Latin America

The logic of reactionary waves in Latin America

When the United States fell into the worst economic depression in its history, it withdrew its military occupation forces from several countries in the Caribbean and Central America. In their place, it installed puppets, all chosen for the same psychological characteristic: they were psychopaths desperate to flatter those in power in order to be protected by the Empire and violate, without restriction, all known and unknown human rights. Such was the case with Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Antonio Machado in Cuba, Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela, among others…

Then came World War II, which not only helped the US economy recover but also, in the end, as the only one of the three allies that did not suffer destruction, left the United States with industrial, military, economic, and media supremacy that could not be compared to the ruins of Europe and Japan.

Washington practically forgot about Latin America, first with its depression and then with World War II. Elegantly but strategically, Roosevelt called this period the “good neighbor policy.” As a direct consequence, many Latin American countries regained civil and union rights, freedom of expression, and a dozen democracies—albeit always limited ones. Latin American countries were the main founding bloc of the United Nations. The psychopaths of the Caribbean and Central America remained, but many other friendly dictatorships fell, such as Jorge Ubico’s banana dictatorship in Guatemala, which was replaced by a democratic revolution.

Shortly after the end of World War II, in which the Soviet Union was the main victor, Washington created the CIA and its new strategy of global domination as a continuation of the brutal and genocidal British Empire. Since empires are based on the now fashionable psychology of the alpha male, there is no room on the planet for two wolves leading the pack.

Anglo-Saxon capitalist fanaticism understands that all possible competition must be eliminated, even if thousands or millions of black subhumans must die. That has been the policy since the 16th century. In the 19th century, the new strategy repeated old tactics. One was the chess tactic: each opponent must secure control of certain squares. In the case of the United States, those untouchable squares were always the countries it called its “backyard,” formalized with the Monroe Doctrine and updated every generation or two by adding new rights for the aggressor. It is a doctrine, not a treaty or international law. In other words, it is a law to be applied to others. The squares are the strategically divided countries. The people are the pawns. On the surface, it appears to be a struggle between white pieces and black pieces, but this is only a woke distraction, functional to the real power: the goal is the defense and triumph of the king, at the cost of the death of the pawns, those anonymous, faceless little pieces that are always sent to the front—because the rules must be respected.

In 1952, Stalin sent three different proposals to the three military powers of NATO (Hitler’s dream, which decades later would be led by two of his commanders) to avoid a cold war, proposing a unified Germany, with its system of Western liberal democracy, not demilitarized but independent of any alliance. The three proposals were rejected without much discussion.

Conflict and war have always been big business for the powerful: internal control in their countries, tribal and nationalist blindness, and laundering of public money through the privatization of the war industry, something that President and General Eisenhower himself denounced in 1961 in his farewell address as the greatest danger to any democracy.

Shortly after the creation of the CIA and the demonization of the wounded and exhausted Allied victor, Washington once again set its sights on Latin America. Once again, it had to secure the boxes of the Monroe Doctrine. But this time, there were few Banana Wars-style military invasions. The invasion of the Dominican Republic by the Marines in 1965 was one such case.

In order to continue doing what had been done for a century, two new elements were introduced: to justify interventions and invasions, it was no longer possible to claim that they were being carried out to defend civilization from blacks. After the defeat of Nazi supremacism, so popular among the American business elite, that was considered ugly and inappropriate. The word “black” was replaced by “communist.”

The second innovation was to replace the Pentagon with the CIA; the Marines were replaced by the media. As the powerful agent Howard Hunt, who intervened in and destroyed democracies in several countries, from Mexico and Guatemala to Uruguay, summed it up before his death in 2007, “Our main weapon did not spit bullets, but words.” As practiced by one of his friends, the inventor of modern propaganda Edward Bernays, and as a central law of all manipulation of opinion: our words, yes, but always through the mouth of some servant.

The result? By the 1960s, the dozen democracies recovered thanks to Washington’s distraction in the 1940s had been lost again. The brutality of Creole militarism reached the Southern Cone. These dictatorships had no economic or moral limits, so they could massacre hundreds of thousands of people (mostly Indians, blacks, poor people, or white rebels) with Washington’s powerful approval and legitimacy. A María Corina Machado would never have spent 25 years conspiring against her government and calling for military intervention in her own country. On the first day, she would have been kidnapped, tortured, raped, and then thrown into the sea, as was the norm.

The propaganda apparatus received tsunami-like amounts of dollars, and the secret interventionism of the CIA’s coup agents and propagandists reached, by the end of the 1940s, the southern tip of South America, those countries that for decades had been considered rebellious and beyond the manipulation of US transnational corporations: Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. By the 1950s, they had already infiltrated armies, unions, educational institutions, and elections.

After the suicide of the Soviet Union, Washington lobbies began desperately searching for a new enemy. They found it in the Middle East, so, especially after 2001, they neglected Latin America once again. That year also coincided with the neoliberal catastrophe imposed by the Washington Consensus, which left almost all countries bankrupt, indebted, and with children rummaging through garbage on the streets.

As in the 1940s, Latin Americans were on their knees, but now they had their hands free once again. They began to deal with their real problems without the massive propaganda of the CIA and without the military harassment of Washington. A wave of left-wing (more or less independence-minded) governments rose to political power. As a result, the continent experienced a golden decade, where economic miracles were not sold in the Northern media, as had been the case with the financed dictatorships of Chile and Brazil, which, while increasing their GDP, also increased poverty, slums, and shantytowns.

From 2002 to 2012, several countries (such as Argentina and Brazil) paid off almost all the debts created and nationalized by military dictatorships or banana republics. At the time, this was considered impossible. As in the days of Dollar Diplomacy, creditors did not want full payment, but only interest.

Countries such as Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela (the Latin American “axis of evil”) experienced historic economic growth with strong social investments and historic poverty reduction. Attempts were made to explain this with the commodities boom, which was only part of the bonanza: for centuries, Latin America experienced dozens of commodity price booms. One of the best known was Venezuela’s boom in the 1970s, due to the oil crisis, which ended with Ronald Reagan’s ally, the social democrat Jaime Lusinchi, the neoliberal turn of the second Andrés Pérez, the bloody social crisis of the Caracazo in 1989, the bailout by G. H. Bush, indebtedness, the accelerated growth of poverty, and the beginning of emigration in the 1990s.

Latin America’s prosperous decade ended for the same reasons as always. By 2012, Washington understood that China was deviating from the script with a development reminiscent of the early decades of the Soviet Union. In addition to being communist, it could not be blocked or broken (as the British did in the 19th century, with a few cannons and a lot of opium), so attention turned back to the southern squares of the chessboard.

Since then, not only have (1) economic and financial blockades against countries such as Venezuela become brutal, but (2) the old practices of the CIA and its satellite foundations have been radicalized to hack public opinion once again.

As this is an area where the Muslim presence is irrelevant, the already metastasized rhetoric of the “danger of communism” was revived. What’s more, passionate statements such as “we are tired of communism” are made against uncomfortable governments, as if there had ever been a communist government in any of those countries. There never was, not even when declared Marxists such as Salvador Allende, José Mujica, or Gabriel Boric were elected.

Currently, the CIA’s financial resources for its main work are several times greater than during the Cold War. In fact, they are unlimited. Not even US congressmen know how much money they receive, let alone how many false rebellions and plots against independence movements they promote every day around the world. We know, only through leaks, that its budget is in the tens of billions and that it now has the most advanced technological resources on the planet to hack into the psychology of the voluntary slaves of the South.

It can be said that the wave of elections won by the right wing by 2025 has multiple causes, but it can never be said that the CIA, the secret agencies of other organizations such as the Pentagon, agencies such as the DEA or USAID, and the Mossad have nothing to do with it. They have a lot to do, listen to, say, and do.

As in the past, there is the paradox that the colonies are easier to manipulate than the metropolises. Today, according to polls, 70 percent of Americans are against any intervention in Venezuela that could cause a civil war or another puppet government. Less than half (between 34 and 40 percent) of Latin Americans are. That’s how they think, and that’s how they vote for candidates who admire Hitler, Pinochet, and Margaret Thatcher. Not just because all the neo-fascist and supremacist puppets in government have blue eyes, I suppose. But there are looks that kill: every time Washington looked at Latin America, there was a far-right uproar.

In fact, right now they are watching and listening to you. But don’t worry, it’s nothing personal and they’re not going to blackmail you with a sex scandal, because they reserve that for their most important servants, and you are not important to them. The information gathered is used for global engineering, for the most perfect apparatus of propaganda and mental manipulation that humanity has ever known.

Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, said it in Off Leash, without a hood: “If so many of these countries around the world are incapable of governing themselves, it’s time for us to just put the imperial hat back on, to say, ‘We’re going to govern those countries … ’cause enough is enough, we’re done being invaded. You can say that about pretty much all of Africa, they’re incapable of governing themselves… Yes, we have to go back to colonialism.’”

Does anyone think that the mercenary group Blackwater, one of the partners of real political and financial power, invests only in the stock market? To name just one of the dozen or so other supremacist psychopaths at the top of the pyramid, such as Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Larry Fink, the Palantir boys, and the rest of the sect that controls financial traffic and accumulates more wealth than 90 percent of the world’s population.

The strategy is to accustom people to violence, barbarism, and dispossession. In other words, to the Palestinization of the world. So, what then? Well, the rest of humanity doesn’t have many resources left, but what remains is clear. Consciousness, unity, and rebellion. All that remains is to resist—like a Palestinian.

Jorge Majfud, December 2015

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Ideology and Intervention: A Critical Review of Jorge Majfud’s The Wild Frontier

The Wild Frontier: 200 Years of Anglo-Saxon Fanaticism in Latin America

«Simply powerful.» Noam Chomsky
The Wild Frontier is a book written with courage and dazzling lucidity. One of the best I’ve ever read.» Víctor Hugo Morales
Fifty years after the publication of How to Read Donald Duck, I am pleased to read a book like The Wild Frontier that explores in detail the less subtle ways in which the United States, for two hundred years, has sought to influence and distort the destiny of our Latin America.» Ariel Dorfman

The Wild Frontier is not only a journey through the most important events of the last two hundred years that marked the expansion of the Thirteen Colonies over the Indigenous nations and over that vast territory we now call Latin America but also the revelation of the logic of their endless wars, of their expansion, and their systematic interventions, direct or secret, in the diverse peoples of the South. These military, economic, political, and narrative practices were the beginning and the continuation of Washington’s imperialism in the rest of the world. These practices and narratives (based on the economic interests of those at the top and the fanaticism instilled in those at the bottom) were the beginning and continuation of American imperialism in the rest of the world, always under other names and excuses. That deep past, as at other moments in history, explains the present and predicts the future of the world superpower. It explains the rise and fall of capitalism and the last Anglo-Saxon empire, like any other empire, based on violence in the name of peace.

Southern Cone Dictatorships: The Silent Generation as Fiction and Reflection

Interview with Uruguayan American author Jorge Majfud by Brazilian journalist Raúl Fitipaldi

Raúl Fitipaldi: In this Great Homeland of political, social, and economic exiles due to imperialism and capitalism, how were our childhoods condemned?

Jorge Majfud: As in every one of the tragedies that have struck different peoples on different continents, there is a generation marked by fire, with the same fire with which the previous generation was marked, the one that witnessed and suffered the events. It is the generation of children who had to live and grow up in that context of witnesses being forced into silence. We are the Silent Generation, not only because our elders always, for fear of reprisals, insisted that we not speak in school or public about everything we inevitably knew, but also because of the silence and indifference of most of the post-dictatorship media, the cultural apparatus, and, more recently, because of the forced indifference of the new generation, who are tired of their parents or grandparents insisting on remembering.

RF: Why these changes?

JM: It’s natural to a certain extent, but also, in a highly political case like the rescue of memory, it has been under strategic attack: it bears the mark of secret agencies (those great storytellers, those truly invisible hands of the market and politics) and the mark of the capital of lobbies and corporations, gods unattainable by mere mortals. It’s not said, or it’s scarce, that someone who remembers the Jewish Holocaust of 80 years ago is politicized. However, any other vindication of memory is discredited as a political act and, worse still, as an act of corruption. Memory isn’t something that is rescued once and for all; it must be kept alive, or it dies. In Argentina, for example, there is a strategic discussion about whether there were 15,000 or 30,000 disappeared, as if 15,000 or 10,000 disappeared would in any way mitigate the brutality on a national and international scale, as was the case with Operation Condor.

RF: The pain of yesterday’s children isn’t taken very seriously either.

JM: As is often the case with the pain of children in general. Like when girls had their ears pierced. «They weren’t suffering.» Like bulls in a bullfight, they can’t express themselves, so they don’t suffer, or their suffering isn’t real, just as was the case with the suffering of women, the poor, Indigenous people, and Black people. Children who take any experience, no matter how brutal, as something normal couldn’t complain; therefore, their suffering wasn’t real, profound, or human-like that of an actual human being. Not without irony, it is precisely the generation most vulnerable in their emotions, memories, fears, and anxieties that is least considered in social narratives and historical analyses. The paradox is multiple since Generation Zero is the one that will have to deal with national traumas in a more profound and more lasting way. As if that tragedy weren’t enough, the chronological experience of a child has nothing to do with that of an adult. From the ages of five to fifteen or from ten to twenty, the existential period is equivalent to an entire lifetime. From 45 to 55, for example, is a different, less extensive period, barely a single stage, sometimes brief, rarely so profound as to leave an indelible mark on individuals.

RF: Have dictatorships been something like a permanent memory that feeds back into our memories and keeps us alert for any fascist outbreak?

JM: Only relatively. Although Latin American countries share a similar history of dispossession, colonization, and imperialist brutality, not all suffered equally or to the same extent. The people who had the misfortune of being born on soil rich in the resources needed to develop the northwestern empires throughout the Modern Era were the ones who suffered the most, for the longest, and who ended up poorer, more corrupt, and with more economic, political, and social violence. On the other hand, a financial dictatorship can be brutal in disposing of an entire country and the world as a whole (as is today’s Ultra Capitalism, as a prelude to Post Capitalism). Still, it is rarely experienced on an emotional, traumatic level due to its high level of abstraction. This is why resistance to its rule is minimal, almost impossible, and can only be experienced through its consequences, which are rarely attributed to its cause. Therefore, both trauma and learning are not inevitable but depend on a militancy of memory.

RF: Today, you dedicate yourself to teaching and cultivating memory through literature. Do you think children and young people today understand the fascist messages conveyed by figures like Trump, Bolsonaro, Meloni, Milei, and Bukele, among others?

JM: There’s always a group that understands this, that reclaims memory, but to answer that question, let’s look at the problem for a moment in general, social, and historical terms.

