Ok then. I'm sorry if this comes across as crass or anything like that. When I wrote this I was trying to get across just how nasty the Red Crosses were, but I'm afraid it might come across as a bit melodramatic.
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Excerpt from The Road to Bluefields by Alexander Thompson, 1980.
The sharp snap of a whip and the terrible shriek of a man suffering pierced the idle sounds of nature, distracting me from the serene beauty of the Jungle. Now alert, I continued my walk, hand at the ready to draw my revolver as I rounded a bend in the Road. Upon doing so, I saw a horror that all of the depravity of the Red Crosses I had seen prior could not match. Just ahead was a gang of a dozen emaciated Miskitans clearing the road of a fallen tree - and lording over them was a brute with a whip in his right hand, pistol the left, and a rifle on his back.
As I approached I could hear the barbarian screaming at the men:
“Faster, faster you blood-suckers! I’ll have your nigger hides if you don’t Work!”
As I drew closer, one of the Miskitans, his belly bloated and ribs sharp as razors, collapsed onto the ground and lay so still I thought he was surely dead. The man screamed and stamped his foot in rage, shouting “Up! Up you dog!” before drawing back the whip, cracking it once, twice on the man’s exposed flesh before I caught his arm as he drew back yet a third time.
“What in the Almighty’s name are you doing to these men,” I demanded of overseer, “Can’t you see these men are too starved to work?”
The fool got over his shock quickly, his face contorting into a cross somewhere between a snarl and a smile as he pulled his hand free from my grasp.
“Lookie here, a nigger lover,” the man said to me, his eyes betraying the rage he felt at having been stopped at his torture. Then, without another word, the man pointed his pistol at the workers and shot two of them dead before gesturing towards me with the still smoking weapon.
“Thanks to your concern, they will have plenty to eat tonight, and if you don’t mind your damn business, there will be a buffet for my workers tonight.”
Still now I hear the overseer’s laughter cutting through the silent jungle above the biting whip and wailing men.