by Marie Arana
How is it that Argentina, the fifth richest country in the world in the 1930s, with a per capita income equal to that of France and more automobiles than the United Kingdom, has been such a perpetual victim to corruption, stagnation, and disarray? How is it that Venezuela, with the largest proven oil reserves on the planet—potentially the wealthiest country in all of South America—is now patently unable to feed itself? When Venezuela’s economy bottomed out under Nicolás Maduro, and all the pretty dreams woven by Hugo Chávez were sent into a spiral of desperation and hunger, millions of the disillusioned set out on an unprecedented exodus, abandoning their country, shaking their heads, wondering where it had all gone wrong. The wiser heads—haves along with have-nots—did not wonder at all. What had gone wrong was what always went wrong: the dictators, the rapine, the seemingly insurmountable indigence, corruption, inefficiency. It’s just our nature.
The renowned Venezuelan intellectual Carlos Rangel once said that the ten thousand kilometers that separate Mexico from Argentina mark a geographic distance, not a spiritual one. There are sufficient commonalities of history and character in Spanish-speaking America to allow us to generalize about the whole. Rangel, who despised Castro’s Communist dictatorship as much as the Fascist dictatorship of Pinochet, argued that to be a Latin American of the humbler class was to be trapped in a perpetual cycle of oppression and rebellion, either resigning oneself to the role of noble savage or taking up the revolutionary gauntlet. The champions of the poor place all blame for Latin America’s ills on predatory foreigners: we are poor because wealthy nations exploit us; because they rob us of our riches, reduce us to vassals in service to a herculean First World. The rich’s champions—guardians of the caste system and the status quo—are inclined to favor dictators, the iron fist, the military, the Church, even foreign interventions so that the haves can keep power in their favor, preserve things exactly as they are. To be a Latin American of the more comfortable class is to long for a firm hand. Whatever our class, Rangel contends, we fear we are congenitally doomed by the other. We assume we’ll eventually fall prey to the ire of the opposing side—be it rich or poor—to bitter history, to the system’s deficiencies, to our worst instincts. We believe failure is bred in the bone, handed down through generations. Why wouldn’t we, if like Leonor Gonzáles—like too many Latin Americans—we are still pounding rock, still dragging water, still living much as our forebears did hundreds of years ago?
There is certainly plenty of evidence for the system’s deficiencies. For all our love of family and tradition—for all our human warmth and natural ingenuity, for all our courage in the face of adversity—Latin America is rife with dysfunction. We are, if body counts are any measure, the most murderous place on earth. In a perpetual pendulum swing from street violence to government brutality, our acculturation to the sword is shocking. Nowhere has that terrible numbness been more evident during the last half century than the spate of Latin American countries where rebellion became terrorism, terrorism became “narconomics,” and disorder swept the land to be met by genocidal military crackdowns. For decades, from the desert of Sonora to the altiplano of Peru, army ranks ballooned to form robust counterinsurgencies, and when those campaigns were done, legions of out-of-work warriors spilled into cities and villages: a ready-made fighting force for the drug trade. So it was that one generation’s centurions became the next generation’s criminals. Demobilized Colombian soldiers who once fought the FARC have been lured to the drug trade in forests outside Medellín, just as Peruvian troops that fought the Shining Path ended up toting guns for the cocaine lords of the Huallaga Valley. From paramilitary to coke thug is a familiar trajectory in these lands. Certainly that was the case for Carlos Buergos, a young Cuban warrior for Communism in Angola who found a profitable career as a drug hood in Washington, DC.
Illegal drugs, as one economist has suggested, are Latin America’s new silver, extracted greedily from the very territories that historically have sent precious metals around the world: Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, Brazil. Just as silver and gold have been dug from Latin America’s bowels and shipped away for five hundred years, cocaine and heroin have been reaped, processed, and sent away for fifty. Though it is difficult to measure the exact volume of this clandestine market, we know that it involves veritable armies of narco-operatives and—in countries where drug production is massive—there are few citizens whose lives it doesn’t touch. Once laundered, drug dollars flow through construction companies, service industries, tourism, banks, food businesses, political organizations, even churches, changing the very nature of the economy. Since the 1990s, illicit cocaine has commanded a vast web involving hundreds of thousands of employees, from farmers, to smugglers, to rehab counselors. With revenues in the hundreds of billions of dollars, it is among the most valuable single commodity chains in world history.
Although drug money typically finances a shady underworld of crime gangs, prostitution, and human trafficking, these days the prosperity one sees all about in certain Latin American cities—from Santiago to Mexico City—can be the result of drug-financed infusions. Indeed, whole countries can profit from black-market ebullience. Venezuela under President Nicolás Maduro has hitched its very survival to the commerce of illicit drugs: in a diabolical triangle of oil, cocaine money, and military muscle, Venezuela has succeeded in reinventing itself as a narco-mafia state. So it is that Latin American drug currency seems to be everywhere around us. Often we hold its ubiquitousness in our very hands: scientists report that 90 percent of all US dollar bills carry traces of cocaine.
