[R-P] Galeano

[Mario Jose de lima]

Eduardo Galeano: Argentina--Obedient Victim

Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit

source - Bill Koehnlein <toplab en toplab.org>

La Jornada (Mexico City) - April 10, 2002


Interview with Eduardo Galeano:

Argentina, "Obedient" Victim

"The lesson for the world is not to buy into the IMF's discourse,
which leads to extermination"

by Jaime Aviles

MONTEVIDEO.- From the east side of the River Plate, 40 kilometers
from Buenos Aires, full of a sadness he does not attempt to hide but
which nourishes him with discoveries and revelations in the field of
language, Eduardo Galeano bears witness to the terminal crisis in
Argentina, a country, he says, that is "a victim of the universal
doctrine that it accepted, complying with everything it was told to
do," and which "now, on top of everything else, they are castigating
for that very obedience."

In the Casa de los Pájaros, where he lives with Elena Vilagra in the
Malvín district, walking with his dog Morgan up the narrow hills that
lead to the beach, dining with his friends in an Italian restaurant
where his portrait and those of Antonio Skármeta, Joan Manuel Serrat
and José Saramago hang from the walls; in short, chatting with La
Jornada late into the night in the basement of an old mill done up as
a bar, the Uruguayan writer reflected out loud, using measured words
that he sometimes drew out to stress their importance within the
phrase.


ARGENTINA DID EVERYTHING IT WAS ORDERED TO DO BY THE INTERNATIONAL
MONETARY FUND AND IT'S DESTROYED. WHAT IS THE LESSON FOR MEXICO?

It's not only a lesson for Mexico, but for the world, and in general
I would say not to fall for the story: one has to be a bit more
careful; the discourses of power are not expressive, they conceal and
disguise. The lesson is that one doesn't have to go on buying into
that discourse, which leads not only to the extermination of national
economies, but to horrific consequences that are not only economic. A
discourse that not only translates into mass impoverishment and an
offensive concentration of wealth, but into slaps in the face, the
daily insults that are the ostentation of the power of the few, in
the face of the helplessness of the many...

WHAT ARE THE NON-ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES?

First, the discrediting of democracy. Nowadays, it is identified with
corruption, inefficiency, injustice, which is the worst thing that
could happen to democracy. At the end of the day, democracy means
"power of the people," and look to what extreme that word has been
humiliated, ending up becoming the antonym of justice. A very large
number of people increasingly perceive it as such, above all the
youth. Democracy is a den of thieves which is of no use at all and
merely injures the poor.

This is the vision of democracy held by a vast number of people, at
least in the Latin American countries, and this is the gravest
cultural consequence, because there is a democratic culture that
allows the exercise of democracy to be more than Asian shadow
puppets.

A BREEDING GROUND FOR FASCISM...

Another tremendous injury is the great damage that the culture of
solidarity has suffered all these years. The links of social
solidarity have cultural expressions born from a connection with
others. In a system that preaches and practices selfishness, the
culture of solidarity is being gravely wounded. Right now the
predominant culture is that of "every man for himself," and if you
fall, you're screwed. And that also hurts me very much. I'm telling
you things that hurt me about the current cultural reality and that
translate into language changes: the dictionary is undergoing a
shitty updating.

I WANTED TO ASK YOU ABOUT THE MELANCHOLY PREVAILING IN COUNTRIES LIKE
ARGENTINA AND URUGUAY, WHICH ARE BASICALLY COMPOSED OF IMMIGRANTS
NOSTALGIC FOR EUROPE.

Yes, these are countries overwhelmingly populated by immigrants, and
here it 's interesting to note that that's the basis of a universal
perplexity, given the magnitude of a crisis like the one being
suffered by Argentina, which is a veritable tragedy. There is
universal perplexity because people don't understand how such a thing
could happen in a white, well-nourished country without a demographic
explosion. The event in itself calls into question the theories of
anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists and other
"ologists" who, for example, identify underdevelopment and poverty
with social explosions -- things they say occur in obscure regions of
the planet, regions condemned by destiny to suffer poverty because of
the color of their skin, as a result of a miscegenation that did not
bear good fruit. But contrary to those racist interpretations of
human misfortune, episodes like this one in Argentina appear, and
they can't understand how it could have happened.

