Upside Down

by Eduardo Galeano

  THE INDUSTRY OF FEAR

  Fear is the raw material that sustains the flourishing industries of private security and social control, and it’s in steady supply. Demand in these industries is growing as fast as or faster than the crime rate that drives it, and experts predict that it’s going to keep on climbing. The market for private police and private jails is booming, while all of us—some more, some less—are turning into guards and prisoners: guards keeping an eye on whoever’s nearby and prisoners of fear.

  TIME OF CAPTIVE JAILERS

  “The TV news is our best ad,” say security salesmen, and they ought to know. In Guatemala there are 180 security firms, in Mexico 600, and in Peru 1,500. There are 3,000 in Colombia. In Canada and the United States twice as much is spent on private security as on public security. At the turn of the century there will be two million private police in the United States. In Argentina security is a billion-dollar-a-year business. Every day in Uruguay there are more homeowners who lock four locks instead of three, making some doors look like knights from the Crusades.

  A Chico Buarque song starts out with the wail of a police siren: “Call the thief! Call the thief!” pleads the Brazilian singer. In Latin America the crime-control industry feeds on an incessant torrent of news about assaults, kidnappings, rapes, and other crimes. But it also relies on the poor reputation of the public police, who commit crimes with enthusiasm and pursue criminals with suspicious inefficiency. The homes of everyone who has anything to lose, however little, are already behind bars or barbed wire. And even we atheists call on God before we call the police.

  In countries where the public police are more effective, alarm at the specter of crime also leads to the privatization of panic. Not only is the number of private policemen in the United States skyrocketing, but so is the number of guns on night tables and in glove compartments. The National Rifle Association, presided over by actor Charlton Heston, has nearly three million members and cites Scripture to justify bearing arms. You can’t blame its leaders for swelling with pride when they proclaim that there are 230 million firearms in the hands of U.S. citizens, an average of one weapon per soul, leaving aside babies and toddlers. In reality, this arsenal is held by a third of the population. For that third, a gun is like a lover or a credit card: without it you can’t sleep or leave home.

  All over the world, fewer and fewer dogs enjoy the luxury of just being pets; ever more of them earn their bone by frightening strangers. Car alarms sell like hotcakes, and so do the little personal alarms that shriek in a woman’s handbag or a gentleman’s pocket. Same story with portable electric cattle prods, the “shockers” that knock out suspects, and with sprays that paralyze from a distance. A security company recently began marketing an elegant coat that attracts glances and repels bullets. Protect yourself and your family, counsels the Internet ad for these sporty leather cuirasses. (In Colombia, the flourishing bulletproof-vest industry sells more and more in children’s sizes.)

  * * *

  Let the Children Come unto Me

  The sale of guns to minors is against the law in the United States, but advertising targets that clientele anyway. National Rifle Association literature sees the future of shooting sports in the hands of our grandchildren, and a pamphlet from the National Shooting Sports Foundation explains that every ten-year-old alone at home or traveling alone to the store ought to have a gun. In the New England Firearms catalog, too, children are the future of the sport.

  According to statistics from the Violence Policy Center, every day in the United States, through crime, suicide, or accident, bullets kill fourteen children under the age of nineteen. The country grunts in disgust and shakes its head at the frequency with which schools are turned into battlefields. The killers are usually not black boys from the slums but white, freckled suburbanites.

  * * *

  Electronic monitoring via closed-circuit TV and other devices keeps an eye on things in many places. It’s undertaken by individuals and businesses, not to mention the state. In Argentina the ten thousand employees of state intelligence agencies spend two million dollars a day spying on people: they tap phones, they film, they record.

  No country fails to use public security as an alibi or a pretext. Hidden cameras and microphones are placed in banks and supermarkets, offices and stadiums, and sometimes they follow people right into their bedrooms. Is there an eye hidden in the TV remote control? Ears listening from the ashtray? Billy Graham, who makes millions preaching the poverty of Jesus on TV, has acknowledged that he is careful when he talks on the phone and even when he talks to his wife in bed. “Our business isn’t to promote Big Brother,” a spokesman for the U.S. Security Industry Association insists defensively. In his prophetic novel written half a century ago, George Orwell imagined a city where Big Brother used TV to keep tabs on everyone. He called it 1984, but perhaps he didn’t get the date quite right.

  Who are the jailers and who the jailed? In one way or another we’re all imprisoned, those in jail and those of us outside. How can the prisoners of need be free, since they live to work and can’t afford the luxury of working to live? And the prisoners of desperation, who have no work and never will and who survive only by robbery or by miracle? What about the prisoners of fear, are we free? Aren’t we all prisoners of fear, those on top, on the bottom, and in the middle, too? In societies obliged to live by everyone-for-himself, we’re all prisoners, the guarded and the guards, the chosen and the pariahs. The Argentine cartoonist Nik drew a reporter interviewing a man gripping the bars of a window in his house:

  “We’ve all installed bars, TV cameras, floodlights, double locks, and tinted glass.…”

  “Don’t your relatives come over?”

