Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

CASE STUDIES

There is no doubt about the educational value of these examples. Here we will examine the illuminating experience of the oil industry, whose love of nature is rivaled only by that of the Impressionist painters. We will recount episodes that illustrate the philanthropic vocation of the military and chemical industries. And we will reveal the keys to success that placed the industry of crime in the vanguard of the world economy.

THE HANGED WRITER

Shell and Chevron have destroyed the Niger River delta. Author Ken Saro-Wiwa, of the Ogoni people of Nigeria, wrote: “What Shell and Chevron have done to Ogoni people, land, streams, creeks and the atmosphere amounts to genocide. The soul of the Ogoni people is dying and I am witness to the fact.”

At the beginning of 1995, Shell’s general manager in Nigeria, Naemeka Achebe, explained why his company supported the military government: “For a commercial company trying to make investments, you need a stable environment.… Dictatorships can give you that.” A few months later, the dictatorship hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa along with eight other Ogonis for resisting the companies that were destroying their villages and turning their country into a vast wasteland. Many Ogonis had already been murdered for the same reason.

Saro-Wiwa’s prestige gave this crime a certain international resonance. The president of the United States announced that his country would suspend arms sales to Nigeria and the world applauded. The announcement wasn’t intended as a confession, but that’s what it was: the president acknowledged that his country had been selling weapons to the bloody regime of General Sani Abacha, responsible for executing a hundred people a year by firing squad or hanging in what had become public spectacles.

An international embargo blocked new arms deals with Nigeria, but the Abacha dictatorship continued adding to its arsenal thanks to “addenda” that appeared miraculously on previously signed contracts. After a dip in this convenient fountain of youth, those old contracts lived on forever.

The United States sells about half the weapons in the world and buys about half the oil it consumes. Its economy and lifestyle depend to a large degree on arms and oil. Nigeria, the African dictatorship with the largest military budget, is an oil country. The Anglo-Dutch consortium Shell takes half that oil, and the U.S. company Chevron takes most of the rest. Chevron operates in twenty-two countries, but more than a quarter of all the oil and gas it pumps comes from Nigeria.

THE PRICE OF POISON

Nnimmo Bassey visited the Americas in 1996, a year after his friend and companion in the Ogoni struggle was murdered. In his travel diary, he recounts some telling stories about the giant oil companies and their contribution to public well-being.

Curaçao is an island in the Caribbean, so named, they say, because its breezes cure the sick. Shell built a huge refinery there in 1918 and has been showering poison on that little island of health ever since. In 1983, local authorities ordered the refinery shut down. Experts calculated the company owed a minimum of $400 million in recompense for damages to the environment, not counting damages to the inhabitants.

Shell didn’t pay a cent. It bought impunity for a fairy-tale price: Shell sold the refinery to the government of Curaçao, for one dollar, in an agreement that freed the company from all responsibility for damages inflicted on the environment at any time throughout history.

THE BLUE BUTTERFLY

In 1994, Chevron, formerly Standard Oil of California, spent many millions of dollars on an advertising campaign praising its tireless efforts to protect the environment in the United States. The campaign focused on a sanctuary the company built for certain blue butterflies in danger of extinction. The sanctuary costs Chevron five thousand dollars a year. Every minute of the advertising blitz that congratulated the company for its ecological conscience cost eighty times that sum to produce and much more than that to actually flutter its blue wings across the TV screens of North America.

The butterfly spa was set up next to the El Segundo refinery on the sands south of Los Angeles. The refinery remains one of the worst sources of water, air, and land pollution in all of California.

THE BLUE STONE

Goiânia City, Brazil, September 1987: two ragpickers find a metal tube in an empty lot. They break it open and discover a stone of blue light, a magic stone that turns the air blue and makes everything it touches shine. The ragpickers break up that stone of light. They give pieces to their neighbors. Whoever rubs it on his skin shines in the night. The entire barrio is a lamp. The poor, suddenly rich in light, celebrate.

The next day the ragpickers start vomiting. They had eaten mango with coconut — that must be why. But the whole neighborhood is vomiting and swelling up and itching. The blue light burns and devours and kills, and it spreads, carried by wind, rain, flies, and birds.

It was one of the greatest nuclear catastrophes in history. Many people died and many more were maimed for life. In that shantytown on the edge of Goiânia, no one knew what the word “radioactivity” meant, and no one had ever heard of Cesium-137. Chernobyl, just the year before, resounded daily in the ears of the world. Of Goiânia, not a word. In 1992, Cuba took in the sick children of Goiânia and gave them free medical care. This event did not merit the slightest coverage either, even though the global factories of public opinion are always, as we know, very concerned about Cuba.

A month after the tragedy, the chief of the federal police in Goiás summed it up: “The situation is absurd. No one is responsible for the radioactive substances used in medicine.”

BUILDINGS WITHOUT FEET

Mexico City, September 1985: the earth trembles. A thousand houses and buildings tumble in less than three minutes.

It isn’t known, and never will be, how many people died in that moment of horror in the largest and most fragile city in the world. When they first started digging through the rubble, the Mexican government said five thousand. Later on it said nothing. The first bodies recovered carpeted an entire baseball stadium.

Old buildings withstood the earthquake, but new ones fell as if they had no foundations, because many of them had none or they had them only in the blueprints. Years have passed and those responsible remain untouched. The developers who built and sold those modern sand castles, the officials who issued permits for skyscrapers in the most sunken parts of the city, the engineers who lied murderously when calculating the foundations and the load, the inspectors who got rich by looking the other way — all of them remain untouched.

The rubble is gone, new buildings have arisen on the ruins, the city keeps on growing.

GREEN, I WANT YOU GREEN

The earth’s most successful companies have offices in hell and in heaven too. The more they sell in one, the better they do in the other. The Devil pays and God forgives.

According to World Bank projections, by the year 2000 the environmental industry will be making more money than the chemical industry, and it already makes a bundle. Saving the environment is turning out to be the most brilliant enterprise of the very companies that are destroying it.

In a recent book, The Corporate Planet, Joshua Karliner offers three telling examples, well worth studying:

• General Electric, which owns four of the companies that most poison the air, is the largest U.S. producer of equipment for air pollution control

• Du Pont Chemical Company, one of the largest producers of toxic waste in the world, has developed a lucrative line of specialized services for incineration and disposal of toxic waste

• and another multinational giant, Westinghouse, which earns its keep selling nuclear weapons, also sells millions of dollars’ worth of equipment to clean up its own radioactive waste.

SIN AND VIRTUE

There are over a hundred million antipersonnel mines spread throughout the world. These artifacts keep exploding years after wars are over. Some mines, shaped like dolls or butterflies or colorful trinkets, are designed to attract children. Of all the victims, half are children.

Paul Donovan, one of the promoters of the global campaign to ban land mines, points out that a new goose is laying golden eggs in the very same arms factories that made and sold mines. These companies now offer their expertise to clean up the vast terrains that have been mined, and it doesn’t take a genius to realize that no one knows the business as well as they do. What a deal: removing the mines turns out to be a hundred times more lucrative than placing them.