BUT ARGENTINA HAS EVERYTHING: WATER, OIL, WHEAT, MEAT, A VAST AND
EMPTY TERRITORY. SOME SECTORS OF THE LEFT BELIEVE THAT IT CAN SAVE
ITSELF ON ITS OWN.

That is impracticable. Nobody can be saved solely their own efforts.
The only way out for the Latin American countries, in order not to
lose everything or to recover part of what they have lost, is our
ability to unite. In Latin America presidents meet but do not unite;
they have those summits, give speeches, pose for the photo, but they
are not capable of uniting to form a common front against the ruling
international banking system, against the usury of the foreign debt
that is strangling us, against the collapse of the prices of
everything we sell. If the presidents were to unite, perhaps
something could be done so as not to have to witness, fatalistically,
this kind of universal imposition of misfortune, the destiny to which
they want to condemn us. And here you have another contribution to
the new dictionary.

WHAT?

The new name for that financial dictatorship is the international
community; anything that you do to defend the little that remains of
your sovereignty is an attack against the international community,
rather than an act of legitimate defense against the usury practiced
by the banking system that rules the world, in which the more you
pay, the more you owe. That is why in a country like Argentina
everything has been dismantled: the economy, the state, the
collective identity of a people who no longer know who they are, from
where they came or where they are going. There is a spiritual void
that symmetrically corresponds to the material void of a country
plundered down to its cobwebs.

ARGENTINA LOST ITS ECONOMY THROUGH PRIVATIZATION AND URUGUAY IS ALSO
IN DIFFICULTY.

Uruguay has three million inhabitants and a profound deception. It's
the middle of summer and the tourists from Buenos Aires who used to
bring the necessary money -- some $5 billion USD per year, so that
the country could survive until the next vacation season -- are still
not arriving. Those resources are now frozen on the other side of the
River Plate, within the bank shutdown that seized the savings and
wages of Argentine depositors.


AND "A TREMENDOUS CRISIS IS GOING TO BREAK OUT HERE AS WELL, IT'S ON
ALL THE BOOK COVERS," SAYS THE TAXI DRIVER TAKING ME ONCE AGAIN TO
THE CASA DE LOS PÁJAROS, WHERE ELENA VILAGRA AND EDUARDO GALEANO
LIVE.

(The interview is renewed in the little garden of his pleasant home.
It's extremely hot, we drink beer, eat fainá [spicy fritters] and
talk in the shelter of the plants and flowers and trees of this
"selva" into which the Uruguayan writer's wife has poured her
imagination and devotion since the couple returned from exile in
Catalonia in the mid-80s, after the end of the military
dictatorship.)


WE ARE ON THE BANK OF ONE OF THE WIDEST RIVERS IN THE WORLD, WHICH
TOUCHES TWO EXPRESSIONS OF A SINGLE CULTURE. WHY HASN'T THE SAME
THING HAPPENED IN URUGUAY AS HAS HAPPENED IN ARGENTINA?

There are certain significant differences between Uruguay and
Argentina, within which there could be a list of things shared. A
shared history that was broken starting with the disintegration of
the colonial space that was the viceroyalty of the River Plate. They
are differences that originate from the early reforms here in the era
of José Batlle y Ordóñez, a man with a tremendous impetus for change
and a precursor in his time (from 1904 onwards); a visionary who
placed Uruguay in the world vanguard in many respects. It is hard to
imagine that now, because we are in the rearguard in so many things,
but this country was the successful laboratory for a series of
social, political, economic and cultural transformations that are now
no more than amazing tableaux in the distance. For example, the
nationalization of public services and then the concept of the state
as an industrial engine.

WHAT KIND OF REFORMS?

