Touchstones
Page 39
There are people who argue that instead of dissuading future dictators, the legal pursuit of Pinochet will encourage those who have usurped power to remain entrenched, and not commit the ex-dictator’s error of giving up office, that had made him invulnerable to sanctions. People that think this must have an image of dictators as archangels, for they believe that they retire from power because one day they will become good or democratic, and that we must encourage them towards this moral and political conversion by guaranteeing them impunity in advance. The truth is that never in history has a dictator stopped being a dictator by choice, through a sudden spiritual, ideological or ethical transformation. All of them would like to stay in power for ever (this is true of many democratic governments too, of course), and if they do not manage to do so it is simply because they cannot, because a particular situation at a specific moment forces them, irresistibly, to leave. Fidel Castro, Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and their kind will not cut short by a single moment their stay in power if the legal prosecution of Pinochet is stopped.
Another reason given against the Pinochet prosecution is the different criteria that some media and some intellectuals and politicians use to judge dictatorships: why do the satraps of the left not deserve the same condemnation as the satraps of the right? Has Pinochet been more cruel and bloodthirsty to his opponents during his seventeen years as dictator than Fidel Castro during his forty years of tyranny? Anyone reasonably well informed knows that, although they are ideologically different, both men are responsible for unspeakable abuses against very basic human rights, which should mean that they would receive the same condemnation and sanctions from the international democratic community. However, as we know, while not one democratic government defended Pinochet, only a tiny number of democratic governments dare to call Fidel Castro what he really is: a little satrap with bloodstained hands. And in a few days, twenty or so Spanish American presidents and prime ministers are going to travel down to Havana, in a grotesque political coven, to embrace this repugnant character and to legitimate him, signing with him once again, without their hands trembling or their faces falling with shame, a declaration in favour of freedom and legality as the necessary framework for the development of the Spanish American community.
Of course, this double standard in morality (this ‘moral hemiplegia’ in the words of Jean-François Revel) when it comes to dealing with dictators of the right or of the left is outrageous, in particular when it comes from the mouths or the pens of cynical people who call themselves democratic or, even more ridiculous, progressive. However, to turn this sense of outrage into a reason for exonerating Pinochet of any guilt since (for now) one cannot punish him and Fidel Castro in the same way, would give carte blanche to the excesses of fascist dictators since communist dictators are often less vulnerable than them to international sanction. It would be like saying that that since we have no absolute and universal system of justice, then humanity should abandon any form of justice, however relative and partial. This is a fundamentalist and Manichean attitude that is at variance with social reality, where it is simply not possible to aspire to perfection and the absolute in any sphere. In the penal system it is always preferable that a murderer be judged and sentenced even though many others escape punishment for their crimes. The same is true for crimes against human rights. The ‘Pinochet affair’ is encouraging from a moral, legal and political point of view because it opens the door, in future, for other dictators – whatever their politics – to be investigated and punished for their crimes, and also because, in this particular case, concrete victims of torture, murder, imprisonment and robbery are receiving lawful, if belated, redress. This is good news for all victims of persecution and abuse the world over, a sign that, finally, a new era is beginning in the history of humanity in which the great political criminals can be taken to court to answer for their crimes, without being able to hide behind ‘national sovereignty’ or amnesties that they instituted when they were in power, and go off into retirement with a clear conscience and their pockets stuffed with money. The fact that it is a right-wing and not a left-wing dictator who is the first in what will be in the future – and this depends on all of us, not just on Judge Baltazar Garzón – a long list of satraps to be punished is an incidental detail that should not in any way affect the transcendent importance of the Pinochet affair from a legal point of view. It depends on genuine democrats, on the true lovers of liberty and law throughout the world, to ensure that what has happened with Pinochet is not the exception but rather the rule, not a mere victory for the ‘left’ but a first effective legal act aimed at bringing about a drastic reduction in political murders and torture across the world, irrespective of who commits them and on whatever religious or political pretext. To some extent, by putting Pinochet in the dock, the Spanish and British judges have summoned to appear in court with him an entire harmful and immemorial dynasty.
Madrid, October 1999
Chilean Yawns
Anyone like me, who has been following closely the elections in Chile, where Michelle Bachelet, the centre-left candidate, defeated the centre-right candidate, must have felt both envy and considerable surprise. Was Chile a Latin American country? For the truth is that this election campaign seemed like one of those boring civic contests, where, say, the Swiss or the Swedes change or re-elect their government after a certain number of years, rather than a Third World election where countries going to the ballot box are staking their political model, their social organisation and often even their very survival.
In a typical Third World election, everything seems to be in question and goes back to square one, from the very nature of the institutions to the political economy and the relations between government and society. The election result can turn everything around, which means that countries can suddenly go backwards, losing overnight what they have gained over the years, or else carry on indefinitely along the wrong path. That’s why it is normal in underdeveloped countries to be continually jumping, usually jumping backwards rather than forwards, or simply jumping on the spot.
