Cont. from page 19 Soviet tanker sailed into the harbor, bringing the Cuban government the oil it would otherwise have been denied. This was the price of its refusal to knuckle under to U.S. sanctions. I said to myself then that the history of our continent, for better or worse, had changed forever. The cold war had killed the Good Neighbor Policy. Its consequences became frighteningly evident during the October missile crisis. I also told myself that Latin America should never again allow itself to be put in the quandary of having to choose between the United States and the Soviet Union; that the next revolution should find conditions that would offer a choice among different sources of economic and political support. Those revolutions have now come, first in Nicaragua and now in El Salvador. They have come about for the same reasons that they came to the thirteen colonies in 1776, to France in 1789, to Mexico in 1910, to Russia in 1917, to Guatemala in 1944, to China in 1948, to Bolivia and Cuba in the 1950s, and to the whole colonized world in the aftermath of World War II; for reasons rooted in the local culture, history, and economy; in the heavens and hells of a people’s imagination, its memory, its hopes, its self. For whether the United States loses or wins militarily in El Salvador, it will always lose in the end.*' 'T HE PROBLEMS in El Salvador JL in 1981, my third date, have been around for five centures; their name is colonialism, the internal colonialism of the traditional ruling class and the external colonialism inherent in client-state relations. El Salvador shares with Guatemala, and Nicaragua under the Somozas—indeed, to some degree, with all of Latin America—problems that existed a long time before the United States or the Soviet Union came into being, problems as old as the discovery of the New World. Our lands were not only discovered and colonized; they were conquered, and conquest plus colonization spells what Max Weber called patri- monialism, a condition brought on by the confusion of all public and private rights in favor of the chieftain and his clan of relatives, favorites,' sycophants, and hangers-on. Patri- monialism—the right of the conquistador—precludes competent administration or economic planning; it is based on obedience and whim, not law. This state of things requires a standing patrimonial army— thugs, mercenaries, death squads, responsible to no law save that of the caprice of the ruling clan. This patrimonialist confusion of public and private functions and appropriations has been the style of governance in Latin America almost constantly, from the Indian empires to the Spanish colonies to the Republican nations. We in Latin America understand this. We know intimately that if we do not abolish these conditions ourselves, we shall never be viable societies and harmonious communities, minimally prosperous, sufficiently independent. Many men and women have tried to change this barbaric order through reform: Juarez in Mexico, Sarmiento in Argentina, Battle in Uruguay, Arevalo in Guatemala, Allende in Chile. Others have had to use arms: Morelos and Morazan, Juarez when conservative militarism allied itself with French intervention to oppose the reform laws/ Zapata, Sandino, and Guevara. The United States, too, knows this conflict between reform and revolution. Jackson and the two Roosevelts and Kennedy were able to reform; Washington and Lincoln had to fight, and their fights were cruel, bloody, and necessary. But they never had to reform or revolutionize such a persistent, ancient, slow-moving creature as this turtle of Latin American patrimonialism, protected by its standing army. Today there are deep inequalities and staggering poverty in many other nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia; but there is not always an accompanying revolutionary situation. Sometimes, as in Mexico or India, nationalist revolutions have created political institutions that cushion class warfare, permit policies of mediation and even of postponement, and are at times capable of effectively and flexibly reforming themselves. In Algeria and Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Nigeria, institutions are being fashioned out of the anti-colonial experience, and many of the problems of those new nations will surely find political solutions. The colonial-military complex TN EL SALVADOR political devel- JLopment was brutally interrupted in 1932, when the army, under the command of General Maximiliano Hernandez Mart'nez, surrounded and massacred 30,000 people in order to crush a rebellion of peasants and proletarians who were simply asking for a minimum wage. Political freedom in El Salvador has been smothered ever since, from coup to rigged election to countercoup and through a constant unresponsiveness to the needs of the people. Who cared? Who knew anything about this nation, the smallest, the most densely inhabited, and one of the poorest nations in our hemisphere? I shall tell you who knew. Father Rutilio Grande knew, who was killed because he said that poverty is not the will of God but the greed of a few. Archbishop Oscar Romero knew, who was killed because he found it intolerable that illiteracy in El Salvador affected nearly half of the population. Four American missionaries knew, who went to work and help so that the level of infant mortality in El Salvador should not be three or four times higher than that of any other Western nation. President Jose Napoleon Duarte should know, he who was tortured by the same thugs with whom he shares power today, who was deprived of his electoral victory in 1972 by the same gorillas with whom today he offers free elections to a population that has seen its brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers and children die, assassinated by the same death squads that are supposed to guarantee free elections in El Salvador. YES, THOSE who knew have been silenced. The political opposition has been decimated. Yet a revolution of complex composition-Catholic, agrarian, and nationalist in its roots, but also with strong Marxist, democratic Christian, and social-democratic eleGASTRONOMIC Natural fiber baskets filled with the finest whole foods. Your design or ours. $2 to $25 A COOPERATIVE GROCERY ON CARLOS FUENTES Cont. from page 19 precisely, of choosing sides. Sometimes my characters express thoughts that are there because they are dramatic thoughts, and In contraposition to others...And since I think that reality is a product of history and not of the ideological ghosts, then I prefer the reality, with all its contradictions, with all of its crimes, with all its grime, with all its blood, to the virginal purity of the ideology.” Author Fuentes brings to his work a remarkable perspective, forged not only of long and intense investigation into the roots of the Mexican experience, but also years of residency abroad, in Europe, the United States (he Is currently a resident of Princeton, New Jersey) and other nations of the Americas. Chilean author Jose Donoso (in The Boom In Spanish Literature, Columbia University Press, 1977) calls Fuentes “the first active and conscious agent of the Spanish American noveL.He spoke English and French perfectly. He had read every novel, including Henry James, and he had seen all the paintings and all the films in all the capitals of the world. He did not have the annoying arrogance of pretending to be a simple son of the people...He was elegantly dressed and it was easy to see that his clothes were important to him. But despite his elegance, it turned out that Carlos Fuentes had very vigorous missions... Fuentes told me that after the Cuban Revolution he agreed to speak publicly only of politics, never of literature; that in Latin America the two were Inseparable and that now Latin America could look only to Cuba. His enthusiasm for the figure of Fidel Castro in that period and his faith in the revolution excited the entire Congress of Intellectuals (in Concepcion, Chile, 1962), which was strongly politicized as a result of his presence.” The image of hope that Cuba presented our southern neighbors, too long awash in a Yankee sea, has since been sullied by the inevitable complications and compromises of political reality. So If Fuentes is less avidly proCastro than he was in those heady days, neither has he turned on his long-time friend. Today, with Mexico’s star on the rise, he is more likely to invoke memory of Juarez, Villa or Cardenas. “In 1938, Lazaro Cardenas (President of Mexico) expropriated the English, Dutch, and North American oil companies. My father told me that at first they hadn’t known what to do. The companies had taken with them their technicians, their engineers, even the plans of their refineries and wells. They’d said, drink your oil and see how you like the taste! The capitalist countries declared a boycott against Mexico. My father says they’d had to improvise to keep going. But it had been worth it. No more White Guards, the company’s private army, stealing land and cutting off the ears of rural schoolteachers. And most important of all, people looked one another in the face,” (Felix Maldonado in Fuentes’ The Hydra Head, Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1978). 20 Clinton St. Quarterly
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