Thursday, April 24, 2014
Narco Cultura
You can watch the complete film on Netflix (streaming). WARNING! There is a lot of graphic violence in this film. Viewer discretion is advised.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Friday, April 18, 2014
LAS PALABRAS CON QUE Gabrial GARCIA MARQUEZ ACEPTO EL NOBEL en 1982
Antonio Pigafetta, un navegante florentino que acompañó a Magallanes en el primer viaje alrededor del mundo, escribió a su paso por nuestra América meridional una crónica rigurosa que sin embargo parece una aventura de la imaginación. Contó que había visto cerdos con el ombligo en el lomo, y unos pájaros sin patas cuyas hembras empollaban en las espaldas del macho, y otros como alcatraces sin lengua cuyos picos parecían una cuchara. Contó que había visto un engendro animal con cabeza y orejas de mula, cuerpo de camello, patas de ciervo y relincho de caballo. Contó que al primer nativo que encontraron en la Patagonia le pusieron enfrente un espejo, y que aquel gigante enardecido perdió el uso de la razón por el pavor de su propia imagen.
Este libro breve y fascinante, en el cual ya se vislumbran los gérmenes de nuestras novelas de hoy, no es ni mucho menos el testimonios más asombroso de nuestra realidad de aquellos tiempos. Los Cronistas de Indias nos legaron otros incontables. Eldorado, nuestro país ilusorio tan codiciado, figuró en mapas numerosos durante largos años, cambiando de lugar y de forma según la fantasía de los cartógrafos. En busca de la fuente de la Eterna Juventud, el mítico Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca exploró durante ocho años el norte de México, en una expedición venática cuyos miembros se comieron unos a otros y sólo llegaron cinco de los 600 que la emprendieron. Uno de los tantos misterios que nunca fueron descifrados, es el de las once mil mulas cargadas con cien libras de oro cada una, que un día salieron del Cuzco para pagar el rescate de Atahualpa y nunca llegaron a su destino. Más tarde, durante la colonia, se vendían en Cartagena de Indias unas gallinas criadas en tierras de aluvión, en cuyas mollejas se encontraban piedrecitas de oro. Este delirio áureo de nuestros fundadores nos persiguió hasta hace poco tiempo. Apenas en el siglo pasado la misión alemana de estudiar la construcción de un ferrocarril interoceánico en el istmo de Panamá, concluyó que el proyecto era viable con la condición de que los rieles no se hicieran de hierro, que era un metal escaso en la región, sino que se hicieran de oro.
La independencia del dominio español no nos puso a salvo de la demencia. El general Antonio López de Santana, que fue tres veces dictador de México, hizo enterrar con funerales magníficos la pierna derecha que había perdido en la llamada Guerra de los Pasteles. El general García Moreno gobernó al Ecuador durante 16 años como un monarca absoluto, y su cadáver fue velado con su uniforme de gala y su coraza de condecoraciones sentado en la silla presidencial. El general Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, el déspota teósofo de El Salvador que hizo exterminar en una matanza bárbara a 30 mil campesinos, había inventado un péndulo para averiguar si los alimentos estaban envenenados, e hizo cubrir con papel rojo el alumbrado público para combatir una epidemia de escarlatina. El monumento al general Francisco Morazán, erigido en la plaza mayor de Tegucigalpa, es en realidad una estatua del mariscal Ney comprada en París en un depósito de esculturas usadas.
Hace once años, uno de los poetas insignes de nuestro tiempo, el chileno Pablo Neruda, iluminó este ámbito con su palabra. En las buenas conciencias de Europa, y a veces también en las malas, han irrumpido desde entonces con más ímpetus que nunca las noticias fantasmales de la América Latina, esa patria inmensa de hombres alucinados y mujeres históricas, cuya terquedad sin fin se confunde con la leyenda. No hemos tenido un instante de sosiego. Un presidente prometeico atrincherado en su palacio en llamas murió peleando solo contra todo un ejército, y dos desastres aéreos sospechosos y nunca esclarecidos segaron la vida de otro de corazón generoso, y la de un militar demócrata que había restaurado la dignidad de su pueblo. En este lapso ha habido 5 guerras y 17 golpes de estado, y surgió un dictador luciferino que en el nombre de Dios lleva a cabo el primer etnocidio de América Latina en nuestro tiempo. Mientras tanto 20 millones de niños latinoamericanos morían antes de cumplir dos años, que son más de cuantos han nacido en Europa occidental desde 1970. Los desaparecidos por motivos de la represión son casi los 120 mil, que es como si hoy no se supiera dónde están todos los habitantes de la ciudad de Upsala. Numerosas mujeres arrestadas encintas dieron a luz en cárceles argentinas, pero aún se ignora el paradero y la identidad de sus hijos, que fueron dados en adopción clandestina o internados en orfanatos por las autoridades militares. Por no querer que las cosas siguieran así han muerto cerca de 200 mil mujeres y hombres en todo el continente, y más de 100 mil perecieron en tres pequeños y voluntariosos países de la América Central, Nicaragua, El Salvador y Guatemala. Si esto fuera en los Estados Unidos, la cifra proporcional sería de un millón 600 mil muertes violentas en cuatro años.
De Chile, país de tradiciones hospitalarias, ha huido un millón de personas: el 10 por ciento de su población. El Uruguay, una nación minúscula de dos y medio millones de habitantes que se consideraba como el país más civilizado del continente, ha perdido en el destierro a uno de cada cinco ciudadanos. La guerra civil en El Salvador ha causado desde 1979 casi un refugiado cada 20 minutos. El país que se pudiera hacer con todos los exiliados y emigrados forzosos de América latina, tendría una población más numerosa que Noruega.
Me atrevo a pensar que es esta realidad descomunal, y no sólo su expresión literaria, la que este año ha merecido la atención de la Academia Sueca de la Letras. Una realidad que no es la del papel, sino que vive con nosotros y determina cada instante de nuestras incontables muertes cotidianas, y que sustenta un manantial de creación insaciable, pleno de desdicha y de belleza, del cual éste colombiano errante y nostálgico no es más que una cifra más señalada por la suerte. Poetas y mendigos, músicos y profetas, guerreros y malandrines, todas las criaturas de aquella realidad desaforada hemos tenido que pedirle muy poco a la imaginación, porque el desafío mayor para nosotros ha sido la insuficiencia de los recursos convencionales para hacer creíble nuestra vida. Este es, amigos, el nudo de nuestra soledad.
Pues si estas dificultades nos entorpecen a nosotros, que somos de su esencia, no es difícil entender que los talentos racionales de este lado del mundo, extasiados en la contemplación de sus propias culturas, se hayan quedado sin un método válido para interpretarnos. Es comprensible que insistan en medirnos con la misma vara con que se miden a sí mismos, sin recordar que los estragos de la vida no son iguales para todos, y que la búsqueda de la identidad propia es tan ardua y sangrienta para nosotros como lo fue para ellos. La interpretación de nuestra realidad con esquemas ajenos sólo contribuye a hacernos cada vez más desconocidos, cada vez menos libres, cada vez más solitarios. Tal vez la Europa venerable sería más comprensiva si tratara de vernos en su propio pasado. Si recordara que Londres necesitó 300 años para construir su primera muralla y otros 300 para tener un obispo, que Roma se debatió en las tinieblas de incertidumbre durante 20 siglos antes de que un rey etrusco la implantara en la historia, y que aún en el siglo XVI los pacíficos suizos de hoy, que nos deleitan con sus quesos mansos y sus relojes impávidos, ensangrentaron a Europa con soldados de fortuna. Aún en el apogeo del Renacimiento, 12 mil lansquenetes a sueldo de los ejércitos imperiales saquearon y devastaron a Roma, y pasaron a cuchillo a ocho mil de sus habitantes.
