Olga Dies Dreaming(38)
“Seems to me,” Alex offered, “he only knows how to operate as a public spectacle. This should make Saturday interesting.”
“I’m not worried about it,” Prieto said genuinely. “My sister’s coming. She’s the Reggie whisperer. We’ll see who looks like a toothless fucking lion.”
“Speaking of lions, Congressman Hurd’s office called about that Hurricane Harvey relief package?”
Prieto let out a slightly bitter laugh. “Tell Will, yes, he can count on my vote, because I’m a Democrat and we don’t let people suffer just so we can keep our checkbook balanced. I just hope that when the next storm comes to P.R., I can—”
A shriek came from the outer office followed by murmurs and gasps. Alex ran to see what the commotion was. He returned moments later, carrying a small box, a somber, almost frightened look on his face.
“Sir, please don’t worry, we’ve already called the Capitol Police.”
“What the fuck is it?” Prieto asked, gesturing for Alex to bring the package to him.
“I … I … don’t really know. But it was sent for you. I just don’t know what it means.”
But as soon as Prieto looked, he knew. The box was filled with worms.
* * *
HIS MOTHER HAD not contacted him in over a year, not since he had voted yes on PROMESA, giving financial control of Puerto Rico to a politically appointed board of mainlanders. Yet he knew it was her behind the box of worms. After much posturing, Prieto managed to convince Alex not to involve the Capitol Police, as it was “likely just kids playing a prank.” Instead, he had the box and its contents messengered over to the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
When Prieto was first elected to Congress and lobbying for his committee assignments, he shied away from one that might require deeper digging into his personal life, for obvious reasons. While Prieto and his sister had some vague notions of their mother’s radicalization, her paper trail—digital and otherwise—was thin. Once on the Hill though, Prieto found himself with increased access to information, and finally, after cultivating a friendship with a rising star at the FBI, a Bronx-born Boricua named Miguel Bonilla, Prieto asked to see his mother’s file. It was, he felt, like finding negatives to the photographs of his own life.
The file was thick, dating back to before her days with the Young Lords Party. It started with NYPD reports, trailing her and his father after Papi’s arrest for the Brooklyn College takeover. After that, when they joined the Lords, COINTELPRO was almost always on their tail. Despite years of hearing his parents’ stories of harassment by the NYPD and the FBI, it was still a trip to see the actual files. To reframe what he’d assumed was the hyperbole of jaded activists as actual fact. Proof not only of his parents’ just paranoia, but also a mirror, he realized, to the skepticism he’d clearly held about it.
After the Lords disbanded, the FBI seemingly lost interest in his mother. Through childhood recollections buttressed by findings from the internet, Prieto sketched an outline of her life over the course of the ten or so years that followed. She was still living with them in New York, teaching at Hunter College. She became increasingly involved with a radical wing of the Socialist party, one more global in scope than the Lords. She’d begun going on a speaking circuit, traveling to Mexico, Central and South America, and, from what Prieto could piece together from old Socialist newspapers he found online, spending time in South Africa on anti-apartheid efforts.
Then, in 1989, the year before his mother disappeared from their lives, the FBI file picked up again. Robustly. A man named Ojeda Ríos was on trial for shooting an FBI agent with an Uzi during a raid on his home in Puerto Rico. The raid was part of an attempted arrest for a bank robbery Ojeda Ríos allegedly committed in Connecticut. Of course, Prieto knew, Ojeda Ríos was no ordinary bank robber, but the leader of Los Macheteros, a militant Puerto Rican independence group that the U.S. government had deemed a terrorist organization. The bank robbery itself was as much about protesting colonialism as it was a money grab. His mother penned a series of impassioned op-eds championing his cause and was immediately back on the FBI’s radar.
Ojeda Ríos was eventually acquitted for injuring the FBI agent, but jumped bond on the robbery charge in 1990. He found cover in the hills and forests of Puerto Rico, managing his secret paramilitary army and disseminating, via the local media, recordings to his followers throughout the rest of the island. Humiliated, the FBI launched a manhunt, deploying hundreds of agents in search of Ojeda Ríos. It was in November of that same year that they put eyes on Prieto’s mother in San Juan, but she quickly vanished, leading the agents to believe she had joined Ojeda Ríos in the hills. They had been correct. In 1993 she emerged again to claim credit, on behalf of Ojeda Ríos’s army, for a bombing at the home of Puerto Rico’s then governor-elect. He’d won on a platform of privatization and statehood; the bomb detonated on the eve of his inauguration, leaving the house in flames. No one had been home at the time. Like her mentor, his mother evaded apprehension and for a time, the FBI believed she’d escaped to Cuba. Then, fifteen years ago she was spotted in Chiapas, Mexico, where she’d found refuge with the Zapatistas. Ojeda Ríos, for his part, became a sort of folk hero on the island, living openly in the Puerto Rican countryside, evading the law until 2005 when he was assassinated by the FBI. It had happened on the anniversary of el Grito de Lares—September 23—fifteen years to the day after he had escaped. On the island there was an outcry.