1940s and 1950s meant the massive transfer of power from the army to the labor and peasant organizations. I stress its importance because if Guatemalan democracy had been allowed to persist it would have influenced democracy in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and would then have met Costa Rican democracy; perhaps a truly Central American model would have been born of this experience. Instead, the experience was aborted with callous, imperial blindness; the price is being paid today, in money and blood, in El Salvador. Democracy in Guatemala, democracy in Nicargua, democracy in El Salvador was born, is being born, shall be born of the local experiences of Spanish conquest and colonization, formal independence, economic dependency, liberal reforms, and dictatorial repression. In 1954, these Guatemalan experiences were violated and corrupted by the CIA invasion. This was the only nonGuatemalan experience suffered by Guatemala. The rest was, as ever, malice and ignorance, innocence and arrogance. 1954 was an important year for the men and women of my generation because the hopes for Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy—which, with political imagination and pragmatic respect for nonintervention, had met the dramatic challenge of the Mexican Revolution under President Lazaro Cardenas, thus ensuring collaboration within the Western hemisphere against the Axis—were now buried inside an iceberg that not even the warm waters of the Caribbean could melt. It was an important year, because it proved how uneven was the balance of forces in the hemisphere at the time. The Dulles resolution against Guatemala at the Caracas Inter-American Conference was approved almost unanimously, with only two abstaining votes: those of Mexico and Uruguay. Mexico paid for its unruliness with the economic pressures exerted on it by the Eisenhower administration: the flight of capital and the devaluation of the peso. It was an important year, 1954, because political development in Guatemala was not merely interrupted by violent foreign intervention; it has been continually perverted and poisoned down to this very day. Today Guatemala is a terrorist nation; the principal terrorist is the A merchant with his wares just off the Lima-Huancayo train (Peru) government of General Lucas Gar- c'a, and the violence that exists there stretches to the extremes of indiscriminate murder of political leaders, abduction of dissidents, torture of missionaries and other social workers, the moral prostitution of young Indians forced to deny their heritage, insult their parents in public, and become murderous goons of the dictatorship. The isolation o f Cuba JJ^HEN SOME of us met C. Fr Wright Mills in Mexico in 1961, my second date, we realized ON CARLOS FUENTES by DavidMilholland T have always represented JL the foreign policy of Mexico, a policy I couldn’t agree more with—and which I defend very much, because I believe it is a reasonable, sensible policy that Americans should understand and heed, because we are much that we should distinguish between the actions of the U.S. government and those of the democratic polity in this country. We realized that the best interests of democracy in the U.S. and Latin America were served not by isolation but rather by a willingness to build bridges and make sure that communication was kept alive above and beyond visa restrictions, prejudices, and honest differences of opinion. "Keep in touch, ” said Mills back in 1961. "We need you and maybe you’ll need us.” He added: “I tell gringos that when they come to Mexico they should keep away from the stones. There are too many more in touch with the reality of Central America and the Caribbean than anybody in this country can be.” Long recognized as Mexico’s foremost novelist, Carlos Fuentes served as his nation’s ambassador to France in the mid-Seventies. Yet in his work, and often publicly, he has spoken out against that government’s worse excesses and the flaws within the bureaucratic structure that has become Mexico’s “Institutional revolution.” Fuentes has made the Mexican reality, its violent and colorful history, Its complex admixture of races and classes, and its slow emergence from oppressed colony to a new status as an oil-rich middle state, a central subject of his many novels. “I am interested, more than anything, in the dramatic conflicts. It is not so much a thing, Cont. on next page beautiful stones in Mexico and they distract you from the people. Stick to the people.” And he also said, ‘‘Do things your way. Don’t sit forever waiting to see what the U.S. will do or won't do. To hell with the United States: do your own stuff. ” Aye, there’s the rub: that when Latin America does not “do its own stuff,” it is accused of being composed of a bunch of shiftless, whining, grumbling, irresponsible beggars who throw all the blame for their native problems on the shoulders of the United States. But when we do do something about our condition, we are accused of being communist agents and Soviet-trained terrorists, a subversive menace in the very backyard of the United States. We are then worthy only of being bombed back into the underdevelopment we should never have left. If ever there was an international Catch-22, it is surely this one. At the beginning of the 1960s, the Cuban revolutionaries were experimenting with self-government. Instead of respecting them, as the Roosevelt administration had done in Mexico’s case, the Eisenhower administration slammed the door in Cuba's face, countered every internal revolutionary reform with U.S. sanctions and propaganda, and prepared the invasion plans, again conceived by the CIA, which the Kennedy administration inherited and sent to defeat at the Bay of Pigs. But as 1962 dawned, the balance of power had changed. At the Punta del Este Conference in late January, the United States tried to ram through the collective decision to break relations with Cuba, expel her government from the OAS, and launch a barrage of economic and political sanctions against the Castro regime. Once again it was Mexico, this time standing quite alone, which refused to go along with a decision it judged legally unfounded and politically foolish. But this time the distribution of forces in the world was different. The Lopez Mateos administration in Mexico could make a show of alliance with Gaullist France and with the leaders of the ’ nonaligned movement, establish trade with communist bloc countries, and nationalize American- owned utilities. I was in Havana the day the first Cont. on next page Clinton St. Quarterly 19
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