It’s not for nothing that witch-hunts went after women, and not only during the Inquisition. Spasms and moans, maybe orgasms—even worse, multiple orgasms—these were the evidence of a woman bewitched. Only possession by the Devil could explain so much forbidden fire, which by fire was punished: God commanded that female sinners burning with passion be burned alive. Envy and terror of female pleasure are nothing new. A myth common to many cultures over the ages and across the world is that of the vagina dentata, the woman’s sex like a mouth filled with teeth, the insatiable piranha that feeds on male flesh. And in the world today there are twenty million women whose clitorises have been mutilated.
No woman is free from suspicion. In boleros they’re all ungrateful; in tangos, they’re all whores (except for mama). In the countries of the South, one woman out of every three married women is routinely beaten for what she has done or could do. “We are asleep,” says a woman worker in Montevideo’s barrio Casavalle. “Some prince gives you a kiss and puts you to sleep. When you awake, the prince is beating you up.” Another: “I’ve got my mother’s fear, and my mother had my grandmother’s.” Men confirm their right of ownership over women with their fists, just as men and women do over children.
And rapes, aren’t they also rites to enforce that right? Rapists don’t seek pleasure, nor do they find it. Rape brands a mark of ownership on the victim’s buttocks, the most brutal expression of the phallic power of the arrow, the spade, the rifle, the cannon, the missile, or any other erection. In the United States a woman is raped every six minutes, in Mexico every nine minutes. A Mexican woman says: “There is no difference between being raped and being hit by a truck, except that after rape men ask if you liked it.”
Statistics track only those rapes that get reported, which in Latin America are always many fewer than occur. Most rape victims remain silent out of fear. Many girls, raped in their homes, end up on the streets, which they work as cheap bodies. Some of them, like all street kids, make their homes on the pavement. Fourteen-year-old Lélia, raised by the grace of God on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, says, “Everybody steals. I steal and people steal from me.” When Lélia sells her body, they pay her little or they pay her with blows. And when she steals, the police steal what she stole and her body as well. Angélica, thrown onto the streets of Mexico City at sixteen, says: “I told my mother that my brother had abused me, and she kicked me out of the house. Now I live with a guy and I’m pregnant. He says he’ll support me if I have a boy. If I have a girl, he doesn’t say.”
“In today’s world, being born female is a risk,” says the director of UNICEF. In 1995 in Beijing, the international women’s conference noted that women today earn one-third what men earn for equal work. Of every ten poor people, seven are women, and barely one woman in a hundred owns property. Minus a wing, humanity flies crooked. For every ten legislators, there is, on average, one woman, and in some parliaments there are none. Women are acknowledged as useful at home, in factories, or in offices and even as necessary in bed or in the kitchen, but public spaces are virtually monopolized by men born with the urge to have power and make war. That a woman, Carol Bellamy, heads UNICEF is unusual. The United Nations preaches equality but doesn’t practice it: at the highest levels of this, the highest international organization, men occupy eight out of every ten positions.
* * *
The Despised Mother
Black Africa’s works of art, the fruits of collective creation by nobody and everybody, are rarely exhibited on an equal footing with those of artists considered worthy of the name. The booty of colonial pillage can sometimes be found in a few museums and art galleries or in private collections in Europe and the United States, but its “natural” place is in the anthropology museum. Reduced to handicrafts or folklore, African art is dealt with only as one of several customs of exotic peoples.
The centers of so-called civilization, accustomed as they are to acting as creditors for the rest of the world, have no great interest in acknowledging their debts. Yet anyone who has eyes to see and admire might wonder what would have happened to twentieth-century art without the black contribution? Without the African mother from whom they nursed, would the most famous paintings and sculptures of our times have been possible? On page after page in a revealing book published by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, William Rubin and other experts document the debt that the art we call art owes to the art of peoples we call “primitive.”
The principal figures of contemporary painting and sculpture were nourished by African art, and some of them copied it without even a thank-you. The greatest artistic genius of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso, always worked surrounded by African masks and weavings, and their influence is evident in the many marvels he left. The painting that gave rise to Cubism, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (the ladies of the red-light district of Barcelona), offers one of many examples. The most famous face in it, the one that breaks most strikingly with traditional symmetry, is an exact reproduction of a mask from the Congo, representing a face deformed by syphilis, that hangs in the Royal Central African Museum in Belgium.
Certain carved heads by Amedeo Modigliani are twin sisters of masks from Mali and Nigeria. The hieroglyphic borders on traditional Mali weavings were the model for Paul Klee’s graphs. Some stylized carvings from the Congo or Kenya made before Alberto Giacometti was born could pass for Giacomettis in any museum. You could try to guess which is a Max Ernst oil of a man’s head and which is the Ivory Coast sculpture Head of a Knight in a private New York collection, but it wouldn’t be easy. Moonlight on a Breeze by Alexander Calder contains a face that is a clone of a Luba mask from Congo displayed in the Seattle Art Museum.
* * *
Justice is like a snake: it only bites the barefooted.
