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November 20 marks the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution. What? Wasn’t that September 16 and all the Miguel Hidalgo business? No way Jose; Mexico has had both a war of independence and a revolution (and various conquests, a few invasions and now a war on drugs). Officially the Mexican Revolution began in 1910 and ended in 1920, although there have been and continue to be revolutionary relapses spawned by the first bloody revolution.
Throughout the revolution a series of rulers succeeded one another in Mexico, always requiring at least a little military force to make it into, and to stay in power. Most of these figures, as with my of the prominent figures of the revolution, would be eventually assassinated by the factions of their rivals.
Two of the most beloved folk-heroes of the revolution are Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, the Centaur of the North and the Tiger (or the Attila, depending on who you talk to) of the South. Neither of them ever became top dog, but both of them were decisive generals who helped topple the other top dogs of the revolutionary period.
While Villa launched his raids and courted Hollywood, Zapata had the more definite agenda to his struggle. Villa was a career bandit who took up the banner of the revolution. Zapata was a dandy and talented horseman who took up arms slowly when it became clear there would be no other way to continue the struggle for land rights for the impoverished serfs of his region.
Eduardo Galeano (author of Open Veins of Latin America) unsurprisingly calls Zapata “purest of the revolutionaries, most loyal to the cause of the poor, most determined to right the wrongs of society”. Certainly Zapata was the most radical of the revolutionaries, and this made him utterly uncompromising. Three consecutive rulers of Mexico were comrades-in-arms to Zapata, until they came into power and did not do enough to address land reform. Ultimately there could be no place in the newly emerging Mexico for Zapata; the new order was one of compromises, of moderation, perhaps of vacillation. It was the last ally-turned-ruler, Venustiano Carranza, whose underlings deceived, ambushed and assassinated Zapata in 1919.
Zapata’s Plan de Ayala was a rambling manifesto, full of spelling errors. It helped characterise Zapata as an illiterate brigand whose movement had been co-opted by radical city intellectuals. The plan was also the most revolutionary document in Mexico at the time; it was printed in newspapers to discredit Zapata, but instead drew thousands upon thousands of disillusioned peasants to his cause. It also demanded that Zapata’s military adversaries be considered traitors and not prisoners of war, and summarily executed en masse. As was written in the Plan, Zapata was “resolved to struggle against everything and everybody”.
Zapata died at the same age as Che Guevara, and like Guevara it required his death to bring him into the mainstream. Both men found they couldn’t live with the systems they had in part established, that the results of their revolutions weren’t sufficient, and that there would be always and forever a need for more guns (even though neither men had started out with a gun in his hands). In death though Che found a place on t-shirts everywhere, the poster boy of the left. Zapata found a place on the now out of circulation 10 peso note, and became one of the heroes of the Revolution, poster boy for a system he had rejected and died still fighting. Although times have changed in Mexico the fundamental inequality has not; the poor are still as voiceless, as trampled as ever.
Zapata has become a hero, though, and not just a hero to jungle revolutionaries or downtrodden peasants. Contemporary Mexico was born out of Carranza’s government, out of his constitution; Zapata is celebrated today by the offspring of those who arranged his murder. Perhaps he had to die for Mexico to find a way forward, perhaps there is no place for an uncompromising, die-on-our-feet-instead-of-living-on-our-knees mentality. Galeano paints a picture of the state Zapata was creating in the wake of his military victories; it is a socialistic utopia. It sounds very much like what Mexico needed and needs. But it doesn’t sound much like something that could ever be allowed to exist; such a society couldn’t be made by a dissenting faction; only the consent of everyone could build such a society and see it thrive. That or a lot of guns.
So finally Zapata is a hero to all, but only in death. In life there was no place for him and his ideas. The only safe way to deal with him was to betray and kill him, so he could be safely printed onto the lowest denomination of paper money; a fitting location for one who sought to raise the lowest common denominator in his country.
In April Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez reached out to Barack Obama and gave him a gift. It wasn’t a billion barrels of crude or a letter of resignation, which were no doubt what Obama was hoping for, but rather a very normal and inoffensive-looking book (this was still far better than Evo Morales’ gift, which was another round of accusations that the US was trying to kill him. Sigh).
The book was Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, a tome of some existing fame which became an instant bestseller as it was passed from Chavez to Obama.
The title should give some indication as to what the book is about, but given that the gift was an untranslated Spanish-language edition, it’s safe to say Obama hasn’t spent much time pouring over its pages. To avoid the potentially awkward consequences that could ensue from the next meeting between Chavez and Obama (“how did you like your gift” “oh yeah, it was pretty, um, interesting” “so which bits did you like the best” “well definitely the um, the start was pretty, like, um, hey look, there’s Kevin Rudd!” “Who?”), I thought I’d provide some cheat notes to help Obama. He’s a busy man after all; he has a Peace Prize to earn…
Title: Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Author: Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist and freelance political exile.
Published: 1971, and then again later.
Chapter Summaries
Introduction: 120 Million Children in the Eye of the Hurricane. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 1: Lust for Gold, Lust for Silver. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 2: King Sugar and other Agricultural Monarchs. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 3: The Invisible Sources of Power. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 4: Tales of Premature Death. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Chapter 5: The Contemporary Structures of Power. Explains how Latin America is exploited.
Seven Years After. Explains how Latin America is still exploited.
Setting
Venezuelan oil fields, Bolivian silver mines, Brazilian favelas, Caribbean sugar plantations, Central American banana plantations, Brazilian coffee plantations, Chilean guano deposits and copper mines, nineteenth century Paraguay, Zapatista Mexico, the Panama Canal, Argentine prisons, leaky slave galleons, denuded rainforests………..