Until 1991, a company called CMS made mines for the U.S. Army. After the Gulf war it changed tack and has been making $160 million a year in de-mining ever since. CMS belongs to the German consortium Daimler-Benz, which makes missiles with the same enthusiasm that it makes cars, and it continues making mines through another of its affiliates, a company called Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm.

Also traveling the road to redemption is British Aerospace: one of its companies, Royal Ordnance, signed a $90 million contract to remove mines from Kuwait, placed there, coincidentally, by Royal Ordnance. Competing in this selfless task is a French company, Sofremi, which will earn $110 million de-mining Kuwait, while continuing to export weapons for wars throughout the world.

One of the angels carrying out this humanitarian mission on earth with the greatest fervor is a South African specialist named Vernon Joynt, who has spent his life designing antipersonnel mines and other deadly contraptions. This man is in charge of clearing Mozambique and Angola of the thousands of mines he invented for the racist army of South Africa. His task is sponsored by the United Nations.

CRIME AND REWARD

General Augusto Pinochet raped, tortured, murdered, robbed, and lied.

He violated the constitution he had pledged to respect. He was the strongman of a dictatorship that tortured and murdered thousands of Chileans. He sent tanks into the streets to discourage the curiosity of those who wanted to investigate his crimes. And he lied every time he opened his mouth to talk about these things.

Once the dictatorship was over, Pinochet stayed on as head of the army. And in 1998, when he was to retire, he stepped onto the country’s civilian stage. As I write these lines, he has, by his own order, become a senator for life. Protest has erupted in the streets, but the buoyant general, deaf to anything but the military hymn praising his achievements, proceeds to take his seat in the Senate. He has plenty of reason to turn a deaf ear: after all, the day of the 1973 coup d’état that ended Chile’s democracy, September 11, was celebrated as a national holiday for a quarter of a century, and September 11 is still the name of one of downtown Santiago’s main thoroughfares.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

In the middle of 1978, while Argentina’s soccer team was hosting and winning the World Cup, the country’s military dictatorship was busy throwing prisoners into the ocean alive. The planes bearing them took off from Aeroparque airport, a stone’s throw from the stadium where the sports event was under way.

Not many people are born with a conscience, that inconvenient gland that haunts your nights and disturbs your sleep worse than the mosquitoes of summer. But sometimes it happens. When Captain Adolfo Scilingo told his superiors he couldn’t sleep without pills or drink, they recommended therapy. At the beginning of 1995, Captain Scilingo decided to make a public confession: he said he had thrown thirty people into the sea. Over the course of two years, he added, the Argentine Navy had thrown between fifteen hundred and two thousand political prisoners to the sharks.

After his confession, Scilingo was imprisoned. Not for having murdered thirty people but for having passed a bad check.

CRIME AND SILENCE

On September 20, 1996, the U.S. Defense Department also made a public confession. The story earned little or no coverage from the major news media. That day, the highest military authorities acknowledged that they had made “a mistake”: from 1982 to 1991, they had trained Latin American military officers in the arts of threat, extortion, torture, kidnapping, and murder at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, and at the Southern Command in Panama. The “mistake” lasted a decade, but they didn’t say how many Latin American officers received the mistaken training or what the consequences had been.

In reality, the Pentagon’s classes for future dictators, torturers, and criminals have been denounced a thousand times in the past half century. Their Latin American students numbered some sixty thousand. Many of these same students became dictators or public executioners and left a permanent bloodstain south of the Rio Grande. To cite just one country, El Salvador, and to offer no more than a few examples from an endless list, nearly all the officers responsible for the assassinations of the archbishop, Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero, and four U.S. nuns were graduates of the School of the Americas. So were those who carried out the murders of six Jesuit priests riddled with bullets in 1989.

The Pentagon has always refused to collect author’s royalties on the training manuals it finally acknowledged as its own. The confession ought to have been a big story, but few heard it and many fewer were angered: the greatest power in the world, the model, the democracy that inspires the most envy and imitation, acknowledged that its military nurseries had been growing specialists in the violation of human rights.

In 1996, the Pentagon promised to correct the “mistake” with the same seriousness as it had made it. At the beginning of 1998, twenty-two culprits were indeed found guilty and sentenced to six months in jail plus fines. These twenty-two U.S. citizens had committed the atrocity of sneaking into Fort Benning to hold a funeral procession in memory of the victims of the School of the Americas.

CRIME AND ECHOES

In 1995, two Latin American countries, Guatemala and Chile, attracted the attention of the U.S. press, something not at all common.

It came out that a Guatemalan colonel accused of two crimes had for many years been on the CIA payroll. The colonel was charged with the murder of a U.S. citizen and the husband of a U.S. citizen. The press ignored the thousands upon thousands of other crimes committed by the military dictatorships the United States had imposed and removed in Guatemala ever since the day in 1954 when the CIA, with the approval of President Eisenhower, overthrew the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz. The long cycle of horror reached its peak in the massacres of the 1980s. That’s when soldiers who brought back a pair of ears were given a necklace with a golden oak leaf as a reward. But the victims of that over-forty-year process — the greatest number of deaths in the second half of the twentieth century anywhere in the Americas — were Guatemalans, and to top off their unimportance, most of them were Indians.

While the story of the Guatemalan colonel was breaking, the U.S. papers reported that two high officials of the Pinochet dictatorship had been sentenced to prison in Chile. The assassination of Orlando Letelier constituted an exception to the norm of impunity in Latin America, but one particular detail caught the journalists’ attention: the dictatorship had assassinated Letelier and his U.S. secretary in Washington, D.C. What would have happened if he had been killed in Santiago or any other Latin American city? Of the death of Chilean general Carlos Prats, murdered with his Chilean wife in Buenos Aires in an attack identical to the one that killed Letelier, we’ve still had no news twenty years after the fact.

HUNTERS OF PEOPLE

Note to criminals starting out: to murder timidly won’t do. Like business, crime pays, but only when it’s done on a grand scale. The top brass who gave the orders to kill so many people in Latin America are not in jail for murder, even though their service records would make gangsters blush and criminologists go bug-eyed.

We are all equal under the law. Under what law? Divine law? Under earthly law, equality grows less equal every day and everywhere, because power usually sinks its weight onto only one tray on the scales of justice.

OBLIGATORY AMNESIA

Inequality before the law lies at the root of real history, but official history is written by oblivion, not memory. We know all about this in Latin America, where exterminators of Indians and traffickers in slaves have their statues in city plazas, while streets and avenues tend to bear the names of those who stole the land and looted the public purse.

Like the buildings in Mexico City that came tumbling down in the 1985 earthquake, Latin America’s democracies have been robbed of their foundations. Only justice could give them a solid base from which to stand up and start walking; instead, we have obligatory amnesia. As a rule, civilian governments are limited to administering injustice and dashing hopes for change in countries where political democracy keeps crashing into the walls erected by economic and social structures that are democracy’s enemy.