—MONSIGNOR OSCAR ARNULFO ROMERO, ARCHBISHOP OF SAN SALVADOR, ASSASSINATED IN 1980
LECTURES ON FEAR
■ The Teaching of Fear
■ The Industry of Fear
■ Sewing: How to Make Enemies to Measure
THE TEACHING OF FEAR
In a world that prefers security to justice, there is loud applause whenever justice is sacrificed on the altar of security. The rite takes place in the streets. Every time a criminal falls in a hail of bullets, society feels some relief from the disease that makes it tremble. The death of each lowlife has a pharmaceutical effect on those living the high life. The word “pharmacy” comes from pharmakos, the Greek name for humans sacrificed to the gods in times of crisis.
THE GREAT THREAT OF THE FIN DE SIÈCLE
At the end of 1982 a routine event occurred in Rio de Janeiro. The police killed a man suspected of robbery. The bullet entered the man’s back, as tends to happen when officers of the law kill in self-defense, and the case was filed away. In his report, the chief explained that the suspect was “a true social microbe,” who had been “absolved on this planet by his death.” The papers, radio, and TV in Brazil often use a vocabulary drawn from medicine and zoology to describe criminals: “virus,” “cancer,” “social infection,” “animals,” “predators,” “insects,” “wild beasts,” even “small beasts” when referring to children. These terms always allude to poor people. When criminals aren’t poor, the story leaps to the front page: “Young Mugger Killed Was Middle-Class,” went a Folha de São Paulo headline of October 25, 1995.
Not counting the many victims of gangs linked to the police, officially the São Paulo state police killed four people a day in 1992; by year’s end the total was four times the number killed by the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for fifteen years. At the end of 1995, the Rio police were given a raise for “bravery and fearlessness.” That pay hike brought another sort of raise in its wake: the number of “alleged criminals” shot dead. “They aren’t citizens, they’re bandits,” explained General Nilton Cerqueira, once a star of the military dictatorship and now responsible for public security in Rio. He has always believed that, like good soldiers, good policemen shoot first a
nd ask questions later.
After the earthquake of the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Latin America’s armed forces turned their attention from the traditional role of defending borders to “internal enemies”: guerrilla subversion and its many incubators. With the free world and democratic rule at stake, these militaries were inspired to do away with freedom and democracy. In just four years, between 1962 and 1966, there were nine coups d’état in Latin America. Following the doctrine of national security to a tee, the brass continued to overthrow civilian governments and massacre people for years thereafter. Time has passed, civilian rule has been reestablished. The enemy remains “internal” but isn’t what it used to be. Now the armed forces are taking up the fight against so-called common crime. Instead of the doctrine of national security, we have the hysteria of public security. Generally speaking, the officers don’t like it one bit that they’ve been demoted to mere policemen—but reality insists.
* * *
Global Fear
Those who work are afraid they’ll lose their jobs.
Those who don’t are afraid they’ll never find one.
Whoever doesn’t fear hunger is afraid of eating.
Drivers are afraid of walking and pedestrians are afraid of getting run over.
Democracy is afraid of remembering and language is afraid of speaking.
Civilians fear the military, the military fears a shortage of weapons, weapons fear a shortage of wars.
It is the time of fear.
Women’s fear of violent men and men’s fear of fearless women.
Fear of thieves, fear of the police.
Fear of doors without locks, of time without watches, of children without television; fear of night without sleeping pills and day without pills to wake up.
Fear of crowds, fear of solitude, fear of what was and what could be, fear of dying, fear of living.
* * *
About thirty years ago the establishment had enemies of all colors, from pale pink to fire-engine red. The work of chicken thieves and knife-carrying slum dwellers was of interest only to crime-page readers, devotees of cruelty, and experts in criminology. Today, “common crime” is a universal obsession, democratized and within the reach of all: many practice it, everyone suffers from it. Crime is the most potent source of inspiration for politicians and journalists who scream for an iron hand and the death penalty, and it gives certain military officers a golden opportunity to pursue civilian careers. Maybe the collective terror that identifies democracy with chaos and insecurity helps explain why some Latin American generals who only a few years ago were running bloody dictatorships have been so successful as politicians. General Ríos Montt, the exterminating angel of Guatemalan Indians, led the polls until his presidential candidacy was ruled illegal, and the same happened with General Oviedo in Paraguay. General Bussi, who killed suspects with one hand while with the other depositing the sweat of his brow in Swiss banks, was elected and reelected governor of the Argentine province of Tucumán. Another uniformed assassin, General Banzer, was rewarded with the presidency of Bolivia.
The experts at the Inter-American Development Bank, who can translate life and death into dollars and cents, calculate that Latin America loses $168 billion a year to crime. We are winning the World Cup of crime. Latin America’s murder rate is six times the world average. If the economy only grew like crime, the region would be the most prosperous on the planet. Peace in El Salvador? What peace? At the rate of a murder an hour, El Salvador is keeping pace with the worst years of the war. Kidnapping is the most lucrative industry in Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico. In our large cities, no one would be considered normal if he hadn’t been mugged at least once. There are five times as many murders in Rio as in New York. Bogotá is the capital of violence, Medellín the city of widows. Elite cops, members of “special groups,” have begun to patrol the streets of some Latin American cities outfitted from head to toe for World War III. They have infrared night visors, headphones, microphones, and bulletproof vests; on their belts they carry pepper spray and bullets; an automatic rifle is in their hands and a pistol on their thighs.
