Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

EDUCATING BY EXAMPLE

The looking-glass school is the most democratic of educational institutions. There are no admissions exams, no registration fees, and courses are offered free to everyone everywhere on earth as well as in heaven. It’s not for nothing that this school is the child of the first system in history to rule the world.

In the looking-glass school, lead learns to float and cork to sink. Snakes learn to fly and clouds drag themselves along the ground.

MODELS OF SUCCESS

The upside-down world rewards in reverse: it scorns honesty, punishes work, prizes lack of scruples, and feeds cannibalism. Its professors slander nature: injustice, they say, is a law of nature. Milton Friedman teaches us about the “natural rate of unemployment.” Studying Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, we learn that blacks remain on the lowest rungs of the social ladder by “natural” law. From John D. Rockefeller’s lectures, we know his success was due to the fact that “nature” rewards the fittest and punishes the useless: more than a century later, the owners of the world continue to believe Charles Darwin wrote his books in their honor.

Survival of the fittest? The “killer instinct” is an essential ingredient for getting ahead, a human virtue when it helps large companies digest small and strong countries devour weak but proof of bestiality when some jobless guy goes around with a knife in his fist. Those stricken with “antisocial pathology,” the dangerous insanity afflicting all poor people, find inspiration in the models of good health exhibited by those who succeed. Lowlifes learn their skills by setting their sights on the summits. They study the examples of the winners and, for better or worse, do their best to live up to them. But “the damned will always be damned,” as Don Emilio Azcárraga, once lord and master of Mexican television, liked to say. The chances that a banker who loots a bank can enjoy the fruits of his labor in peace are directly proportional to the chances that a crook who robs a bank will land in jail or the cemetery.

When a criminal kills someone for an unpaid debt, the execution is called a “settling of accounts.” When the international technocracy settles accounts with an indebted country, the execution is called an “adjustment plan.” Financial capos kidnap countries and suck them dry even when they pay the ransom: in comparison, most thugs are about as dangerous as Dracula in broad daylight. The world economy is the most efficient expression of organized crime. The international bodies that control currency, trade, and credit practice international terrorism against poor countries, and against the poor of all countries, with a cold-blooded professionalism that would make the best of the bomb throwers blush.

The arts of trickery, which con men practice by stalking the gullible on the street, become sublime when certain politicians put their talents to work. In the shantytown nations of the world, heads of state sell off the remnants of their countries at fire-sale prices, just as in the shantytowns of cities criminals unload their booty for peanuts.

Hired guns do much the same work, albeit at retail, as the generals whose wholesale crimes get billed as acts of glory. Pickpockets lurking on street corners practice a low-tech version of the art of speculators who fleece the multitudes by computer. The worst violators of nature and human rights never go to jail. They hold the keys. In the world as it is, the looking-glass world, the countries that guard the peace also make and sell the most weapons. The most prestigious banks launder the most drug money and harbor the most stolen cash. The most successful industries are the most poisonous for the planet. And saving the environment is the brilliant endeavor of the very companies that profit from annihilating it. Those who kill the most people in the shortest time win immunity and praise, as do those who destroy the most nature at the lowest cost.

Walking is risky and breathing a challenge in the great cities of the looking-glass world. Whoever is not a prisoner of necessity is a prisoner of fear, deprived of sleep by anxiety over the things he lacks or by terror of losing the things he has. The looking-glass world trains us to view our neighbor as a threat, not a promise. It condemns us to solitude and consoles us with chemical drugs and cybernetic friends. We are sentenced to die of hunger, fear, or boredom — that is, if a stray bullet doesn’t do the job first.

Is the freedom to choose among these unfortunate ends the only freedom left to us? The looking-glass school teaches us to suffer reality, not change it; to forget the past, not learn from it; to accept the future, not invent it. In its halls of criminal learning, impotence, amnesia, and resignation are required courses. Yet perhaps — who can say — there can be no disgrace without grace, no sign without a countersign, and no school that does not beget its counterschool.

THE STUDENTS

Day after day, children are denied the right to be children. The world treats rich kids as if they were money, teaching them to act the way money acts. The world treats poor kids as if they were garbage, to turn them into garbage. And those in the middle, neither rich nor poor, are chained to televisions and trained to live the life of prisoners.

The few children who manage to be children must have a lot of magic and a lot of luck.

TOP, BOTTOM, AND MIDDLE

In the ocean of desperation, there are islands of privilege, luxurious concentration camps where the powerful meet only the powerful and never, for even a moment, forget how powerful they are. In some Latin American cities where kidnappings have become commonplace, rich kids grow up sealed inside bubbles of fear. They live in fortresslike mansions or groups of homes ringed by electrified fences and guardhouses, watched day and night by bodyguards and closed-circuit security cameras. They travel like money in armored cars. They don’t know their own city except by sight. They discover the subway in Paris or New York, but never use it in São Paulo or Mexico City.

They don’t live in the city where they live. They’re not allowed to set foot in the vast hell that threatens their tiny private heaven. Beyond the walls lie regions of terror filled with ugly, dirty, envious people. They grow up rootless, stripped of cultural identity, aware of society only as a threat. Their homeland lies in the designer names on their clothes, and their language is a modern Morse code. In cities around the globe, children of privilege are alike in their habits and beliefs, like shopping malls and airports, which lie outside the realms of time and space. Educated in virtual reality, they know nothing of real reality, which exists only to be feared or bought.

Fast food, fast cars, fast life: from birth, rich kids are trained for consumption and speed, and their voyage through childhood confirms that machines are more trustworthy than people. When the day arrives for their rite of passage, they will be handed the keys to their first four-wheel-drive all-terrain corsair. In the meantime, they construct their identities by driving full speed down cybernetic highways, devouring images and merchandise, zapping and shopping. They feel at home navigating cyberspace the way homeless children do wandering city streets.

A Child’s World

You have to be very careful when you cross the street, Colombian teacher Gustavo Wilches explained to a group of children. “Even though the light is green, never cross without looking first one way, then the other.”

Wilches told the children that once he was knocked down by a car in the middle of the street. His face darkened as he recalled the disaster that nearly cost him his life. The children asked: “What kind of car was it?” “Did it have air-conditioning?” “A sunroof?” “Did it have fog lights?” “How big was the motor?”

Store Windows

Toys for boys: Rambos, Robocops, Ninjas, Batmen, monsters, machine guns, pistols, tanks, cars, motorcycles, trucks, planes, spaceships.

Toys for girls: Barbies, Heidis, ironing boards, kitchens, blenders, washing machines, televisions, babies, cribs, baby bottles, lipsticks, curlers, makeup kits, mirrors.

Long before rich kids stop being kids and discover expensive drugs to fool their solitude and shroud their fear, poor kids are sniffing gasoline and glue. While rich kids play war with laser-beam guns, street kids are dodging real bullets.

In Latin America children and adolescents make up nearly half the population. Half of that half lives in misery. Survivors: in Latin America a hundred children die of hunger or curable disease every hour, but that doesn’t stem their numbers in the streets and fields of a region that manufactures poor people and outlaws poverty. The poor are mostly children and children are mostly poor. Among the system’s hostages, they have it the worst. Society squeezes them dry, watches them constantly, punishes them, sometimes kills them; almost never are they listened to, never are they understood.

Everywhere on earth, these kids, the children of people who work hard or who have neither work nor home, must from an early age spend their waking hours at whatever breadwinning activity they can find, breaking their backs in return for food and little else. Once they can walk, they learn the rewards of behaving themselves — boys and girls who are free labor in workshops, stores, and makeshift bars or cheap labor in export industries, stitching sports clothes for multinational corporations. They are manual labor on farms and in cities or domestic labor at home, serving whoever gives the orders. They are little slaves in the family economy or in the informal sector of the global economy, where they occupy the lowest rung of the world labor market:

• in the garbage dumps of Mexico City, Manila, or Lagos they hunt glass, cans, and paper and fight the vultures for scraps

• in the Java Sea they dive for pearls

• they hunt diamonds in the mines of Congo

• they work as moles in the mine shafts of Peru, where their size makes them indispensable, and when their lungs give out they end up in unmarked graves

• in Colombia and Tanzania they harvest coffee and get poisoned by pesticides

• in Guatemala they harvest cotton and get poisoned by pesticides

• in Honduras they harvest bananas and get poisoned by pesticides

• they collect sap from rubber trees in Malaysia, working days that last from dark to dark

• they work the railroads in Burma

• in India they melt in glass ovens in the north and brick ovens in the south

• in Bangladesh they work at over three hundred occupations, earning salaries that range from nothing to nearly nothing for each endless day

• they ride in camel races for Arab sheiks and round up sheep and cattle on the ranches of the Rio de la Plata

• they serve the master’s table in Port-au-Prince, Colombo, Jakarta, or Recife in return for the right to eat whatever falls from it

• they sell fruit in the markets of Bogotá and gum on the buses of São Paulo

• they wash windshields on corners in Lima, Quito, or San Salvador

• they shine shoes on the streets of Caracas or Guanajuato

• they stitch clothes in Thailand and soccer shoes in Vietnam

• they stitch soccer balls in Pakistan and baseballs in Honduras and Haiti

• to pay their parents’ debts they pick tea or tobacco on the plantations of Sri Lanka and harvest jasmine in Egypt for French perfume

• rented out by their parents in Iran, Nepal, and India they weave rugs from before dawn until past midnight, and when someone tries to rescue them they ask, “Are you my new master?”