In the sixties and seventies, Latin America’s military leaders took power by assault. To put an end to political corruption, they stole much more than the politicians, an achievement made possible only because they exercised absolute power and started work each day at reveille. Years of blood and dirt and fear: to put an end to the violence of local guerrillas and international red phantoms, the armed forces tortured, raped, or murdered as many people as they could get their hands on, in a vast manhunt that punished every expression of the human desire for justice, no matter how inoffensive.

The Uruguayan dictatorship tortured a lot and killed little. The Argentine one, in contrast, practiced extermination. Despite their differences, the many Latin American dictatorships of those years worked together and were quite similar, as if cut by the same shears. What shears? In the middle of 1998, Vice Admiral Eladio Moll, once chief of intelligence for the Uruguayan military regime, revealed that U.S. advisers had encouraged the regime to eliminate subversives after extracting whatever information it could from them. The vice admiral was arrested — for the crime of candor.

A few months before that, Captain Alfredo Astiz, one of the Argentine dictatorship’s chief slaughterers, was demoted for telling the truth: he declared that the navy had trained him to do what he had done and, in a flight of professional arrogance, added that he was “technically the best prepared in this country to kill a politician or a journalist.” At the time Astiz and other Argentinean officers had been charged or tried in several European countries for the murders of Spanish, Italian, French, and Swedish citizens, but the murders of thousands of Argentines had been pardoned by laws intended to wipe the slate clean.

The Devil Was Hungry

El Familiar is a black dog that breathes fire from his nose and ears. At night his fires roam the cane fields of northern Argentina. El Familiar works for the Devil, giving him rebel flesh to eat, keeping watch on and punishing the peons of sugar. Its victims leave this world without saying good-bye.

In the winter of 1976, under the military dictatorship, the Devil was hungry. On the night of the third Thursday in July, the army entered the Ledesma sugar refinery in Jujuy. The soldiers took away 150 workers. Thirty-three disappeared, never to be seen again.

The laws of impunity also seem cut by the same shears. Latin America’s democracies were resuscitated only to be condemned to paying debts and forgetting crimes. It was as if the new civilian governments were thankful for the efforts of the men in uniform: military terror had created a favorable climate for foreign investment and paved the way for selling off countries at the price of bananas. It was under democracy that national sovereignty was fully abandoned, labor rights were betrayed, and public services were dismantled. All this was done, or rather undone, with relative ease. Accustomed to surviving amid lies and fear, the societies that recovered their civil rights in the eighties were drained of their best energies, as sick from discouragement as they were needy of the creative vitality that democracy promised but couldn’t or didn’t know how to deliver.

For the elected governments, justice meant vengeance and memory meant disorder, so they dribbled holy water on the foreheads of the men who had waged state terrorism. In the name of democratic stability and national reconciliation, they passed laws that deterred justice, interred the past, and preferred amnesia. Several of these went beyond even the most horrific precedents in other parts of the world. In its haste to absolve, Argentina’s government passed a “due obedience” law in 1987 (repealed a decade later when it was no longer needed), exonerating soldiers following orders from any responsibility for what they had done. Since there is no soldier who doesn’t follow orders, whether from the sergeant, the captain, the general, or God, criminal responsibility ended up in heaven. The German military code that Hitler perfected in 1940 to serve his deliria was in fact more cautious: in article 47 it established that a subordinate was responsible for his acts, “if he knew that the superior’s order referred to an action that was a common or military crime.”

The Living Thought of Military Dictatorships

During the leaden years of late, Latin American generals managed to make their ideology heard despite the roar of machine guns, bombs, trumpets, and drums.

Carried away with bellicose exhilaration, Argentine general Ibérico Saint-Jean cried: “We are winning the third world war!”

Carried away with chronological exhilaration, his compatriot General Cristino Nicolaides shouted: “For two thousand years Marxism has threatened Western Christian civilization!”

Carried away with mystical exhilaration, Guatemalan general Efraín Ríos Montt bellowed: “The Holy Spirit runs our intelligence service!”

Carried away with scientific exhilaration, Uruguayan rear admiral Hugo Márquez roared: “We have turned the nation’s history around by three hundred and sixty degrees!”

Celebrating that epic feat and carried away with anatomical exhilaration, Uruguayan politician Adauto Puñales thundered: “Communism is an octopus that has its head in Moscow and its testicles everywhere!”

The rest of Latin America’s laws were not as fervent as “due obedience,” but they all agreed that civilians should bow to armed arrogance; mandated by fear, they placed massacres beyond the reach of justice and gave the order to sweep all the rubbish of recent history under the rug. Most Uruguayans supported impunity in the plebiscite of 1989, following a media blitzkrieg that threatened a return to violence: what triumphed was fear, which among other things is a source of law. Sometimes hidden, sometimes visible, fear feeds and justifies power throughout Latin America. And power has deeper roots and more lasting structures than the governments that come and go with each democratic election.

What is power? An Argentine businessman, Alfredo Yabrán, defined it unmistakably: “Power is impunity.” He knew what he was talking about. Said to be the visible head of an omnipotent mafia, Yabrán started out selling ice cream on the street and ended up making a fortune for himself — or for who knows whom. Not long after he uttered that sentence, a judge issued a warrant for his arrest for the murder of photographer José Luis Cabezas. That marked the beginning of the end of his impunity, the beginning of the end of his power. Yabrán put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

Impunity is crime’s reward, openly promoting and encouraging more of the same. And when the criminal who has raped, robbed, tortured, and murdered without answering to anyone happens to be the state, a green light is flashed to all of society to rape, rob, torture, and kill. The same society that uses punishment like a scarecrow to frighten criminals at the bottom rewards them at the top with a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card.

Democracy pays the consequences. It’s as if any murderer, smoking gun in hand, could ask: “Why should I be punished for killing one person, when those generals killed half the world and are walking the streets proud as can be? They’re heroes in the barracks and on Sunday they take Communion.”

Under democracy, Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla took Communion in a church in the province of San Luis that refused entry to women in short sleeves or miniskirts. In the middle of 1998, he choked on the host: this pious fellow actually went to jail, though since he was a senior citizen he was soon granted house arrest. It was enough to make you rub your eyes: the exemplary obstinacy of the mothers, grandmothers, and children of the victims had wrought a miracle, an exception, one of very few. Videla, murderer of thousands, was not punished for genocide, but at least he had to answer for the children born in the concentration camps and kidnapped by officers who took them home as war booty after killing their mothers.

Advertising

The Argentine military dictatorship had a habit of sending many of its victims to the bottom of the ocean. In April 1998, a brand of clothing called Diesel placed an ad in Gente magazine intended to prove that its pants would hold up to any number of washings. A photograph showed eight young men chained to cement blocks in the depths of the sea. The caption read: “They aren’t your first jeans, but they could be your last. At least you’ll make a lovely body.”

