Top Quotes: “Viva South America! A Journey Through a Restless Continent” — Oliver Balch
Introduction
“Revolutionary, state-builder, philosopher, and ladies’ man, Simon Bolivar Jose Antonio de la Santisima Trinidad Bolivar y Palacios represents the archetypal South American hero. He’s Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the Incan Tupac Amaru all rolled into one.
Born into the upper echelons of Venezuelan aristocracy in 1783, he enjoyed a privileged childhood and a golden youth in Europe. Orphaned and widowed before his 20th birthday, he also had his share of tragedy.
On his return to his homeland in 1807, Bolivar dedicated his life to winning independence for Hispanic America. A master strategist and charismatic general, he’s credited with liberating modern-day Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.
Ever since his death in 1830, the Great Liberator has become the subject of nationalistic pride and literary fable. To schoolchildren, he’s the man who vanquished the Spanish and held high the torch of liberty. To political theorists, he’s the visionary who mapped out a unified future for the free Americas. To everyday South Americans, he’s the bronze statue sitting high on a horse in the town square, model citizen, die-hard romantic and martyr to his cause.
Today, the first President of Greater Colombia enjoys a cult following across the continent. Ardent patriot, American hero, macho male, faithful Catholic — Bolivar’s image is used to fit them all. He has a country named after him. Heads of state espouse his ideas. Poets and artists evoke his memory.
But Bolivar, like South America itself, remains little known to the outside world. Even the great emancipator once described his own continent as ‘shrouded in darkness.’ For those after a torch to light their way, there’s none brighter than the Liberator’s own life and legacy.”
“Time, not birth, established Bolivar’s status as Liberator; so too his character as a libertine. As a 17-year-old student in Spain, the young Simon had fallen head over heels for the dark-eyed Maria Teresa Rodriguez del Toro y Alayza, 2 years his elder. In May 1802, the love-struck Venezuelan married his novia, and 3 weeks later the newlyweds set sail for home. Tragically, his virgin bride didn’t take to the tropics. 7 months later, the fair-skinned Maria Teresa, Bolivar’s ‘jewel without a flaw,’ was dead of a malignant fever. On the pretext of completing his education, the inconsolable young aristocrat returned to Europe. His grief diminished gradually in the arms of various lovers. A raucous affair with Fanny du Villars, the wife of a Parisian count, sealed his reputation as an inveterate playboy. He returned to South America ready to sow the seeds of independence, in the full sense of the term.
Never did the Liberator marry again. Yet he did fall in love, regularly and recklessly. But among his infatuations and one-night stands, only one woman could be said to have mended his broken heart. Manuela Saenz was young, beautiful, passionate — and married. The two met during his victorious entry into Quito in June 1822. His aides-de-camp probably gave the romance a fortnight, perhaps a month at most. Over 7 years later, the two were still an item.
Their open affair scandalized the snobbish salons from Lima to Caracas. Wagging tongues didn’t bother the lovestruck couple though. Manuela was happy to be called a harlot as long as she had the heart of her Liberator. A hot-blooded romantic, she drafted a letter to her middle-aged English husband to inform him as such. It was a put-down of the first order. ‘You are boring,’ she wrote, ‘like your nation.’ Now South America’s most famous mistress, she thought it best he return to his homeland, a place ‘which makes love without pleasure, conversation without grace…and jokes without laughing.’ The recipient’s response isn’t recorded, but the two quietly separated.”
Bolivia
“Like no other city in the world, La Paz’s postcodes are arranged by paleontology. Amid the lower strata, compressed beneath millennia of accumulated sediment, lives the slender vein of Bolivia’s wealthy. In defense of their surroundings, they hose their barren backyards until grass lawns sprout. They surround their lots with electric gates and cameras, little kings in the folds of Illimani’s flowing robes.
Above them, halfway up the capital’s exposed rock-face walls, reside those who work for them: their office managers and accountants, their car salesmen and bank clerks, the teachers of their children and vendors of their security systems.
On the higher ground, toppling on the crater’s crust, where the wind tousles the sandy topsoil in bilious clouds, lives the teeming remnant. El Alto, a hilltop community of over 1 million inhabitants, is so cold that water pipes crack and the rocks are said to split in two. Its residents suffer the extremes of poverty too, a poverty that dates back centuries, as entrenched as the geological gradations beneath their feet. A steady job here is the exception, electricity a boon and crime the norm.”
“The pest-averse coca plant thrives in the region’s tropical temperatures and nutrient-poor soils. In a good year, farmers can bank on up to 4 harvests. Narcotics manufacturers like it too. Remote and inaccessible, the Chapare jungles provide them with an ideal location for their canopy-covered labs.
By the 70s, Villa Tunari was competing with Colombia as the narcotics nexus of South America. Bolivian coca farmers accounted for more than 1/3 of the world production, most of which was destined for the U.S. By the mid-80s, Bolivia’s cocaine exports were worth over twice the country’s legal exports put together.
The party was never going to last forever. Uncle Sam, for one, wouldn’t allow it. As early as 1950, an investigation by a US banker concluded that ‘the chewing of coca is responsible for mental slowness and poverty in the Andean countries.’ His report influenced world leaders, who, under the 1961 Geneva Convention, lumped the humble cola leaf together with heroin, cocaine, and other banned Class-A drugs.
With billions of dollars in US aid conditioned on fighting the narcotics trade, the Bolivian authorities began cracking down. Their main target was Chapare’s coca growers. For decades, the province became one large boot camp. The war on drugs went into overdrive in the late 90s. President Hugo Banzer, a former dictator turned drugs tsar, pledged to wipe out every last coca plant within 5 years. His ‘zero coca’ policy shaped the battle lines that, over the coming years, would lead to dozens of deaths on both sides.”
“As well as old war stories, the curricula of Villa Tunari’s politicians share another factor in common: they were all educated at the university of life. No elitist degree certificate will be found after their names, only sweat and toil. Jose came late to politics, he wants me to know. Before Evo, he earned his crust as a job-hopping day laborer. Not a single one of Chapare’s 9 municipal reps is a professional (shorthand for ‘graduate,’ ‘manager,’ ‘capitalist,’ and a host of other sins). In Cahapate, the doctrine of class war wins.
‘Like Evo, our politicians know the problems of the people because they’ve lived through them. They’re not out of touch like the political elites of the past,’ The Top Official says, repeating his political liturgy with the passion of a faithful acolyte.
He laughs, ‘Did I know that the ex-minister of agriculture didn’t even know how much a kilo of tomatoes cost? That would never happen under companero Evo. What else is different now? Chapare’s farmers no longer have to worry about crop-sprayers indiscriminately destroying their harvests. Coca isn’t cocaine, I should know. A remonstrating finger is raised. Bolivians have been using unprocessed coca for centuries: as a stimulant, an anasthetic, a hunger suppressant, and a cure for stomach aches and all manner of everyday ills. Incan brain surgeons even used it. And as a narcotic? No, never. Drugs are for coke-sniffing gringos. ‘For us Bolivians, no.’
The Top Official has some bullet points he feels obliged to share. Was I aware that all Bolivians up to age 21 now get free medical care? I shake my head. Had I been told about the bonus payments for parents who keep their children in school? Nope. Did I know the minimum wage had been increased and a nationwide literacy program instigated? Vaguely. I must’ve heard how contracts with foreign energy multinationals had been renegotiated and their excessive profits curbed? Yes, now that I was familiar with. With the second-largest gas reserves in South America, it was a subject that had preoccupied the international media during the first months of Evo’s presidency. That and the alpaca wool jumper he’d worn every day during his first world tour.”