• sold by their parents for a hundred dollars in Sudan, they are put to work in the sex trade or at any other labor.

Armies in certain places in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America recruit children by force. In war, these little soldiers work by killing and above all by dying. They make up half the victims of recent African wars.

Flight/1

Chatting with a swarm of street kids, the ones who cling to the bumpers of buses in Mexico City, reporter Karina Avilés asked about drugs.

“I feel great, I get rid of all my problems,” said one. “When I come down and I’m just me,” he added, “I feel trapped like a bird in a cage.”

These children are regularly harassed by the police and their dogs in the Northern Bus Terminal. The company manager assured the reporter, “We don’t let these children die, because in some way they are human.”

In nearly all these tasks, except war, which tradition decrees and reality teaches is a male affair, girls’ hands are just as useful as boys’. But the labor market treats girls the same way it treats women. They always earn less than the meager bit paid to boys, when they earn anything at all.

Prostitution is the fate of many girls and fewer boys around the world. Astonishing as it seems, there are at least a hundred thousand child prostitutes in the United States, according to a 1997 UNICEF report. But the vast majority of child victims of the sex trade work in the brothels and on the streets of the southern part of the globe. This multimillion-dollar industry, with its networks of traffickers, intermediaries, travel agents, and procurers, operates with scandalous ease. In Latin America, it is nothing new: child prostitution began in 1536, when the first “tolerance home” opened in Puerto Rico. Today half a million Brazilian girls sell their bodies for the benefit of adults — as many as in Thailand, but not as many as in India. On some Caribbean beaches, the prosperous sex tourism industry offers virgins to whoever can pay the price. The number of girls placed on the market is rising steadily: according to estimates by international organizations, at least a million girls swell the ranks of the global supply of bodies every year.

Flight/2

In the streets of Mexico City, a girl inhales toluene, solvents, glue, you name it. When she stops trembling, she says: “I hallucinated the Devil, I mean I went into the Devil and right then, whoa! I was at the edge, I was about to jump, the building was eight stories high, and I was about to jump, but just then my hallucination stopped, the Devil left me. The hallucination I liked best was when the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared before me. I saw her twice.”

The number of poor children who work, in their homes or out, for their families or for whomever, is uncountable. They work outside the law and outside statistics. And the rest? Many are superfluous. The market doesn’t need them, nor will it ever. They aren’t profitable; they never will be. From the point of view of the established order, they begin by stealing the air they breathe and soon steal anything they can lay their hands on. Hunger or bullets tend to shorten their voyage from crib to grave. The system that scorns the old also fears the young. Old age is a failure, childhood a threat. Ever more poor children are “born with a tendency toward crime,” according to specialists. They are the most dangerous category of the “surplus population.” The child as public threat: “the antisocial conduct of youth in Latin America” has been a recurring theme at the Pan-American Children’s Congress for years. Governments and some experts on the subject share this obsession with violence, vice, and perdition. Each child is a potential El Niño, and the disasters he or she may cause must be prevented. At the first South American Police Congress, held in Montevideo in 1979, the Colombian delegate explained that “the rising daily increase in the population under eighteen leads us to expect a higher POTENTIALLY DELINQUENT population” (uppercase in original).

In Latin American countries, the hegemony of the market severs ties of solidarity and tears the social fabric to shreds. What fate awaits the nobodies, the owners of nothing, in countries where the right to own property is becoming the only right? And the children of the nobodies? Hunger drives many, who are always becoming many more, to thievery, begging, and prostitution. Consumer society insults them by offering what it denies. And then they take vengeance, united by the certainty of the death that awaits them. According to UNICEF, in 1995 there were eight million abandoned children on the streets of Latin America. According to Human Rights Watch, in 1993 death squads linked to the police murdered six children a day in Colombia, four a day in Brazil.

Between the extremes lies the middle. Between the prisoners of opulence and the prisoners of destitution are the children who have quite a bit more than nothing but much less than everything. They, too, are less and less free. “To be allowed to be or not to be allowed to be, that is the question,” Spanish comic Chumy Chúmez liked to say. The freedom of these children is confiscated by societies that venerate order as they generate disorder. Fear of fear: the floor creaks under their feet and there are no guarantees. Stability is unstable, jobs evaporate, money vanishes. Just to make it to the end of the month is a feat. “Welcome, middle class,” is the greeting on a billboard at the entrance to one of the worst barrios of Buenos Aires. Middle-class people still live as impostors, pretending to obey the law and believe in it, pretending to have more than they have. But never before has it been so difficult for them to keep up this exhausting charade. Suffocated by debts and paralyzed by fear, the middle class raises its children in a state of panic. Fear of living, fear of falling, fear of losing your job, your car, your home, your possessions, fear of never having what you ought to have in order to be. In the widespread clamor for public security, imperiled by lurking criminal monsters, the members of the middle class shout loudest. They defend order as if they owned it, even though they’re only tenants overwhelmed by high rents and the threat of eviction.

So the Deaf Will Hear

The number of malnourished children in the world is growing. Twelve million children under the age of five die every year from diarrhea, anemia, and other illnesses caused by hunger. A 1998 UNICEF report, full of such statistics, suggests that the struggle against child hunger and death “become the world’s highest priority.” To make it that, the report turns to the only argument that seems to work today: “The lack of vitamins and minerals in the diet costs some countries the equivalent of more than 5 % of their gross national product in lives lost, disability, and lower productivity.”

Caught in the trap of terror, more and more of their children are condemned to suffer the humiliation of perpetual imprisonment. In the city of the future, which is becoming the city of the present, telechildren watched by electronic nannies will contemplate the street from a window of their telehomes: the street, off-limits thanks to violence or fear of it, the street where the dangerous and sometimes prodigious spectacle of life takes place.

INJUSTICE 101

Advertising enjoins everyone to consume, while the economy prohibits the vast majority of humanity from doing so. The command that everybody do what so many cannot becomes an invitation to crime. In the papers, crime stories have more to say about the contradictions of our times than all the articles about politics and economics.

This world, which puts on a banquet for all, then slams the door in the noses of so many, is simultaneously equalizing and unequal: equalizing in the ideas and habits it imposes and unequal in the opportunities it offers.

EQUALIZATION AND INEQUALITY

Twin totalitarianisms plague the world: the dictatorships of consumer society and obligatory injustice.

The machinery of compulsory equalization works against the finest trait of the human species, the fact that we recognize ourselves in our differences and build links based on them. The best of the world lies in the many worlds the world contains, the different melodies of life, their pains and strains: the thousand and one ways of living and speaking, thinking and creating, eating, working, dancing, playing, loving, suffering, and celebrating that we have discovered over so many thousands of years.

Equalization, which makes us all goofy and all the same, can’t be measured. No computer could count the crimes that the pop culture business commits each day against the human rainbow and the human right to identity. But its devastating progress is mind-boggling. Time is emptied of history, and space no longer acknowledges the astonishing diversity of its parts. Through the mass media the owners of the world inform us all of our obligation to look at ourselves in a single mirror.

Whoever doesn’t have, isn’t. He who has no car or doesn’t wear designer shoes or imported perfume is only pretending to exist. Importer economy, impostor culture: we are all obliged to take the consumer’s cruise across the swirling waters of the market. Most of the passengers are swept overboard, but thanks to foreign debt the fares of those who make it are billed to us all. Loans allow the consuming minority to load themselves up with useless new things, and before everyone’s eyes the media transform into genuine needs the artificial demands the North of the world ceaselessly invents and successfully projects onto the South. (“North” and “South,” by the way, are terms used in this book to designate the carving up of the global pie and do not always coincide with geography.)

What about the millions upon millions of Latin American children who will soon be condemned to unemployment or hunger wages? Does advertising stimulate demand or, as seems more likely, incite violence? Television gives us the full treatment: it teaches us to confuse the quality of life with the quantity of things and offers daily audiovisual courses on violence with video games for extra credit. Crime is the biggest hit on the small screen. “Strike first before they strike you,” caution the video game professors. “You’re all alone. Don’t count on anyone else.” Cars fly, people explode: “You, too, can kill.” Meanwhile, in Latin America’s cities, among the largest in the world, crime grows at an alarming rate.

The Exception

There is only one place in the world where North and South meet on an equal footing: a soccer field at the mouth of the Amazon in Brazil. The equator cuts right through the middle of Zerão stadium in Amapá, so each team plays one half in the South and the other half in the North.

The world economy requires consumer markets in perpetual expansion to absorb rising production and keep profit rates from falling. It also requires ridiculously cheap labor and raw materials to keep production costs down. The same system that needs to sell more and more needs to pay less and less. This paradox gives birth to another: to increase the number of consumers, the North issues ever more imperious orders to consume to the South and the East, but the number of criminals multiplies even faster. Muggers seize the fetishes that make people real, in order to become what their victims are. Glove thy neighbor: in the madhouse of the streets, anyone can be dealt a punch or a bullet, those born to die of indigestion as well as those born to die of hunger.