An individual reproduces their ancestors’ ancestral hopes and fears as if they were something new. What we feel now was felt by hundreds of generations before us. The same fire also integrates this ahistorical factor. The fire of yesterday and the fire of today are the same fires. On the other hand, generations don’t experience, politically speaking, the same thing as their predecessors. Unlike the existential, ahistorical condition of the individual, from a social and historical dynamic, I suspect that generations experience three different levels of the same trauma, the same tragedy. As I’ve explained elsewhere, we have:

1. A generation is seduced by fascist violence to resolve its deep frustrations.

2. The next generation suffers profound trauma due to massive war or fascist dictatorships (generally, fascisms are dictatorships that serve capitalist empires, but it is not impossible to find examples of fascism that claim to be leftist or in the form of liberal democracies; basically, fascism is nationalist, anti-intellectualist, yearns for the past, is reactionary, and needs to control public and private life, usually through censorship, fear, and the fragmentation of work and concepts, privileging faith, propaganda, and impassioned sermons over criticism and complex analysis).

3. The third generation—that of children, like the protagonist in The Same Fire and ours in the military dictatorships of Latin America during the Cold War—retains an awareness of brutality and works to expose the traumas of the previous generation. The recovery of memory is its main tool of dehumanization.

4. The fourth generation repeats the first. If it does not forget or deny the tragedy of the second generation, at least it does not feel it. They are more willing to ignore or downplay historical events and the memory of their grandparents, something we are clearly seeing today in many countries, both satellites and Argentina, with the attack on enlightened education, against those who insist on remembering those who disappeared during the last dictatorship, as in empires themselves (this is the case of the United States and its cultural and police reaction to historical revisions, which are «unpatriotic»). So, this generation begins to play with fascism once again, as did the generation that preceded their grandparents, until the next generation must suffer and repeat the catastrophe and traumas of the second generation.

RF: Can you explain a little more about what you mean by history and memory?

JM: Of course, history and memory are not the same thing. The former, especially official histories, the histories fossilized by the cultural industry, such as cinema, commercial literature, the press, and social narratives in general, are made up of strategic forgettings. Power can never tell its story without forgetting, without forgetting. For example, when John Wayne’s iconic film The Alamo dramatizes the heroic resistance of Anglo settlers in Texas, it omits the detail that they weren’t fighting for freedom but to reinstate slavery where the Mexicans had outlawed it. The same goes for the Two Demons Theory or the «We Were at War» theory imposed by the CIA through its militaristic narrators in Latin America. Official history is always mythological, from its narrative to its monuments, with heroes going into battle dressed like they were for a gala ball and riding expensive white horses, which was like going to war in Ukraine in a Lamborghini.

Now, when someone appears trying to rescue the memory buried along with the corpses of glorious historical events, they are accused of being unpatriotic, a heretic, or a dangerous radical who wants to destroy the West.

But that’s not all. The omissions of official histories also occur in very subtle and effective ways, such as when, at best, a newspaper tells all the facts but dedicates a headline to what a politician said and a small-print note on the fifth page about a genocide. In other words, even when the story doesn’t hide relevant facts, it effortlessly defines what is essential and what is irrelevant, with a consistency that causes the irrelevant to eventually disappear from the collective consciousness.

Another way is through politicians’ simplistic but demagogic narratives. Two or three days ago, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stated, «A process of Islamization is taking place in Europe that is far removed from the values ​​of our civilization.» Millions applauded this logic, which we criticized in «The Slow Suicide of the West» when, in 2002, we responded to another famous Italian woman with the same ideas, Oriana Fallaci.

The most obvious things are not seen, just as we tend not to see our noses because they are too close to our eyes. The West rises with «rage and pride» at the Islamization of the West for being something that is «very far from the values ​​of our civilization,» when it has been the West that has invaded every corner of the world throughout Asia, Africa, and America for the last five centuries and up until yesterday, with its armies and missionaries to impose by force of sword, whip, cannon, and banks the strategic Christianization of everything else that was neither Christian nor shared «our values.» In other words, it is not just a matter of strategic forgetfulness but also of the eternal presumption that our laws, our policies, our religion, our race, our culture, and our morals are superior, special, and therefore, must be applied by force and with bloodshed to others (in the name of love and freedom), but never the other way around. The golden rule of international and intercultural relations, reciprocity, has never been applied when it meant a danger to the interests of the powerful. Then, the dispossessed, oppressed, and massacred react. We demonize them to continue killing them, as we did with the natives around the world and continue to do with any independent rebel.

RF: What fears does the adult Jorge Majfud recreate as heirs to the Condor Plan period, the Trujillos, Ríos Montt, Somozas, Pinochet, Videla, «Goyo» Álvarez, and other more recent monsters like Janine Agnes?

JM: They are the fears of returning to the second generation, the ones that must suffer the traumas and brutality of fascism, as I told you before. At my age, I don’t have many personal fears. Not even death worries me. I’m concerned about the suffering of the new generation, our children, who will have to pay not only the massive debts that generations have created for the benefit of a micro-elite but also the consequences of this global injustice that, sooner or later, ends in a painful, though necessary and inevitable, revolution or rebellion, with tragedy multiplied by the reaction of fascists like those you just mentioned, who are ultimately only functional lackeys, banana republic generals who carry out the dirty work that our generation witnessed firsthand, such as kidnapping, torture, rape, murder, and disappearance. These things don’t happen on a battlefield where two equals face each other, but rather in the cowardly dungeons of the «saviors of the homeland» or in the camps of poor refugees who are emotionlessly massacred by the intelligent, multi-million-dollar bombs of the same powerful psychopaths as always.

RF: Why do we need to read your new book, The Same Fire?

JM: I don’t think anyone needs to read any of my books, regardless of the genre. I only propose problems, sometimes possible solutions, when it comes to analytical books or essays. Regarding novels, I propose many things, not solutions or entertainment. Suppose there’s someone there who’s interested, fine. If not, there’s no drama, either.

What people need (and always from my point of view, which is not the point of view of any chosen person, but quite the opposite) is that people need to be less submissive and more decisive in their search for truth, from the social to the individual, from ethics to aesthetics, from a sense of justice to a sense of dignity and worth.

https://editorialcuatrolunas.com/libros/narrativa/el-mismo-fuego/

On the dehumanization of poor immigrants

On the dehumanization of poor immigrants

The fight for the rights of immigrants is the fight for Human Rights, which is shown to be irrelevant every day when the interests of the powerful are not served. But immigration is not only a right; it is also the consequence of a global system that violently discriminates between rich and poor, capitalists and workers. This old class struggle is not only made invisible through cultural, ethnic, and sexual wars, as has been the case for centuries with racial and religious struggles but also through the very demonization of the concept of “class struggle” practiced by the rich and powerful and attributed to leftist ideologues as a project of evil. The class struggle, the violent dispossession, and the dictatorship of the ultra-millionaires over the rest of the working classes is a fact observable by any quantitative measurement.

This culture of barbarism and humiliation, of the politics of cruelty and the ethics of selfishness, occurs within every nation and is reproduced on a global scale, from the imperial nations to their servile capitalist colonies and their exceptions: the blockaded and demonized rebellious alternatives.

The illegality of immigration was invented more than a century ago to extend the illegality of imperial invasions to weaker countries. It was invented to prevent the consequences of the plundering of colonies held in servitude through the cannon, of systematic massacres, of the eternal and strategic debts that bleed them dry even today, of the secret agencies that murdered, manipulated the media, destroyed democracies, rebellious dictatorships, plunged half the world into chaos and dehumanized slaves from day one, some of them happy slaves.

Illegal immigration not only punished the disinherited of this historical process but also those persecuted by the multiple and brutal dictatorships that Europe and the United States spread throughout Africa and Latin America, with the various terrorist groups designed in Washington, London and Paris, such as the Contras in Central America, the Death Squads in South America, the extermination plans such as Plan Condor, the Organisation armée secrète in Africa, Islamic terrorists such as Al Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, all created by the CIA and its complicit mafias to end independence, secular and socialist projects in Africa and the Middle East… In other words, it is not only colonial capitalism that expels its people but the origin of that brutality: imperial capitalism.

Then, the victims become criminals. As with Haiti’s audacity to declare itself free and independent in 1804, as in other cases of the abolition of slavery, the slave owners demanded compensation from the governments for the loss of their private property of flesh and blood. Not the victims who had built the wealth of the United States, of the banks, of the corporations, not the slaves who built the White House and the Congress building. In the same way, according to Trump and his supremacist horde, the Panama Canal belongs to the invading master and not to the Panamanians and Caribbeans who left their lives by the thousands in its construction.

Immigration, in almost all its forms, from economic to political, is a direct consequence of these historical injustices. The rich do not emigrate; they dominate their countries’ economies and media and then send their «profits» to tax havens or in the form of investments that sustain the global slavery system as if it were a «high-risk» activity.

The rich are assured of their entry into any country. The poor, on the other hand, are suspect from the moment they show up at the embassy of a powerful country. Their applications are usually denied, which is why they often go into debt with loans from coyotes for 15 thousand dollars, only to enter a country that prints a global currency and work for years as slaves while being doubly criminalized. They do not victimize themselves, as some assimilated academics define them. They are real victims. They are wage slaves (often not even that) under permanent psychological terrorism that both they and their children suffer. In the United States, hundreds of thousands of children do not attend school regularly because they work under a regime of slavery, no different from the indentured slaves of centuries past.

Every year, for decades, illegal immigrants have been paying a hundred billion dollars into the Social Security system of complaining voters, money that will not be received by them but by those who spend their days complaining about the jobs that immigrants have stolen from them. As if this scale of injustice were not enough, finally, the most selfless, persecuted, and poor workers are thrown into prison as terrorists and returned to their countries in chains and humiliated, ironically by the mercilessness of rulers convicted of serious crimes by the justice system of the very country they govern, as is the case of the current occupants of the White House. They call this remarkable cowardice courage, just as they call the slavery of others’ freedom and the global bullies’ victims. Added to this is the traditional collaboration of the promoted sepoys, from academics to voters, from journalists to Latin, Indian, or African members of the imperial governments who, as a “solution to the problem of immigration” and the sovereign disobedience of some countries of the South, impose more blockades and sanctions to strangle further their less successful brothers who decided not to emigrate to God’s Land. The pathology is then sold as an example of “success based on merit and hard work.” Because that is the only pleasure of psychopaths who cannot be happy with anything: not their own success, but the defeat and humiliation of all others. One of the characteristics of fascism, apart from resorting to a non-existent past, is to exploit, persecute, demonize, blame, and punish all those who do not have the economic or military power to defend themselves, as is the case of poor immigrants in the imperial centers of the world. We, stripped of the sectarian interests of global power and responding only to a sense of morality and Human Rights, raise our voices to protest against the largest organized crime organization in the world, sure that this perversion of human cruelty will eventually collapse – not by its weight, but by the courage and solidarity of those below.

Jorge Majfud, Feb 4 2025

¿Para qué sirve la cultura?

English: «What good is culture?»

Es comprensible que en tiempos de crisis todos los sectores de una sociedad sufran recortes presupuestales y reducción de ganancias. No es del todo comprensible pero es fácilmente aceptable que la primera víctima de esos recortes sea la cultura. Aceptamos que si dejamos de leer un libro o si nos privamos de un clásico del cine no sería tan grave como si dejásemos de vestirnos o de comer. A corto plazo esto es cierto, pero a largo plazo es una trampa extremadamente peligrosa.

¿En qué sentido? Por ejemplo, en el sentido de la práctica del “sunset” o “atardecer”, técnica conocida por los legisladores de la antigua Roma y preferida por los grandes estrategas políticos, parásitos de los sistemas democráticos: se establece una ley o una norma, como el recorte de impuestos para las clases inversionistas con fecha de expiración, lo que le da una apariencia de medida provisoria; generalmente esa fecha cae en un año electoral, lo cual significa que nadie propondrá un aumento de los impuestos y la ley es previsiblemente extendida, ahora con la ventaja de haberse consolidado en el discurso político y en la desmemoria de la gente.

El problema sobre qué es superfluo y qué no lo es, se multiplica cuando pasamos del ámbito individual al ámbito público, de un tiempo medido en días o semanas a un tiempo social de años o a un tiempo histórico de décadas.

Los hombres y mujeres que suelen acceder a los gobiernos recurriendo siempre a los sueños y a las esperanzas de sus votantes, siempre terminan por justificarse en sus gobiernos no por ser soñadores sino todo lo contrario: porque tienen verdaderas responsabilidades (¿pero con quiénes?); porque son pragmáticos y quienes no están de acuerdo son soñadores delirantes, irresponsables manifestantes que no tienen otra cosa más productiva que hacer.

Por lo tanto, las armas de los pragmáticos apuntan de forma impune al flanco más débil de cualquier gobierno: primero la cultura, después la educación. En realidad, existen innumerables rubros mucho más inútiles que la cultura y la educación, como lo son vastas áreas de la administración misma. Pero obviamente necesitamos de esa administración cuando tenemos una educación y una cultura precaria y primitiva. Esto es así tanto en el llamado mundo desarrollado como en el nunca nombrado bajo mundo.

Es natural que en tiempos de crisis económica la cultura sea la primera víctima de estos francotiradores, ya que normalmente lo es aun en tiempos de bonanza. El argumento principal radica, por ejemplo, en que se deben eliminar o estrangular programas públicos como los canales de televisión estatales, las radios, las orquestas sinfónicas, los estímulos a las diversas artes, al pensamiento, a las humanidades en general, a las ciencias en particular.

¿Por qué? Porque se argumenta y se acepta que no es justo que, por ejemplo, un programa privado de televisión sobre las debilidades sexuales de los productores de entretenimiento (por no decir productores de frivolidades) que tiene cinco veces más audiencia que una serie sobre la Primera Guerra o sobre los cuentos de Borges, deba arreglárselas con sus propios medios, mientras aquellos otros programas que tienen poca audiencia injustamente reciben ayuda del gobierno, es decir, dinero de todo el resto de la población que no mira ni le interesan esos programas “culturales”.

Eso es lo que con fanático orgullo se llama libre competencia, lo cual no es otra cosa que la tiranía de las leyes del mercado sobre el resto de la vida humana. De hecho, el argumento central, explícito o azucarado, radica en que también la cultura debe someterse a las mismas reglas a las que estamos sometidos todos quienes nos dedicamos a actividades “más productivas”, como si las actividades productivas en las sociedades de consumo no fuesen, en realidad, una ínfima minoría: basaría con considerar todos los trabajos productivos que se mueven en torno al fútbol (desde los chóferes de ómnibus hasta los policías y los vendedores de parabrisas), en torno a la televisión basura, en torno a la literatura de entretenimiento, por no hablar de asuntos más serios como las drogas y las guerras. Si hiciéramos un estudio para identificar aquellos rubros realmente “productivos” o esenciales para la vida humana, probablemente no alcanzaríamos a un diez por ciento de todos los capitales que giran en torno nuestro.

Ahora, entiendo que dejar a la cultura en las manos de las leyes del mercado sería como dejar a la agricultura en las manos de las leyes de la meteorología y de la microbiología. Nadie puede decir que el exceso de lluvias, que las sequías, que las invasiones de langostas y gusanos, de pestes y parásitos son fenómenos menos naturales que la siempre sospechosa mano inasible del mercado. Si dejásemos a la agricultura librada a su suerte pereceríamos de hambre. De la misma forma es necesario entender que si dejamos a la cultura en manos de las leyes del mercado, pereceríamos de barbarie.

