In the 1940s the people of Amsterdam awoke to the nonsensical news that Holland was participating in a world championship of baseball — a sport foreign to the Dutch — and the fact was that Curaçao was about to win the world championship for Central America and the Caribbean. With regard to the Caribbean, I believe its area is not well defined, because it really ought to be cultural, not geographical. It ought to begin in the southern United States and extend down to northern Brazil. Central America, which we suppose belongs to the Pacific, doesn’t have much of that ocean, and its culture is Caribbean. This legitimate claim would at least have the advantage that Faulkner and all the great writers of the southern United States would begin to form part of the magical realism congregation. Also in the 1940s Giovanni Papini declared that Latin America had contributed nothing to humanity, not even a saint, as if he thought that were a small thing. He was wrong, for we already had Saint Rosa of Lima, but he didn’t count her, perhaps because she was a woman. His statement illustrated very well the idea the Europeans have always had of us: everything that doesn’t resemble them they think is an error, and they do everything they can to correct it in their own way, like the United States. Simón Bolívar, exasperated over so much advice and so many prescriptions, said: ‘Let us have our Middle Ages in peace.’
He more than anyone endured pressure from a Europe already grown old regarding which system he ought to choose, a monarchy or a republic. A great deal has been written about his dreams of wearing a crown. The truth is, at that time, even after the North American and French revolutions, monarchy was not as anachronistic as it seems to us republicans of today. Bolívar understood it in this way and thought the system didn’t matter if it served the dream of an independent, united America. That is, as he said, the largest, richest, most powerful state in the world. We were already victims of the war between dogmas that still torment us, as Sergio Ramírez reminded us yesterday: some fall and others rise, even if they are only a subterfuge, like elections in democracies.
A good example is Colombia. Regular elections are enough to legitimize the democracy, for the ritual is what matters, without worrying too much about its vices: patronage, corruption, fraud, the buying and selling of votes. Jaime Bateman, the comandante of the M-19, said: ‘A senator isn’t elected with 60,000 votes but with 60,000 pesos. Not long ago, in Cartagena, a fruit vendor shouted at me in the street: “You owe me 6,000 pesos!” The explanation is that she had voted by mistake for a candidate whose name she confused with mine, and realized it only afterwards. What could I do? I paid her the 6,000 pesos.’
The fate of the Bolívarian idea of integration seems increasingly sown with doubts, except in arts and letters, which move forward towards cultural integration on their own and at their own risk. Our dear Federico Mayor Zaragoza is right to worry about the silence of the intellectuals, but not the silence of the artists, who, after all, are not intellectuals but emotionalists. They express themselves in shouts from Río Bravo to Patagonia, in our music, our painting, our theatre and dance, our novels and soap operas. Félix B. Caignet, the father of radio soap operas, said: ‘I start from the basic premise that people want to cry, and all I do is give them the excuse.’ They are the simplest and richest popular expression of continental multilingualism. When political and economic integration are achieved, and they will be, cultural integration will be a long-standing, irreversible fact. Even in the United States, where enormous fortunes are spent on cultural penetration, while we, without spending a cent, are changing their language, their food, their music, their education, their styles of living and loving. That is, the most important thing in life: their culture.
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One of the great joys I’ll take away from these two day-long sessions with no breaks was my first meeting with my good neighbour Minister Francisco Weffort, who began by surprising us with his impeccable Spanish. And yet I wonder whether around this table there are more than two people who speak Portuguese. President de la Madrid was correct when he said that our Spanish isn’t bothered by leaping across the Mato Grosso while the Brazilians, in a national effort to get along with us, are creating Portish, which may be the lingua franca of an integrated America. Pacho Weffort, as we would call him in Colombia; Pancho, as we would call him in Mexico; or Paco, as they would call him in any tavern in Spain, defends with heavyweight reasons the Ministry of Culture. I oppose, with no success, and perhaps that’s fortunate, establishing one in Colombia. My principal argument is that it would contribute to the officializing and bureaucratizing of culture.
But there’s no need to simplify. What I reject is the ministerial structure, an easy victim of patronage and political manipulation. I propose instead a National Council on Culture that would not be governmental but part of the state, responsible to the president of the republic and not to Congress, and safe from frequent ministerial crises, palace intrigues, and the black arts of the budget. Thanks to Pacho’s excellent Spanish, and in spite of my embarrassing Portish, we have agreed that it doesn’t matter how it’s done as long as the state assumes the grave responsibility of preserving and extending the cultural sphere.