Outlawed Memory

Bishop Juan Gerardi led a task force that rescued the recent history of terror in Guatemala. Bit by bit, through the testimonies of thousands of voices collected throughout the country, he and his colleagues gathered forty years of isolated memories of pain: 150,000 Guatemalans dead, 50,000 disappeared, 1,000,000 displaced refugees, 200,000 orphans, 40,000 widows. Nine out of every ten victims were unarmed civilians, most of them Indians. And in nine out of every ten cases, the responsibility lay with the army and its paramilitary bands.

The Church released the report on a Thursday in April 1998. Two days later, Bishop Gerardi was dead, his skull beaten in with a chunk of concrete.

Justice and memory are exotic luxuries in Latin America. The murderers of Uruguayan parliamentarians Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz stroll calmly down the streets that bear the names of their victims. Forgetting, the powerful say, is the price of peace, and they impose on us a peace based on accepting injustice as an everyday norm. They’ve gotten us used to a peace in which life is scorned and remembering prohibited. The media and the schools don’t do much to help us integrate reality and memory. Every fact appears divorced from the rest, divorced from its own past and the past of every other fact. Consumer culture, a culture of disconnectedness, trains us to believe things just happen. Incapable of recalling its origins, the present paints the future as a repetition of itself; tomorrow is just another name for today. The unequal organization of the world, which beggars the human condition, is part of eternity, and injustice is a fact of life we have no choice but to accept.

Broken Memory

At the end of the eighteenth century, Napoleon’s soldiers discovered that many Egyptian children believed the Pyramids had been built by the French or the English.

At the end of the twentieth century, many Japanese children believed the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been dropped by the Russians.

In 1965, the people of Santo Domingo resisted an invasion of forty-two thousand U.S. Marines for 132 nights. People fought house by house, hand to hand, with sticks and knives and carbines and stones and broken bottles. What will Dominican children believe a little while from now? The government celebrates this heroic resistance not as a Day of Dignity but as the Day of Brotherhood, placing an equal sign between those who kissed the hands of the invaders and those who bared their breasts to the tanks.

Does history repeat itself? Or are its repetitions only penance for those who are incapable of listening to it? No history is mute. No matter how much they burn it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is. The right to remember does not figure among the human rights consecrated by the United Nations, but now more than ever we must insist on it and act on it. Not to repeat the past but to keep it from being repeated. Not to make us ventriloquists for the dead but to allow us to speak with voices that are not condemned to echo perpetually with stupidity and misfortune. When it’s truly alive, memory doesn’t contemplate history, it invites us to make it. More than in museums, where its poor old soul gets bored, memory is in the air we breathe, and from the air it breathes us.

To forget forgetting: the Spanish writer Don Ramón Gómez de la Serna tells a story of a fellow who had such a bad memory that one day he forgot he had a bad memory and remembered everything. To remember the past, to free us of its curse, not to tie the feet of the present but to help the present walk without falling into the same old traps. Up until a few centuries ago, the Spanish word for “remember” also meant “wake up,” and it’s still used in that sense in some rural parts of Latin America. A memory that’s awake is contradictory, like us. It’s never still, and it changes along with us. It was born to be not an anchor but a catapult. A port of departure, not of arrival. It doesn’t turn away from nostalgia, but it prefers the dangers of hope. The Greeks believed memory was the sister of time and the sea, and they weren’t wrong.

Impunity is the child of bad memory. All the dictatorships that have ever existed in Latin America have known this well. They’ve burned entire mountain ranges of books, books guilty of revealing an outlawed reality and books simply guilty of being books, and mountains of documents as well. Military officers, presidents, priests: the history of burnings is a long one, dating from 1562 in Maní de Yucatán when Father Diego de Landa threw Mayan books into the flames, hoping to reduce indigenous memory to ashes. To mention only a few bonfires: in 1870, when the armies of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay razed Paraguay, the historical archives of the vanquished were torched; twenty years later, the government of Brazil burned all the papers that testified to three and a half centuries of black slavery; in 1983, the Argentine brass set fire to all the records of their dirty war against their countrymen; and in 1995, the Guatemalan military did the same.

EXTERMINATORS OF THE PLANET

Crimes against people, crimes against nature: the impunity enjoyed by the masters of war is shared by their twins, the voracious masters of industry, who eat nature on earth and, in the heavens, swallow the ozone layer. The most successful companies in the world are the ones that do the most to murder it; the countries that decide the planet’s fate are the same ones that do their best to annihilate it.

NO-RETURN PLANET

Effluence, affluence: inundating the world and the air it breathes are floods of crud and torrents of words — expert reports, speeches, government declarations, solemn international accords that no one observes, and other expressions of official concern for the environment. The language of power diverts blame from consumer society and from those who impose consumerism in the name of development. The large corporations who, in the name of freedom, make the planet sick and then sell it medicine and consolation can do what they please, while environmental experts, who reproduce like rabbits, wrap all problems in the bubble-wrap of ambiguity. The state of the world’s health is disgusting, and official rhetoric extrapolates in order to absolve: “We are all responsible” is the lie technocrats offer and politicians repeat, meaning no one is responsible. Official palaver exhorts “the sacrifice of all,” meaning screw those who always get screwed.

All of humanity pays the price for the ruin of the earth, the befouling of the air, the poisoning of the waters, the disruption of the climate, and the degradation of the earthly goods that nature bestows. But hidden underneath the cosmetic words, statistics confess and little numbers betray the truth: one-quarter of humanity commits three-quarters of the crimes against nature. Each inhabitant of the North consumes ten times as much energy, nineteen times as much aluminum, fourteen times as much paper, and thirteen times as much iron and steel as someone in the South. The average North American puts twenty-two times as much carbon into the air as an Indian and thirteen times as much as a Brazilian. It may be called “global suicide,” but this daily act of murder is being perpetrated by the most prosperous members of the human species, who live in rich countries or imagine they do, members of countries and social classes who find their identity in ostentation and waste. The widespread adoption of such models of consumption faces a small impediment: it would take ten planets the size of this one for poor countries to consume as much as rich ones do, according to the well-documented Bruntland Report, presented to the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987.

The giants of oil, the sorcerer’s apprentices of nuclear energy and biotechnology, the large corporations that make weaponry, steel, aluminum, automobiles, pesticides, plastics, and a thousand other products like to shed crocodile tears over the suffering of nature. These companies, the most devastating on the planet, figure among those that make the most money. They also spend the most money — on advertising that magically turns pollution into philanthropy and on high-minded favors for politicians who decide the fates of countries or the world. Explaining why the United States refused to sign the Convention on Biodiversity at the Rio summit in 1992, President George Bush was unequivocal: “It is important to protect our rights, our business rights.”

The Language of International Experts

In the context of evaluating the contributions made by reframing the projects currently under way, we will focus our analysis on three fundamental questions: the first, the second and the third. As can be deduced from the experience of those developing countries where some of the measures which are the object of our study have been put into practice, the first question has many points of coincidence with the third, and one or another of these appear to be intrinsically linked to the second, such that it could well be argued that the three questions are related to one another.

