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Latin America: An Impractical Handbook

Table of contents

Some keywords

Cannibals
Civilizations (rise and fall)
Creole
Criollo
Inquisition
Machismo
Metro de Caracas
Nigger
Negro
Rationality
Religion (Catholic vs. Protestant)
Religion (instrument of conquest)
Rome

Foreword with fable

In 1934 Nicaraguan General Augusto César Sandino was killed in a treacherous rendezvous of National Reconciliation. He had just led a protracted rebellion against the U.S.-trained National Guard, whose commander-in-chief murdered him. Forty-five years after that assassination, in another rebellion inspired by Sandino and against the son of his killer, the Sandinistas stormed Managua, the capital.

Fidel Castro stormed Havana in 1959 and is still in power at this writing.

The Colombian guerrillas have been impossible to subdue after half a century. Shining Path guerrillas in Peru were very hard to overpower.

Salvador Allende was overthrown by a plot coordinated by the CIA in 1973, and anti-U.S. Mayor Francisco Caamaño Deñó was defeated and later killed in the Dominican Republic after the 1965 massive U.S. invasion.

On January 1^st 1994 a new guerrilla war erupted in Southern Mexico, in Chiapas. It is still forcing the government to negotiate. The International Monetary Fund has been forced to tweak its policies, at least formally, to reckon with this kind of eventuality.

Venezuela is facing since 1989 a massive internal conflict, whose recent developments were encouraged by some U.S. officials, as it’s being investigated in the U.S. Senate, particularly the coup d’état staged between 11^th to 13^th April 2002. This conflict is not essentially different to the causes of other similar situations in the past: a democratically elected government, popular among the poor, is toppled by a coalition of right-wing internal forces and the U.S. government: Gallegos, Árbenz, Goulart, Bosh, Allende, Perón, etc. Only the whole context has changed in this occasion:

• Satellite communications, cell phones and the Internet, that didn’t allow the insurgents to isolate Venezuela from the world, as it has happened during other typical coups d’état.
• The internal convulsion of the Venezuelan military, who are divesting themselves of their expected role as Latin American soldiers: containing the poor. Now they face a different role, but they haven’t finished defining it, something that only they can do.

And above all:

• The overwhelming and massive participation of the poor, who besieged military bastions and the presidential palace, facing a sure death if the conditions of the coup had been typical — something impossible to discern by the besieging crowds at that moment. They couldn’t know there were favorable conditions inside the compound and the presidential palace. Fortunately the coupsters did not dare to perform the killing that would have been normal if the present internal change of role of the Venezuelan military had not been in process. The coupsters themselves interrupted the “Government Of Transition” they had appointed a few hours before. They hesitated to fully support a government that had abolished all the constitutional powers of the country in only one decree. That hesitation made the provisional power to stumble down in a few hours.

It’s impossible at this writing (June 19^th 2002) to predict that a new coup d’état — this time perhaps successful — will not happen again in Venezuela in the near future, but in any case it will have to face radically new circumstances, even if the causes are as old as the U.S. “Big Stick” policy (see Documentos de los sucesos de abril de 2002 en Venezuela).

Sometimes Latin America is subdued, sometimes it is not. As history goes on and on, Latin America is harder and harder to master. The nearest economic partner of the United States, though, Latin America’s strategic significance was made clear by the 1962 October Crisis, when a small island, Cuba, served as a bridge for a remote foreign power, the USSR. The missile crisis put the world at the brim of the worst war threat in human history. But Cuba was far from being a simple outpost of the USSR. All these years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cuba is still there, starving, looking desperately for distant economic partners, but still politically stable. The Cuban experience is not a superficial anecdote. Cuba will not be easily subdued. Most probably it will not be subdued at all (see The Cuban disconnection).

Invasions — the most radical means of fully imposing conditions to other peoples — are not what they used to be even a few years ago, when Latin American countries were weak, with small and defenseless populations. Imagine the present cost of deploying thousands of troops endowed with modern and expensive equipment, and then furnishing them for years. Imagine the pressure from disgruntled U.S. tax-payers, unwilling to finance a costly adventure. Even invading a small country like Panama, Grenada or Haiti can end up costing very highly — let alone Mexico or Brazil. Let alone too the pertinacious tendency of native populations to resist invasions, which significantly inflates the budget — something the Romans had already verified. Remember Vietnam, and the political cost of facing international — and national — bad press. This is of course a minor annoyance if the invader is powerful enough. It can be easily ignored, as much as Amnesty International usually is. Nevertheless, it creates the need to invest considerable funds in Public Relations to reverse a bad image, it is a minor cost, but it is preferable to avoid it. It is preferable to find another less expensive and more pacific means of engaging an exchange with Latin America.

Even so-called pacific invasions can be very expensive. Recently the supply-side militant neoliberal economic doctrines invaded Latin America, turning it into a vast experimental field, which failed most clamorously, especially in its showcases: Argentina and Mexico. It is incredible how much the militant neoliberal doctrine is unknown as such outside Latin America. It is perhaps because only in Latin America have its apostles been more blissful and have provoked the worst economic effects. And perhaps because state-run policies are common stock in Latin America from the times of the Spanish rule. Right-wing neoliberalism is usually professed by former Communists and other formerly enraged left militants — leftists do not practice moderation even after they become conservative. In their psychological frame of mind the susbstance of the doctrines they profess is not as important as the uncritical nature of the beliefs they happen to profess: they need a dogmatic unilateral authoritarian faith, whether leftist or conservative. That is why neoliberals have imposed to whole countries a hysterical, sacrificial, arrogant and ignorant consecration to free-market policies, an uncritical revival of the old laissez faire-laissez passer economic liberal doctrine, which has provoked many ruinous disasters everywhere in the world when applied in an unrealistic manner. In order to work, capitalism must become a heterogeneous patchwork ranging from free-market to state-intervention policies. It is a complex phenomenon. Capitalism is not as simple as many of its advocators pretend.

From now on — and every day this condition will become more radical — every possible partner of Latin America will be unable to fully control it either by force or deceit. Not that every partner of Latin America has tried to force or deceive it, but it has happened with some frequency. Deceit is eventually unveiled, denounced and defied, which unleashes potentially endless wars of attrition. Force is useless, at least in the long run. Every simplistic attempt at it will noisily fail. Perhaps resistance can be momentarily defeated, but it is useless, because it is costly and lasts only for a short time. After a brief lull, unrest blasts off again with stronger force. Every day these periods of apparent composure become shorter, costlier, and more unstable. Chile, the most successfully long coup-d’état operation so far, came to a head in 1989 with street riots that forced Dictator Augusto Pinochet to negotiate, leave the Presidency and retire to the Defense Secretary. He continued to be Chile’s strong man, but his tenure was unstable. Then one day he went to the U.K. where a Spanish judge accused him. Pinochet couldn only return to Chile after a long legal battle. Dictatorships are fragile, otherwise they wouldn’t need repression. Even the strongest dictatorships can perish easily, as the unexpected and rapid fall of the Soviet Union proved — it was perhaps the strongest dictatorship ever known to man. To this we must add the high social cost of the neoliberal experiment in Chile, that has been exhibited as a sort of Paradise, disregarding at least 40 percent of the population in critical poverty levels.

It’s better to negotiate, that is, to respect Latin America as any other continent is respected. Negotiation is more profitable, both for Latin America and for any negotiating partner. It would be easier too, for that matter.

But, it seems that the need for a new negotiation-based approach is not easy to understand. Some groups are reluctant to abandon unilateral despotic attitudes toward Latin America — old instincts are difficult to overcome. Nostalgia plays an important role in this. Old instincts lost billions in the Mexican neoliberal honeymoon that ended in disaster in January 1995, for example. The same happened in Argentina in 2001 and 2002. For about thirty years, conservative policies caused the United States to directly or indirectly spend billions in the Central American protracted civil war, to no avail and at the cost of thousands of human lives, some of them U.S. citizens, not to mention the destruction of the fragile political and economic institutions in these countries. No big business is possible in situations like these: only petty ventures that yield comparatively scanty profit, when they don’t cause big losses. Impoverished masses are all the time menacing, sabotaging and boycotting the apparently happy economic experiments. And, to put it cynically, being too poor, they are lost as potential customers... Economics must take into account anything that has economic consequences, and the resistance of ignored populations has economic consequences: Chiapas, the coca farmers in Colombia, the 1989 riots in Venezuela, all of them have powerful economic consequences, stopping some processes or making them more difficult, costly, and eventually unprofitable.

This book tries to address this growing restlessness with some insights from within Latin America. We don’t profess the two most common and antithetical approaches, namely the radical “anti-Yankee” stance and the pitiyanqui ‘pro-United States’ attitude. The first consists of the a priori rejection of anything from the United States. The second consists of some kind of abject attitude whose dream is to become another United State of America, which is not only undesirable, but impossible. Both postures are useless — until now they’ve failed miserably. Let’s examine the facts:

• No Latin American country has ever been able to successfully resist the United States for a long time without falling back under their rule, or without having to spend a big budget in defense and impair its economy, as has happened in Cuba.
• At the other extreme, that of annexation, after almost a century of efforts to assimilate Puerto Rico, this country still remains a foreign body within the U.S. community: no matter how much the United States or how many Puerto Ricans want to assimilate the island to the U.S. mainland, the cultural structures themselves refuse to comply. (Structures work like machines independent from the individual persons constituting them. See Structures). Even Chicanos remain Chicanos after more than a century of U.S. domination.

It’s a no-win stalemate in which both parties lose. But there are manners of dealing with this quandary in new, creative, and unprejudiced ways. Such is the purpose of this book: to show new hints of and for a “new New Deal.” Much in the same way as Latin America, the United States promise the best and the worst for the future, the final outcome will depend on both the Latin Americans and the U.S. citizens:

The U.S. is the best of countries

The United States is the accomplishment of the best modern European traditions of promised freedom, equality, and egalitarianism. For centuries Europe strove to achieve a secular society where fair play was the most common trait, where virtue was second nature to its demises, i.e., the republican regime. The United States is the fusion of the ideals of this republican regime, secular principles, and of the advancement of reason, which supported science and justice. The United States are the realization of the noblest ideals of Athens, the Roman republic, Renaissance universality, Thomas More’s Utopia, 18^th century Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. In all those projects humanity has sought to overcome arbitrariness, prejudice, “the oppressor’s wrong, [...], the law’s delay, the insolence of office” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, III:i).

The U.S. is the achieved utopia, the legend of the centuries, from which Latin American republics got inspiration and strength when a few years after the U.S. Independence they essayed their own effort to win sovereignty from Spain. The first constitutions of many Latin American republics literally copied many passages of the U.S. Constitution. The French Revolution also got inspiration and strength from the U.S. Independence.

The United States is today the only country where virtually all significant technical innovation takes place. The United States have taken humanity to the Moon and have cured the most horrendous diseases and hopes to heal the remaining ones. Without the United States the 20^th century would have been a bad imitation of the 19^th century...

The U.S. is the worst of countries

Having promulgated its Constitution, the U.S. society dishonoured it by keeping slavery and establishing a society in which obscene economic and hence political inequality is a most salient trait, where delirious richness contrasts with pathetic misery, as never before, even under the most despotic Oriental tyrannies of yore and present. The United States is a country where the Mafia has found a meretricious equilibrium with the most conservative self-righteous Puritans. A country where greed and ruthless competition have devastated its moral landscape. A nation where The Simpsons are not only possible but trivial.

Together with the former USSR, the United States has put humanity at the brink of nuclear Armageddon, and is menacing the survival of the global ecosystem.

The Spanish contemporary philosopher Fernando Savater has declared that the three 19^th century utopias — the United States, the USSR and Israel — have all been accomplished... The results are usually contrary to what their founders had in mind.

All countries present similar contrasting traits: we can find them in Latin America as well: it is the first real federation of humanity since its first diaspora, when human beings spread all over the globe from Kenia. For the first time all those human beings are represented in a fertile society that has produced the most beautiful music, poetry, art, sports and architecture. But at the same time it has been the world of ruthless and backward dictatorships, the home of economic failures and misery. We are human beings too, that is, capable of the worst and the best at the same time.

Now the fable (in the manner of Ambrose Bierce)

One night the Diligent Fool was found on all fours busily looking for something under a lamp. The Devout Friend came and asked the Diligent Fool what he was looking for. The Diligent Fool said he was looking for a lost coin.

“Where did you lose the coin?” the Devout Friend asked.

“Down there in the dark,” the Diligent Fool answered.

“But why do you look for it here under the lamp, where you know for sure you shall never find it?,” asked the Devout Friend most sensibly.

“Because here there is light,” the Diligent Fool pompously answered.

Moral: we can prolong the United States-Latin American mutual misunderstanding indefinitely if we persist in methods that are simple and easy, but that have been proven over and over again not to work at all. It’s preferable to explore in the dark. It will be difficult to find the coin, but sooner or later we’ll recover it. Perhaps when the sun rises. If we choose the easy way we will surely find nothing, no matter how long and hard we look for the coin under the lamp.

See Bierce’s Fantastic Fables at ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/etext/gutenberg/etext95/fanfb10.txt

A note on grammar and political correctness

We will avoid gender-specific terms whenever they constitute a clear discrimination against either sex. But, alas, it cannot be tastefully done all the time. In Spanish, my native tongue, where gender is present even in sexless things, it would be impossible to apply a similar restriction. In English, semantic gender has been cornered to a few words that clearly denote sex, such as man/woman, mother/father; and a few words that carry a residual semantic non-morphologic gender, like ship, which is a she, and time, which is Father Time. It appears also in two pronouns that denote gender: he/she and its derivations his/her-hers, him/her. As a consequence, attributing a gender to someone is limited to the occurrence of he or she and its derivations. He has become the “genderless” pronoun, until now that is, when it began to be considered discriminatory and English speakers are now constrained to write “he or she” or “s/he” every time they have to mention a third singular sexually undetermined person. Sometimes they alternate “she” and “he,” within a given text. Sometimes they use only “she.” It’s now mandatory to adopt spokesperson instead of spokesman or spokeswoman, for instance.

In Spanish, where every noun is either feminine or masculine (sometimes both), it would be necessary to stop at every noun and adjective to avoid gender-specific forms. Language would become a field of clarifications instead of a communications medium. So, avoiding gender-specific expressions is a feasible policy in English language, and as a good guest in this language I comply with its present norms as far as I feel they’re sensible. In many languages the masculine is as a sort of “umbrella gender” — that’s why we include women when we call “man” all the humanity. While it happens with a few words in English, it happens with all Spanish words.

In any case I subscribe to the opinion of the British naturalist Richard Dawkins:

I am distressed to find that some women friends (fortunately not many) treat the use of the impersonal masculine pronoun as if it showed intention to exclude them. If there were any excluding to be done (happily there is not) I think I would sooner exclude men, but when I once tentatively tried referring to my abstract reader as “she”, a feminist denounced me for patronizing condescension: I ought to say “he-or-she”, and “his-or-her”. That is easy to do if you do not care about language, but then if you do not care about language you do not deserve readers of either sex. Here, I have returned to the normal conventions of English pronouns. I may refer to the “reader” as “he”, but I no more think of my readers as specifically male than a French speaker thinks of a table as female. As a matter of fact I believe I do, more often than not, think of my readers as female, but that is my personal affair and I’d hate to think that such considerations impinged on how I use my native language (The Blind Watchmaker, London: Longman, 1986, p. XVI-XVII).

For an essay on gramatical gender, with special reference to Spanish language, see Roberto Hernández Montoya’s El género del género (in Spanish).

What’s in a name

Dawkins mentions an interesting problem: the rapid decay of non-derogatory terms. When the generic use of he began to be perceived as discriminating against women, some people began to use she alone, but then some women found that she as a generic term was patronizing. They now demand the uncomfortable he/she and he or she — the question of who goes first, he or she, she or he, remains a problem, of course.

The word Negro disappeared from common use in English language during the late 60’s. Black was adopted instead — until it became derogatory too for some ears. African American is now preferred, until... In his Devil’s Dictionary Ambrose Bierce says that African American is a Negro that votes for our party... Bierce denounced the sanctimony of euphemistic expressions. Perhaps it should have been preferable to continue using Negro...The same thing happened with Latino and Latin: they were felt as pejorative by some Latin Americans living in the United States. Now the name Hispanic is favored until one day it becomes disparaging too. Women protested being called ladies — and dames and gentlewomen and so on — because it was considered to be patronizing, and demanded the plain use of women — curiously enough, men haven’t protested the use of gentlemen. Of course, women cannot be patronizing toward men by calling them gentlemen...

The problem is not in the words themselves, of course, but in their meaning. We will persist indefinitely tracking down non-derogatory terms as long as their meaning alludes to scorned, that is, oppressed, persons: people from Latin American and/or African origin, and people belonging to the female sex. We choose a perfectly “clean” term to mention those persons and then their condition contaminates that word and turns it into a disdainful term. We have then to look again for another, perfectly clean expression until it gets contaminated too — and so on. This neurotic hesitation between derogatory and non-derogatory terms is a symptom of an undesirable condition in the persons who receive them as a name. One day we won’t have to be careful about the terms used to name some people — that day there will be no racism and sexism. Perhaps we cannot imagine now a world without racism and sexism, but then during the time of slavery most people did not conceive the world without slaves, and there were people who considered that the suffrage of women was a ridiculous idea... Humanity is better now.

Easy thinking

They were called los perfumados, the perfumed boys. Dressed in Armani suits, bearing Ph.D.s in economics from Harvard, Yale and Stanford, they descended on Wall Street and Washington from places like Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Caracas and Brasília in the 1980s, speaking with a clipped, urbane assurance admired by U.S. policymakers and fund managers alike (Newsweek, January 16, 1995).

Why do Latin Americans seem to refuse development? When everything looked like the U.S. had finally found a common way with its Southern neighbor, when it looked like the ancient and persistent discords were about to be settled, when Mexico looked like taking the path of the United States’ endless progress, in the middle of the honeymoon, Chiapas came to interrupt the daydream.