No pretendo encarnar las ilusiones de Tonio Kröger, cuyos sueños de unión entre un norte casto y un sur apasionado exaltaba Thomas Mann hace 53 años en este lugar. Pero creo que los europeos de espíritu clarificador, los que luchan también aquí por una patria grande más humana y más justa, podrían ayudarnos mejor si revisaran a fondo su manera de vernos. La solidaridad con nuestros sueños no nos haría sentir menos solos, mientras no se concrete con actos de respaldo legítimo a los pueblos que asuman la ilusión de tener una vida propia en el reparto del mundo.
América Latina no quiere ni tiene por qué ser un alfil sin albedrío, ni tiene nada de quimérico que sus designios de independencia y originalidad se conviertan en una aspiración occidental.
No obstante, los progresos de la navegación que han reducido tantas distancias entre nuestras Américas y Europa, parecen haber aumentado en cambio nuestra distancia cultural. ¿Por qué la originalidad que se nos admite sin reservas en la literatura se nos niega con toda clase de suspicacias en nuestras tentativas tan difíciles de cambio social? ¿Por qué pensar que la justicia social que los europeos de avanzada tratan de imponer en sus países no puede ser también un objetivo latinoamericano con métodos distintos en condiciones diferentes? No: la violencia y el dolor desmesurados de nuestra historia son el resultado de injusticias seculares y amarguras sin cuento, y no una confabulación urdida a 3 mil leguas de nuestra casa. Pero muchos dirigentes y pensadores europeos lo han creído, con el infantilismo de los abuelos que olvidaron las locuras fructíferas de su juventud, como si no fuera posible otro destino que vivir a merced de los dos grandes dueños del mundo. Este es, amigos, el tamaño de nuestra soledad.
Sin embargo, frente a la opresión, el saqueo y el abandono, nuestra respuesta es la vida. Ni los diluvios ni las pestes, ni las hambrunas ni los cataclismos, ni siquiera las guerras eternas a través de los siglos y los siglos han conseguido reducir la ventaja tenaz de la vida sobre la muerte. Una ventaja que aumenta y se acelera: cada año hay 74 millones más de nacimientos que de defunciones, una cantidad de vivos nuevos como para aumentar siete veces cada año la población de Nueva York. La mayoría de ellos nacen en los países con menos recursos, y entre éstos, por supuesto, los de América Latina. En cambio, los países más prósperos han logrado acumular suficiente poder de destrucción como para aniquilar cien veces no sólo a todos los seres humanos que han existido hasta hoy, sino la totalidad de los seres vivos que han pasado por este planeta de infortunios.
Un día como el de hoy, mi maestro William Faullkner dijo en este lugar: "Me niego a admitir el fin del hombre". No me sentiría digno de ocupar este sitio que fue suyo si no tuviera la conciencia plena de que por primera vez desde los orígenes de la humanidad, el desastre colosal que él se negaba a admitir hace 32 años es ahora nada más que una simple posibilidad científica. Ante esta realidad sobrecogedora que a través de todo el tiempo humano debió de parecer una utopía, los inventores de fábulas que todo lo creemos, nos sentimos con el derecho de creer que todavía no es demasiado tarde para emprender la creación de la utopía contraria. Una nueva y arrasadora utopía de la vida, donde nadie pueda decidir por otros hasta la forma de morir, donde de veras sea cierto el amor y sea posible la felicidad, y donde las estirpes condenadas a cien años de soledad tengan por fin y para siempre una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra.
Agradezco a la Academia de Letras de Suecia el que me haya distinguido con un premio que me coloca junto a muchos de quienes orientaron y enriquecieron mis años de lector y de cotidiano celebrante de ese delirio sin apelación que es el oficio de escribir. Sus nombres y sus obras se me presentan hoy como sombras tutelares, pero también como el compromiso, a menudo agobiante, que se adquiere con este honor. Un duro honor que en ellos me pareció de simple justicia, pero que en mí entiendo como una más de esas lecciones con las que suele sorprendernos el destino, y que hacen más evidente nuestra condición de juguetes de un azar indescifrable, cuya única y desoladora recompensa, suelen ser, la mayoría de las veces, la incomprensión y el olvido.
Es por ello apenas natural que me interrogara, allá en ese trasfondo secreto en donde solemos trasegar con las verdades más esenciales que conforman nuestra identidad, cuál ha sido el sustento constante de mi obra, qué pudo haber llamado la atención de una manera tan comprometedora a este tribunal de árbitros tan severos. Confieso sin falsas modestias que no me ha sido fácil encontrar la razón, pero quiero creer que ha sido la misma que yo hubiera deseado. Quiero creer, amigos, que este es, una vez más, un homenaje que se rinde a la poesía. A la poesía por cuya virtud el inventario abrumador de las naves que numeró en su Iliada el viejo Homero está visitado por un viento que las empuja a navegar con su presteza intemporal y alucinada. La poesía que sostiene, en el delgado andamiaje de los tercetos del Dante, toda la fábrica densa y colosal de la Edad Media. La poesía que con tan milagrosa totalidad rescata a nuestra América en las Alturas de Machu Pichu de Pablo Neruda el grande, el más grande, y donde destilan su tristeza milenaria nuestros mejores sueños sin salida. La poesía, en fin, esa energía secreta de la vida cotidiana, que cuece los garbanzos en la cocina, y contagia el amor y repite las imágenes en los espejos.
En cada línea que escribo trato siempre, con mayor o menor fortuna, de invocar los espíritus esquivos de la poesía, y trato de dejar en cada palabra el testimonio de mi devoción por sus virtudes de adivinación, y por su permanente victoria contra los sordos poderes de la muerte. El premio que acabo de recibir lo entiendo, con toda humildad, como la consoladora revelación de que mi intento no ha sido en vano. Es por eso que invito a todos ustedes a brindar por lo que un gran poeta de nuestras Américas, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, ha definido como la única prueba concreta de la existencia del hombre: la poesía. Muchas gracias.
Antonio Pigafetta, un navegante florentino que acompañó a Magallanes en el primer viaje alrededor del mundo, escribió a su paso por nuestra América meridional una crónica rigurosa que sin embargo parece una aventura de la imaginación. Contó que había visto cerdos con el ombligo en el lomo, y unos pájaros sin patas cuyas hembras empollaban en las espaldas del macho, y otros como alcatraces sin lengua cuyos picos parecían una cuchara. Contó que había visto un engendro animal con cabeza y orejas de mula, cuerpo de camello, patas de ciervo y relincho de caballo. Contó que al primer nativo que encontraron en la Patagonia le pusieron enfrente un espejo, y que aquel gigante enardecido perdió el uso de la razón por el pavor de su propia imagen.
Este libro breve y fascinante, en el cual ya se vislumbran los gérmenes de nuestras novelas de hoy, no es ni mucho menos el testimonios más asombroso de nuestra realidad de aquellos tiempos. Los Cronistas de Indias nos legaron otros incontables. Eldorado, nuestro país ilusorio tan codiciado, figuró en mapas numerosos durante largos años, cambiando de lugar y de forma según la fantasía de los cartógrafos. En busca de la fuente de la Eterna Juventud, el mítico Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca exploró durante ocho años el norte de México, en una expedición venática cuyos miembros se comieron unos a otros y sólo llegaron cinco de los 600 que la emprendieron. Uno de los tantos misterios que nunca fueron descifrados, es el de las once mil mulas cargadas con cien libras de oro cada una, que un día salieron del Cuzco para pagar el rescate de Atahualpa y nunca llegaron a su destino. Más tarde, durante la colonia, se vendían en Cartagena de Indias unas gallinas criadas en tierras de aluvión, en cuyas mollejas se encontraban piedrecitas de oro. Este delirio áureo de nuestros fundadores nos persiguió hasta hace poco tiempo. Apenas en el siglo pasado la misión alemana de estudiar la construcción de un ferrocarril interoceánico en el istmo de Panamá, concluyó que el proyecto era viable con la condición de que los rieles no se hicieran de hierro, que era un metal escaso en la región, sino que se hicieran de oro.