The first …

Whether he signed or not mattered little, because such international accords are worth less than a bounced check. The Rio summit was called to keep the planet from dying. But, with the exception of Germany (and even it acted only halfheartedly), none of the great powers kept the agreements they signed, for fear that their companies would lose their competitive edge and their governing politicians would lose elections. And the great power that complied least was precisely the most powerful of all, whose essential objectives were stated clearly in President Bush’s confession.

The colossi of the chemical, oil, and automobile industries, so central to the theme of the Rio summit, paid a large portion of the cost of the conference. You can say anything you like about Al Capone, but he was a gentleman: good old Al always sent flowers to the funerals of his victims.

Five years later, the United Nations called another meeting to evaluate the impact of the Rio summit. In those five short years the planet’s skin of vegetation had been stripped of its tropical flora over an area two and a half times the size of Italy, and fertile lands the size of Germany had turned arid. A total of 250,000 species of animals and plants had become extinct; the atmosphere was more polluted than ever; 1.3 billion people were without proper homes or food, and 25,000 were dying each day from drinking water contaminated by chemical poisons or industrial waste. Not long before, twenty-five hundred scientists from a broad array of countries, also called together by the United Nations, concluded that in the near future the planet will face the greatest climate changes in the last ten thousand years.

Morgan

They don’t have peg legs or eye patches, but bio-pirates are roaming the Amazon jungle and other tropical lands. They force their way on board, snatch the seeds, patent them, and turn them into successful commercial products.

Four hundred indigenous villages of the Amazon recently decried the seizure of a sacred plant, ayahuasca, “our equivalent,” they said, “of the Christian host.” At the U.S. Patent Office, International Plant Medicine Corporation patented ayahuasca for making psychiatric and cardiovascular medicine. From now on, ayahuasca is private property.

Those who suffer most from this punishment are, as usual, the poor — poor people and poor countries condemned to expiate the sins of others. Economist Lawrence Summers, with a doctorate from Harvard and a post high in the World Bank hierarchy, bore witness to this fact at the end of 1991. In an internal document leaked by mistake, Summers proposed that the World Bank encourage the migration of dirty industries and toxic waste “toward less developed countries,” for reasons of economic logic that had to do with “the comparative advantages” those countries enjoy. Those advantages turned out to be three: pitiful wages, vast expanses where there’s still lots of room for polluting, and the low incidence of cancer among the poor, who have a habit of dying young from other causes.

The publication of that document caused quite a furor: such things are to be done but not said. Summers imprudently set to paper what the world has been doing in practice for a long time. The South functions as the garbage can of the North. The factories that most pollute the environment migrate south, and the South is the dump where most of the industrial and nuclear shit the North generates ends up.

Sixteen centuries ago, Saint Ambrose, priest and doctor of the Church, prohibited usury among Christians and authorized it against barbarians. The same thing happens nowadays with the most lethal pollution. What’s bad in the North is good in the South; what’s outlawed in the North is welcome in the South. In the South lies the vast kingdom of impunity; there are no controls or legal limits and, when there are, it’s never hard to discover their price. The complicity of local governments rarely comes free, and then there’s the cost of waging advertising campaigns against the defenders of nature and human dignity, dismissing them as advocates of backwardness who only want to scare off foreign investment and sabotage economic development.

At the end of 1984, in the city of Bhopal, India, forty tons of deadly gas leaked from a pesticide factory run by the chemical company Union Carbide. The gas spread through the shantytowns, killing 6,600 people and harming another 70,000, many of whom died shortly thereafter or were maimed for life. Union Carbide in India did not abide by any of the security regulations it must adhere to in the United States.

In Latin America, Union Carbide and Dow Chemical, like the other giants of the world’s chemical industry, sell many products that are outlawed in their own country. In Guatemala, for example, crop dusters spray the cotton plantations with pesticides that can’t be sold in the United States or Europe. These poisons filter through the food chain into everything from honey to fish and finally reach the mouths of babes. As early as 1974, a study by the Central American Nutrition Institute found that the milk of many Guatemalan mothers contained up to two hundred times the pesticide limit considered dangerous.

Bayer, the world’s second-largest producer of pesticides, has been untouchable since the days when it was part of the I. G. Farben consortium and used unpaid labor from Auschwitz. At the beginning of 1994, a Uruguayan environmental activist became a Bayer stockholder for a day. Thanks to the solidarity of German friends, Jorge Barreiro was able to raise his voice at an annual stockholders meeting graced with beer, sausage, mustard, and aspirins. Barreiro asked why the company sold toxic agricultural chemicals in Uruguay that were banned in Germany, three of which the World Health Organization considered “extremely dangerous” and another five “highly dangerous.” The usual transpired. Every time someone raises the issue of selling in the South poisons prohibited in the North, the executives of Bayer and the other global chemical companies have the same answer: they aren’t breaking any laws in the countries where they operate, which could be technically true, and besides, their products are not dangerous. They never explain the enigma of why these balms of nature can’t be enjoyed by their own countrymen.

Maps

In the United States, the environmental map is also a racial map. The most polluting factories and the most dangerous dumps are located in the pockets of poverty where blacks, Indians, and Latinos live.

The black community of Kennedy Heights in Houston, Texas, exists on land ruined by Gulf Oil’s wastes. The residents of Convent, the Louisiana town where four of the dirtiest factories in the country operate, are nearly all black. Most of those who went to the emergency room in 1993, after General Chemical rained acid on the northern part of Richmond on San Francisco Bay, were black. A 1987 study by the United Church of Christ confirmed that the majority of the population living near hazardous waste dumps was black or Latino.

Indian reservations take in nuclear waste in exchange for money and the promise of jobs.

Maximum production, minimum cost, open markets, high profits — the rest is unimportant. Many U.S. industries had already set up shop on the Mexican side of the border long before the two countries signed a free-trade agreement. They turned the border zone into a vast industrial pigpen. All the treaty did was make it easier to take advantage of Mexico’s abysmal wages and the freedom to poison its water, land, and air. To put it in the language of the poets of capitalist realism, the treaty maximized opportunities to make use of the resources of comparative advantage. Four years before the treaty, the waters near the Ford plant in Nuevo Laredo and the General Motors plant in Matamoros already contained thousands of times more toxins than the maximum allowed on the other side of the border. And in the vicinity of the Du Pont plant, also in Matamoros, the filth was such that people had to be evacuated.

Progress spreads across the globe. Japanese aluminum is made no longer in Japan but in Australia, Russia, and Brazil, where energy and labor are cheap and the environment suffers in silence. To provide electricity for the aluminum industry, Brazil has flooded gigantic tracts of tropical forest. No statistic can register the ecological cost of that sacrifice. After all, it’s normal: Amazonian flora and fauna have suffered many sacrifices, mutilated day after day, year after year, in the service of lumber, cattle, and mining companies. Such organized devastation makes “the lungs of the earth” ever more vulnerable. The gigantic fire in 1998 that razed the forests of the Yanomami Indians in Roraima was not just the devilish work of El Niño.

Development

A bridge with no river.

A tall façade with no building.

A sprinkler on a plastic lawn.

An escalator to nowhere.