  “Yes, I have visiting hours.”

  “And what do the police say?”

  “If I keep up my good behavior, Sunday morning I can go out to the bakery.”

  I’ve seen bars on shantytown hovels made of scrap wood and tin, poor people defending themselves from other poor people. Urban development metastasizes inequality: in the suburbs, hovels and gardens spring up side by side. Rich suburbs tend to be not too far from the shantytowns that supply them with maids, gardeners, and watchmen. In places of despair, those who eat only now and then lie in wait. In places of privilege, the rich live under house arrest. On a private block in San Isidro in Buenos Aires, the man delivering newspapers jokes, “Live here? No thanks. If I have nothing to hide, why would I?”

  Helicopters cross the skies above the city of São Paulo, coming and going between luxury prison homes and downtown rooftops. The streets, kidnapped by thugs and poisoned by pollution, are a trap to be avoided. Fugitives from violence and smog, the rich are obliged to live in hiding. Paradoxes of exhibitionism: opulence is concealed behind ever-higher walls in houses without faces, invisible to the envy and covetousness of everyone else. Microcities rise up on the edges of the great cities. There mansions huddle, protected by complex electronic security systems and armed guards who patrol their borders. Just as malls are like the cathedrals of other times, these castles of our days have watchtowers, cressets, and embrasures to spy the enemy and keep him at bay. On the other hand, they have neither the magnificence nor the beauty of those old stone fortresses.

  * * *

  Family Chronicle

  Nicolás Escobar’s aunt died in her sleep, peacefully, at home in Asunción, Paraguay. Nicolás was six and had already logged thousands of hours of television when he learned that he had lost his beloved elderly relative. He asked, “Who killed her?”

  * * *

  The captives of fear don’t realize they are prisoners. But the prisoners of the penal system, who wear numbers on their chests, have lost both their freedom and the right to delude themselves. The most modern jails, the latest thing in fashion, tend to be maximum-security prisons. No one suggests returning criminals to society, saving those who have lost their way, as it was once so quaintly put. Nowadays, the only desire is to shut them away forever, and no
one bothers to preach lies. Justice blindfolds herself to keep from seeing where a criminal comes from or why he committed a crime, which ought to be the first step toward his possible rehabilitation. The model fin-de-siècle jail is not the least concerned with redemption or even with teaching a lesson. Society locks up public menaces, then throws away the key.

  In some new prisons in the United States, the cell walls are steel and windowless; the doors open and close electronically. The U.S. penitentiary system is generous only when it hands out televisions, for their narcotic effect, and a growing number of prisoners have little or no contact with other prisoners. A prisoner might see a guard once in a while, but even guards are growing scarce. Today’s technology allows a single employee in a control room to keep watch over a hundred prisoners. Machines take care of everything.

  Those under house arrest have also been controlled by electronic means, ever since a judge named Love, Jack Love, invented a lovely remote-control bracelet. Attached to the criminal’s wrist or ankle, it keeps track of his movements and knows if he’s trying to take it off, or if he drinks alcohol, or if he leaves the house. At this rate, predicts criminologist Nils Christie, trials will soon be held by video with the accused never seen in person by the prosecutor, the defense attorney, or the judge.

  In 1997, there were 1.8 million prisoners in U.S. jails, more than double the number ten years earlier. But that figure would triple if it encompassed those under house arrest, out on bail, or on parole. That total would include five times as many black prisoners as all those imprisoned under apartheid at its height, a number equal to the entire population of Denmark. This gigantic clientele, tempting for any investor, has encouraged privatization. Private jails continue to sprout in the United States, even though they’ve shown themselves to be purveyors of horrible food and poor treatment—eloquent proof that for the taxpayer private jails are no cheaper than public ones, since their huge profits far outweigh their low costs.

  Back in the seventeenth century, English jailers bribed judges to get more prisoners. When their sentences were up, prisoners were so deep in debt that they had to work for their jailers, often as beggars, for the rest of their lives. At the end of the twentieth century, a private U.S. prison company, Corrections Corporation of America, was one of the five highest-priced companies on the New York Stock Exchange. Founded in 1983 with capital from Kentucky Fried Chicken, the company made it clear from the start that it intended to sell jails like chicken dinners. By the end of 1997, the value of its stock had multiplied seventy times, and the company had set up prisons in England, Australia, and Puerto Rico. But the domestic market is the meat and potatoes of its business. In the United States, where prisoners are always plentiful, jails are hotels that never have a vacancy. In 1992, over a hundred companies were designing, building, or administering prisons.

  In 1996, World Research Group sponsored a conference on how to maximize the profits of this dynamic industry. The invitation read: “While arrests and convictions are on the rise, profits are to be made—profits from crime.” The fact is that the incidence of crime in the United States has been falling in recent years, but the market still serves up ever more prisoners. He who is not jailed for what he has done is jailed for what he might do. There’s no reason why falling crime statistics should disturb the brilliant growth of this enterprise. Besides, as executive Diane McClure assured investors in October 1997, “Our market analysis shows that juvenile crime will continue growing.”