Cultural equalization, the process of casting all in the single mold of consumer society, can’t be reduced to statistics, but inequality can. The World Bank, which does so much to encourage inequality, freely admits — and several agencies of the United Nations confirm — that never has the world economy been less democratic, never has the world been so scandalously unjust. In 1960, the richest 20 percent of humanity had thirty times as much as the poorest 20 percent. By 1990, that figure had increased to seventy times. And the scissors continue to open: in the year 2000 the gap will be ninety times.

Between the richest of the rich, who appear on the pornofinancial pages of Forbes and Fortune, and the poorest of the poor, who appear on the streets and in the fields, the chasm is even greater. A pregnant woman in Africa is a hundred times more likely to die than a pregnant woman in Europe. The value of pet products sold annually in the United States is four times the GNP of Ethiopia. The sales of just the two giants General Motors and Ford easily surpass the value of all black Africa’s economies. According to the United Nations Development Program, “Ten people, the ten richest men on the planet, own wealth equivalent to the value of the total production of fifty countries, and 447 multimillionaires own a greater fortune than the annual income of half of humanity.” The head of this UN agency, James Gustave Speth, declared in 1997 that over the past half century the number of rich people doubled while the number of poor tripled and that 1.6 billion people were worse off than they had been only fifteen years earlier.

Not long before that, the president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, threw cold water on the annual meeting of the bank and the International Monetary Fund. He warned those celebrating the achievements of the world government run by those two bodies that if things continue as they are, in thirty years there will be five billion poor people in the world, and inequality will explode in the face of future generations. Meanwhile, an anonymous hand wrote on a Buenos Aires wall, “Fight hunger and poverty! Eat poor people!”

As if to confirm our optimism, as Mexican writer Carlos Monsiváis suggests, the world carries on: the injustice that rules between countries is reproduced within each country, and year after year the gap between those who have everything and those who have nothing widens. We know it well in the Americas. In the United States half a century ago, the rich earned 20 percent of national income; now they get 40 percent. And in the South? Latin America is the most unjust region in the world. Nowhere else are bread and fish distributed as unfairly; nowhere else does such an immense distance separate the few who have the right to rule from the many who have the duty to obey.

Latin America is a slave economy masquerading as postmodern: it pays African wages, it charges European prices, and the merchandise it produces most efficiently is injustice and violence. Official statistics for Mexico City from 1997: 80 percent poor, 3 percent rich, the rest in the middle. The same Mexico City is the capital of the country that in the 1990s spawned more instant multimillionaires than anywhere else on earth: according to UN figures, one Mexican has as much wealth as seventeen million of his poor countrymen.

There is no country in the world as unequal as Brazil. Some analysts even speak of the “Brazilianization” of the planet in sketching a portrait of the world to come. By “Brazilianization” they certainly don’t mean the spread of irrepressible soccer, spectacular carnivals, or music that awakens the dead, marvels that make Brazil shine brightest; rather they’re describing the imposition of a model of progress based on social injustice and racial discrimination, where economic growth only increases poverty and exclusion. “Belindia” is another name for Brazil, coined by economist Edmar Bacha: a country where a minority lives like the rich in Belgium while the majority lives like the poor of India.

In this era of privatization and free markets, money governs without intermediaries. A state that is judge and police and not much else keeps cheap labor in line and represses the dangerous legions of those without work. In many countries, social justice has been reduced to criminal justice. The state takes charge of public security; everything else is left to the market. And where the police can’t handle it, poverty — poor people, poor regions — is left to God. Even when government tries to dress up like some kindly mother, it has only the strength to exercise vigilance and mete out punishment. In these neoliberal times, public rights are reduced to public charity and handed out only on the eve of elections.

Every year poverty kills more people than the entire Second World War, which killed quite a few. But from the vantage point of the powerful, extermination is not a bad idea if it helps regulate a population that is growing too fast. Experts decry “surplus population” in the South, where ignorant masses violate the Sixth Commandment day and night: “surplus population” in Brazil, where there are seventeen inhabitants per square kilometer, or in Colombia, where there are twenty-nine. Holland has four hundred inhabitants per square kilometer and no Dutchman dies of hunger, but Brazil and Colombia belong to a handful of gluttons. Haiti and El Salvador are the most overpopulated countries in the Americas — just as overpopulated as Germany.

Points of View/1

From the point of view of the owl, the bat, the bohemian, and the thief, sunset is time for breakfast.

Rain is bad news for tourists and good news for farmers.

From the point of view of the natives, it’s the tourists who are picturesque.

From the point of view of the Indians of the Caribbean islands, Christopher Columbus, with his plumed cap and red velvet cape, was the biggest parrot they had ever seen.

Power, which practices and lives by injustice, sweats violence through every pore. The damned of dark skin, guilty of their poverty and their hereditary criminal traits, exist in shantytown hells. Advertising makes their mouths water and the police chase them from the table. The system denies what it offers: magic lamps that make dreams come true, neon lights announcing paradise in the city night, the splendors of virtual wealth. As the owners of real wealth know, there is no Valium to calm so much anxiety, no Prozac to snuff out so much torment. Jails and bullets are the proper therapy for the poor.

Twenty or thirty years ago, poverty was the fruit of injustice. The left decried it, the center admitted it, the right rarely denied it. How quickly times have changed: now poverty is fair reward for inefficiency. Poverty may arouse pity, but it no longer causes indignation. People are poor by the law of chance or the hand of fate. The dominant language — mass-produced images and words — nearly always serves a carrot-and-stick system that conceives of life as a pitiless race between a few winners and many losers, who were born to lose anyway. Violence is generally portrayed not as the child of injustice but as the fruit of bad behavior by poor sports, the numerous socially inept who fill poor neighborhoods and poor countries. Violence is their nature. It corresponds, like poverty, to the natural order of things, to the biological or perhaps zoological order. That’s how things are, that’s how they’ve been, and that’s how they will be.

The moral code of the end of the millennium condemns not injustice but failure. Robert McNamara, one of those responsible for the war in Vietnam, wrote a book in which he admitted it was a mistake. That war, which killed more than three million Vietnamese and fifty-eight thousand Americans, was a mistake not because it was unjust but because the United States carried on in full knowledge that it could not win. By 1965, according to McNamara, there was already overwhelming evidence that the invading force could not prevail; nonetheless, the U.S. government continued as if victory were possible. The fact that the United States spent fifteen years visiting international terrorism on Vietnam in order to impose a government the Vietnamese did not want does not even enter into the discussion. That the world’s premier military power dropped more bombs on a small country than all the bombs dropped during the Second World War is utterly irrelevant.

Points of View/2

From the point of view of the South, summer in the North is winter.

From the point of view of a worm, a plate of spaghetti is an orgy.

Where Hindus see a sacred cow, others see an enormous hamburger.

From the point of view of Hippocrates, Galen, Maimonides, and Paracelsus, there was a disease called indigestion but none called hunger.

From the point of view of his neighbors in the town of Cardona, Toto Zaugg, who wore the same clothes in summer and winter, was an admirable man. “Toto’s never cold,” they said.

He said nothing. He was cold, but he had no coat.

After all, during that long butchery the United States was exercising the right of big powers to invade whomever they wish and impose whatever they choose. Officers, businessmen, bankers, and makers of opinions and emotions in ruling countries have the right to create military dictatorships or docile governments. They can dictate economic or any other kind of policy, give the orders to accept ruinous trade deals and usurious loans, demand servitude to their lifestyles, and enforce consumer trends. This right is a “natural one,” consecrated by the impunity with which it is exercised and the rapidity with which its exercise is forgotten.

Power recalls the past not to remember but to sanctify, to justify the perpetuation of privilege by right of inheritance, absolving those who rule of their crimes and supplying their speeches with alibis. What schools and the media teach as the only possible way of remembering the past simply passes on the voices that repeat the boring litany of power’s self-sacralization. Exoneration requires unremembering. There are successful countries and people and there are failed countries and people because the efficient deserve rewards and the useless deserve punishment. To turn infamies into feats, the memory of the North is divorced from the memory of the South, accumulation is detached from despoliation, opulence has nothing to do with plunder. Broken memory leads us to believe that wealth is innocent of poverty. Wealth and poverty emerge from eternity and toward eternity they march, and that’s the way things are because God or custom prefers it that way.

Points of View/3

From the point of view of statistics, if a person earns a thousand dollars and another earns nothing, each of them appears to earn five hundred dollars when one calculates per capita income.

From the point of view of the struggle against inflation, adjustment policies are a good remedy. From the point of view of those who suffer such policies, they spread cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, and other damnations.