Jorge Majfud

 Milenio, II,  (Mexico)

MDZ (Argentina)

Jorge Majfud’s books at Amazon>>

Eduardo Galeano

Eduardo Galeano

“The Hoariest of Latin American Conspiracy Theorists”

 

Although I would say that the article “The Land of Too Many Summits” by Christopher Sabatini (Foreign Affairs, April 12, 2012) is right on some points, it nonetheless fails to give little more than unproved opinions on other matters — or as Karl Popper would say, certain statements lack the “refutability” condition of any scientific statement — and is inaccurate in terms of its overall meaning.

For years I have argued that Latin American victimhood and the habit of blaming “the Empire” for everything that is wrong is a way to avoid taking responsibility for one’s own destiny. Mr. Sabatini is probably right in the central point of his article: “If the number of summits were a measure of the quality of diplomacy, Latin America would be a utopia of harmony, cooperation, and understanding.” However, Latin American leaders continue to practice antiquated traditions founded upon an opposing ideology: a certain cult of personality, the love for perpetual leadership positions, the abuse of grandiloquent words and promises, and the sluggishness of concrete and pragmatic actions and reforms, all of which are highly ironic features of governments that consider themselves “progressive.» Regardless, not all that long ago, when conservative dictatorships or marionette governments in some banana republic or another manifested such regressive characteristics, it didn’t seem to bother the leaders of the world’s wealthiest populations all that much.  

On some other basic points, Sabatini demonstrates factual inaccuracies. For example, when he states that Eduardo Galeano “wrote the classic screed against the developed world’s exploitation and the region’s victimhood, Open Veins of Latin America, read by every undergraduate student of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s,” he forgets — I cannot assume any kind of intellectual dishonesty since I don’t know much about him, but neither can I accuse him of ignorance, since he has followed “Latin American politics for a living” — that at that time Latin America was not the magic-realist land of colorful communist dictators (with the exception of Cuba) as many Anglo readers frequently assume, but rather the land of brutal, conservative, right-wing military dictatorships with a very long history.

Therefore — anyone can logically infer the true facts — that famous book was broadly forbidden in that continent at that time. Of course, in and of itself, the widespread prohibition against it made the publication even more popular year after year. But such popularity did not primarily stem from the book’s portrayal of the self-victimization of an entire continent — which I am not going to totally deny — but was more in response to Galeano’s frank representation of another reality, not the false imaginings of certain horrible conspiracy theorists, but rather the reality created throughout Latin American history by other hallucinating people, some of whom became intoxicated by their access to power, although they themselves did not actually wield it in the formal sense.

Therefore, if Eduardo Galeano — a writer, not a powerful CEO, a commander in chief of some army, another drunken president, nor the leader of some obscure sect or lobby — is “the hoariest of Latin American conspiracy theorists,” then who or what is and was the de facto hoariest of Latin American conspirators? Forget the fact that Galeano is completely bald and try to answer that question.

Regrettably, it has become commonplace for the mass media and other supporters of the status-quo to ridicule one of the most courageous and skillful writers in postmodern history, and to even label him an idiot. However, if Eduardo Galeano was wrong in his arguments — no one can say he was wrong in his means, because his means have always been words, not weapons or money — at least he was wrong on behalf of the right side, since he chose to side with the weak, the voiceless and the nobodies, those who never profit from power, and consequently, we may argue, always suffer at its hands.

He did not pick white or black pieces from the chessboard, but instead chose to side with the pawns, which historically fought in wars organized by the aristocracy from the rearguard (kings, queens, knights, and bishops). Upon the conclusion of battle, that same aristocracy always received the honors and conquered lands, while the pawns were forever the first to die.

Thus has it been in modern wars. With the ridiculous but traditional exception of some prince playing at war, real soldiers are mostly from middle and lower classes. Although a few people have real money and everyone has real blood, as a general rule, only poor people contribute to wars with their blood, whereas only rich people contribute to wars with their money — not so hard to do when one always has abundant material means, and even less difficult when such a monetary contribution is always an interest-bearing investment, whether in terms of actual financial gain or perceived moral rectitude, both of which may well be considered as two sides of the same coin.

Is it mere coincidence that the economically powerful, the politicians in office, the big media owners and a variety of seemingly official self-appointed spokespersons for the status quo are the ones who continuously repeat the same tired litany about the glory of heroism and patriotism? It can hardly be a matter of chance, considering that such individuals have a clear need to maintain high morale among those who are actually going to spill their own blood upon the sacrificial altar of war, and have an equally evident motive for demoralizing to the greatest extent possible those skeptics or critics such as Eduardo Galeano who cross the line, and who never buy those jewels of the Crown.

 

Jorge Majfud

 The International Political Review >>

 Jorge Majfud’s books at Amazon>>

Interview on Crisis

Jorge Majfud applies his fractal vision to Latino immigrants

 
 

Teacher, writer and novelist Jorge Majfud. (Photo/ Jacksonville University)

Jorge Majfud is a writer, novelist and professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at the University of Jacksonville in Florida whose books — including his fourth, Crisis, to be on the market in the U.S. in June — share a common thread: They are born from his experiences as a Latino and as an immigrant.

Uruguayan by birth, Majfud’s childhood in the 70’s was imprinted by the stream of political affairs in the Southern Hemisphere: political persecution, corruption, years of suffering and torture – real, psychological and moral — and social solidarity. “Those were years of listening at the official speeches and holding back the unofficial truth, of watching universal injustices and being unable to stop them,” Majfud told Voxxi.

“Until someone pushed you to take sides, and when you refused to do it, then  you became a ‘critic’ of the events, a suspicious one but ultimately a critic.”

Beginnings

A writer who confesses learning to read newspapers before nursery rhymes in kindergarten, Majfud, 42, describes himself as an avid devourer of the “classics” during those formidable childhood years. Perhaps as a form of escape from reality. “It was a time of fantastic discoveries, perceiving literature as something useless but fascinating,” he said.

Taking after his mother, Majfud explored the world of painting and sculpture, and ended up at the School of Architecture in the University of the Republic of Uruguay.  However, he could not resist writing essays and fiction during those years, which “not only channeled my psychological conflicts but also gave me a new philosophical perspective about reality and fiction, of what was important and not.”

During seven years working as an architect, Majfud came to realize that reality was built more from words than from bricks. Soon after, his first novel, Memorias de un desaparecido (Memories of a Missing Person), was published in 1996.

Highlight

Fast forward to 2012 and Majfud is about to give birth to his fourth novel, Crisis, which will be printed in Spain and available to the U.S. market next month. “On its surface, Crisis is the drama ofLatin-American immigrants, especially those undocumented ones, in the United States,” Majfud told Voxxi. “At a deeper level, it is the universal drama of those individuals fleeing from a geographical space, apparently looking for a better life but in reality, fleeing themselves; fleeing a reality perceived as unfair but rarely solved through the actual physical relocation.”

Missing, moving, fleeing individuals seem to be recurrent characters in Majfud’s writings, which document their paths towards permanent discovery of their own identity in different realities and situations. These characters stumble upon communication barriers and live through moral, economic and cultural violence as inevitable components of their double drama: as social and as existential beings.

Faithful to his architectural past, Majfud chose a “mosaic” format for his new novel.

“They are fractals in the sense that they may be nearly the same at different scales,” he said. “Each story can be read by itself but when read through, they form an image, such as the pieces of a mosaic, a reality that is less visible to the individual but it can be seen from afar as a collective experience.”

Many of its characters are different but they share the same names – Guadalupe, Ernesto, and so on – because they are collective roles. “Sometimes we believe our life is unique and particular without perceiving we are merely replicating our ancestors’ past experiences or the same dramas of our contemporaries living in different spaces but in similar conditions,” Majfud said. “We are individuals in our particularities but we are collectives in our human condition.”

Each story is set in a different U.S. location with Latin American images appearing in inevitable flash-backs. “Each time a character goes to eat at a Chili’s – a Tex-Mex chain restaurant – trying to navigate a reality between a Hispanic and an Anglo-Saxon context, it is hard to say if they are in California, Pennsylvania or Florida,” Majfud said.

Likewise, he chose Spanish names for all the cities where the stories take place. “It is a way to vindicate a culture that has been under attack for a long time. Just looking at the United States map, you can find a large amount of geographical spaces named with Spanish words, names like‘Escondido’, ‘El Cajón’, ‘Boca Ratón’ o ‘Colorado,’ especially in certain states where they are predominant.”

Novel «La ciudad de la luna» by Jorge Majfud. (The city of the moon)

“However,” he said, “they are invisible to the English speaker, who in his/her ignorance considers them as part of the daily vocabulary. The history ofHispanic culture becomes then subdued, disappears under this blanket of collective amnesia, in the name of a non-existent tradition. Spanish language and culture were in this country one century before the first English settlers arrived, and have never left. Consequently, we cannot qualify Spanish language and culture as being ‘foreign.’ This label is a violent strategy for an indiscernible but dreadful culturicide.”

Although Majfud believes all individuals share a common base – not only biological and psychological but also moral in its most primitive levels – they also differ in certain characteristics, which in our times are considered positive, with certain exceptions, such as cultural diversity.

“Such differences produce fears and conflicts, actions and reactions, discrimination and mutual rejection,” he said. “It is natural that these cultural currents, the Anglo-Saxon and the Hispanic cultures, would reproduce the universal dynamics of dialogue and conflict, and integration and rejection from one another, elements that are also present in Crisis.”

Achievements

Finally, Majfud talked about his achievements. “A writer’s life, like any other person’s, looks like his résumé: the most impressive record of achievements hides a number of failures, sometimes larger than the successes.”

Majfud believes his best achievement is his family; one with failures, because he is human, but his main achievement so far.

“I doubt my actions, sometimes obsessively; however, I never have doubts about the angel I have brought to this life, my son. I hope he will be a good man, not without conflicts or contradictions but an honest one, serene and the happiest he can be,” Majfud said.

“This desire does not have a rational explanation, it just is. As the most important things in life, which are few, it does not depend on reason.”

Shown here is Ernesto Camacho’s painting, “Christie’s World“ from his Series, “Diaries of a City”. “Christie’s World” Christie’s World is a depiction of a single mother in a big city. Although surrounded by the hard, fast paced society of New York, she never looses the quality of being a gracious woman. Even though life in the Big Apple can become disheartening at times, Christy remains alive. (Photo/ Courtesy Majfud with artist permission)

Crisis cover

http://voxxi.com/jorge-majfud-applies-his-fractal-vision-to-latino-immigrants/

 

The Secular Nation-State and Latin American Catholicism

The emergence of the Secular Nation-State and Latin American Catholicism

Edward J. Williams

Comparative Politics, Vol. 5, Nº 2 (Jan., 1973), 261-277. University of New York.

La importancia de este ensayo consiste, a mi juicio, en el momento de su publicación y en la perspectiva exterior que el autor tiene de la Iglesia Católica. Su publicación es de 1973, pocos años después de la formulación de la Teología de la Liberación por parte de sus pensadores más representativos. Esta visión histórica de la institución nos ayuda a comprender el contexto y el surgimiento en sí de las nuevas teologías —“con los pies en la tierra”— en un breve recorrido de dieciocho páginas.

Principalmente, E. Williams reflexiona sobre los cambios históricos que ha ido operando la Iglesia Católica en América Latina según las circunstancias a las cuales estuvo enfrentada.

Según el autor, tradicionalmente, la Iglesia Católica Romana vio a los Estados nacionales como usurpadores de su propia jurisdicción, hasta que terminó por reconocerles legitimidad, de forma oficial, en el Vaticano II. (Vatican, 603)

Hasta entrado el siglo XX, y luego de su separación del Estado, los miembros de la Iglesia se consideraban dentro de un orden civil pero no pertenecientes a él. En muchos casos no reconocían otra autoridad más que la del Papa.

Desde el nacimiento de los nuevos Estados-naciones en el continente americano, la Iglesia Católica apoyó a España durante la guerra de independencia y luego lo hizo con las oligarquías rurales cuando estos Estados comenzaron a organizarse como nuevas instituciones del poder civil. Debido a las riquezas acumuladas, cualquier cambio fue visto como una amenaza para la Iglesia. Mientras tanto —y quizás como consecuencia—, el nacionalismo se identificó con las democracias liberales y estas dos con el anticlericalismo.  (263).

Según E. Williams, la transición que va desde el antinacionalismo de la Iglesia Católica a la aceptación de un Estado secular comienza a generarse a partir de la Primera Guerra Mundial y se extiende hasta 1960.

Ante las nuevas amenazas —comunismo, protestantismo, etc.— la Iglesia Católica comienza un proceso de revisiones internas con respecto a su antinacionalismo.

Enmarcado en el nuevo contexto “antiimperialista”, la Iglesia Católica se sumó a los discursos nacionalistas que llamaban por la independencia, en oposición a la relación económica que la institución ha mantenido históricamente con el extranjero. (265)

Wiliams va más allá y arriesga una interpretación que bien podríamos objetar en parte:

Within the context of theological speculation, furthermore, the evolving “theology of liberation” posits the necessity for complete liberation from dependency on the United States—not only in a political and in a socioeconomic sense, but also from a pastoral dependency (Williams, 265)

Incluso, es por la propia iniciativa Papa que el Vaticano II debilitó el poder del papado concediéndolo en parte a las iglesias nacionales.

Con respecto a las nuevas tendencias de pensamiento católico que E. Williams advierte en 1973, éstas son principalmente tres: (1) Un énfasis en el reconocimiento de las particularidades de América Latina y su relación con la Iglesia; (2) la importancia de la contingencia y la consiguiente acción política para transformar este mundo; (3) la definición del Catolicismo como un credo minoritario operando desde una sociedad plural y secularizada. (268)

In the first instance, Latin American Catholic thought is in search of the understanding the distinctive reality of Latin America and its particular nation-states. Introspective self-analysis, looking to the peculiar characteristics of each peculiar situation, is the thrust of the contemporary speculation. (Williams, 268) [Énfasis nuestro]

Así se llega a la afirmación del presidente de la Conferencia Episcopal Latinoamericana —Medellín, 1968—(CELAM), quien dijo que “la Iglesia Católica, siendo una, no es uniforme sino pluriforme” (268).

Por nuestra parte, pensamos que el proceso histórico-espiritual que afecta a la Iglesia es concomitante con el creciente humanismo que se ha ido desarrollando en el resto de las sociedades occidentales en los últimos siglos. Esta metamorfosis es resumida claramente por un sacerdote colombiano:

From the theology of the supernatural values superimposed on natural ones, we shift to a theology in which the supernatural is integrated with the natural, where creation and redemption are inseparable; from theology that separate soul and body to a theology of the integrated; from an abstract to a political theology, in which the people participate in the development of society in its economics, political and social areas (Williams, 270) [Énfasis nuestro]

“El mundo secular se vuelve el contexto de la actividad religiosa” (270) y el Papa Pablo VI reconoce la posibilidad de cierto “progreso humano”. La Iglesia ya no tiene la solución a los problemas humanos sino que se suma a otras instituciones y agentes sociales para interactuar en un contexto más complejo  —incluyendo a las corrientes marxistas de pensamiento (273).

