La Violencia Genera mas Violencia

Al final de ¨Inés del Alma Mía¨ de Isabel Allende, me quedé pensando en el daño que la conquista de América causo en la historia del continente.

Allende describe en detalle como Pedro de Valdivia murió a manos de Lautaro, el destacado líder militar de los Mapuches. Los detalles son aterradores. Según Allende, Lautaro le hizo tragar oro derretido a Valdivia, en venganza por el sufrimiento que el metal hizo pasar a su pueblo. Allende escribe que en parte estos hechos de violencia estaban justificados. O al menos, los Mapuche tenían una venganza en mente por los tormentos que los Españoles les hicieron pasar.

Según los describe Allende, los Españoles les cortaban las narices, los brazos y la punta de los pies. Pero los Mapuche no se rendían, seguían peleando por su tierra, cojos y mancos. En la novela, Inés Suárez, la narradora de la historia, comenta que ella hubiese hecho lo mismo hasta el final. Prefería morir peleando por su tierra, que vivir bajo el mando de los invasores.

Décadas después, los Mapuche siguen teniendo una presencia en Chile, pero no lograron sacar a los huincas de su región como Lautaro se lo propuso.

Los invasores de América entraron y salieron con violencia en un ciclo que duró décadas. Las cicatrices de estos estragos siguen vivas en nuestro continente.

Hace falta que todos los americanos sanemos. Esta tierra fue fundada a punta de sangre.

Missing the freedom

In the spirit that I just got into, I am going to tell everyone a little bit about the system that just trapped me.

I miss college.

I miss it more than what I missed Colombia when I moved to the United States.

I miss it more than what I miss eating luscious fruits every day with exotic names that stick to your tongue.

I miss it more than what I miss my father.

It is impossible to convey the feeling that just grabbed me. I miss college.

Maybe it was the freedom I felt this weekend in Gainesville, the town where my Alma Mater is located.

The freedom of not feeling guilty while enjoying an afternoon of leisure in the balcony, staring out… Thinking, making plans.

The freedom to drink and not worrying about my mother.

The freedom to sleep in the same bed with my boyfriend.

The freedom to take my car and just drive…

The freedom to stare vacantly into the crowd of a punk/rock show.

Well, now that I am back to reality and the lack of time to make plans, I feel more trapped than ever and had a spark of creativity. Here is my outburst!

Corporate America sucks.

It promises high-paying jobs for those who go to college. Jobs that will award you the freedom to travel once a year to an exotic destination, move to a trendy loft, go out to drink cosmopolitans with your friends and do whatever you want. Because you did the right thing. You went to college. You graduated cum laude from a great school.

It is a lie. And I am living it.

Métodos similares

En general, los métodos de justicia utilizados con intención de venganza, no solamente son poco efectivos, sino que también son usados bilateralmente en muchas ocasiones. En el caso de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, estos métodos son utilizados por ambos bandos- la Gestapo y los fifis- después de la liberación.

Estos son descritos por Juan Manuel de Prada en “El Séptimo Velo.”

En esta novela, la hermana del protagonista, Jules Tillon, es llevada al Velódromo de Invierno después de liberación en Francia. El ambiente de celebración después de que Francia es liberada de los Nazis, se ve opacado después de que los fifis comienzan a tomar la justicia en sus propias manos, cobrando venganza contra las personas que ayudaron a los Nazis durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. A Therese Tillon, la llevan presa junto con otras mujeres del barrio al ser acusadas de “colaboración horizontal.” Luego son llevadas a Drancy donde:

Se interrogaba a los prisioneros sin ahorro de brutalidades; muchos de los carceleros eran comunistas españoles, curtidos durante la Guerra Civil en las checas, aquellas sucursales del infierno ante cuyo umbral se detenía la legalidad republicana. (p. 119)

 En este escenario, de Prada describe una escena que marco a Tillon. Al buscar a su hermana entre las mujeres, se encuentran con “las putas de Henri Lafont”

Habían sido violadas, marcadas como reses con hierros al rojo, sometidas a descargas eléctricas y termocauterios; a alguien, incluso, le habían arrancado los pezones y de sus senos brotaba una sangre exhausta, como el residuo de una lactancia carnívora. (p. 122)

Este escenario se refleja en “The Black Book,” una película Holandesa que narra la historia de una mujer judía apoyando la Resistencia. La Gestapo la apresa y ella también es torturada en una situación similar. Ella también es levada a un centro de interrogación y su tortura es similar a aquella de los fifis en Drancy.

Pienso que estos métodos son poco efectivos ya que son impulsados por un sentimiento de venganza. No es correcto pagarle a aquellos que torturan con mas tortura. Lucia, la protagonista de “El Séptimo Velo” demuestra su carácter noble cuando le preguntan si las “putas de Lafont” merecen esa tortura, ya que ella responde que nadie merece tanto mal.   