La independencia del dominio español no nos puso a salvo de la demencia. El general Antonio López de Santana, que fue tres veces dictador de México, hizo enterrar con funerales magníficos la pierna derecha que había perdido en la llamada Guerra de los Pasteles. El general García Moreno gobernó al Ecuador durante 16 años como un monarca absoluto, y su cadáver fue velado con su uniforme de gala y su coraza de condecoraciones sentado en la silla presidencial. El general Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, el déspota teósofo de El Salvador que hizo exterminar en una matanza bárbara a 30 mil campesinos, había inventado un péndulo para averiguar si los alimentos estaban envenenados, e hizo cubrir con papel rojo el alumbrado público para combatir una epidemia de escarlatina. El monumento al general Francisco Morazán, erigido en la plaza mayor de Tegucigalpa, es en realidad una estatua del mariscal Ney comprada en París en un depósito de esculturas usadas.
Hace once años, uno de los poetas insignes de nuestro tiempo, el chileno Pablo Neruda, iluminó este ámbito con su palabra. En las buenas conciencias de Europa, y a veces también en las malas, han irrumpido desde entonces con más ímpetus que nunca las noticias fantasmales de la América Latina, esa patria inmensa de hombres alucinados y mujeres históricas, cuya terquedad sin fin se confunde con la leyenda. No hemos tenido un instante de sosiego. Un presidente prometeico atrincherado en su palacio en llamas murió peleando solo contra todo un ejército, y dos desastres aéreos sospechosos y nunca esclarecidos segaron la vida de otro de corazón generoso, y la de un militar demócrata que había restaurado la dignidad de su pueblo. En este lapso ha habido 5 guerras y 17 golpes de estado, y surgió un dictador luciferino que en el nombre de Dios lleva a cabo el primer etnocidio de América Latina en nuestro tiempo. Mientras tanto 20 millones de niños latinoamericanos morían antes de cumplir dos años, que son más de cuantos han nacido en Europa occidental desde 1970. Los desaparecidos por motivos de la represión son casi los 120 mil, que es como si hoy no se supiera dónde están todos los habitantes de la ciudad de Upsala. Numerosas mujeres arrestadas encintas dieron a luz en cárceles argentinas, pero aún se ignora el paradero y la identidad de sus hijos, que fueron dados en adopción clandestina o internados en orfanatos por las autoridades militares. Por no querer que las cosas siguieran así han muerto cerca de 200 mil mujeres y hombres en todo el continente, y más de 100 mil perecieron en tres pequeños y voluntariosos países de la América Central, Nicaragua, El Salvador y Guatemala. Si esto fuera en los Estados Unidos, la cifra proporcional sería de un millón 600 mil muertes violentas en cuatro años.
De Chile, país de tradiciones hospitalarias, ha huido un millón de personas: el 10 por ciento de su población. El Uruguay, una nación minúscula de dos y medio millones de habitantes que se consideraba como el país más civilizado del continente, ha perdido en el destierro a uno de cada cinco ciudadanos. La guerra civil en El Salvador ha causado desde 1979 casi un refugiado cada 20 minutos. El país que se pudiera hacer con todos los exiliados y emigrados forzosos de América latina, tendría una población más numerosa que Noruega.
Me atrevo a pensar que es esta realidad descomunal, y no sólo su expresión literaria, la que este año ha merecido la atención de la Academia Sueca de la Letras. Una realidad que no es la del papel, sino que vive con nosotros y determina cada instante de nuestras incontables muertes cotidianas, y que sustenta un manantial de creación insaciable, pleno de desdicha y de belleza, del cual éste colombiano errante y nostálgico no es más que una cifra más señalada por la suerte. Poetas y mendigos, músicos y profetas, guerreros y malandrines, todas las criaturas de aquella realidad desaforada hemos tenido que pedirle muy poco a la imaginación, porque el desafío mayor para nosotros ha sido la insuficiencia de los recursos convencionales para hacer creíble nuestra vida. Este es, amigos, el nudo de nuestra soledad.
Pues si estas dificultades nos entorpecen a nosotros, que somos de su esencia, no es difícil entender que los talentos racionales de este lado del mundo, extasiados en la contemplación de sus propias culturas, se hayan quedado sin un método válido para interpretarnos. Es comprensible que insistan en medirnos con la misma vara con que se miden a sí mismos, sin recordar que los estragos de la vida no son iguales para todos, y que la búsqueda de la identidad propia es tan ardua y sangrienta para nosotros como lo fue para ellos. La interpretación de nuestra realidad con esquemas ajenos sólo contribuye a hacernos cada vez más desconocidos, cada vez menos libres, cada vez más solitarios. Tal vez la Europa venerable sería más comprensiva si tratara de vernos en su propio pasado. Si recordara que Londres necesitó 300 años para construir su primera muralla y otros 300 para tener un obispo, que Roma se debatió en las tinieblas de incertidumbre durante 20 siglos antes de que un rey etrusco la implantara en la historia, y que aún en el siglo XVI los pacíficos suizos de hoy, que nos deleitan con sus quesos mansos y sus relojes impávidos, ensangrentaron a Europa con soldados de fortuna. Aún en el apogeo del Renacimiento, 12 mil lansquenetes a sueldo de los ejércitos imperiales saquearon y devastaron a Roma, y pasaron a cuchillo a ocho mil de sus habitantes.
No pretendo encarnar las ilusiones de Tonio Kröger, cuyos sueños de unión entre un norte casto y un sur apasionado exaltaba Thomas Mann hace 53 años en este lugar. Pero creo que los europeos de espíritu clarificador, los que luchan también aquí por una patria grande más humana y más justa, podrían ayudarnos mejor si revisaran a fondo su manera de vernos. La solidaridad con nuestros sueños no nos haría sentir menos solos, mientras no se concrete con actos de respaldo legítimo a los pueblos que asuman la ilusión de tener una vida propia en el reparto del mundo.
América Latina no quiere ni tiene por qué ser un alfil sin albedrío, ni tiene nada de quimérico que sus designios de independencia y originalidad se conviertan en una aspiración occidental.
No obstante, los progresos de la navegación que han reducido tantas distancias entre nuestras Américas y Europa, parecen haber aumentado en cambio nuestra distancia cultural. ¿Por qué la originalidad que se nos admite sin reservas en la literatura se nos niega con toda clase de suspicacias en nuestras tentativas tan difíciles de cambio social? ¿Por qué pensar que la justicia social que los europeos de avanzada tratan de imponer en sus países no puede ser también un objetivo latinoamericano con métodos distintos en condiciones diferentes? No: la violencia y el dolor desmesurados de nuestra historia son el resultado de injusticias seculares y amarguras sin cuento, y no una confabulación urdida a 3 mil leguas de nuestra casa. Pero muchos dirigentes y pensadores europeos lo han creído, con el infantilismo de los abuelos que olvidaron las locuras fructíferas de su juventud, como si no fuera posible otro destino que vivir a merced de los dos grandes dueños del mundo. Este es, amigos, el tamaño de nuestra soledad.
