Open Veins of Latin America

by Eduardo Galeano

  He killed himself in 1846, but his ideas took hold in both countries.) Nothing roused such British anger as protectionism, and they sometimes gave vent to it in violent language, as during the Opium War against China. But free trade only became revealed truth for them after they became sure of being the strongest power, and after they had developed their own textile industry under the umbrella of Europe's toughest protectionist legislation. In the difficult early days, when British industry was still at a disadvantage, an Englishman caught exporting raw wool was sentenced to lose his right

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  hand, and if he repeated the sin he was hanged. It was prohibited to bury a corpse without prior certification from the parish priest that the shroud came from a British factory.

  "All the destructive phenomena which unlimited competition gives rise to within one country," wrote Marx, "are reproduced in more gigantic proportions on the world market."("If the free-traders cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another, we need not wonder, since these same gentlemen also refuse to understand how within one country one class can enrich itself at the expense of another."11) Latin America's entry into the British orbit-which it would leave only to enter the U.S. orbit--took place within this general framework, and within it the dependence of the new independent countries was consolidated. Free circulation of merchandise, and of money for payment and transfer of capital, had dramatic consequences.

  Vicente Guerrero came to power in Mexico in 1829, writes Chavez Orozco, "on the shoulders of the artisans' despair, fanned by the great demagogue Lorenzo de Zavala who loosed a hungry, desperate crowd on shops stuffed with British marketplace items." Guerrero soon fell amid the workers'

  indifference, since he did not want or was not able to dam up European merchandise, "the abundance of which spread unemployment among urban artisan masses who before independence--above all in periods of war in Europe--enjoyed modest comfort."12 Mexican industry had been short of capital, labor, and modern techniques, had not been efficiently organized, and had lacked communications and transport to and from markets and supply sources. "The only things it probably had too much of," writes Alonso Aguilar, "were interference, restrictions, and every kind of obstacle."13 Nevertheless, as von Humboldt noted, industry had grown when foreign trade was stagnant, sea communications were being interrupted or obstructed, and the manufacture of steel and the use of iron and mercury had begun. The liberalism that accompanied independence added new pearls to the British crown and paralyzed the textile and metallurgical workshops in Mexico City, Puebla, and Guadalajara.

  Lucas Alaman, an able conservative politician, gave timely warning that the ideas of Adam Smith contained poison for the national economy, and set the stage, as minister, for a credit and loan bank to promote 180

  industrialization. By taxing foreign cotton textiles, Mexico could buy machinery and equipment abroad in order to supply its own needs in cotton cloth. The country had the raw material and hydraulic power--cheaper than coal--and could train good workers quickly. The bank opened in 1830 and soon afterward modern cotton-spinning and weaving machinery from the best European factories arrived; the state also hired foreign experts in textile techniques. In 1844 the big Puebla plants produced 1.4 million lengths of heavy cotton. The country's new industrial capacity exceeded internal demand; the consumer market in the "kingdom of inequality," mostly consisting of hungry Indians, could not sustain the dizzying industrial growth. The effort to break the inherited colonial structure collided against this wall. Yet the industry had been so modernized that in 1840 U.S. textile mills averaged fewer spindles than did those in Mexico. Ten years later the ratio had been more than reversed. Political instability, pressure from British and French merchants and their powerful domestic partners, and the paltriness of an internal market strangled in advance by the mining and latifundista economy, wrecked the experiment. By 1850 Mexico's textile industry had stopped progressing, The creators of the credit and loan bank had broadened their Field of action and, when the bank died, its credits also included woolen mills, carpet factories, and iron and paper producers. Esteban de Antunano insisted on Mexico's need to create, as soon as possible, a national machine industry "to resist European egoism." The great merit of the Alaman-Antunano industrializing cycle was that both men reestablished the identity between political independence and economic independence, and extolled industrialization as the only defense against powerful and aggressive nations.