“The companero was always involved in the union movement, did I know? That was back when the coca clampdown was just picking up. There were always clashes with the police. One time, the anti-drugs squad arrested the future president and bundled him into the back of their van. The villagers were incensed. For the first time, a smile appears on Don Santiago’s wrinkled face. They rushed the van. The police had to throw Evo out of the back. Then they fled into the forest. Don Santiago is laughing uproariously now. Could I guess where the van ended up? In the river. The villagers upended it and tipped it in.”
“Only 1 in 30 Bolivians has a TV, but almost every house, however humble, has a radio.”
“I pop by to ask Omar his opinion on what economic system is best for Bolivia. His starting position is clear: Bolivia needs foreign investment. No sensible economist would say otherwise. What matters are the ‘rules of the game.’ In Bolivia’s case, the rules have always been skewed. The rich get richer, and the poor get to eat potatoes.
For 2 decades, the country became the lab rat of technocrats in DC. Suited execs from lending orgs such as the World Bank would fly down, business class, to preach ‘free-market fundamentalism.’ The experiment failed. Bolivia emerged from privatization poorer than before. And without its family silver.
‘Imagine 2 people buy a car, but only 1 of the 2 gets to drive it. The other pays for the petrol, yet still has to walk. That, in essence, was the deal Bolivia struck with its foreign creditors.’
The exasperation of everyday Bolivians has been a long time coming. For centuries, the deal was even worse. They not only had to pay in full for the car, they had to build it, polish it, and even push it when their master wanted to go for a drive.
The reason why Bolivia remains stubbornly at the bottom of all wealth-creating indices isn’t because its citizens are stupid, Jim insists. It’s because they got ripped off — truly, royally, superlatively.”
“[Potosi] is at its grimmest in San Cristobal, the poor man’s hillside district where the miners live and their wives mourn. Potosi is a city of widows. Few husbands make it into middle age, their wheezing lungs eaten away by asbestos and silicosis.
At the district’s dilapidated health center, a queue of patients waits wearily outside. A harried nurse checks their papers at the door. Inside, a baby with TB coughs plaintively into his mother’s breast. A gaunt old woman, weak with malnutrition, sits slumped on a bench. The dank waiting room is crowded despite the early hour. Abcesses await lancing. Rooting teeth ache. Stomach cramps and skin diseases hold out hope for the proper pills and medicine.
No one has money to pay. A paunchy consultant doctor, whose limbs are shivering in spite of an Arctic duffel coat and homemade fingerless mittens, calls for the next patient. Cuban and not yet acclimated, the Havana exile is one of the free medics gifted by his socialist homeland in exchange for cheap Bolivian gas.
Through the waiting room’s cracked window sounds the deep boom of a distant explosion. Not a soul flinches. The residents of San Cristobal have grown deaf to the detonation of dynamite.”
“From San Cristobal, I retrace my steps up the desolate mountainside. On the way, I dawdle a little at a flat-roofed shed selling mining materials. The lower shelves are stocked with the usual fare: hard hats, electric lamps, battery packs, matches, overalls, 96-proof-spirits. Lurking on the higher shelves is a veritable terrorist treasure trove. For the princely sum of 17 bolivianos (under $2), the proprietor hands me two 8-inch sticks of dynamite, a bag of ammonium nitrate, a detonator, and a meter-length fuse. As gift-bearing goes, I feel well-armed.
Climbing up a gravel path that skirts the Cerro Rico, I stop by one of the bleak rabbit-hole entrances that perforate the mountain’s slopes. Standing in for my young guide of yesteryear is another scrawny youngster. A blackened cap hides his face. Two holes in the knees of his ragged trousers open and close as he walks.
13 years old, Julio is employed by the Unificara Cooperative at the Candeleria mine. His job is to transfer the excavated rocks from the tunnel opening to a nearby collection point. The miners’ findings arrive in open-cast wagons weighing half a ton, which Julio shoves and shoulders to the end of a wobbly twin-rail track. There they’re tipped into an aggregates lorry by two adult men, and the contents are taken off for sorting. Deep within the mountain, his 3 older brothers are digging diligently.
Miners start young in Potosi. In school holidays, as now, the number of child laborers shoots up. In good years, when metal prices are high, their teachers even join them.
Basillo is another of Cerro Rico’s school-age navvies. The eldest son of a now fatherless family, his career as a miner began soon after his 15th birthday. Although he suffers back pain and his nose sometimes bleeds for days, he still heads off to the mine every morning. He knows that if he doesn’t his mother and 3 siblings will go hungry.”
“Santa Cruz has the good fortune of being a resource-rich province in a dirt-poor country. The province occupies over 2/5s of the country’s territory, represents more than 1/3 of its industrial activity, and produces in excess of half its exports. The charming Senor Suarez doesn’t mention that its residents are also predominantly of European stock. He doesn’t need to. The aquiline noses, clear eyes, and blood rinses of the graduates’ families say it all.
The eastern province might boast an enviable opulence today, but a century ago it was a ramshackle outpost rotting in the heat. And then it stuck oil. The black gold propelled it from a tropical backwater to Bolivia’s petrodollar capital. Today, clunky 4x4 jeeps ply up the capital city’s handsome avenues, and business parks spread like lichen through its suburbs.
Under Evo, the pro-indigenous Movement Towards Socialism thinks it’s high time the Crucenos started sharing. The white folk in Santa Cruz aren’t convinced. Pedro Youhio, for one, won’t budge an inch. The portly president of the province’s main business lobby derides the government’s meddling. He’s looking out from his 9th-floor office, a self-righteous sense of ownership about him, as if he’d built the glass tower himself. Santa Cruz’s success is all to do with its entrepreneurial spirit. Where was the central government when his forefathers were breaking their backs in this wilderness? An answer pops into my head. In the land department, signing over vast tracts of indigenous land. I leave it unsaid. It’s not the answer he has in mind anyway.”
“On the shores of Lake Titicaca, a veritable sea in the sky, resides Bolivia’s most revered virgin saint. Pilgrims travel from all over the country to have her bless their newly-purchased cars. They park outside the Moorish cathedral, creating a car showroom on the sacred steps. Around the silver hubcaps and shining spoilers walks a circumambulatory priest. Reaching into his plastic wash bucket of holy water, he baptizes each vehicle with a shower of sanctified sprinkles. At the end of each lap, the cassocked cleric orders the bonnet open and consecrates the engine. Then a short perfunctory prayer, for safe traveling and vigilance behind the wheel. Cocooned in the embrace of the Virgin of Copacabana, the devotees speed off home with horns tooting and wheels spinning.
On a rocky outcrop above the town, a group of 6 cholitas sit in a circle. A picnic rug is spread out between them, covered with coca leaves and glasses of beer. Wrapped in shawls of rough-hewn sheep wool, they’re conducting their own private ceremony. If Pachamama, in her munificence, might only bless them with a bountiful harvest, a healthy family, a sober husband.”