The Eighth Wonder of the World, Beethoven’s Tenth, the Eleventh Commandment of the Lord: on all sides one hears hymns of praise to the free market, source of prosperity and guarantor of democracy. Free trade is sold as something new, as if born from a cabbage or the ear of a goat, despite its long history reaching back to the origins of the unjust system that reigns today:

• three or four centuries ago, England, Holland, and France practiced piracy in the name of free trade, through the good offices of Sir Francis Drake, Henry Morgan, Piet Heyn, François Lolonois, and other neoliberals of the day

• free trade was the alibi all Europe used while enriching itself selling human flesh in the slave trade

• later on, the United States brandished free trade to oblige many Latin American countries to accept its exports, loans, and military dictatorships

• wrapped in the folds of that same flag, British soldiers imposed opium smoking on China, while by fire and in the name of freedom, the filibuster William Walker reestablished slavery in Central America

• paying homage to free trade, British industry reduced India to the worst penury and British banks helped finance the extermination of Paraguay, which until 1870 had been the only truly independent country in Latin America

• time passed, and in 1954 it occurred to Guatemala to practice free trade by buying oil from the Soviet Union, and the United States promptly organized a devastating invasion to set things straight

• shortly thereafter, Cuba, also failing to see that free trade consisted of accepting prices as imposed, purchased outlawed Russian oil; the terrible fuss that ensued led to the Bay of Pigs invasion and the interminable blockade.

These historical antecedents teach us that free trade and other such monetary freedoms are to free peoples what Jack the Ripper was to Saint Francis of Assisi. The free market has transformed the countries of the South into bazaars filled with imported trinkets that most people can see but not touch. Nothing has changed since the far-off days when merchants and landowners usurped the independence won by barefoot soldiers and put it up for sale. That’s when the workshops that might have incubated national industries were annihilated, when ports and big cities razed the hinterlands, choosing the delights of consumption over the challenges of creation. Years have passed and in Venezuela’s supermarkets I have seen little plastic bags of water from Scotland to drink with your whiskey. In Central America’s cities, where even rocks sweat buckets, I have seen fur stoles on fancy ladies. In Peru, I’ve seen German electric floor waxers for homes with dirt floors and no electricity; in Brazil, plastic palm trees bought in Miami.

Another path, the inverse one, was taken by developed countries. They never had Herod to their childhood birthday parties. The free market is the only commodity they produce without any subsidies, but it’s only for export. They sell it, the South buys it. Their governments generously aid national agricultural production so that they can flood the South with food at ridiculously low prices despite ridiculously high costs, and so condemn the farmers of the South to ruin. The average rural producer in the United States receives state subsidies a hundred times greater than the income of a farmer in the Philippines, according to UN figures. And don’t forget the ferocious protectionism practiced by developed countries when it’s a matter of what they want most: a monopoly on state-of-the-art technologies, biotechnology, and the knowledge and communications industries. These privileges are defended at all cost so that the North will continue to know and the South will continue to repeat, and thus may it be for centuries upon centuries.

Many economic barriers remain high, and human barriers higher yet. No need to look further than Europe’s new immigration laws or the steel wall being erected by the United States along its border with Mexico. This is no homage to the Berlin Wall but one more door slammed in the face of Mexican workers who refuse to acknowledge that the freedom to change countries is money’s privilege. (To make the wall less unpleasant, the plan is to paint it a salmon color, display tiles of children’s artwork on it, and leave little holes to peek through.)

Language/1

Companies are called “multinationals” because they operate in many countries at once, but they belong to the few countries that monopolize wealth; political, military, and cultural power; scientific knowledge; and advanced technology. The ten biggest multinationals today earn more than a hundred countries put together do.

“Developing countries” is the name that experts use to designate countries trampled by someone else’s development. According to the United Nations, developing countries send developed countries ten times as much money through unequal trade and financial relations as they receive through foreign aid.

In international relations, “foreign aid” is what they call the little tax that vice pays to virtue. Foreign aid is generally distributed in ways that confirm injustice, rarely in ways that counter it. In 1995, black Africa suffered 75 percent of the world’s AIDS cases but received 3 percent of the funds spent by international organizations on AIDS prevention.

Every time they get together, and they get together with pointless frequency, the presidents of the Americas issue resolutions insisting that “the free market will contribute to prosperity.” Whose prosperity, they don’t say. Reality — which exists even if sometimes barely noted and which is not mute even if sometimes it keeps its mouth shut — tells us that the free flow of capital only fattens drug traffickers and the bankers who offer refuge to their narco-dollars. The collapse of public financial and economic controls provides good cover, allowing for the more efficient organization of drug distribution and money-laundering networks. Reality also tells us that the green light of the free market helps the North express its generosity, by offering the South and East as gifts its most polluting industries, its nuclear waste, and other garbage.

Language/2

In 1995, the Argentine press discovered that certain directors of the state-owned Banco Nación had received $37 million from IBM in return for a service contract $120 million above the usual price.

Three years later, the directors acknowledged that they had taken the money and deposited it in Swiss bank accounts, but they had the good taste to avoid using the word “bribe” or the rude expression “payoff”: one of them used the word “gratuity,” another said it was a “douceur,” and the most delicate among them explained that it was just “a sign of IBM’s happiness.”

Language/3

In the Victorian period, one did not speak of trousers in the presence of an unmarried woman. Today, there are certain things one can’t say in the face of public opinion:

• capitalism wears the stage name “market economy”

• imperialism is called “globalization”

• the victims of imperialism are called “developing countries,” much as a dwarf might be called a “child”

• opportunism is called “pragmatism”

• treason is called “realism”

• poor people are called “low-income people”

• the expulsion of poor children from the school system is measured by the “dropout rate”

• the right of bosses to lay off workers with neither severance nor explanation is called “a flexible labor market”

• official rhetoric acknowledges women’s rights among those of “minorities,” as if the masculine half of humanity were the majority

• instead of military dictatorship, people say “process”

• torture is called “illegal compulsion” or “physical and psychological pressure”

• when thieves belong to a good family they’re “kleptomaniacs”

• the looting of the public treasury by corrupt politicians answers to the name of “illicit enrichment”

• “accidents” are what they call crimes committed by cars

• for the blind, they say “the unseeing”

• a black man is “a man of color”

• where it says “long and difficult illness,” it means cancer or AIDS

• “sudden illness” means heart attack

• people annihilated in military operations aren’t dead: those killed in battle are “casualties,” and civilians who get it are “collateral damage”

• in 1995, when France set off nuclear tests in the South Pacific, the French ambassador to New Zealand declared, “I don’t like that word ‘bomb.’ They aren’t bombs. They’re exploding artifacts”

• “Getting Along” is what they call some of the death squads that operate under military protection in Colombia

• “Dignity” was what the Chilean dictatorship called one of its concentration camps, while “Liberty” was the largest jail of the Uruguayan dictatorship

• “Peace and Justice” is the name of the paramilitary group that in 1997 shot forty-five peasants, nearly all of them women and children, in the back as they prayed in the town church in Acteal, Chiapas, Mexico.

RACISM AND SEXISM 101

Subordinates owe eternal obedience to superiors, just as women owe obedience to men. Some are born to rule, others to be ruled.

Racism, like sexism, is justified by genetic inheritance. The poor are damned not by history but by biology. Their fate is written in the blood, and worse yet, their inferiority chromosomes carry the evil seeds of crime. When a poor, dark-skinned man approaches, red lights flash and alarm bells ring.

FABLES, LABELS, AND SIMPLE UNABLES

In the Americas and Europe the police hunt stereotypes guilty of wearing an unconcealed face. Every nonwhite suspect confirms the rule written in invisible ink in the depths of our collective conscience: crime is black or brown, or at least yellow.

This demonization ignores history. Over the past five centuries, white crimes aren’t hard to find. No more than one-fifth of the world’s population in the Renaissance, whites already claimed to embody God’s will. In his name they exterminated untold millions of Indians in the Americas and abducted untold millions of blacks from Africa. White of skin were the kings, vampires, and flesh traders who founded hereditary slavery in the Americas and Africa, so that the children of slaves would be born slaves in the mines and on the plantations. White were the authors of the countless acts of barbarism that civilization committed over the centuries, imposing white imperial power on the four corners of the earth by blood and fire. White were the heads of state and the warrior chiefs who, with a hand from the Japanese, organized and executed two world wars in the twentieth century, killing sixty-four million people, most of them civilians. And white were those who planned and carried out the Holocaust against the Jews, Reds, Gypsies, and gays in the Nazi death camps.

The certainty that some are born to be free and others to be slaves has guided all empires since the world began. But it was with the Renaissance and the conquest of the Americas that racism became a system of moral absolution at the service of European gluttony. Since then, racism has ruled, dismissing majorities among the colonized and excluding minorities among the colonizers. In the colonial era racism was as essential as gunpowder, and in Rome pope after pope slandered God by attributing to him the order to loot and plunder.

In America a new vocabulary was invented to locate people on the social scale according to their degree of degradation by miscegenation. “Mulatto” was, and is, a mixture of white and black, an evident allusion to the mule, the sterile offspring of a male donkey and a mare. Other terms classified the thousand colors engendered by the successive embraces of Europeans, Americans, and Africans in the New World: English names like half-caste, quadroon, octoroon, mustee, sambo, griffe, or the Spanish castizo, cuarterón, quinterón, morisco, cholo, albino, lobo, zambaigo, cambujo, albarazado, barcino, coyote, chamiso, zambo, jíbaro, tresalbo, jarocho, lunarejo, and rayado. And there were Spanish names meaning “turn-back,” “there-you-stay,” “hang-in-the-air,” and “I-don’t-understand-you,” to baptize the fruits of these tropical salsas and to define greater or lesser degrees of hereditary damnation.