Sin embargo, frente a la opresión, el saqueo y el abandono, nuestra respuesta es la vida. Ni los diluvios ni las pestes, ni las hambrunas ni los cataclismos, ni siquiera las guerras eternas a través de los siglos y los siglos han conseguido reducir la ventaja tenaz de la vida sobre la muerte. Una ventaja que aumenta y se acelera: cada año hay 74 millones más de nacimientos que de defunciones, una cantidad de vivos nuevos como para aumentar siete veces cada año la población de Nueva York. La mayoría de ellos nacen en los países con menos recursos, y entre éstos, por supuesto, los de América Latina. En cambio, los países más prósperos han logrado acumular suficiente poder de destrucción como para aniquilar cien veces no sólo a todos los seres humanos que han existido hasta hoy, sino la totalidad de los seres vivos que han pasado por este planeta de infortunios.
Un día como el de hoy, mi maestro William Faullkner dijo en este lugar: "Me niego a admitir el fin del hombre". No me sentiría digno de ocupar este sitio que fue suyo si no tuviera la conciencia plena de que por primera vez desde los orígenes de la humanidad, el desastre colosal que él se negaba a admitir hace 32 años es ahora nada más que una simple posibilidad científica. Ante esta realidad sobrecogedora que a través de todo el tiempo humano debió de parecer una utopía, los inventores de fábulas que todo lo creemos, nos sentimos con el derecho de creer que todavía no es demasiado tarde para emprender la creación de la utopía contraria. Una nueva y arrasadora utopía de la vida, donde nadie pueda decidir por otros hasta la forma de morir, donde de veras sea cierto el amor y sea posible la felicidad, y donde las estirpes condenadas a cien años de soledad tengan por fin y para siempre una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra.
Agradezco a la Academia de Letras de Suecia el que me haya distinguido con un premio que me coloca junto a muchos de quienes orientaron y enriquecieron mis años de lector y de cotidiano celebrante de ese delirio sin apelación que es el oficio de escribir. Sus nombres y sus obras se me presentan hoy como sombras tutelares, pero también como el compromiso, a menudo agobiante, que se adquiere con este honor. Un duro honor que en ellos me pareció de simple justicia, pero que en mí entiendo como una más de esas lecciones con las que suele sorprendernos el destino, y que hacen más evidente nuestra condición de juguetes de un azar indescifrable, cuya única y desoladora recompensa, suelen ser, la mayoría de las veces, la incomprensión y el olvido.
Es por ello apenas natural que me interrogara, allá en ese trasfondo secreto en donde solemos trasegar con las verdades más esenciales que conforman nuestra identidad, cuál ha sido el sustento constante de mi obra, qué pudo haber llamado la atención de una manera tan comprometedora a este tribunal de árbitros tan severos. Confieso sin falsas modestias que no me ha sido fácil encontrar la razón, pero quiero creer que ha sido la misma que yo hubiera deseado. Quiero creer, amigos, que este es, una vez más, un homenaje que se rinde a la poesía. A la poesía por cuya virtud el inventario abrumador de las naves que numeró en su Iliada el viejo Homero está visitado por un viento que las empuja a navegar con su presteza intemporal y alucinada. La poesía que sostiene, en el delgado andamiaje de los tercetos del Dante, toda la fábrica densa y colosal de la Edad Media. La poesía que con tan milagrosa totalidad rescata a nuestra América en las Alturas de Machu Pichu de Pablo Neruda el grande, el más grande, y donde destilan su tristeza milenaria nuestros mejores sueños sin salida. La poesía, en fin, esa energía secreta de la vida cotidiana, que cuece los garbanzos en la cocina, y contagia el amor y repite las imágenes en los espejos.
En cada línea que escribo trato siempre, con mayor o menor fortuna, de invocar los espíritus esquivos de la poesía, y trato de dejar en cada palabra el testimonio de mi devoción por sus virtudes de adivinación, y por su permanente victoria contra los sordos poderes de la muerte. El premio que acabo de recibir lo entiendo, con toda humildad, como la consoladora revelación de que mi intento no ha sido en vano. Es por eso que invito a todos ustedes a brindar por lo que un gran poeta de nuestras Américas, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, ha definido como la única prueba concreta de la existencia del hombre: la poesía. Muchas gracias.
Thursday, April 17, 2014
Tire Die
Tire Die, dir. Fernando Birri (Argentina)
Boca de Lixo, Fernando Coutinho (Brazil)
Por primera vez, Octavio Cortázar (Cuba)
Boca de Lixo, Fernando Coutinho (Brazil)
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Interview with the President of Ecuador
President Rafael Correa with Charlie Rose
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/ecuador-pres-rafael-correa-charlie-rose-04-15-tfCTNM8TQvq_teUtFoWkUw.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/video/ecuador-pres-rafael-correa-charlie-rose-04-15-tfCTNM8TQvq_teUtFoWkUw.html
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Latin American Rock
Los Shakers (Uruguay)
Sandro y los del fuego (Argentina)
Los Gatos (Argentina)
Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Cuarto Patio (Mexico)
Os mutantes (Brazil)
Pescado Rabioso, Artaud (Argentina)
Roberto Carlos (Brazil)
Cafe Tacuba, Aprovechate (México)
Monday, April 14, 2014
Thursday, April 10, 2014
http://prezi.com/xd9q-pdsckri/edit/?auth_key=wl9r568&follow=tgwbb5aukxpo
This is our group prezi but I don't know if you guys can see it.
This is our group prezi but I don't know if you guys can see it.
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
http://libcom.org/files/Sitrin%20(Ed.)%20-%20Horizontalism%20-%20Voices%20of%20Popular%20Power%20in%20Argentina.pdf
This is a link to Marina Sitrin's Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. Please read the first part "Translating We Walk." This helps set the general thinking needed for horizontalism.
Thank you!
This is a link to Marina Sitrin's Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. Please read the first part "Translating We Walk." This helps set the general thinking needed for horizontalism.
Thank you!
This is a brief compare-contrast analysis of the two readings we read last class. Please scan over this. We went over most of this in class but there is still some concepts we didn't go in depth on. Thank you!
This is an article by John L. Hammond and it was published in the NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America)
Link: https://nacla.org/article/rise-%E2%80%98horizontalism%E2%80%99-americas
According to the two authors reviewed here, a new kind of social movement is arising in several Latin American countries. These new movements are nonhierarchical, territorially based, and autonomous—they tend to reject involvement with the state (though not absolutely); instead they propose to solve their problems of survival with their own resources.
These movements are different from traditional community or working-class movements, as well as the movements that opposed dictatorships and called for democratization in the 1980s. They have a territorial base and address the concrete problems of a particular locality in which people live and work. They reject the top-down model of organizing, which they argue has prevailed in past movements; they do not seek state power nor do they primarily seek benefits from the state. They emphasize affective bonds and personal interaction as the basis for solidarity. They reject the prevailing conception of power as domination, seeing it rather as the ability to carry out projects collectively and to develop activists’ capacities to cooperate. Beginning in the 1990s, people in marginal communities as well as people who have suffered sudden losses due to economic crisis have formed most of these movements.
Raúl Zibechi, author of Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements, is a journalist covering all of Latin America for the Uruguayan weekly Brecha. Marina Sitrin, author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina, is a sociologist at New York’s City University and a member of NACLA’s editorial committee. Zibechi characterizes the new movements as “movements of resistance,” Sitrin as “autonomous movements.” Zibechi highlights their opposition to the state, Sitrin their autonomy and creativity. They therefore differ in emphasis—and in the movements they examine—but there is a strong overlap.
