Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 68
cadres and the rising entrepreneurs put out of business. In this climate of uncertainty
and fear a new wave of urban terrorism hit the country.
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FREEDOM FIGHTERS.
This time the aggressor was not a foreign guerrilla, although many individual terrorists
were recent foreign arrivals. The aggressors were the native communists organized in
myriad splinter groups with acronyms such as FLIN, ELN, MIR, PRIN, PCB and others
to identify their own tendencies. Some were Trotskyites, others Maoists, Stalinists,
Lenninists, Ho-Chi-Minists, etc. Many of these fanatic militants were children of the
small Bolivian bourgeoisie. Some of them had even been my schoolmates and, on one
occasion, because their families and mine had been friends for generations, attended a
party at my parents’ home when I was present. A group of them began singing
communists hymns, in a not-so-disguised but unsuccessful attempt to start trouble.
Their models were the terrorists of their European counterparts in the Red Brigades in
Italy, the Baader-Meinhoff Gang and the Red Army Faction in Germany and other
similar terrorist groups, all with upper class connections in European society. These
misguided petty-burgeoise were ashamed of their origins and concluded that turning
against their own kind was the only way to atone for what they saw as the
institutionalized violence directed by their parents. Blood and destruction were a
common currency in their hands. Once inducted into more radical groups, the only way
for a person to resign was to disappear, lest old comrades themselves make the
weakening member an example – a dead example. Terror is always an effective way to
keep discipline in the ranks.
These people, some of whom I knew personally, had no significant means of income
but yet they were always on the go. Traveling to Eastern Europe, China and even Viet
Nam was common to them. Going to Cuba was a short trip for some. Without a doubt
they had more foreign funding for their political purposes than we, the freedom fighters,
ever had. The Soviet and Cuban embassies in Bolivia’s capital of La Paz were the sites
of national decision-making. Every government department had Cuban, Nicaraguan or
Salvadoran advisors. But the Bolivian armed forces still had officers who didn’t toe the
Soviet line.
I am the oldest male of the five surviving children my parents had. By 1967 the oldest
four (my sister Toqui, myself and my brothers Chris and Chuso) had already returned to
Cochabamba after our education in the United States. The youngest sibling, my sister
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