Identity

Where are my ancestors? Whom shall I celebrate? Where shall I find the raw material? My first American ancestor … was an Indian, an early Indian; your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan.

— Mark Twain, who was white, in the New York Times, December 26, 1881

Of all the names, “I-don’t-understand-you” is the most revealing. In the five centuries since the so-called discovery of America, we’ve had nothing but I-don’t-understand-yous. Christopher Columbus thought that the Indians were from India, that Cubans lived in China and Haitians in Japan. His brother Bartholomew burned six Indians alive when all they had done was bury Catholic medallions so the new gods would make their crops fertile. When the conquistadors arrived on the eastern coast of Mexico they asked, “What is this place?” The natives answered, “We don’t understand a thing,” which in the Mayan language sounded like “Yucatan,” and that is what the region has been called ever since. When the conquistadors reached the heart of South America they asked, “What is this lake?” The natives answered, “Water, sir?” which in the Guaraní language sounded like “Ypacaraí,” the name promptly conferred on the lake near Asunción, Paraguay. Indians were always beardless, but in his Dictionnaire universel of 1694 Antoine Furetière described them as “furry and covered with hair,” because the European iconographic tradition held that savages were always hairy like monkeys. In 1774, the priest charged with teaching catechism in the town of San Andrés Itzapa in Guatemala discovered that the Indians worshiped not the Virgin Mary but the serpent crushed under her foot, the serpent being a Mayan divinity. He also discovered that they venerated the cross because it was shaped like the sacred meeting of the rain and the earth. At the same time in the German city of Königsberg, Immanuel Kant, who had never been to America, declared that Indians were “incapable of civilization” and were destined to be exterminated. In fact, extermination was occurring, though it had little to do with their nature: not many Indians survived the harquebusades and cannonades, the attacks of virus and bacteria unknown in the Americas, and the endless days of forced labor in the fields and in the gold and silver mines. Many were condemned to the lash, the stake, or the gallows for the sin of idolatry. Those “incapable of civilization” lived in communion with nature and believed, like many of their descendants today, that the earth is sacred, as is all that walks on it or grows from it.

Century after century, the whites kept getting it wrong. At the end of the nineteenth century, the military campaigns to annihilate the Indians in southern Argentina were called “the conquest of the desert,” even though Patagonia was less deserted then than it is today. A few years ago the Argentine civil registry refused to accept indigenous names “because they are foreign.” Anthropologist Catalina Buliubasich discovered that the registry was giving undocumented Indians from highlands near Salta birth certificates on which their aboriginal names were exchanged for unforeign ones like Chevroleta, Ford, Twenty-Seven, Eight, and Thirteen. Some were even rebaptized Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the whole shebang, in homage to the founding father who felt nothing but disgust for the native population.

For the Course on Penal Law

In 1986, a Mexican congressman visited the jail in Cerro Hueco, in Chiapas. There he found a Tzotzil Indian who had slit his father’s throat and been sentenced to thirty years. But every day at noon, as the congressman discovered, the dead father brought tortillas and beans to his son in jail.

The Tzotzil prisoner had been interrogated and judged in Spanish, of which he understood little or nothing, and with the help of a good beating he confessed to something called parricide.

Today, Indians are considered deadwood in the economies that live off their hard labor, and a millstone for the plastic culture to which these countries aspire. In Guatemala, one of the few countries where Indians managed to recover from their demographic catastrophe, they suffer mistreatment as an excluded minority even though they are the majority. Mestizos and whites (or those who call themselves white) dress and live (or wish they could dress and live) Miami-style so that they won’t look like Indians, while thousands of foreigners make the pilgrimage to the market at Chichicastenango, a pillar of world beauty, to buy the marvels woven by indigenous artists. Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, who took power in 1954, dreamed of turning Guatemala into Disneyland. To save the Indians from ignorance and backwardness, the colonel proposed “awakening their aesthetic sense,” as an official pamphlet explained, “by teaching them weaving, embroidery, and other trades.” Death surprised him in the midst of this task.

“You look like an Indian” or “You smell like a black,” say some mothers in countries with a large Indian or black presence when their children don’t want to take a bath. Yet the chroniclers of the Conquest noted the Spaniards’ astonishment at the frequency with which Indians bathed. It was Indians, and later African slaves, who had the courtesy to pass their hygienic habits on to other Americans from Canada to Chile.

The Christian faith distrusted bathing, suspecting it of being a sin because it felt so good. In Spain during the Inquisition, frequent bathers, accused of Moslem heresy, could end up burned at the stake. In Spain today, someone is a real Arab if he vacations at Marbella on the Costa del Sol, but a poor Arab is just a Moor, perhaps “a stinking Moor.” Anyone who has visited the Alhambra, that festival of water in Granada, knows Islam has been a culture of water since way back when Christians wouldn’t touch it except to drink. In reality, showers became popular in Europe quite recently, more or less at the same time as television.

They say Indians are supposed to be cowards and blacks easily frightened, but they’ve always been good cannon fodder in wars of conquest, wars of independence, civil wars, and border wars in Latin America. The Spanish used Indian soldiers to massacre Indians during the Conquest. The nineteenth-century wars of independence were a hecatomb for Argentine blacks, who were always sent to the front lines. In the war against Paraguay, the bodies of black Brazilians littered the battlefields. Indians were the troops Peru and Bolivia used in the war against Chile. “That abject and degraded race,” as Peruvian writer Ricardo Palma called them, were sent to the slaughterhouse as the officers fled shouting “Long live the fatherland!” More recently, it was Indians who died in the war between Ecuador and Peru and Indian soldiers who destroyed Indian villages in the Guatemalan highlands. For their mestizo officers each crime was a grisly rite meant to exorcise half their blood.

The Goddess

On the night celebrating Iemanyá, the entire coast is a feast. Bahía, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and other shores celebrate the goddess of the sea. Crowds turn the beach into a sea of candles and the waters into a garden of flowers and perfumes, necklaces, cakes, candies, and other trifles and treats she may fancy.

Then the worshipers make a wish:

The map of buried treasure,

The key to forbidden love,

The return of the lost,

The resurrection of the dead.

The worshipers ask and their wishes come true. Perhaps the miracle lasts no longer than it takes to utter the words that name it, but in that fleeting moment when the impossible happens, the worshipers shine with their own light, luminous in the dark.

Once the waves have carried away their offerings, the worshipers retreat, their eyes on the horizon, so as not to turn their backs on the goddess. And very slowly they return to the city.

The same people who claim blacks are lazy also say admiringly, “He works like a black.” They say, “Whites run, blacks flee.” The white who runs was robbed; the black who flees is a thief. Even Martín Fierro, the character from the Argentine literary classic, who best embodies all poor and persecuted gauchos, thinks blacks are thieves created by the Devil to the disgrace of hell. Indians, too: “The Indian is Indian and will not try/To change his ways so forlorn/An Indian thief he was first born/And like an Indian thief he will die.” Black thief, Indian thief: the I-don’t-understand-you tradition insists that thieves be the ones who are robbed the most.

Since the days of conquest and slavery, Indians and blacks have been robbed of their hands and their lands, their labor and their wealth — their words and memory as well. In the Rio de la Plata, “quilombo” now means brothel, chaos, disorder, confusion, but this Bantu word really meant training camp. In Brazil, quilombos were the sanctuaries founded in the jungle by fugitive slaves, some of which lasted a long time. The free kingdom of Palmares in the hinterlands of Alagoas lasted an entire century, resisting more than thirty military expeditions by the armies of Holland and Portugal. The true history of the conquest and colonization of America is a story of unceasing dignity. There was not a day without rebellion. Yet official history has erased every one of those uprisings with the disdain reserved for ill-mannered servants. After all, when blacks and Indians refused to accept slavery or forced labor as their fate, they were trying to subvert the organizing principles of the universe. Between the amoeba and God, universal order was founded on a long chain of successive subordinations: like the planets that orbit the sun, serfs revolved around their lords. Social inequality and racial discrimination are still an integral part of the harmony of the cosmos, and not only in the Americas. As Italian politician Pietro Ingrao noted in 1995: “I have a Philippine maid at home. It’s so strange. It’s hard for me to imagine a Philippine family that would have a white maid in their home.”

Hell

In colonial times, Palenque was a sanctuary of freedom deep in the jungle, a refuge for fugitive black slaves from Cartagena de Indias and the plantations of the Colombian coast.

Years have gone by, centuries, and Palenque survives. The people of Palenque continue to believe that the earth, their earth, is a body made of fields, jungles, wind, people, that it breathes through trees and cries through streams. They continue to believe that those who have enjoyed life will be rewarded in paradise and those who haven’t will burn in hell, in the eternal fire reserved for the cold women and men who disobeyed the sacred voices that command us to live life with pleasure and passion.

Thinkers capable of elevating the prejudices of the ruling class to the category of science have never been lacking, but in nineteenth-century Europe they were particularly bountiful. The philosopher Auguste Comte, a founder of modern sociology, believed in the superiority of the white race and the perpetual childhood of women. Like nearly all his colleagues, Comte harbored no doubts about one essential principle: white men are the most fit to rule over those condemned to the lower rungs of the social ladder.