Sitrin focuses on Argentina and presents the neighborhood assemblies, self-managed workplaces, and the piqueteros (movements of unemployed workers) that arose after the country’s economic collapse and popular uprising of December 2001. Zibechi seeks a broader compass, including all the Argentine movements of Sitrin’s account but also indigenous people in several countries, women’s social action collectives in Peru, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), and the Zapatistas in Mexico (as well as some others that are mentioned more briefly). Sitrin emphasizes the horizontal and affective relations among activists, to which Zibechi pays relatively little attention. She is more interested in portraying the movements from the inside, while he looks at their relation—or deliberate avoidance of relation—to the outside world.
The three sets of movements on which Sitrin focuses all arose or grew during the Argentine financial collapse of 2001. The collapse was due largely to a previous government’s pegging the Argentine currency to the U.S. dollar, which led to a balance-of-payments crisis. In response, the government froze bank accounts. Massive protests shouting the slogan “Que se vayan todos” (“throw them all out”) toppled governments in rapid succession: Five presidents held office in less than a month.
Sitrin accompanied these movements intermittently for a decade. She tells about marching with them and joining in their occupations. Middle-class people, those most directly affected by the bank closures—because they had bank accounts—formed neighborhood assemblies and flooded the streets in cacerolazos, demonstrations accompanied by the loud banging of pots and pans. Unemployed workers in more marginal areas formed the piqueteros—the name comes from their picket lines that closed roadways to demand unemployment subsidies that would be managed by the associations of the unemployed themselves. As capitalists dismissed workers or abandoned their firms because of the crisis, workers asserted authority over those workplaces and began to run them themselves.
In all of these sites, the new activists created horizontal forms of organization, rejecting the hierarchical leadership of earlier movements that had failed to respond to the crisis adequately. In horizontal organizations, people developed what Sitrin calls affective politics, a political practice of deepening human relationships and respect for individuals, rejecting strategic manipulation. She includes dynamic descriptions and extensive quotes from those who experienced the movements’ solidarity and problem solving through bonds of mutual respect and affection. Close personal relations, she argues, sustained people in the movements and motivated them to work on their collective projects.
But the three types of organization were different, depending largely on whether they had concrete tasks to perform. The workplaces had to organize to produce and sell their products or serve their customers, as well as to fight off the repression that the state brought down on them, complying with the demands of the ousted owners. The piqueteros’ organizations in poor neighborhoods on the periphery of Buenos Aires and other cities, though they fought for unemployment subsidies, mainly organized mutual self-help to allow people to survive on their own resources. The neighborhood assemblies had less reason to exist once the immediate financial crisis was past and bank accounts were unfrozen; traditional political parties often intervened in the assemblies that survived, and partisan strife hampered their functioning.
Sitrin’s ethnographic account includes many testimonies of participants in the movements, describing not only how the organizations worked but also the transformation that participation has brought about in activists’ lives. As a woman in a local movement of unemployed workers put it, “We . . . started to love each other as neighbors. We discovered that we were a lot happier when we were confronting the crisis together.”
Sitrin is attentive to the way language is transformed as well. Many words took on new meanings. Autonomy, for example: At first it had the mainly negative connotation of freedom from control by the external forces of government and parties, but it came to be something positive: an “active form of being”, a creation of something new rather than just a response to an external power.
Zibechi, in essays that were originally published separately, not only has a broader geographic reach, but offers a more structural account of what he refers to as movements of resistance, both of their origin and of their current relations to the larger society. He regards the new movements as a response to neoliberalism. Older movements that had represented the working class, most notably trade unions, were decimated by neoliberalism in the waning years of the last century. Most of the movements he discusses are based not in workplaces but in communities and are concerned with identity and everyday life.
He pays little attention to horizontality and affective relations in these movements. For him, their most distinctive feature is their territoriality. They exist on the margins of society, spatially as well as socially, where they are beyond the reach of the powerful. They can therefore resist subjection to the dominant institutions of society, including the state, and organize their own institutions. The workplaces he discusses have all come under worker control, usually after a struggle to oust owners or to pick up the pieces after owners had abandoned them.
Where Sitrin strongly emphasizes the language with which activists express their experiences, Zibechi emphasizes their epistemology. In their relative isolation, activists control knowledge-based activity and reject the beliefs imposed by colonizers. The knowledge they transmit in community-controlled schools (in the Bolivian Andes and in the Brazilian MST settlements) or in providing medical care (in Chiapas and the piqueteros’ communities) is derived from their received traditions. In the schools they can teach their own culture, not the ruling ideology propagated in official schools, which belittle that culture. In health care they take advantage of modern medicine, but selectively. The movements that can do this most effectively are those that control territory. Overall, his argument fits movements that are more physically separate, hence more autonomous, than the other movements.
In his concluding section, Zibechi deals with these movements’ relation to the new progressive governments that have won elections in many Latin American countries in this century. The governments of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Lula in Brazil, and the new governments in Bolivia and Ecuador, he says, have not really broken with neoliberalism; instead, despite programs to alleviate the worst of the poverty left by the preceding neoliberal decade, they have followed the same neoliberal prescription promoting the free market, resource extraction, and economic growth for its own sake. He draws on Foucault’s concept of bio-political power: The state represses movements while incorporating the poor through social benefits (in the Southern Cone) or community action (in the Andean countries), and reinforces its position vis-à-vis the movements by seducing their leaders with government offices. He is hardly friendlier to the more radical governments of Bolivia and Ecuador than to the center-left Argentine, Brazilian, and Uruguayan governments. (His treatment of Venezuela is less harsh.)
These governments offer inducements to co-opt social movements, he says, and traditional movements have succumbed. The movements of resistance have maintained their autonomy more successfully. While their territorial base can protect them from repression, Zibechi argues, governments work hard to co-opt them. In general, however, the movements’ isolation protects them from co-optation.
These two books differ in their coverage, and partly for that reason they also differ in their emphases. Together, however, they give us a portrait of a new kind of movement of the last decade or more whose activism is a welcome antidote to the quiescence and incorporation of many of the more traditional urban and class-based movements. Neither book gives a full-scale analysis either of the neoliberalism or of the allegedly post-neoliberal governments. Though the authors show that those governments have repressed social movements, they do not clearly explain why—except that Zibechi seems to assume that states are necessarily repressive.
Recognizing the danger of co-optation, both authors insist that the movements must guard their autonomy jealously. Some readers will be skeptical about both the movements’ staying power and about their ability to achieve the desired social transformations without using the tools of the state. Sitrin talks explicitly about staying power. As she acknowledges, many participants have dropped out and some movements have opted for accepting state benefits even at the cost of autonomy. She nevertheless declares the movements successful at fostering caring, cooperative relations and achieving their goals. She insists that their success must be measured by the testimony of the activists themselves—not by a numbers game counting those who have remained active and dedicated to horizontality and autonomy in comparison to the number who have dropped out or compromised with the state. If the experience of participants is the measure of success, however, then the experience of those who responded differently should also be accounted for.
Both authors count these movements’ autonomy from the state as their greatest strength. But their own evidence shows that the movements thoroughly imbricate themselves with the state even as they attempt to escape its strictures. And in the end, both authors qualify their claims and show that instead of complete separation, the movements are working out a more complex relation with the state that, they say, maintains a critical stance and avoids being taken over.
In Zibechi’s case the discrepancy arises in part because the essays in the book were written separately: He offers broad generalizations in early chapters claiming that the movements he has studied “not only [reject] the state form, but [they acquire] a non-state form”; later in the book, however, he presents details about particular movements that make them appear considerably less autonomous. The Brazilian MST, for example, while clearly a movement of opposition, relies heavily on the country’s agrarian reform bureaucracy for legitimization of its possession of occupied land and for support in the form of agricultural credit and technical assistance.
Sitrin, in her concluding chapters, argues that over time the movements developed a more sophisticated analysis of the state and learned to engage with it without making it the point of reference. Both authors’ claims of autonomy, however, are highly qualified by descriptions of the actual practice.
