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battle. All around us were the three thousand troops the army had sent out -- we could hear their shooting all day long. It was we whom they were seeking. The days had a certain rhythm and timing. Three times a day the old peasant man would come. He would deliver the sacks of tortillas and the plastic bags filled with bean paste. Then he would sit back on a rock for a full hour gazing fondly at the young rebels.
    "Tell me," I asked him finally, "why do you help the guerrillas?"
    This time he climbed down from the rock with apparent eagerness and walked over to me. "For humanitarian love," he said. He looked me straight in the eye as he added, "They are the first ones who ever cared about us."
    Cesar, so slim, so sure, so cool, then motioned to another, younger peasant who had come up with the older man. "Tell her everything," he said emotionlessly.
    "Do you have any land?" I asked the younger man, as he scram bled dutifully down to face me.
    "We pay twenty-five dollars a year to the landlord for the land ... " he began. (That was a lot, given their meager incomes.)
    Montes cut in. "The landlord they never see," he added scornfully. "They have just enough land to live on a subsistence level."
    "We're not allowed to live in our village anymore," the peasant began again.
    "For helping us -- they were forced to move here," Montes inserted. "The police burned their houses, and burned down their chapel -- they are Evangelicals."
    The peasant nodded. "And they destroyed our honeybees. I was four months a prisoner."
    "Did they torture you?" the guerrilla commander asked.
    "No," he said, shaking his head. "But my brother--they put that thing over his head and hit him."
    "That thing" was a bag they wrapped over a prisoner's head until he couldn't breathe. Meanwhile they were beating him until he was almost dead, or frightened nearly to death from fear of asphyxiation.
    "My boy, he was eighteen, died of malnutrition while I was in jail. One of my relatives had to pay one hundred fifty dollars to get free. I only had to pay eighty dollars."
    Cesar and his men kept prodding the peasants: "Remember this ... Remember Justo de la Cruz, whom they killed and he didn't even know us ... Think of all the injustices .... "
    It was an effective teaching method, I could see that. Besides, they were organizing the village into political cells, even though the final word came from the directorate general in the capital.
    Most of the guerrillas had been to Cuba for some training, but when I asked Cesar about money from Cuba, he drew himself up proudly and said, "Haven't you read about our bank robberies and our kidnappings? We're entirely self-supporting."
    "Say," Montes went on, "did you know the robbery of the Bank of the Occident was by the FAR? The papers say forty thousand dollars, but we haven't finished counting the money yet." He paused devilishly. "The bank was right in front of the police station," he added, grinning.
    Another time Montes pressed me for what I thought of Fidel Castro. I demurred. I never did believe in expressing my own beliefs while on assignment. Finally he demanded, "Don't you think he's a big egocentric?"
    "Well, frankly, I do," I relented.
    "I do, too," Montes said with a big smile. "But we won't be like that."
    I looked long and hard at him. I didn't say anything more. In years to come I would hear that phrase--"We won't be like that, we will be different" -- so many, many sad times.
    Little by little I drew them out on their acciónes , trying to find out what they really did--and how they justified it.
    There had been an "action" at Jocotales, for instance, a small working-class district of Guatemala City where the guerrillas' "city resistance unit" had attacked that November, killing three of the policemen in ten minutes of steady machine-gunning of the miserably poor adobe section. One of the men killed was a young sergeant, Rigoberto Parazzoli, and he was buried in a military funeral that punctuated the suffering