Como conclusión, debemos observar que este proceso notable hacia la independencia (relativa) de las iglesias locales con su correspondiente atención a las problemáticas propias de cada contexto —problemática más humana que teológica, más física y moral que metafísica—, anotadas por E. Williams en 1973, han sido desaceleradas e incluso detenidas por un gobierno eclesiástico más conservador, como lo es el del actual Papa. Por otra parte, luego de 1973 se sucederían en Sudamérica un número importante de dictaduras militares que replantearían el papel de la Iglesia Católica, llegando a ser, en ocasiones, contradictoria, fluctuando entre la legitimización del poder y la resistencia al mismo, entre un nacionalismo conservador y un humanismo universal.

También es necesario distinguir el doble uso que se puede llegar a hacer de la palabra “política” en este mismo contexto. Para la Teoría de la Liberación, la implicación en política significaba un paso doble hacia (1) la toma de conciencia y (2) el compromiso social con los sectores económica o ideológicamente marginados. Pero también “política”, en el contexto jerárquico de la Iglesia ha tenido otro significado: (1) tradicionalmente como fuerza legitimadora de los poderes civiles y militares y (2) como fuerza “reaccionaria” a nivel internacional —sin hacer un juicio de valoración—, como lo ha sido la cruzada del Papa Juan Pablo II contra el marxismo y otras formas ideológicas, de gobierno o simplemente de interpretación de la realidad.

* * *

Jorge Majfud

Vatican II, The documents of. (New York, 1966).

Williams, Edward J. The emergence of the Secular Nation-State and Latin American Catholicism. En Comparative Politics, Vol. 5, Nº 2 (Jan., 1973), 261-277. University of New York.

Ron Paul and Right-Wing Anarchy

Ron Paul et l’anarchisme de droite (French)

Ron Paul y el anarquismo de derecha (Spanish)

Special Reports

Ron Paul and Right-Wing Anarchy

by Jorge Majfud

Scandalized by the misery that he had found in the poorer classes of the powerful French nation, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Madison, informing him that this was the consequence of the “unequal division of property.” France’s wealth, thought Jefferson, was concentrated in very few hands, which caused the masses be unemployed and forced them to beg. He also recognized that “the equal distribution of property is impracticable,” but acknowledged that marked differences led to misery. If one wanted to preserve the utopian project for liberty in America, no longer for reasons of justice only, it was urgently necessary to insure that the laws would divide the properties obtained through inheritance so that they might be equally distributed among descendants (Bailyn 2003, 57). Thus, in 1776 Jefferson abolished the laws in his state that priveleged inheritors, and established that all adult persons who did not possess 50 acres of land would receive them from the state, since “the land belongs to the living, not the dead” (58).

Jefferson once expressed his belief that if he had to choose between a government without newspapers and newspapers without a government, he would choose the latter. Like the majority of his founding peers, he was famous for other libertarian ideas, for his moderate anarquism, and for an assortment of other contradictions.

Ron Paul: Carrying Jefferson’s torch in a hostile environment?

Maybe nowadays Ron Paul is a type of postmodern incarnation of that president and erudite philosopher. Perhaps for that same reason he has been displaced by Sarah Palin as representing the definition of what it means to be a supposedly good conservative. In addition to being a medical doctor, a representative for Texas, and one of the historic leaders of the Libertarian movement, Paul is probably the true founder of the non-existent Tea Party.

If anything has differentiated neoconservative Republicans from liberal Democrats during the last few decades, it has been the former’s strong international interventionism with messianic influences or its tendency to legislate against homosexual marriage. On the other hand, if anything has characterized the strong criticism and legislative practice of Ron Paul, it has been his proposal to eliminate the central bank of the United States, his opposition to the meddling of the state in the matter of defining what is or should be a marriage, and his opposition to all kinds of interventionism in the affairs of other nations.

A good example of this was the Republican Party debate in Miami in December of 2007. While the rest of the candidates dedicated themselves to repeating prefabricated sentences that set off rounds of applause and stoked the enthusiasm of Miami’s Hispanic community, Ron Paul did not lose the opportunity to repeat his discomforting convictions.

In response to a question from María Elena Salinas about how to deal with the president of Venezuela, Ron Paul simply answered that he was in favor of having a dialogue with Chavez and with Cuba. Of course, the boos echoed throughout the venue. Without waiting for the audience to calm down, he came back with: “But let me tell you why, why we have problems in Central and South America — because we’ve been involved in their internal affairs for a long time, we’ve gotten involved in their business. We created the Chavezes of this world, we’ve created the Castros of this world by interfering and creating chaos in their countries and they’ve responded by taking out their elected leaders…”

The boos ended with the Texan’s argumentative line, until they asked him again about the war in Iraq: “We didn’t have a reason to get involved there, we didn’t declare war […] I have a different point of view because I respect the Constitution and I listen to the founding fathers, who told us to stay out of the internal affairs of other nations.”

In matters of its internal politics, the Libertarian movement shares various points with the neoconservatives, for example, the idea that inequalities are a consequence of freedom among different individuals with different skills and interests. Hence, the idea of “wealth distribution” is understood by Ron Paul’s followers as an arbitrary act of social injustice. For other neocons, it is simply an outcome of the ideological indoctrination of socialists like Obama. Subsequently, they never lose the opportunity to point out all of the books by Karl Marx that Obama studied, apparently with a passionate interest, at Columbia University, and all of the “Socialist Scholars Conference” meetings that he attended (Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, Stanley Kurtz). Nonetheless, according to the perspective of the libertarians, all of this would fall within the rights of anyone, such as smoking marijuana, as long as one doesn’t try to impose it upon everyone else, which in a president would be at the very least a difficult proposition.

The sacred cow of neoconservative North Americans is liberty (since according to them liberalism is a bad word), as if it had to do with an exalted concept separate from reality. In order to attain it, it would be enough to do away with or reduce everything called state and government, with the exception of the military. Hence, the strong inclination of some people for keeping guns in the hands of individuals, so that they can be used against meddling government power, whether their own or that of others.

Fanatics for total liberty either do not consider or minimize the fact that in order to be free, a certain amount of power is needed. According to Jefferson and Che Guevara, money was only a necessary evil, an outcome of corruption in society and a frequent instrument of robbery. However, in our time (the Greeks in the era of Pericles already knew this), power stems from money. It is enough, then, to have more money in order to be — in social rather than existential terms — freer than a worker who cannot make use of the same degree of liberty to educate his children or to have free time for encouraging his own personal development and intellectual creativity.

At the other extreme, in a large part of Latin America, these days the sacred cow is the “redistribution of wealth” by means of the state. The fact that production can also be poorly distributed is often not considered or is frequently minimized. In this case, the cultural parameters are crucial — there are individuals and groups who create and work for everyone else and who therefore cry out because of the injustice of not getting the benefits that they would deserve if social justice existed. Which is as if a liar were to hide behind a truth in order to safeguard and perpetuate his vices. According to this position, any merit is only the outcome of an oppressive system that doesn’t even allow the idle to put their idleness behind them. So, idleness and robbery are explained by the economic structure and the culture of oppression, which keep entire groups shrouded in ignorance. Which up to a certain point is not untrue. However, it is insufficient for demonstrating the inexistence of perpetual bums and others who are barely equipped for physical or intellectual work. In any case, there should not be redistribution of wealth if there is not first redistribution of production, which would partly be a redistribution of the desire to study, work and take on responsibility for something.

These days, states are necessary evils for protecting the equality of liberty. But at the same time they are the main instrument, as those revolutionary Americans believed, for protecting the privileges of the most powerful and for feeding the moral vices of the weakest.

Jorge Majfud, Jacksonville University.

Washington University Political Review >> Washington University.

http://www.wupr.org/?p=3185

Translated by Dr. Joe Goldstein, Georgia Southern University.

Libros y autores clásicos de la literatura uruguaya (según encuesta)

Jueves 26.05.2011

Eligen libro de Galeano como mejor espejo de la sociedad

Los universitarios uruguayos consideran que «Las venas abiertas de América Latina», de Eduardo Galeano, es el libro que mejor representa a la sociedad. Y es también su libro preferido.

Así lo reveló una encuesta realizada por la red de universidades «Universia» entre 601 estudiantes, que buscó saber cuál era el libro que mejor explica a una sociedad que este año cumple 200 años.

La obra de Galeano superó a «La Tregua», de Mario Benedetti; «Las cartas que no llegaron», de Mauricio Roseconf y «¡Bernabé, Bernabé!» de Tomás de Mattos, que quedaron en segundo, tercer y cuarto lugar respectivamente.

Sin embargo, pese a que un libro de Galeano fue el más votado en cuanto a mejor espejo de lo que somos, es la obra de Mario Benedetti la elegida para ser recomendada a un extranjero que desee entender a los uruguayos.

Los diez libros que mejor nos representan

1. Las venas abiertas de América Latina – Eduardo Galeano

2. La tregua – Mario Benedetti

3. Las cartas que no llegaron – Mauricio Rosencof

4. ¡Bernabé, Bernabé! – Tomás de Mattos

5. Ariel – José Enrique Rodó

6. La vida breve – Juan Carlos Onetti

7. Las lenguas de diamante – Juana de Ibarbourou

8. Nocturnos – Idea Vilariño

9. Montevideanos – Mario Benedetti

10. El pozo – Juan Carlos Onetti.

El mejor autor para que un extranjero nos entienda

1. Mario Benedetti

2. Eduardo Galeano

3. Horacio Quiroga

4. Roy Berocay

5. Juan José Morosoli

6. Florencio Sánchez

7. Juan Carlos Onetti

8. Mauricio Rosencof

9. Juana de Ibarbourou

10. Carlos Vaz Ferreira

Los 10 libros preferidos por los uruguayos

1 Las venas abiertas de América Latina – Eduardo Galeano

2 La tregua – Mario Benedetti

3 Cuentos de amor, de locura y de muerte – Horacio Quiroga

4 Montevideanos – Mario Benedetti

5 Las cartas que no llegaron – Mauricio Rosencof

6 El libro de los abrazos – Eduardo Galeano

7 Gracias por el fuego – Mario Benedetti

8 ¡Bernabé, Bernabé! – Tomás de Mattos

9 Pateando lunas – Roy Berocay

10 Ariel – José Enrique Rodó

fuente>>

Ideology and Intervention: A Critical Review of Jorge Majfud’s The Wild Frontier

If Latin America Had Been a British Enterprise

His family was originally from Serantes, Ferro...

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Si América Latina hubiese sido una empresa inglesa (Spanish)

If Latin America Had Been a British Enterprise

Jorge Majfud

In the process of conducting a recent study at the University of Georgia, a female student interviewed a young Colombian woman and tape recorded the interview.  The young woman commented on her experience in England and how  the British were interested in knowing the reality of Colombia.  After she detailed the problems that her country had, one Englishman observed the paradox that England, despite being smaller and possessing fewer natural resources, was much wealthier than Colombia.  His conclusion was cutting:  “If England had managed Colombia like a business, Colombians today would be much richer.”

The Colombian youth admitted her irritation, because the comment was intended to point out  just how incapable we are in Latin America.  The lucid maturity of the young Colombian woman was evident in the course of the interview, but in that moment she could not find the words to respond to the son of the old empire.  The heat of the moment, the audacity of those British kept her from remembering that in many respects Latin America had indeed been managed like a British enterprise and that, therefore, the idea was not only far from original but, also, was part of the reason that Latin America was so poor – with the caveat that poverty is a scarcity of capital and not of historical consciousness.

Agreed: three hundred years of monopolistic, retrograde and frequently cruel colonization has weighed heavily upon the Latin American continent, and consolidated in the spirit of our nations an oppositional psychology with respect to social and political legitimation (Alberto Montaner called that cultural trait “the suspicious original legitimacy of power”).  Following the Semi-independences of the 19th century, the “progress” of the British railroad system was not only a kind of gilded cage – in the words of Eduardo Galeano -, a strait-jacket for native Latin American development, but we can see something similar in Africa: in Mozambique, for example, a country that extends North-to-South, the roads cut across it from East-to-West.  The British Empire was thus able to extract the wealth of its central colonies by passing through the Portuguese colony.  In Latin America we can still see the networks of asphalt and steel flowing together toward the ports – old bastions of the Spanish colonies that native rebels contemplated with infinite rancor from the heights of the savage sierras, and which the large land owners saw as the maximum progress possible for countries that were backward by “nature.”

Obviously, these observations do not exempt us, the Latin Americans, from assuming our own responsibilities.  We are conditioned by an economic infrastructure, but not determined by it, just as an adult is not tied irremediably to the traumas of childhood.  Certainly we must confront these days other kinds of strait-jackets, conditioning imposed on us from outside and from within, by the inevitable thirst for dominance of world powers who refuse strategic change, on the one hand, and frequently by our own culture of immobility, on the other.  For the former it is necessary to lose our innocence; for the latter we need the courage to criticize ourselves, to change ourselves and to change the world.

Translated by Bruce Campbell

* Jorge Majfud is a Uruguayan writer and professor of Latin American literature at the University of Georgia.

Ten Lashes Against Humanism

Erasmus in 1523, by Hans Holbein

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Diez azotes contra el humanismo (Spanish)

Ten Lashes Against Humanism

 

Jorge Majfud

A minor tradition in conservative thought is the definition of the dialectical adversary as mentally deficient and lacking in morality. As this never constitutes an argument, the outburst is covered up with some fragmented and repetitious reasoning, proper to the postmodern thought of political propaganda. It is no accident that in Latin America other writers repeat the US experience, with books like Manual del perfecto idiota latinoamericano (Manual for the Perfect Latin American Idiot, 1996) or making up lists about Los diez estúpidos más estúpidos de América Latina (The Top Ten Stupid People in Latin America). A list that is usually headed up, with elegant indifference, by our friend, the phoenix Eduardo Galeano. They have killed him off so many times he has grown accustomed to being reborn.

As a general rule, the lists of the ten stupidest people in the United States tend to be headed up by intellectuals. The reason for this particularity was offered some time ago by a military officer of the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983) who complained to the television cameras about the protesters marching through the streets of Buenos Aires: “I am not so suspicious of the workers, because they are always busy with work; I am suspicious of the students because with too much free time they spend it thinking. And you know, Mr. Journalist, that too much thinking is dangerous.” Which was consistent with the previous project of General Onganía (1966-1970) of expelling all the intellectuals in order to fix Argentina’s problems.

Not long ago, Doug Hagin, in the image of the famous television program Dave’s Top Ten, concocted his own list of The Top Ten List of Stupid Leftist Ideals. If we attempt to de-simplify the problem by removing the political label, we will see that each accusation against the so-called US leftists is, in reality, an assault on various humanist principles.