Cesare Lombroso turned racism into criminology. To demonstrate the innate dangerousness of “primitive savages,” this Italian professor, who happened to be Jewish, developed a method quite similar to the one Hitler would use half a century later to justify anti-Semitism. According to Lombroso, criminals are born criminals and the animal features that give them away are the very same ones that black Africans and American Indians inherited from the Mongoloid race. Murderers have high cheekbones, frizzy black hair, sparse beards, large incisors. Robbers have flat noses; rapists, swollen lips and eyelids. Like savages, criminals do not blush, which allows them to lie shamelessly. Women do blush, though Lombroso discovered that “even women considered normal have some criminal features.” Revolutionaries, too: “I have never seen an anarchist with a symmetrical face.”

Herbert Spencer attributed to the empire of reason inequalities that today spring from the law of the market. Though a century has passed, some of his truths sound rather modern, well suited to our neoliberal days. According to Spencer the state ought to remain on the margins and not interfere with the processes of “natural selection” that give power to the strongest and best-endowed. Social welfare only adds to the herd of lazy bums, and public education sows discontent. The state ought to stick to instructing “inferior races” in manual trades and keeping them away from alcohol.

Heroes and Villains

Inside some athletes lives a crowd. In the forties, when blacks couldn’t even share a cemetery with whites in the United States, Jackie Robinson was a baseball star. Millions of oppressed blacks found dignity through this athlete who shone like no one else in an exclusively white sport. Fans threw insults and peanuts at him; players spat on him; death threats welcomed him home.

In 1996, while the world was busy acclaiming Nelson Mandela and his long struggle against racism, the athlete Josia Thugwane became the first black South African to win an Olympic medal. Over the past few years, it has become normal for Olympic medals to end up in the hands of Kenyans, Ethiopians, Somalis, Burundis, or South Africans. Tiger Woods, the Mozart of golf, is a star in a rich white sport, and for years now basketball and boxing have been dominated by blacks. Blacks and mulattos are the players who give soccer most of its joy and beauty.

In racism’s doublespeak, it is perfectly acceptable to applaud successful blacks and damn the rest. At the World Cup won by France in 1998, nearly all the players in blue who started each match to the tune of the “Marseillaise” were immigrants. A poll taken during the Cup confirmed that four of every ten people in France harbor racial prejudice, but every Frenchman celebrated that triumph as if those blacks and Arabs were the sons of Joan of Arc.

As when the police conduct a search, racism finds whatever it has planted. Until the early years of the twentieth century, weighing brains was a common way of measuring intelligence. This scientific method, which gave rise to obscene exhibitions of encephalitic matter, demonstrated that Indians, blacks, and women had rather light brains. Gabriel René Moreno, the great intellectual of nineteenth-century Bolivia, proved, scale in hand, that Indian and mestizo brains weighed five to ten ounces less than white brains. The weight of the brain has about as much to do with intelligence as the size of the penis does with sexual ability — in other words, none. But scientists tracked down famous brains, undaunted by disconcerting results. The brain of Anatole France, for example, weighed half as much as Ivan Turgenev’s, even though their literary merits were considered more or less the same.

A century ago in Paris, Alfred Binet invented the first IQ test, with the laudable objective of identifying children who needed more help from their teachers. The inventor was the first to say that this instrument was of no use in measuring intelligence, which cannot be measured, and should not be used to disqualify anyone from anything. But by 1913, U.S. officials were already using the Binet test at the very gates of New York, right near the Statue of Liberty, on recently arrived Jewish, Hungarian, Italian, and Russian immigrants. They found that eight out of every ten immigrants had the minds of children. Three years later, Bolivian authorities put the test to work in the public schools of Potosí: eight out of every ten children there were abnormal. And ever since, racial and social prejudice has relied on the scientific aura of intellectual coefficients, treating people as if they were numbers. In 1994, The Bell Curve was a spectacular best-seller in the United States. Written by two university professors, it proclaimed unabashedly what many thought but didn’t dare say above a whisper: that blacks and poor people have lower IQs than whites and the rich thanks to their genetic makeup. To waste money on education and social assistance for them would be like throwing water into the sea. The poor, especially those with black skin, are donkeys, and not because they’re poor. Rather they’re poor because they’re donkeys.

Names

The marathon runner Doroteo Guamuch, a Quiché Indian, was the greatest athlete in Guatemalan history. Since he was the pride and glory of his country, he had to change his Mayan name and call himself Mateo Flores.

In homage to his feats, the country’s largest soccer stadium was named Mateo Flores while the man himself earned his living as a caddy, carrying clubs and collecting balls and tips at the Mayan Golf Club.

Racism only acknowledges evidence that supports its own prejudices. African art has been a primordial source of inspiration for, and often the object of blatant plagiarism by, the most famous painters and sculptors of the twentieth century. And where would we be without the music that came out of Africa to spawn new magic in Brazil, the United States, and the Caribbean? African rhythms saved the world from dying of boredom or sorrow. Nevertheless, to Jorge Luis Borges, Arnold Toynbee, and many other worthy modern intellectuals, the cultural sterility of blacks was self-evident.

In the Americas, our culture is the daughter of several mothers. Our multiple identity gains its creative vitality from the fertile contradiction of its parts. But we have been trained not to see ourselves, not to see the full splendor of the human condition in all its glory. The Americas are sick with racism, blind in both eyes from North to South. Latin Americans of my generation were educated by Hollywood. Indians were guys with long faces wearing feathers and war paint, seasick from riding in circles. Of Africa all we knew was what we learned from Professor Tarzan, the invention of a novelist who never set foot on that continent.

Non-European cultures are not seen as cultures but as catch basins of ignorance, useful at best for proving the impotence of inferior races, or attracting tourists, or giving holiday parties a decorative touch. But in the real garden of mestizo culture, indigenous and African roots flower with as much potency as their European counterparts. Their bountiful fruits can be plainly seen not only in high art but in arts scorned as handicrafts and in religions dismissed as superstition. Those roots, ignored but not ignorant, feed the daily lives of people of flesh and blood even if some don’t realize it or would rather not see it. They are alive in the languages that reveal who we are by what we say and what we keep silent, in our ways of eating and preparing what we eat, in the melodies that make us dance, the games that make us play, and the thousand and one secret or shared ceremonies that help us live.

For centuries the divinities that came from the American past and the coasts of Africa were outlawed and lived in hiding. Although they are still disdained today, many believing whites and mestizos pay them homage or acknowledge them and ask their favors. In the Andean countries, it’s not only Indians who tilt their glasses and allow the first swallow to spill so that Pachamama, goddess of the earth, may drink. On the islands of the Caribbean and the Atlantic coasts of South America, it’s no longer only blacks who offer flowers and treats to Iemanyá, goddess of the sea. The days are over when Indian and black gods had to dress up as Christian saints in order to exist. Still, they remain objects of scorn by official culture. In our alienated societies, trained for centuries to spit in the mirror, it isn’t easy to accept that religions which originated in the Americas or came on slave ships from Africa are as worthy of respect as Christianity. Not more, but not a bit less. Religions? Those superstitions? Those pagan exaltations of nature, those dangerous celebrations of human passion? Picturesque, maybe even pleasant, but deep down what are they? Just expressions of ignorance and backwardness.

Justice

In 1997, an expensive new car with official plates traveled at a normal speed down a São Paulo avenue. Three men rode inside. At a corner they were stopped by a policeman who made them get out and stand against the car, hands in the air, for over an hour while he asked them again and again where they had stolen the car.

The three men were black. One of them, Edivaldo Brito, was the head of the São Paulo Justice Department. For Brito this was nothing new. In less than a year it had already happened five times.

The policeman who stopped them was also black.

Viewing blacks and their symbols of identity that way is a longstanding tradition. In 1937, to open the road to progress in the Dominican Republic, Generalissimo Rafael Leónidas Trujillo ordered twenty-five thousand black Haitians cut to pieces with machetes. The generalissimo, a mulatto whose grandmother was Haitian, used to whiten his face with rice powder and he wanted to whiten the country, too. As an indemnity, the Dominican government paid $29 per body to Haiti. After lengthy negotiations, Trujillo admitted to eighteen thousands deaths, for a total of $522,000.

Meanwhile, far from there, Adolf Hitler was sterilizing Gypsies and the mulatto children of Senegalese soldiers who had come to Germany in French uniforms. The Nazi plan to achieve Aryan purity began with the sterilization of criminals and people with hereditary diseases and then moved on to the Jews.

The world’s first euthanasia law was approved in 1901 by the state of Indiana. By 1930, thirty U.S. states had legalized the sterilization of the retarded, dangerous murderers, rapists, and those who belonged to categories as fuzzy as “social perverts,” “alcoholics and other drug addicts,” and “sick and degenerate people.” Most of those sterilized were, of course, black. In Europe, Germany wasn’t alone in enacting laws inspired by dreams of social hygiene and racial purity. Sweden, for example, has recently admitted to sterilizing more than sixty thousand people under a 1930s law not repealed until 1976.