Chile
“Sundays in South America are rarely so infernal. Across the continent, the Sabbath is guarded as a private, slow-paced affair; the preserve of late-morning lie-ins, long family lunches, and snoozes in the shade. Faith, habit, illness, or guilt might see a Mass thrown in too. But total inactivity is generally the ideal. Shops close, and public transport creaks along with a skeletal service. I know because these are the times on my travels that I feel most abandoned, when city centers turn into ghost towns and only homeless runks join the tourists roaming the streets. It’s a good day, in my experience, for long-distance bus journeys.”
“The bucolic valley inspired Gabriela Mistral, born in 1889 to a seamstress mother and a soon-to-be-absent father. She overcame her bad start in life to become Chile’s foremost female poet. As well as her verse, she’s remembered as South America’s first female Nobel Prize winner, an accomplished diplomat, a life-long educator, and a passionate defender of women’s rights. The peregrinate writer never forgot the gravelly mountains and lush vales of her childhood, referring back to them continually in her work. When Chile’s best-loved daughter died in 1957, the country pulled its curtains closed and went into 3 days of official mourning.
From the window, I watch the vineyards swish by. With the speed of the bus, the regimental rows of young vines fragment into disordered agricultural cross-stitch. Far, far ahead, where the road peters to a stop and the valley gives out, lies the Andean cordillera, capped with snow and silence. The Elqui Valley is so beautiful it could be a poem itself. As the bus tootles eastwards, I imagine full sonnets trickling down its babbling rivers and rhyming couplets inscribing themselves on the stems of its grapevines. The thought of Gabriela Mistral searching out doggerels on the bark of an orange tree or discovering a floral pentameter on the rind of a custard apple keeps me entertained.
Foreign tourists tend to skip over this picturesque corner of rural Chile. The omission is understandable, but regrettable.”
“‘An interesting fact you should know about Elqui Piso is how many single women there are here.’
‘Really? And how many are there?’
Well, the exact figure she doesn’t know, but it’s definitely ‘plenty.’ Gabriela is one of them, for example, which, as an aside, doesn’t worry her as she’s bound to suffer less and therefore live longer. Apparently, the high number has to do with all the dope that the local men smoke.
‘They call it ‘the curse of Gabriela Mistral.’’ The singleness that is, not the dope.”
“‘Machismo kills’ runs the headline. I read on. In the past 6 years, 300+ women have died at the hands of their male partners or ex-partners. The article includes a list of ‘femicides’ from the previous week: stabbed or beaten to death by estranged partners. In each case, the guilty party had a record of domestic abuse stretching back years. Murder, a Chilean psychologist would later explain to me, represents the ‘final act’ of the male exertion of control. Another reason why Alma and thousands like her stay put for so long.”
“Sitting at the till, she was sifting through internet orders on a computer. She double-clicked on the photo of an 8-inch plastic dildo to check the price. The enlarged $24,50 penis then expanded alarmingly across the screen. Their collection of 1,000+ explicit videos filled the wall-to-wall shelving. Most had European or American titles. Solo Adultos relied on Argentina and Brazil for its small Latino section. Chile’s film industry is still fighting shy of its own porn production.”
Argentina
“Argentina’s recent history certainly makes its citizens more skeptical than most. During the 1990s, the country turned into one huge boot sale. For the price of a sailing yacht or a flash car, its politicians sold the country from under them. State-run companies were broken up and packaged off. The president drove a Ferrari and built himself an airport. Meanwhile, his underlings sat back, sipped champagne, and sold shares on the stock exchange.
Only when the family silver ran out and the creditors came calling did someone think to check the books. The public purse was dry. Not a peso of the privatization windfall remained. The high living and foreign bank accounts of the politicians had swallowed it all up. Naturally, protests followed. Millions took to the streets. Casserole dishes were clanged. 4 presidents came and went in a fortnight.
‘Que se vayan todos,’ the people cried: ‘Out with the lot of them.’ Several government administrations later, the memory of those dark days still lingers. As do many of the grease-palmed politicians.”
“I catch the bus out to Ciudad Evita. A rough neighborhood on the road out to the capital’s main airport, it’s known as a bastion of Peronism. Decrepit blocks of social housing, built in a bygone era as barracks for the general’s blue-collar foot soldiers, bear witness to the district’s political roots. It’s so Peronist, in fact, that the town planners even used Evita’s profile to determine the layout of the streets.”
“After 25+ years of democratic government, the dark days of dictatorship still touch a raw nerve in Argentina. Back then, the country’s military-minded politicians hadn’t tolerated any opposition voices. Instead, they’d had them ‘disappeared.’ As many as 30,000 people were thrown from airplanes or buried in mass graves during the junta’s murderous regime.”
“Marcelo and Jorge may have stumbled on their labor-led revolution almost by accident, but Argentina’s 15,000 cooperatives have been at it for years.”
“‘Cooperatives are preaching democracy within a factory. They decide things consensually, which is revolutionary when you think about it. Capitalists make their money by dividing the workforce into those that manage and those that work. They’re the ones that manage, so they’re the ones that take the cream of the profits. Imagine what would happen if those on the factory floor started proving them wrong? The whole edifice would come crumbling down.’”
Paraguay
“His father was one of the 500+ Paraguayans who went missing without a trace during General Stroessner’s regime. A dissident member of the navy (itself a square peg in a round but landlocked country), the exiled Federico Tatter Sr. was tracked down in Buenos Aires. His son presumes he was taken back to Paraguay but can’t be sure.
‘It’s possible the Argentines killed him. Back then, the region’s military dictators would help catch and kill one another’s dissidents.’
The US even gave them money to do it, the human rights campaigner continues. During the Cold War, DC was terrified of its backyard turning Communist.”
“We slew our way across the slippery, unpaved tracks of Paraguay’s eastern soya belt. Each community we visit is different, but the story the same: mega-farms expanding, toxins spreading, forests disappearing and peasant farmers migrating.”
“Ciudad del Este’s burgeoning shanty towns are where most soya refugees end up.”
“He tells me about the victoriously-named village. Unlike neighboring settlements, where plots are divided up between individual families, El Triunfo is jointly owned by all its residents. Adopting a collective front, Delio hopes, will prevent the soya farmers picking them off one by one. Next year, he’s also planning to take a special course on the law governing agrotoxic use. ‘I’m going to bring 40–50 cases,’ the Paraguayan Erin Brockovich states confidently.
Even with so much enthusiasm, the unqualified attorney admits the chances of success are slim: ‘Here, if you have money, you can do whatever you like. You can buy our land illegally, you can buy a judge, you can buy anything.’ Regrettably, none of El Triunfo’s residents have a dime.”
Brazil
“Fear of crime is a guiding sentiment among most Brazilians. Sao Paulo’s municipal government seriously discussed changing the traffic laws a few years ago to protect motorists from being robbed at traffic lights. Drivers, it was proposed, would not only be allowed to run a red light after dark, they’d be encouraged to do so.”
“From the middle of the 19th century, thousands of poor migrants — most European — boarded ships and headed to the New World. Many set off with one-way tickets to Sao Paulo, Brazil’s industrial capital.
As the city grew more prosperous, it became the natural jumping-off point for the growing flood of foreign fortune-seekers. Not that the new arrivals managed to jump too far. As soon as they stepped foot on the quay, most were corralled into a steam train and whisked off to the Hospedaria. A mega-boarding house of sorts, the service was bankrolled by large landowners in need of cheap manual labor. In exchange for a health check-up and a roof over their heads, the new immigrants were presented with a pen, a work contract, and a line on which to sign. For the majority, it was then off to the coffee fields.