10: Environmentalism. According to the author, leftists do not stop at a reasonable point of conservation.

Obviously the definition of what is reasonable or not, depends on the economic interests of the moment. Like any conservative, he holds fast to the idea that the theory of Global Warming is only a theory, like the theory of evolution: there are no proofs that God did not create the skeletons of dinosaurs and other species and strew them about, simply in order to confuse the scientists and thereby test their faith. The conservative mentality, heroically inalterable, could never imagine that the oceans might behave progressively, beyond a reasonable level.

9: It takes a village to raise a child. The author denies it: the problem is that leftists have always thought collectively. Since they don’t believe in individualism they trust that children’s education must be carried out in society.

 

In contrast, reactionary thought trusts more in islands, in social autism, than in suspect humanity. According to this reasoning of a medieval aristocrat, a rich man can be rich surrounded by misery, a child can become a moral man and ascend to heaven without contaminating himself with the sin of his society. Society, the masses, only serves to allow the moral man to demonstrate his compassion by donating to the needy what he has left over – and discounting it from his taxes.

8: Children are incapable of handling stress. For which reason they cannot be corrected by their teachers with red ink or cannot confront the cruel parts of history.

The author is correct in observing that seeing what is disagreeable as an infant prepares children for a world that is not pleasant. Nonetheless, some compassionate conservatives exaggerate a little by dressing their children in military uniforms and giving them toys that, even though they only shoot laser lights, look very much like weapons with laser lights that fire something else at similar targets (and at black people).

7: Competition is bad. For the author, no: the fact that some win means that others lose, but this dynamic leads us to greatness.

He does not explain whether there exists here the “reasonable limit” of which he spoke before or whether he is referring to the hated theory of evolution which establishes the survival of the strongest in the savage world. Nor does he clarify to which greatness he refers, whether it is that of the slave on the prosperous cotton plantation or the size of the plantation. He does not take into account, of course, any kind of society based on solidarity and liberated from the neurosis of competition.

6: Health is a civil right. Not for the author: health is part of personal responsibility.

This argument is repeated by those who deny the need for a universal health system and, at the same time, do not propose privatizing the police, and much less the army. Nobody pays the police after calling 911, which is reasonable. If an attacker shoots us in the head, we will not pay anything for his capture, but if we are poor we will end up in bankruptcy so that a team of doctors can save our life. One deduces that, according to this logic, a thief who robs a house represents a social illness, but an epidemic is nothing more than a bunch of irresponsible individuals who do not affect the rest of society. What is never taken into account is that collective solidarity is one of the highest forms of individual responsibility.

5: Wealth is bad. According to the author, leftists want to penalize the success of the wealthy with taxes in order to give their wealth to the federal government so that it can be spent irresponsibly helping out those who are not so successful.

That is to say, workers owe their daily bread to the rich. Earning a living with the sweat of one’s brow is a punishment handed down by those successful people who have no need to work. There is a reason why physical beauty has been historically associated with the changing but always leisurely habits of the aristocracy. There is a reason why in the happy world of Walt Disney there are no workers; happiness is buried in some treasure filled with gold coins. For the same reason, it is necessary to not squander tax monies on education and on health. The millions spent on armies around the world are not a concern, because they are part of the investment that States responsibly make in order to maintain the success of the wealthy and the dream of glory for the poor.

4: There is an unbridled racism that will only be resolved with tolerance. No: leftists see race relations through the prism of pessimism. But race is not important for most of us, just for them.

That is to say, like in the fiction of global warming, if a conservative does not think about something or someone, that something or someone does not exist. De las Casas, Lincoln and Martin Luther King fought against racism ignorantly. If the humanists would stop thinking about the world, we would be happier because others’ suffering would not exist, and there would be no heartless thieves who steal from the compassionate rich.

3: Abortion. In order to avoid personal responsibility, leftists support the idea of murdering the unborn.

The mass murder of the already born is also part of individual responsibility, according to televised right-wing thought, even though sometimes it is called heroism and patriotism. Only when it benefits our island. If we make a mistake when suppressing a people we avoid responsibility by talking about abortion. A double moral transaction based on a double standard morality.

2: Guns are bad. Leftists hate guns and hate those who want to defend themselves. Leftists, in contrast, think that this defense should be done by the State. Once again they do not want to take responsibility for themselves.

That is to say, attackers, underage gang members, students who shoot up high schools, drug traffickers and other members of the syndicate exercise their right to defend their own interests as individuals and as corporations. Nobody distrusts the State and trusts in their own responsibility more than they do. It goes without saying that armies, according to this kind of reasoning, are the main part of that responsible defense carried out by the irresponsible State.

1: Placating evil ensures Peace. Leftists throughout history have wanted to appease the Nazis, dictators and terrorists.

The wisdom of the author does not extend to considering that many leftists have been consciously in favor of violence, and as an example it would be sufficient to remember Ernesto Che Guevara. Even though it might represent the violence of the slave, not the violence of the master. It is true, conservatives have not appeased dictators: at least in Latin America, they have nurtured them. In the end, the latter also have always been members of the Gun Club, and in fact were subject to very good deals in the name of security. Nazis, dictators and terrorists of every kind, with that tendency toward ideological simplification, would also agree with the final bit of reasoning on the list: “leftists do not undertand that sometimes violence is the only solution. Evil exists and should be erradicated.” And, finally: “We will kill it [the Evil], or it will kill us, it is that simple. We will kill Evil, or Evil will kill us; the only thing simpler than this is left-wing thought.”

Word of Power.

 

The official word: criminalize the victim

De mestizo e india, sale coiote (From a Mestiz...

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The official word: criminalize the victim


By Jorge Majfud

Translated by Tony R. Barret

Few weeks ago, just as in the last few centuries, the land claims of rural workers have been brought back up in several spots of Latin America. If it is really true that our own 21st century cannot base its economies exclusively in small farms, it isn’t less true that economic disenfranchisement is still an urgent popular cause in any social or historical progress. I could very well say that that the old Latin American cause didn’t exist in the United States, the paradigm of economic development, etc. But the answer is quite easy: in the United States there were no farm movements nor “liberation movements” because this country wasn’t founded upon the estates of an aristocratic society, as in Latin America, but rather upon an initial distribution infinitely more equitable of colonists that worked for themselves and not for the King or the landholder.

It’s not by chance that the founders of the original United States considered themselves successful in their anti-imperialist, populist, and radically revolutionary projects, whereas our Latin American leaders died embittered when not in exile. As the caudillos of that day used to say, “the laws are respected but not enforced.” And so we had republican and egalitarian constitutions, almost always copies of the American one but with a different twist: reality contradicted them.

In Latin America, we were the laughingstock of a discussion that wasn’t even applied in the developed centers of the world, but rather catered to the creole oligarchy. So violent was this moralization that when the Bolivian and Peruvian Indians systematically burned out at age 30 because of the animal jobs they had to do, sometimes with another’s pride and almost always with self-reluctance, they were unfailingly called “bums” or “idiots.”

That feudal system (typical of so many Latin American countries that included pawns for free almost, or the “pongueo” system that impeded farming and industrial development) existed in the southern United States. But it was defeated by the progressivist forces of the North. Not in Latin America. This structure of our continent, vertical and aristocratic, served up its own self-exploitation and its own underdevelopment and benefited the world powers taking their turns, who were not foolish enough to sustain moralist discourses about the old aristocracy. Meanwhile, our “heroic” oligarchy squandered the demoralizing debate toward those who claimed more social and economic equity. According to this discourse accepted unanimously by the slaves themselves, those who were opposed to the landholding estate Order were idlers that wanted to live off the State, as if the oligarchy didn’t help itself to the violence of this State to sustain its privileges and interests, almost always supporting dictatorships on call that they meaningfully called “saviors” and then they “combated” in the discourse to present themselves as the eternal “saviors of the country” and to reinstall the same aristocratic status quo, the very reason for the historical setbacks of our societies. Thus, business was twofold but insatisfaction was also twofold: both those at the bottom and those at the top agreed on something: “things in this country don’t work” or “no one can save this country, etc.” But on reforms, nothing.

Jorge Majfud

The University of Georgia, March 2007

Translator: Tony R. Barrett

¿Para qué sirve la literatura? (II)

xarranca - rayuela (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,le ciel)

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¿Para qué sirve la literatura? (I)

What good is literature? (II) (English)

À quoi sert la littérature ? (French)

¿Para qué sirve la literatura? (II)

Cada tanto algún político, algún burócrata, algún inteligente inversor resuelve estrangular las humanidades con algún recorte en la educación, en algún ministerio de cultura o simplemente descargando toda la fuerza del mercado sobre las atareadas fábricas de sensibilidades prefabricadas.

Mucho más sinceros son los sepultureros que nos miran a los ojos y, con amargura o simple resentimiento, nos arrojan en la cara sus convicciones como si fueran una sola pregunta: ¿para qué sirve la literatura?

Unos esgrimen este tipo de instrumentos no como duda filosófica sino como una pala mecánica que lentamente ensancha una tumba llena de cadáveres vivos.

Los sepultureros son viejos conocidos. Viven o hacen que viven pero siempre están aferrados al trono de turno. Arriba o abajo van repitiendo con voces de muertos supersticiones utilitarias sobre el progreso y la necesidad.

Responder sobre la inutilidad de la literatura depende de lo que entendamos por utilidad, no por literatura. ¿Es útil el epitafio, la lápida labrada, el maquillaje, el sexo con amor, la despedida, el llanto, la risa, el café? ¿Es útil el fútbol, los programas de televisión, las fotografías que se trafican las redes sociales, las carreras de caballos, el whisky, los diamantes, las treinta monedas de Judas y el arrepentimiento?

Son muy pocos los que se preguntan seriamente para qué sirve el fútbol o la codicia de Madoff. No son pocos (o no han tenido suficiente tiempo) los que preguntan o sentencian ¿para qué sirve la literatura? El futbol es, en el mejor de los casos, inocente. No pocas veces ha sido cómplice de titiriteros y sepultureros.

La literatura, cuando no ha sido cómplice del titiritero, ha sido literatura. Sus detractores no se refieren al respetable negocio de los best sellers de emociones prefabricadas. Nunca nadie ha preguntado con tanta insistencia ¿para qué sirve un buen negocio? A los detractores de la literatura, en el fondo, no les preocupa ese tipo de literatura. Les preocupa otra cosa. Les preocupa la literatura.

Los mejores atletas olímpicos han demostrado hasta dónde puede llegar el cuerpo humano. Los corredores de Formula Uno también, aunque valiéndose de algunos artificios. Lo mismo los astronautas que pisaron la Luna, la pala que construye y destruye. Los grandes escritores a lo largo de la historia han demostrado hasta dónde puede llegar la experiencia humana, la verdaderamente importante, la experiencia emocional; el vértigo de las ideas y la múltiple profundidad de las emociones.

Para los sepultureros sólo la pala es útil. Para los vivos muertos, también.

Para los demás que no han olvidado su condición de seres humanos y se atreven a ir más allá de los estrechos límites de su propia experiencia, para los condenados que deambulan por las fosas comunes pero han recuperado la pasión y la dignidad de los seres humanos, para ellos, es la literatura.

Jorge Majfud

La Republica (Uruguay)

Milenio (Mexico)

El diario (Bolivia)

¿Para qué sirve la literatura? (I)

Why the name of Latin America?

Latin America (orthographic projection)

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What does “Latin America” mean?

Why the name of Latin America?

By Jorge Majfud

The essentialist component of the ancestral search for identity as part of nationalistic projects – which kept intellectuals busy for such a long time, being Octavio Paz one of them- has not completely disappeared or has become a commercial relation of struggling signs in a new global context. And as usual, reality is a byproduct of mistakes of their own representations.

What does “Latin” mean? For many years, the typical Latin American – which is another way to say “the stereotypical Latin American” – has been represented by the indigenous person of Aztec, Maya, Inca, or Quechua origin, who preserves their ancestral traditions and mixes them with the Catholic rites. It was the Castilian language and the violence of colonization what these peoples had in common. However, to European and North American eyes, and even to their own eyes, they were monolithically defined as “Latin Americans”. Those who lived in the region of Río de la Plata were called by Anglo Saxons “Southern Europeans”.

If we go back to the ethimology of the Latin word, we will find a great contradiction in this former identification: none of the indigenous cultures found by the Spaniards in the new continent was related with Latin. On the contrary, other regions further south lacked this ethnic and cultural component. The greatest part of their population and culture came from Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal.

In Valiente Mundo Nuevo (Brave New World), Carlos Fuentes says: “We are in the first place a multiracial, policultural continent. For this reason, the term “Latin American”, invented by the French in the 18th century to include themselves in the American territory, is not employed. The most complete description is used instead: Indo-Afro-Iberian-America. But in any case, the Indian and the African components are present, implicit.”

To this objection of the Mexican essayist, Koen de Munter gives an answer of the same kind, observing that the indigenistic discourse has become fashionable as long as it refers to the defense of certain politically harmless, folkloric groups, so as to forget the very many people who massively migrate to cities and blend in a sort of compulsory mixed race groups. This mixed race thing, in countries like Mexico, would only be the central metaphor of a national project that began in the 90s as such. This source believes that we were lucky to be colonized by the Spanish and not by the English, which gave place to this mixed race in the continent. But Koen de Munter understands this discourse as being part some Hispanophile demagogy, a “mixed race ideology” as a result of which the unacceptable conditions of the current Latin American reality are overlooked. According to the author himself, Hispanophile makes these intellectuals forget about the colonial racism of the Spain that fought the Moors and the Jews as they made their way into new continent. In short, rather than mixed races, we should talk about “multiple violation”.

Maybe because the term that had been suggested was too long, Carlos Fuentes decided to use “Iberian America”, being this, in my view, more specific than the one “interestedly” suggested by the French, since it excludes not only the French migration waves to the southern hemisphere and to other regions of the continent in question; it also excludes other immigrants, more numerous and as Latin as the Iberian peoples: the Italians. It would be enough to remember that, by the end of the 19th century, eighty percent of the Buenos Aires population was Italian, as a result of which someone defined the Argentineans –again generalizing- as “Spanish speaking Italians”.

On the other hand, the idea of including the indigenous component (“Indo”) together with the name “America” implies that they are two different things. Similarly lucky has been the prudorous and “politically correct” reference “Afro-American” to refer to a dark- skinned North American who is as African as Clint Eastwood or Kim Basinger. We could think that the indigenous peoples are the ones to vindicate the denomination of “Americans”, but the term has been colonized as the earth, physical space, and cultural space were. Even today, when we say “American” we refer to the people from a specific country: The United States of America. As to this term, it is as important to define what it means as it is to define what it does not mean. And this definition of the semantic frontiers is not only derived from its ethimology, but from a semantic dispute in which the exclusion of all the non- North American has won. A Cuban or a Brazilian could provide a long list of reasons why they too should be called “Americans”, but the definition of this term is not established based on the intellectual will of some, but on the power of cultural and intercultural tradition. Although the first creoles who lived south to the Rio Grand, from Mexico to the Rio de la Plata, called themselves “Americans”, the geopolitical power of the United States grabbed this term, forcing the rest to use an adjective in order to differentiate themselves.

