Drug War Capitalism Read Online Free

nearly a dozen people from different areas of Santo Domingo, who came to the school cafeteria—an open room without walls or much other than cement tables and chairs—to tell their stories.
    Daniel Zavala, a freckle-faced farmer with piercing green eyes and a traditional black-and-white straw hat, explained what happened to his neighbor in March 2013: “At my neighbor’s house.… I’m not exaggerating, unfortunately he’s not here.… But without word of a lie, a helicopter opened fire approximately fifty meters from his house; it literally rained lead. There were kids there—a family, he has a son who is around twelve years old and a daughter who is eight. It’s incredible.” As Zavala explained how flyovers traumatize children in the community, more and more community members arrived. Some suggested that I should visit one of the bombing sites, and community members discussed among themselves which one would be the most suitable. Finally, they decided to take me to an area that was bombed on December 7, 2013—a place called Lusitania.
    I climbed on the back of a motorcycle, and three men and I went ten minutes down the highway, then turned onto a thin grassy trail, with rustic wood bridges and cows grazing on either side. After thirty minutes, we stopped so that they could show me the schoolhouse, a large palm hut without electricity or running water. We carried on for another twenty minutes until we arrived at Joel Armando Estrada’s small house, which shelters seven children and five adults. When we pulled up, the boys were coloring and the younger kids were playing in the yard. Not a two-minute walk from the house into the jungle were two craters, each easily twenty meters wide and ten meters deep, evidence of the recent bombing. A large snake emerged from the bottom of one crater, which had since filled with water, and two boys took turns trying to kill it with a rock.
    “It was four in the morning. We were sleeping when the planes came and bombed. All of my kids got nauseous because the explosions nearly made them burst, and the youngest one vomited,” Armando Estrada told me, his hand on the shoulder of his youngest son. An hour and a half after the explosion, soldiers landed the helicopter, came into the house and went through everything. They asked Estrada where he had hidden guerrilla fighters—something the farmer, who cultivates bananas, yucca, and corn, said his family has never done. Miguel Otero, who lives with Estrada, told me that he was already awake when the bombing started, and that he looked out after the first one fell to see a sixty- to seventy-meter fireball less than 200 meters from the house. Moments later, a shower of shrapnel fell onto the roof and ricocheted off the house. Later, the children picked up hundreds of small round iron shells, and they showed me the fragments of the bombs they found in their yard. At least one of the shells penetrated the thin wall of the palm house, and many others lodged in trees near the family’s home.
    “You can imagine how we felt afterwards: totally psychologically ill. We’ve never lived through a situation like that, something so terrible,” Otero said. “When the soldiers arrived, they were aggressive as usual, insulting us and asking us where the man was who was hiding inside the house. They arrived so angry, as if we were their targets. That’s what it seemed like.”
    “Maybe they were chasing the guerrillas or other groups, but when we went to [the bombing site] we didn’t see any traces of a dead human being, nothing, not even footprints of guerrillas or anything. We didn’t see anything like that,” said Otero, who sat across from me and fiddled with a piece of paper as he spoke. “We can’t understand why they would bomb in this area where there’s no one.… I don’t know.”
    The possibility that oil exploration is going on in the lands surrounding Santo Domingo seems to others like the motivation behind the violence.