More than 2.5 million people passed through the Hospedaria’s doors between 1886 and 1915. Not all new immigrants came to Sao Paulo. A large population of Germans settled in the south, while hordes of Dutchmen headed north. Even so, the ledger of the immigrant hotel contains surnames from 70+ nationalities. Some escaped their backbreaking contracts and realized their dream of becoming rich. Most didn’t. Rich or poor, though, nearly all got on with one job in common: procreation. It’s that genetic melting pot that today adds so many different layers to South America’s rainbow nation.”
“Slaves in Brazil were allowed to buy their freedom. Even before the formal end of slavery, therefore, a black man walking the street could feasibly be either slave or free. That’s very different from how the situation was in the US.
Brazil’s colonizers were also more pragmatic than the Puritans. To exploit the natural wealth of their New World discovery, the Portuguese required a workforce. As the royal accountants pointed out, begetting one was a good deal more practical than buying one. So from the outset, the Portuguese crown consented to its subjects siring children whenever and with whomsoever they could. Having sex with their slaves or indigenous servants became nothing short of a patriotic duty.
Another difference with the USA: after emancipation, Brazil never had any segregation laws and, therefore, no ghetto-mentality. Tough anti-racism legislation in the past 2–3 decades has strengthened the notion that everyone is equal, regardless of color.
‘Have a look around,’ she encourages me. ‘You’ll see that being black doesn’t mean just having black friends. Society is more mixed here. It makes life easier, more pleasant.’
‘Don’t let me mislead you. All this doesn’t mean Brazil is truly a racial democracy. We might be different from the US, but silent discrimination is still deep-rooted here. 5 minutes in a favela will show you that.’”
“Gun battles with police result in 1,000+ deaths a year in Rio’s 700+ favelas.”
“Rocinha has an estimated 200,000 inhabitants and is reckoned to be the largest of Rio’s favelas. The settlement’s origins date back to the 1920s, when poor farmers from the NE started flocking to Rio in search of work. Almost 50% of the favela’s children aren’t in school. Family incomes are around 400 reals per month, less than half the average for Rio. Rents range from 150–700 reals (roughly $50-$225) per month, with the cheaper housing found on the hill’s lower reaches where the sewage and garbage tend to collect. 2 health centers serve the entire population. Only those living on the main street that we drove up pay for water and electricity. Everyone else steals from the grid.”
“7 in 10 of very poor Brazilians turn out to be non-white. In contrast, nearly 87% of Brazil’s richest 1% are white-skinned. If you’re born black and poor in Brazil, not only are you more likely to remain poor than a non-black, you’re also more likely to suffer ill health and die younger.
Typically, the child of a mixed-race or black couple receives 2 years less education than their white peers. At university, the difference becomes even more marked. Over a third of whites 18–24 are enrolled in a university or an equivalent institution. The number drops to 5% for Brazil’s black population. Little wonder that Afro-Brazilians are more than 2x as likely to be illiterate as their white contemporaries, and have half the earning power.”
“Music groups, youth dance groups, theatre companies, and circus acts add to AfroReggae’s creative mix.
‘If they weren’t involved in AfroReggae, most admit that they’d be in jail or dead,’ says Eve.
It sounds a little alarmist. That’s until she tells me about a video documentary AfroReggae produced shortly after starting out. Of the 12 boys featured, only 1 is still alive today. It’s a lucky drug dealer that sees it to his 25th birthday, she says. Many don’t even reach adulthood.”
“‘Yes, culture is the base. Yes, it’s essential to the black-rights movement. But no, it won’t break the barriers of prejudice. Only politics can do that. Slavery might have disappeared more than a century ago, but slavers continue to run things. In Salvador, Brazil’s blackest state, there are only 3 non-white representatives in the State Assembly, out of 63! Affirmative action is what’s required.’”
“Discrimination in Brazil is very sophisticated. The national censuses are a perfect example. Whites have only the branco box to tick. Blacks are divided between pretos and pardos. There’s no negro option. WHITES come in at around 46%. BLACKS amount to 49%.
‘If you lump the pretos and pardos together, that is. Of course, the authorities never do. So, whites remain the official majority.’”
“Brazil never imposed segregation laws as in the US. I wonder if that’s why Brazil has never had a powerful civil rights movement? No Brazilian has ever been banned from a restaurant because of the color of their skin. Explicit racism therefore cannot explain why a food court in a posh shopping mall should remain a whites-only one.
Official segregation gave black Americans something tangible to fight against. In Brazil, black rights activists are flailing against a shapeless, secret phantom. Affirmative action will certainly help their cause, but not unless the myth of the country’s colorblindness is shown for what it is.”
“Now Candomble is legal, it’s not necessary to hide behind the white man’s religion. But the tradition has stuck. Ironically, it’s the Catholics who now encourage the association. The saints’ days give the church an excuse to encourage Candomble followers to come to Mass.”
Peru
“Spain’s early missionaries did much to tweak the culture of the Incas to the mores of the church, but Catholic marriage rites have always proved a difficult sell. Lifelong monogamy didn’t suit Peru’s indigenous nations. Men were accustomed to giving their women a trial run. If the girl were found to fit, they’d marry. Then, as now, weddings were communal affairs as much as contractual. No self-respecting groom could leave the altar without a 3-day knees-up for his guests.
Oddly, Mass doesn’t seem to feature on the ‘good Catholic’ requirement list. Fewer than 200 worshippers regularly attend the Sunday service in Ayaviri’s 17th-century baroque cathedral. A poor turnout considering the 25,000 ‘faithful souls’ in the parish registry.”
Ecuador
“Located in the Amazon rainforest close to the Brazilian border, Iquitos is the world’s biggest city without road access. If its million or so citizens want out, they must either fly or take a boat for 5 days downstream. Most never leave.”
“Among Ecuador’s 11 indigenous nationalities and their various sub-divisions, the Huaorani remain among the most untouched. They have only become ‘civilized’ within the past 2 generations. Before that, they lived for hundreds of years as Amazonian nomads.
Traditionally, their territory stretched over 2 million hectares, covering today’s Orellana, Pastaza, and Napo provinces. Huao, their native tongue, shows no linguistic connection to other indigenous languages in the region. Nor does it include words for modern contraptions such as the PC, the combustion engine, or chewing gum.
Their first contact with the outside world came at the end of the 19th century, when Brazilian farmers arrived in search of rubber. Sustained contact would have to wait for the arrival of Protestant missionaries half a century later. Only then did the Huaorani give up their nomadic ways and build themselves semi-permanent settlements alongside the jungle’s rivers. With the introduction of hoes and basic husbandry, they set about cultivating garden plots of yucca and plantain. They also learned to swim.
The incursion of outsiders brought with it a raft of undeniably negative consequences too. Disease topped the list. Within 2 decades, the total Huaorani population had dropped to as few as 800 people thanks to the flu and other everyday Western illnesses. Internecine conflict also took its toll on the tribal demographic. The Huaorani like a good family fist fight. Their alternative name, Auca, comes from the Quechua for ‘savage.’
All non-Huaorani represent potential targets of the tribe’s warring ways, especially if they threaten their traditional territory. Huaorani culture historically holds outsiders to be cannibals. Legend has it that cohouri, white men, would one day come and eat them. When 5 North American missionaries floated down the river in canoes half a century ago, they presumed that day had arrived. Taking no chances, the tribesmen finished off the visitors with an avalanche of spears.