  Alaman himself became an industrialist, building Mexico's biggest textile plant of the day (it still exists), and organizing fellow industrialists as a pressure group against successive free-trade governments. (Various protectionist statements were published in 1850 in El Siglo XIX:. "With the end of the conquest by Spanish civilization and its three centuries of military dominion, Mexico entered a new era, which can also be called conquest, but a scientific and mercantile one... Its power is merchant shipping; its faith is absolute economic freedom; its mighty principle with less advanced people is the law of reciprocity..... 'Bring to Europe,' we were told, 'what manufactures you can (except, however, those we prohibit); and in return let us bring you what manufactures we can, though they may ruin your industries.' ... If we adopted doctrines that they (our lords across the ocean and the Rio Grande) give but do not take, our exchequer would perhaps benefit a little ... but we would not 181

  be promoting the labor of the Mexican people but that of the English, French, Swiss and North American people."14) But Alaman, conservative and Catholic, never took up the agrarian question since he felt ideologically linked to the old order. And he did not realize that industrial development was condemned in advance to remain up in the air, without bases of support, in that land of countless latifundios and general poverty.

  THE MONTONEROS AND JUAN MANUEL DE ROSAS'S

  LEGACY OF HATE

  Protectionism versus free trade, the country versus the port: this was the essence of the struggle in Argentina's nineteenth-century civil wars. Buenos Aires, which in the seventeenth century was no more than a big village with 400 houses, took power over the whole nation after the May revolution and independence. It was the only port: all that entered or left the country was forced to pass through it. Today the deformations that its hegemony imposed on the nation are plain to see: the capital and its suburbs embrace more than a third of the country's population and in various ways play the role of procurer to the provinces. In that period, with its monopoly on customs revenue, banks, and the issuance of currency, Buenos Aires prospered dizzily at the expense of the inland provinces. It appropriated the national customs receipts--almost all of the port city's income--for its own benefit, spending more than half on wars against the provinces--which thus paid for their own destruction.

  From Buenos Aires's Sala de Comercio, founded in 1810, the British kept watch on shipping through telescopes; they supplied the city folk with fine cloth, artificial flowers, shoelaces, umbrellas, buttons, and chocolate, while the flood of ponchos and factory-made stirrups played havoc up-country. To appreciate the value the world market then placed on Rio de la Plata hides, the imagination must travel back to an age when plastics and synthetic fabrics did not exist, even as a gleam in a chemist's eye. Nothing could equal the fertile coastal plains for grandscale cattle production. In 1816, a new system was discovered for the indefinite preservation of hides by treatment with arsenic; at the same time,

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  slaughterhouses were prospering and multiplying. Brazil, the Antilles, and Africa were opening their markets to imported dried meat, and as that product gained foreign consumers, Argentinians felt the change. Taxes were imposed on internal meat consumption and removed from exports; in a few years the price of calves tripled and ranches upped the value of their land. The gauchos were accustomed to hunting calves freely under the open sky of the unfenced pampa, to eating the best meat and discarding the rest with the sole obligation of delivering the hide to the owner. Things changed. Reorganization of production invol
ved submitting the nomad gaucho to a new servile dependence: a decree in 1815 proclaimed every propertyless countryman a servant, with the obligation to carry a card and have it checked every three months by his master.

  Either he was a servant or a vagrant, and vagrants were forcibly recruited into frontier battalions. The untamed criollo of yore, who had served as cannon-fodder in patriot armies, was turned into a pariah, a wretched peon, or a buck private. Or else he got himself a weapon and joined the rebel montonera bands.( The montonera band "is born in the plains like a whirlwind. It strikes, roars, and smashes like a whirlwind, and suddenly stops and dies like one."15 In Martin Fierro, Argentina's most popular book, Jose Hernandez (who was a federal soldier) puts the plight of the gaucho exiled from his haunts and persecuted by the authorities into song: The eagle lives in his nest,

  The tiger lives in the jungle,

  The fox in any cave,

  And in his fickle fortune,

  Only the gaucho lives a-wandering

  Wherever fate takes him.