What happened? Why does it seem Latin Americans insist on remaining in their endemic condition? Why don’t they understand progress means their own improvenment? Why do they persist in ignoring the discipline, that is, the Western means and manners? Why do they display that disarray of guerrilla war, urban riots, revolutions, coups d’état, if that all only contributes to famine, disease, misery and melancholy? Why don’t they understand that the Western means and manners are designed for their own improvement?

When everything seemed to be working smoothly, Mexicans began to adopt the term perfumados for the very men and women who were allegedly leading Mexico in the way of indefinite progress. Los perfumados means ‘the perfumed ones,’ that is, the pampered, the spoiled, the bland, the suave, the unctuous, perhaps implying little virility — a serious insinuation in the country where machos supposedly come from. Why did they give that derogatory name to the very people who were supposedly doing everything possible to put Mexico on the map of advanced industrial, that is to say, developed countries?

Why so many Asians countries don’t have such a resistance to the Western approach to life? It’s surprising since it should be much more difficult for Asians. To begin with, they don’t speak a European language as a mother tongue. Latin Americans, instead, speak French, Portuguese or Spanish as native tongues. For most Latin Americans, Spanish is their mother tongue, something that cannot be said of most Spaniards whose native tongue is Catalan, Galician or Basque, and who learn the Spanish language as a foreign tongue, sometimes at school. For most Latin Americans, Spanish is the only language they’ll ever speak. People in Curaçao and Aruba speak Dutch and papiamento, a creole language composed of African, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish roots. But can we consider them Latin Americans? Asians didn’t have the same degree of exposure to European culture as Latin Americans did. What’s more, Latin Americans weren’t exposed to European culture because they’re part of the European culture itself, as long as they descend directly from the Europeans who conquered and colonized their territories. For a Japanese, Western civilization should be not only strange, but hostile, much more than it’s for the Chiapas Indians, who have never suffered a Western atomic bomb as the Japanese experienced in 1945. Why then so much Latin American resentment against Europe, that is, against an essential part of itself? For the Latin American feeling Europe comprises the United States in this context. No matter how different Europe and the United States might be, Latin Americans perceive them both in the same class: the origin of their white root.

Let’s examine in detail how this mystery has put a dense barrier between the United States and its Southern neighbors.

Method to our madness

The European visitor in our America finds in it a number of Western republics that support Western culture. He finds also aspects and areas of backwardness, but it is Western backwardness, it corresponds to forms that precede Western culture; in the worst of cases, the visitor has the sensation of being on a trip to a suburb or a colony, not to an alien condition. If the European visitor settles in our America, he begins to see and feel something strange, unexpected, impossible to define, incalculable in the behavior and the purposes of these people; it is something that is alien and foreign to the cultural horizon of this European. Friends — even the closest, whose thoughts, emotions and purposes are clear in the ordinary Western communication, who are usually cordial in assurance and confidence — can become opaque, enigmatic, impenetrable, totally alien. Later on they recover their “normality,” with no explanation for these unpredictable changes they suffered just a moment ago. What is that? Who is that? (J. M. Briceño Guerrero, 1994:221).

Informality is a recurrent imputation against Latin Americans. On the dark side they are said to be lazy, slow, disorderly, even dumb — depending on the source consulted. On the light side they are said to be lively, nice, clever, hospitable.

It’s common that foreign people be perceived everywhere in a murky light. Latin Americans, for their part, attribute negative idiosyncrasies to the “gringos”: under the “dark light” these are considered heartlessly utilitarian, insensitive to the pleasures and the joys of life, even dumb... On the light side Latin Americans admire their technical proficiency and appreciate their kindness and organization. Aliens are always considered slightly or utterly “anomalous.” This supposed anomaly varies according to the subject matter considered and the importance of conflicts or mutual admiration — which is also possible; it’s by the way usually the case: most nations (whatever ‘nation’ means) have a love-hate relationship for each other. Stereotypes are usually false but, alas, they abound in this kind of judgment, so we’d better be careful. That’s why facts and figures surprise us so much when they contradict our prejudices.

Let’s consider working attitudes, for instance.

The facts of figures

When the appointment is due and the duty calls, Latin Americans evaluate the situation. If what they’re doing at the moment is too engaging, most probably they’ll shun a duty they do not feel theirs.

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno examined a case that’s common in Spain: you’re looking for an address and you ask for it to a Spanish passer-by. Voluntarily — most of the times enthusiastically — this Spaniard escorts you all the way down to your destination. No matter how resolutely you protest so much generosity, this Spaniard won’t abandon you in mid-journey. Perhaps it has happened to you many times during your visit to Spain, if you’ve ever been there. Perhaps it happened to you in some Latin American provincial regions too. Then you wonder why Spaniards and Latin Americans have such a tendency to sidestep from their itinerary to keep you company up to your destination. Why do they freely bestow their time upon you? Then, Unamuno asked himself: “But was this Spaniard going somewhere, in the first place?” Very probably not. This Spaniard was there in the street waiting for something to happen, something that would give a sense and a purpose to life. Perhaps this Spaniard was going to work, but then he found a more exciting way of spending time: leading you to your destination, chatting with an unknown person, querying about life abroad, satisfying many a curiosity, betting on the unexpected... Who knows. In the worst of cases, it’s amusing to help strangers find their way.

Something in the same vein happens to Latin Americans. If they’re devoured by an undertaking, they won’t stop until they finish it, well beyond their capabilities, and maybe their health and their other engagements in life. But if it doesn’t bewitch them, they’ll tend to evade it. They’ll become erratic, shunning, opaque. You don’t understand them anymore. They’ll vanish one day, then another and then perhaps for good. Their performance will be below their standards. It happens with almost all Latin Americans, regardless of social status, political, religious or professional engagement.

It’s one of the most puzzling of Latin American behaviors — it puzzles Latin Americans themselves. A continental psychoanalysis would be necessary to make this clear. Latin Americans cannot always explain what happens when they gratuitously fail to an appointment or an engagement, for instance, including appointments and engagements that “objectively” profit them. They fail even after declaring most solemnly that they’d honor their covenant, even though at the moment of the oath they’re firmly convinced of their pledge. Then a rather shadowy syntax rhythms and deviates their course. A twilight zone obscures it all and no European ratiocination can dispel the dusk.

Not infrequently something even more complicated and puzzling happens: in the middle of a collective enterprise, they desert it or they undermine it from inside, perhaps gratuitously or perhaps placing their individual interests before it. The collective enterprise crumbles to pieces because everybody moves in babelic, that is, erratic and anarchical directions. Nevertheless everybody is baffled because nobody wanted the collective enterprise to fail — at least explicitly... Latin Americans don’t feel comfortable with this outcome. They’re too imbibed with the contemporary European guilt discourse as to feel at ease with this attitude.

But there is method to this madness.

As far as I have observed the facts and after some introspection, what goes on within Latin Americans is a sort of incongruence between what’s publicly posited by the contemporary Europe superego and what they feel inside as feasible and worth doing both from the traditional Latin American oligarchy’s and the Savage’s feelings (for the three discourses that prevail in Latin America, see One, two, savage) There is a playful and/or ominous attitude, I speculate, that prevents Latin Americans to renounce their sense of happiness or drama.

Acto cultural

It’s admirably well expressed in a comedy by the late Venezuelan playwright José Ignacio Cabrujas: Acto cultural.

It’s difficult to convey into English the meaning of the Spanish expression Acto cultural. It’s a public ceremony in which edifying and high-brow values are fervently exalted by people who are supposed to be very formal: school teachers, public servants, priests, high-placed ladies and intellectuals. In those ceremonies a very rococo and meaningless prose reigns in all speeches, in which Spanish language reaches its most contorting heights. Foreigners understand nothing because there’s nothing to understand in those convoluted and sometimes syrupy speeches. You must contour them in order to understand what’s really going on. The play Acto cultural is, for that matter, a parody and hence a key clue to understand Latin America. Let’s examine just a passage.

As a member of the pompous Society for the Advancement of the Arts and Science in a far off Latin American provincial town, Cosme Paraima is supposed to be a serious and formal gentleman. Nevertheless, after some schizophrenic events that disrupt the ceremony the Society is uselessly striving to perform, Cosme confesses that what really matters in his barren life are three cups of rum he drinks every afternoon at the plaza while he joyfully admires the derrière of a certain German woman who usually strolls by there at that hour. Then he isn’t concerned anymore by the importance of the “advancement of the arts and the sciences.” He concludes then that perhaps we’d all be happier if we admitted that what’s really important for us are those three rums and the German woman’s bottom, or their equivalents. That is, to stop pretending to be what we are not. See the complete text in Spanish.

This leads us to another essential consideration: very likely you’ll meet a Latin American that will inform you about some amazing or surreal fact. A larger-than-life figure, for example, a pink elephant, a flying toaster, a preposterous sports record, like a slugger who hit twenty home-runs in one game. Or common things that are slightly or amply distorted, especially concerning facts and figures. Things like that. It’s called “fantastic realism” and the “real marvelous” by the literary people and many Latin American writers have immortalized it in novels, short stories and plays. Latin Americans are amazed that they’re always believed by non-Latin Americans. Latin Americans don’t expect to be believed when they use this sort of fantastic and hyperbolic speech. They state those things just to amuse each other. Or themselves. Or maybe it’s themselves who believe it in the first place... These lies are too beautiful to be untrue. Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is strongly recommended as a means of learning this particular method to our madness.

The great Andalusian poet Antonio Machado said that Andalusians lie to each other but that they never deceive each other («se mienten, mas no se engañan», he said). They’re all the time aware that their fellows are trying to outwit them with exaggerations or plain lies. They respond accordingly, producing their own exaggerations and plain lies. It’s a game they play every time they chat in an informal setting. It’s called phatic talk by linguists, i.e., when people aren’t interested in exchanging real information. The purpose of this kind of talk, if any, is to be there together and feel each other by friendly outsmarting each other. It’s like a game. It’s a game.

Plain truth uses to be too drab to be accepted without a little spicing.

See a discussion on this by R. Hernández M., Hay que tomar medidas. In Spanish.

A very short long history

All of us, foreign and native, usually tend to forget that in what’s now Latin America there were once immense cultures, and that there was a correspondingly immense tragedy as the conquistadors exterminated most of the native people they found, up to 90 percent — depending on the source consulted —, and enslaved the rest. To make everything worse, they shattered and humiliated the native symbols, legends, stories, rhythms, feelings, affections, tastes, gestures, loves. In short, they crushed both their culture and their humanity. No less.

This tragedy provoked deep confusion and resentment among Latin Americans, who culturally and partially descend from European peoples. Confusion and resentment are entrenched in all Latin Americans, no matter how strong their ceremonial association with their European roots may be. This European connection is usually just a make-believe ceremony, an outer identification that does not affect the inner proceedings. But the shreds and splinters of the ancient cultural monuments persist: the imposing Spanish father vanquishing and ravishing the humiliated Indian mother, left a field full of remnants that have found no reconciliation to this day. These remnants create a sort of Hamletian, that is, tragic attitude in life: deranged, erratic, confused. That is when, according to Briceño Guerrero, Latin Americans turn their backs on the European visitor, who cannot grasp what those latinos are up to (see One, two, savage).

The Pilgrims and Puritans who founded the British Colonies in the American continent — the present United States — obliterated most of the culture they found in the territories they conquered. Even if these cultures persist today on the surface of the Earth as fragments of an ancient tradition (Indian reservations, Black ghettos), they were killed in the spirits of the orthodox English conquerors. Most of the time these conquerors ignored everything that did not conform to their Western means and manners. For the Puritans and Pilgrims there was only their family and their endeavor in the new land. Eventually they learned to appreciate non-white, or not-quit-white, elements like tobacco and jazz, but it was just a minor and rather marginal brush stroke in the general picture. No inner drama lingered in them and their descendants comparable to that of Latin Americans. The tragedy was completely transferred to Indians, African Americans, and, of course, Latin Americans living in the U.S. territories. WASPs went forward with their “manifest destiny.” It’s true that the United States were built by other peoples too, but the WASPs, being the critical mass, defined the U.S. basic framework. WASPs weren’t the first, because they found there the Indians and the Mexicans.

This story didn’t go like this all the time. It’s just lazy thinking to assume there is an inherent “something” in the respective outcomes of the United States and Latin America, to mention two well entrenched paradigms. The first problem we face is how to evaluate the two outcomes. This is what has misled nearly every exchange of views on this matter. The most common premise is untrue, namely that there’s a former colony that’s ‘better’ than the other — ‘better’ being such a vague and subjective appraisal. Those who love rum and salsa music above everything find the Caribbean ‘better’; those who cannot drive except on the left side of roads find the United Kingdom ‘better’; those who eat carrots all day long are rabbits.

So let’s limit ourselves to what’s implicit in this kind of judgment: which offspring (the United Kingdom’s or Spain’s) is more integrated into modern industrial society, that is, modern capitalism — which is the real kernel of this contention. Clearly some countries of predominantly English descent show a better integration to capitalism, they even incarnate capitalism as a text-book concept. Karl Marx himself identified England as the epitome of capitalism. Latin American countries are not capitalist countries in the same sense. Their direction is unclear. In its deep structures Latin American capitalism is permeated with all kinds of privileges not emanating from the possession of capital but from the possession of family name and social rank. Latin American capitalism has to live with this manner of disparate pre-capitalist hierarchy. That’s why Marx scorned India and Mexico, because theirs was an “impure” capitalism, still polluted with the debris of previous “modes of production,” to use his jargon, if not his style.

Obviously , we’ve been simplifying things: neither the United States’ origins are all British nor Latin America’s are all Spainish. Both the United Kingdom and Spain predominate respectively, but even in that case it’s not sure that it’s the cause of the outcomes of their respective historical scions.

Believe it or not

This conflicting integration to capitalism has nothing to do with the predominant religious faith, for example — another common simplification.

The present outcomes of France, Italy, Portugal and Spain are very different, all the same as those of England, the United States, Germany, regardless of their respective religious practices. The Soviet Union, to evoke an extreme case, was in rapid industrial bloom all through the ’30s while the United States was slowed down by the Depression (Daniel Ford, A Reporter at Large. Rebirth of a Nation, in The New Yorker, New York: March 8, 1988:61-80. We cannot stop here to consider the genocidal means and manners Stalinism used to “forge steel”). The Soviet Union led the Space exploration for at least two decades. This had nothing to do with professing one religion or another, or being atheist, as the Soviet Union officially was. Just as the fact that France produces the best champagne and Spain the best jamón serrano and Japan the best everything it seems (at least so we’ve been brainwashed to think...) has nothing to do with Protestantism, Catholicism or Shintoism.

Things, alas, are much more complex and the answer is not as simple as religious predominance. Until about the 18^th century Latin America was a many-splendored thing in all fields, economic, social, cultural, while what we now call the United States of America was a very poorly performing province — at least in the present sense of what a good performance is. This is a relative appraisal too: pyramid-building Egyptians, for instance, had a very different opinion than ours about what a good performing society ought to be.

The romantic legend that the Spanish conquest of America was a male-only enterprise is wrong. From the very beginning the first Spanish settlers asked for their families to be sent to America en masse, a petition promptly granted by the Spanish Catholic Kings. Families got together and immediately undertook the exploitation of the land — and of Indians and Africans too, of course. There were rolling stones like Cortés, Pizarro, and Balboa too, but then there were also Francis Drakes and Walter Raleighs, the predecessors of Davy Crockett and Buffalo Bill in the founding of what would eventually become the United States of America... That is the consequence of relying on anecdotes to elucidate history. That’s the consequence of easy thinking, that is, reducing complex things to only one of its elements. It’s sometimes legitimate and advisable, as when an expert studies the chemical composition of the stone of a sculpture. But he knows very well that he’s considering only one of its parts. The problem arises when it’s unconscious. Then you think that Latin America is only white, only Black or only Indian.

The same kind of myth contends that the first conquistadors were only a bunch of philistine barbarous frenzied stormy howling disorderly desperado beastly thugs. Which is false. No bunch of thugs begins any enterprise by creating the Santo Domingo University and exquisite monuments like Mexico City’s Cathedral. All the brothers of such a cardinal Spanish poet of all time as Saint Teresa of Ávila migrated to Ecuador... In what would become Latin America there were printing houses, universities, theaters, refined courts, convents, intellectuals, hidalgos ...and, alas, the thugs that exterminated millions of Indians too. But compare colonial Lima or Mexico or Santo Domingo or Cartagena with the Philadelphia of the same period, for example.

There was every breed of people in the conquest and colonization of the Spanish American possessions, as everywhere else. As in the Far West, for that matter. As in the Gold Rush, for that matter. As in the Rolling ’Twenties, for that matter.

And never forget that the Renaissance began in Italy, a Catholic country if there ever was one. So, it isn’t necessary to be Protestant to develop a great culture.

Similarly the Islam proved to be “better” than Christendom during the many centuries the Arabs dominated medieval backwards Europe. It’s a commonly ignored fact that for about eight centuries the Moors were more refined, richer, and cultured than the comparatively barbarous Christian European masses they conquered. This is of course a disgusting politically incorrect petitio principii too — namely, a false premise from which derives a string of falsehoods. If you accept it you must accept everything that derives there from. What really happened was that the Medieval Muslims had more military might and had much better assimilated the philosophy, science, art and political proficiency of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, which had developed all their culture as a function of domination. The Muslim historical engine was in tune... Christian Europe rediscovered Aristotle through the Arab savant Averroës, who lived in Córdoba (Spain), for example.

And we should consider other religions too: the pantheistic and “successful” religions of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, and Asian Buddhism... They weren’t Protestant either. What was the religion of Persia and Babylon for that matter?

Everything that goes up, comes down

We don’t know why civilizations rise and fall, yet we know it isn’t a simple question. Let’s consider the mere fact: civilizations just rise and fall. The pendulum of civilizations comes and goes, and it goes to different peoples at different times. The pendulum was once Egyptian — with Greeks, Asians and Black Africans as their mingled and mingling population. It was subsequently Greek, Roman, Arab, Italian, Spanish, British and it is now in the U.S. This pendulum falls on different people every time, and the contrary would be inconceivable: that only one people would carry the aegis of civilization forever, whatever carrying the aegis means.