  In an interview at the beginning of 1998, novelist Toni Morrison pointed out that “the brutal treatment of prisoners in private jails has grown so scandalous that even Texans are concerned. Texas, a place not known for its big heart, is rescinding contracts.” But the prisoners, the unfree, must serve the free market. They don’t deserve better treatment than any other commodity. The National Criminal Justice Commission estimates that at the current rate of change in the prison population, by the year 2020 six out of every ten black men will be behind bars. Over the past twenty years, public spending on prisons has grown by 900 percent. That hasn’t alleviated public fears one bit, but it has done lots for the health of the prison industry.

  * * *

  For Sale

  Here are some of the ads published in the April 1998 issue of the U.S. magazine Corrections Today:

  Bell Atlantic offers the “most secure phone systems” for monitoring and screening calls: “Full control over who, when and how inmates call.”

  The ad for US West’s inmate telephone service shows a crouching prisoner with a cigarette butt hanging from his lips: “He could cut you up. Somewhere, there could be a hardened criminal concealing a sharpened weapon.”

  On another page a threatening shadow, another prisoner, lies in wait: “Don’t give an inch,” warns LCN’s ad for high-security closers. “Any door, not fully latched, is an open invitation to trouble.”

  “Inmates are built tougher than ever before,” warns Modu-Form. “Fortunately, so is our furniture.”

  Motor Coach Industries shows off its latest-model jail on wheels, something akin to a doghouse divided into steel cages. “Save time. Save dollars,” suggests Mark Correctional Systems, a builder of prisons. “Economy! Quality! Speed! Durability! Security!”

  * * *

  “After all, jail means money,” concludes Nils Christie. And he tells the story of a British parliamentarian, Sir Edward Gardner, who in the 1980s crossed the Atlantic at the head of a European commission to study prison privatization in the United States. Sir Edward was an enemy of private prisons. When he returned to London, he had changed his mind and so became president of the company Contract Prisons, PLC.

  SEWING: HOW TO MAKE ENEMIES TO MEASURE

  Never have so many economic resources and so much scientific and technological knowledge been brought to bear on the production of death. The countries that sell the world the most weapons are the same ones in charge of world peace. Fortunately for them, the threat of world peace is receding. The war market is on the rebound and the outlook for profits from butchery is promising. The weapons factories are as busy as those producing enemies to fit their needs.

  THE DEVIL’S AMPLE WARDROBE

  Good news for the military economy, which is to say, good news for the economy: the weapons industry, selling death, exporting violence, is flourishing. Demand is steady, the market is growing, and good harvests continue to be reaped from the cultivation of injustice across the globe. Crime and drug addiction, social unrest, and national, regional, local, and personal hatred are all on the rise.

  After a few years of decline at the end of the Cold War, arms sales have turned around. The world market in weaponry, with total sales of $40 billion, grew 8 percent in 1996. Leading the list of buyers was Saudi Arabia at $9 billion. For several years that country has also led the list of countries that violate human rights. In 1996, says Amnesty International, “reports of torture and ill-treatment of detainees continued, and the judicial punishment of flogging was frequently imposed. At least 27 individuals were sentenced to flogging, ranging from 120 to 200 lashes. They included 24 Philippine nationals who were reportedly sentenced for homosexual behavior. At least 69 people were executed.” And also: “The government of King Fahd bin ’Abdul ’Aziz maintained its ban on political parties and trade unions. Press censorship continued to be strictly enforced.”

  For many years that oil-rich monarchy has been the top client for U.S. weapons and British war planes. Arms and oil, two key factors in national prosperity: the healthy trade of oil for weapons allows the Saudi dictatorship to drown domestic protest in blood, while feeding the U.S. and British war economies and protecting their sources of energy from threat. A skeptic might conclude that those billion-dollar purchase orders bought King Fahd impunity. For reasons that only Allah knows, we never see, hear, or read anything about Saudi Arabia’s atrocities in the media, the same media that tend to get quite worked up about human rights abuses in other Arab countries. Best friends are those who buy
the most weapons. The U.S. arms industry wages a struggle against terrorism by selling weapons to terrorist governments whose only relation to human rights is to do all they can to trample them.

  * * *

  Points of View/7

  On a wall in San Francisco: “If voting changed anything, it would be illegal.”

  On a wall in Rio de Janeiro: “If men gave birth, abortion would be legal.”

  In the jungle, do they call the habit of devouring the weakest the “law of the city”?

  From the point of view of a sick people, what’s the meaning of a healthy currency?

  Weapons sales are good news for the economy. Are they also good news for those who end up dead?

  * * *

  * * *

  Points of View/8

  Until not so many years ago, historians of Athenian democracy never mentioned slaves or women, except in passing. Slaves were a majority of the Greek population and women half of it. What would Athenian democracy have looked like from their point of view?

  The U.S. Declaration of Independence declared in 1776 that “all men are created equal.” What did that mean from the point of view of the half a million black slaves whose status remained unchanged after the declaration was made? And to women, who still had no rights? To whom were they created equal?