This simplification may also be the result of the predomination of the other´s perspective: the European. Not only Europe and the United States have been historically self-centered and self-loving, but also the colonized peoples have. Few in America, with no important ideological influence, have looked at and studied the indigenous cultures as they have done with the European. That is, our simplified and simplifying definitions of “Latin America” may be the result of the natural confusion that the other´s look projects: all Indians are the same: Mayas, Aztecs, Incas, and Guaranies. Only in today´s Mexican territory, there was – and is- a wide spectrum of cultures that only our ignorance can confuse and group in the term “indigenous”. These differences were usually discussed by going to war or by sacrificing the other.

Anyway, even if Latin America is considered a prolongation of the West (as extreme West), their names and identities have represented a negation, mainly since the 19th century. In July, 1946, Jorge Luis Borges observed, in Sur (South) magazine, this same cultural habit restricted to Argentineans. Nationalists, “however, ignore the Argentineans; they `refer to define them in ways of some external fact, as the Spanish conquerors (let us say) or some imaginary Catholic or Anglo Saxon imperialist tradition.”

Latin American republics were successive literary inventions of the intellectual élite of the 19th century. Defining, prescribing, and naming are not minor details. But reality also exists, and it never completely adapted to their definitions, despite the fertile imagination of violence. The difference between the Conception and the reality of the people were sometimes as big as injustices, exclusions, and violent revolts and rebellions dating back from centuries, which never reached the category of revolutions. What is represented remains weaker than its Representation.

Translated by Cubanow

February 22, 2008

¿Cuál es el nombre de América Latina?

Jorge Luis Borges, escritor argentino

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Why the name of Latin America? (English)

¿Cuál es el nombre de América Latina?

El componente escencialista de la antigua búsqueda de la identidad como parte de diferentes proyectos nacionalistas —y que ocupó tanto tiempo a intelectuales como Octavio Paz—, no ha desaparecido completamente o se ha transmutado en una relación comercial de signos en lucha, en un nuevo contexto global. Y como siempre la realidad es un subproducto de equívocos de sus propias representaciones.

¿Qué significa «latino»? Por años, el latinoamericano típico —que es otra forma de decir «el latinoamericano estereotípico»— fue representado por el indígena de origen azteca, maya, inca o quechua que conservaba sus tradiciones ancestrales mezclándolas con los ritos católicos. Lo que tenían en común estos pueblos era la lengua castellana y la violencia común de la colonización. Sin embargo, todos, a los ojos europeos, norteamericanos e, incluso, ante sus propios ojos, eran definidos monolíticamente como «latinoamericanos». A los habitantes de la región del Río de la Plata se los llamaba, por parte de los anglosajones, «los europeos del Sur».

Si volvemos a la etimología de la palabra latina, veremos una fuerte contradicción en esta identificación anterior: ninguna de las culturas indígenas que encontraron los españoles en el nuevo continente tenían algo de «latino». Por el contrario, otras regiones más al sur carecían de este componente étnico y cultural. En su casi totalidad, su población y su cultura procedía de Italia, de Francia, de España y de Portugal.

En Valiente mundo nuevo, Carlos Fuentes nos dice: «Lo primero es que somos un continente multirracial y policultural. De ahí que a lo largo de este libro no se emplee la denominación ‘América Latina’, inventada por los franceses en el siglo XIX para incluirse en el conjunto americano, sino la descripción más completa Indo-Afro-Ibero-América. Pero en todo caso, el componente indio y africano está presente, implícito».

A esta objeción del ensayista mexicano, Koen de Munter responde con la misma piedra, observando que el discurso indigenista ha pasado a ser una moda, siempre y cuando se refiera a la defensa de pequeños grupos, políticamente inofensivos, folklóricos, de forma de olvidar las grandes masas que migran a las ciudades y se mimetizan en una especie de mestizaje obligatorio. Este mestizaje, en países como México, sería sólo la metáfora central de un proyecto nacional, principalmente desde los años noventa. Fuentes que sostiene que afortunadamente fuimos una colonia española y no inglesa, lo que permitió un «mestizaje» en el continente. Pero Koen de Munter entiende este tipo de discurso como parte una demagogia «hispanófila», de una «ideología del mestizaje» por la cual se soslayan las condiciones inaceptables de la actual realidad latinoamericana. Según el mismo autor, la hispanofilia de estos intelectuales no les permite recordar el racismo colonial de la España que luchó contra moros y judíos al tiempo que se abría camino en el nuevo continente. En resumen, más que mestizaje deberíamos hablar de una «multiple violation».

Al parecer porque el término propuesto era demasiado largo, Carlos Fuentes se decide por usar «Iberoamérica», siendo éste, a mi juicio, mucho más restrictivo que el propuesto «interesadamente» por los franceses, ya que se excluye no sólo a las oleadas de inmigración francesa en el Cono Sur y en otras regiones del continente en cuestión, sino a otros inmigrantes aún más numerosos y tan latinos como los pueblos ibéricos, como lo fueron los italianos. Bastaría con recordar que a finales del siglo XIX el ochenta por ciento de la población de Buenos Aires era italiana, motivo por el cual alguien definió a los argentinos —procediendo con otra generalización— como «italianos que hablan español».

Por otra parte, la idea de incluir en una sola denominación el componente indígena («Indo») junto con el nombre «América» nos sugiere que son dos cosas distintas. Semejante, es la suerte de la pudorosa y «políticamente correcta» referencia racial «afroamericano» para referirse a un norteamericano de piel oscura que tiene tanto de africano como Clint Eastwood o Kim Basinger. Podríamos pensar que los pueblos indígenas son los que más derecho tienen a revindicar la denominación de «americanos», pero se ha colonizado el término como se colonizó la tierra, el espacio físico y cultural. Incluso cuando hoy en día decimos «americano» nos referimos a una única nacionalidad: la estadounidense. Para el significado de este término, tan importante es la definición de lo que significa como de lo que no significa. Y esta definición de las fronteras semánticas no deriva simplemente de su etimología sino de una disputa semántica en la cual ha vencido la exclusión de aquello que no es estadounidense. Un cubano o un brasileño podrán argumentar fatigosamente sobre las razones por las cuales se les debe llamar a ellos también «americanos», pero la redefinición de este término no se establece por la voluntad intelectual de algunos sino por la fuerza de una tradición cultural e intercultural. Si bien los primeros criollos que habitaban al sur del río Grande, desde México hasta el Río de la Plata se llamaban a sí mismos «americanos», luego la fuerza de la geopolítica de Estados Unidos se apropió del término, obligando al resto a usar un adjetivo para diferenciarse.

Es posible, también, que esta simplificación se deba al predominio de la perspectiva del otro: la europea. Europa, como Estados Unidos, no sólo ha sido históricamente egocéntrica y egolátrica sino también los pueblos colonizados lo han sido. Pocos en América, sin una carga ideológica importante, han estimado y han estudiado las culturas indígenas tanto como la europea. Es decir, es posible que nuestras definiciones simplificadas y simplificadoras de «América Latina» se deban a la natural confusión que proyecta siempre la mirada del otro: todos los indios son iguales: los mayas, los aztecas, los incas y los guaraníes. Sólo en lo que hoy es México, existía —y existe— un mosaico cultural que sólo nuestra ignorancia confunde y agrupa bajo la palabra «indígena». Con frecuencia, estas diferencias se resolvían en la guerra o en el sacrificio del otro.

De cualquier forma, aún considerando América Latina como una prolongación de Occidente (como extremo Occidente), sus nombres y sus identidades han estado, principalmente desde mediados del siglo XIX, en función de una negación. En julio de 1946, Jorge Luis Borges observaba, en la revista Sur, este mismo hábito cultural restringido a los argentinos. Los nacionalistas «ignoran, sin embargo, a los argentinos; en la polémica prefieren definirlos en función a algún hecho externo; de los conquistadores españoles (digamos) o de alguna imaginaria tradición católica o del imperialismo sajón».

Las repúblicas latinoamericanas fueron sucesivos inventos literarios de la elite intelectual del siglo XIX. Definir, prescribir y nombrar no son detalles menores. Pero la realidad también existe y ésta nunca se adaptó del todo a sus definiciones, a pesar de la violencia de la imaginación. La diferencia entre la concepción y la realidad del pueblo muchas veces tuvo el tamaño de centenarias injusticias, exclusiones y violentas revueltas y rebeliones que nunca llegaron a la categoría de revoluciones. Lo representado sigue siendo más débil que su representación.

The Fragments of the Latin American Union

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Los fragmentos de la desunión latinoamericana (Spanish)

The Past Hurts But Does Not Condemn

The Fragments of the Latin American Union

Jorge Majfud

Lincoln University

1.

In Latin America, in the absence of a social revolution at the moment of national independence there were plenty of rebellions and political revolts. Less frequently these were popular rebellions and almost never were they ideological revolutions that shook the traditional structures, as was the case with the North American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Cuban Revolution. Instead, internal struggles abounded, before and after the birth of the new Republics.

A half century later, in 1866, the Ecuadorian Juan Montalvo would make a dramatic diagnosis: “freedom and fatherland in Latin America are the sheep’s clothing with which the wolf disguises himself.” When the republics were not at war they enjoyed the peace of the oppressors. Even though slavery had been abolished in the new republics, it existed de facto and was almost as brutal as in the giant to the north. Class violence was also racial violence: the indigenous continued to be marginalized and exploited. “This has been the peace of the jail cell,” conclued Montalvo. The indian, deformed by this physical and moral violence, would receive the most brutal physical punishments but “when they give him the whip, trembling on the ground, he gets up thanking his tormenter: May God reward you, sir.” Meanwhile, the Puerto Rican Eligenio M. Hostos in 1870 would already lament that “there is still no South American Confederation.” On the contrary, he only saw disunion and new empires oppressing and threatening: “An empire [Germany] can still move deliberately against Mexico! Another empire [Great Britain/Brazil] can still wreck Paraguay with impunity!”

But the monolithic admiration for central Europe, like that of Sarmiento, also begins to fall apart at the end of the 19th century: “Europe is no happier, and has nothing to throw in our face with regard to calamities and misfortunes” (Montalvo). “The most civilized nations—Montalvo continues—, those whose intelligence has reached the sky itself and whose practices walk in step with morality, do not renounce war: their breasts are always burning, their jealous hearts leap with the drive for extermination.” The Paraguay massacre results from muscular reasoning within the continent, and another American empire of the period is no exception to this way of seeing: “Brazil trades in human flesh, buying and selling slaves, in order to bow to its adversary and provide its share of the rationale.” The old accusation of imperial Spain is now launched against the other colonialist forces of the period. France and England – and by extension Germany and Russia – are seen as hypocrites in their discourse: “the one has armies for subjugating the world, and only in this way believes in peace; the other extends itself over the seas, takes control of the straits, dominates the most important fortresses on earth, and only in this way believes in peace.” In 1883, he also points out the ethical contradictions of the United States, “where the customs counteract the laws; where the latter call the blacks to the Senate, and the former drive them out of the restaurants.” (Montalvo himself avoids passing through the United States on his trip to Europe out of “fear of being treated like a Brazilian, and that resentment might instill hatred in my breast,” since “in the most democratic country in the world it is necessary to be thoroughly blonde in order to be a legitimate person.”)

Nonetheless, even though practice always tends to contradict ethical principles—it is not by accident that the most basic moral laws are always prohibitions—the unstoppable wave of humanist utopia continued to be imposed step by step, like the principal of union in equality, or the “fusion of the races in one civilization.” The same Iberoamerican history is understood in this universal process “to unite all the races in labor, in liberty, in equality and in justice.” When the union is achieved, “then the continent will be called Colombia” (Hostos). For José Martí as well, history was directed inevitably toward union. In “La América” (1883) he foresaw a “new accommodation of the national forces of the world, always in movement, and now accelerated, the necessary and majestic grouping of all the members of the American national family.” From the utopia of the union of nations, project of European humanism, it comes to be a Latin American commonplace: the fusion of the races in a kind of perfect mestizaje. The empires of Europe and the United States rejected for such a project, the New World would be “the oven where all the races must be melted, where they are being melted” (Hostos). In 1891, an optimistic Martí writes in New York that in Cuba “there is no race hatred because there are no races” even though this more of an aspiration than a reality. During the period advertisements were still published in the daily newspapers selling slaves alongside horses and other domesticated animals.

In any case, this relationship between oppressors and oppressed can not be reduced to Europeans and Amerindians. The indigenous people of the Andes, for example, also had spent their days scratching at the earth in search of gold to pay tribute to those sent by the Inca and numerous Mesoamerican tribes had to suffer the oppression of an empire like the Aztec. During most of the life of the Iberoamerican republics, the abuse of class, race and sex was part of the organization of society. International logic is reproduced in the domestic dynamic. To put it in the words of the Bolivian Alcides Arguedas in 1909, “when a boss has two or more pongos [unsalaried worker], he keeps one and rents out the others, as if it were simply a matter of a horse or a dog, with the small difference that the dog and the horse are lodged in a wood hut or in a stable and both are fed; the pongo is left to sleep in the doorway and to feed on scraps.” Meanwhile the soldiers would take the indians by the hair and beating them with their sabres carry them off to clean the barracks or would steal their sheep in order to maintain an army troop as it passed through. In the face of these realities, utopian humanists seemed like frauds. Frantz Tamayo, in 1910 declares, “imagine for a moment the Roman empire or the British empire having national altruism as it foundation and as its ideal. […] Altuism! Truth! Justice! Who practices these with Bolivia? Speak of altruism in England, the country of wise conquest, and in the United States, the country of the voracious monopolies!” According to Angel Rama (1982), modernization was also exercised principally “through a rigid hierarchical system.” That is to say, it was a process similar to that of the Conquest and the Independence. In order to legitimate the system, “an aristocratic pattern was applied which has been the most vigorous shaper of Latin American cultures throughout their history.”

Was our history really any different from these calamities during the military dictatorships of the end of the 20th century? Now, does this mean that we are condemned by a past that repeats itself periodically as if it were the a novelty each time?

2.

Let us respond with a different problem. The popular psychoanalytic tradition of the 20th century made us believe that the individual is always, in some way and in some degree, hostage to a past. Less rooted in popular consciousness, the French existentialists reacted by proposing that in reality we are condemned to be free. That is, in each moment we have to choose, there is no other way. In my opinion, both dimensions are possible in a human being: on the one hand we are conditioned by a past but not determined by it. But if we pay paranoid tribute to that past believing that all of our present and our future is owed to those traumas, we are reproducing a cultural illness: “I am unhappy because my parents are to blame.” Or, “I can’t be happy because my husband oppressed me.” But where is the sense of freedom and of responsibility? Why is it not better to say that “I have not been happy or I have these problems because, above all, I myself have not taken responsibility for my problems”? Thus arises the idea of the passive victim and instead of fighting in a principled way against evils like machismo one turns to the crutch in order to justify why this woman or that other one has been unhappy. “Am I sick? The fault is with the machismo of this society.” Etc.