What’s more, people are different not only in space but in time. No one can pretend that the present WASPs are exactly the same passengers who signed the Mayflower Compact. The present WASPs descend culturally from the Mayflower passengers and prolong their traditions, but in a quite different manner. Their religion comes from the same root, but they practice science and play rock too. In Wall Street, in the Silicon Valley, in the streets of Los Ángeles. Who knows what they will be doing in one hundred years.

The concept of ‘people’ (from Latin populus) is an invention of empires to legitimize themselves. There is humanity in general, which comprises different groups that we call ‘peoples.’ People, the people, as in “the people of France,” is a fiction nourished by empires to create a unique reference for all cultural forms. What’s the French people? Is it the people of Paris? The Normans? The almost German Alsatians? The Perigordians? The French rich? The French poor? The African immigrants? The Corsicans who bomb streets to fight for their independence from France?

Peoples are complex phenomena. Sometimes it’s they who decide they’re Iroquois or Slavs. Sometimes it’s other people who call them this or that. Sometimes it’s the common defense that forces a group of disparate tribes to band together and constitute a people. Sometimes it’s a tribe that imposes itself over other communities and forces them into a common language, religion and zest. Peoples are generally produced by war. Sometimes it happens within the confines of a small territory. Sometimes this territory has no circumscribed confines: the Macedonian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire, the British Empire. Sometimes they don’t even have a territory, as the Jewish people until Israel was founded.

Even what we consider a colonial people is an invention. It’s common that governing human groups attribute to the dominated the supposed causes of their subordination: laziness, dumbness, treachery, perversity, etc. That’s where Barbarians come from. There’s nothing objective in this situation in which a human group has the power to subjectively, absolutely and arbitrarily decide what must be thought of the aliens it has conquered. These have no power to retaliate, except to murmur their resentment in the dark and let it explode hysterically from time to time. Perhaps what we assert as Latin American conditions are the results of its subservience.

It’s simple because it’s complex

The confusion comes from the fact that we usually simplify things too much for the benefit of the argument. In the very short list of empires just presented above, we omitted the Chinese, the Russians — including the Soviet period — , the Scythes, the Huns, the Aztecs, the Mongols, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Incas, and many more, who were once powerful empires too. We’re disregarding the union of human groups and cultures that got entangled in all those experiences. The list is Homeric.

Empires present themselves as pure and simple because they pretend to impose a pure and simple rule on all the peoples that comprise them.

It’s a paradoxical fact that an empire pretends to be simple just because it’s complex, the more complex it is the more it defiantly pretends to be simple. The Spanish Empire imposed a simple religion, a simple state, a simple administration on a disparate and complex conglomerate of peoples.

In the beginning of the Spanish Empire there were the Spanish peoples that confederated for the enterprise of the Conquest. Spain was then a multitudinous aggregate of peoples who spoke different languages and responded to different values and cultural traditions: Catalans, Galicians, Valencians, Basques, Castilians, Andalusians... Even today they remain different “nations” or “peoples,” whaterver you call them. Spain’s most radical inhabitants don’t feel Spanish at all.

The Roman Catholic religion they all professed was not a unified structure either. Otherwise the Spanish Inquisition wouldn’t have been a necessity. But the only common element Queen Isabella could find to unify all those peoples was that disparate, delirious [1] and jumbled religion — it’s surprising to see how a religion that has had thousands of heresies is still perceived as having a common Christian root, independently of its hundreds of surviving denominations. Queen Isabella called herself and her husband, King Ferdinand, “the Catholic Kings,” and delegated the job of doctrinal unification to no less than Tomás de Torquemada, the Great Inquisitor, because the Faith had to be distilled from every single polluting element. First from the Jewish elements, who were expelled from the Peninsula in 1492, then from the Muslims, who were subdued in Grenade in February of that year, then from the heretics, who were scorched by the Inquisition. In June Antonio de Nebrija offered Isabella his milestone Spanish Grammar, because “language was always the companion of the empire,” he told her in its prologue («la lengua fue siempre compañera del imperio»). He knew only too well what he was talking about because he had written a Latin grammar too — an imperial language if there ever was one. Everything was ready. Four months later Columbus hit the beaches of the Caribbean. Theirs was a “manifest destiny” too.

Then the conquistadors met a population of aborigines who were as different among them as a Japanese can be different from a Lapon. Even more, as far as today Lapons watch the same television images that the Japanese watch — at the same time, on the same Japanese television sets. There were Indian nations that had never met each other through centuries, if at all, because even today many of them speak languages and profess cultures that have no common root, even though they live a few miles away from each other. To think American aborigines are all the same is as simplifying as pretending that Latvians and Californians are all the same because they apparently share the same epidermic whiteness and enjoy The Flintstones.

And finally the African slaves: the Portuguese who bought them in the African shores from other Africans; then the Spanish who bought them in transit; and then the British who bought them from the Spanish, they all purposely mingled the slaves from many African nations in the ships to babelize any bud of resistance. What arrived in America was a sundry blend of the most diverse African roots, as different among them as the Indians and the Spanish were. What we call now Africans, Indians and Spanish are three heterogeneous sets of peoples each of which unified only in a given geopolitical territory: the black African continent, the Spainish Peninsula and the American continent.

Spain forced the same simplified religion, administration and values upon this cocktail of peoples, so much so that as a result today’s Spanish language, among other cultural elements, is the same from New Mexico to Argentina, with few variations that don’t preclude each other from communicating.

The nameless continent

The name America was an accident. The Florentine cartographer Amerigo Vespucci traced the first useful map of the new continent, which was subsequently called after his first name. Incidentally, Vespucci baptized another region, this time voluntarily: Venezuela, a Spanish word that literally means ‘Little Venice.’ He observed that the Indians in the Maracaibo Lake dwelled in houses made in the water, as Venetians use to do. Venezuelans have debated for centuries if the diminutive Venezuela is derogatory or not. It reveals our complex of inferiority, as the diminutive in Spanish can be pampering too, as people in love and loved children know. Deminutives can be both derogatory and lovely, but we choose the derogatory interpretation because we feel insanely diminished by essence.

The word America covered the New World as a whole, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Amerigo Vespucci’s first name was used for one of the five continents on Earth, an exaggerated prize for tracing a map — being opportune is often more rewarding than being diligent... Before Vespucci — even after him — there were other names for the continent: La Española ‘The Spanish,’ Nueva España ‘New Spain,’ Peru, Virginia, New England. The Spaniards were reluctant to call it América. They preferred Las Indias ‘The Indies,’ Las Indias Occidentales ‘the West Indies,’ or Las Indias, Islas y Tierra Firme de la Mar Océano ‘The Indies, Isles, and Mainland of the Ocean Sea.’ The German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, together with the French Aimé Bonpland, called it Régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent ‘the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent.’ The name of their monumental book was Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent ‘Voyage of Humboldt and Bonpland to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent.’

When Columbus hit the continent for the first time in 1498, at what later became the present Venezuelan coast, he baptized it Tierra de Gracia ‘Graceland,’ in a letter to Queen Isabella. There he said the World was like a woman’s breast, the nipple being the Paradise. Venezuela was the Paradise Sensuously Recovered.

“Brave New World” was it for Shakespeare in The Tempest:

MIRANDA — O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!

Enter the inhabitants, the “goodly creatures,” the “beauteous mankind”: what today is Latin America was called simply America by its founding fathers. They excluded the United States, as arbitrarily as the United States excludes us when they call themselves America. Nineteenth Century Cuban poet and patriot José Martí called it Nuestra América ‘Our America’ in his famous article of the same name: “Let’s graft the world in America, but let the stem be America,” he redundantly said. A good idea, indeed, but only if he had made clear what that American stem is. A similar attitude was held by the Brazilian cultural movement at the beginning of the 20^th Century that dubbed itself “the Anthropophagi.” They professed to “eat,” that is, symbolically assimilate, every cultural element from anywhere in the world, that was their idea of being Latin Americans. They weren’t wrong but they didn’t make clear what Latin America was either. Perhaps it’s Latin America’s very anthropophagous attitude, that is, the cultural assimilation of anything human. Both Martí and the Brazilian anthropophagi were tautologic. Tautology, according to Wittgestein’s Tractatus, is true but does not inform anything.

Then U.S. President James Monroe proclaimed “America for the Americans” and only the United States were “America”, a denomination today pervading all over the world, where America is synonym for the U.S. only, even in casual Latin American parlance (see The Monroe Doctrine). That’s why we’ve deliberately avoided in this handbook the use of the terms America and American to call only the United States and the persons and things therein. We’ve been mutually stupid to use America and American to exclude the inhabitants on either side of the Río Grande. Nothing of the sort happens in other continents. No part of Europe pretends to be only Europe, excluding the rest, as the United States do when they seize for themselves the name of the whole American continent, as if only the United States were American. All the same as Latin American founding fathers Simón Bolívar and José Martí excluded the United States when they spoke about “América.” Or perhaps the United States have the implicit project of taking over the rest of the American states...

The name United States of America covers a large portion of the continent. It encompasses the contiguous continental territory of what we use to call the United States of America, but it includes non-contiguous Alaska too. It covers the “free associate state” of Puerto Rico, a Caribbean island that Latin Americans feel as an usurped part of their America. But the name United States of America includes also an archipelago far off the shores of the continent: Hawaii. This was taken over much in the same manner as Cuba and Puerto Rico were. But Hawaii wasn’t historically torn off from a continent of its same coherent roots as Puerto Rico is today. That’s why Hawaii seems to have been assimilated to the U.S. better than Puerto Rico, even though its totally alien culture is far more distant from the U.S. than the European-originated culture of Puerto Rico is. It’s a problem of powers, not of cultural congeniality. Puerto Rico will remain a problem as long as there’s a Hispanic culture in the island and a cultural link with the rest of the Hispanic continent.

What are then those states of America that were united in one federation? The answer isn’t simple. There are some states in the U.S. that formerly belonged to Mexico. So Latin Americans have reason to think that the “manifest destiny” of the United States implies the annexation of other Latin countries, as it happened to Puerto Rico, and was nearly the case of Cuba, the Dominican Republic and the Philippines, which were Spanish colonies too. The case of the Philippines is completely different. For reasons whose exposition doesn’t belong here, Latin America has never felt a living link with that distant archipelago. The fact that a small and practically extinguished Filipino elite speaks Spanish is generally ignored by most Latin Americans and Spaniards. The fact that its name derives from the Spanish King Philip II is mostly unknown too, even in Spain. The Philippines went astray in Latin American history books and the general Hispanic paradigms since its very beginnning.

The denomination “The United States of America” responds to no mythical root, stemming from a remote past, like France ‘the land of the Franks,’ England ‘the land of the Angles,’ Germany ‘the land of the Germans,’ Spain, from Romanicized Hispania which meant ‘the land of hares,’ and so on.

Then, to further obscure things, the similarly denominated Organization of American States (OAS) was created in 1948. It includes all the independent states that exist in the American continent’s soil: the U.S., all the Latin American countries, the West Indies and other former European colonies. Ambiguity itself, the OAS has existed only as an ancillary agency of the U.S. State Department. Accordingly, it expelled Cuba in 1962 and endorsed the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. The OAS did nothing during the conflict of the Islas Malvinas (Falkland Islands) between the United Kingdom and Argentina, an “American State,” because the United States aligned themselves with the United Kingdom. A proof that, when in doubt, the United States align with Europe, and that the Monroe doctrine is fatigued or never was to be trusted.

As part of the U.S. rhetoric addressed to Latin America, the expressions “Pan-American” and “Pan-Americanism” were widely used until they faded out almost completely. “Pan-Americanism” was supposed to be the name of the utopia described by the Monroe doctrine, the blissful coexistence of all the American states under the Good Neighbor policy designed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. As it usually happens with utopias, it turned into hell, at least for the invaded countries that saw their sovereignty and dignity trampled upon.

The name Latin America is confusing too. It was an invention of the 19^th century French imperialists, who were successful in adjoining the adjective Latin to America, in order to exclude the “Anglo-Saxon America” as having no right to the South of the Río Grande. It sought also to diminish the Spanish origin. The French imperialists wanted Latin America for themselves, much like the English imperialists and President Monroe wanted it too. The adjective Latin includes the countries of French, Portuguese and Spanish roots, because they descend from Latin Rome. But it excludes the Indian and African roots, and the English-speaking countries of the Caribbean Sea and other non-Spanish-speaking countries: Guyana, Surinam, etc. — a small detail that didn’t worry the French imperialists.

The same happens when we speak of Iberoamérica ‘Iberian America,’ which includes the Portuguese and the Spanish roots, as long as Iberian alludes to the whole Iberian Peninsula, and not only Spain. But it excludes Indians, Africans and non-Spanish-speaking countries.

América Española ‘Spanish America’ and Hispanoamérica ‘Hispanic America’ exclude the formerly Portuguese Brazil, together with Indians and Africans. Spanish authorities and even iconoclast Spanish Nobel Prize winner novelist Camilo José Cela insist that Hispanic America includes Brazil, because the adjective Hispanic referred to the whole Peninsula, comprising Portugal, the former Brazilian metropolis. We don’t think the Portuguese are too content with this integrating interpretation.

Indoamérica ‘Indian America’ includes Indians, but excludes the rest of the Latin American humanity, which is all the humanity. The Spanish speaking Antilles, where no Indians survived the holocaust perpetrated by the conquistadors, would be excluded.

South America excludes Mexico and Central America...

The Americas includes too many people who do not belong to what we usually call Latin America: the United States, Canada, the West Indies, the French and Dutch Antilles, and Surinam.

To further complicate things, the United States shelter a Hispanic community of more than twenty million people — you can call it a country... And, according to the size of its Hispanic population, New York is the fifth Spanish speaking city in the world. Not to mention Florida, which perhaps one day will become the first Disunited State of Latin America...

Every time Latin Americans name the continent they belong to, they display a Hamletian monologue, in which they cannot decide which parent to love or hate. No other continent presents this agonizing hesitation. Latin Americans bet on their very identity every time they mention themselves. Every name they choose implies a decisive political engagement. Nomen est omen ‘name is omen,’ said the Romans. They were right. The names of America, or whatever we call it, reveal its serious identity problems.

What will we call all this mess?

We’ll keep as a compromise the names Latin America and the United States in this handbook because they’re comparatively the less confusing and the less discriminating of all. The name Latin America excludes Indians and Africans, but perhaps we can hopefully enhance the meaning of the adjective Latin to imply the fact that the Latin people who arrived in America were enriched with the contribution of Indian and African cultures...

Back to basics

We’ve gone a long way from our subject — Latin America today — in order to illustrate how easy thinking simplifies complex matters. These are abecedarian things that are easily forgotten — human beings have a weak memory. The center of gravity of civilization has never been naturally placed on one single people. Never. The Greeks were as varied a nation as the United States can be today. Imperial Rome was far from the shepherds that formed the first homogenous nucleus of the Seven Hills. When Romans began to dominate their neighbors they began to integrate those various peoples around a common set of civic values and a common tongue: Ubicumque lingua latina, ibi Roma ‘wherever there is Latin language, there is Rome.’ One day this variety of people couldn’t be held together any longer and the empire collapsed.

The United States are at the same time an integration and disintegration of peoples from every origin. The British roots live together with the Irish, the Scots, the Italians, the Poles, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Indians, the Africans. They all speak English with their respective accents and, with different levels of success and conflict, they have fashioned the “American Way of Life” to their peculiar means and manners. As an important component of the United States we find the Hispanics, by millions.

But there’s a difference between Latin America and the United States concerning the union of groups from different ethnic origins. In the United States these groups hardly mingle, in the recent past Blacks were segregated by written and unwritten laws that can only be compared to South African Apartheid. That segregation has weakened, especially in the symbolic world, but hasn’t disappeared at all. In Latin America people from different origins tend to fuse into the same community, even with the conflicts arising from disparate ethnic origins. Maybe they hate each other, but not to the point of being unable to contact skins of different tints and then bear children. This is a very important difference: in the United States the different ethnic groups still tend to live in hermetic quarters in the cities, the ghettos, the Chinatowns, the Italian neighborhoods.

In Latin America you have only the mostly European non-hermetic neighborhoods surrounded by the mostly non-hermetic mestizo neighborhoods, where people of predominant African and Indian origin use to live in. Anyway you can find many a white in those slums. There are no “clean” or “pure” airtight ethnic groups in Latin America, no matter how much they cry aloud their whiteness. “Real whites remained in Spain,” some say jokingly, but that’s doubtful too, because there were Africans in Spain before Columbus. There’s always the suspicion of a grand-mother in Africa. If you ask Peruvians or Chileans or any other Latin American where they come from, they very probably will tell you they’re Peruvian, Chilean or whatever. They almost never tell, as it happens with U.S. citizens, that they’re from Italian or Lebanese or Syrian or Portuguese origin, except if explicitly asked about it. Even though there have been recent and abundant streams of immigration, especially from Italy, Lebanon, Portugal, Spain and Syria. So there are no clear-cut boundaries in Latin America. Even the Colombian or Peruvian aristocracies — perhaps the only ones in the world to take themselves seriously as such — nervously suspect all the time some stealthy African or Indian ancestor. In these conditions racism is very difficult to administer and Apartheid would be absolutely impossible: what would Apartheid do with the millions of mestizos and cholos (Peruvian mestizos) who are the majority of the population? They would fall in a sort of limbo, with no “usable” category. That’s what we call complexity... In the United States you have racial tiles that are clear enough to be reckoned with. Even computers could tell them apart in the United States, as long as they are digitally accountable as primitive components. Latin American groups cannot be accounted even with a very advanced computer... Latin American differences are analogical, while U.S. differences are digital.

But it isn’t a biological determination: Latin American people inherit a cultural tradition that comes in a complex package where you can find the African, the Indian, the European and the you-name-it features. Maybe you’re a Latin American of German or Finnish or Latvian or Japanese origin. No trouble: you dance salsa, you eat tamales, you drink rum, you sway graciously when you walk. That has nothing to do with biology, which is a subject matter racists love putting between things and their intelligibility. Biology obscures everything in anthropology. It comes as no surprise that modern anthropology has definitively abandoned ‘race’ as a scientific concept. It only designates the social inheritance of codes, symbols, languages — in a word: culture (see Racism Unexplained).