  Because:

  For him there are calabooses,

  For him grim prisons,

  Nothing he says is right,

  Although he has right aplenty--

  The right of a wooden churchbell,

  The right of the poor.16

  Jorge Abelardo Ramos notes that the two real surnames appearing in Martin Fierro are Anchorena and Gainza--names representing the oligarchy chat exterminated the armed criollos; today both have been fused into the family that owns the daily La Prensa.

  The other face of Martin Fierro appears in Ricardo Guiraldes's Don Segundo Sombra (1939): here it is the domesticated gaucho, tied to his daily wage, fawning upon his master, a useful type for the folklore of nostalgia and pity.) This fierce gaucho, dispossesed of 183

  everything except glory and anger, swelled the cavalry charges that repeatedly defied well-equipped armies sent from Buenos Aires. The rise of the capitalist cattle ranch in the damp coastal pampa subjected the whole country to the exporting of hides and meat, and went hand in hand with the dictatorship of the free-trade port. Until his defeat and exile, the Uruguayan Jose Artigas had been the outstanding leader of the criollo masses' struggle against merchants and landlords tied to the world market; years later Felipe Varela was able to set off a big rebellion in northern Argentina because, as he proclaimed, "to be a provincial is to be a beggar without country, liberty, or rights." His rising drew a response from the entire hinterland. He was the last of the montoneros; he died in 1870, tuberculous and in poverty.( In 1870 Paraguay, the only Latin American country that still had not entered the imperialist prison, also fell in a bloodbath by foreign invaders.) In history as taught in Argentine schools, this defender of the "American Union"--the dream of reviving the fragmented Great Fatherland--

  remains as much a bandit as Artigas did until recently.

  Born in a village lost among the Catamarca sierras, Varela had been an unhappy witness of the poverty inflicted on his province by the remote arrogant port. In 1824, when Varela was three, Catamarca could not pay the expenses of the delegates it sent to the Constituent Congress in Buenos Aires, and Misiones, Santiago del Estero, and other provinces were in similar plight.

  Catamarcan deputy Manuel Antonio Acevedo pointed to "the ominous change"

  brought about by foreign competition: "Catamarca has had to stand by helplessly, while its agriculture is primitive and costly, its industry without consumers . . . and its commerce by now almost nonexistent."17 In 1830, the representative from Corrientes province, Brigadier General Pedro Ferre, summed up the possible consequences of the protectionism he advocated: Yes, certainly a few wealthy men will be deprived of fine wines and liquors with their dinners.... For the less well-off classes the difference will hardly be noticeable in the wines and liquors they now drink, only in the price, and consumption will go down, which is not such a bad thing. Our country folk won't wear English ponchos or carry British-made bolas and lassos; we won't get clothing, and other things we can make ourselves, from abroad; but on the other hand, the condition of all the Argentine communities will begin to be less miserable and the frightful poverty to which we are now condemned will no longer pursue us.18

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  In an important step toward reconstruction of the national unity that war had torn apart, the Juan Manuel de Rosas administration introduced a decidedly protectionist tariff. It banned the importation of iron and tinplate manufactures, riding equipment, ponchos, belts, wool or cotton waistbands, coarse woolen cloth, farm products, carriage wheels, tallow candles, and combs, and levied heavy duties on coaches, shoes, cordage, clothing, saddles, dried fruits, and alcoholic beverages. There was no tax on meat transported in Argentine flagships, and saddlery and tobacco-growing were encouraged. The effects were soon observable. Until the battle of Caseros that brought Rosas down in 1852, ships built in the Corrientes and Santa Fe yards sailed the rivers, more than one hundred factories prospered in Buenos Aires, and all travelers agreed on the excellence of Cordoba-and Tucuman-made textiles and shoes, Salta cigars and crafts, and Mendoza and San Juan wines and brandies.