Perhaps it goes without saying that being human is neither only biology nor only psychology: we are constructed by a history, the history of humanity that creates us as subjects. The individual—the nation—can recognize the influence of context and of their history and at the same time their own freedom as potential which, no matter how minimal and conditioned it might be, is capable of radically changing the course of a life. Which is to say, an individual, a nation that would reject outright any representation of itself as a victim, as a potted plant or as a flag that waves in the wind.

Translated by Bruce Campbell

Intelectuales argentinos se oponen a que Vargas Llosa inicie feria

Mario Vargas Llosa, Miami Book Fair Internatio...

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Intelectuales cercanos a la presidenta argentina, Cristina Fernández, rechazaron el martes que el peruano Mario Vargas Llosa, premio Nobel de Literatura en 2010, sea quien inaugure la Feria Internacional del Libro de Buenos Aires, al acusarlo de liberal autoritario.

«Me gustaría que en la inauguración de la Feria del Libro no estuviera presente. Su liberalismo lo expresa de una manera tajante y hasta diría que, si me permite la paradoja, autoritaria también», dijo el director de la Biblioteca Nacional, Horacio González, en declaraciones a la prensa.

En cambio, la postura del Gobierno fue expresada por el secretario de Cultura, Jorge Coscia, quien dijo que de ninguna manera se intentará prohibir el discurso de Vargas Llosa.

Pero Coscia coincidió en considerarlo «un reaccionario (…), enemigo de las industrias culturales (…) y funcional a un sistema de dependencia cultural en Latinoamérica».

«Me parece válido que los intelectuales tomen partido. En lo que no estoy de acuerdo es en la prohibición», señaló el funcionario a Radio del Plata.

Aurelio Narvaja, de Ediciones Colihue, también solicitó que se rectifique la decisión de invitar al autor de «Conversación en la Catedral» para la apertura de la Feria el 20 de abril, y que durará hasta el 9 de mayo.

En una carta dirigida a los organizadores, Narvaja consideró a Vargas Llosa «un extraordinario escritor y muy merecido Nobel» pero afirmó que su presencia sería «un grave error que desvirtúa la tradición de la Feria».

«Es un propagandista, ostensible y florido, de las ideas y las políticas de la derecha liberal y como tal ha dicho las peores cosas de nuestro gobierno», agregó.

El filósofo y escritor José Pablo Feinmann dijo que le produjo «una enorme indignación que Vargas Llosa venga a abrir la feria después de lo que dijo sobre la Argentina».

El Premio Nobel había dicho al diario italiano Corriere della Sera que «Cristina Fernández es un desastre total. Argentina está conociendo la peor forma de peronismo, populismo y anarquía. Temo que sea un país incurable».

Los intelectuales están elaborando una solicitada para expresar un común rechazo a Vargas Llosa, invitado por la Fundación El Libro para la inauguración cultural de la 37 edición de la Feria.

El autor de «El sueño del celta» había señalado al diario El País de Madrid que Kirchner y su extinto marido, el ex presidente Néstor Kirchner, son «capitalistas ejemplares que (…) consiguieron multiplicar siete veces su capital».

El escritor peruano dijo una vez a la radio argentina La Red que «no es posible que Argentina, con lo que representa desde el punto de vista cultural, elija un presidente de esos niveles de incultura y de pobreza intelectual».

La Feria tendrá por primera vez dos aperturas, la oficial el 20 de abril, con presencia de Kirchner, y al día siguiente la apertura cultural.

El filósofo y profesor de la Universidad de Buenos Aires Ricardo Forster, miembro junto con González del Grupo Carta Abierta, afín al Gobierno, opinó que le parece «desafortunada la decisión de que sea él quién inaugure la Feria».

Vargas Llosa «tiene una mirada política que ha venido expresando con mucha intensidad. Una mirada del mundo muy destemplada, muy poco abierta y muy poco diversa para quienes no piensan como él», dijo Forster.

Fuente: AFP

Eduardo Galeano: The Open Eyes of Latin America

Cover of "Mirrors: Stories of Almost Ever...

Cover of Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone

 

Eduardo Galeano:

The Open Eyes of Latin America


On Mirrors, Stories of Almost Everyone

Jorge Majfud

Lincoln University

There are very few cases of writers who maintain total indifference toward the ethics of their work. There are not so few who have understood that in the practice of literature it is possible to separate ethics from aesthetics. Jorge Luis Borges, not without mastery, practiced a kind of politics of aesthetic neutrality and was perhaps convinced this was possible. Thus, the universalism of Borges’ precocious postmodernism was nothing more than the very eurocentrism of the Modern Age nuanced with the exoticism proper to an empire that, much like the British empire, held closely to the old decadent nostalgia for the mysteries of a colonized India and for Arabian nights removed from the dangers of history. It was not recognition of diversity—of equal freedom—but confirmation of the superiority of the European canon adorned with the souvenirs and booty of war.

Perhaps there was a time in which truth, ethics and aesthetics were one and the same. Perhaps those were the times of myth. This also has been characteristic of what we call committed literature. Not a literature made for politics but an integral literature, where the text and the author, ethics and aesthetics, go together; where literature and metaliterarure are the same thing. The marketing thought of postmodernity has been different, strategically fragmented without possible connections. Legitimated by this cultural fashion, critics of the establishment dedicated themselves to rejecting any political, ethical or epistemological value for a literary text. For this kind of superstition, the author, the author’s context, the author’s prejudices and the prejudices of the readers remained outside the pure text, distilled from all human contamination. But, what would remain of a text is we took away from it all of its metaliterary qualities? Why must marble, velvet or sex repeated until void of meaning be more literary than eroticism, a social drama or the struggle for historical truth? Rodolfo Walsh said that a typewriter could be a fan or a pistol. Has this fragmentation and later distillation not been a critical strategy for turning writing into an innocent game, into more of a tranquilizer than an instrument of inquiry against the musculature of power?

In his new book, Eduardo Galeano responds to these questions with unmistakable style—Borges would recognize: with kind contempt—without concerning himself with them. Like his previous books, since Days and Nights of Love and War (1978), Mirrors is organized with the postmodern fragmentation of the brief capsule narrative. Nevertheless the entire book, like the rest of his work, evinces an unbreakable unity. His aesthetics and his ethical convictions as well. Even in the midst of the most violent ideological storms that shook recent history, this ship has not broken up.

Mirrors expands to other continents from the geographical area of Latin America that had characterized for decades Eduardo Galeano’s main interest. His narrative technique is the same as in the trilogy Memory of Fire (1982-1986): with an impersonal narrator who fulfills the purpose of approaching the anonymous and plural voice of “the others” and avoiding personal anecdote, with a thematic order at times and almost always with a chronological order, the book begins with the cosmogonic myths and culminates in our times. Each brief text is an ethical reflection, almost always revealing a painful reality and with the invaluable consolation of a beautiful narration. Perhaps the principle of Greek tragedy is none other than this: lesson and commotion, hope and resignation or the greater lesson of failure. As in his previous books, the paradigm of the committed Latin American writer, and above all the paradigm of Eduardo Galeano, seems to be reconstructed once again: history can progress, but that ethical-aesthetical progress has mythical origin for its utopian destination and memory and awareness of oppression for its instruments. Progress consists of regeneration, of the recreation of humanity in the same manner as the wisest, most just and most vulnerable of the Amerindian gods, the man-god Quetzalcóatl, would have done it.

If we were to remove the ethical code with which each text is read, Mirrors would shatter into brilliant fragments; but it would reflect nothing. If we were to remove the aesthetic mastery with which this book was written it would cease to be memorable. Like myths, like the mythical thought redeemed by the author, there is no way of separating one part from the whole without altering the sacred order of the cosmos. Each part is not only an alienated fragment but a tiny object that has been unearthed by a principled archeologist. The tiny object is valuable in its own right, but much is more valuable due to the other fragments that have been organized around it, and these latter become even more valuable due to those fragments that have been lost and that are now revealed in the empty spaces that have been formed, revealing an urn, an entire civilization buried by wind and barbarism.

The first law of the narrator, to not be boring, is respected. The first law of the committed intellectual as well: never does entertainment become a narcotic instead of a lucid aesthetic pleasure.

Mirrors has been published this year simultaneously in Spain, Mexico, and Argentina by Siglo XXI, and in Uruguay by Ediciones del Chanchito. The latter continues an already classic collection of black cover books which has reached number 15, represented meaningfully with the Spanish letter ñ. The texts are accompanied with illustrations in the manner of little vignettes that recall the careful art of book publishing in the Renaissance, in addition to the author’s drawings as a young man. Even though his conception of the world leads him to think structurally, it is difficult to imagine Eduardo Galeano skipping over any detail. Like a good jeweler of the word who polishes in search of every one of his different reflections, he is equally careful in the publication of his books as works of art. The English edition, Mirrors, Stories of Almost Everyone, translated by Mark Fried, will be published by Nation Books.

With each new contribution, this icon of Latin American literature confirms for us that additional formal prizes, like the Cervantes Prize, should not be long in coming.

Translated by Bruce Campbell

Hacia una mundialización humanista

Averroes

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Hacia una mundialización humanista o La conciencia ética de nuestro tiempo

 

Jorge Majfud
(University of Georgia)

Montiel, Edgar (coordinador): Hacia una mundialización humanista. París,  Ediciones UNESCO, 2003.Hacia una mundialización humanista o La conciencia ética de nuestro tiempo

“Mientras una civilización ejerza sobre otras una presión política, intelectual y moral basada en aquello que la naturaleza y la historia le han concedido, no podrá haber esperanza de paz para la humanidad”
Alpha Oumar Konaré, presidente de la República de Malí (UNESCO, 1997, Hacia una mundialización, 18).

Resumen

Durante el siglo XIX, el siglo de las independencias políticas y las creaciones de los nuevos estados, comienza a gestarse la “lucha por la identidad” en América Latina. Esta fue, en gran medida, una lucha dialéctica. Un ejemplo de este conflicto podemos apreciar en la disputa que mantuvieron Juan Bautista Alberdi y Faustino Domingo Sarmiento en el Cono Sur. Alberdi, en oposición a Sarmiento, no creía en la educación —basada en antiguos modelos de erudición y repetición— como base para el progreso material sino que atribuía mayor importancia al desarrollo empírico de las industrias manufactureras y de la agricultura. Para contestar a las tesis de su adversario dialéctico, Alberdi practicará una precoz decontrucción de Facundo, negándole a su propio autor la autoridad de administrar los posibles significados de su texto. Entendido así, el texto no es la expresión final de un “revealed logos” de otra realidad sino parte misma de ese logos sin revelar. Tanto Alberdi como Sarmiento parecen atrapados en el logocentrismo de la Modernidad. Sin embargo, el primero revela destellos de un pensamiento opuesto y “posmoderno” cuando, más allá de un eclecticismo filosófico, advierte (en 1842) la particularidad temporal y geográfica de toda filosofía. Al mismo tiempo, entiende lo que futuros análisis marxistas entenderán de la dinámica económica y social de la historia, en oposición a la visión metafísica o “moralista” de Sarmiento (tan común a principios del siglo XXI). Pese a todas estas discrepancias, coincidieron en su admiración por la Europa anglosajona y los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica. Ambos fueron liberales y progresistas, como la mayoría de los intelectuales de su época. Con la agonía del siglo XIX, no sólo se renovará el sentimiento bolivariano de frustración, sino que los intelectuales más leídos y escuchados de América Latina abandonarán los sueños liberales redefiniendo el campo semántico de este término hasta asociarlo a su antiguo antónimo: conservador. Las admiraciones iniciales se convertirán en reproches y el amor en odio. Será otra la realidad —otras las lecturas.

Palabras clave: Sarmiento, Alberdi, identidad América Latina, lucha dialéctica, Campos semánticos, liberalismo, desarrollo.

Abstract

During the 19th century, known as the century of political independence and the creation of new states, the Latin American “struggle for identity” begins to brew. This was to a great extent, a dialectical struggle. We can observe an example of this conflict in the argument that Juan Bautista Alberdi and Faustino Domingo Sarmiento held in the Southern Cone. Alberdi, as opposed to Sarmiento, didn’t believe in education based on outdated models of scholarship and learning as a basis for material progress but rather, he attached more importance to the empirical development of manufacturing industries and agriculture. In order to respond to the thesis of his dialectical adversary, Alberdi would perform a precocious deconstruction of Facundo, denying his own self the authority to administrate all of the possible meanings of his text. Understood in this fashion, the text is not the final expression of an absolute truth or a logos revelado of another reality but rather the part itself of that “logos without revealing”. Alberdi as well as Sarmiento seem trapped in their own modernistic logocentrism. However, the former reveals the glints of an opposing and “postmodern” thought when, beyond any philosophical eclecticism, he pointed out (in 1842) the temporal and geographical peculiarities of all philosophy. At the same time, he understands that future Marxist analyses will know about the social and economic dynamics of history, as opposed to the “moralistic” or metaphysical view held by Sarmiento (quite common at the beginning of the 21st century). Despite all these discrepancies, they agreed on their admiration for the United States of America and Anglo-Saxon Europe. Both were progressive and liberal, like the majority of the intellectuals of their time. With the agony of the 19th century, not only would the Bolivarian sentiment of frustration be renewed, but also the most read and listened to intellectuals of Latin America would abandon their liberal dreams by redefining the semantic field of this term until associating it with it’s old antonym: conservative. The initial praise and admiration would turn into reproaches and love within hate. Other would be the reality —and others would be the works.

Key words: Sarmiento, Alberdi, Latin America identity, dialectic, SFT – Semantic Fields Theory, liberalism, development.

.

