With a speed and efficiency that would arouse Michael Jackson’s envy, many revolutionary activists and parties of the red or pink left are undergoing an ideological color change. I once heard it said that the stomach shames the face, but contemporary chameleons prefer to explain it another way: democracy must be consolidated, we have to modernize the economy, there is no alternative but to adapt to reality.
Reality, however, says that peace without justice, the peace we enjoy today in Latin America, is a field sown with violence. In Colombia, the country that suffers the most violence, 85 percent of the dead are victims of “common violence,” and only 15 percent die from “political violence.” Could it be that common violence somehow expresses the political impotence of societies that have been unable to establish a peace worthy of the name?
History is unambiguous: the U.S. veto has blocked or closed off to the point of strangulation most of the political experiments that have sought to get at the roots of violence. Justice and solidarity have been condemned as foreign aggression against the foundations of Western civilization, leaving it plain as can be that democracy has limits and you’d better not test them. The story is a long one, but it’s worth recalling at least the recent examples of Chile, Nicaragua, and Cuba.
At the beginning of the seventies, when Chile tried to take democracy seriously, Henry Kissinger dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s of the White House decree against that unpardonable foray. “I don’t see why,” he said, “we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”
The process that led up to General Pinochet’s coup d’état left hanging a few questions practically no one asks anymore about relations between countries in the Americas and the imbalance in the rights they enjoy. Would it have been normal for President Allende to say that President Nixon was not acceptable to Chile, just as President Nixon said with a straight face that President Allende was not acceptable to the United States? Would it have been normal for Chile to organize an international credit and investment blockade against the United States? Would it have been normal for Chile to pay off U.S. politicians, journalists, and military officers and then encourage them to drown democracy in blood? And suppose Allende had mounted a coup d’état to block Nixon’s inauguration and another to overthrow him? The great powers that govern the world practice terrorism without compunction, since their crimes lead them not to the electric chair but to the thrones of power. And the crime of power is the mother of all crimes.
Nicaragua was sentenced to ten years of war in the 1980s when it committed the insolence of being Nicaragua. An army recruited, trained, armed, and led by the United States tormented the country, while a campaign to poison world opinion portrayed the Sandinista revolution as a conspiracy hatched in the basement of the Kremlin. Nicaragua wasn’t attacked because it was a satellite of a great power but to force it back into being one. Nicaragua wasn’t attacked because it lacked democracy but so that democracy would be lacking. While fighting the war, the Sandinistas also taught half a million people how to read and write, cut infant mortality by a third, and inspired a sense of solidarity and a yearning for justice in many, many people. That was their challenge and that was their damnation. In the end, exhaustion from the long, devastating war cost the Sandinistas an election. And later, as tends to happen, several of their leaders sinned against hope by disowning their own words and deeds in an astonishing about-face.
During the years of war, peace reigned in the streets of Nicaraguan towns. Since peace was declared, the streets have become scenes of war, the battlegrounds of common criminals and youth gangs. A young U.S. anthropologist, Dennis Rodgers, joined a group of toughs in one of the worst barrios of Managua. He found that such gangs are indeed the violent response of young people to a society that excludes them, and they flourish not only because of grinding poverty and the absence of any hope for work or study but also out of a desperate search for some sort of identity. In the seventies and eighties, years of revolution and war, young people saw themselves in their country, in the colony that wanted to become a country, but the youth of the nineties were left without a mirror. Now they are patriots of the barrio, or of a block in the barrio, and they fight to the death against gangs from enemy neighborhoods or enemy blocks. By defending their territory and organizing themselves to fight and steal, they feel a little less alone and a little less poor in their atomized and impoverished world. They share what they steal and spend the loot from their muggings on glue, marijuana, drink, bullets, knives, Nike shoes, and baseball caps.
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The World Map
The equator did not cross the middle of the world map that we studied in school. More than half a century ago, German researcher Arno Peters understood what everyone had looked at but no one had seen: the emperor of geography had no clothes.
The map they taught us gives two-thirds of the world to the North and one-third to the South. Europe is shown as larger than Latin America, even though Latin America is actually twice the size of Europe. India appears smaller than Scandinavia, even though it’s three times as big. The United States and Canada fill more space on the map than Africa, when in reality they cover barely two-thirds as much territory.
The map lies. Traditional geography steals space just as the imperial economy steals wealth, official history steals memory, and formal culture steals the word.