In the twenties and thirties the most prestigious educators in the Americas spoke of the need to “regenerate the race,” “improve the species,” or “change the biological quality of children.” When Peruvian dictator Augusto Leguía opened the Pan-American Children’s Congress in 1930, he emphasized “ethnic improvement,” echoing Peru’s recent National Conference on Children, which had raised the alarm about “child retards, degenerates, and criminals.” Six years earlier, when the congress was held in Chile, many speakers insisted on the necessity of “selecting the seeds to be sown, to avoid impure children,” while the Argentine daily La Nación editorialized about the need “to look out for the future of the race” and in Chile El Mercurio warned that Indian “habits and ignorance impede the adoption of certain modern customs and concepts.”

Points of View/4

In the East of the world, Western day is night.

In India, those in mourning wear white.

In ancient Europe, black, the color of the fertile earth, was the color of life, and white, the color of bones, was the color of death.

According to the wise old men of Colombia’s Chocó region, Adam and Eve were black, and so were their sons, Cain and Abel. When Cain killed his brother with one blow, God’s fury thundered across the heavens. Cringing before the Lord’s rage, the murderer turned so pale from guilt and fear that he stayed white until the end of his days. We whites are all children of Cain.

A leading participant in the congress in Chile, a socialist medical doctor named José Ingenieros, wrote in 1905 that blacks, “opprobrious scoriae,” merited enslavement for reasons “of purely biological reality.” The rights of man could not be extended to “these simian beings, who seem closer to anthropoid monkeys than to civilized whites.” According to Ingenieros — a guiding light of Argentine youth — neither should “these scraps of human flesh” aspire to be citizens, “because they shouldn’t be considered people in the juridical sense.” A few years earlier, another doctor, Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, had spoken in no less outrageous terms. This pioneer of anthropology in Brazil declared that “the study of inferior races has offered science well-observed examples of their organic cerebral incapacity.”

Most of the intellectuals of the Americas were convinced that “inferior races” blocked the road to progress. Nearly all governments held the same opinion. In the south of the United States mixed marriages were outlawed and blacks couldn’t get into schools, washrooms, or cemeteries reserved for whites. The blacks of Costa Rica couldn’t enter the city of San José without a permit. No black was allowed to cross the border into El Salvador. Indians weren’t allowed on the sidewalks of the Mexican city of San Cristóbal de las Casas.

But Latin America never had euthanasia laws, maybe because hunger and the police were already on the job. Today, indigenous children in Guatemala, Bolivia, and Peru are still dying like flies from hunger and curable diseases, and in Brazil eight out of every ten street kids murdered by death squads are black. The last U.S. euthanasia law was repealed in 1972 in Virginia, but in the United States the mortality rate of black infants is twice that of whites, and four out of every ten adults executed in the electric chair, by lethal injection, pills, firing squad, or hanging are black.

During the Second World War, while many black Americans lay dying on European battlefields, the U.S. Red Cross refused blood donations from blacks, lest the mixing outlawed in bedrooms occur by transfusion. Fear of contamination, as seen in some of William Faulkner’s literary marvels and in the many horrors of the hooded Ku Klux Klan, is a ghost that has not disappeared from the nightmares of North Americans. No one can deny the spectacular achievements of the civil rights movement over the past few decades. Yet blacks still face an unemployment rate twice that of whites, and more of them end up in jail than in college. One out of every four has been or is currently imprisoned. Three out of every four black residents of Washington, D.C., have been arrested at least once. In Los Angeles, blacks driving expensive cars are systematically stopped by police offering the usual humiliations and the occasional beating as well, like the one given to Rodney King in 1991, setting off an explosion of collective anger that made the city tremble. In 1995 Ambassador James Cheek of the United States flippantly dismissed Argentina’s patent law, a timid effort at independence, as “worthy of Burundi,” and he didn’t offend a soul, not in Argentina, the United States, or Burundi. By the way, Burundi was at war at the time, as was Yugoslavia. According to the news agencies, Burundi suffered tribal conflict, but in Yugoslavia the conflict was — take your pick — ethnic, national, or religious.

Thus It Is Proven That Indians Are Inferior

(According to the Conquistadors of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)

The Indians of the Caribbean islands commit suicide? Because they are lazy and refuse to work.

They go about naked, as if their entire bodies were faces? Because savages have no shame.

They know nothing of the right of property, share everything, and have no desire for riches? Because they are closer to the apes than to man.

They bathe with suspicious frequency? Because they are like the heretics of the sect of Mohammed, who burn well in the fires of the Inquisition.

They believe in dreams and obey their voices? The influence of Satan or plain stupidity.

Homosexuality is practiced freely? Virginity has no importance? Because they are promiscuous and live at hell’s door.

They never hit their children and they let them run free? Because they are incapable of punishment or discipline.

They eat when they are hungry and not at mealtimes? Because they are incapable of dominating their instincts.

They adore nature, which they consider their mother, and believe she is sacred? Because they are incapable of religion and can profess only idolatry.

Thus It Is Proven That Blacks Are Inferior

(According to the Thinkers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries)

Voltaire, anticlerical writer, advocate of tolerance and reason: Blacks are inferior to Europeans but superior to apes.

Carolus Linnaeus, classifier of plants and animals: The black is a vagabond, lazy, negligent, indolent, and of dissolute morals.

David Hume, master of human understanding: The black might develop certain attributes of human beings, the way the parrot manages to speak a few words.

Etienne Serres, sage of anatomy: Blacks are condemned to be primitive because of the short distance between their belly buttons and their penises.

Francis Galton, father of eugenics, the scientific method for impeding the propagation of the unfit: A crocodile will never become a gazelle, nor will a black ever become a member of the middle class.

Louis Agassiz, prominent zoologist: The brain of the adult black is equivalent to that of a seven-month-old white fetus; the development of the brain is blocked because the black cranium closes much earlier than the white cranium.

Two hundred years ago, the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who truly understood Spanish America, wrote that “lighter or darker skin determines the class a man occupies in society.” Those words continue to paint a fairly accurate picture not only of Spanish America but of all the Americas, from North to South, even though Bolivia recently had an Indian vice president and the United States can show off a well-known black general brimming with medals, some prominent black politicians, and successful black businessmen.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the few Latin American mulattos who had become wealthy could buy certificados de blancura from the Spanish crown or cartas de branquidão from the Portuguese crown, testaments to a sudden change of skin color that bestowed a corresponding change in rights. Over the centuries, money continued to be capable of such alchemy. In exceptional cases, so could talent: the Brazilian Machado de Assis, the greatest Latin American writer of the nineteenth century, was mulatto but, as his compatriot Joaquim Nabuco liked to say, his literary talent turned him white. “Racial democracy” remains a social pyramid with a summit that is white or pretends to be.

The situation of Indians in Canada is reasonably similar to that of blacks in the United States: they make up less than 5 percent of the population, but three out of every ten prisoners are Indian and their infant mortality rate is twice that of whites. In Mexico, the average wage for Indians is barely half the national average and the rate of malnutrition is double. Rarely are black-skinned Brazilians found in universities, on soap operas, or in advertisements. Official Brazilian statistics show many fewer blacks than there really are, and the followers of African religions are listed as Catholics. In the Dominican Republic, where for better or worse everyone has some black ancestor, identity documents register skin color but the word “black” is never used: “I don’t put down ‘black’ so they won’t be disgraced their whole lives,” an official explained to me.

The Dominican border with Haiti, a black country, is called “the Bad Pass.” Throughout Latin America, classified ads that ask for “well-groomed employees” are really asking for light-skinned ones. A black lawyer in Lima told me judges are always confusing him with the defendant. In 1996, the mayor of São Paulo had to issue a decree to open elevators in private buildings to everyone. They had usually been off-limits to the poor, which is to say, to blacks and dark-skinned mulattos. At the end of that year, just before Christmas, the Nativity scene in the cathedral of Salta in northern Argentina caused a scandal. The shepherds and the three kings, the Virgin and Saint Joseph, even the baby Jesus were all Indians, with Indian clothes and features. Such a sacrilege could not last. After expressions of indignation from local high society and threats of arson, the Nativity scene was removed.

At the time of the Conquest it was already clear that Indians would be condemned to servitude in this life and hell in the next. There was plenty of evidence of Satan’s reign in the Americas. Among the more irrefutable proofs: homosexuality was practiced freely in the Caribbean and elsewhere. In 1446, King Alfonso V ordered Portuguese homosexuals burned at the stake: “We order and dispose by general law that any man who commits such a sin under any guise shall be burned and reduced to dust by fire, so that memory of neither his body nor his burial shall ever be heard.” In 1497, Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Spain, ordered burned alive those guilty of the “nefarious sin of sodomy,” who previously had been stoned to death or hanged. The conquistadors offered their own worthy contributions to the technology of punishing homosexuals. In 1513, two days before what is called the discovery of the Pacific Ocean, Captain Vasco Núñez de Balboa “dogged” fifty Indians who offended God by committing “the abominable sin against nature.” Instead of burning them alive, he threw them to dogs trained to devour human flesh. The spectacle took place in Panama by the light of bonfires. Balboa’s dog, Leoncico, earned the salary of a second lieutenant.

Nearly five centuries later, in May 1997, in the small Brazilian city of São Gonçalo de Amarante, a man killed fifteen people, then committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest because people in town were saying he was gay. Ever since the Conquest, the established order has worked feverishly to uphold the biblical tradition not by socializing worldly goods — God forbid — but by perpetuating its most horrendous phobias.