On the whole, these two books provide us with graphic pictures of a new kind of movement that maintains a critical stance toward the state while living within it. They show what resources make that stance possible. A similar movement has arisen in the United States since 2011: Occupy Wall Street and its extensions across the country have generally adopted the horizontal, leaderless style of organization. The occupation of territory, even if only for a short period, has given them an identity and a platform for asserting, at least rhetorically, their refusal to join in state-oriented politics. Sitrin herself has been an active participant and mentor to the movement in New York. The movements discussed in these books, despite the considerable differences between their social/political environments and our own, offer examples to inform us about the possibilities open to movements for social transformation in the United States as well.
Series of Videos from Al Jazeera about Brukman, garment factory that was taken over by workers
https://archive.org/details/LINKTV_20131027_210000_Al_Jazeera_World_News#start/120/end/180
This is an article by John L. Hammond and it was published in the NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America)
Link: https://nacla.org/article/rise-%E2%80%98horizontalism%E2%80%99-americas
According to the two authors reviewed here, a new kind of social movement is arising in several Latin American countries. These new movements are nonhierarchical, territorially based, and autonomous—they tend to reject involvement with the state (though not absolutely); instead they propose to solve their problems of survival with their own resources.
These movements are different from traditional community or working-class movements, as well as the movements that opposed dictatorships and called for democratization in the 1980s. They have a territorial base and address the concrete problems of a particular locality in which people live and work. They reject the top-down model of organizing, which they argue has prevailed in past movements; they do not seek state power nor do they primarily seek benefits from the state. They emphasize affective bonds and personal interaction as the basis for solidarity. They reject the prevailing conception of power as domination, seeing it rather as the ability to carry out projects collectively and to develop activists’ capacities to cooperate. Beginning in the 1990s, people in marginal communities as well as people who have suffered sudden losses due to economic crisis have formed most of these movements.
Raúl Zibechi, author of Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements, is a journalist covering all of Latin America for the Uruguayan weekly Brecha. Marina Sitrin, author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina, is a sociologist at New York’s City University and a member of NACLA’s editorial committee. Zibechi characterizes the new movements as “movements of resistance,” Sitrin as “autonomous movements.” Zibechi highlights their opposition to the state, Sitrin their autonomy and creativity. They therefore differ in emphasis—and in the movements they examine—but there is a strong overlap.
Sitrin focuses on Argentina and presents the neighborhood assemblies, self-managed workplaces, and the piqueteros (movements of unemployed workers) that arose after the country’s economic collapse and popular uprising of December 2001. Zibechi seeks a broader compass, including all the Argentine movements of Sitrin’s account but also indigenous people in several countries, women’s social action collectives in Peru, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), and the Zapatistas in Mexico (as well as some others that are mentioned more briefly). Sitrin emphasizes the horizontal and affective relations among activists, to which Zibechi pays relatively little attention. She is more interested in portraying the movements from the inside, while he looks at their relation—or deliberate avoidance of relation—to the outside world.
The three sets of movements on which Sitrin focuses all arose or grew during the Argentine financial collapse of 2001. The collapse was due largely to a previous government’s pegging the Argentine currency to the U.S. dollar, which led to a balance-of-payments crisis. In response, the government froze bank accounts. Massive protests shouting the slogan “Que se vayan todos” (“throw them all out”) toppled governments in rapid succession: Five presidents held office in less than a month.
Sitrin accompanied these movements intermittently for a decade. She tells about marching with them and joining in their occupations. Middle-class people, those most directly affected by the bank closures—because they had bank accounts—formed neighborhood assemblies and flooded the streets in cacerolazos, demonstrations accompanied by the loud banging of pots and pans. Unemployed workers in more marginal areas formed the piqueteros—the name comes from their picket lines that closed roadways to demand unemployment subsidies that would be managed by the associations of the unemployed themselves. As capitalists dismissed workers or abandoned their firms because of the crisis, workers asserted authority over those workplaces and began to run them themselves.
In all of these sites, the new activists created horizontal forms of organization, rejecting the hierarchical leadership of earlier movements that had failed to respond to the crisis adequately. In horizontal organizations, people developed what Sitrin calls affective politics, a political practice of deepening human relationships and respect for individuals, rejecting strategic manipulation. She includes dynamic descriptions and extensive quotes from those who experienced the movements’ solidarity and problem solving through bonds of mutual respect and affection. Close personal relations, she argues, sustained people in the movements and motivated them to work on their collective projects.
But the three types of organization were different, depending largely on whether they had concrete tasks to perform. The workplaces had to organize to produce and sell their products or serve their customers, as well as to fight off the repression that the state brought down on them, complying with the demands of the ousted owners. The piqueteros’ organizations in poor neighborhoods on the periphery of Buenos Aires and other cities, though they fought for unemployment subsidies, mainly organized mutual self-help to allow people to survive on their own resources. The neighborhood assemblies had less reason to exist once the immediate financial crisis was past and bank accounts were unfrozen; traditional political parties often intervened in the assemblies that survived, and partisan strife hampered their functioning.
Sitrin’s ethnographic account includes many testimonies of participants in the movements, describing not only how the organizations worked but also the transformation that participation has brought about in activists’ lives. As a woman in a local movement of unemployed workers put it, “We . . . started to love each other as neighbors. We discovered that we were a lot happier when we were confronting the crisis together.”
Sitrin is attentive to the way language is transformed as well. Many words took on new meanings. Autonomy, for example: At first it had the mainly negative connotation of freedom from control by the external forces of government and parties, but it came to be something positive: an “active form of being”, a creation of something new rather than just a response to an external power.
Zibechi, in essays that were originally published separately, not only has a broader geographic reach, but offers a more structural account of what he refers to as movements of resistance, both of their origin and of their current relations to the larger society. He regards the new movements as a response to neoliberalism. Older movements that had represented the working class, most notably trade unions, were decimated by neoliberalism in the waning years of the last century. Most of the movements he discusses are based not in workplaces but in communities and are concerned with identity and everyday life.
He pays little attention to horizontality and affective relations in these movements. For him, their most distinctive feature is their territoriality. They exist on the margins of society, spatially as well as socially, where they are beyond the reach of the powerful. They can therefore resist subjection to the dominant institutions of society, including the state, and organize their own institutions. The workplaces he discusses have all come under worker control, usually after a struggle to oust owners or to pick up the pieces after owners had abandoned them.
Where Sitrin strongly emphasizes the language with which activists express their experiences, Zibechi emphasizes their epistemology. In their relative isolation, activists control knowledge-based activity and reject the beliefs imposed by colonizers. The knowledge they transmit in community-controlled schools (in the Bolivian Andes and in the Brazilian MST settlements) or in providing medical care (in Chiapas and the piqueteros’ communities) is derived from their received traditions. In the schools they can teach their own culture, not the ruling ideology propagated in official schools, which belittle that culture. In health care they take advantage of modern medicine, but selectively. The movements that can do this most effectively are those that control territory. Overall, his argument fits movements that are more physically separate, hence more autonomous, than the other movements.
In his concluding section, Zibechi deals with these movements’ relation to the new progressive governments that have won elections in many Latin American countries in this century. The governments of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, Lula in Brazil, and the new governments in Bolivia and Ecuador, he says, have not really broken with neoliberalism; instead, despite programs to alleviate the worst of the poverty left by the preceding neoliberal decade, they have followed the same neoliberal prescription promoting the free market, resource extraction, and economic growth for its own sake. He draws on Foucault’s concept of bio-political power: The state represses movements while incorporating the poor through social benefits (in the Southern Cone) or community action (in the Andean countries), and reinforces its position vis-à-vis the movements by seducing their leaders with government offices. He is hardly friendlier to the more radical governments of Bolivia and Ecuador than to the center-left Argentine, Brazilian, and Uruguayan governments. (His treatment of Venezuela is less harsh.)