Si por algo se caracterizó Occidente en su Edad Moderna fue por la confianza en la inteligencia humana. En sus expresiones más radicales, esta confianza tomó la forma de diferentes utopías, inaugurando así un nuevo diálogo entre el individuo y la sociedad. El siglo XVII se atrevió a imaginar el futuro; con entusiasmo, los más influyentes pensadores renovaron una especie de comunión con la humanidad, después de siglos de dominio eclesiástico, de un pensamiento teológico que despreció las preocupaciones del más acá. En el siglo XIX este espíritu alcanzó la cumbre de su propio optimismo. Acostumbrados a los descubrimientos y a una nueva mecánica de la historia, los nuevos utopistas no sólo imaginaron sociedades perfectas sino que planearon la forma de alcanzarlas en el tiempo más breve posible. Con excepción de unos pocos pensadores, los profetas de la sociedad justa retuvieron a sus seguidores hasta bien entrado el siglo XX, el siglo del pesimismo, del miedo, del triunfo de las revoluciones modernas y de su decepción -el siglo de las deconstrucciones. Apenas comenzado el tercer milenio, los hombres -y ahora también las mujeres- perdieron la costumbre, o el entusiasmo, de imaginar y proyectar sociedades perfectas, revoluciones definitivas que acabasen con la opresión y con la injusticia. Desde entonces, ya no se discute cómo alcanzar la perfección sino cómo salvarse de la catástrofe. Paradójicamente, la urgente idea de “salvar al mundo del caos” atraviesa los discursos del centro y del margen, del opresor y del resistente, de la potencia mundial y del mundo en potencia. Pero quizás no hay perfección ni catástrofe, sino hombres y mujeres luchando por entender sus vidas. A éstos, seguimos llamándolos, después de tantos siglos, pensadores, aunque su significado probablemente se nos escapa tal como lo entendieron ellos, y es de suponer que también existía alguna otra forma de pensamiento que servía al poder, para otros fines.En el año 2003 la UNESCO publicó una colección de textos bajo el título Hacia una mundialización humanista, donde reunió a 23 de estos pensadores, con la particularidad de que la mayoría de ellos pertenecía, de alguna forma, al mundo Iberoamericano, una de las regiones periféricas que aún hoy mantiene con el centro una relación conflictiva de amor y odio, de pertenencia y de exclusión del mismo.El título del libro alude, además, a un par de opuestos que es recurrente en el cuerpo del texto: la mundialización como una agrupación democrática de lo diverso, cuyo mayor gestor sería la política. Concretamente, según François de Bernard, mundialización es la posibilidad de leer diferentes diarios de diferentes partes del mundo el mismo día de su publicación, el conocimiento del cine colombiano o iraní para los europeos, el arte de Malí o el arte joven de China (152). Por otro lado, tenemos el diagnóstico de la actualidad y el nuevo gran tópico negativo que se le opone al primero: la Globalización como un retorno a una economía de subsistencia y a un estado pre-político –post-ético (Prandi 1996, 99)- donde impera la uniformización. Por su parte, Fernando Andach recuerda 1984, de George Orwell, como ejemplo del viejo miedo a la estandarización, y al intelectual uruguayo, José Rodó -opuesto a Sarmiento-, que ya en 1900 advertía de la conquista “utilitarista” del mundo por parte de Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, para Andach, a fines del siglo XIX ya existía una globalización en América Latina, aunque europea en lugar de norteamericana. Sólo por una razón de nostalgia se entendería la “Cruzada del Croissant” (francés) superior a la “macdonalización” del continente (205-224). Claro, aún quedaría por analizar comparativamente la capacidad de una y otra “globalización” para tolerar un amplio espectro ideológico.Dos invitados de lujo inauguran Hacia una mundialización humanista: Ernesto Sábato y Eduardo Galeano[1] . El primero, uno de los escritores latinoamericanos más conmovedores del siglo XX, como desde hace ya muchos años, sólo se limita a una percepción del presente, entre apocalíptica y esperanzada. El segundo, el ya mítico autor de apuntes breves, denuncia la “macdonalización” del mundo y, una vez más, vuelve sus ojos a la historia de los olvidados, cuestionando la ética del valor comercial de los actos humanos. Al igual que más tarde lo hace Francisco Weffort, Galeano defiende la diversidad cultural, amenazada por una globalización de los mercados que no permite una verdadera mundialización de las culturas, más allá de la mera vulgarización de fetiches tradicionales. Una vez más comprobamos cómo, por alguna extraña conciencia, a los pensadores de la periferia que imaginaron la liberación de esta problemática relación con el centro, ni siquiera les alcanzó la ilusión central de que el desarrollo es una consecuencia de la riqueza o son la misma cosa (Gutiérrez, 74-78).Diferentes tópicos atraviesan las páginas de este libro, lo que nos deja la sensación de una gran diversidad dentro de una compacta unidad: la diversidad o la uniformización cultural, la resistencia o la integración al centro, la memoria o el olvido, la globalización o la mundialización, el desarrollo mercantil o el desarrollo humano… A partir de aquí se abrirán varias interrogantes. Como por ejemplo, la emergencia de las alternativas, ¿se postergan por el predominio de una cultura dominante o por la falta de alternativas reales? ¿Todo modelo de mundialización, como dice Melià, “por definición debería ser uno solo”? (112), o es posible una mundialización pluricultural y plurivalente (10), es decir, democrática en un sentido cultural? ¿La globalización (¿cuál?) es un hecho inevitable y, por lo tanto, oponernos a ella es entorpecer su paso fatal? En este caso, ¿qué papel juega la libertad individual y la colectiva? La diversidad cultural, ¿está amenazada por la lógica económica de los mercados, como lo plantea Edwin R. Harvey? (119). Para ello, ¿son necesarias políticas culturales (como propone la UNESCO) o es inútil oponerse a un proceso que, como una gran maquinaria, ya ha trazado su propio camino? ¿Es posible, como lo propone Susana Villavicencio, “cambiar el rumbo y actuar en otro sentido para ‘gobernar la globalización’?” Por otra parte, ¿cualquier planificación cultural es una intervención artificial de este proceso de cambio y, por lo tanto, es reaccionaria? Si ya no hay lugar para los revolucionarios modernos, ¿habrá lugar para los rebeldes? En definitiva, si no logramos responder a estas preguntas -sin equivocarnos- ¿será cierto, como dice Juan Andrés Cardozo, que “en general en América Latina no hemos aprendido a pensar”? (253). ¿Será que somos pobres porque somos Idiotas? (Manual) ¿Será, entonces, que los ricos son necesariamente inteligentes, como tantos genios que conozco?Nos resultaría muy difícil imaginar un tiempo sin cambios. En cada momento de la breve historia de las civilizaciones, han nacido y han muerto símbolos, idiomas y hasta culturas enteras. En cada momento los pueblos produjeron o se apropiaron de una determinada cultura la que, a su vez, siempre fue una mezcla de culturas ajenas. “Nadie se queja de Mozart -dice Francisco Weffort-, sin embargo no es producto de nuestro desarrollo cultural” (36). Como lo confirman Galeano y Weffort, toda cultura es la síntesis de otras. Es decir, podemos ponernos fácilmente de acuerdo sobre la inevitable, necesaria y sagrada “impureza” de toda cultura, como de toda lengua y de toda raza. Por otro lado, sería un trabajo museístico e imposible pretender conservarlas todas al mismo tiempo, negando, implícitamente, el cambio y probablemente también la evolución a estadios de mayor libertad y justicia social. “Asistimos -dice Edgar Montiel- a un replanteo civilizatorio que nos afecta a todos” (10). Una novedosa particularidad de ese replanteo es la carencia de un referente territorial de los símbolos, o de los espacios mismos -como lo plantea Carlos Juan Moneta (134). Carencia territorial que lleva a problematizar la misma palabra “nuestra”, cuando Pablo Guadarrama Gonzáles cita a José Martí, refiriéndose a la enseñanza sobre la cultura inca: “nuestra Grecia es preferible a la Grecia que no es nuestra” (284). La idea de “lo que es nuestro” o “lo que es ajeno” hasta el siglo XX estaba muy ligada a la geografía, a la región. Hoy ha perdido mucho peso y “lo nuestro” -la identidad- está más comprometida con aquello que yo tengo en común con otros, mi proximidad temporal, ideológica, ética, económica y simbólica; no necesariamente con la dimensión espacial. El espacio geográfico ha sido reconstruido por una identidad que dialoga violentamente con su propia disolución, con su propia metamorfosis, ya que sólo se busca una identidad cuando se la ha perdido.En esta lucha simbólica por la identidad -por el poder-, advertimos otro fenómeno reciente. La poderosa irradiación de los símbolos centrales se expande a la periferia al mismo tiempo que las culturas periféricas irrumpen en el centro, traficadas por los nuevos inmigrantes. Edgar Montiel y Patricio Dobreé nos recuerdan que desde la formación de los Estado-Nación (XVIII) se procuró que la cultura coincidiese con lo límites políticos para dar unidad nacional. Ya desde comienzos del siglo XX esta espacialidad se vio trastocada. Hoy el espacio-tiempo de la cultura ha sido modificado drásticamente por los medios de representación y comunicación virtuales (161). Surgen entonces nuevas afinidades sociales y una desterritorialización de la cultura. Lo cual se puede advertir con cierta claridad. Sin embargo, más adelante se recae en la tentación de Umberto Eco de comparar nuestro tiempo con la Edad Media: habría, así, un renacimiento de la cultura de la imagen, regreso a la Edad Media: la era “imagológica” -lo cual no toma en cuenta el actual regreso a la cultura escrita de Internet- entre otras cosas.Por su parte, Fernando Ainsa matiza, con lucidez, entre varios pares de opuestos. Para él, es necesario recuperar aspectos positivos de la dimensión mundializada de la política (que hizo posible la declaración de los derechos humanos, como la fundación de diversos organismos internacionales de solidaridad) y enfrentar la “dictadura neoliberal del mercado” asumiendo la vocación universalista de la historia occidental. Desde siglos precedentes, tanto los liberales como luego los socialistas imaginaron e impulsaron la internacionalización de sus aspiraciones: el libre mercado o la solidaridad humana. Una conciencia de ciudadanía planetaria, en reclamo de los “derechos de los pueblos”, complementaría los anteriores derechos individuales declarados en la Revolución Francesa primero y en 1948 después. En este sentido, también Arturo Andrés Roig menciona la utopía de Alberdi: una organización de justicia internacional que trascienda los conceptos de país o nación (266). Todo lo cual, aunque tímida y temerosamente, comenzamos a ver en los recientes intentos de internacionalizar lo procesos judiciales en persecución de las violaciones a estos derechos. Ahora, cuando Ainsa analiza la tradición de utopías en América Latina hace la distinción entre lo posible y lo absoluto, “en un mundo donde los escombros de las utopías políticas con visibles…” (181-182). En este escenario de “escombros de utopías”, Alejandro Serrano Calderas reflexiona que “el problema de la identidad política del latinoamericano está estrechamente ligado al problema de la legitimidad del poder” (271). En la historia republicana de América Latina la institución ha existido débilmente, como instrumento para facilitar el ejercicio del poder. Debemos pasar de la política como arte del poder a la política como arte del bien común (273). Es, lo que José Luis Gómez-Martínez ha señalado, refiriéndose la América Latina de la “independencia”, como un traspaso fundacional de la opresión española a la opresión de una clase dominante e inconsciente de los beneficios de una verdadera “liberación” (Conferencia).Como proyecto esperanzador, nos dice Ainsa, la utopía debe seguir preconizando un pensamiento de ruptura, al tiempo que debe sospechar de los poderes establecidos y de las ortodoxias ideológicas (183). En nuestro tiempo -se asume- esa ortodoxia es la neoliberal. No por lo que tiene de teoría cerrada sino por su carácter fatalista que la confunde con un orden natural. Según Hugo Biagini, esta ideología se presenta a sí misma como espontánea e inevitable, basada en leyes inmutables (229). Por otro lado, no existe razón alguna para aceptar un nuevo cambio y un nuevo orden renunciando a una participación más justa en esa dinámica que sólo beneficia a unos pocos en el mundo. Como observó el propio Weffort refriéndose al mercado cultural en Brasil, “somos económicamente marginales dentro de nuestro propio mercado” (41).Es, en este momento, donde aparece un viejo actor en la nueva disputa: el Estado, su necesidad o su inconveniencia para salvar la diversidad cultural y legislar sobre las arrogantes leyes del mercado. Atilo Borón aporta algunos datos que, como un caballo de Troya, llevan consigo su propia interpretación: a) el gasto público en Europa aumentó en los últimos 20 años, mientras en América Latina, aun siendo de los más bajos, disminuyó por razones de “ajustes”; b) en los últimos 15 años la población adolescente disminuyó 2 cm de su estatura; y c) la propuesta de aplicar la Tasa Tobin[2] a las transacciones internacionales (72). Con ello, se podría acceder a la “economía bilingüe” -como la llama Melià-, en la que el mercado y la solidaridad no fueran excluyentes (109).El riesgo que pueden correr estos pensadores es recaer en la trampa que Derrida cuestionó hace ya tiempo: los pares de opuestos. No sólo porque pudiese ser una ilusión estructuralista, sino -sobre todo- porque es parte del juego de las ideologías dominantes. Por ejemplo, bastaría con mencionar brevemente la historia de los mercados. Veríamos que en el pasado lejano éstos operaron como poderosos medios de difusión cultural, desde los antiguos fenicios hasta los navegantes europeos del siglo XVI, pasando por la ruta de la ceda que unía Xi’an con Roma. Pero también fue un poderoso motor de destrucción, de conquista, abuso y muerte en todos los sentidos de la palabra. Es decir, que no se trata de un ente metafísico o de naturaleza cósmica sino, en todo caso, de ese ser ambiguo y contradictorio que es el ser humano. Al igual que con la energía atómica, se pueden esperar los resultados más antagónicos. Como siempre, todo depende de su conciencia moral; no de su inteligencia.Hacia una mundialización humanistaes un libro heterogéneo, de una lectura rápida y atrapante; un libro que discrepa consigo mismo y lo hará, sin duda, con un lector consecuente. Los más lúcidos –conjeturo-, no irán en busca de una verdad o de alguna revelación; tampoco buscarán datos que confirmen sus prejuicios ideológicos (para estos otros, el libro tiene contraindicaciones). Se recomienda sólo para lectores en el más amplio sentido de la palabra, ya que, sin duda, se verán estimulados en su propia reflexión, en el acuerdo o en la discrepancia.Sólo por esto, Hacia una mundialización humanistacumple con la función más urgente y más importante de una problemática apasionante: la toma de conciencia de nuestro tiempo.
Bibliografía

Gómez-Martínez, José Luis: La encrucijada del cambio: Simón Bolívar entre dos paradigmas. Conferencia, Montevideo, 2004.Gutiérrez, Gustavo. Teología de la liberación. Ediciones Sígueme, Salamanca, 1999.Montiel, Edgar (coordinador): Hacia una mundialización humanista. París,  Ediciones UNESCO, 2003.Prandi, Reginaldo: Perto da magia, longe da política. En A realidade social das religiões no Brasil: religão, sociedade e política. Ed Antônio Flâvio de Oliveira Pierucci and Prandi. São Pablo, Hucitec, 93-105, 1996.Vargas Llosa, Álvaro, Montaner; Montaner, Carlos Alberto; Mendoza, Plino Apuleyo: Manual del perfecto idiota Latinoamericano. Barcelona, Plaza y Janés, Editores S. A., 2001.

[1] Eduardo Galeano es considerado uno de los 10 mayores Idiotas latinoamericanos, según recientes publicaciones del hijo del escritor Mario Vargas Llosa, reconocido especialista en la materia.

[2] Si se pusiera un impuesto del 0,5% a las transacciones especulativas internacionales, se obtendrían por año 200.000 millones de dólares, el equivalente a dos planes Marshall para combatir la pobreza en el mundo.

 

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