Today, the gay and lesbian movement has won broad freedoms and respect, above all in the North, but cobwebs still cloud our vision. Too many people see homosexuality as a sin that cannot be expiated, an indelible and contagious stigma or an invitation to ruin that tempts the innocent. The sinners, whether viewed as diseased or delinquent, constitute a public threat. Many homosexuals fall victim to “social cleansing groups” in Colombia, death squads in Brazil, or any number of fanatics in uniform or civilian clothes around the world who exorcise their own demons by beating or stabbing or shooting. According to anthropologist Luiz Mott of the Gay Group of Bahía, no less than eighteen hundred homosexuals have been murdered in the past fifteen years in Brazil. “They kill one another,” say the police. “That’s how fags are.” One hears exactly the same explanation for wars in Africa (“That’s how blacks are”) and for massacres of Indians in the Americas (“That’s how Indians are”).

“That’s how women are” is also said. Racism and sexism drink from the same wells and spit out similar words. According to Argentine criminologist Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, the founding text of all penal law is The Witches’ Hammer, a manual from the Inquisition directed against half of humanity and published in 1546. The inquisitors spend the entire book, first page to last, justifying the punishment of women by their biological inferiority. Women had long been mistreated in the Bible and in Greek mythology, from the days when foolish Eve made God throw us out of paradise and when that idiot Pandora opened the box and filled the world with misfortune. “The head of woman is that of man,” explained Saint Paul to the Corinthians, and nineteen centuries later Gustave Le Bon, one of the founders of social psychology, was able to prove that an intelligent woman is as rare as a two-headed gorilla. Charles Darwin acknowledged some feminine virtues, like intuition, but these were “virtues characteristic of inferior races.”

Since the earliest days of the Conquest of America, homosexuals have been accused of treason to masculinity. Then, the most unpardonable of affronts to the Lord, who was obviously male, was the femininity of those Indians who to be women needed only to have tits and to give birth, as Balboa is said to have put it. Today, treason against femininity is the accusation leveled at lesbians, those degenerates who don’t reproduce. Born to make children, undress drunks, and dress up saints, women have traditionally been accused of congenital stupidity, like Indians, like blacks. And like them they have been condemned to the shantytowns of history. Official history in the Americas concedes only a tiny role to those loyal shadows of male heroes, resigned mothers and suffering widows: the flag, embroidery, and mourning. Rarely is mention made of the European women who fought in the Conquest or the women born in the Americas who raised their swords in the wars of independence, although macho historians should at least applaud their virtues as warriors. Even less does one hear of the Indian and black women who led several of the many rebellions in the colonial period. Invisible, they appear only miraculously, when you dig deep enough. Not long ago, reading a book about Surinam, I learned of Kaála, leader of free people, who roused fugitive slaves with her sacred staff and abandoned her husband because he was feeble at love.

Points of View/5

Had the Saints who wrote the Gospels been women, how would they have portrayed the first night of the Christian era?

Saint Joseph, the Holy women would have written, was in a foul mood, the only one with a long face in that stable where the baby Jesus shone in his manger. Everybody else was smiling: the Virgin Mary, the little angels, the shepherds, the sheep, the oxen, the donkey, the kings who had come from the East, and the star that had led them to Bethlehem. Everybody smiled except for sullen Saint Joseph, who grumbled, “I wanted a girl.”

Points of View/6

If Eve had written Genesis, what would she have said about the first night of human love?

Eve would have begun by making it clear that she was not born from anyone’s rib, nor did she know any serpents, nor did she offer anyone apples, and God never told her that giving birth would hurt or that your husband would tell you what to do. All those stories were just lies Adam told the press.

Like Indians and blacks, women, though inferior, are a threat. “Better a man’s spite than a woman’s kindness,” warns Ecclesiasticus. And Odysseus knew enough to avoid the songs of mermaids meant to entice men from their course. There is no cultural tradition that does not justify the masculine monopoly on weapons and words, nor is there a popular tradition that fails to perpetuate disdain for women or to denounce them as a danger. Proverbs transmitted from generation to generation teach that women and lies were born the same day and that a woman’s word isn’t worth a pin. The peasant mythology of Latin America is filled with ghosts of women seeking vengeance as fearsome spirits, “evil lights” that lie in wait for travelers at night. In vigil and in sleep, men betray their terror that females may invade the forbidden territories of pleasure and power, and thus it has been from time immemorial.

It’s not for nothing that witch-hunts went after women, and not only during the Inquisition. Spasms and moans, maybe orgasms — even worse, multiple orgasms — these were the evidence of a woman bewitched. Only possession by the Devil could explain so much forbidden fire, which by fire was punished: God commanded that female sinners burning with passion be burned alive. Envy and terror of female pleasure are nothing new. A myth common to many cultures over the ages and across the world is that of the vagina dentata, the woman’s sex like a mouth filled with teeth, the insatiable piranha that feeds on male flesh. And in the world today there are twenty million women whose clitorises have been mutilated.

No woman is free from suspicion. In boleros they’re all ungrateful; in tangos, they’re all whores (except for mama). In the countries of the South, one woman out of every three married women is routinely beaten for what she has done or could do. “We are asleep,” says a woman worker in Montevideo’s barrio Casavalle. “Some prince gives you a kiss and puts you to sleep. When you awake, the prince is beating you up.” Another: “I’ve got my mother’s fear, and my mother had my grandmother’s.” Men confirm their right of ownership over women with their fists, just as men and women do over children.

And rapes, aren’t they also rites to enforce that right? Rapists don’t seek pleasure, nor do they find it. Rape brands a mark of ownership on the victim’s buttocks, the most brutal expression of the phallic power of the arrow, the spade, the rifle, the cannon, the missile, or any other erection. In the United States a woman is raped every six minutes, in Mexico every nine minutes. A Mexican woman says: “There is no difference between being raped and being hit by a truck, except that after rape men ask if you liked it.”

Statistics track only those rapes that get reported, which in Latin America are always many fewer than occur. Most rape victims remain silent out of fear. Many girls, raped in their homes, end up on the streets, which they work as cheap bodies. Some of them, like all street kids, make their homes on the pavement. Fourteen-year-old Lélia, raised by the grace of God on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, says, “Everybody steals. I steal and people steal from me.” When Lélia sells her body, they pay her little or they pay her with blows. And when she steals, the police steal what she stole and her body as well. Angélica, thrown onto the streets of Mexico City at sixteen, says: “I told my mother that my brother had abused me, and she kicked me out of the house. Now I live with a guy and I’m pregnant. He says he’ll support me if I have a boy. If I have a girl, he doesn’t say.”

“In today’s world, being born female is a risk,” says the director of UNICEF. In 1995 in Beijing, the international women’s conference noted that women today earn one-third what men earn for equal work. Of every ten poor people, seven are women, and barely one woman in a hundred owns property. Minus a wing, humanity flies crooked. For every ten legislators, there is, on average, one woman, and in some parliaments there are none. Women are acknowledged as useful at home, in factories, or in offices and even as necessary in bed or in the kitchen, but public spaces are virtually monopolized by men born with the urge to have power and make war. That a woman, Carol Bellamy, heads UNICEF is unusual. The United Nations preaches equality but doesn’t practice it: at the highest levels of this, the highest international organization, men occupy eight out of every ten positions.

The Despised Mother

Black Africa’s works of art, the fruits of collective creation by nobody and everybody, are rarely exhibited on an equal footing with those of artists considered worthy of the name. The booty of colonial pillage can sometimes be found in a few museums and art galleries or in private collections in Europe and the United States, but its “natural” place is in the anthropology museum. Reduced to handicrafts or folklore, African art is dealt with only as one of several customs of exotic peoples.

The centers of so-called civilization, accustomed as they are to acting as creditors for the rest of the world, have no great interest in acknowledging their debts. Yet anyone who has eyes to see and admire might wonder what would have happened to twentieth-century art without the black contribution? Without the African mother from whom they nursed, would the most famous paintings and sculptures of our times have been possible? On page after page in a revealing book published by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, William Rubin and other experts document the debt that the art we call art owes to the art of peoples we call “primitive.”

The principal figures of contemporary painting and sculpture were nourished by African art, and some of them copied it without even a thank-you. The greatest artistic genius of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso, always worked surrounded by African masks and weavings, and their influence is evident in the many marvels he left. The painting that gave rise to Cubism, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (the ladies of the red-light district of Barcelona), offers one of many examples. The most famous face in it, the one that breaks most strikingly with traditional symmetry, is an exact reproduction of a mask from the Congo, representing a face deformed by syphilis, that hangs in the Royal Central African Museum in Belgium.

Certain carved heads by Amedeo Modigliani are twin sisters of masks from Mali and Nigeria. The hieroglyphic borders on traditional Mali weavings were the model for Paul Klee’s graphs. Some stylized carvings from the Congo or Kenya made before Alberto Giacometti was born could pass for Giacomettis in any museum. You could try to guess which is a Max Ernst oil of a man’s head and which is the Ivory Coast sculpture Head of a Knight in a private New York collection, but it wouldn’t be easy. Moonlight on a Breeze by Alexander Calder contains a face that is a clone of a Luba mask from Congo displayed in the Seattle Art Museum.