These governments offer inducements to co-opt social movements, he says, and traditional movements have succumbed. The movements of resistance have maintained their autonomy more successfully. While their territorial base can protect them from repression, Zibechi argues, governments work hard to co-opt them. In general, however, the movements’ isolation protects them from co-optation.
These two books differ in their coverage, and partly for that reason they also differ in their emphases. Together, however, they give us a portrait of a new kind of movement of the last decade or more whose activism is a welcome antidote to the quiescence and incorporation of many of the more traditional urban and class-based movements. Neither book gives a full-scale analysis either of the neoliberalism or of the allegedly post-neoliberal governments. Though the authors show that those governments have repressed social movements, they do not clearly explain why—except that Zibechi seems to assume that states are necessarily repressive.
Recognizing the danger of co-optation, both authors insist that the movements must guard their autonomy jealously. Some readers will be skeptical about both the movements’ staying power and about their ability to achieve the desired social transformations without using the tools of the state. Sitrin talks explicitly about staying power. As she acknowledges, many participants have dropped out and some movements have opted for accepting state benefits even at the cost of autonomy. She nevertheless declares the movements successful at fostering caring, cooperative relations and achieving their goals. She insists that their success must be measured by the testimony of the activists themselves—not by a numbers game counting those who have remained active and dedicated to horizontality and autonomy in comparison to the number who have dropped out or compromised with the state. If the experience of participants is the measure of success, however, then the experience of those who responded differently should also be accounted for.
Both authors count these movements’ autonomy from the state as their greatest strength. But their own evidence shows that the movements thoroughly imbricate themselves with the state even as they attempt to escape its strictures. And in the end, both authors qualify their claims and show that instead of complete separation, the movements are working out a more complex relation with the state that, they say, maintains a critical stance and avoids being taken over.
In Zibechi’s case the discrepancy arises in part because the essays in the book were written separately: He offers broad generalizations in early chapters claiming that the movements he has studied “not only [reject] the state form, but [they acquire] a non-state form”; later in the book, however, he presents details about particular movements that make them appear considerably less autonomous. The Brazilian MST, for example, while clearly a movement of opposition, relies heavily on the country’s agrarian reform bureaucracy for legitimization of its possession of occupied land and for support in the form of agricultural credit and technical assistance.
Sitrin, in her concluding chapters, argues that over time the movements developed a more sophisticated analysis of the state and learned to engage with it without making it the point of reference. Both authors’ claims of autonomy, however, are highly qualified by descriptions of the actual practice.
On the whole, these two books provide us with graphic pictures of a new kind of movement that maintains a critical stance toward the state while living within it. They show what resources make that stance possible. A similar movement has arisen in the United States since 2011: Occupy Wall Street and its extensions across the country have generally adopted the horizontal, leaderless style of organization. The occupation of territory, even if only for a short period, has given them an identity and a platform for asserting, at least rhetorically, their refusal to join in state-oriented politics. Sitrin herself has been an active participant and mentor to the movement in New York. The movements discussed in these books, despite the considerable differences between their social/political environments and our own, offer examples to inform us about the possibilities open to movements for social transformation in the United States as well.
Series of Videos from Al Jazeera about Brukman, garment factory that was taken over by workers
https://archive.org/details/LINKTV_20131027_210000_Al_Jazeera_World_News#start/120/end/180
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Friday, April 4, 2014
The Economy and Latin America
Bello
The going gets tougher
Sustaining recent social progress may require a squeeze on the richMar 1st 2014 | From the print edition
FOR Latin Americans, the past dozen years have been remarkable. The region has seen a magical combination of faster economic growth, falling poverty and declining income inequality. Is this unprecedented period of progress over?
Growth has certainly slowed, to below 3% in the past two years compared with an annual average of 5% in 2003-08. But poverty continues to fall. In a report* released this week, the World Bank reckons that in 2012 only a quarter of Latin Americans were “poor”, a category defined as those living on less than $4 a day at purchasing-power parity (see chart). The largest social group in the region is made up of those whom the bank defines as “vulnerable” to sinking back into poverty. But they are set to be surpassed in size by the middle class sometime in the next three years. That is significant, not least because the bank uses a more realistic definition of the middle class (a daily income of $10-50) than those often bandied about in the region.
In this section
Towards the brink
Shackling Shorty
Unarmed and dangerous
The going gets tougher
Reprints
Related topics
Economic Inequality
Business
Economics
Economic development
Venezuela
As growth slows, however, so will the pace of the fall in poverty. The bank expects the annual decline in the number of poor to have dropped to only 0.8 percentage points since 2012, from 1.8 points in 2003-12. It also thinks the fall in income inequality has come to an end. The region’s Gini coefficient—a standard measure where zero means that income is equally shared and one means one person takes it all—fell from 0.57 in 2000 to 0.52 in 2010, but the bank reckons it has more or less been stuck there since. This still leaves Latin America as the world’s most unequal region, along with sub-Saharan Africa.
That assessment may be a bit pessimistic. The bank pools data from 17 countries in the region to come up with averages (it excludes Venezuela, whose statistics are not verifiable by outsiders). Nora Lustig, an economist at Tulane University in New Orleans, has crunched the household-survey numbers for individual countries. She thinks the fall in income inequality is continuing in many countries, and has accelerated in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador—though not in Mexico, where it seems to have reversed in 2010. But she, too, thinks there is a risk of the fall in inequality petering out.
Government cash-transfer programmes to the poor, and demographic changes—a smaller proportion of dependents and more women going out to work—have played a role in reducing inequality. But the big change has been in wages: unlike in many developed countries, differentials between higher and lower earners have fallen in Latin America. The expansion in education, especially secondary schooling, has reduced the premium this previously attracted in the labour market. In some countries big rises in the minimum wage have also helped.
Such gains may have largely run their course. The poor quality of the region’s public schools risks holding back the expansion of higher education (together with slow economic growth, that seems to be the problem in Mexico, says Ms Lustig). Growing fiscal constraints and competitiveness problems mean the scope for rises in the minimum wage is limited.
So what can governments do to keep progress going? The most important answer is to undertake the structural reforms required to boost economic growth as the commodity boom wanes: 70% of the fall in poverty in 2003-12 was due to a rise in incomes from employment, not from social programmes, according to the bank. This message will be reinforced by a likely rise in poverty in Venezuela and Argentina, whose economies are suffering stagflation after years of handouts.
Keeping the fall in inequality going will require a crusade to improve the quality of education—which is easier said than done. Many governments need to spend more on health and education, especially for brown, black and rural Latin Americans, whose opportunities continue to lag behind. That means raising taxes (see page 80). But since most countries rely excessively on consumption taxes, this in turn risks aggravating inequality rather than reducing it.
Data on income from capital are skimpy. But because taxes on property, inheritance and capital gains are all low to non-existent, it is clear that, compared with their peers elsewhere and their salaried fellow-countrymen, rich Latin Americans pay less than their fair share of taxes. Keeping the fall in poverty and inequality going may require a squeeze on the rich—but done cleverly, so as not to deter growth-enhancing investments.