* * *
Typical Scenes from Latin America
States stop running businesses and concentrate on running jails.
Presidents become local managers of foreign companies.
Finance ministers make good translators.
The captains of industry become importers.
The many more depend more and more on the leftovers of the ever-fewer few.
Workers lose their jobs.
Peasants lose their plots.
Children lose their right to be children.
Youth lose the capacity to believe.
Old folks lose their pensions.
“Life is a lottery,” say the winners.
* * *
Of every hundred crimes committed in Colombia, ninety-seven are never solved. The proportion is similar in the barrios of Buenos Aires, where the police spend most of their time committing crimes and killing young people. From 1983, when democracy was restored, to the middle of 1997, the police blew away 314 suspicious-looking boys. In the course of a police shake-up at the end of 1997, the press discovered that nobody knew what five thousand officers on the payroll did or where they were. Polls showed that few Argentines or Uruguayans would turn to the police if they had a serious problem. Six out of ten Uruguayans favored taking justice into their own hands, and some had signed up for shooting lessons.
In the United States four out of every ten people admit to having changed their routines because of crime, and south of the Rio Grande people talk about muggings and robberies as much as about soccer or the weather. The public opinion industry throws oil on the fire, doing its best to turn public security into public obsession, but the fact is, reality does more. Reality assures us that violence is rising even faster than the statistics confess. In many countries people don’t report crimes, because they don’t trust the police or they fear them. The Uruguayan papers call gangs that pull off spectacular robberies “supergangs,” and those who have police officers among their members are called “poligangs.” Of every ten Venezuelans, nine believe the police commit crimes. In 1996, the majority of Rio de Janeiro’s finest admitted that they had been offered bribes, while their chief said that “the police were created to be corrupt” and that a society “that wants corrupt and violent police” is to blame.
An internal police report leaked to Amnesty International shows that six out of every ten crimes in Mexico City are committed by the police. To catch a hundred criminals in a year, it takes 14 police in Washington, 15 in Paris, 18 in London, and 1,295 in Mexico City. “We have allowed the police to become excessively corrupt,” the mayor of that city admitted in 1997. “Excessively?” asked the ever-curious Carlos Monsiváis. “What’s wrong with them? Are they corrupt or are they getting away with honesty? Put them to work.”
At century’s end, everything is becoming globalized and everything is becoming alike: clothes, food, the lack of food, ideas, the lack of ideas, and crime, too, not to speak of the fear of crime. Throughout the world, crime is rising faster than the numbers can sing, even though they sing with gusto. Since 1970, reported crimes have grown three times faster than the world’s population. In Eastern Europe, while consumerism buried Communism in the 1990s, daily violence multiplied at the same rate that wages fell: by three in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Organized and disorganized crime have taken over Russia, where juvenile crime is flowering as nowhere else. The kids who wander the streets of Russian cities are called “the forgotten”; “We have hundreds of thousands of homeless children,” admitted President Boris Yeltsin.
At the end of 1997, terror of assaults was written into law in most eloquent fashion in Louisiana, where drivers were authorized to kill anyone who tried to rob them, even if the crook was unarmed. This no-holds-barred approach was then promoted on TV thanks to the toothy smile of the reigning Miss Louisiana. Me
anwhile the popularity of New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani rose spectacularly when he hit criminals hard with a “zero tolerance” policy. The crime rate dropped in the same measure as charges of police brutality rose. Beastly repression, a magic potion adored by the media, fell savagely on blacks and the other “minorities” that make up the majority of New York’s residents. “Zero tolerance” quickly became a beacon for Latin America’s cities.
Presidential elections in Honduras, 1997: crime is the key issue in the speeches of all the candidates, every one of whom promises security to a people cowering in fear. Legislative elections in Argentina, the same year: candidate Norma Miralles comes out for the death penalty, but not if it’s painless: “It’s no big deal to kill a condemned man, because he doesn’t suffer.” Not long before, Rio de Janeiro mayor Luiz Paulo Conde said he preferred life sentences or forced labor, because the death penalty has the drawback of being “a very quick thing.”
But no law can stop the invasion of those who live outside the law. The frightened only multiply in number, and they can be more dangerous than the danger that frightens them. Not only do the hustlers and spongers who live in prosperity feel threatened, so do many who survive in scarcity, poor people who suffer the attacks of people poorer or more desperate than themselves. “Frenzied Mob Burns Child Alive for Stealing an Orange,” reads the headline. The blind fury of poor against poor: between 1979 and 1988 the Brazilian press reported 272 lynchings by people who had no money to pay the police to do the job for them. Poor, too, were those responsible for the 52 lynchings that occurred in Guatemala in 1997 and the 166 lynchings between 1986 and 1991 in Jamaica. During those same five years, quick-triggered Jamaican police killed over a thousand suspects. A poll found that a third of the population believed delinquents should be hanged, since neither street vengeance nor police violence did the trick. Polls in 1997 in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo revealed that more than half the people considered lynching criminals to be “normal.”
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