When empires disintegrate they leave a deep groove, they first delegate the scepter to the mounting empire. Most likely the rising empire snares the scepter from the decaying empire. The United States squeezed it from the unnerved hands of the once powerful Spanish Lion. The scepter adopted the material form of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, in 1898.

Then the wreckage of empires continues its existence in the nostalgia of the former glory, while their peoples regain the sense of provincial life the empire had taken away from them. Things can reverse, but always in a different manner. The Greeks were conquered by the Romans, but they continued to dominate through their scholars in the Roman Empire. The Romans of the Quattrocento rose from the wreckage of the Empire, evoking the cultural grandeur of ancient Greece and Rome, and broadcast the Renaissance from the Sistine Chapel to Texas.

The wreckage of a fallen empire is a multitudinous collection of dispersed elements, unconnected, unintelligible to each other, as the blueprint is gone: it’s like the rubbish of an abandoned monument. Only a patient archeologist can reconstruct the original, and that with very arduous guesswork and sometimes to no avail, when all or most of the codes are lost.

The wreckage sometimes lets us perceive the ancient grandeur of the monument, but perhaps looks like a dismal collection of incoherent parts. Only the erect empire is completely intelligible, because it has the weapons ready to discourage and dispel any puzzlement or distraction, any confusion or misunderstanding. If someone didn’t understand the Pax Romana, the Roman military had powerful cohorts ready to make it unequivocally understood. The blueprint was all the time ready to be heeded...

The Cuban disconnection

One day it had to happen: one of the Latin Americas would steal away from the tightly knit Monroe Doctrine’s web. There had been many attempts: the 1910 Revolution in Mexico; the rebellion of General Augusto César Sandino in Nicaragua; the morose APRA movement in Peru; the nationalist movements in Puerto Rico; the events of Guatemala in the ‘50s, suffocated in 1954 by a U.S. intervention; the ambiguous Socialdemocrat experience of Venezuela in 1945-1948, crushed by a coup-d’état promoted by the U.S.; the charismatic and ambiguous leadership of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, killed by the Colombian oligarchy in 1948; the equivocal Juan Domingo Perón’s movement in Argentina.

Then came Cuba, harvesting a long tradition of anti-U.S. Latin American sentiments. These were nourished by the founding fathers themselves. Cuban national hero José Martí had warned against the “monster” — the United States, that is — in whose “entrails” he had lived. South American Liberator Simón Bolívar advanced similar cautions: “The United States seem destined by Providence to cause misery in our nations in the name of liberty.”

One day it had to happen. It wasn’t an accident. A talented and charismatic leadership successfully sustained a rapturous discourse that captured the imagination and the long overdue Latin American hopes of liberation from the yoke of the European root — which includes the United States, of course, as it’s perceived by a continent imperfectly absorbed by Europe (Fidel Castro (1961-1962), Declarations of Havana, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1962). This leadership was to serve justice and create a sylvan utopia comparable to the one the Chiapas Subcomandante Marcos is promising to Mexican Indians (see An Address from Chiapas’ Subcomandante Marcos).

It’s difficult to describe the contradictory sentiments Fidel’s Cuba has provoked among Latin Americans. It’s hard for Latin Americans to have a composed attitude toward the Cuban Revolution. It has accomplished the feat of redeeming a Latin American territory from U.S. domination; Cuba was a territory where corruption, prostitution and gambling were conducted by the U.S. Mafia. The scenario was set for a beautiful story of a gallant white horse-riding prince rescuing a defenseless innocent princess from the paws of a wicked dragon. David defeating Goliath once again. The Star Wars’ Alliance against the Empire. The Cuban Revolution entered in the powerful stream of very ancient myths. The Cuban phenomenon was the result of five centuries of unsuccessful counterattacks against European and U.S. domination by a Hamletian continent awkwardly searching its identity and dignity.

Then things went awry: first came the compact with the USSR and Communism. This ethic-messianic doctrine imposed itself, as everywhere else, in the same manner Christian faith imposes itself: as a means of rescuing people from themselves and then, as a consequence, imposed an airtight dictatorship. Even though Cuban Communism hasn’t enforced the most repugnant Stalinist and Maoist despotic and asinine excesses, it has been a dictatorship nevertheless. See El stalinismo: efecto perverso del capitalismo, for a discusion on Stalinism.

A defeat of Cuba at the hands of the U.S. would be a great humiliation for Latin America. But Fidel’s unlimited rule is unacceptable too for many Latin Americans. It’s a tragedy, and tragedies are tragedies because they don’t have solutions. Their heroes cannot resign and go home: imagine Macbeth saying something like: “I’ll take my leave from this contrariety of puissance and bland my life into a wintry age in concord.” Wherever tragic heroes go, they bring their tragedy with them, as Oedipus proved when he abandoned Tebas.

It has been the fate of all Cubans: whether they stay home or go abroad as émigrés, they take their tragedy everywhere to haunt them day and night. It’s the same tragedy for those who support Fidel, those who fight Fidel inside Cuba, those who abandon the island and even those who are, so to speak, indifferent to it all.

But it is impossible for a Latin American to be really nonchalant about the Cuban Revolution. For a European or a U.S. citizen it’s simple to blame it for its totalitarian character, or to celebrate it as a triumph of global geopolitical justice, to be indifferent or to just ignore it. It’s a minor decision about a minor island. Or they can choose to admire Fidel’s amazing intelligence, eloquence and sympathy, for instance, as they do everywhere he goes. For Europeans or U.S. people Cuba is an intellectual experience. But for Latin Americans it contains a vital element that they have to face with all their blood and guts. Cuba is the only Latin American country — a small island, for that matter — that has successfully imposed its conditions for more than forty years upon the most powerful empire of all time — after nearly two centuries of independence from Spain, haunted by the imposing U.S. gravitational pull. Again, this makes it all very complex. Ignoring it, that is, oversimplifying it, will render it even more complex. Latin Americans cannot take it lightly, and they don’t, no matter if they support or reject it. Or manage to be indifferent to it...

But there’s still another possible outcome: the China syndrome. That is, a socialist regime with a capitalist economy. Lately Cuba has been luring European and Canadian capitals to invest in the island, Fidel has even donned a business suit, offering a highly educated and state-controlled work force in exchange for capitals. It can work finely, but forget about Marxism. If it works, the tough-minded U.S. politicians will be shutting down a very good opportunity for U.S. capitalists. A strange epilogue for four decades of Socialism and U.S. belligerent opposition to socialism: Fidel ironizes saying that the principal protector of socialism in Cuba is the U.S. embargo... Humanity does schizophrenic things like that. It isn’t the first time it happens. The Pope in person crowned Napoleon as an Emperor, who inherited a regicide and lay Revolution. After a whole life consecrated to the destruction of Communism, the last political act of Richard Nixon was receiving a standing ovation by a congress of the surviving and semi-clandestine Communist Party of the former Soviet Union. The Pope himself recently received Fidel at the Vatican and visited Cuba in 1998. Fidel was educated by the Jesuits... We’re homo sapiens indeed, but we’re homo demens too, as Edgar Morin says. And homo hystericus, Morin adds.

See Fidel Castro’s welcome speech to the Pope and the Pope’s arrival speech at Cuba (both in Spanish language).

The drug-dealer states

Drug use is a common trait of every human community. No human group has missed alcohol, chocolate, coca, coffee, marijuana, peyote, mushrooms, yopo... Drug use belongs to the depths of the symbolic, cultural, emotional, dramatic, jolly and religious dimensions of every society. People drink alcoholic beverages or eat hallucinogenic mushrooms to celebrate the birth of a child or to communicate with their deities: when a Catholic priest drinks wine at the height of the mass, he’s drinking Christ’s blood, as Christ summoned his apostles himself, raising the Holy Grail full of wine: “Drink, for this is my blood.” No less. It’s a global, anthropologic phenomenon. In the most recent witless pseudo-hygienic years we tend to think drugs were created by a band of scoundrels, especially South American, who profit from corrupting the healthy and innocent youth of the immaculate U.S. and European societies.

The present official hygienic discourse on drugs strategically forgets two essential aspects:

1. Drug use is a complex phenomenon, involving all the elements mentioned above, in addition to political, medical and economic factors.
2. In traditional societies, drug use is highly ritualized and subject to cultural rigors of deep consequence. The Incas have used coca for centuries, without the dismal consequences of present cocaine abuse in the United States and elsewhere. Modern societies don’t have the cultural wisdom necessary to regulate drug use. This problem cannot be seen as a mere problem of police and law enforcement, which is a dimension of a lower logical hierarchy concerning drug use. It’s easy thinking again. The same phenomenon happens to traditional societies with alcohol, when it’s introduced into them by foreign “civilized” people. Traditional societies don’t usually have the cultural wisdom necessary to regulate the use of spirits, except when it has been produced by themselves long enough to develop a culture around it and from it. The unprepared individuals in those societies, then, give themselves to alcohol without measure, without ritual, without alcoholic culture, without wisdom, like Noah, the first drunkard, who caused laughter because he didn’t know how to stop drinking. Later on in the Bible, Christ declares that wine is his blood. In ancient times, wine was a sacred substance created by the gods Dionysus or Bacchus. Drugs aren’t a frivolous matter to be considered with the rudimentary instruments of easy thinking. It’s a very serious, poetic and sacred subject.

The pseudo-hygienic discourse profits from a strategic ignorance in order to politically and historically blame the societies (Asian and Latin American) that produce drugs that are illegal in the United States and Europe. Many Latin American leaders have uselessly insisted that the problem is not only on the supply side but on the demand side too. If the United States did not use cocaine the Colombian cartels wouldn’t exist. Drugs are freely trafficked in the U.S. streets, school children buy them in the open, but rarely a U.S. drug trafficker is caught and imprisoned — it’s naive to think that the powerful United States and Europe will ever restrain their own behavior to solve a global problem. It’s easier to let all the responsibility fall on the weakest partner — but not to curb the weak partner’s part of the business, but to launder bad consciousness, much the same as dollars obtained from drug dealing are laundered.

It serves the ideological purpose of turning weak societies into moral scapegoats in order to better dominate them. The pseudo-hygienic discourse recycles Henry Kissinger’s doctrine of “limited sovereignty” (a complement of the Monroe Doctrine): the United States must guard and custody its Southern neighbors. Now that there’s no Communist danger to invoke, there’s the Apocalyptic Drug Danger to justify measures leading to moral, cultural, political and military domination. The hygienic discourse resulted in the invasion of Panama to catch Manuel Antonio Noriega, and the intervention in Colombia to arrest drug lord Carlos Lehder. It configures Latin America as a continent with no maturity to govern itself. Latin America remains an international minor.

As drug production is banned from the field of legitimate economic activities, it becomes encapsulated as a chronic and non-mortal cancerous state within the State, as in Colombia and the United States, where the Mafia is an alternative state apparatus for the repression and administration of society. The Mafia and the U.S. state have implemented each other in order to attain their respective goals. How could the U.S. destroy Nazism and are now unable to destroy the Cosa Nostra, except in films, i.e., in the realm of myth? What kind of balance has been established between the Mafia and the U.S. state? How can the U.S. be ready to detect a nuclear attack and yet be incapable of catching the thousand airplanes that enter their territory, full of cocaine and other drugs?

Presenting the fight against drugs as a simplistic struggle between heroes and villains is to place the problem just where it has no solution. It’s the same place where a similar phenomenon was put in the past: alcohol use during Prohibition. In the name of the repression of alcoholism, society was repressed as a whole. It was a function of the necessities of cohesion, coaction and coercion of the Puritan, self-righteous — that is, mad — state of that time. In the fight against alcoholism and abuse of other drugs the repressive state extends a marginal problem to the whole population — originating a situation in which

1. A deep need has to be satisfied through the crooked tracks of bootlegging, that is, in a perverse manner. And
2. Attracting the general attention to what otherwise would be a rather marginal affair.

Drug trafficking entered the black hole opened by the obvious congeniality between drug lords and the states, and these include the Unided States inasmuch as it doesn’t seem to prosecute the U.S. drug lords. Colombia delivered Lehder and killed Pablo Escobar Gaviria. At least. The United States haven’t done anything comparable with a U.S. drug lord.

Part of this fraudulent argument is that the legalization of drugs would increase proclivity for drug addiction. This is a fraudulent argument, as alcoholism was not reduced because of the Prohibition, nor was it augmented when the Prohibition was abolished. Alcoholics are people who have a special propensity, for biological and/or mental reasons that remain largely unknown. Perhaps people in general couldn’t find a single bottle of wine during Prohibition, but alcoholics could find it — that is, those who were the supposed principal beneficiaries of Prohibition. No repressive apparatus, no matter how strong and furious, will prevent drug addicts from finding drugs. It prevents their availability only to those who aren’t interested in using them...

Drug dealing entered an ‘orbit’ — a concept introduced by Jean Baudrillard to designate menacing, uncontrollable and ultimately ineffectual phenomena like nuclear weapons’ build-up and stock market speculation (Jean Baudrillard (1990), la Transparence du mal. Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes, Paris: Galilée. In English: The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, London-New York: Verso, 1993). Drug dealing will flourish even more, because neither the U.S. nor Latin American states are interested in curbing it. They are drug dealer states. The U.S. won’t be able to impose a one-sided solution because Latin America cannot be handled in the same manner as when it was a bunch of banana republics (see Foreword With Fable; see a list of works by Jean Baudrillard mostly in English language).

It isn’t a hopeless problem, but it’s radical. Traditional means have failed and will continue to fail miserably, like the wishful-thinking campaigns against drug abuse.

Obviously the consumers know only very well the damage provoked by drugs when they’re obsessively consumed. To warn them against cocaine, crack or heroine is either cynical derision or naïveté — we’ve found the hard way that naïveté is not incompatible with cynicism.

We’re not talking about the occasional use, for the sake of the mere hedonistic or religious tendencies of every culture. Drug use is a luxury of spirit. No people in the world refuse that luxury. Indians, who are wise, know when to stop using them. So-called civilized societies aren’t that cultured. We’re talking about the obsessive and suicidal drug abuse that prevails in so-called civilized societies.

Unattended children deliberately break a dish to call their parents’ attention. Fifteen years later they enter a juvenile gang and/or kill themselves at 150 Mph in a motorcycle. It’s a matter of scale. Inattention ranges from negligence to contempt and it provokes a resentment that may lead to a vindictive self-immolation. Obsessive consumption of drugs is excellent for that purpose: a slow, lavish, glamorous, pleasant suicide.

This juvenile resentment is hurled at anyone with a parental role: parents who have lost the compass of affection; educators who ignore what they teach; sports leaders who deliberately prescribe drug abuse to athletes in order to gain a 10^th of a second in an Olympic record. And at the center of them all lies a hypocrite leadership that obviously won’t fight the drug lords on their own soil.

Then, in this affective dessert I sacrifice myself to see if I impress the baneful parent who brought me to this world only to scorn me. An attended and loved young person would hardly use drugs in this desperate manner. Telling resentful young persons to refuse drugs is to confirm they are achieving their goal of calling attention by causing irritation... And the young person who didn’t know it, learns about it on the spot. That’s why the anti-drug messages only serve a villainous leadership to launder its image. The drug-addict feels that the parental figure warning against drugs doesn’t give a damn for the despised and unattended young person.

The individual problem as such is clinic and must be attended through the usual clinical means. The big scale problem is that of the state: is it capable of rescuing the mass of scorned young persons? If the answer is positive, then no campaign will be needed. Brother and Sister Example will be more effective preachers than all those hypocritical campaigns that tell a mass of young desperate persons to say no to the only thing that has been left to them to simulate the emotion of being alive.

If the United States want to curb drug use and trafficking they have to confront their three faces: production, circulation and consumption. It’s a long journey, it includes the efforts of cooperation of both Latin America and the United States. It involves of course overcoming Latin American — and U.S. — social disintegration. It isn’t easy, but it’s the only solution. Hiding this fact is becoming part of the problem — or looking under the lamp for the coin lost in the dark far from the light...

Shakespeare: Latin American writer

Shakespeare told the story of Latin America in his last play: The Tempest.

Prospero, the Duke of Milan, arrives in an island, probably in the Caribbean Sea, with his daughter Miranda. He’s an exile. His brother has usurped his dukedom. In the island he finds two beings: Ariel, an exquisite and obedient spirit, who helps Prospero in all his schemes to recover his rule; and Caliban, “a savage and deformed Slave” whom Prospero calls “monster,” “abhorred slave,” “savage,” “vile race,” “hag-seed,” “malice,” “dull thing,” and other rude epithets. Caliban tries “to violate” (‘rape’) Miranda. Many dramatis personæ also have names more usual in Spanish than in English: Adrián, Alonso, Antonio, Gonzalo, Sebastián... Another name “sounds like” Spanish: Trínculo. The name “Caliban” seems to be a transposition of the Spanish word caníbal (’cannibal’), a name that’s usually thought to come from the fact that Columbus thought the Caribbean Indians were subjects of the Chinese Khan... This is what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say about cannibals: “Cannibal [...] [In 16th c. pl. Canibales, a. Sp. Canibales, originally one of the forms of the ethnic name Carib or Caribes, a fierce nation of the West Indies, who are recorded to have been anthropophagi, and from whom the name was subsequently extended as a descriptive term.”

Columbus carried credentials from the Spanish Kings addressed to the Chinese Khan, because he intended to go to the Orient, and there he thought he had arrived. It is etymologically false but politically meaningful, as long as these Indians were said to be what Othello called “Anthropophagi.” According to linguistic evidence, English Cannibal and Spanish caníbal come from the Indian languages of the Caribbean, not from the Chinese Khan, whose subjets would be “khanibals.”

Prospero taught language to Caliban, who used it only to curse:

CALIBAN — You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!

