NVN Thursday: STREETS OF BOUGAINVILLEA

by Elizabeth Rose

Since we started collecting data in 2012, 1,335 defenders across Latin America have lost their lives…. Yet very few families have seen justice for these killings. —Global Witness, September 2023

*

You must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
           —Naomi Shihab Nye, “Kindness”

*

I have my own Indian story.
Fausto, my friend, was also dead
 
by the roadside, macheted
in a waterless gully.
 
Stripped naked,
hanged, and cut through,
 
on a Sabbath.
His daughters asleep in cribs.
 
Fausto could have been
my child had I been born
 
on another continent
with another skin color.
 
We were both bent
toward social justice,
 
for me a conceptual brick
tossed through a window,
 
for him a sink
with running water.
 
His mother’s cavity eyes
his father’s taut mouth
stretched toward inevitability.
 
A cold case upon death.
A national miscarriage of laws.
 
Is this the sadness that kindles kindness?
Allows us to go out each day
 
into the streets of bougainvillea,
and ride the Tuk Tuk,
 
bodies next to baskets
overflowing with avocados
and mangoes.

*

Author’s note: This is the story of my friend Fausto Otzin. He was a lawyer in Guatemala. He worked on land rights cases representing indigenous people. He was an indigenous Katchakel himself. He worked in Guatemala City during the week and traveled back to Comalapa on the weekends where his wife and two baby girls lived with his parents, his younger sister and her son, and another brother, sister-in-law, and their three children. I was involved in building a school from rubbish in Comalapa for eighteen years and I became friends with the Otzin family during that time. In October 2009 he went out on a Friday night and didn't return. He was found in a gully hanged and stabbed thirteen times on the following Sunday. There was no investigation and now 14 years later there have been no arrests or even people of interest brought forward.

*

Elizabeth Rose is a poet and psychotherapist living in Massachusetts. She has previously published poetry in BarBar and Verdad. Her personal essays have appeared in the New Mexico Review, The Boston Globe, and Anti-Heroin Chic. She published a chapter in Escape, a memoir collection published in 2023 by the Pathfinders Collective. She received an MFA from Lesley University in 2019.