Fr. Alejandro Labaca, a Spanish missionary priest, shared a similar fate in 1987. A friend of the Huaorani, he was flown in by an oil exploration company to negotiate with the neighboring Tagaeri tribe. The 67-year-old priest had first begun visiting the communities along the river Cononaco a decade beforehand. His journals record the Huaorani as ‘totally friendly, open [and] happy.’ When the chopper returned a few days later, the pilot found the missionary mediator in exactly the same spot. Only now, 17 spears pierced his spreadeagled body. The autopsy revealed 89 individual stab wounds. Oil workers venturing into Huaorani territory have since met with similar treatment. Nowadays, with the wisdom of hindsight, they generally choose to keep away.
Today, Huaorani aggression tends to focus more on the timber trade. Several reports of illegal loggers found slumped over their chainsaws have circulated in the national press over recent years. Tourist, I’m assured, have so far remained off limits.”
“4 decades ago, Kempery and his clan were living deep within the jungle without contact or care for the outside world. Their ‘discovery’ came in 1970. It’s not a date they commemorate.
3 years later, the tribe were being carted off to make room for the intruding oil companies. They eventually resettled in Bameno, home to a disused airstrip built by a French prospecting firm. The Huao chieftain build his house at the end of the grassy runway. Small tourist-laden aircraft still land in his backyard from time to time.
The Huaorani are by no means the only Ecuadorian tribe affected by the world’s insatiable thirst for fossil fuels. The Cofan, Secoya, Huarani, Siuna, and Quichua tribes know only too well what oil exploration can bring. In the mid-60s, Chevron-Texaco won a concession not too far to the north of Bameno. Over the next 2.5 decades, the company dumped millions of gallons of crude and drilling wastewater into waterways and unlined open pits. The contamination spread over 1,500 squre miles of once spotless rainforest. Today, levels of skin disease, cancer, and reproductive disorders among the indigenous groups in the area are off the charts. They’ve been waiting since 1919 for the courts to grant them compensation. The trial remains ongoing.
Along with constant fights over territory, another battleground has formed in the classroom. Ecuador’s indigenous people, who represent 1/4 of the total population, had to wait until the 80s to win the right of a bilingual education for their children. Up until then, Spanish was the universal language of learning and Western Christianity its dominating ethic.
Bameno remains a rarity for having a Huao teacher who instructs his pupils in his maternal tongue. In most indigenous communities, native dialects are relegated to the foreign-language class, much like French or German in an English-speaking school. Indigenous children learn that their language is second-class from the moment they can speak.”
“In the shadows of the snow-crested Tungurahua and Cotopaxi volcanoes, I find traces: remote rural communities, lost in the clouds, hidden down mule tracks, where adobe homes predominate and Quechua dialects prevail. Living off the land, these descendants of the Inca wars today survive by growing vegetables, rearing livestock, and keeping themselves to themselves. Life isn’t easy; the summers are the cold and the winters freezing. Clean drinking water and electricity remain the exception. Unsurprisingly, people are leaving in droves, heading down the hills in their thick blanket shawls and calf-length trousers to build a future for themselves in the towns and cities.
Saquisili, a market town 47 miles south of Quito, is facing just such an exodus. Its population of over 20,000 people is split roughly 2:1 between indigenous and mestizo. Thursday is market day and a good time to gauge the town’s mood.
If Segundo Monta is any judge, it’s not good. He runs a hat stall in one of Saquisili’s 8 markets. He has been in the job 30 years. Segundo’s felt hats only come in one shape, a thin-brimmed oval fedora typical to the region’s indigenous population. As a concession to customer taste, he varies the color. Shoppers can choose between blue, black, green, and brown. He recently introduced a smaller version in red for children. But the locals aren’t buying.
‘Business is bad these days,’ Segundo moans. ‘Folk just don’t wear sombreros as much as they used to. Before, people round here would replace their hats every 6 months or so. Now they come perhaps once a year, if they come at all. I’m at a loss at what to do. Hats are all I know.’
A brief survey of Saquisili’s clothes offering shows just how fast tastes are changing. In the case of native fashions, fluorescent is currently all the rage. Luminous knee-length stockings and blinding lime ponchos jump out like neon lights from several stalls. But indigenous garb, however spruced up, is on the wane. Mass-produced Western clothes are what people want.”
“‘We grew tired of the politics of the big oligarchies who governed not for the people but for their own interests. When the mestizos controlled things, it was almost impossible for us indigenous to get as much as a hearing.
Almost a decade later, all that changed. Thousands of indigenous men and women from Saquisili and other towns in the Cotopaxi province took to the road and marched on Quito.
Mr. Cholocinga and an army of hoe-carrying indigenos had wanted to tell the president directly what they thought. Conquered by the Incas, marginalized by the Spanish, oppressed under the republic, they were sick of feudal servitude. As far back as 1825, Bolivar had written an edict from Quito ordering employers to pay the ‘native peoples’ in cash ‘without forcing them to accept other forms of pay against their will and at levels below that commonly paid for such work.’
Abuses continued all the same. Well into the second half of the 20th century, Ecuador’s indigenous tenant farmers were still working half-day Saturdays in their patron’s house for no pay. Even their traditional ponchos, bought by unwitting tourists for their pretty colors, are little more than cattle branding. An indentured tartan, each separate design corresponds to the hacienda to which individual laborers once belonged.
To the chants of the indigenous civil code, thousands of Mr. Cholocingas had stormed the palace. ‘No thievery, no lying, no laziness.’ Temporarily, they even occupied Congress. Jamil Mahaud, the Harvard-educated president, got the message and quit his post. The moment marked the zenith of an indigenous political movement that had been bubbling up for 4 decades.
Since then, indigenous politics have followed a rockier path. With Mahaud gone, the native leaders immediately chummied up with a gaggle of disgruntled generals who staged a coup. The collusion proved a grave mistake. Their 3-man junta swiftly collapsed. So too did most public sympathy for the indigenous cause.
To their credit, they haven’t given up. Under the banner of the Pachacutik Party, indigenous reps can be found scattered sparsely on the benches of Congress, their fedora hats and long hair a stark contrast to the smart suits of the other legislators. Today their fight is focused primarily on increasing government support for agriculture. The agenda makes sense. Ecuador’s native peoples are mostly campesino farmers, which generally categorizes them as indigent as well as indigenous.”
“White and mestizo politicians always used to be the self-serving vermin of Ecuadorian democracy. Now the indigenous are lumped in too. Power is color-blind. Moises and Lucas cite cases of indigenous leaders owning shares in oil companies with exploration activities in the Amazon. The ‘indigenous mafia,’ they claim, robbed state funds earmarked for Ecuadorian minorities. Divided ideologically among themselves, the indigenous candidates flopped at the last selection. Pachacutik’s presidential hopeful posted a dismal 2% at the polls — less than 1 in 10 of the indigenous vote.”
“Under their new benevolent patron, the folk of Salinas have since transformed the Andean parish into a veritable business hub. The sound of whirring machinery from the balloon factory, the chocolate-makers and the town’s other 16 micro-enterprises reverberates along the village’s sloping lanes. From a 2-story building down a shadowy side street wafts the smell of cheese. Marketed under the ‘El Salinerito’ brand, the town’s mozzarella, camembert and gruyere today sell in supermarkets across the country.