A highway to the places the highway destroyed.

An image on TV of a TV showing another TV on which there is yet another TV.

Impunity is fed by fatality, and fatality obliges us to accept whatever orders are dictated by the international division of labor — like the fellow who jumped from the tenth floor to obey the law of gravity.

Colombia grows tulips for Holland and roses for Germany. Dutch companies send tulip bulbs and German companies send rose seedlings to immense plantations on the savannah of Bogotá. When the flowers are ready, Holland gets the tulips, Germany gets the roses, and Colombia gets low wages, damaged land, and poisoned water. Thanks to these floral arrangements of the industrial era, the savannah is drying out and sinking, while the workers, nearly all of them women and children, are bombarded by pesticides and chemical fertilizers.

The rich countries grouped in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development cooperate in economically developing the South by sending it radioactive garbage and other toxic expressions of kindness. The very countries that outlaw the importation of polluting substances shower them generously on poor countries. Just as with pesticides and herbicides banned at home, they export hazardous waste to the South under other names. The Basil Convention banned such shipments in 1992, yet there are more today than ever before. They come disguised as “humanitarian aid” or “contributions to development projects,” as Greenpeace discovered on several occasions, or they come as contraband hidden inside mountains of legal industrial waste. Argentine law bans the entry of hazardous waste, but to solve that little problem all you need is a certificate of innocuousness issued in the country that wants to get rid of the waste. At the end of 1996, Brazilian ecologists managed to put an end to the importation of used car batteries from the United States that for years had come into the country as “recyclable material.” The United States exported used batteries and Brazil paid to receive them.

Education

Near Stanford University I visited a smaller university that offers courses in obedience. The students, dogs of all races, colors, and sizes, learn to stop being dogs. When they bark, the professor punishes them by squeezing their snouts with her hand and yanking painfully on collars made of sharp steel points. When they remain quiet, the professor rewards their silence with treats. That is how she teaches them to forget how to bark.

Driven out by the ruin of their lands and the poisoning of their rivers and lakes, twenty-five million people are wandering about, looking for their place in the world. According to the most credible forecasts, in the coming years environmental degradation will be the principal factor causing an exodus of people from the countries of the South. And the countries that smile so nicely for the pictures, those happy protagonists of one economic miracle or another, think they have paid the toll, have passed the pole, and are on a roll, but they are already paying the price of their great leap to modernization: in Taiwan a third of the rice crop is inedible because it’s poisoned with mercury, arsenic, or cadmium; in South Korea the water from only a third of the rivers is drinkable. There are no longer edible fish in half the rivers of China. In a letter he was writing, a Chilean child drew a picture of his country: “Ships depart filled with trees, and ships arrive filled with cars.” Chile today is a long highway bordered by shopping malls, arid lands, and industrial forests where no bird sings; the trees, like soldiers at attention, march off to the world market.

View of Dusk at the End of the Century

Poisoned is the earth that inters or deters us.

There is no air, only despair; no breeze, only sleaze.

No rain, except acid rain.

No parks, just parking lots.

No partners, only partnerships.

Companies instead of nations.

Consumers instead of citizens.

Agglomerations instead of cities.

No people, only audiences.

No relations, except public relations.

No visions, just televisions.

To praise a flower, say: “It looks plastic.”

The twentieth century, a weary artist, ended its days painting still lifes. The extermination of the planet spares no one, not even the triumphal North that contributes the most to the catastrophe and, at the hour of truth, whistles and looks the other way. At the rate we’re going, it won’t be long before we’ll have to put up new signs in maternity wards in the United States: Attention, Babies: You are hereby warned that your chance of getting cancer is twice that of your grandparents. The Japanese company Daido Hokusan already sells air in cans, two minutes of oxygen for ten dollars. The label assures us: This is the electric generator that recharges human beings.

Wild Blue

This sky never grows cloudy; here it never rains. On this sea no one ever drowns; this beach is free of theft. There are no stinging jellyfish, no spiny urchins, no bothersome mosquitoes. The air and the water, climatized at a temperature that never varies, keep colds and flus at bay. The dirty depths of the port are envious of these transparent waters; this immaculate air mocks the poison that people in the city must breathe.

The ticket doesn’t cost much, thirty dollars a person, although you pay extra for chairs and umbrellas. On the Internet, it says: “Your children will hate you if you don’t take them…” Wild Blue, the Yokohama beach encased in glass, is a masterpiece of Japanese industry. The waves are as high as the motors make them. The electronic sun rises and falls when the company wishes, and the clientele is offered astonishing tropical sunrises and rosy sunsets behind swaying palms.

“It’s artificial,” says one visitor. “That’s why we like it.”

News

In 1994 in Laguna Beach, southern California, a deer came out of the forest. Galloping down the street, the deer was struck by a car. It leapt over a fence, crashed through a kitchen window, broke another window, threw itself off a second-floor balcony, burst into a hotel, and, like a bullet stained red with blood, raced past the astonished patrons of beachfront restaurants before plunging into the sea. The police trapped it in the water and hauled it onto the beach, where, bleeding profusely, it died.

“He was crazy,” the police explained.

A year later in San Diego, also in southern California, a veteran stole a tank from an arsenal. Driving the tank he crushed forty cars, damaged several bridges, and, with police cruisers in hot pursuit, ran down whatever crossed his path. When he got stuck on a steep rise, the police climbed on the tank, forced open the hatch, and plugged this ex-soldier full of bullets. TV viewers saw the entire spectacle live and direct.

“He was crazy,” the police explained.

THE SACRED CAR

Human rights pale beside the rights of machines. In more and more cities, especially in the giant metropolises of the South, people have been banned. Automobiles usurp human space, poison the air, and frequently murder the interlopers who invade their conquered territory — and no one lifts a finger to stop them. Is there a difference between violence that kills by car and that which kills by knife or bullet?

THE VATICAN AND ITS LITURGIES

Our age abhors public transportation. In the middle of the twentieth century, Europeans used trains, buses, subways, and streetcars for three-quarters of their comings and goings. Today the figure is a quarter. That’s still high compared with the average for the United States, where public transportation, virtually eliminated in most cities, accounts for only 5 percent of all transportation.

Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone were good friends back in the twenties, and they both got on well with the Rockefellers. Their affection for one another reinforced a mutuality of interests that went a long way toward dismantling the railroads and creating a vast network of roads, then highways that spanned the United States. With the passing years, the power of car, tire, and oil magnates has grown ever more ruinous. Of the sixty largest companies in the world, half either belong to this holy alliance or work for it.

Today’s high heaven, the United States, has the greatest concentration of cars and the greatest quantity of weapons. Six, six, six: of every six dollars spent by the average North American, one is for the car; of every six hours of life, one is spent traveling in the car or working to pay for it; and of every six jobs, one is directly or indirectly related to the car, and another to violence and its industries. Each murder by cars and guns, of people and of nature, adds to the gross national product.