President de la Madrid did us the great favour of bringing up the drama of drug trafficking. For him, the United States every day supplies between 20 and 30 million drug addicts with no difficulty at all, almost providing home delivery of drugs as if they were milk, the newspaper, or bread. This is possible only with mafias stronger than the Colombian, and greater corruption among the authorities than in Colombia. The problem of narcotraffic of course touches us Colombians very deeply. By now we’re almost the only ones responsible for narcotraffic, the only ones responsible for the United States having that great consumers’ market, which, sad to say, makes the narcotraffic industry so prosperous in Colombia. My impression is that the traffic in drugs is a problem that has slipped out of humanity’s hands. This doesn’t mean we should be pessimists and declare ourselves defeated, but we must continue to combat the problem starting from that point of view and not from the starting point of fumigation.
Not long ago I was with a group of North American reporters on a small plateau that couldn’t have had more than three or four hectares planted in poppies. We were given a demonstration: fumigation from helicopters, fumigation from planes. By the third pass of helicopters and planes we calculated that this probably cost more than the plot of land. It’s disheartening to know that this in no way will combat drug trafficking. I told some of the North American reporters who were with us that fumigation ought to begin with the island of Manhattan and the city hall of Washington. I reproached them, too, because they and the rest of the world know about the drugs in Colombia — how it is planted, how it is processed, how it is exported — because we Colombian journalists have investigated it, published it, made it known throughout the world. Many have even paid with their lives. On the other hand, no North American journalist has taken the trouble to tell us how drugs enter the United States and what their internal distribution and commercialization are like.
I believe we all eventually agreed with the conclusion of former president Lacalle that the redemption of these Americas lies in education. We arrived at the same conclusion last year at UNESCO’s Forum for Reflection, where the beautiful idea of a ‘long-distance university’ was outlined. There it fell to me once again to uphold the idea of an early apprehension of the aptitudes and vocations that the world needs so much. The basis of it is that if a child is placed in front of a group of different toys, he or she will eventually keep just one, and the duty of the state would be to create the conditions for that toy remaining with that child. I am convinced this is the secret formula for happiness and longevity. That each person can live and do only what he or she likes, from the cradle to the grave. At the same time, we all agree, apparently, that we must be alert to the tendency of the state to disengage from education and entrust it to private entities. The argument against this is devastating: priv
ate education, good or bad, is the most effective form of social discrimination.
A good ending for a four-hour relay race, which can serve to dissipate doubts regarding whether Latin America really exists, is that from the beginning former president Lacalle and Augusto Ramírez hurled at this table a kind of fragmentation grenade. Well, to judge by what has been said here during these two days, there is not the slightest doubt that it exists. Perhaps its Oedipal destiny is to continue searching for its identity for ever, which will be a creative fate that would make us distinctive in the world’s eyes. Battered and dispersed, still incomplete, and always searching for an ethic of life, Latin America exists. The proof? In these two days we’ve had it: we think, therefore we exist.
A DIFFERENT NATURE IN A WORLD DIFFERENT FROM OURS
Santafé de Bogotá, Colombia, April 12, 1996
I heard about the military for the first time at a very early age, when my grandfather told me a bloodcurdling tale about what used to be called the Banana massacre. That is: the repression by gunfire of a demonstration by Colombians working for the United Fruit Company who were cornered in the Ciénaga railway station. My grandfather, a silversmith by trade and a diehard liberal, had been promoted to colonel in the ranks of General Rafael Uribe Uribe during the Thousand Days’ War, and because of that distinction had been present at the signing of the Treaty of Neerlandia, which ended half a century of formal civil wars. Facing him on the other side of the table was his oldest son, a conservative parliamentarian.
I believe my vision of the drama of the banana workers as recounted by him was the most intense of my early years, and also the most enduring, to the extent that I remember it now as a subject that obsessed my family and their friends throughout my childhood and somehow conditioned our lives forever. But it also had an enormous historical importance, because it precipitated the end of more than forty years of hegemonies and undoubtedly influenced the subsequent organization of the military profession.
But it marked me forever for another reason that is relevant now: it was the first image I had of the military, and many years would go by before I not only began to change it but also to reduce it to reasonable proportions. In reality, in spite of my conscious efforts to exorcize it, in fifty years I’ve never had the opportunity to converse with more than half a dozen military men, and I managed to be spontaneous and unguarded with very few. The impression of mutual uncertainties always hampered our encounters, I never could overcome the idea that words didn’t mean the same thing for them as for me, and that in the long run we didn’t have anything to talk about.
You shouldn’t think I was indifferent to the problem. On the contrary: it is one of my great frustrations. I also wondered where the fault lay, in the military or in me, and how it would be possible to demolish that bastion of non-communication. It wouldn’t be easy. During the first two years of studying law at the Universidad Nacional — when I was nineteen — two of my classmates were lieutenants in the army. (I really wish they were here among you.) They came to class in their identical, impeccable uniforms, always together and always punctual. They sat to one side and were the most serious and methodical students, but it always seemed to me that they were in a world different from ours. If you spoke to them, they were attentive and pleasant, but invincibly formal: they replied only to what they had been asked. At exam time we civilians divided into groups of four to study in cafés, we’d see one another at the Saturday dances, at student rock-throwing fights, in the tame taverns and lugubrious brothels of the period, but we never ran into our military classmates, not even by accident.