Globalization has its costs

As technology advances and the future seems likely to be heading towards the globalized society in Gioconda Belli’s  of “Waslala,” I really wonder if this future is closer than what it seems.

I remember a month ago when many Colombians considered it their duty to vote, if they could, for John McCain because they thought he would support the free trade agreement with Colombia. I still think that this is deranged for my fellow Colombians to actually think that McCain really cared about Colombia, but lately I’ve been thinking if the free trade agreement will actually be a good thing for Colombia.

In the past, trade between Colombia and the United States helped the Colombian economy, but as with everything else where the United States gets involved it involves a cost. What really comes to my mind is the hinting of the massacre of the United Fruit Company in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

In the long run, I don’t think it is in the best interest of Colombia to be part of the free trade agreement because of the bad record of American companies in Latin America– and the rest of the world. Moreover, this agreement will really further the presence of the United States in Colombia, making it more Americanized and closer to Faguas as it is described in “Waslala.”

Angry Sandinistas still ruling Nicaragua

Reading about the bitter protests in Nicaragua, I am starting to wonder if Faguas, the fictitious country in Gioconda Belli’s “Waslala,” is somehow a prediction of what Nicaragua is turning into.

Belli’s futuristic novel makes a case for how the world is going to become more globalized while, at the same time, the gap between the developed and undeveloped countries will widen. In Faguas, the Espadas seem to be controlling every aspect of life in Faguas, and the people seem contempt with the situation.  Everybody is too afraid to say anything because they don’t want to be silenced– or killed.

In the book, Belli paints a very possible scenario of what life may turn into if those in power fail to manage resources well, turning undeveloped countries into dumps where other powerful countries can exploit those resources and leave the people starving. One of the main characters of the book, Raphael, is a journalist in what I assume the United States. He was sent to Faguas to find fields of “filina”, which is a combination of marihuana and cocaine. On the way there, he hears about Waslala, an Utopic land in Faguas, and finds Melisandra, a local, who will take him there. Raphael knows that the filina fields will sell more newspaper copies, but he is in love with Melisandra and wants to find Waslala with her.

On the way there, the scenes that Belli describes are much like the ones in a newspaper article about Nicaragua today. The New York Times said:

“The streets are ours,” said José Bonilla, a Sandinista supporter holding a homemade plywood shield, during the tumult in Managua on Tuesday afternoon. Fellow demonstrators, waving red-and-black Sandinista flags, shot explosives over the heads of riot police officers who were blocking them from Mr. Montealegre’s rally a block away.

What really sounds outrageous to me is that the Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega limited the access of outside observers to the elections and arranged the ballots so that candidates loyal to him came out on top. If there is nothing to hide, what’s all the mystery?

Far from Utopia

Finding a great, new book I can curdle in bed with is really exciting. Even more when the book seemed to be destined for me, and for some reason I haven’t been able to read it until now.

“Waslala” by Gioconda Belli is the story of the search for utopia. So far I am loving it. Belli’s revolutionary self seems to make way into her writing, making me longing for more.

I tried ordering the book through Amazon.com some time ago, but I ended up ordering the German translation. I finally found the book at the University of Florida’s Latin American Collection.

As I finished the first chapter, I fell in love with Belli’s writing, yet again, because she mentioned how the regions of African and Latin America were sometimes viewed as land, nothing more.

“reduced to jungles, natural reserves, to work as the lung and the dumping ground of the developed world”

These type of ideas about Latin America are the ones that make me love Belli for her honesty. Also, I love how she mentions that the developed world uses Latin America to their own advantage, especially because there is always a different Latin American country dividing opinions in Washington. The Washington Post made an excellent point of this situation and how Nicaragua has been scarcely mentioned in Washington lately.

In the article, Jackson Diehl explains how two decades ago Nicaragua and its president, Daniel Ortega, were inspiring divided attention among Washington politicians. At the time, they were arguing whether the United States should fund an armed opposition.

Nicaragua is Belli’s native country, and she was involved with the Sandinista Revolution in the 1980′s. However, she switched loyalties with Ortega after no longer agreeing with his policies.

Time certainly showed that things haven’t changed much in Nicaragua, and that the country is still far from an Utopian society.

However, Utopia is be definition “the place that isn’t” and comes from the Greek ou, meaning no, and topos, meaning place. Belli points out this definition in the beginning of the book. But the book is about the search of Waslala, the Utopian paradise of her ancestors.

Inspiration for a new generation of writers

Rafael Trujillo, the former dictator of the Dominican Republic, was the source of inspiration for Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel “The Feast of the Goat.” Nowadays, a new generation of writers is being inspired by deranged leaders and history will soon judge their actions.

Vargas Llosa seems to agree and said so in a story published in the Guardian. In the story, Vargas Llosa argues complains about the governments of Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez, saying that soon there will be a generation of writers documenting their actions. He said that their governments are:

“like a broken record that repeats the same concepts, the same clichés and phobias, the same politics”.

