Latin America

Argentina

Robert Romeo has sent me a message from his Argentine friend Alberto which is a commentary on the Kirchner government, with comments in Spànish by Alberto which I have summarized in English: "Our doubts arise when we examine the road chosen by Kirchner to make Argentina become a serious and normal country. First, he has declared himself to be a neo-Keynesian. What is that? It's someone who maintains that the engine of the economy is public expenditure and that the state's essential function is to help the neediest. Kirchner assumes that the U.S. economic recovery in Roosevelt's time was the result of vast programs of social aid. That is not a well-informed conclusion" [A: Bush is doing the same thing; he is buying arms, but he will have to resort to welfare since half the population is dying of hunger]

In the mid-20th Century, Juan Domingo Perón, stirred up by the fascist influence that he had received in Italy in the 1930s, became anti-American and anti-capitalist. Perón believed in the ''third path:'' neither communism nor capitalism." [A: Perón talked anti-Americanism, but he did just the opposite. Argentina had been dependent on the UK, but now it became dependent on the US. At the end of his administration he granted American oil companies all they wanted.]

Perón was a militant nationalist when it came to politics and a right-wing socialist when it came to economics. So is Kirchner, along with a substantial part of the Argentine population that has not broken with that tradition . . . It is odd that, to get out of the crisis, President Kirchner has selected the repertoire of ideas and behavior that sank Argentina and almost all of Latin America throughout the 20th Century" [A: This was written by someone who does not know Argentine reality. The last president, Menem, privatized everything in record time, even the postal service and toll highways. It was extreme neoliberalism. Since devaluation the economy has been growing , but the most important thing is to reduce the gap between rich and poor. Kirchner is fighting to control his own party, which is the usual gang of thieves, Argentina is not anti-American, but it simply refuses to obey American orders blindly, as did the previous government. Argentina gives priority to Mercosur, and will not join the American Free Trade Area, as US officials are demanding. To do so would be suicidal.

Thanks to Curator Bill Ratliff, an ancient WAISer, the Hoover Institution Archives now have the largest Perón collection in the world (but not Perón's important letter to me). At the same time, La Nación (2/18/04) reports that the French sociologist Alain Touraine, a great friend of Argentina, has advised President Néstor Kirchner to abandon Peronism. This has caused a stir in Argentina, since it might mean that the whole Peronista structure would collapse. It remains to be seen what Kirchner will do. Incidentally, his first name Nestor, is pagan, being that of the wise old man in the siege of Troy. Do not confuse it with Nestorio, patriarch of Constantinople.

Brazil

We have discussed use of race terms in Latin America, especially Brazil, "Preto" is Black, and "pardo" is brown. In Brazil, slavery was abolished in 1888 without civil war, and it is commonly but incorrectly said that there is no race prejudice in Brazil. Hank Levin has forwarded to me an article which I had seen in The Economist (2/14-20/04), and which seems to have been put on line by something called The Economist Our of Eden Here is the article:

Race in Brazil. Black brainpower. A university challenge to racism

Thinking he was a thief, police shot a young black dentist who had just dropped his girlfriend off at São Paulo's international airport on February 3rd. That killing haunted a celebration which took place a week later, the opening of Brazil's first college catering mainly to blacks. It “shows the dimension” of the exclusion of black Brazilians from a society that until recently considered itself unusually tolerant, says José Vicente, president of Afrobras, a group that is the moving force behind the school.

Race and racism are both slippery ideas in Brazil. Slavery lasted until 1888 but there was no formal segregation thereafter. Nearly half the population is non-white if you count people who describe themselves as preto (black) or as pardo (brown), as activists insist you should. Both groups (together known as negros) are poorer than other Brazilians, less well-educated and paid less for the same work. But this gap has inspired nothing comparable to the United States' civil-rights movement or South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle.

The new school, called Zumbi dos Palmares after a heroic 17th century leader of fugitive slaves, aims to fill the vacuum. It is starting modestly, as a “faculty”, not a full-fledged university. Its 200 students (five white, though the college wanted many more) are studying management, with a view to finding jobs in the growing markets for “Afro-ethnic” products. Mr Vicente sees them as the nucleus of a new elite that will encourage other blacks to study, earn and lead the struggle for equal rights.

In fact, mainstream universities are already contributing to that elite. Activists claim that just 2% of students at public universities, the most prestigious, are black or brown. But a third of those taking the final exam last year described themselves thus. That number falls to 15% in high-status courses such as medicine and law; to raise it, the government is thinking of imposing racial quotas.

