In Argentina in March 1977, at the time of the military government’s “dirty war” against the guerrillas, I found myself taken off a long-distance bus by the police one day, and held for some hours as a suspected guerrilla.
This was in the far north of the country—an older, more tropical Argentina, deep in the continent, and still with the feel of the Spanish empire: wide valleys beside the Andes, miles and miles of sugar cane, an Indian population. While in Buenos Aires I was an obvious stranger, here in the north I could pass. (And sometimes more than pass. Once, in a small town in the Córdoba hills, during an earlier trip, a middle-aged Spanish-looking man had called out with great seriousness to me across a café: “You! You look like a pistolero.” A gangster.)
I was staying this time in the old colonial town of Salta. One morning I took a bus for the town of Jujuy, in the province to the north, on the border with Bolivia. Just outside Salta the bus stopped, perhaps at the provincial boundary. Indian policemen in dark-blue uniforms came in and asked for identity papers. Argentines are trained from childhood to carry their papers. I had none; I had left my passport in the hotel in Salta. So—with my gangster’s face momentarily of interest to the other passengers, who were mainly Indian—I was taken off the bus, which then went on again.
I went with the two policemen to the small white concrete shed or hut at the side of the road. This shed was plain outside and inside. A third policeman was there, standing behind a chesthigh counter; and I could see, on a table on his side of the counter, and close to his hand, the black-and-gray metal of a machine gun lying flat. There was nothing else on that table.
I was with serious people. They listened, but without much interest, to what I had to say. They talked among themselves; then they held consultations with someone else on the telephone or on a radio system. After a while I was taken—in what vehicle or by what ways I cannot remember: I made no notes about the events of this day—to a small low building standing by itself in a sunstruck patch of bush somewhere. This, though it didn’t look it, was a police post or subpost.
The men who had brought me there went away—rather like the morning bus to Jujuy. Salta began to feel far away. My idea of time changed; I learned to wait. I gave my details once again. The policeman who wrote them down then began to telephone. This wasn’t easy; the Argentine telephone service was very bad. Telephone lines, legitimate and illegitimate, hung over the streets and belle époque buildings of central Buenos Aires like gigantic cobwebs; the Indian policeman was trying to tap into the cobwebbed city, from a patch of bush …