  Tucuman cabinetmakers were exporting to Chile, Bolivia, and Peru. Ten years after passage of the law, the guns of British and French warships smashed the chains across the Rio Parana to open up the interior waterways that Rosas had kept firmly closed. Blockade followed the invasion.

  Ten appeals from Yorkshire, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Halifax, and Bradford, signed by 1,500 bankers, traders, and industrialists, had urged the British government to take measures against the restrictions on trade in La Plata. The blockade showed up the limitations of the national industries which, despite the progress made under the tariff law, were incapable of satisfying internal demand. Since 1841 manufacturing had in fact been languishing rather than gaining in vigor. Rosas represented above all the interests of the beef ranchers in Buenos Aires province, and no industrial bourgeoisie existed or was created to promote the development of a genuine national capitalism: the big ranch occupied the center of the economic stage, and no industrial policy could be independently and vigorously undertaken without destroying the omnipotence of the exporting latifundio. Basically, Rosas always remained true to his class, The best rider in the province, guitar-strummer, dancer, and noted horsebreaker, who on stormy starless nights chewed some blades of grass to locate his whereabouts, was himself a big ranch owner producing cured meat and hides, and the big landowners had made him their chief. The black legend that was later spun around his

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  name cannot conceal the national and popular character of many of his administrative measures,( In his well-known Tablas de sangre, Jose Rivera listed Rosas's crimes in order to horrify European sensibilities. According to Atlas (London), the British banking house of Samuel Lafone paid the writer a penny per corpse. Rosas had hit the Imperium hard by banning gold and silver exports, and had dissolved the National Bank, which was an instrument of British trade.19) but class contradictions explain the lack-- except for the customs-house surgery--of any dynamic, sustained industrial policy. This lack cannot be attributed to instabilities and shortages resulting from domestic wars and foreign blockade, for was it not in the whirlwind of a besieged revolution that Artigas, twenty years earlier, had combined in-depth agrarian reform with policies aimed at industrializing and uniting the country? In a substantial book, Vivian Trias has compared Rosas's protectionism with the series of measures spread by Artigas from the Banda Oriental (now Uruguay), between 1813 and 1815, to bring true independence to the area of the La Plata viceroyalty.20 Rosas neither barred foreigners from trading in the internal market, nor returned to the nation the tariff revenues which Buenos Aires still appropriated, nor ended the dictatorship of the one and only port. But the nationalization of internal trade and the abolition of Buenos Aires's port and customs monopoly had been foundation stones--along with the agrarian questioner Artigas's policy. Artigas had wanted free navigation on internal waterways, but Rosa
s never gave the provinces this key to the door of foreign trade. Rosas also remained basically loyal to his privileged province. Despite all these limitations, the nationalism and populism of the "blue-eyed gaucho"

  still inspire hatred in Argentina's ruling classes. Rosas remains "guilty of treason to the fatherland"--as a never-annulled law of 1857 put it--and the country still refuses to provide a tomb for his bones, which are buried in Europe. His official image is that of an assassin.

  With the suppression of Rosas's heresy, the oligarchy rediscovered its destiny. The chairman of the rural exhibition committee of 1858 opened the show with these words: "We, still in our infancy, are humbly content to send our products and raw materials to European markets so that they may be returned to us transformed by the powerful means at Europe's disposal. Raw materials are what Europe wants, so as to change them into rich artifacts."21

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  The illustrious Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and other liberal writers saw in the rural montonera only a symbol of barbarism, backwardness, and ignorance, the anachronism of the countryside confronting urban civilization, the poncho and chaps against the frock coat, the spear and knife against the troops of the line, illiteracy against the school. Sarmiento wrote to President Bartolome Mitre in 1861: "Don't try to economize on gaucho blood, it's all they have that is human. This 'is a fertilizer that must be made useful to the country." Such scorn and hatred were an expression of antipatriotism clearly tinged with political economy: "We are neither industrialists nor navigators,"