The cheese factory, Fr. Antonio likes to think, represents an ‘example of solidarity in action.’ Others might just call it a great business concept. Ideology aside, one thing is undeniable: cheese is changing the lives of the district’s indigenous inhabitants. Every morning, dairy farmers can be seen guiding their cows toward the 2 dozen milking stations now scattered around the hunchbacked hills and valleys of Salinas.
‘We get a set price and a stable market for our milk these days,’ says Amable, a young farmer who sells the milk from his 5 cows in a nearby hamlet. ‘There’s not much migration any more. Now it’s only the lazy who leave.’
The message is the same wherever indigenous communities have hit on a successful money-spinner. The best ideas tend to draw on existing local skills or on Ecuador’s natural beauty. Textiles, handicrafts and tourism come in high on the list.
In the Hosteria Indi Wasi, the Patuloma family are engaged in all three. The hostel-cum-ethnic emporium is to be found on Salaska’s main street. The Patuolomas enjoy a healthy passing trade thanks to their location on the trunk road to Banos, a resort town in eastern Ecuador popular for its hot springs.
The Patulomas are certainly an enterprising gang. Their house, like their Hosteria, has room for guests and a workshop for weaving. All the family wear their hair long and speak in Quechua. Their talk is of the recent Capitan festival, an annual knees-up where the Salaskans dress as Spanish soldiers and reenact the oppression of their forefathers. I ask them if they wouldn’t like the opportunity to go to discos or to the cinema like their contemporaries in the city. My question meets with a friendly, but firm, reproach.
‘Our parents and our leaders teach us that we don’t have to think like the city or the mestizo,’ says Juan, who switches between Quechua and Spanish with absent-minded ease. ‘Anyway, we’ve never been to a modern cinema or a disco, so, no, it’s not something we’re too bothered about.’
The longhaired Juan has been to Quito twice in his life, both times for cultural festivals. Unlike most indigenous migrants, who remove their traditional costume to enter the city gates, he hit the town in his smartest black poncho and white, pressed linen trousers.
The Otavalenos wear their traditional garb with similar pride. The country’s most commercially-minded indigenous community, they were making money trading between the coast and the highlands even before the Incas arrived. They are still taking it in today. Their crafts and clothing sell around the world, from the streets of Seville to the market stalls of Vancouver.
The pony-tailed Otavalenos have turned their ethnicity into a brand. It’s what sets them apart. Juan, who has never eaten pizza let alone read a marketing textbook, instinctively understands the value in being different: ‘For me, being indigenous is something to be proud of. We’re unique. We’re not a mix of anything.’
He writes me, ‘This is us, our life, it’s the best.’”
Colombia
“Established in the mid-60s, when the Cold War was just getting hot, the FARC had taken to the hills to strike a blow for socialism. Other left-wing guerrilla groups had joined the call. Somewhere along the line their ideology gave way to banditry.
‘I guess the fear at seeing them must’ve shown on my face because Guillermo swiveled round immediately,’ Alvaro says.
It wasn’t the first time the FARC had come to the farm. They were regular visitors. Alvaro’s land lay in the middle of one of Colombia’s guerrilla-controlled ‘red zones.’ Each month, someone would come calling for his vacuna — literally, his ‘vaccine.’ The regular protection fee is calculated according to head of cattle. With 30 cows in his herd, Alvaro’s monthly antidoate came in at 150k pesos. An additional sales tax of 30k pesos was tacked on for every cow that he sold.
‘The FARC say the money goes toward their ongoing struggle for the pueblo,’ he explains, virtually spitting out the Spanish word for ‘the people.’
Fail to pay, and the pueblo’s alleged defenders turn very nasty, very quickly. Alvaro recalls an occasion when a buyer had landed him with a bad debt for 2 prize heifers. The soldiers stripped him naked and tied him to a tree. Then a member of the accountancy unit dealt a few sharp, well-aimed blows at the back with a machete.”
“This time his guests came with AK-47s rather than Nikon digitals. The Colombian army had decided Alvaro’s farm would make a strategic spot from which to attack the FARC. There was no ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ on this occasion. It was Alvaro’s patriotic duty to do as he was told. The army were fighting for the pueblo after all.
The army platoon ended up staying 3 weeks. Uncle and nephew remained holed up inside the farmhouse throughout. The pair spent their days listening to the rattle of machine-gun fire in the nearby hills and the sound of heavy artillery rockets overhead.
The government conscripts suffered 8 fatalities in total. Their corpses were piled unceremoniously in body bags on Alvaro’s back porch. 4x as many guerrilla members died, or so the army claimed.
Thinking back to those days cooped up, a prisoner in his own home, he claims fighting itself didn’t scare him. Death or survival lay out of his hands, he resolved. What kept him awake at night were the repercussions. Having government forces camped on his lawn, whether willingly or not, singled him out as a collaborator. And, as every Colombian knows, collaborators come to an ugly end.”
“The FARC commander pulled a pistol from his holster, turned to Guillermo and shot him at point blank range in the head.
‘It was so quick and casual…’ Abruptly, his crying stops, his tear ducts momentarily checked by the atrocious violence of the scene in rewind. ‘Like putting down a dog.’
‘The man then raised his gun at me. ‘Now do you understand ‘now?’ Get out of here or the next bullet’s for you.’
Alvaro turned and fled, dashing through the gate, leaping over the stream and tearing down the hillside as fast as his legs would carry him. He hit the main road in little over half an hour. Wheezing madly and still blind with fear, he flagged down the first bus that passed. He jumped on without inquiring where it was heading. Noting his distraught state, the driver waived the fare and dropped the empty-handed farmer at the end of his route 3 hours north.
Alvaro isn’t sure what the town was called. He just remembers sitting for hours in a busy bus terminal, his mind dulled by grief and panic, his ability to rationalize temporarily immobilized. After what felt like hours, a kindly woman approached him. He was huddled on a bench, shivering in his T-shirt, more from shock than cold. They spoke briefly, he forgets what about exactly. But it transpired that the lady had a truck. She was traveling to Bogota that night and offered him a lift.
Alvaro took the ride. And so it was that he went from sitting outside his farm one sunny morning to standing at a busy intersection in Bogota the next.”
“The country’s reputation for brutality dates back at least to the times of the Liberators. The War of Independence is reckoned to have cost a third of Colombia’s adult population. The Liberators contributed their part to the carnage.
Bolivar notoriously declared Guerra a Muerte against his colonial adversaries. The edict was unequivocal. No royalist would be spared and no prisoners taken. ‘Even if you profess neutrality, know that you will die,’ Spaniards on South American soil were warned. He kept to his word. In 1814, a few months after this fatal declaration, he gave the order for 1,300 imprisoned royalist soldiers to be executed. It was not the Liberator’s finest hour.”
“Before Bolivar’s body was even interred, rival political factions would be bumping one another off in search of the spoils. In the second half of the 19th century alone, independent Colombia would suffer 13 blood-splattered coups.
If Colombians hoped the new century would bring a let-up in the terror, they were sadly mistaken. In fact, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, levels of savagery became so bad that historians simply refer to the period as La Violencia.