As the daughter of a North American mother, I am outraged at the physical enslavement of twenty-three million human beings—nearly half of them citizens of the United States—to this veritable firehose of white “silver.” As the daughter of a South American father, I am appalled at the insatiable hunger for illegal drugs in the United States and Europe and the ways it has shackled the Latin American economy to criminal gangs and a boundless, foreign addiction. There is plenty of blame to go around.
But trade in heroin, marijuana, and cocaine has given the region more than an exuberant underworld market. It has been a powerful generator of violence. More costly in human terms than terrorism, the drug wars have proven to be a grim reaper in these Americas. No other region formally at peace has equalled its levels of violence. Since 2006, more than a quarter million Mexicans have been killed in the US-backed government campaign to stamp out illegal drugs in Mexico. Those killings became so routine that it was hardly reported when thirteen thousand were mowed down in drug-related violence in the first nine months of 2011. Almost forty thousand Mexicans have gone missing. When five severed heads were flung onto a crowded dance floor in Michoacán in the name of “divine justice,” the revelers cleared out in terror, but no one was particularly surprised.
The same can be said for Colombia. An equivalent number of Colombians—more than 220,000, to be exact—have been sacrificed in drug wars that have raged for generations. Almost 8 million souls have been displaced. Tens of thousands of children were kidnapped and recruited as combatants. The peace process in Colombia that began in 2016 reduced the murder rate dramatically, cutting it by a third. Even so, to date, Colombia has the highest number of internal refugees of any country in the world: higher than Syria, the Congo, Somalia, Yemen, or Iraq. Similarly, in Venezuela’s increasingly violent and dysfunctional ambit, millions of refugees have fled, streaming across borders to seek safety elsewhere. And the litany goes on: according to the United Nations, Brazil’s drug-related homicides in a single year rivaled the death toll of the Syrian civil war. Peru, which today is the largest source of coca leaf and a mighty force in the production of cocaine, has long suffered the rampant street violence that drug mafias generate. If forty-three of the fifty most violent cities of the world are in Latin America, illegal drugs are surely one of the big reasons why.
Just as silver brought enormous wealth to the Spanish elite but unspeakable cruelty to native
Americans, the illegal drug culture has brought riches to a very few and conflagration to the overwhelming many. Here is an endlessly recurring history, nudged along by the region’s gravest affliction: its dire inequality. Latin America is the most unequal region on earth precisely because it has never ceased to be colonized—by exploiters, conquerors, proselytizers—and, for the past two centuries, by its own tiny elite. As economists have long argued, extractive societies such as Latin America’s are built on social injustice. They are designed and maintained by a ruling class whose primary goal is to enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. They thrive when absolute privilege reigns over absolute poverty. But extractive nations are also programmed to fail. The damage left behind in their endless raid on natural resources—by silver, if you will—is all too enduring. It is violence, resentment, poverty, environmental damage, crime. To paraphrase Bolívar: what you are left with is an ungovernable America, where revolutions only plow the sea.
If few places on this globe are as violent as Latin America, few are as corrupt. According to polls, the overwhelming majority of Latin Americans believe their governments are riddled with vice. That corruption is most pernicious precisely where probity is most needed: in the region’s security forces. Too often in Latin America, the police and the army are co-opted by politicians, less likely to serve the letter of the law than whoever happens to be in power. Even as Latin American dictators go about rewriting constitutions and dismantling the checks on their power, police chiefs and generals are given free rein to brutalize the population. In El Salvador in 2015, the vice president—a former guerrilla chief himself—approved the police director’s policy of killing gang members “without fear of suffering consequences.” In Honduras, a drug czar investigating the government’s collusion with cocaine cartels found that the National Police were reporting directly to drug lords and carrying out murders on their behalf. “We are rotten to the core,” the drug czar said after he had been fired summarily for doing his job too well. “We are at the edge of an abyss. . . . You write a report, you give it to your boss, and then you realize that he was the very one committing the crimes you’re documenting.” Two weeks later, he was dead.
Playing no small part in the culture of corruption is colonialism’s most faithful accomplice: the Church. When Pope Francis learned of the systemic and widespread graft being exposed in the Odebrecht bribery cases—a gargantuan Brazilian operation totaling billions of dollars of payoffs to politicians throughout the hemisphere, the largest foreign bribery case in history—his response was unequivocal outrage. Latin American politics was in crisis, he declared. Very much in crisis! It was more sick than well! Which was true. But as just about everyone in the region knew, this was no passing ailment. Corruption has been endemic since Columbus planted a cross in Hispaniola and, despite the good pontiff’s lamentations, the Church was all too present in its foundation.