Talismans against loneliness or invitations to crime? Car sales parallel sales of weapons, and cars could well be considered a form of weapon: they are the principal killers of young people, with guns a close second. Every year cars kill and wound more people in the United States than all the U.S. soldiers killed and wounded throughout the long war in Vietnam, and in many states a driver’s license is all you need to buy a machine gun and riddle the entire neighborhood with bullets. A driver’s license is also required to pay by check or to cash a check, to sign for documents or notarize a contract. A driver’s license is the most common ID: cars give people their identity.

North Americans enjoy some of the cheapest gasoline in the world thanks to sheiks in dark glasses — kings straight out of light opera — and other allies of democracy whose business it is to sell oil at a bargain, violate human rights, and buy U.S. weapons. According to the calculations of the Worldwatch Institute, if ecological damages and other “hidden costs” were taken into account the price of gasoline would at least double. In the United States gasoline is three times as cheap as in Italy, the second-most-motorized country in the world, and each American burns on average four times as much gas as the average Italian, which is to say, a lot.

Paradise

If we behave ourselves, it will come to pass. We will all see the same images and hear the same sounds and wear the same clothes and eat the same hamburgers and enjoy the same solitude in our houses all alike in neighborhoods all alike in cities all alike where we will all breathe the same garbage and serve our cars with the same devotion and carry out the orders of the same machines in a world that will be marvelous for all who have no legs or wings or roots.

U.S. society, afflicted with autoitis, generates a quarter of the worst gases that poison the atmosphere. Although cars and their unquenchable thirst for gasoline are mostly to blame, it’s politicians who give cars the right to roll and rule in exchange for money and votes. Every time some fool suggests raising gas taxes, the Detroit Big Three (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) scream to the skies and with broad popular support mount million-dollar campaigns decrying this vile threat to public freedom. And when a wayward politician feels wracked by doubts, the companies prescribe an infallible remedy: as Newsweek once put it, “The relationship between money and politics is so organic that seeking reform is tantamount to asking a doctor to perform open-heart surgery on himself.”

Rarely is any politician, Democratic or Republican, willing to commit sacrilege against a national way of life that venerates machines, squanders the planet’s natural resources, and equates human development with economic growth. Advertising extols the miracles that way of life performs, miracles the entire world would like to deserve. In the United States everyone can achieve the dream of owning a car, and many can trade their vehicles in regularly for new ones. Can’t afford the latest model? This identity crisis can be overcome with aerosol sprays that make your autosaurus purchased three or four years ago smell as good as new.

Like death, old age is a sign of failure. The car is the one eternally youthful body you can buy. It eats gasoline and oil in its own restaurants, has its own pharmacies with its own medicine, and its own hospitals for diagnosis and treatment. It even has its own bedrooms and cemeteries.

Cars promise people freedom — highways aren’t called “freeways” for nothing — yet they act like traveling cages. Despite technological progress, the human workday continues to lengthen year after year and so does the time required to get to work and back in traffic that moves at a crawl and shreds your nerves. You live in your car and it won’t let you go. “Drive-by shooting”: without leaving your speeding car you can pull the trigger and shoot blindly, as some people occasionally do in the Los Angeles night. “Drive-thru teller,” “drive-in restaurant”: without getting out of your car you can get money from the bank and eat hamburgers for supper. And without leaving your car you can also get married—“drive-in marriage.” In Reno, Nevada, the car rolls under arches of plastic flowers, a witness appears at one window, the pastor at the other and, Bible in hand, he declares you man and wife. On your way out a woman dressed in wings and a halo gives you your marriage certificate and receives your “love donation.”

The automobile, that buyable body, moves while the human body sits still and fattens. The mechanical body has more rights than the one of flesh and bone. As we all know, the United States has launched a holy war against the devil tobacco. I saw a cigarette ad in a magazine with the required public health warning: “Tobacco smoke contains carbon monoxide.” But the same magazine had several car ads and not one of them warned that car exhaust, nearly always invisible, contains much more carbon monoxide. People can’t smoke. Cars can.

Flight/3

In the sewers, under the asphalt, the abandoned children of the Argentine city of Córdoba make their home. Once in a while they surface to grab pocketbooks and wallets. If the police don’t catch them and beat them to a pulp, they use their booty to buy pizza and beer to share. And they buy tubes of glue to inhale.

Journalist Marta Platía asked them what they felt like when they got high.

One of the kids said he whirled his finger and created wind: he pointed at a tree and the tree swayed in the wind he sent forth.

Another recounted that the world filled up with stars and he flew through the sky; there was sky above and sky below and sky to the four corners of the earth.

And another said he was sitting beside the sleekest and most expensive motorcycle in the city. Just by his looking at it, it was his; a harder look and he was riding it full speed while it grew and changed colors.

Rights and Duties

Although most Latin Americans do not have the right to buy a car, it’s everyone’s duty to pay for that right. For every thousand Haitians, barely five are motorized, but Haiti spends a third of its foreign exchange to import vehicles, spare parts, and gasoline. So does El Salvador, where public transportation is so disastrous and dangerous that people call buses “caskets on wheels.” According to Ricardo Navarro, a specialist in these matters, the money that Colombia spends every year to subsidize the price of gasoline would pay for handing out 2.5 million bicycles.

Cars are like gods. Born to serve people as good-luck charms against fear and solitude, they end up making people serve them. The church of the sacred car with its U.S.-based Vatican has the entire world on its knees. The spread of car gospel has proven catastrophic, each new version deliriously multiplying the defects of the original.

A tiny proportion of the world’s cars circulate on Latin America’s streets, but Latin America boasts some of the most polluted cities on the globe. The structures of hereditary injustice, laced with fierce social contradictions, have given rise to cities that are outsized monsters beyond any possible control. The imported faith in the four-wheeled god and the confusion of democracy with consumption have been more devastating than any bombing campaign.

Never have so many suffered so much for so few. Disastrous public transportation and the absence of bicycle lanes make the use of private cars practically obligatory, but how many people can enjoy the luxury? Latin Americans who don’t own a car and can never hope to buy one live engulfed in traffic and suffocated by smog. Sidewalks shrink or disappear altogether; distances increase; more and more cars cross paths while fewer and fewer people meet. Not only are buses scarce, in most Latin American cities public transportation consists of just a few rust-heaps that spew out deadly plumes of exhaust, adding to pollution instead of alleviating it.

In the name of freedom — free enterprise, freeways, and the freedom to buy — the world’s air is becoming unbreathable. Cars aren’t the only guilty party in this daily act of murder, but they’re the worst culprits. In cities the world over, they produce most of the noxious cocktail that destroys our lungs and eyes and everything else. They cause most of the noise and tension that makes our ears hurt and our hair stand on end. In the North, cars are generally obliged to use fuels and technologies that at least limit the poisons they give off — a big improvement, if only cars didn’t reproduce like flies. But in the South, it’s much worse. Only rarely are unleaded gas and catalytic converters required, and even then the law is respected but not obeyed, as tradition dating from colonial times would have it. Ferocious volleys of lead penetrate the blood with utter disdain, attacking the lungs, liver, bones, and soul.

