The Longest Night
One night in September 1973, nine of us Tupamaro militants were taken, by surprise, from each of our cells in the Libertad penitentiary. In the solitude of the freezing winter night, even the engines of the trucks that awaited us seemed to whisper so that the other prisoners (thousands of them) wouldn’t hear. So that nobody would know what happened, what was starting that night.
It was, from the very beginning, a shameful transfer. There, in the deepest depths of the pitch-black consciences that made the decision, among the officers, privates and soldiers that covered our eyes, there was the buried feeling that something terrible was being done. The kind of stifled, tenuous reproach that always persists. We felt it, too, and we set out to demonstrate that human beings can withstand such magnitude of cruelty without becoming a beast or a plant. Without mineralizing.
The long voyage undertaken by us hostages to tyranny lasted, exactly, eleven years, seven months, and seven days. There have been many like us in humanity’s vast, tortured history. History that bears the sting of agony.
God did not need to blow on the clay to mold humanity; most likely, he simply struck it with his fist.