Argentina "obedient " Victim
Interview With Eduardo Galeano
by Jaime Aviles
La Jornada
April 14, 2002
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 P·jaros, where he lives with Elena Vilagra in the MalvМn 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 Sk·rmeta, Joan
Manuel Serrat and JosИ 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?
Itнs 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 doesnнt 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, youre 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 itнs interesting
to note that thatнs 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 donнt 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 у
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 canнt 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. Itнs the middle of summer
and the tourists from Buenos Aires who used to bring the necessary money у some $5 billion
USD per year, so that the country could survive until the next vacation season у 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 BREAKOUT HERE AS WELL, IT'S ON ALL THE BOOK COVERS,"
SAYS THE TAXI DRIVER TAKING ME ONCE AGAIN TO THE CASA DE LOS PЎJAROS, WHERE ELENA VILAGRA
AND EDUARDO GALEANO LIVE.
The interview is renewed in the little garden of his pleasant home. Itнs extremely hot, we
drink beer, eat fain· [spicy fritters] and talk in the shelter of the plants and flowers
and trees of this "selva" into which the Uruguayan writerнs wife has poured her imagination
and devotion since the couple returned from exile in Catalonia in the mid- н80s, 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 JosИ Batlle y OrdЫТez,
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.
MIRACLE IN A SMALL COUNTRY - 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 н24 and н28 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 NezahualcЫyotl. 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 donнt 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 didnнt believe the story that privatization was going to free
the country from the external debt у 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 donнt 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 itнs 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.є
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 PENTAGONнS BLACKLIST.
Well, I have the hide of an old elephant, but think of that manнs 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.