It was impossible not to conclude that their nature was different. In general, the children of military men are military men, they live in their own neighbourhoods, meet in their casinos and clubs, and their worlds go by behind closed doors. It wasn’t easy to find them in the cafés, rarely at the cinema, and they had a mysterious aura that made them recognizable even in civilian clothes. The very nature of their work has made them nomads, and this has given them the opportunity to know even the farthest corners of the country, on the inside and the outside, but by their own choice they do not have the right to vote. Out of elementary good manners, I have learned I don’t know how many times to recognize their insignias in order not to make a mistake when I greet them, and it has taken me longer to learn this than to forget it.
Some friends familiar with my prejudices think this visit is the strangest thing I’ve ever done. But my obsession with different forms of power is more than literary — it is almost anthropological — ever since my grandfather told me about the tragedy in Ciénaga. I’ve often wondered whether that isn’t the origin of a thematic line that runs through the centre of all my books. In Leaf Storm, which is the convalescence of the town after the exodus of the banana growers; in the colonel nobody wrote to in In Evil Hour, which is a reflection on the use of the military for a political cause; in Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who wrote verses in the clamour of his thirty-two wars; and in the patriarch more than two hundred years old who never learned to write. From the first to the last of these books — and I hope in many others in the future — there is a whole lifetime of questions about the nature of power.
I believe that my real awareness of all this began when I was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. What most inspired me then was the possibility of a historical vindication for the victims of the tragedy, as opposed to the official history that proclaimed it a victory for law and order. But it was impossible: I couldn’t find any direct or remote evidence that the dead had numbered more than seven and that the extent of the drama hadn’t been the one wandering through collective memory. Which, of course, did not diminish in any way the magnitude of the catastrophe, given the size of the country.
You might ask, and with reason, why, instead of recounting it in its real proportions, I magnified it to three thousand dead who were transported in a train two hundred carriages long and thrown into the sea. The reason, in poetic code, is simple: I was working in a dimension where the episode of the banana workers was no longer a historical horror from nowhere but an event of mythic proportions in which the victims were not the same and the executioners no longer had faces and names, and perhaps no one was innocent. From that lack of restraint the old patriarch came to me, dragging his solitary hernia through a palace filled with cows.
How could it be otherwise? The only mythical creature Latin America has produced is the military dictator from the end of the last century and the beginning of this one. Many of them, it is true, liberal caudillos who in the end turned into savage tyrants. I’m convinced that if Colonel Aureliano Buendía had won even one of his thirty-two wars, he would have been one of them.
However, when I fulfilled the dream of writing about the last days of the Liberator, Simón Bolívar, in The General in His Labyrinth, I had to twist the neck of the swan of invention. This was a flesh-and-blood man of extraordinary stature who waged war against his devastated body with no witnesses other than the entourage of young soldiers who accompanied him in all his wars and would accompany him till death. I had to know how he really was, and how each of them was, and I believe I discovered this as much as possible in the Liberator’s revealing, fascinating letters. I believe, in all humility, that The General in His Labyrinth is historic testimony wrapped in the irresistible trappings of poetry.
It is about these literary enigmas that I would like to continue the dialogue with you that other friends have begun during the past few days. Those who have applauded the military branch know I’m no stranger to that necessary idea, and my one hope is that it prospers. Each one has talked about his speciality. I have none except letters, and even here I’m an empiricist with no academic formation, but I do feel able to enrol you in the not always peaceful armies of literature. To begin with, I want to leave you with just one sentence: ‘I believe all our lives would be better if each of you would always carry a book in your knapsack.’
JOURNALISM: THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD
Los Angeles, United States, October 7, 1996
A Colombian university was asked what aptitude and vocational tests they give to those who want to study journalism, and the response was categorical: ‘Journalists are not artists.’ These reflections, on the contrary, are based precisely on the certainty that written journalism is a literary genre.
Some fifty years ago, schools of journalism were not the fashion. One learned in editorial rooms, printing plants, the little café across the street, the Friday drinking sessions. The entire newspaper was a factory that formed and informed without equivocation and generated opinion in a participatory atmosphere that kept morality in its place. For we journalists always went around together, lived together, and were such occupational fanatics that we didn’t talk about anything else but the job. The work brought with it a group friendship that left little room for a private life. Institutional editorial meetings did not exist but, at five in the afternoon, with no official notification, the entire staff took a break from the tensions of the day and assembled to have coffee somewhere in the editorial offices. It was an open meeting where topics from each section were discussed in a heated way and final touches given to the morning edition. Those who didn’t learn in those twenty-four-hours-a-day ambulatory and impassioned lecture halls, or became bored by talking so much about the same thing, wanted to be or thought they were journalists but really weren’t.
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