Ariel, in contrast, is “an airy Spirit.” Prospero calls him “my brave spirit,” “fine apparition! My quaint Ariel,” “fine Ariel,” “my industrious servant,” “dainty.” Caliban and Ariel are radically contrasting characters: Ariel is an ethereal spirit, elegant, happy, beautiful and obedient, while Caliban is an earthly, carnal, tortuous, hideous, lewd, enslaved and rebellious human being.

The story — all’s well that ends well... — finishes with the restitution of harmony among human beings and Ariel’s liberation, which Prospero had promised him in exchange of his submission.

Part of this parable suggests a Latin American two-fold cardinal paradigm: Ariel is the docile colonial subject while Caliban is the unruly colonial subject. Ariel’s demeanor promises to non-Europeans the same lot of the Europeans, on the condition that they reverentially surrender to the most severe European discipline. The Ariel-inspired Latin American demeanor has gone through diverse ideologies: Christian faith, the Enlightenment, a certain racist and fatalist Positivism and now the so called Neoliberalism and the droll End-of-History proposal. All of them count on a foreordained destiny — salvation, or its present earthly incarnation: indefinite progress.

Caliban’s demeanor proclaims revulsion against the European domination, he finds only in himself the new “light,” etc. He resents Prospero’s treachery:

CALIBAN — [...]

This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou takest from me. When thou camest first,
Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in’t, and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee
And show’d thee all the qualities o’ the isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:
Cursed be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king: and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o’ the island.

Prospero has his reasons too, the reasons of the colonizer, who legitimizes his domination invoking the culture he has supposedly transmitted to the colonized:

PROSPERO — Abhorred slave,
Which any print of goodness wilt not take,
Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes
With words that made them known. But thy vile race,
Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures
Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou
Deservedly confined into this rock,
Who hadst deserved more than a prison.

In Caliban’s view, the world is an error that will be amended through an apocalyptic collision, after which infinite and ecumenical bliss should result (see: An Address from Chiapas’ Subcomandante Marcos; some of this is present in the hope poor Venezuelans bestow on Hugo Chávez). Similarly Latin Americans wait for a Messiah who will deliver them from all their ordeals through an apocalyptic revolution. In contrast, Anglo-Saxons and the societies where they are the dominant group, says Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, patiently accumulate small steps toward vindication and right.

Both Latin American Ariel and Caliban demeanors respectively display in two ideologically opposed matrixes:

1. Ariel’s attitude of prostration translates into systems of self-diminution before the European and U.S. conqueror and whiteness in general. Neoliberalism is the most recent stance of this attitude.
2. The Calibanistic exalted vindication of Indian and African roots, inspired and fueled by Romanticism, as a sort of Good Savage as described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It all leads to “National liberation,” which curiously elevates to apotheosis the two pardo (‘dark’) roots and at the same time paradoxically proclaims salvation through some emancipating white European ideology: Positivism, Marxism, Theology of Liberation... In this segment of Calibanist perversion we must mention a certain creeping vindication of drug traffic as Latin America’s response to its ordeals... (see The Drug-Dealer States).

These two compulsions have opposed each other every minute of Latin American history. Latin Americans have tottered between Ariel and Caliban and, worse, both demeanors simultaneously persist inside every Latin American, producing a painful tearing apart, because neither the Ariel nor Caliban demeanors can be abandoned, hence the ambigous and tormenting attitude toward the Cuban revolution. The most enthusiastic Ariel demeanor faces the arrogance of the European victor and confronts two equally unmerciful prospects: becoming Caliban like Cuba, Chiapas, Venezuela since 1989 to this day (June 2002) or submitting without pride, like Ariel. Worst still, both demeanors persist together in the same persons, in varying degrees, as in schizophrenics. The most enthusiastic Calibans find they cannot renounce the European roots that form the institutions they live by, and even the European language they speak, Prospero’s language, which all Latin American rebels employ to insult their European forefathers. They find too that it is impossible to go back to the pre-Columbian origins, or just useless, because their aborigine past was not as blissful as they pretend.

None of these states of mind can live all alone, they must live together in a perpetual brawl, tormenting each other at every move, and eventually paralyzing their victim.

One, two, savage

Another possible view: in his book The Labyrinth of the Three Minotaurs, [2] Venezuelan philosopher J. M. Briceño Guerrero exposes the presence of three discourses in Latin America:

1. The discourse of what he calls the ‘First Europe’: the Europe of deep traditions, revolving around Christian religion. It is the discourse of the privileged traditional classes, stemming from Colonial times, the mantuanos, as they are called in Venezuela. [3] It’s the discourse that was immersed deep in Medieval Europe, with crusaders and inquisitors, hierarchy and privileges, aristocracy and birth rank.
2. The discourse of the ‘Second Europe,’ that is, modern Europe, with its ideal law-abiding institutions, its science, technology and rationality at the head of every initiative. It is the product of the 18^th century. It dominates public addresses, and every declaration of principles. It’s the shield that covers up the other two discourses.
3. The ‘savage discourse’ is the one held mostly by the surviving Indian and African parties. It’s the discourse of surreptitious resistance, of the failure to comply with the disciplines of the First and Second Europes. It’s the discourse of resentment, of nostalgia for non-European values and traditions, splintered, shredded, disrupted, unhappy, tragic, without a clear and conscious definition of its principles.

The Second Europe discourse is the most visible, but the other two are the dominant ones, pervasive, invasive, evasive. They’re all the time fighting each other, but they depend on each other, as much as Prospero dependeds on Caliban:

PROSPERO — But, as ‘tis,
We cannot miss him: he does make our fire,
Fetch in our wood and serves in offices
That profit us..

Our interpretation of Ariel and Caliban is congruous with Briceño’s interpretation of Latin America.

There are two other interpretations that have no relation to ours: the classical view of the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó (in his book Ariel, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho. In English: Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988) and the Cuban Roberto Fernández Retamar (in his book Calibán caníbal (1971) [Caliban cannibal], Havana: Casa de las Américas. In English: Caliban and Other Essays, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, c. 1989). Briceño Guerrero doesn’t mention Caliban or Ariel in this context. Of course, our reading of The Tempest does not exclude other interpretations of this intricate play.

Briceño proposes a clarifying third dimension, the Second Europe, that explains the disguising function of the Second Europe’s discourse. It really dominates in Europe, in the United States, in the Seven Asian Tigers. Not in Latin America, where its sole action consists of camouflaging the First Europe mantuano interests. That’s why we said Latin America isn’t completely capitalist, because there capitalism (as well as all other Second Europe subservient discourses: Socialism, Industrialism, science, technology, etc.) must surrender to the privileges and hierarchy imposed by the mantuano discourse.

These three discourses penetrate each other, parasite each other, hinder each other in a tragic combat [...] None of them dominates public life to the point of leading it to a coherent and successful organization, but each one is strong enough to frustrate the other two, and the three are unable to reconcile. Meanwhile, the international circumstances bolster the Second Europe discourse and proclaim the rapid development of Second Europe rational order, supported by science and technology. But the mantuano discourse hides behind the Second Europe discourse and negotiates its continuity with the great powers’ interests, which benefit from this state of things, while the savage discourse corrodes every project and then whimpers in pleasure (Briceño, 1994:9).

This “pleasurable whimpering” is part of the Latin American neurosis: first it sabotages progress and then laments its own ruin. It wants progress because progress is militantly advertised to be better, but the savage discourse does not tolerate the progress that excludes it.

There is a group of Latin Americans that keep loyal to the Second Europe. They persist and insist because they cannot live with the mantuano or the savage discourses. They led the war of Independence and the forces that have led the progresses made in the industrial activities linked to Europe and the United States. To exploit oil, copper, bananas... But they feel outraged when they find the United States conspiring with the mantuano-savage discourses, which the Second Europe-inspired Latin American perceives as the same because they produce the same effects. That’s when the United States promote primitive dictators like Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua or Augusto Pinochet in Chile or Pedro Carmona Estanga for a few hours in Venezuela in April 2002. The U.S. defend both their First Europe and the mantuano interests, allied with Second European (generally U.S.) interests, through savage methods. Briceño expresses it vividly:

The contradiction, rather the treason, is unbearable when we, Second Europeans of America, members of the same family, fighting against the First Europe of America — in the name of the second knowledge, progress, liberty, equality, fraternity, social justice, second reason —, see in the field of the enemy, beside the tyrants, no less than our mentors and brothers of the Second Europe.

But treason is exalted to affront, ignominy and infamy, as to tear off one’s own hair and garments and sit down on ashes, as to invoke the epiphany of the most irreconcilable hatred, of mortal battle, when we see an American country, the United States, after having accessed to modernity and progress, invade us, despoil us, repress us through local despots, and foment in us what it vanquished in itself (1994:48).

It comes as no surprise, then, that the most vehement anti-U.S. leaders in Latin America have always been “Second Europeans of America.” The leaders — Francisco de Miranda, Simón Bolívar, Augusto César Sandino, José Martí, Fidel Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Salvador Allende, Peruvian Shining Path’s Chairman Abimael Guzmán, and now Mexican Zapatistas’ Subcomandante Marcos — have almost always been Second Europe intellectuals, college-educated cultured idealists. They’ve very rarely been either savages or mantuanos (Bolívar and San Martín were mantuanos, to be sure). From the very outset they were the most likely to be the first natural allies of U.S.-inspired progress. Instead, the U.S. leaders chose to support the most barbarous tyrants. So, when Theodore Roosevelt was told that the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, the killer of Sandino, was a “son of a bitch,” so the tradition goes, he answered: “He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” It’s in the history books. Other versions of this episode change the characters and circumstances, but they all tell the same story and lead to the same conclusion.

The U.S. placed the Somoza dynasty in charge of Nicaragua and then supported it for many decades until the Sandinistas routed them from absolute power. It was the same with Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic for more than three decades; Fulgencio Batista in Cuba; Juan Vicente Gómez and Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela; Manuel Odría in Peru; Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in Colombia; Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and a long long list of the most ignorant, barbarous and ruthless comic opera dictators in the world, who clearly respond to the savage discourse. All of them were sponsored, promoted or directly appointed by the U.S. Hence “the epiphany of the most irreconcilable hatred” professed by the most idealist Latin American leaders, who turned into the most ardent enemies of the U.S.

We all know the kind of petty business that can be conducted through these slapstick despots: intensive mineral extraction (copper, oil, iron). It’s good for intensive exportation agriculture too, in banana republics. But that’s that. It serves only the primary sector of the economy (mining, agriculture), that is, the part of the economy that in modern society is dwindling in importance together with manufacture, in favor of the rapidly expanding tertiary sector of services and information — an intellectual development for which ignorant dictators aren’t the best option. Three quarters of the U.S. gross national product now consist of services. If the U.S. wants Latin America to devote itself to the role of economic partner, well, we’re happy to report that the Big Stick policy cannot realistically continue. Something like the NAFTA agreement, which implies that Latin America transforms into an advanced post-industrial mould, cannot be organized and led by these farcical and abominable dictators.

Maybe that is what lurks behind the grandeur of the NAFTA façade: maybe it’s one more instance of the deceiving vocation of the Second Europe discourse in Latin America. In such a case we’ve nothing more to tell about this. It will be a catastrophic — even criminal — failure, of course, but if it’s a firm decision, we don’t know how to argue with human foolishness.

Politics

Ostrigoths gaggin fishigoths...
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

By politics we mean its Aristotelian root: human beings are ‘political animals.’ That is, ‘citizens.’ ‘Political’ derives from the Greek polis ‘city.’ Humans are ‘urban animals.’ Hence, we’re animals that organize in an artificial system, the city, as opposed to the natural jungle. Humans aren’t natural, they’re extra-natural. They build themselves. According to Hegel, they aren’t content with the manner in which Nature made them. According to the Spanish thinker José Ortega y Gasset, human beings are “novelists of themselves.” So they govern themselves. But even in the deep jungle humans are artificial, as far as bows and arrows don’t grow spontaneously in plants. Politics is the art of artificially organizing life. It implies, then, power and its most visible phenomenon: government.

When the elements to be organized reject each other, the polis refuses to be constituted in a stable manner. What has happened in Latin America is that the elements that compose it reject each other.

From the start the Europeans absolutely subdued the other peoples in America by force. It’s perhaps impossible to find another place and time when the domination was so powerful and absolute. When Romans dominated other people they had to negotiate the Pax Romana: you accept my rule in exchange for protection against your enemies. “Divide and conquer” meant ‘I protect you against your enemy, who wants to kill you and your kind. I just want to dominate you, integrate you into my society, not to kill you.’ Rome had to negotiate because the military difference between its army and the other people’s was not very radical. They were better warriors, but the others were good too. Many times Rome found itself at the brink of perishing before a strong enemy. So, to assure its own survival, Rome had to negotiate.

The conquistadors didn’t have to negotiate. Their weapons overwhelmingly outdid those of Indians and Africans. Their political theory and experience couldn’t compare either — theirs was the continent of Machiavelli.

Morover, during the Renaissance they had developed a universal view of Humankind that allowed them to encompass other peoples in their intellectual framework.

Christian religion, a compound of Greek dialectics and Jewish monolithic resolution was a powerful weapon too. It’s easy to imagine the uneven confrontation between the Indian shamans and the Spanish friars and nuns in the 15^th and 16^th centuries. These friars and nuns were the survivors of at least 1492 years of mutual accusations in the course of subtle debates on holy matters. These topics were so “blessed” that the holy men and women burned each other as a consequence of deliberating over them in the “wrong way.” Thus they tragically and dramatically sophisticated their terrifying weapon, using themselves as an experimental field. They inherited both the cultures of Plato and Moses, Aristotle and Jesus. They combined the Greek, Egyptian and Jewish traditions, to mention only the milestones, and fashioned them into a formidable assault ideology to subdue and organize other people. They began with Rome and continued with all humanity, under the spiritual and political rule of the Catholic Church — Catholic means ‘universal.’ The Church’s project of becoming a universal government has been largely frustrated so far. But its spiritual presence has been strong and is well and alive after the increasing secularization of the Second Europe that began in the 18^th Century. Eighteenth Century was the century of secularization. This turn from 20^th to 21^th Centuries is the comeback of religions in their worst fanatical vein: monomaniacal sects sprout everywhere, hysterically yelling their revelations and sometimes killing people, as Muslim integrists use to do, as well as the new paranoid U.S. terrorists that blew off a Federal building in Oklahoma and the Japanese Aum fanatics who poison people with lethal seirin gas, or sects that commit mass suicide because an extraterrestrial vessel has come to take them to a better place than Earth. For a compilation of 20^th Century irrationality, see Juan Nuño, “Un mundo pacato” (‘A prudish world’), El diario de Caracas, 4/19/95:I, 36. Not to mention the Twin Towers and the Pentagon terrorist attacks in the name of Allah.

All these elements brought about the capability of absolute power, and, as Baronet Acton wrote in the famous letter, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrups absolutely.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that humanity overcomes radical differences. Europe is a confluence of peoples much more varied than those of Latin America. To be short, having consulted encyclopædic Homer, in alphabetical order:

Not that they’re an ideal example of integration; there are still many wrinkles to iron out, there are still Basque, Corsican, Irish people who terrorize whole countries in the name of their independence. But most of those peoples simply fused one into the other and today most Europeans don’t know if their ancestors are Locrians or Phrygians, and, better: they don’t mind, having received the cultural inheritance of all them. The present European Community is a reconciliation long due among peoples who have coexisted for millennia.

If humans can integrate to the point they’re now integrating in Western Europe, anyone can elsewhere. All those European peoples have killed each other for centuries — to the point of extermination, something Latin Americans haven’t incurred in yet. These European peoples have enslaved each other, despised each other, admired each other, feared each other, loved each other, hated each other, learned from each other, ignored each other. They’ve had the best of times, they’ve had the worst of times. Europe is a mestizo (’mingled,’ ‘mixed’) continent. As much as every other piece of humanity in the world. There’s no place on Earth where there isn’t an aggregation of people of multiple ethnic origins. Humanity is a mestizo species.

The Latin American aggregation happened first in Spain, especially in Andalusia, a basin where a mingle of about every people in Europe and Africa converged for centuries, cooking a very thick soup of cultures. Then the Andalusians came as a predominant group in America, where they met the Indians, themselves a dense and unknown soup, and then the African bouillon. Long centuries and vast lands of human experience concentrated in one continent.

We use the Spanish word mestizo here because the equivalent words in English don’t have the force it has in the Latin American tradition. There’s in Venezuelan Spanish, for instance, a wealth of terms to call the many nuances resulting from the crossing of races. Most of these designations are now extinct, but during Latin American Colonial times they were in full force. We propose a small glossary of terms that belong to ancient and present Venezuelan Spanish. We could have taken them from any other Latin American country to the same effect. In fact, some of these words are common in other Latin American nations. (When we say “Venezuelan Spanish” we don’t mean there’s a big difference from the Spanish language spoken in other countries. Spanish language is much more homogeneous than English language. Notwithistanding, there are some dialectal nuances — that’s the sense of “Venezuelan Spanish” in this context). Here’s the glossary:

• Mantuanos, the members of the criollo aristocracy, said they had a clean bloodline, that is, they supposedly descended only from Europeans, and had no contamination of “bad race,” namely African or Indian. They’re called godos too, that is Goths, a mocking term to express their pretension to an old lineage: theirs is so old that they descend from the Goths that stormed Spain in the early Middle Ages... They don’t declare today they have such a thing as a “clean bloodline,” but they act as if they had it.

Race, as such, became a systemic factor in the division of colonial society into distinct castes. Spaniards originally based their social structure on economic and cultural criteria, which emphasized such characteristics as legitimacy of origin. The use of limpieza de sangre (purity of bloodline) allowed them to distinguish themselves from illegitimate individuals in subordinate groups. Their economic and political power gave them further reasons to set themselves apart from the common castes. But even though ethnicity and caste played central roles in determining social status, race entered into the equation by readily identifying the subservient castes, which comprised Africans, Indians, and their mixed racial descendants (Wright, 1990:21-22).