Those bloodstained decades proved a marker post in Colombian butchery. From armed men killing other armed men, civilians were dragged into the fray. A contemporary eyewitness report describes how federal soldiers sacked a rural village: ‘They murdered [the inhabitants] and carved them up, little by little; they cut them into small pieces and the pieces jumped. When the sun rose there were bodies everywhere. They took a little child from a pregnant woman and they put one of its limbs in her mouth.’
Boves’ perverted diversions evidently survived the generation.
Grotesque massacres such as these turned out to be a warm-up for what was to come. Summary executions, disappearances, disembowelment, systematic rape, torture, and group assassinations became the hallmarks of a civil war that had since torn Colombia apart. Over the past 4 decades, the country’s bloody domestic conflict is estimated to have cost at least 30,000 lives. With mass graves still turning up, the figure could well be more. As a rule, the left-wing rebel groups and their paramilitary enemies contented themselves with terrorizing the countryside. That left the cities to the drug cartels.
In the days of Pablo Escobar, Colombia’s most notorious narco and one-time member of the Forbes rich list, the per-capita murder rates in Medellin and Cali were the highest in the world. Even the morgues of Somalia, which was swimming in blood courtesy of its own monstrous civil war, couldn’t compete.
‘The thing about men like Escobar is that they would kill so casually. It was just an everyday part of doing business,’ a veteran reporter in Medellin told me. ‘Many in fact are charming. When you speak with them, you have to remind yourself they’re cold-blooded murderers who would as soon slit open your granny with a carving knife as look at her.’
If the official stats are to be believed, then Colombia is at last getting safer. The drug cartels are no more (or no longer so evident); the paramilitaries have supposedly handed in their guns; and the rebel groups are allegedly on the run. Today, you’re only twice as likely to get killed on the streets of Cali as those of Beirut.”
“More popular nowadays are targeted kidnappings. Compared to random motorists, wealthy businessmen constitute a far more lucrative catch. Children are also popular. Kidnappers find that parents tend to find the cash quickly. Another strategy for a fast payment is to send ears, fingers, or other body parts in the post.
Less common are political hostages. Until recently, the FARC held around 50 such unfortunates. Most were public figures or members of the security services. They were worth more to the guerrillas as bargaining chips than bank notes. The most famous was ex-congresswoman Ingrid Betancourt. Daughter of a former Miss Colombia, the mom of 2 was seized in 2002 during a visit to a demilitarized zone in C. Colombia. At the time, she was running for president. Her husband pledged to continue her campaign, but the public guessed they wouldn’t be seeing her for a while. She ended up garnering less than 1% of the vote.
My visit brought fresh news of Ingrid through an emancipated policeman who’d been a guest of the FARC for 8+ years. He’d given his guards the slip and spent the previous fortnight or more beating a path out of the jungle. He emerged with 20 worms under his skin. He also had with him reliable info about Ingrid. She was alive. At least, she was the last time he’d seen her several months beforehand. Her relatives at last had reason to hope. The international campaign for her release picked up pace.
Then, a little over a year later, the remarkable happened. Ingrid was rescued. She and 14 of her fellow captives had been traveling by helicopter from 1 rebel-controlled zone to another. The trip turned out to be an elaborate ruse. The pilots, dressed as international mediators, were really undercover soldiers. Once in the air, they quickly disarmed the 2 FARC guards and pronounced the surprised hostages free. For a week, the daring rescue captured world headlines.
There’s another means by which violence in Colombia deprives people of their liberties. Displacement may be less newsworthy than massacres and kidnappings, but it’s far more commonplace. War-ravaged Sudan is the only country in the world that boasts more internal refugees than Colombia. Alvaro is just one of more than 2 million people who’ve been forced from their homes over the past 2 decades.”
“Spread across the foothills of N. Cauca, 2 hours south of Cali, the Nasa have been the victims of one land grab after another. Eventually, they decided enough was enough. As a collective group, they marched down the mountains and seized back part of their traditional territories. At the beginning of the 90s, their exercise in mass squatting obtained legal sanction. Under a new national constitution, parcels of tribal land were earmarked for indigenous reservations.
I took the bus from Cali to see how the experiment was working out. I took a truck into the mountains to Canoas. Home to around 6,000 people, the indigenous settlement commands a spectacular view across a lush, forested valley. The reservation consists of isolated wooden houses stationed sporadically over the hillside.”
Venezuela
“Under ‘Plan Bolivar,’ the country’s soldiers are educated to become caring combatants. When they’re not on military exercise, they’re out in the community fixing potholes and manning market stalls. The tactic of ‘civil-military union’ went down so well with the public that El Comandante effectively militarized the rest of government too.
Public services are now planned and plotted like battleground maneuvers. The main vehicle for attack are the missions; a sort of multi-insurgent offensive against Venezuela’s prevailing ills.
One of the earliest assaults set out to annihilate illiteracy. Reinforced by a battalion of Cuban teachers, Mission Robinson dispatched crack education demonstrators to root out those in need of their ABCs. The coded title owes its origins to Bolivar’s eccentric tutor, Simon Rodriguez (who later changed his surname to Robinson after reading the adventures of the shipwrecked sailor). No aspect of the Liberator’s life is too insignificant for the marketing-minded missions. Mission Negra Hipolita, for example, a meals-on-wheels service for the hungry and destitute, takes its name from Bolivar’s wet nurse.
My first appointment behind allied lines [to visit the missions] takes me downtown. Unlicensed vendors hawk week-old vegetables and stale-looking meat from stalls along the roadsides. Set back from the street are the HQ of Mission Mercal, the poor man’s supermarket. Its subsidized goods are stacked up along the aisles of a characterless warehouse.
There’s no car park, no shopping trolleys, and no automatic sliding door to facilitate entrance. Instead, there’s an iron-grill gate and a uniformed guard. Each waiting shopper is handed a numbered chit. Mercal works on a one-in, one-out system. The guard monitors the barred door, shouting out a number every few minutes like a bingo caller and allowing the next in line to scuttle through. The heavy metal door clangs shut down behind them. it reminds me of visiting day at Asuncion’s Tacumbu prison.
Once inside, the supermarket sweep begins. Customers have no special 2-for-1 deals to tempt them. Everything in Mercal is on permanent rock-bottom offer. Products are packaged in simple, nondescript containers. Some aren’t wrapped at all. Shoppers come to buy the larder essentials: meat, flour, milk, sugar, cheese, salt, rice, cooking oil. These are the rations of the revolution.
I conduct a spot of market research in the queue outside. Mercal’s customers all seem elated with the bargain-basement store. The women I speak with (there are only women in the queue) have no word of complaint. The chicken might come with a few feathers, one young mum concludes, but she can pull those off. Fresh milk is sometimes scarce, an older lady comments, but her husband prefers the powdered stuff anyway. No one moans about the 3-hour wait outside or about the total absence of customer service. Thanks to El Presidente, they can now put food on the family table. If it means standing in the scorching sun all afternoon, so be it.
Out at the Barrio Adentro Clinic on Av. Ramon Antonio, a similar satisfaction reigns. Waiting by the entrance, I come across 29-year-old Migales. An unemployed single mom, she’s waiting to see the doctor with her energetic 4-year-old, Juan. She came by this morning, but the queue was too long and the attending told her to come back later. The reception desk is temporarily empty.
Migales unsuccessfully grabs at her young son, who’s slipped on the floor and is now crawling under the waiting room’s row of cupped plastic chairs: ‘They think he might be suffering from a pelvis problem. We’re here to get some X-rays.’