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In Cuba street violence has also grown, and prostitution has flourished, ever since the country’s Eastern European allies collapsed and the dollar became the island’s currency. For forty years Cuba was treated as a leper for the crime of having built in this hemisphere a society based more on solidarity and less on injustice. In recent years, that society has lost most of its material base of support: the economy is out of whack, the tourist invasion has warped people’s daily lives, work has lost its value, and the dolorous traitors of yesterday have become the dollar-are-us traders of today. Despite these recent sorrows, even the revolution’s bitterest enemies admit that some of its achievements still stand, above all in education and health. The mortality rate for Cuban children, for example, is half that for the young of Washington, D.C. Fidel Castro is still the political leader who speaks forbidden truths to the world’s rulers and the one who most insists that the ruled must unite. As a friend just back from Cuba told me, “There are shortages of everything—except dignity. That they have in such quantities they could give out transfusions.” But the crisis in Cuba and the island’s tragic isolation have stripped bare the limitations of a top-down system that hasn’t shaken the bad habit of believing things do not exist unless they’re mentioned in the official press.
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Scrawled on City Walls
I like night so much, I’d throw a blanket over day.
True, crickets don’t work. But ants can’t sing.
My grandmother said no to drugs. And she died.
Life is a disease that goes away on its own.
This factory smokes birds.
My dad lies like a politician.
No more action! We want promises!
Hope is the last thing we lost.
We weren’t asked about coming into the world. But we demand to be asked about living in it.
There’s a different country somewhere.
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The nine U.S. presidents who have screamed successive condemnations of Cuba for its lack of democracy have done nothing more than denounce the consequences of their own acts. It was the ceaseless aggression and the long, implacable blockade that drove the Cuban revolution to become more and more militarized, far removed from the model that was originally envisioned. The omnipotence of the state, which began as a response to the omnipotence of the market, ended up succumbing to the impotence of the bureaucracy. The revolution sought to grow by transforming itself, and it spawned a bureaucracy that reproduces by repeating itself. At this point, the internal blockade, the authoritarian blockade, is turning out to be ju
st as much of an enemy as the external imperial blockade, stifling the creative energy of the revolution. Many Cubans have lost their opinions for lack of use. But others are not afraid to speak and are eager to act. Thanks to their encouragement, Cuba is alive and kicking, offering proof that contradictions are the heartbeat of history, no matter how badly that sits with those who view them as heresies or as wrenches that life throws into the best of plans.
For much of the twentieth century, the existence of the Eastern bloc, so-called real socialism, encouraged the independent forays of countries that wished to escape the trap of the international division of labor. But the socialist states of Eastern Europe had a lot of state and little or nothing of socialist. When they fell, we were all invited to the funeral of socialism, but the undertakers were mistaken about who had died.
In the name of justice, so-called socialism had sacrificed freedom. The symmetry is revealing: in the name of freedom, capitalism sacrifices justice day in, day out. Are we obliged to kneel before one of these two altars? Those of us who believe that injustice is not our immutable fate have no reason to identify with the despotism of a minority that denied freedom, was accountable to no one, treated people as children, and saw unity as unanimity and diversity as treason. Such petrified power was divorced from the people it ruled. Perhaps that explains the ease with which it fell, without pity or glory, and the rapidity with which a new power emerged featuring the same personalities. Bureaucrats turned a quick somersault and in a flash reappeared as successful businessmen and mafia capos. Moscow now has twice as many casinos as Las Vegas, while wages have fallen by half and in the streets crime grows like a mushroom after a rain.
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The Other Globalization
The Multilateral Agreement on Investment, a new set of rules to liberate the circulation of money, was a sure thing at the beginning of 1998. The most-developed countries had negotiated the accord in secret and were ready to impose it on all the others and on the bit of sovereignty those countries still retained.
But civil society broke the news. Using the Internet, alternative organizations managed to ring alarm bells throughout the world and pressure governments to good effect. The accord died unhatched.
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We are in the midst of a tragic but perhaps healthy crisis of convictions—a crisis for those who believed in states that claimed to belong to everyone but were really of the few and ended up being no one’s; a crisis for those who believed in the magic formulas of the armed struggle; and a crisis for those who believed in political parties that went from withering denunciations to bland platitudes, that began by swearing to bring down the system and ended up administering it. Many party activists now beg forgiveness for having believed that heaven could be built. They work feverishly to erase their own footprints and climb down from hope as if hope were a tired horse.
End of the century, end of the millennium, end of the world? How much unpoisoned air do we have left? How much unscorched earth? How much water not yet befouled? How many souls not yet sick? The Hebrew word for “sick” originally meant “with no prospect,” and that condition is indeed the gravest illness among today’s many plagues. But someone—who knows who it was?—stopped beside a wall in the city of Bogotá to write, “Let’s save pessimism for better times.”
In the language of Castile, when we want to say we have hope, we say we shelter hope. A lovely expression, a challenge: to shelter her so she won’t die of the cold in the bitter climate of these times. According to a recent poll conducted in seventeen Latin American countries, three out of every four people say their situation is unchanged or getting worse. Must we accept misfortune the way we accept winter or death? It’s high time we in Latin America asked ourselves if we are to be nothing more than a caricature of the North. Are we to be only a warped mirror that magnifies the deformities of the original image: “Get out if you can” downgraded to “Die if you can’t”? Crowds of losers in a race where most people get pushed off the track? Crime turned into slaughter, urban hysteria elevated to utter insanity? Don’t we have something else to say and to live?