Although it is not a First World country – it is still some way from being so – Chile is not an underdeveloped country. In the last quarter of a century it has progressed systematically, consolidating democracy, opening up its economy and strengthening its civil society in a way that has no equal in Latin America. It has reduced the level of those living in poverty to 18% (the average in Latin America is 45%), a rate of progress comparable to Ireland or Spain, and its middle class has grown consistently, so that now it is, in comparative terms, the largest in Latin America. One million Chileans have escaped poverty in the last ten years. This is due to the extraordinary stability of Chilean society, which can attract all the foreign investment it wants, and can equally sign free-trade agreements with half the world (with the United States, the European Union and South Korea, and now it is negotiating agreements with India, China and Japan).
All this has come out very clearly in these elections. In the debate between Michelle Bachelet and Sebastián Piñera, which took place a few days before the end of the second round, you would have had to have been psychic or a diviner to discover on which points the candidates from the left and the right disagreed openly. Despite their respective attempts to distance themselves from each other, the truth is that their differences are not important. Piñera, for example, wants to put more police on the street than Bachelet.
When an open society reaches these levels of consensus, it is a long way down the road of civilisation. This is a word that finds little favour with intellectuals who are infatuated with barbarism – and it is true that, seen from a distance and from somewhere safe, barbarism seems much more amusing and exciting than civilisation, that smacks of tedium and routine – but it is the most effective framework for defeating hunger, unemployment, ignorance, human rights abuses and corruption. And it is the only environment that guarantees its citizens freedom of expression.
President Lagos left power
with a 75% approval rate, a really extraordinary figure in a democracy: only dictators, who can massage the figures, would seem to have that level of popularity. In the case of Ricardo Lagos it is absolutely deserved. He has been a socialist who, like Felipe González or Tony Blair, knew how to take advantage of the lessons of history and promote, without any sense of inferiority, a modern political economy which was liberal, open to the world, supported private initiatives and, during his government, led to significant growth.
He is also an intelligent politician, a man of ideas, a careful speaker, not charismatic, a leader who deserves the highest praise of all: that he left his country much better off than when he found it. During his administration, the anti-democratic traces of the Pinochet dictatorship were confronted and dealt with. And the ex-dictator himself, during these years, thanks to the tenacious and patient work of several judges, has appeared before the world stripped of the mask of the honest autocrat that his supporters had fashioned for him. Nobody would now dare to say that Pinochet was ‘the only dictator who did not steal’. He did steal, large amounts, which is why he and his family and his close associates are now being tried or investigated for suspect transactions to the value of more than thirty-five million dollars.
In these elections the Chilean right, thanks to Sebastián Piñera, has managed to purge a great deal if not all of its original sin: its links with the dictator. Piñera campaigned against the dictator in the referendum, and no one that knows him could doubt his democratic convictions. Many people thought that his major economic holdings would get in the way of his political leadership. But that was not the case, and the energy and intelligence with which he conducted his campaign would seem to have guaranteed him a solid future as the leader of the Chilean right.
The victory of Michelle Bachelet, among other things, showed the Chilean people willing to make moral redress to all those people who were abused, tortured, exiled or silenced during the years of the dictatorship. And it is a giant step forward towards equality between men and women in a country where machismo seemed unmovable. (It was the last country in Latin America to allow divorce.) But it is not just the rights of women that will be boosted by this new president. Secularisation, that fundamental prerequisite for democratic progress, will also be encouraged. The Catholic Church has had a much stronger influence in Chile than in the rest of Latin America. Despite all these promising signs, Chile cannot rest on its laurels if it wants to continue to progress. One of its greatest problems is that it does not have energy resources to meet the increasing demands of its expanding industry and industrial infrastructure. For this reason it is essential that Chile looks to repair relations with its neighbours, especially with Bolivia. The dispute with Bolivia goes back to the War of the Pacific in 1879, when Bolivia lost its access to the sea. One of the great challenges facing Michelle Bachelet’s government is to solve once and for all this dispute with Bolivia and also its maritime disagreements with Peru, so that active collaboration between these three countries can bring tangible benefits to all: the energy that Chile needs and that Bolivia has in abundance, the opening up of the prosperous Chilean market to Bolivian and Peruvian goods, and the investment and technology that Chile could bring to its neighbours, which they need for their own development. Such collaboration would also mean that they could put a stop to, and begin to reduce, the arms build-up in the region, which has had such disastrous consequences in the past and which currently creates suspicion and mistrust, a fertile breeding ground for xenophobic nationalism. Chile spends more on arms than any other country in South America, and under Lagos alone it spent two-and-a-half billion dollars on military equipment.
Compared with its neighbours, Chile is today a very boring country. By contrast, we Peruvians, Bolivians, Argentines and Ecuadorians live dangerously and never get bored. That is why we get what we get. Not like the Chileans, who now have to get their kicks through literature or the movies or sport rather than in politics.