• Segundones ‘half-Black/half-white.’
• Tercerones ‘one third-Black/two thirds-white.’
• Cuarterones ‘one fourth-Black/three fourths-white.’
• Quinterones ‘one fifth-Black/four fifths-white.’
• Tente-en-el-aire literally ‘hold-in-the-air’, those who remained at birth in their particular cocktail of breeds, becoming neither blacker nor whiter.
• Saltoatrás literally ‘jump-back’, an unexpected Black within a white family with a prior Black ancestor.
• Pardo ‘dark’ was the generic term used during Colonial times to comprehend all the non-white varieties.
• Zambo designates still today a breed of Black and Indian, eventually with some white tint. They were defined like this by the French voyager Jean Joseph Dauxion-Lavaysse: “The word Zambo is synonymous with worthless, idler, liar, impious, thief, villain, assassin, etc. Of ten crimes that may be committed in the province [Caracas], eight are said to be done by zamboes.” Supposedly the evil nature of the zambos owed to their being “born of clandestine and adulterous unions, of natives who have contracted only the vices of civilization, and of African slaves: what can be expected of children born of such parents, whose minds are totally neglected, and in a climate that invites to sloth and indolence” (Jean Josepth, Dauxion-Lavaysse (1820), A Statistical, Commercial and Political Description of Venezuela, Trinidad, Margarita and Tobago, London: G. & W. B. Whitaker. In Winthrop Wright (1990), Café con leche. Race, Class and National Image in Venezuela, Austin: University of Texas Press, p. 23-24).
• Bachaco is a person of white and Black breed with kinky blond hair, white skin and black facial traits, whatever all that means. Bachaco is the name of a big blond-colored ant, very common in Venezuela and its whereabouts.

The complete list would fill pages and pages. Whatever complete means in a context so vague by nature.

Some of these terms are still used in other countries, even in English, as mulatto, from the Spanish and Portuguese word mulato, formed from mulo ‘mule,’ that is, of mixed breed. It is avoided in Venezuela, where the euphemistic moreno ‘Moorish’ is preferred to designate a person perceived as distintively Black, whatever that means. Moreno is an equivalent of mulato. Venezuelans use trigueño also, ‘the color of wheat,’ to designate mestizos in general, and even Blacks. The word negro is avoided in some Spanish-speaking countries altogether. Usually, as in Venezuela, moreno and trigueño are euphemistically used to designate a person perceived as distintively Black. In Dominican Republic they prefer a synonym of negro: prieto. The word negro is so undesirable in the Dominican Republic that they avoid attributing it even to things. Cubans shun negro too; they prefer mulato, which has generalized as a common form of treatment for everyone, regardless of pigment. It is an intricate entanglement that attests the intricacy of racial codes usual in everyday life and the permanent necessity of classifying, that is, discriminating people by race (for a discussion of the case of the decay of non-derogatory names, see What’s in a Name).

All these dramatis personæ evolved behind the dazzling white façade of the colonial house. Behind these walls a busy life sprung behind the stones, in the kitchens, in the nights, when the white master sojourned with the pardo maid. Outside, the wall was white; inside, it was pardo, the product of sensuous and sinful encounters. The sons and daughers of those liaisons were considered the fruit of disorder and vice. They were guilty of a second Original Sin. So darkness of skin became a perverse metaphor of corrupt and impure behavior, because in it everything dark gathered: a race defined by its vexation, and a wicked entanglement, the dark races seduced and corrupted the supposedly chaste white knights that conquered America. They were Parsifal and the Indian and African women were Kundry, as in the Wagnerian Singspiel. The little white blood the pardos had was dissolved in a sea of dark, sinful and revolting fluids. Those white drops only served the purpose of bleaching and mitigating the burden of a subservient and guilty social rank. But those white drops were irreparably invalidated by the dark ones.

Of course this is the biased version of the conquerors: lechery was a common trait of both Spaniards, and Indians and Africans — as in all human beings, for that matter. But Christian conquerors of all time hate to admit their own sins, attributing what they call sins to the vanquished. They accuse Black people of being lusty, forgetting that the male conquerors and their descendants, not Blacks, entertain harems of mulatto women even today — not that Blacks wouldn’t like to have the same amenity, but they do not usually have the funds to finance it. The only real sin Blacks can finance in is not hiding their normal human sensuality, while the white Christians usually conceal it. Of course, being hard-working slaves, only Blacks’ bodies had any value and it is only their bodies that are exalted: physical work was the saint part, sensuous appetite was the wicked part. At best Blacks are considered nice and are supposed to have verve. “She’s Black, but she’s beautiful.” “He’s handsome, he has white traits.” For the rest, Blacks are considered vicious, lazy and lusty. They’ve little or no spirit. When they’ve little spirit they are segregated. When they’ve none, they are suitable to be hanged by the Ku Klux Klan (see Racism unexplained) You enslave people, and for accomplishing that feat you must

• catch them,
• separate them from their loved ones and their culture,
• ship them to a far away and hostile country,
• chain them,
• humiliate them,
• exploit them beyond their physical resistance,
• torture them,
• starve them. It has been calculated that at a certain period slaves had to be replaced every two years, because they did not endure their hardships more than that. Perhaps no slaves were subject to harder conditions in human history. Subsequently you
• declare they are vicious, so you can justify their subjugation. Africans are guilty of their ordeal. Europe only gave them culture and religion, but they are not grateful, they revolt, they try to kill you, they do not deserve your kindness, Prospero.
• White supremacists declare their radical superiority over Black people.

Racism is human perversity at its worst.

In colonial times, pardos could coexist in the same household with their mantuano brothers and sisters, who would even play with them. But at dinner time they would split, though. The mantuanos would return to their silver cutlery and the pardos to the servants’ rooms where they belonged, with their other pardo relatives, perhaps Black or Indian. These could not avoid an ironic gaze at those presumptuous pardo boys and girls, who thought they were superior just because they were fathered by a mantuano in a disorderly night and because their tanned skin had a clearer tinge.

This situation engaged a system of mutual and sordid rejections: the mantuanos suspected and scorned their pardo relatives. Pardos resented their mantuano kin, but they despised and felt superior to their lesser pardo relatives, who resented them too.

This system still persists behind the dazzling white façade of the egalitarian republican constitutions inspired by the Second Europe. The paradigm of clean bloodline is still in full force in Latin America — as everywhere in the world, for that matter. But in Latin America it is not an external experience of the individual. In Latin America this system creeps deep into the marrow of every individual. It is a discourse that rules deep in the veins.

The Spanish word negro, the French nègre or noir, and the English Negro, nigger and Black, are a product of North, Central and South America. To our knowledge, before the arrival of the first cargo of African slaves in America, the words negro, noir, black, etc., designated only the absence of light in things, not human beings. The ancient Greeks and Romans did not perceive the darkness of people in the same sense as we do today. They thought men were naturally darker than women... It seems this was their sole consideration concerning color of skin. No Greek author speaks about this “important” matter. As far as bodily traits are concerned, alien peoples had only one eye as the cyclops, or were half human-half animals, as the satyrs, the centaurs and the sirens. The first Spanish chroniclers did not perceive the Indian racial traits that were later attributed to them. Of course they attributed some racial traits: they perceived them much as the Greeks perceived the cyclops and the sirens. They reported Indians who had no head, instead they had their face on the chest, the teats being their eyes and the navel their mouth. Others had ears so big that they could cover with them down to their ankles as with a cloak. There were Indians who had only one foot, and so on. Those chroniclers invented racial traits as much as we still do today when we arbitrarily attribute non-existent physical or psychological characteristics to Indians and Africans — and even whites. When we attribute fantastic things like bigger sexual power to Africans or innate sadness to Indians, or hereditary higher intelligence to Caucasians we’re behaving like 16^th century Spanish chroniclers.

For the ancient Greeks or Romans, no foreign people, no matter how geographically or culturally distant, had a noticeable different color of skin. For Romans an Ethiopian — as Africans were generally called — was a Barbarian at the same level as a German or a Goth. The color of their skin and eyes, the form of their face and the texture of their hair were not perceived as having a distinctive importance. The descendants of an Ethiop could become a Roman citizen as much as a Slav or a Saxon.

We infer that the blackness and the rest of the so-called “racial traits,” whatever that means, came to be perceived only at the moment they became slaves and were placed beyond the threshold of the human condition. The blackness and the other traits became the surface sign of their abysmal condition. This condition being absent before African slaves were shipped to America, black skin and the other traits were meaningless and hence symbolically, that is, culturally unnoticed. There was nothing to be noticed. They were foreign people as any other. Africans were well known in Europe during ancient times and the Middle Ages, and it is remarkable that, to our knowledge, no author ever mentions their “color” before the 15^th. Human perception can physically discern many things that are culturally ignored or distorted or magnified — even invented. Sometimes we see only what we want to see. And what we see is arbitrarily associated with whatever we culturally deem pertinent. That is why so many people saw flying witches as much as they see flying saucers. Black people, as people who sport a dark skin, are a product of the North, Central and South American history and culture.

One of the first to mention blackness as a human characteristic was Shakespeare, when he said Othello was dark, some 80 years after the Spanish began to import African slaves to their American colonies and about the same time slavery of Africans was introduced in the British colonies in America.

Roderigo, the rejected wooer of Desdemona, who has just fled with Othello, shouts most obscenely at her father:

Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is topping your white ewe.

And Iago adds:

you’ll
have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse;
you’ll have your nephews neigh to you; you’ll have
coursers for cousins and gennets for germans.

Brabantio declares about the abduction of his daughter Desdemona:

If such actions may have passage free,
Bond-slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be.

And then comments:

To fall in love with what she fear’d to look on!

Othello speaks like this about himself to Brabantio:

—And, noble signior,
If virtue no delighted beauty lack,
Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.

Those who suffer discrimination are usually the worst racists against themselves. Othello is not the exception, and he concludes about his moorship:

I do confess the vices of my blood.

The criollo way

Criollo (’Creole’) is a most cherished concept in the Latin part of America. It designates a native person of Latin America. Criollo is originally a Portuguese word, crioulo (’the one that bred,’ ‘native to the region,’ ‘born at home’). It all comes from Latin creare (’to produce’).

Criollo referred first to an animal or plant brought from Europe, that grew up in America. It soon extended to the descendants of human Europeans who were born in America. Later on it designated the Colonial aristocracy, and during the War of Independence it was a synonym of the mantuanos who led it, at least in Venezuela. But today criollo is a ‘red-blood Latin American.’ In some countries, like Argentina or Venezuela, it means ‘Argentine’ or ‘Venezuelan,’ respectively, in contrast with foreigners. Criollo is the result of the mixed breeding of Latin America, where all human roots tend to reconcile.

Perhaps this conflict of “races” is impossible to overcome and We will persist for centuries in this agony of mutually canceling forces that paralyze Latin America. There are two possibilities: 1) there is a god or some other supreme entity governing human affairs, 2) there is no god or supreme entity and human life is an batch of a priori purposeless events. In both cases it falls upon humans to give a meaning to life on Earth. There is no one else to decide in our place — even if there is a god up there. We should overcome this contrariety of so called races, just to live better. It is difficult, but it is not impossible.

I am schizophrenic, and so am I

Either we invent or we err (Simón Rodríguez)

Simón Rodríguez was one of the teachers of South American Liberator Simón Bolívar and one of the most important Latin American thinkers. His central educational and political proposal was to create a new Latin American set of means and manners where the three discourses described on One, two, savage could coexist and nourish each other.

To “invent” means finding the procedure necessary to reconcile the three radical systems. It should be an algorithm, a method to our madness. It should overcome the present schizophrenia that prevents us from integrating our basic roots. To invent is indispensable as long as we cannot put aside our roots, we cannot commit suicide — not even partially, killing the African root, for example.

This schizophrenia is not exclusive to Latin Americans. It is present in every heterogeneous group of people, no matter what this heterogeneity consists of. It can happen to any human being. It happens when you are put in a “double bind” — in Gregory Bateson’s terms — as for example when your parents urge you to be independent and then blame you for behaving independently. It happens, for example, when European people look down at non-European people and then sexually desire them. It happens to the high class woman who makes love with her chauffeur, because she’s aroused by the fact that he’s her lackey, and then hides it in shame, especially from herself. That is schizophrenia. If she chooses to ignore that liaison in the rest of her practical life, she’s a schizoid; if she completely forgets it in the rest of her life, she’s a schizophrenic, like Dr. Jekill and Mr. Hyde.

The psychic disintegration of humankind in radically opposing roots is a universal problem. It is been so among people born from an Asian father and a European mother, or vice versa. Where do those people place the axis or their identity? It is not a problem if the two roots are not in conflict, as when your father is a medicine doctor and your mother an attorney. The problem arises when your father is African and your mother Swedish, because being African is radically different from being Scandinavian. They are radically opposing because they are socially and historically valued in radically opposing manners. It is much different from having a father who practices medicine and a mother who practices a legal profession, because those occupations are not considered better one than the other. They differ, but they do not oppose. It is a radical opposition if your father is a God’s minister and your mother a strip-teaser, because those trades are generally valued in a radically opposing manner, and mutually repel. If your father is French and your mother a Briton, your problems should be only practical. You would have trouble deciding between Cheddar and Camembert, driving on the right or on the left side of roads, speaking French or speaking English. That is, you would really have no trouble, because you wouldn’t be considered a mestizo. You’d be a European.

The problem arises when humanity values people in radically different manners, placing the choice between “better” and “worse” on the balance. The problem arises when the fact of having a different color of skin and taste for food or manner of walking is decisive in order to be considered good or bad, better or worse, commendable or disreputable. That is, powerful or powerless, dominant or dominated, conqueror or conquered.

It is a universal problem, it concerns all humanity, but in Latin America this schizophrenia is particularly intense, because it is structural. In other parts of the world there are problems of this kind, it is true, to the point of civil war and holocaust, but there the problem generally happens outside each individual. There are Black individuals and there are white individuals who reject each other. Some people reject other people. If you are not a U.S. African and you want to contact the U.S. African roots, you must meet other people. You must go out of yourself, you must read books, study other cultural roots.

In Latin America it is radically different, however, because you are Black and White at the same time, in one person, no matter what’s the color of your skin. You are both one and many persons, an actor with many roles, because you are Indian too, and your white part rejects the Black-Indian part, while the Black-Indian part resents the white part’s rejection and rebuffs it in revenge. There is a curious tradition in Spanish theater, the bululú: a single actor represents all the characters in a play. Latin Americans are bululú players, but in real life. You are the hero of a Shakespearean tragedy: Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, torn apart by mortally conflicting origins and engagements... It began when the first conquistador raped the first Indian woman. Or when that Indian woman willingly gave herself to the conquistador because he was powerful. Their child was a resentful product of hatred or of mutual contempt — not a product of love.

There is no sense in segregating oneself, or part of oneself. “There is white people, there is Black people, and there is smart people,” as a popular singer used to sing. Only stupid people insist on such a stupid attitude as racism. Only we humans can be that stupid, for that matter, but only we humans can amend our mistakes. We’re slow and perversely reluctant at it, but we can do it, we’ve done it in the past, so we can do it in the future. It depends on us, only on us.

One day someone asked the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges what did he think about the confrontation between Spanish and Indians. He said he did not mind, as much as he did not mind the confrontation between ancient Romans and Carthaginians. He was not right, however, as long as the confrontation between Europeans and Indians is still well and alive in the streets of Peru and Venezuela. Maybe it is not obvious, as in Venezuela, where people tend to subtly conceal their racism. They even boast they are not racist, until one of their children comes home with a Black sweetheart... Even some whitish pardos use their ambiguous condition to pull themselves into the all-white field, ignoring their African ancestors, except when explicitly entreated to it.

It is present all over the world, but in Latin America it is present in every soul, under and over everybody’s skin, every time Latin Americans watch themselves in the mirror they feel compelled to decide if their appearance is deserving or vile. Perhaps Romans and Carthaginians are still in conflict, as long as the surviving Carthaginians fused with those we call Arabs today. Perhaps this conflict began when the Carthaginian chieftain Hannibal failed to conquer Rome and then Rome “deleted” Carthage in retaliation. “Delenda est Carthago” (‘Carthage is to be deleted’) insisted Cato the Elder in the Roman Senate.

Racism unexplained

Racism is supported by the following axioms. In the following postulates, number one operates as a petitio principii, that is, a false and abusive postulation, if you accept it then you are condemned to admit the rest.

1. Races are equal to biological species.
   1. As biology teaches, reproduction is generally impossible across different species.
   2. If reproduction ever happens, it gives birth to defective progeny. They are Creole, that is, subhuman, that is, monstrous beings (see The criollo way).
2. Species oppose because one of them is superior — mine, of course — and all the others are inferior — theirs, yours, of course.
   1. Any criterion is valid to support the principle of superiority vs. inferiority: culture, beauty, odor, intelligence, social organization, deportment...
   2. Superiority of race has priority over all other ethical, political or religious considerations about the oneness of humanity, because inferior species are not human.
   3. A man of superior species is superior to a woman of superior species. But a woman of superior species is superior to a man of inferior species.
   4. The tenet that “all men are created equal” excludes inferior species because they are not men.
   5. Inferior species are always spuriously trying to assimilate into the superior species.
   6. It is the mission of the superior species — that is, real humanity — to keep pure and clean, by all possible means, for the sake of the survival of real humanity.
3. It is not sinful nor illegal nor illegitimate to harm and even kill individuals of other species because they are not human.

Syntactic strictures

Symbols are an all-pervading human phenomenon.

Even though animals use many kinds of symbolic systems, human symbols are much different: they are creative and hence adaptable and unstable... Bees’ symbols are the same as they were millennia ago. Human symbols are different every moment they are proffered and perceived. Human symbols adapt, adopt, addict and addle... They are never the same because they change and blend and split. Oppositions in sense and meaning, semanticians say, are essential to human communications. We distinguish between bulls and cows, between men and women, children and adults. We distinguish between things as far apart as rabbits and screwdrivers, but then we distinguish too between hairsplitter differences as bunnies and hares. It includes people, whether they are fat or skinny, bald or hirsute, black or white. (For a discusion on sense see R.H.M.’s El sentido del sentido).