The inhabitants of Latin America’s largest cities spend their days praying for rain to cleanse the air or wind to carry the poison elsewhere. Mexico City, the largest city in the world, lives in a state of perpetual environmental emergency. Five centuries ago, an Aztec song asked:

Who could lay siege to Tenochtitlán?

Who could move the foundations of the heavens?

Today the city once called Tenochtitlán is under siege from pollution. Babies are born with lead in their blood and one person in three suffers frequent headaches. The government’s guidelines for dealing with the motorized plague read like a defense against an invasion from Mars. In 1995, the Metropolitan Commission for the Prevention and Control of Environmental Pollution advised residents of Mexico’s capital that on so-called days of environmental contingency, they should go out of doors as little as possible, keep doors, windows, and vents closed, not exercise between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.

On those days, which occur ever more frequently, more than half a million people require some sort of medical attention from breathing what was known not so long ago as “the most transparent of air.” At the end of 1996, fifteen poor peasants from the state of Guerrero marched in Mexico City to protest injustices; all of them ended up in the public hospital.

On another day that year, it rained oceans on the city of São Paulo, creating the largest traffic jam in the country’s history. Mayor Paulo Maluf celebrated: “Traffic jams are a sign of progress.”

A thousand new cars take to the streets of São Paulo every day. The city breathes on Sunday and chokes the rest of the week. Only on Sunday can you see the skyline from the outskirts. The mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Luiz Paulo Conde, also likes traffic jams. Thanks to that blessing of urban civilization, he once said, motorists can talk on their cell phones, watch their portable TVs, and enjoy music on their cassettes or compact discs. “In the future,” the mayor announced, “a city without traffic jams will be considered boring.”

His prediction coincided with an ecological catastrophe in Santiago de Chile. Schools were closed and crowds of children packed the emergency rooms. In Santiago, environmentalists say, each child breathes the equivalent of seven cigarettes a day and one child out of four suffers some form of bronchitis. The city is separated from the heavens by an umbrella of pollution that has doubled in density over the past fifteen years, a period when the number of cars has also doubled.

The “airs” of the city called Buenos Aires grow more poisonous year by year, keeping pace with the vehicles, which increase by half a million every twelve months. In 1996, sixteen neighborhoods already suffered “very dangerous” noise levels, a perpetual racket that the World Health Organization says “can produce irreversible damage to human health.” Charlie Chaplin liked to say that silence is the gold of the poor. Years have passed and silence is ever more the privilege of the few who can afford it.

It’s a Joke/1

On a large avenue in a large Latin American city, a man is waiting to cross. He stands at the curb, trapped by the incessant flow of cars. The pedestrian waits ten minutes, twenty minutes, an hour. Then he turns his head and spies a man leaning against a wall, smoking. And he asks, “Tell me, how do I cross to the other side?”

“I don’t know,” the man responds. “I was born over here.”

Consumer society imposes its own symbolism of power and its own mythology of social progress. Advertising sends out invitations to join the ruling class; all it takes is a magic little ignition key. “Have it your way!” thunders the voice that gives the orders in the market. “You are in charge!” “Strut your stuff!” And if you put a tiger in your tank, according to the billboards I recall from my childhood, you’ll be quicker and stronger than anyone else, crushing whoever blocks your path to success. Language creates a reality that advertising depends on, but real reality isn’t at all like the spells of commercial witchcraft.

For every two children born into the world a car is born, and the automotive birthrate is gaining on the human one. Every child wants to own a car, two cars, a thousand cars. How many adults will be able to realize their childhood fantasies? The numbers show cars to be a privilege, not a right. One-fifth of humanity owns four-fifths of the cars, even though all five-fifths of humanity have to breathe the poisoned air that results. Like so many other symbols of consumer society, cars belong to a minority whose habits are parlayed into universal truths, obliging the rest of us to see cars as the only possible extension of the human body.

It’s No Joke/1

Managua, Las Colinas neighborhood, 1996. It’s a night for celebrating: Cardinal Obando, the U.S. ambassador, several government ministers, and the cream of local society attend the inauguration. They raise their glasses to toast Nicaragua’s prosperity. Music and speeches resound.

“This is how you create jobs,” declares the ambassador. “This is how you build progress.”

“It’s just like being in Miami,” gushes Cardinal Obando. Smiling for the TV cameras, His Eminence cuts the red ribbon on the new Texaco station. The company announces that it will build more service stations in the near future.

The number of cars in Latin America’s Babylons keeps swelling but it’s nothing compared with that in the centers of world prosperity. In 1995, the United States and Canada had more motor vehicles than the rest of the world combined, Europe aside. Germany that year had as many cars, trucks, pickups, mobile homes, and motorcycles as all of Latin America and Africa. Yet it’s in the cities of the South where three out of every four deaths by car occur. And of the three who die, two are pedestrians. Brazil has a third as many cars as Germany but three times as many victims. Every year Colombia suffers six thousand homicides politely called “traffic accidents.”

Advertisements like to promote new cars as if they were weapons. At least that’s one way ads aren’t lying. Accelerating is like firing a gun; it offers the same pleasure and the same power. Every year cars kill as many people as were killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1990, they caused many more deaths or disabilities than wars or AIDS. According to World Health Organization projections, in the year 2020 cars will be the third-largest cause of death or disability. Wars will be eighth, AIDS tenth.

Hunting down pedestrians is part of daily routine in big Latin American cities, where four-wheeled corsairs encourage the traditional arrogance of those who rule and those who act as if they did. A driver’s license is equivalent to a gun permit, and it gives you license to kill. Ever more demons are ready to run down anyone who crosses their path. On top of the traditional thuggery, hysteria about robberies and kidnappings has made it more and more dangerous, and less and less common, to stop at red lights. In some cities stoplights mean, Speed up. Privileged minorities, condemned to perpetual fear, step on the accelerator to flee reality, that dangerous thing lurking on the other side of the car’s tightly closed windows.

In 1992, a referendum was held in Amsterdam. People voted to reduce by half the already restricted area where cars can circulate in that kingdom of cyclists and pedestrians. Three years later, Florence rebelled against auto-cracy, the dictatorship of cars, and banned private vehicles from its downtown core. The mayor announced that the prohibition would be extended gradually to the entire city as streetcar, subway, and bus lines and pedestrian walkways expanded. And bike paths, too: according to plans it will be possible to pedal anywhere in the city safely, on a means of transportation that is cheap, runs on nothing, and was invented five centuries ago by a Florentine, Leonardo da Vinci.

Modernization, motorization: the roar of traffic drowns out the chorus of voices denouncing civilization’s sleight of hand that steals our freedom, then sells it back to us, that cuts off our legs to make us buy running machines. Imposed on the world as the only possible way of life is a nightmare of cities governed by cars. Latin America’s cities dream of becoming like Los Angeles, with its eight million cars ordering people about. Trained for five centuries to copy instead of create, we Latin Americans aspire to become a grotesque imitation. If we are doomed to be copycats, couldn’t we at least be a little more careful about what we choose to copy?