’t suppose you know that your father, Diego Martinez, was formally excommunicated in the early nineties? Or what might have led to that?”
I lifted my cup and let the water touch my lips but didn’t drink. “His divorce,” I said. “He says the parish priest won’t even look at him if they run into each other—that he crosses the street.”
“Divorce? That’s what he told you?” Emilio’s remark sounded more a statement than a question. “According to church records, he and your mother were married in 1982, divorced the following year, and he received an annulment a few months after that. He had to be in good standing at the time to get an annulment.”
“What does that mean? He got into an argument with the priest or something?”
Manuel leaned forward on his elbows and lowered his voice. “The Church mandates excommunication for a variety of things.” He closed his hand over mine and squeezed, the coarse warmth of his palm jarred me ,but I didn’t pull back. “In the case of your father, for very specific reasons. It was the eyewitness testimony of a former cartel operative that turned him in.”
“Cartel?” I said. “That’s impossible.” Somewhere in the middle of the tent a cell phone rang. The young man with the ponytail answered it, talking excitedly. His group rocked with laughter. “If you’re going to make accusations like that, you’d better have proof.”
The brothers exchanged knowing looks. Manuel nodded toward the manila folder, and Emilio withdrew a stapled packet. “This is the testimony of a dear friend, Father Juan. Only much later in his life did he find the Church. Before that, he was a subordinate in the drug war until after the collapse of the Medellín cartel. This is far too long for you to read tonight,” Emilio said, and tucked the packet back inside the folder. He folded his hands on top. “I’ll just tell you his story.”
Emilio was seventeen when he heard Father Juan speak at a youth retreat, a soft-spoken man, broad and graying, with a rosary cinched to his cargo pants. Once, when Emilio had gone to visit an impoverished village the priest was ministering to in the southern Andes, they’d gone to swim at a waterfall, removed their clothes. A knotted patchwork of bullet wounds scarred the priest’s shoulder. What had happened for this man, in mid-life, to repent and work to rescue those most at risk to join the guerillas? Father Juan removed his glasses, and as he rubbed them with the end of his shirt, he stared at the peasant teenagers diving and shouting. “Some are born with black hearts—do you believe that?” the priest asked. “Well, I don’t. The heart is the most neglected aspect of humanity, and the most critical. How it grows, whether it hardens with greed and fear or expands with love, depends on how we each are taught to feed it. When it turns black, the only way to reclaim it is through pain.”
Even the three bullets hadn’t been enough to stop him, back when he was known as Juan Perez. That wasn’t what drove him inside a village church in the Andes one night, where he crawled up to the altar on his knees and prostrated on his belly, begging God for peace and salvation or else he’d get back in his car and, alone on his way to Medellín, drive himself off the next cliff. Escobar’s empire was collapsing. The heads of the Cali cartel, the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers and their subordinates, including Juan Perez and Diego Martinez, had given themselves the name Los Pepes and arranged the murders—“as clean as possible” they had agreed upon meeting. Then one of Escobar’s traffickers received the bloody head of an alpaca on a platter, with a note threatening that he would be “the first of his herd to go to the slaughter.” Two days later he went missing.
Juan Perez hadn’t known about the hit. He suspected Diego had carried it out because he raised alpacas on his plantation. When he confronted Diego and asked what they had done with the trafficker, if he had used him to find out some crucial information, Diego told Juan he could find him in the alpaca pasture and do the questioning himself. Instead, Juan found the man’s body disemboweled, dumped behind the alpaca shed. Vultures circled and picked at the bloated corpse. The stench was rancid from ten feet away.
That was what had driven Juan from Cali that night, into the chapel, never to return to the cartel.
“From Father Juan, I saw just how important it is to stay connected to the youth—not just the peasants who are drawn by the guerillas, but those who think that joining the paras will keep their families’ lands safe,” Emilio said, voice husky.