It can be a merely practical distinction, as people with musical vocation and people with diabetes. But it can be a political distinction too, as between powerful people and penniless people. When this happens, all secondary properties (color of skin, texture of hair, etc.) mean political differences. All this is part of the laws that rule human perception. If powerful people were hairy we’d tend to identify hairiness with power. Any secondary trait, objectively alien to power, becomes significant and decisive, as the color of skin. Color of skin is a perverse cover-up metaphor of power. It tells who has the right to be in power and who does not. It happens with other traits too, as sex, which has usually divided those with a right to power and those with no right to it.

Legitimate people are central people, they are humans comme il faut, the paradigm of human condition itself. The rest are either subhuman or not human at all: Blacks, Indians, Mongoloids, and any mixture in-between. If ebony people were more powerful than pallid people they would consider themselves better, central, legitimate, comme il faut, the paradigm of humankind, because stupidity is not exclusive of white people.

“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed,” René Descartes said. Idiocy too, we’d humbly contribute. Powerful people are not spared from idiocy. Perhaps they are the privileged recipients of idiocy. It is so easy to be an idiot when you are rich and powerful. Mistakes are more easily pardoned. Blunders are perceived as idiosyncrasies when they are made by powerful people. But while powerful people’s mistakes are perceived as venial, they are objectively worse than underdogs’ mistakes because they are more... well, powerful, that is, bigger. A common person makes a mistake and loses ten dollars on a bet. A rich person can lose billions on a wrong decision.

Concerning human affairs, Shakespeare did his homework. The range of his insight of human matters was portentous. He grasped what happens when people are discriminated: first they are considered inferior in every imaginable aspect: looks, manners, tastes, attitudes, demeanor, culture, dances, accent, music, tales, poetry, garments, hair, nose, eyes... There is no aspect that is considered good. Their music is strident, their food is loathsome, their looks are hideous, their children are a bad race of little Calibans... Then they get convinced that it is all true and in the best of cases they cannot accept the homage and love of people they consider “superior,” whatever that means.

That is why Othello killed a perfect woman, because in his innards he felt he was not up to her social value. Of course he was jealous because he had a sense of possession over Desdemona — it is normal in every couple, but to buttress the jealousy, to make Desdemona’s infidelity credible to Othello’s eyes Shakespeare added the racial element that Iago exploits to death. If Othello and Desdemona had both belonged to the high rank of Venice, there would have been no such tragedy: Othello would have formally asked Brabantio’s approval for a normal marriage. The problem appears because Othello is a Moor and Desdemona a European — remember postulate 2.3: men of inferior race are inferior to women of superior race. It is been the same drama in Latin America, where barbarity has been opposed to civilization since the first day Columbus disembarked in the Caribbean — thousands of essays and novels have been written in Latin America with this subject: a couple cannot get happily together because of an ethnic inconsistency.

Even though Othello was the highest military authority of the Venetian Republic, he felt he was inferior to Desdemona’s kinship. He felt himself as a brutish Moor, who ignored the refinements he perceived as “natural” to Desdemona. That is why he felt Desdemona was not really pure, because in his view she indulged in the “aberration” of loving an abject guy like him. His high rank in the Venetian state (minister of defense, no less) was a mere accident. What Iago did was to put forth the anomaly that a Moor could occupy such an honorable place. Othello is the tragedy that ensues when love is impossible between people from different lineages, as happened to Romeo and Juliet. These fictional tragedies happened to a small band of Shakespearean dramatis personæ, but extend it to a whole continent and you have the history of Latin America.

A thousand common fallacies

It is been a common fallacy that Latin Americans are more emotional than people from Europe or the U.S. It is the same assumption about Africans or Andalusians, for that matter. This prejudice is erected upon the postulate that rational is better than emotional, that civilization is the defeat of emotion, that the ‘whole man’ (l’homme entier) is the one that controls his passions. That is why we usually consider that the model human being is the European adult male, because non-Europeans, women, children and senior people are usually considered undependable, as they are reputed to be unable to discipline their excitements. This is untrue, of course, as European adult men have proved to be as incontinent as any other human being with a healthy sexual drive.

Anyway, this contention that Europe is more rational should be examined under the light of such European feats as Auschwitz. It is impossible to identify the rationality of deeds like that. Latin Americans are not civilized to the point of organizing such an accomplished killing machine to exterminate six million persons that breathe and sweat and love their children as well as you do. Imagine it for a moment: it is not a multitude of abstract Jews, Jehovah Witnesses, Gypsies, Communists, and homosexuals; it is you, your father, your brother, your spouse, your smiling baby, all naked in a line waiting to enter a crematorium. When the Red Army liberated the Birkenau killing compound, its chimneys had a layer of 18 inches of charred fat from women, men and children like your mother, your cousin, your sister. Sorry, but we cannot call the European Birkenau a rational behavior. Neither we can call rational the British soccer hooligans and the Italian tifosi. Were rational people the redneck fanatics who placed a bomb in a Federal building in Oklahoma in 1995? We rational men the soldiers who did the killing in My-Lai during the Vietnam war?

We find in Europe and the U.S. the same social and economic problems that prevail in Latin America: racism, deadly hostility among nations, violence in the streets, political and corporate corruption, unemployment, homeless people, drug abuse and traffic, organized crime, illiteracy, moral and material misery... (for an out of date but still useful fresco of all these problems in the U.S., see Ferdinand Lundberg (1968), The Rich and the Super-Rich, New York: Lyle Stuart).

Perhaps the proportion of these problems is different,

• The massive killing machines have been killing people by dozens of millions in Europe — with U.S. participation in both World Wars — and have been much less efficient in Latin America, where they’ve slain only a few thousand people at a time, as during the “Dirty War” in Argentina or the Pinochet repression in Chile. Not that the Latin American killers are more “humane” than their European counterparts — they are only less efficient. Latin Americans haven’t used industrial methods to exterminate other Latin Americans by the millions as it happened during the two world wars and under Stalinism in the USSR. It is the same argument we used for Latin American Indians: they were as humanly murderous as Spaniards, but they had no firearms... Massive industrial killing has begun to spread to Third World countries, as the Rwanda killing in 1995 proved. It is just a matter of time before it happens in Latin America too.
• unemployment and illiteracy are worse in Latin America than in Europe or in the U.S. — depending on the historical period concerned.
• Sanitary conditions are dismal in Latin America.
• Corruption is more sophisticated in the U.S. and Europe.
• The Mafia is strong in the U.S. and Italy and almost non-existent in Latin America, where drug dealers have successfully played the role the U.S. Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Neapolitan camorra have played, with very similar traits.
• Racism exists everywhere.

But, apart from the industrialized killing machines, which are still a common trait of advanced industrialized societies gone ideologically astray, all those problems are present everywhere.

Reason is a universal human ability. The difference is that the Second Europe could isolate it as the subject of specific reflection and conscious exploitation (see page 127). It began in ancient Athens and is stronger every day. Arbitrarily, Europe made reason the certification of civilization. Irrationality was considered contemptible. Reason was even elevated to Goddess status by the French revolutionaries.

The same can be said about Latin American machismo, which should be considered in the light of such U.S. macho heroes as Humphrey Bogart and Rambo. Furthermore, to our knowledge, women are rarely or never beaten in Latin American films as is common in films made in Europe and the U.S. Even villains spare women in Latin American films and TV shows. No matter how macho are the male characters, it is very rare that they physically abuse a woman in a Latin American film, and much less in the manner in which women are assaulted every two feet in U.S. and European films and TV shows. Latin American male film characters are rather patronizing toward women.

There are battered women and children both in Europe and the U.S., as much as in Latin America, for that matter. But there is an edge in the U.S., where serial killers who slice women to pieces have made a singular contribution to the range of human mores. Jack the Ripper was a subject of Her British Majesty. Nothing of the sort in Latin America. Latin Americans do not systematically scrutinize a woman’s life, follow her, kidnap her, chop her (certainly serial killers do not kill only women, but we must yield to the statistical evidence that women are their most frequent target). Something similar happens in France, where women are the favorite victims of the long literary tradition inaugurated by the Marquis de Sade. Alain Robbe-Grillet, a distinguished member of the French nouveau roman literary movement declared to the press: “A woman’s body is a privileged place for an assault” (le Monde, Paris, September 22^th, 1978. For a militant denunciation of this French literary tradition, see Anne-Marie Dardigna, les Châteaux d’Éros, ou l’infortune du sexe des femmes, Paris: François Maspero, 1980). When Latin Americans abuse women, they do it in a more average fashion. There is no point in examining the statistics to find which women suffer more in Europe, North, Central or South America, Asia, Africa or Oceania. The important thing is that it happens everywhere. Not that Latin Americans are not machistas. Of course they are, but they are not worse than other peoples on that matter.

Latin Americans have only been more competent in advertising their machismo, especially in the classic Mexican films, where women admire tough and braggart guys. Sometimes Latin American film heroines disdain charros, who then suffer as hell, and who idealize women to the point of dying for them: the usual Medieval ideals of the knight-errant, where knights and ladies had very clear-cut stereotypical roles. Latin American machos are much more romantic and sentimental.

Spaniards and Latin Americans were the first to coin a successful icon, and a word (macho, ‘male,’ especially referred to animals), that stormed the planet with the image of the Mexican charro, the toreador and, thanks to Rodolfo Valentino, the Argentine-French “Apache” tango dancer. The word macho derives from the Latin masculinum. It is the same etymological root of the English male, which comes from the French mâle.. Stereotypes are hard to reverse once they’ve been established. “Apache” cabaret tango dancers were very common in the ‘20s and ‘30s. They could be seen well into the ‘50s, when they quietly faded out. In the ‘20s, especially in France, the Apaches became very popular as the romantic ideal of the renegade who supposedly revolts against stupid social conventions, who does not hesitate in engaging in objectionable social attitudes. Apache was the name of the outcasts and the outsiders. A couple of “Apache” tango dancers appears in Chaplin’s City Lights, where Charlot tries to rescue the woman, thinking that her partner is really mishandling her. “Apache” tango dancers’ scripts vaguely suggested situations like a pimp roughly handling his exploited girl...

What’s surprising is that the cowboy did not capture filmgoers’ imagination as an epitome of macho as much as Mexican charro did all over the world. Perhaps it is because the cowboy is the cultural scion of the charro he found in the territories that the U.S. excised from Mexico. They sport similar garments and boast similar macho attitudes. They play even the same exercises in rodeo, which was a Spanish invention in almost all Latin America. Even the name cowboy seems to be a transliteration of the Spanish vaquero. Like buckaroo or buckayro, an anglicization of the Spanish word vaquero (whose v sounds like b in English). This encounter with Latin American people enriched the English language with an assortment of terms: banana (from African origin through Spanish), bronco, burro, caballero, cargo (< Spanish carga) chile con carne, coyote (< Nahuatl coyotl), dinero, frijoles, gringo, hombre, lasso (< lazo), machete, machismo, macho, mango (< Tamil mankay), mañana, mescal (< Nahuatl mexcalli), monte, mustang (< mesteño ‘a mestizo horse’), peyote (< Nahuatl peyotl), pinto, politico, pronunciamento (< pronunciamiento), ranch (< rancho),rodeo, rumba, señor, señora, señorita, sierra, silo, sombrero, tamales, tornado, toro, etc. This encounter left a million toponimics too: Arizona (< árida zona ‘arid zone’), El Paso (‘the passageway’), La Jolla (<la  joya ‘jewel’), Texas (‘roof tiles’). Spanish language has adopted many English words too. Cowboys adopted cattle rearing techniques and even the ranch itself from the Mexicans they found in the newly conquered territories. Of course, I do not pretend that the English word cowboy is copied from the Spanish vaquero. But it is clear to me that the cowboy as it developed as a cultural icon has many interesting coincidences with the charro. The word cowboy is very old in English, but it did not mean the same as the present cowboy.

Putting aside this peculiar symbolic phenomenon, the mere fact is that

• the sexes’ relationship has been marked by male supremacy in all humanity since very old times,

and that

• Latin American women have been present in initiatives of female vindication since the very beginning of women’s rights movements. Even before, as did the Mexican nun Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of the greatest poets in Spanish language, a pioneer in women’s rights in the 17^th century.
• Many Latin American women fought in the Independence War like soldiers and even in guerrillas during the 20^th century.

The music of spheres can be a macabre dance

It is a structure of spheres. Being inferior is being radically unable to overcome that condition, in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Perhaps one finds Latin Americans who are Big-Leaguers, Nobel Prize winners, great musicians, world-wide admired painters. No matter how preeminent are their merits, their fellow Latin Americans suspect them. There must be something false about their celebrity, their fellow Latin Americans think, they must have deceived everyone, they cannot be that great after all...

It is an a priori judgment, it precedes all empirical evidence. According to it, if I’m a Latin American I cannot reach the positions reserved for Europeans, who are in the highest and unattainable sphere. Perhaps I’m acclaimed by my fellow Latin Americans, but sooner or later the suspicion arises and I’m returned by myself or by other Latin Americans to my lower sphere.

Spheres are hermetic to each other as we saw with races — it is the same phenomenon. Races and spheres cannot be trespassed. Once you are born within a race or a sphere you are condemned to remain in it for the rest of your life — including the eternal life. It is a radical condition that cannot be overcome. Maybe this Cuban base-ball player is the best Big Leagues slugger, but he’s Cuban, it cannot be true. Perhaps he’s the best Hispanic slugger, but not the best of all sluggers. A Latin American poetess might win the Nobel Prize of Literature, like the Chilean poetess Gabriela Mistral, but her fellow Latin Americans feel she cannot be compared to the U.S. poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay or the French novelist Margueritte Yourcenar. If she’s the same color as I and eats tamales and dances samba she cannot be compared to European or U.S. writers. The pinnacle of the inferior sphere is always lower than the bottom of the superior sphere (see Racism unexplained). The greatest Latin American scientist is inferior to the lowest of the European scoundrels. Well, yes, there are Latin Americans who do their best to assimilate to the “American Way of Life.” But then, they confirm our theory of hierarchical spheres, even when these can be crossed, they remain there, one radically on top of the other. I can be exalted to the upper sphere because I come from a lower sphere.

Of course, we do not mean it happens all the time, especially at the moment when Latin Americans use reason and compare facts and figures. There are the Roberto Clementes and the Oswaldo Gulléns, the Pelés and the Maradonas, all of whom Latin Americans consider their heroes. And they know they are as great as any other Big Leaguer or European soccer player, even better than them all sometimes. The sentiment of inferiority occurs when the feeling rests on the irrational side, that is, the automatic representations, the basement of spiritual life, where everything comes from, including reason. These things look dark and appalling and nothing can be done about them. The spheres are a structure and no one can plead against the structure:

Structure makes no exception of persons; it is terrible (like a bureaucracy). We cannot implore to it and tell it: “Look how I am better than H...” Structure inexorably answers: “You are in the same place as H..., therefore, you are H...” Nobody can plead against the structure (Barthes, 1977:154-55).

So, it is a fate — obstinate, callous, ever-present, Kafkaesque. It is a “natural” destiny after all, as spheres are felt as a cosmic reality. This absurdity cannot be reasoned, of course, but it can be felt, and it is felt by every Latin American, all the time. It is a horrible feeling. Structures are not impossible to overcome, but they strongly resist.

At the same time there is the corresponding revenging feeling: the radical and Calibanesque affirmation of everything Latin American. It is a sort of pathetic chauvinism.

Business as unusual

Maybe you think it is easy to take advantage of the situation, and it is true. It has been done once and again. But that is that, the kind of business that can be conducted won’t reach any further. More ambitious projects like the Canada-U.S.-Mexico’s NAFTA will inevitably be threatened. NAFTA is in danger of failing because it was supported by only a part of the Mexican complex, and even that part proved to be much different from the Second Europe image it wanted to counterfeit, as the Salinas-Massieu-Colossio scam proved to be, immediately after the peso debacle in 1995. It was always so, but they could manage to hide the fact that they were deep into the Savage discourse.

In such disintegrated conditions only petty business can be conducted. Exploitative, abject, miserable. The big-thinking NAFTA project promised a better prospect, but the gringos did not realize what the perfumados really meant in their monody. They did not realize that the perfumados’ dirge was just the customary cover that the Second Europe discourse offers to the Savage and the mantuano discourses, the discourses of the traditional oligarchies and of the tan skin resentment, all put together. Middle rank officials in Latin America, especially if they have studied in U.S. universities, are great in the task of serving gringos, but they are expert in deceiving them too, even the less naive gringos, as Wall Street brokers are supposed to be.

See One, two, savage.

Not only they dismissed the obvious possibility of events like the Chiapas peasant uprising, but they did not even follow the simplistic litany they parroted in Stanford, Harvard and Berkeley and still keep repeating: that opening the economy to unlimited freedom should lead to unlimited prosperity. They thought that the average Mexican was like the daydream they have about the average Wall Street broker: a fervent unselfish investor, all the time carefully scrutinizing the best prospects for productive investment to serve the community. They thought every Mexican, including the Chiapas Indians, were like a Wall Street broker because in their mirage they think that the idea they have of the average Wall Street broker corresponds to the Universal Human Being, that everything else is aberrant and ultimately non-existent. It is the consequence of marrying ignorance with arrogance.

The perfumados were trying to cheat the damn gringos, and the damn gringos wanted to take advantage of the fluke that was offered to them — like taking a candy from a baby.

The Wall Street brokers thought that the short-term speculation open to them in Mexico would last forever, as the perfumados proclaimed again and again. The perfumados are so good at deceiving people that they deceived themselves to begin with. But Wall Street speculators deceived the perfumados too: they did not make clear that all they were doing was to short-term speculate with the deceitfully easy occasion the perfumados offered to them.

Once upon a town

The dream is over (John Lennon).

 

In underdeveloped countries everything is exceptional (Umberto Eco)

 

When the extraordinary happens every day , it is revolution (Ernesto “Che” Guevara)

Chichiriviche de la Costa is a hamlet where the only power plant died some twenty years ago. There is no budget to repair it, so its inhabitants never watch TV: they are too poor to afford battery-operated Watchmen. Only a few afford batteries for their transistor radios. Since Spanish colonial times they used to be fishers, but now they work mainly watching and taking care of the houses of the well-to-do from Caracas who have a secondary residence there to enjoy the delights of the Caribbean beaches. The village is so beautiful and the people are so nice that the Club Méditerranée has considered the possibility of building a resort somewhere around there.