Staffed by Cuban medics, the clinic forms part of a network of smaller Barrio Adentro health centers dotted around the town’s poorer neighborhoods.
‘Before the health services were pathetic,’ Migales says. ‘You used to have to pay for operations and medicines up front, and the doctors were always very unfriendly. In the normal public hospitals, it’s still like that.’ Like the ladies at Mission Mercal, she doesn’t mind the wait. Besides, as with everything else at the clinic, the X-rays are free of charge.”
“Class is out when I climb the stone stairs of Cecilio Acosta High Scool. Coro’s oldest school has seen more changes in recent years than the rest of its 150+ year history combined: class hours and teaching days have been extended to maximize learning opportunities; competitive rankings are off limits; entrance fees have been abolished; exams can be re-sat until the student passes; group work is replacing individual study; and the tuck shop has been replaced by free, healthy lunches in the canteen.
The most substantive changes are in the curriculum. ‘Trans-disciplinary’ is the new buzzword. The laws of gravity and the periodic table now sit side by side in 1 homogenized subject called ‘science.’ French and English, meanwhile, are merged together in one Esperantoesque ‘language’ class.
Bolivar’s own ideas on teaching had their quirks. In a letter about the education of his 12-year-old nephew, he specified the subject areas he judged worthy of study. The list includes classes in good manners, botany, dance, civil engineering (optional), and the ‘enjoyment of cultivated society where the fairer sex exerts its beneficial influence.’
By the same token, the Liberator also decreed that primary schools be established with public funds, a visionary measure for the time. His appetite for innovation is often credited to Simon Rodriguez, whose edict on life Bolivar learned by rote as a boy: ‘Either we invent or we err.’ In recognition, Venezuela’s new Bolivarian kindergartens are now known as Simoncitos.”
“The bridge being opened today is just one of heaps of projects that this government has enacted. Schools, hospitals, train lines, power plants, you name it. Previous presidents just used to pocket the money or share it around among their cronies. You should see the millions they’ve got stashed away in gringo bank accounts. Chavez is different. He cares about Venezuela. He wants to make us great again!”
She hands out bottles of water. ‘Think nothing of it,’ she says. ‘It’s free. This country produces a lot so it can pay for stuff like this.’ I’m reminded of the unsightly oil refineries outside Maracaibo.
Ramon and his friends have grown used to ‘free stuff.’ How long the gravy train will last depends largely on world oil prices. Not that they’re complaining about the government’s short-termism. None of them has a salaried job exactly. They’re all volunteer members of an ill-defined ‘committee.’ Their task is to invigilate the delivery of foodstuffs, medicines, and other government-subsidized goods in their neighborhood. By hanging around the stockrooms, employees are supposed to be dissuaded from stealing. There’s still a substantial deficit in the stock list every month. Despite never having caught anyone, the team collects an ‘incentive’ for its vigilance.”
“Poor old Christopher Columbus is bearing the brunt of these changing winds. The European adventurer is held responsible for introducing the New World to the Old, a fateful encounter that makes him very much persona non grata. His birthday is now celebrated as the Day of Indigenous Resistance. In Caracas’ Plaza Venezuela, his statue has been shrunk. Sculptors are working up a miniature replacement. Above him, dominating the spot where the discoverer of America used to stand, the image of a gigantic indigenous warrior is planned. In Merida, they’ve gone one step further. Someone has lopped off Columbus’ head. All that’s left of the main who once sailed the ocean blue is a bare plinth with a severed neck.”
Cuba
“Most ironies in modern Cuba tend to be less intentional. Some end up being amusing, such as the socialist bookstore in the Plaza de Armas who had somehow allowed an English version of Market-Driven Management to slip between his tracts on Communist economics. Yet, the majority veer toward the tragic, like an island people banned from owning boats. Or a universal free healthcare system that lacks basic medicines. Or trained professionals who work as waiters because the tips pay 10x their salary.”
“He’s occupied with the trials of living in a modern socialist republic: the food shortages, the lousy wages, the high prices, the inability to travel abroad, the ban on moving house, the restrictions on free speech, the farcical voting system.
‘Here I am, 46 years old, never having owned my own car,’ he says. ‘Just think about it: I have a beautiful beach less than half an hour away from my house, and I haven’t visited it for 3 years because I can’t afford the transport.’
‘Here in Cuba, we’re taught that capitalism is bad,’ he continues, ‘that it brings crime and beggars and social unrest. Sure, there’s social inequality in Europe and other countries, but there’s nothing like the general poverty we have in Cuba.’”
Conclusion
“The obedient students of free-market economics — Chile, Peru, Colombia, and, especially, Brazil — are growing moderately, although not nearly as madly as previously predicted. Furthermore, redistribution in the most marginalized groups remains problematic for these countries. In Brazil, poverty has halved over the last decade or so. The expansion of the country’s social welfare programs and progressive tax policies have helped more than 28 million people out of poverty since the Workers’ Party came to power under Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva in 2003. His successor in post, Dilma Rousseff, has since introduced new welfare initiatives, such as the multi-million dollar ‘Brazil Without Misery’ program. Even so, disparities in weatlh remain huge. Brazil is now the world’s 6th-biggest economy. Yet on a per capita earnings rate, it slips back to 100th place, behind Iran. Brazil’s own stats bureau estimates that 16 million Brazilians still live on less than $20/month — the same amount that low-budget travelers ‘can probably scrape by on’ per day, according to the Lonely Planet guide. And while the stats office declines to reveal the racial balance of the country’s entrenched poor, you can bet that Afro-Brazilians continue to make up a fair slice of those at the bottom of the ladder.”
“[Uruguay’s leader Mujica] is a man who repeatedly gives 90% of his presidential salary to charity, and who the BBC once described as the ‘poorest president in the world’ (a title that apparently grated on him).
Mujica’s rhetoric fits his image. His UN 2015 Rio Earth Summit speech is often presented as an archetypal example. Down with ‘hyper-consumption,’ he cried. Let’s bring an end to ‘market societies,’ he pleaded. Enough with rampant globalization, ‘it’s time to start fighting for a different culture,’ he said. Nation states should be ruling over the market, not vice versa. The whole performance served as a harbinger to a genuinely sustainable model of human (not just economic) development, to a way of living that fits within the planet’s material means. Mujica’s message resounded with millions around the world. Almost immediately the 10-minute talk became an Internet sensation.
Little of such clear-minded thinking ever made its way onto the statute book, however. That’s not to say that Mujica didn’t push through a range of progressive social measures. Marijuana, abortion, and same-sex marriages all became legal under his watch, for example. That’s no mean feat. Yet the fundamental economic model on which modern Uruguay relies has survived untouched. So the mill owners gain tax breaks by the dozen, while the fiscal burden on national workers edges ever upwards. The same market-beholden system is changing the shape of the countryside too as traditional smallholders lose out to high-tech farmers and grazing lands disappear under commercial forest plantations. When a British-based exec firm proposed creating the country’s first open-pit mine, Mujica’s government made its support clear. Why? For the same reason he refuses to dismantle the laissez-faire logic to which the majority of South America is now dutifully bound: ‘Because [my] people ask for more and more.’ Mujica, a former Marxist, can do little to rebut the material desires of his people. Indeed, if he forced his countrymen to live like he does, he admits that he’d have a revolution on his hands — and not the kind the hard Left has in mind.”