He also said that he is more supportive of the approaches of other leaders like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Michelle Bachelet in Brazil and Chile respectively because they practice what he calls in the Guardian story a “democratic left.”

However, two things mentioned in the story left me wondering about the future of Latin American politics and the future of its leaders. First, this story made me think about the destiny of Latin America without much meddling of the United States, which has changed from Vargas Llosa’s youth due to the focus of the state department in Iraq, the Middle East and the rise of China. And second, what really made me look into the future was what Vargas Llosa had to say about the future generations of writers. He said that leaders like Chavez and Morales are sure to inspire the new generations to write novels about their lives, and that the current leaders will have to wait on history to judge them through literature. Vargas Llosa concluded:

“The book about Chavez will come at some point,” he says. “Just give the Venezuelans time to assimilate him.”

The left is leaving Nicaragua

Much to the dismay of expatriates in South Florida, Daniel Ortega made a political comeback and was re-elected as Nicaragua’s president in 2006. One of my best friends was especially affected by the new term of Ortega in his native Nicaragua. He knew that this will be a life-changing presidency for him the same way it was for his parents in the 1980′s when they had to leave the country to come to the United States.

My friend introduced me to the intricate story of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution and its effects on his life. Moreover, he introduced me to one of my favorite Latin American writers, Gioconda Belli.

“The Country Under my Skin” is Belli’s own account of the Sandinista Revolution. What really makes me wonder about this book is how much things have changed in Latin American politics over the past 20 years. The left, which at the time was somehow glorified, is now deemed in a different light with unpopular rulers like Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales claiming it. At the time, the left was less stigmatized with the presence of military regimes oppressing people and creating a tight elite, like the one of Anastasio Somoza before the Sandinistas took over power in the 1980′s.

Earlier this month, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece on Ortega’s involved in a great scandal over the prosecution of the 83-year-old poet Ernesto Cardenal, who was once his minister of culture and is now being judged by a Sandinista judge.

The sin for which he is now being punished is that during a visit to Paraguay last month, he had the temerity to call Ortega a “thief” who runs “a monarchy made up of a few families in alliance with the old Somoza interests.”

The author of the opinion piece, Stephen Kinzer, draws a parallel between Cardenal’s case and that of Heberto Padilla, who was under house arrest in Cuba after Fidel Castro punished him for his writings. At the time, figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, who had previously expressed admiration for Castro, signed a protest petition against Castro and his derailment from the true leftist thinking.

Similarly, other thinkers are drawing a clear distinction between them and Ortega. Among them is Belli, who cut off her links to the unpopular president after having helped his revolution 20 years ago.

Jose Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel Prize Winner, is now among the more than 60 Latin American writers and figures protesting against the judge’s move against Cardenal. He said:

if Ortega does not reverse last week’s court ruling, “we will know that his human and political merits have fallen to zero,” and added: “Once more a revolution has been betrayed from within.”

I agree with Saramago and Belli. People can’t be silenced for what they think. If Cardenal wanted to give such a controversial statement, he is free to do so. Maybe, when the Sandinista Revolution had plans for greater good, its leaders were not as corrupted as they may be now. But that is a whole other story. I think that somehow that leftist regimes have proved to be ineffective in Latin America.

Mysterious disappearances

In the midst of the political turmoil in Bolivia, I remembered the story of other disappearances that intertwine the political history of Latin America and seem to be recurrent through many countries. Right now, 30 people have died in Bolivia during the recent wave of violence and 100 people are missing. All this deaths and disappearances surfaced after President Evo Morales decided to hold a referendum on a new constitution in December and members of the opposition protested.

The news really make me wonder if the numbers are somehow embellished by Morales’ government and if the situation is worse than what it appears. In the past, the worst human right violations always surface after leaders no longer have power. This situation is definitively a reason to worry, especially because Morales is trying to change the constitution. Is it possible that all the Morales’ allegations of the U.S. backing up the opposition are hiding something worse? Is he covering up for something else?

Somehow, these mysterious disappearances during certain dictatorial regimes seem to be also a recurrent theme for Latin American authors.

Of the many books about dictatorial regimes, the one that really comes to my mind is “The Feast of the Goat” by Mario Vargas Llosa. (However, I really feel the need to clarify that Evo Morales is not a dictator, for he was elected by majority vote in 2005.)

The novel tells the story of the conspiracy to kill Rafael Trujillo, a dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.  “The Feast of the Goat” also follows four of the conspirators involved in the assassination of Trujillo and their motives to kill the dictator. The novel describes how many of the members of Trujillo’s party had to prove their loyalty to the dictator in violent ways.

Violence seemed to be the way in which Trujillo exercised his power, and I fear that it is the same way for many leaders today. After reading the news from Bolivia, I am really wondering. Have Latin Americans failed to learn from the mistakes of the past? I really hope not.