Argentina

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 MalvÃŒn 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 JosÈ 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?

Itís 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 doesnít 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 itís interesting to note that thatís 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 donít 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 ó 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 canít 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. Itís the middle of summer and the tourists from Buenos Aires who used to bring the necessary money ó some $5 billion USD per year, so that the country could survive until the next vacation season ó 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 P¡JAROS, WHERE ELENA VILAGRA AND EDUARDO GALEANO LIVE.

The interview is renewed in the little garden of his pleasant home. Itís 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 writerís wife has poured her imagination and devotion since the couple returned from exile in Catalonia in the mid- í80s, 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 JosÈ Batlle y OrdÛÃ'ez, 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 í24 and í28 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 NezahualcÛyotl. 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 donít 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 didnít believe the story that privatization was going to free the country from the external debt ó 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 donít 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 itís 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.º

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 PENTAGONíS BLACKLIST.

Well, I have the hide of an old elephant, but think of that manís 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.