At least now we hardly ever hear the old refrain about history being infallible. After all we’ve seen, we know for sure that history makes mistakes: she gets distracted, she falls asleep, she gets lost. We make her and she looks like us. But she’s also, like us, unpredictable. Human history is like soccer: her finest trait is her capacity for surprise. Against all predictions, against all evidence, the little guys can sometimes knock the invincible giants for a loop.
On the woof and warp of reality, tangled though it be, new cloth is being woven from threads of many radically different colors. Alternative social movements don’t just express themselves through parties and unions. They do that, but not only that. The process is anything but spectacular and it mostly happens at the local level, where across the world a thousand and one new forces are emerging. They emerge from the bottom up and the inside out. Without making a fuss, they shoulder the task of reconceiving democracy, nourishing it with popular participation and reviving the battered traditions of tolerance, mutual assistance, and communion with nature. One of their spokesmen, ecologist Manfred Max-Neef, describes these movements as mosquitoes on the attack, stinging a system that repels the hug and compels the shrug: “More powerful than a rhinoceros,” he says, “is a cloud of mosquitoes. It grows and grows, buzzes and buzzes.”
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Latin Americans
They say we missed our date with history, and it’s true we’re usually late to appointments. Neither have we been able to take power, and the fact is we do sometimes lose our way or take a wrong turn, and later we make a long speech about it.
We Latin Americans have a nasty reputation for being charlatans, vagabonds, troublemakers, hotheads, and revelers, and it’s not for nothing. We’ve been taught by the law of the market that price equals value, and we know we don’t rate much. What’s worse, our good nose for business leads us to pay for everything we sell and buy every mirror that distorts our faces.
We’ve spent five hundred years learning how to hate ourselves and one another and work heart and soul for our own ruin. That’s what we’re up to. But we still haven’t managed to correct our habit of wandering about daydreaming and bumping into things or our inexplicable tendency to rise from the ashes.
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The Landless
Sebastião Salgado photographed them, Chico Buarque sang to them, José Saramago wrote about them: five million families of landless peasants wander the deserted vastness of Brazil “between dreams and desperation.”
Many of them have joined the Movement of the Landless. From encampments improvised by the sides of roads, rivers of people flow through the night in silence into the immense, empty farms. They break the padlocks, open the gates, enter. Sometimes they’re greeted by bullets from hired guns or soldiers, the only ones working on those unworked lands.
The Movement of the Landless is guilty. Not only does it show no respect for the property rights of sponging landlords; even worse, it fails to fulfill its duty to the nation. The landless grow food on the lands they occupy when the World Bank commands the countries of the South not to grow their own food but rather to be submissive beggars on the world market.
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In Latin America, they are a species at risk of expansion: organizations of the landless, the homeless, the jobless, the whateverless; groups that work for human rights; mothers and grandmothers who defy the impunity of power; community organizations in poor neighborhoods; citizens’ coalitions that fight for fair prices and healthful produce; those that struggle against racial and sexual discrimination, against machismo, and against the exploitation of children; ecologists, pacifists, health promoters, and popular educators; those who unleash collective creativity and those who rescue collective memory; organic agriculture cooperatives, community radio and television stations, and myriad other voices of popular participation that are neit
her auxiliary wings of political parties nor priests taking orders from any Vatican. These unarmed forces of civil society face frequent harassment from the powerful, at times with bullets. Some activists get shot dead. May the gods and the devils hold them in glory: only trees that bear fruit suffer stonings.
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The Zapatistas
Mist is the ski mask the jungle wears. That’s how it hides its persecuted children. From the mist they emerge, to the mist they return. The Indians of Chiapas wear majestic clothing, they float when they walk, and they speak softly or remain silent. These princes condemned to servitude were the first and are the last. They’ve been run off the land and out of the history books, and they’ve found refuge in mist, in mystery. From there they’ve emerged, wearing masks, to unmask the power that humiliates them.
* * *
With the odd exception, like the Zapatistas in Chiapas or the landless in Brazil, these movements rarely garner much public attention—not because they don’t deserve it. To name just one, Mexico’s El Barzón emerged spontaneously in recent years when debtors sought to defend themselves from the usury of the banks. At first it attracted only a few, a contagious few; now they are a multitude. Latin America’s presidents would do well to learn from that experience, so that our countries could come together, the way in Mexico people came together to form a united front against a financial despotism that gets its way by negotiating with countries one at a time. But the ears of those presidents are filled with the sonorous clichés exchanged every time they meet and pose with the president of the mother country, the United States, always front and center in the family photos.
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