What do the colonized learn, after all, from a church that is willing to collaborate with the Crown to sell cédulas de Gracias al Sacar—certificates of “whiteness”—to those of the darker races so that they might be admitted to a schoolroom, or a government office, or even marry? What do the faithful learn from an institution that required their ancestors to pay tributes or, if they failed to do so, condemned them to hard labor? What do they learn from a religion whose cardinals and bishops side with strongmen—with Cortés, Pizarro, Perón, or Franco; who offer their services to tyrants, as Chilean Cardinal Raul Silva Henríquez once offered them to General Pinochet, in order to “put the right face” on a deadly coup? What do they learn from priests who boast that they have accepted donations from traffickers and filled their churches’ coffers with ill-gained lucre? Or what do they learn when priests who refuse to capitulate to despots—as Bishop Óscar Romero did—are gunned down in the bright light of day? For all the mercies that the Church has extended to Latin America, and there have been many, the institution has been a tower of ambiguity. All too often, it wears two faces: one that champions the lowly, another that speaks for the lords. And when measured against the long train of history, it has failed in its most basic task: to impart the abiding virtues of a truly humane, law-abiding, egalitarian society. As the Jesuit Xavier Albó put it so aptly: those virtues were well in place long before Christianity arrived on American soil. They were written into the laws of civilizations it dismantled. To wit: ama suwa, ama llulla, ama qhella. Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not go idle.
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Leonor Gonzáles has proven unable to live down-mountain from the reeking garbage heaps of La Rinconada. Although good fortune arrived in the form of an American documentary filmmaker who arranged to educate her children in exchange for filming her family, she was never quite able to adjust to life elsewhere. Leaving the raw violence and toxins of the illegal gold mines for the frenetic life of Juliaca—a Peruvian airport town thirty miles from Puno—she was considered little more than an illiterate rube in a wide skirt; an outsider with no skills to offer. Although her children enrolled in school and quickly adapted to their two-room cement shack in the slum behind the airport, Leonor was soon back in the gold mines, taking her chances on her hands and knees, scrabbling through rock spills again. Every Thursday she takes the diminutive stone that represents her husband, puts it in the pocket of her apron, and rides a rickety combi up-mountain for six hours, over bone-rattling dirt roads; and every Monday, she travels back to see that her children have eaten, studied, and have clean clothes for the next week. Her youngest daughter, Senna, has graduated from the Universidad Andina Nestor Cáceres. Her older daughter, Mari, is recovering from the suicide of a lover, a young miner in La Rinconada who drank too much, hanged himself in a mine shaft, and left her with an infant child. She is studying to be a pharmacist. The eldest, Jhon, still suffers multiple traumas—eye, brain, and lung damage—from the collapse of the mine that killed their father, but he manages to work fifty-four hours a week for a cable installation service. Leonor’s youngest, Henrry, a high-spirited sixteen-year-old who might otherwise be laboring in the cyanide pits of Mount Ananea, receives the highest grades his ramshackle school can offer.
Carlos Buergos, thousands of miles north, somewhere between Florida and Louisiana—nobody really knows—is no less consigned to a life on the margins. Scrounging work wherever he can, he has drifted from city to suburb, making ends meet as a janitor, busboy, carwash, messenger boy, plying his wits on the streets. Now in his sixties and plagued by old injuries—the bullet to his head, the knife to his gut—he surely finds it hard to get up and out into the street at all. What deliverance he has found has been through the kindness of strangers. Most of them, older women looking to forget the past. Before marrying his round, spunky, no-nonsense Venezuelan wife, he had been living with Helen, a menopausal blonde he had met on the dance floor of a Washington, DC, bar. After serving a fifteen-year jail sentence for dealing cocaine—after his sickly six-year-old son died and his wife divorced him—he found himself using that strategy again. He sought out mature, unattached women in mambo bars, and offered to exchange a little tenderness for a place to stay. From time to time, he scored a few months of grace, especially with American women who found his impish good looks and thick Cuban accent charming. But age, weariness, and a long criminal record seem to have caught up with Carlos. He can no longer be found in his old haunts in Dade County or the jittery singles bars on the perimeter of New Orleans. Nor do court records that register his petty burglaries or his fleeting coke deals or his dustups with police suggest that he stays in one place very long. In those reports, under the rubric “Possible Employers,” the record is clear: none found. The last coke kingpin he dealt with identifies himself only as “GOD.”
Xavier Albó, a priest who has dedicated sixty-seven years of his life to the culture and welfare of Indians—who, being more inclined to spiritual than genealogical classifications, counts himself an indio, an Aymara, a Quechua—can claim with all certitude that he is no longer a Catalan. Nor even a Spaniard.
He is Bolivian. He has seen Bolivia reborn, and he has seen it proceed through all hell’s circles of transfiguration. Having worked to elect Evo Morales—the country’s first indigenous president—with all the hope he could muster, Xavier has seen that hope run aground. Morales, who began as a poor coca leaf farmer, became what so many democratically elected Latin American presidents have become: rich, rabidly authoritarian, a hidebound dictator. Like Hugo Chávez, like Alberto Fujimori, like Juan Perón, like Daniel Ortega, he has used democracy to undermine democracy. Xavier is not shy to say so. He is forthright about the dreams, and he is forthright about the failures. But like a father who loves his child no matter how errant, he is unwilling to abandon hope for what yet might be. Latin America’s redemption is just around the corner. If only there were better courts, better schools, better leaders. He may be in his ninetieth decade, but Xavier still works tirelessly to champion what he has always believed in, the trinity that will redeem Latin America: justice, equality, education. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.