Whatever your game is... We've got it... and some you've never tried before! The most incredible collection of games and puzzles Endgames Portland 401 SW 4th 224-6917 Downtown Eugene Fuentes achieved literary recognition more than two decades ago with his Where the Air is Clear, an eclectic, idiosyncratic and lyrical pastiche of the many interlocked worlds which inhabit Mexico City. His reputation was solidified by such works as Aura, The Good Conscience, A Change of Skin and The Death of Artemio Cruz (which many consider his best—a man of the Revolution looks back at his success, the product of compromise, betrayal and alienation from those he loved). All the while, he has served as a major organizer of and stimulus for the first internationally famous generation of Latin American novelists—Gabriel Gar- cfa Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortazar, etc. Now, with the recent publication of his vast epic, Terra Nostra, which spans centuries, continents, and our entire literary history, and The Hydra Head, an eminently readable thriller on the world of petro-poli- tics, Carlos Fuentes has reached a maturity of vision and voice that should be the envy of writers everywhere. “I am now writing the three novels I couldn’t write before, because I didn’t have the technical Instruments to write them with. Novels I had been carrying with me since I was 15-20 years old. Now I say, God almighty, this Is the reward of aging, you finally know you can sit down and do this novel the way it should be done.” His first Keith Morden Memorial Lecture at PSU gave us reasons to look forward to his further literary work. Fuentes literally swept us off our feet with his Clackamas Town Center 12092 SE 82nd 652-1434 pace, his intellectual breadth and his critique of the West’s belief In linear time and the notion of “progress” it thrusts in Its wake. “Capitalism is the religion of futurity. Yet in the name of the future, we may not have a future at all.” He counterposed the time notions of many cultures—Indian, Chinese, Zapotec—as well as the visions of such writers as Borges, Faulkner, Woolf, Kafka, Proust and Beckett. “The novel is the literary form with the most complexity that permits us to recreate time...to create more history.” He stated that the Imposition of one sense of time denies the others. “If the future is to have a future, It must have a past. If you chase the past out the door, it will come in the window wearing disguises.” Carlos Fuentes, in his writings and in his public statements, urges us to tap into this multifaceted, often contradictory reality, and to protect It. “When we live in a world such as ours, where the nations of the Third World arrive at the rims of the shores of progress, just when progress is In crisis In the nations that have successfully accomplished the Industrial Revolution, we- must ask ourselves If we should not keep all this past in reserve for the rainy days of history. We don’t know what’s going to happen.” Carlos Fuentes’ statements come from his Keith Morden Lectures and from an interview he gave to David Milholland of the Clinton St. Quarterly and Vernon Peterson of Willamette Week, much of which appears in the November 11 issue of that paper. ments, with militant students and accountants, printers and bank clerks—has claimed the right to do for El Salvador what has not been achieved in nearly five centures: the abolition of colonialism, and at the very least the creation of a few conditions that might permit some evolution of the political structure. They have met the army. I suppose they have found out what every Latin American democratic movement has had to find out for itself: that as long as the army protects the fortress of colonialism, conditions will continue as they traditionally always have. Perhaps the problem for El Salvador is not the overthrow of this or that junta, but the overthrow of the army. For the army is the only obstable standing between the congealed colonialism that feeds its own vicious circle and any form of evolutionary democracy. In order to exist, colonialism needs an army to protect it by repression; in order to exist, the army needs a colonial structure, which it must defend and preserve through repression. The problem is there. It has been there for nearly five centuries. But it has been forgotten. It is conveniently forgotten every time Latin America makes a move toward independence. When the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, says that violence in El Salvador is created by outside intervention, not by social injustice, which has "existed for decades," she forgets that violence has also existed for decades; that it has, in fact, co-existed with social injustice for centuries. And when Secretary of State Alexander Haig says that "we are not going to be dragged into another Vietnam, but the problems will be dealt with at the source of the difficulty, ” it is to be hoped that he understands that the "source of the difficulty" in El Salvador is military and paramilitary repression, the prevention of political evolution by the army. Perhaps Mr. Haig and Ms. Kirkpatrick, if they are real anticommunists, will come to understand that by helping the military in El Salvador they help communism in El Salvador; that by identifying the Soviet Union with the revolution in El Salvador they hand the Soviet Union a moral victory that belongs only to the Salvadoran people. And that even if Cuba and the Soviet Union did not exist, there would still be a revolution in El Salvador. And that if it were true that arms are flowing into El Salvador from Hanoi and Havana and Managua, and should they then cease to flow, the civil war would continue in El Salvador, because it depends on historical factors that have nothing to do with communism—and because most of the arms that flow in come from private sources of contraband in Florida, Texas, and California. The State Department White Paper on communist intervention in El Salvador proves nothing. The same arms that have been photographed over and over, for Indochinese and Cuban and now Salvadoran effect; the captions and the photographs do not coincide; an example of what, ludicrously, does coincide is the sinister "meeting" between Salvadoran communists and Sandinistas in Managua on a particular date, which happens to be the date of the the anniversary of the Nicaraguan Revolution. So that Ambassadors McHenry and Pezullo, who were also present, stand accused as well. What can be proved is that if the Salvadoran rebels had half the arms that the State Department credits them with, they would by now have swept the army barracks and captured the abundant U.S. material shipped into El Salvador; that the army commanders themselves smirk at the allegations of the State Department, because they know the rebels have mostly old rifles and bazookas and whatever they can get on the international black market. But they will not say so publicly; they need arms to control El Salvador and repress, again and again, any attempt at even minimal change. For how long would the present agrarian reforms outlive the triumph of the army and the death squads in El Salvador? Two sets of figures tell the tale: 240 members of the new agrarian cooperatives have now been murdered by the paramilitary forces; eighty co-ops are paying "protection" to the army. Protection from what? From the death squads trained, armed, and financed by the army itself, of course. The way out of El Salvador THE WAY OUT of this mess is by not identifying military success in El Salvador with the prestige of the United States. For whether the United States loses or wins militarily in El Salvador, it will always lose in the end. It loses because if it thinks it has won it will have done so at the expense of the social and economic self-determination of the Salvadoran people. It will only have strengthened the prevailing official brutality and postponed the next insurrection. But it also loses if it thinks it has lost militarily, because it will then have passed up the opportunity to help El Salvador in the only way it can be helped by the United States. *< cared? Who knew anything about this nation, the smallest, the most densely inhabited, and one o f the poorest nations in our hemisphere?" This way is for the United States to swallow hard and choose to become simply one among many participating forces in the solving of El Salvador’s economic and social problems, according to El Salvador’s needs. For 1981 is not 1954; it is not even 1961. The opposition in El Salvador knows, as the revolutionaries in Nicaragua have learned, that once in power it can and should choose a plurality of sources of support—financial, technological, political. The choice for Nicaragua and El Salvador, the choice for all the underdeveloped nations, is not between the United States and the Soviet Union. It is between cold-war submission to one of the superpowers and the new, freer polity taking shape in spite of Moscow and Washington. The balance of forces in 1981 is not what it was in 1954 or in 1961. The U.S. should take a good hard look at the Central American and Caribbean area; link the realities there to those of the emerging nations in Asia and Africa, especially after the election of Francois Mitterrand in France; understand Western Europe's desirable role as an enlightened broker in the relations between the developing and Clinton St. Quarterly 21
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