On February 27^th 1989, though, the raging Chichirivicheans looted and sacked the only shop in town. It is surprising if we consider their peacefulness. But it is less surprising if we consider that it was happening in all the rest of Venezuela that very day. To our knowledge, the 27^th February 1989 in Venezuela is the first time in the history of humankind that an entire country goes mad for two days, simultaneously looting everywhere.

Suddenly there was no city spared of the ransacking of every shop that sold corporeal goods: food, garments, hardware and appliances. Banks, jewel and book shops were generally spared. Perhaps they offer too abstract services and goods. Some specific food, garment, hardware and appliance shops were spared too, however. “Their owners are good pals,” explained the slum dwellers who made sure that those shops remained untouched. That is, they were owned by people who did not forcibly exact due payments, for example, and who generally observed a good attitude toward the slum denizens.

During February 27^th and 28^th people sacked everywhere. Many politicos and big businessmen panicked and fled the country. Others took refuge in embassies. The government was taken by surprise and did not react until next day in the late afternoon, decreeing a curfew and the state of siege.

What happened? Venezuela has had no international war since 1821 after the last battle for its independence from Spain, and the last civil war ended more than a century ago. Judged by international standard behavior, Venezuela is relatively a very pacific country. Why then?

On February 27^th 1989 a bus service near Caracas decided to raise the fares. A violent conflict with the passengers ensued and at about 10:00 A.M. it overflowed to become a riot of general looting and disorder. People went mad. With virtually no report on radio and TV, practically through word of mouth, a spontaneous order was transmitted: “Loot, baby, loot!” It was followed to the point of leaving the shops with only the walls because they could not be taken away. A potlatch or riches drenched the miserable, who in the night of February 27^th toasted with champagne and had beggars’ banquets all over the slums of the country, dancing and singing until sunrise. The night after that they were bravely fighting the army, which was trying to control the situation. It is the only thing the Latin American military know how to perform very well: trample the civil population. They controlled it in the end, after a death toll that goes from 300 to thousands, depending on the source consulted. There were some failed attempts to assault middle class and well-to-do residences.

On February 4^th 1989 president Carlos Andrés Pérez inaugurated his second term. After a legal ten year absence from the job — the 1961 Venezuelan Constitution allows reelection only ten years after the first term (article 185). He invited for the occasion every president, king and prime minister he could find around. Former U.S. vice-president Dan Quayle was there because the then president George Bush was not available. But Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Spain’s Felipe González and an assortment of Latin American presidents and vice-presidents were available. They assisted to a prodigal extravaganza that culminated with Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand in the “Teresa Carreño” Theater, one of the most sumptuous in the world. This beautiful and lavish hall is a product of the madness caused by the glut of riches that poured on Venezuela after the 1973 oil embargo. One of the visiting presidents enviously declared that it was more of the crowning of a king than the austere inauguration of a republican president.

Roger Caillois says that war and feast are analogous in structure: both decree excess, extravagance and the systematic suspension of prohibitions (Roger Caillois (1988), Guerre et fête [‘war and feast’], in l’Homme et le sacré [‘man and the sacred’], Paris: Gallimard (coll. Folio), p. 222. Everything becomes exceptional).

[During war] cunning and lying are appreciated. Even stealing is admitted: when it is necessary to provide even a supplement of foodstuffs the means to obtain them are not rigorously examined, and slyness is more esteemed than scrupules. And murder itself is obligatory and rewarded (ibid. p. 225).

This time another glut of riches fell down upon people who had never seen such a wealth in their whole lives. A man took about forty shoe boxes and placidly tried them in a plaza, one pair at a time. He carefully discriminated those that fit his feet from those that did not, which he duly put into a trash can. Weak people were seen world-wide in the newscasts carrying refrigerators or washing machines on their backs.

When Pérez was inaugurated, the economic prospects were dismal, as every economist knew, but common people unconsciously hoped he would magically bring things back to the 1973 bonanza that reigned during his first term. He did not. Instead, on February 16^th, on a gloomy national TV and radio broadcast, he announced that the dream was over. There would be no feast. Pérez announced a package of severe Neoliberal measures instead. They were intended to adjust the economy to a huge and forcible transfer of capitals to the rich countries in the name of honoring the external debt. Eleven days after that, people went mad. A small event triggered the avalanche.

In those two days Venezuela simultaneously lived war and feast in only one event. Things slowed down to a halt in a few days. The same people who organized the looting organized the return to normality. The feast was over.

What surprised everybody was the suddenness and the simultaneity of the upsurge everywhere, as if they had been carefully planed by a very clandestine yet influential leadership. Nothing of the sort happened. It was totally spontaneous. And it is surprising how could the almost isolated Chichiriviche de la Costa hamlet learn only through the few radios available what was happening in the rest of Venezuela and go mad too. It is evident that they were waiting and ready for it. Fury was sleeping, it only had to be awakened. An avalanche of resentments has been building up for centuries. It explodes from time to time.

In most places the police collaborated with the looters, organizing them to avoid accidents and injuries. It is only normal everywhere in the world: in situations of general civil uprising the police refuses to crush the revolt. It happened in France in May 1968, it happened in Romania on the aftermath of Ceaucescu’s fall.

Some weeks after that, copycat looting riots took place in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Britain. As it happens, at least one fourth of the European and U.S. population lives in Third World conditions. Caliban peopled the world with Calibans as he mockingly told Prospero. What happened in Venezuela on February 27^th 1989 hides a lesson for everyone: it is another demonstration of how stupid human beings can be.

But

Homo sum. Nihil humani a me alienum puto (Terence)

Until now we’ve considered some of the commonplaces of the pessimistic view of Latin America. That is, the fate of a continent where everything looks gloomy and disorder seems to be built-in. Whenever a hope twinkles on the horizon, a shadowy destiny shows up with its load of pain and sorrow. It is the most common view of Latin America, judged according to U.S. guidelines. There are other guidelines no less important than those prevailing in the United States.

Latin America is the continent where all humanity has fused together for the first time since homo sapiens split in Africa to begin his universal Diaspora. That is why we can say the same thing the Roman comedian Terence said: “I am a man. Nothing human is alien to me.”

Never before had all the versions of humankind had a living delegation, a collective envoy, in one common place. It is better than the United Nations, because it is not a diplomatic duty, but a vital engagement. People are there together to live and produce a new humanity. No matter what they think of it, they have no other way out than producing a new humanity. The Spanish conquerors were racist, but not to the point of refusing to bear children with Indian and African women. The skins were able to caress, no matter what color they exhibited. They found a moment and a place to couple and explode in a perplexed lineage. This lineage would never know its identity because it never understood there was no need to discern between being Spanish, African or Indian.

It is not the first time many human groups converge in one region. It happened, for example, in the Mediterranean Sea, the Mare Nostrum of every people that lived around it (for an interesting analogy between the Mediterranean Sea and the Caribbean Sea, see Germán Arciniegas (1993), Biografía del Caribe [A biography ot the Caribbean], Bogotá: Planeta). But the old world peoples knew each other before they got together. There was no surprise when Romans conquered Etruscans and Germans. They had had news of each other for centuries. Marco Polo informed Europeans of the existence of Cathay, which we know as China today. But when the Spanish, the Africans and the Indians found themselves together in the same territory for the first time, they had no previous news of each other and their respective territories.

All kingdoms are present among us, every people on Earth has brought to Latin America its means and manners (Tenemos de todos los reinos [‘We have something from every kingdom’] is the beautiful title of a book by Angelina Lemmo (1986), Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela). If you try to be simple and take Latin Americans for pure Europeans — as the perfumados did — they’ll respond with their simple Calibanistic side. If you try to be simple and take them for Indians or Africans, their Ariel side will respond with great offense. These Latin Americans have learned that most Europeans tend to diminish their African and Indian roots as “simple and primitive.” It is not true, they are not “primitive,” as modern anthropology has taught. So-called “primitive” communities — what we easily think of as “tribes” — are built around very complex and rational systems, from their architecture to their family systems. Structural anthropology has discovered long ago how rational the systems that rule all myths are. Many myths are still present among us supposedly “rational civilized” people. The myths of virginity and the hero — from Snow White to Indiana Jones —, for instance, are well and alive in this end of the 20^th century. Myth is one of the radical elements composing human beings.

The difference with ancient Greeks and their cultural descendants is that for them reason is a separate conscious topic, in contrast with other peoples who did not develop this competence to “think reason” separately and had to learn it from Greek savants. Rationality is present in myth, but myth obscures it. What the ancient Greeks did was to explicitly isolate the rational component of myth (Briceño, 1994:17). This isolation of reason as a distinct subject matter led later to Descartes, Kant and the present development of the philosophy of science.

Latin America has the possibility of managing all the components it has gathered from all over the Planet to put them together in a harmonious whole. What has been missing is the holistic approach. A deep political decision is needed to engage in the formidable enterprise of integrating the whole jigsaw puzzle of humanity.

We have a beautiful example in the Metro de Caracas (the Caracas subway service), a place where a very clever social software has organized society into a model of orderly coexistence. At the Metro de Caracas there is no place for violence, inferiority complex or racism — not even the surreptitious kind generally practiced in Venezuela. Venezuelans think it is their only decorous institution — it is not true, there are other respectful institutions in Venezuela, but it is symptomatic that they perceive it as such. It has recently resented from the general economic crisis affecting the whole country with strikes and some incipient maintenance insufficiency, but it still persists as a very well organized service, that ought to be regarded as a model to the world. It is the exact opposite of the New York subway, for example — there are no muggers, rapists or violent thugs controlling it.

How could this happen? It happened because it was not dominated by the historical perversities controlling almost all Latin American initiatives: the authorities did not plan it to separate the “well-born” from the castaways. From day one the authorities abandoned the premise of building a Berlin Wall between our historical disjoined roots. Its organization only confirmed the best traits of those roots. It was conceived having in mind the universality of the people who would use it. As a consequence people, many of which behave in the most inappropriate manners elsewhere, conduct themselves in the subway in the best convivial and orderly style. Instead of dismal graffiti scribbled on the walls or trash trailing on the floor, there are sculptures and frescoes by the best Venezuelan artists. There is no brutal police force watching that people are staid and respectful. It is people themselves who react in the most positive manner to a context that respects them as human beings in the first place, forgetful of the historical dooms that have set them apart into separate ranks.

The Metro de Caracas proves it is possible — and easy. Let’s try things like that everywhere else.

An address from Chiapas’ Subcomandante Marcos

We, the first inhabitants of this land, the Indians, were progressively forgotten in a corner and the rest began to become big and strong and we only had our history to defend ourselves and we clinched to it in order to avoid dying. This part of the story came about and it seems funny because a country alone, the country of money, placed itself over all the flags. And then they said “globalization” and we learned that they call “globalization” this absurd order in which money is the only homeland to serve and the frontiers vanish, not for the sake of fraternity, but for the bleeding that fats the nationless magnates. Falsehood became universal coin and our country unfolded, over the nightmare of the majority, a dream of bonanza and prosperity for the few.

Corruption and falsehood were the main products that our homeland exported to other nations. Being poor, we dressed our scarcity with wealth. The lie was so big, that we finished by believing it was true. We prepared for the great international forums and poverty was declared, by governmental will, an invention that vanished before the development shouted out by the economic figures. Where were we? They increasingly forgot us, and history was not a good enough reason to die like that, forgotten and humiliated. We discovered that we did not exist anymore, that the administrators had forgotten us in the ecstasy of figures and growth rates. A country that forgets itself is a sad country, a country that forgets its past cannot have any future.

And then we got our weapons and went to the cities where we were animals. And we went and told the powerful: “Here we are!” and to the country as a whole we shouted: “Here we are!” And look at the irony of things, in order to be seen we covered our faces; in order to be mentioned we had to renounce our names; we bet on the present to have a future; and in order to live... we die. And then came the planes and the helicopters and the tanks and the bombs and the bullets and death and we went back to our mountains and there went death after us and many people from many places told us: “Speak!” and we said: “Well, then, let us speak!” And we spoke and we told them what we wanted and they did not understand and we repeated that we wanted democracy, liberty and justice, and they made a grin that they did not understand and reviewed their macroeconomic plans and all their notes of Neoliberalism, and they did not find those words and told us “we do not understand” and offered us a prettier corner in the museum of history and a longer-term death and a golden chain to fetter dignity.

Subcomandante Marcos

March 17th, 1995A Virtuous Illegal Alien (dedicated to Pete Wilson and supporters of Prop 187.

What makes an illegal alien virtuous?

A virtuous illegal alien must cross the border only when you need him. When you factories are low and your goods need assembling, he may cross. When your fields need hands to gather your harvests, he may cross. And when your children need nannies to walk them to school, he may cross. But a virtuous illegal alien must not carry across that which you cannot use; namely his language, his children, and his ways. Only his hands and his back must cross that line.

A virtuous illegal alien must make your economy swell. He must labor hard, buy your goods, and pay taxes into you system, but he must not request any services in return. He must remain sick rather than seek hospital care. He must keep his children ignorant rather than to educate them. And he must leave his assaults unreported, rather than seek police protection.

A virtuous illegal alien must be silent. He must never complain when he cannot afford to feed his family on the wages you give him. He must never gripe when he cannot bear to work in unsanitary conditions you have placed in. He must never protest when you blame him for all the ills of society that you yourself have sown. A virtuous illegal alien must never weigh on your conscience. He must never tell you why he was forced to flee his country. He must never speak of the military regime — propped up by your government — that terrorized him in his home. He must never confide that it was your money, your guns, and your ammunition that killed his uncle, his wife, and his brother. And he must never charge that it was your imperialism and your corporate agenda that forced his country to collapse.

A virtuous illegal alien must disappear when you tell him to. When your factories are full, he must fade. When his work is done, he must withdraw. When you are scared of his numbers, he must shrink.

And as he is leaving, a virtuous illegal alien must never stop — not even to point out that it was your forefathers who were once the aliens on this land you now call your own.

Rosalvo Welsch, Yale University. Printed in the American College Personnel Committee on Multicultural Affairs Newsletter, Vol. 1995, Winter Issue.

The Monroe Doctrine

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At the proposal of the Russian Imperial Government, made through the minister of the Emperor residing here, a full power and instructions have been transmitted to the minister of the United States at St. Petersburg to arrange by amicable negotiation the respective rights and interests of the two nations on the northwest coast of this continent. A similar proposal has been made by His Imperial Majesty to the Government of Great Britain, which has likewise been acceded to. The Government of the United States has been desirous by this friendly proceeding of manifesting the great value which they have invariably attached to the friendship of the Emperor and their solicitude to cultivate the best understanding with his Government. In the discussions to which this interest has given rise and in the arrangements by which they may terminate the occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers. . .

It was stated at the commencement of the last session that a great effort was then making in Spain and Portugal to improve the condition of the people of those countries, and that it appeared to be conducted with extraordinary moderation. It need scarcely be remarked that the results have been so far very different from what was then anticipated. Of events in that quarter of the globe, with which we have so much intercourse and from which we derive our origin, we have always been anxious and interested spectators. The citizens of the United States cherish sentiments the most friendly in favor of the liberty and happiness of their fellow-men on that side of the Atlantic. In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so. It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defense. With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected, and by causes which must be obvious to all enlightened and impartial observers. The political system of the allied powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America. This difference proceeds from that which exists in their respective Governments; and to the defense of our own, which has been achieved by the loss of so much blood and treasure, and matured by the wisdom of their most enlightened citizens, and under which we have enjoyed unexampled felicity, this whole nation is devoted. We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintain it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States. In the war between those new Governments and Spain we declared our neutrality at the time of their recognition, and to this we have adhered, and shall continue to adhere, provided no change shall occur which, in the judgment of the competent authorities of this Government, shall make a corresponding change on the part of the United States indispensable to their security.

The late events in Spain and Portugal show that Europe is still unsettled. Of this important fact no stronger proof can be adduced than that the allied powers should have thought it proper, on any principle satisfactory to themselves, to have interposed by force in the internal concerns of Spain. To what extent such interposition may be carried, on the same principle, is a question in which all independent powers whose governments differ from theirs are interested, even those most remote, and surely none of them more so than the United States. Our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars which have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is, not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it, and to preserve those relations by a frank, firm, and manly policy, meeting in all instances the just claims of every power, submitting to injuries from none. But in regard to those continents circumstances are eminently and conspicuously different. It is impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent without endangering our peace and happiness; nor can anyone believe that our southern brethren, if left to themselves, would adopt it of their own accord. It is equally impossible, therefore, that we should behold such interposition in any form with indifference. If we look to the comparative strength and resources of Spain and those new Governments, and their distance from each other, it must be obvious that she can never subdue them. It is still the true policy of the United States to leave the parties to themselves, in hope that other powers will pursue the same course.

Notes

1. A god conceives a child in a virgin woman. That child is God together with his father and another supreme entity of unclear role, called the Saint Spirit. Other non-Catholic Christian denominations have different and no less delirious versions of the same doctrine. Of course we’re being unfair: 1) all religions are equally delirious because 2) they are intensely metaphorical about the meanings they convey in those apparently deranged myths. We do not mind at all, provided they do not pretend to impose their tenets on everybody by force, as they usually do.
2. J. M. Briceño Guerrero, El laberinto de los tres Minotauros (1994), Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana. This is a collection of three previously published books by Briceño Guerrero: Latin American Identification with the Second Europe (La identificación americana con la Europa segunda); Europe and America in Mantuano Thought (Europa y América en el pensar mantuano); and Savage Discourse (Discurso salvaje). They are all cardinal for any knowledgeable person on Latin American matters.
3. There are two meaningful nicknames for the gentry stemming from Venezuelan Colonial times: mantuanos (‘those clad with a mantle’), because only aristocrat women could wear a mantle. Godos (‘Goths’), the second nickname, comes from the joke that they had such a long lineage that they descended from the very Gothic Kings of primeval Spain...

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