* “Social Gains in the Balance: A Fiscal Policy Challenge for Latin America and the Caribbean”, February 2014
From the print edition: The Americas
Thursday, April 3, 2014
RESEARCH TOOLS
Handbook of Latin American Studies
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/indexes/titles.php?id=168
Journal of Latin American Studies (with full text from 1997 to present, electronically from Cambridge Press:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/indexes/titles.php?id=168
Journal of Latin American Studies (with full text from 1997 to present, electronically from Cambridge Press:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=LAS
You can search within the journal using the ProQuest software here:
http://search.proquest.com/publication/48667
Also available from the Ikeda Library: Hispanic American Historical Review http://hahr.dukejournals.org/, (with electronic coverage from 2000 to present in full text)
Also available from the Ikeda Library: Hispanic American Historical Review http://hahr.dukejournals.org/, (with electronic coverage from 2000 to present in full text)
You can use the Academic Search Premier software to search the contents here:
Revolution, revolutionaries groups and social movements
CONAIE
The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE)
The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE)
http://conaie.nativeweb.org/
Zapatista Related Websites
http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/
Writings of Sub-commander Marcos
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/marcos_index.html
Zapatista Related Websites
http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/
Writings of Sub-commander Marcos
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/marcos_index.html
A PLACE CALLED CHIAPAS, dir. Nettie Wild (1998)
REVOLUTION AND REVOLUTIONARIES GROUP Silvio Rodriguez on the Special Period (1990's)
DISILLUSIONMENT
Like coins
Disillusionment jingles its theme
Disillusionment.
With a red mouth
And big droopy breasts
Disillusionment
Smoking light tobacco
And exhaling alcohol
The owner of the bed embroidered
In underwear.
What frenzy in interrogation
What suicide in investigating
A brilliant fashion show
Disillusionment.
Like coins
Disillusionment jingles its theme
Disillusionment.
With a red mouth
And big droopy breasts
Disillusionment
Smoking light tobacco
And exhaling alcohol
The owner of the bed embroidered
In underwear.
What frenzy in interrogation
What suicide in investigating
A brilliant fashion show
Disillusionment.
It opened a business
Reviving leisure
Disillusionment.
Like tourism
It invented the abyss
Disillusionment
It touched the diamond
And turned it to coal
And it planted a good-for-nothing
In the administration.
THE FOOL
To keep my icon from being smashed,
To save myself among the few and the odd ones,
To grant me a space in their Parnassus,
To give me a little corner in their altars,
they come to invite me to repent,
they come to invite me not to lose out,
they come to invite me to undefine myself,
they come to invite me to so much bullshit.
I can't say what the future is,
I've always been what I've been
Only God, up there , is divine.
I will die just as I've lived.
I want to keep on betting on the lost cause,
I want to be with the left hand rather than right,
I want to make a Congress of the united,
I want to pray deeply an "our son ."
They'll say that craziness has gone out of fashion, They 'll say that people are evil and don't
deserve it, but I'll leave with my mischievous dreams
(perhaps multiplying bread and fish).
Reviving leisure
Disillusionment.
Like tourism
It invented the abyss
Disillusionment
It touched the diamond
And turned it to coal
And it planted a good-for-nothing
In the administration.
THE FOOL
To keep my icon from being smashed,
To save myself among the few and the odd ones,
To grant me a space in their Parnassus,
To give me a little corner in their altars,
they come to invite me to repent,
they come to invite me not to lose out,
they come to invite me to undefine myself,
they come to invite me to so much bullshit.
I can't say what the future is,
I've always been what I've been
Only God, up there , is divine.
I will die just as I've lived.
I want to keep on betting on the lost cause,
I want to be with the left hand rather than right,
I want to make a Congress of the united,
I want to pray deeply an "our son ."
They'll say that craziness has gone out of fashion, They 'll say that people are evil and don't
deserve it, but I'll leave with my mischievous dreams
(perhaps multiplying bread and fish).
I can't say what the future is, I've always been what I've been, Only God, up there, is divine.
I will die just as I've lived.
They say that I'll be dragged over the rocks when the Revolution comes crashing down, that they'll
smash my hands and my mouth, that they'll tear out my eyes and my tongue.
It may well be that I'm the child of foolishness, the foolishness of what today seems foolish: the
foolishness of accepting one's enemy,
the foolishness of living without a price.
I can't say what the future is, I've always been what I've been, Only God, up there , is divine.
I will die just as I've lived.
THE FIFTIES CLUB
1arrive at the club of the fifty-year-olds (1950s)
and one hand brings the bill
The sum (addition) calls my attention from back to my cradle
Every fire, every underta king [with the implication of something you really
want to do]
I will die just as I've lived.
They say that I'll be dragged over the rocks when the Revolution comes crashing down, that they'll
smash my hands and my mouth, that they'll tear out my eyes and my tongue.
It may well be that I'm the child of foolishness, the foolishness of what today seems foolish: the
foolishness of accepting one's enemy,
the foolishness of living without a price.
I can't say what the future is, I've always been what I've been, Only God, up there , is divine.
I will die just as I've lived.
THE FIFTIES CLUB
1arrive at the club of the fifty-year-olds (1950s)
and one hand brings the bill
The sum (addition) calls my attention from back to my cradle
Every fire, every underta king [with the implication of something you really
want to do]
comes with a price tag next to it
in spite of what has been paid .
I wonder what kind of business this is
in which even desire becomes an object of consumption
what will I do when the sun sends its bill?
in spite of what has been paid .
I wonder what kind of business this is
in which even desire becomes an object of consumption
what will I do when the sun sends its bill?
But I keep turning my face to the east
and order another breakfast [using an Anglicism; that is, the word order isn't
really used like that in Spanish]
in spite of the cost of love.
Let debts and inflation come,
rous, fines, recessions.
Let the pickpocket try to grab
the taste of my bolero.
Whoever the boss may be
Let him charge me diligently
(that cruel hand will find out
when I send him my bill).
FLOWERS
The night flowers of Fifth Avenue open
For those poor gentlemen who go to the hotel
Flowers that break in the darkness
Flowers of winks of complicity
Flowers whistling suicides
Flowers with a fatal aroma
What gardener has sown our Fifth Avenue
With such a precise nocturnal variety
What is their species, what is their country
What fancy fertilizer nourished their root
Giving them a wild tone
Where could their womb be?
Flowers that go through forbidden doors
Flowers that know what I'll never know
Flowers that string their dream of life
In garlands without faith
Flowers of sheets with eyes
Disposable flowers
Doorbells of desire
Flowers eating the leftovers of love
They sprout, they bounce, they explode on our Fifth Avenue
They are pulled up and depart with swift air
They say that a flower's job is hard
When its petals wither in the sun
Pale nocturnal flowers
Flowers of disillusionment.
TRANSLATBD BY AVIVA CHOMSKY
and order another breakfast [using an Anglicism; that is, the word order isn't
really used like that in Spanish]
in spite of the cost of love.
Let debts and inflation come,
rous, fines, recessions.
Let the pickpocket try to grab
the taste of my bolero.
Whoever the boss may be
Let him charge me diligently
(that cruel hand will find out
when I send him my bill).
FLOWERS
The night flowers of Fifth Avenue open
For those poor gentlemen who go to the hotel
Flowers that break in the darkness
Flowers of winks of complicity
Flowers whistling suicides
Flowers with a fatal aroma
What gardener has sown our Fifth Avenue
With such a precise nocturnal variety
What is their species, what is their country
What fancy fertilizer nourished their root
Giving them a wild tone
Where could their womb be?
Flowers that go through forbidden doors
Flowers that know what I'll never know
Flowers that string their dream of life
In garlands without faith
Flowers of sheets with eyes
Disposable flowers
Doorbells of desire
Flowers eating the leftovers of love
They sprout, they bounce, they explode on our Fifth Avenue
They are pulled up and depart with swift air
They say that a flower's job is hard
When its petals wither in the sun
Pale nocturnal flowers
Flowers of disillusionment.
TRANSLATBD BY AVIVA CHOMSKY
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