An extremely early divorce law, in 1908; for example, my grandmother
was divorced, and fundamental social reforms like free, obligatory
lay education, including physical education. Uruguay filled up with
sports fields, which explains the miracle of us being world soccer
champions before the Jules Rimmet Cup existed, in the '24 and '28
Olympics and then in the first World Championships of 1930, something
truly noteworthy in a country so small that it has fewer inhabitants
than the municipality of Nezahualcóyotl. But it was possible because
the state really was an expression of the community as a whole, not
just a machine invented by a few to make mincemeat of the rest. In
some ways, I believe that was what was behind the plebiscite
organized some years ago. I don't recall the date, but in all the
euphoria of privatization in Latin America, when they were even
selling obelisks, there was a plebiscite here and 73% of the
population voted against privatization. Thus, public monopolies
continue being public: telephones, light, everything that corresponds
to state activity. Here people didn't believe the story that
privatization was going to free the country from the external debt --
that rope that has us all dangling by the neck. And that was correct,
because in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, where everything was
privatized, not only was there no free competition; private sector
monopolies and the external debt multiplied in the midst of an
avalanche of capital coming from the sale of public services and
resources. That plebiscite saved us from falling into the same trap.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE SITUATION IN YOUR COUNTRY?

Uruguay is going through difficult times, globalization has hit us
extremely hard, our industry has been demolished; little remains of
the Uruguay that made and formed me. But in spite of that, the
country still has some potential defenses that Argentina lacks, for
the simple reason that the latter has lost its economy; if you don't
have some kind of control over the basic economic resources,
sovereignty ends up being reduced to an anthem, a flag.

You were saying that the tragedy of Argentina, a white, educated and
well-nourished society, has become an example of what could happen to
any educated and well-fed society.

What happened in Argentina broke the boundaries of the schemas within
which one sole philosophy tries to enclose reality. But it's only one
case. There is another that has painfully exposed the ignorance of
the so-called Western world -- because you'd have to see up to what
point it is Western -- in relation to the Islamic world, a culture
that embraces more than one billion people and which has become the
victim of the industrial-scale fabrication of lies to discredit it. I
am a writer, or I like to believe I am, and I write in a language
that has thousands of Arabic words, which I use all the time. That
obliges me to be very careful about rejecting that kind of "dark
threat" to which the media is trying to reduce Islam. Given that I
was in exile in Spain, I can testify to that incessant homage to
water that is Islamic culture, as opposed to the somber world of
cathedrals from which I come, because I had a very Catholic
childhood, but that does not prevent me from opening my eyes and
trying to see the rest, the others, those who believe something
different, who think differently, who feel differently. [British
historian Arnold J.] Toynbee warns that decadent societies tend
toward uniformity and ascendant societies tend toward diversity. When
a society begins to decline, to fall, to remain silent, it always
repeats the same words, it suffers a crisis of ideas that is
manifested in repetition.

THE SOCIETY STOPS THINKING FOR ITSELF, RIGHT?

In relation to what happened last September 11, I have read the most
colossally senseless things. For example, that the U.S. intelligence
agencies are totally incapable of acting in Afghanistan because they
lacked personnel "specialized in the Arabic language." But Arabic is
not spoken in Afghanistan, only Pashtu and other languages. Or like
the number of times I have heard talk of the "Arab threat," taking
Iran as an example. But Iran is Persian, not Arabian. Or when there
is talk of the "Arab religion." But the Arabs are a minority within
Islam and the overwhelming majority of the world population that
believes in the message of Muhammed is not Arab. I give this as an
example of the stupidities repeated to us day after day, until they
become irreversible truths.

Look what has just happened in a Boston university. A professor wrote
to me to tell me that he had taken an article of mine in La Jornada
about September 11 called "El teatro del bien y del mal" (The Theater
of Good and Evil.) He put it on the Internet and distributed it among
other professors from his college. However, one of them denounced him
to the administration, which charged him with endangering national
security. From there, the case was passed on to the state agencies,
who warned that my article could contain subliminal messages in code,
terrorist instructions in code. Now this professor has had to hire
lawyers and has become the object of a persecution worthy of the
McCarthy era.

SO YOU MUST BE ON THE PENTAGON'S BLACKLIST.

Well, I have the hide of an old elephant, but think of that man's
situation. This is the climate that is being mounted in the world to
toss into the fire anything that could be taken for a doubt, any
dissidence... For that reason, it is becoming more and more evident
that something has to be invented, a way out, because we are banging
our heads against the wall everywhere and all the time. And waiting
for a miracle -- like for my hair to grow -- that is not possible. We
have to rebel against this imposition of misfortune as a destiny and
try to imagine something different, based on certain truths that we
still can count on.


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