Mr Vicente is not willing to wait. The Zumbi dos Palmares faculty marks “one of the few times in history negros in Brazil are acting as agents of change,” he says. Its students seem convinced. Ignez Bacelar was initially cool to the idea. But she says that most universities are “for young whites with good incomes.” She is happy to study with people who understand the obstacles. Just as important, the subsidised tuition­at 240 reais ($80) a month, less than half the going rate for private universities­will allow her to become the first graduate in her family.

RH: Accompanying the article is a commentary in Portuguese by Eunice R.Durham of the University of Sao Paulo.
She questions the figures given, saying that the 2000 census shows that only 5.4% of the population considers themselves black. while 39.9% consider themselves "pardos"· (brown) or mulatto. Thus 45.3%of the population is what in the US would be called Black, since we do not recognize mulatto as a category, even though most American Blacks are really mulatto. Eunice Durham goes on to analyze the figures in Brazilian higher education. She claims that the racism of Brazilian universities is not as great as the article implies.

Guatemala

Bill Ratliff writes: "Those who are really interested in what Rigoberta Menchu really said or didn't say for her famous 1983 "autobiography" can check all of the original interviews and supporting materials in the Elizabeth Burgos collection in the Hoover Institution Archives.

In 1999 David Stoll, a Stanford graduate, wrote a detailed study of Menchu entitled "Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans." It caused quite an uproar because it demonstrated that in many respects Menchu's book, I, Rigoberta Menchu, was really more a morality play than the autobiography it purported to be. The dramatic international reaction to Stoll's study raised at least two questions. First, should the prize be taken away from her, but since many "peace" prizes are so blatantly political from the very beginning, taking Menchu's back might have raise the possibility of having to take back others as well. So, forget that. Second, heated disputes began in the academy (and not for the first time) as to just how important facts are when moral issues (as individual believers see, or partially see, them) are involved. Since the Guatemalan military had done (and was doing) a lot of brutal things to Indians (and others), which is beyond dispute, why can't one twist the facts to make the most damaging possible case against the brutes? After all, it is in a good moral cause and serves a "higher purpose." Perhaps I have already given away my position on this matter, that "academics" who think that way should be openly following the equally honorable professions, in their ways, of preacher or politician.

But the line that Menchu was the great defender of poor repressed Indians in Guatemala and beyond, as so blithely asserted by the Nobel Committee, is twice flawed, twice a lie. Menchú’s passion was Marxist revolution, not the rights of indigenous peoples, and her actions, particularly before the collapse of the Soviet bloc and her receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1992, demonstrate that beyond serious question. For example, she militantly supported brutal Sandinista repression of the Miskito Indians and others in Nicaragua in the early 1980s, a matter both Stoll and I wrote about before she even got the prize, not that the Nobel Committee was interested. This Sandinista repression of Nicaraguan Indians was so blatant it even got some American human rights activists who otherwise seldom criticized the Sandinistas, and American Indians, to condemn or at least "vigorously admonish" the Sandinista comandantes over their actions. The critical datum is that for Menchu the Sandinistas were quite right to burn villages, kill and resettle Miskitos and others who resisted their dictates because their (Sandinista) Marxist cause was right. Human rights of Indians gave way to Marxist political objectives. Period.

But was Menchu defending the interests of Guatemalan Indians? Many did not thinks so, as Stoll demonstrated in his 1993 book entitled Between Two Armies, referring to the Indians stuck between the armies of the government and the guerrillas, both of which often treated them brutally. Over the years Stoll, who detests the actions of the Guatemalan military, shows how foreign supporters of guerrillas in Guatemala and Marxist revolution in general used Menchu's words and her fame as winner of the Nobel Peace Prize to justify continuing a hopeless war in Guatemala. This was done at the expense of Indians who did not support it and indeed paid with heavy and senseless casualties. That is, Menchú promoted her political passion effectively because she (and particularly her advocates abroad) knew how to tell politicized urban audiences in America, Europe and Latin America what they wanted to hear in order to pursue their own objectives, which were not not necessarily the real interests of indigenous peoples in Guatemala or elsewhere. Several years ago, the founder of Guatemala's Guerrilla Army of the Poor, which Menchú supported in her book and elsewhere, asked the Guatemalan people to forgive him for his past. When anyone challenges Menchu's past, however, she simply dismisses them as “racists.”

RH. what did Rigoberta Menchu say or not say about Castro's Cuba?

Ronald Hilton - 01.25.04

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