Lima, January 2006
The Odyssey of Flora Tristán
The nineteenth century was not just the century of the novel and of nationalism: it was also the century of utopias. The fault lay with the French Revolution of 1789: the upheavals and social transformations brought about by the Revolution convinced both its supporters and its opponents, not just in France but throughout the entire world, that history could be fashioned like a sculpture, until it reached the perfection of a work of art. There was one condition: a plan or a theoretical model should be outlined in advance, that could then be neatly imposed on reality. This idea can be traced back a long way, at least to classical Greece. In the Renaissance, it appeared in such important works as Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which established a genre that continues to this day. But it was in the nineteenth century that the idea was at its most powerful and seductive, generating daring intellectual projects and inflaming the imagination and idealism (and sometimes the madness) of so many thinkers, revolutionaries or ordinary citizens. It was the conviction that, with the right ideas, carried through selflessly and courageously, one could create paradise on earth and establish a society without contradictions or injustice, where men and women could live in peace and order, sharing the benefits of the three principles of 1789 in a harmonious blend: liberty, equality and fraternity.
The whole of the nineteenth century is full of utopias and utopian thinkers. Alongside groups committed to violent action, like those formed by the disciples of François-Noël Babeuf (1746–97), we find remarkable thinkers like Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and Charles Fourier (1772–1837), daring businessmen like the Scot Robert Owen, men of action and adventurers, among whom the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76) stands out, flamboyant dreamers like Etienne Cabet (1788–1856) or delirious examples of the genre like Jules-Simon Ganneau (1806–51), the messianic founder of Evadisme. The most important of all the nineteenth-century utopian thinkers, in historical terms, was, without doubt, Karl Marx, whose ‘scientific’ utopia would incorporate much of this earlier thought and end up overriding it.
Flora Tristán (1803–44) belongs to this lineage of great nonconformists, radical opponents of the society that they were born into, believing fanatically that it was possible to reform society root and branch, eradicate injustice and suffering and establish human happiness. She was a bold and romantic campaigner for justice who, first in her difficult life, plagued by adversity, then in her writings and finally in the passionate militancy of the last two years of her life, offered an example of rebelliousness, daring, idealism, naïvety, truculence and adventurousness which fully justifies the praise she received from the father of Surrealism, André Breton: ‘Il n’est peutêtre pas de destinée féminine qui, au firmament de l’esprit, laisse un sillage aussi long et aussi lumineux’. (‘There is perhaps no feminine destiny that, in the firmament of the spirit, has left such a long and luminous trace.’) The word ‘feminine’ is key here. Not just because in the vast panoply of nineteenth-century social utopian thinkers, Flora Tristán is the only woman, but also, fundamentally, because her desire to reconstruct society in its entirety stemmed from her indignation at the discrimination and servitude that women of her time suffered and which she herself experienced more than most.
Two traumatic experiences and a trip to Peru were the decisive events in the life of Flora Tristán, who was born in Paris on 7 April 1803 and christened with the long, grandiose name of Flora Celestina Teresa Enriqueta Tristán Mocoso: her birth and her marriage. Her father, a Peruvian, Don Mariano Tristán y Mocoso, belonged to a very prosperous and powerful family and served in the armies of the King of Spain. Her mother, Anne-Pierre Laisnay, a Frenchwoman, had fled the Revolution and taken refuge in Bilbao. It was there that they met and apparently were joined – there is no proof of this – in a religious marriage conducted by a French priest, another exile, which had no legal status. For that reason, Flora was born as an illegitimate child, a shameful condition which, from the cradle, condemned her to life as a ‘pariah�
��, a term that she would later use insolently in the title of the most famous of her books, Peregrinaciones de una paria (Peregrinations of a Pariah, 1837). When her father died in June 1807, when the child was not yet five, mother and daughter, since they lacked any legal status, were evicted from the elegant property they lived in, in Vaugirard, and all Don Mariano’s possessions reverted to the family in Peru. After a few years, as their situation declined, we find Flora and her mother living in a poor neighbourhood in Paris – around the Place Maubert – and the young girl beginning to work mixing colours in the print shop of the painter and printer André Chazal, who fell in love with her. Their wedding, on 3 February 1821, was, for Flora, a catastrophe that would affect her life even more dramatically than her illegitimacy.
This was because, from the outset, she felt that this marriage made her a mere appendix of her husband, a child-breeder – she had three children in four years – someone completely deprived of her own life and freedom. It was from this time that Flora became convinced that matrimony was an intolerable institution, a commercial transaction in which a woman was sold to a man, thus becoming to all intents and purposes his slave, for life, because divorce had been abolished with the Restoration. And, at the same time, she began instinctively to reject motherhood and to develop a deep distrust of sex, which she saw as part of women’s servitude, of their humiliating subjugation to men.