Characters
The Spanish. Outsiders that harvested, mined and plundered Latin America for their own benefit. Villains.
The English, and to a lesser extent the other Europeans. Outsiders that harvested, mined and plundered Latin America for their own benefit. Came after the Spanish (see above). Villains.
The USAmericans. Outsiders that harvested, mined and plundered Latin America for their own benefit. Came after the English (see above). Villains.
The Oligarchy. Insiders that privatised, mortgaged and sold Latin America for their own benefit. Villains.
The International Monetary Fund. See the USAmericans.
Augusto Pinochet. Chilean general who became president/dictator through a violent coup. Friend of the Oligarchy (see above) and the USAmericans (see above). A villain.
Salvador Allende. Chilean socialist president overthrown by Augusto Pinochet (see above). A hero.
Isabel Allende. First cousin once removed of Salvador Allende (see above). Wrote the foreword to Open Veins. Likes it. Fled Augusto Pinochet’s coup (see above) carrying a copy of Open Veins (an early edition, before she had written the foreword).
Old Woman. Lives in a São Paulo hovel. Drinks coffee from small tin can and talks to author. Claims that Brazil is “ours”. An anecdote.
Quotes
“We have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity”.
“The massacres of Indians that began with Columbus never stopped”.
“The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret – every year, three Hiroshima bombs”.
“There are less than 1,000 computers in Latin America and 50,000 in the United States”.
“One wonders if those that made us paralytic might offer us a wheelchair”.
“One writes to answer the questions that buzz in one’s head”.
Notes for the President (of the USA)
* Don’t take anything Galeano says too personally, after all you were only 10 years old when this book was published, and not directly complicit in, for example, the CIA’s support of Pinochet.
* Galeano is opposed to slavery, to indentured labour, to serfdom, and to other forms of labour exploitation. By aligning yourself similarly you may be able to reach out to those of the left like Galeano and Hugo Chavez. These people cannot vote for you, but being cordial to them might boost your popularity with certain demographics (most of whom also cannot vote for you).
* The CIA, the IMF, the green berets and the oil companies are for the large part unpopular within Latin America. This may be because every time they become involved in Latin America people start dying (according to Galeano). Finding less polarising cultural ambassadors to send to the region may prove worthwhile.
* Galeano wrote Open Veins in the years after Che Guevara was assassinated. Neither this event nor the ongoing embargo seem to have ended the Communist threat in the region. Cuba may be the country that has changed the least from the time of the book’s publication to today. It might be time to consider a new Cuba strategy.
* Five hundred years of exploitation has not caused Latin America to love unreservedly the Spanish (see above) or the English (see above) or the USAmericans (see above). For the USAmericans at least it is not to late to rethink this approach. It might be time to call off the conquest.
Would the history of the Americas have been different if it hadn’t been Columbus that discovered them? Hard to say, but probably not; Columbus was just one of the many opportunists floating about Europe and the world at the time. If it hadn’t been him it would have been someone very like him.
One thing is certain though, Columbus was a real bastard. From the moment he arrived in the new world, still thinking – due to his vast under-estimation of the circumference of the world – that it was east Asia, Columbus was thinking only of how he could make use of the indigenous populations. They seemed obedient, quick to learn and poorly defended; they would, he observed, make great slaves.
A part of the old bastard’s arrangement with the crown of Spain was that he would be governor of all new lands he discovered. During his years of exploration and colonisation, Columbus comported himself like a true bastard, demanding great tributes of gold from the indigenous people that had at times welcomed him. He tortured or mutilated those that could not pay tribute (which was practically everyone given the Caribbean possessed almost no gold) and enslaved many more, shipping them (and probably also syphilis) to Europe. The Taino people were scattered over the Caribbean and probably numbered several hundred thousand when Columbus first arrived. A few years later their numbers had halved; fifty years later they were on the brink of extinction.
All this bastardry was brought to the attention of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, and as a consequence of numerous testimonies (he was an unpopular bastard), and also of the overly-generous initial arrangement extended to him which the monarchs quickly came to regret, Columbus was put into chains, and like his victims shipped across the Atlantic. Unlike his victims though, Columbus was released and the bastard died prosperous and old (for the time).
In most countries that care, October 12 is Columbus Day, but how should this day be celebrated? What to do with the bastard Columbus? Columbus’s discovery – although it would be fairer to say he claimed, rather than discovered the New World – set the Americas onto a very different path. It begun the mestizo-isation of the hemisphere, the mixing and clashing and dissolving of cultures which has made the Americas what they are today. Such a shame it all started with a bastard, and that so many more bastards followed his lead.
Columbus’s name has been omitted from the celebrations in Mexico. Instead October 12 has been entitled ‘Dia de la Raza’, Day of the Race, which is intended to encapsulate the rich heritage and many peoples of Latin America, without overt reference to all that initial bastardry. Columbus isn’t going to be forgotten – the Spanish empire couldn’t get rid of him and neither can we – but at least by focusing on what came after him, and not on what the old bastard actually did, we can perhaps get on with overturning the unfinished centuries of exploitation that he initiated, and perhaps we can dare to imagine a hemisphere free of such bastards.
The first national holiday wheeled around, landing on a Wednesday, breaking up school as it broke up the thunderstorms that had been skulking about for days.
September 16 is Independence Day in Mexico. On the preceding day at school we had corralled the kids into the central patio for a flag ceremony, involving marching and saluting and the withering eye of the school director. Long strips of the Mexican red and white and green covered the city. Sombrero pedlars had been dragging their carts about the city for weeks.
On the eve of the 16th people gather in plazas all over Mexico, and at 11pm commemorate the cry of liberty. In Mexico City’s monster Zocalo the president leads the cry, and is echoed by cries of Viva! from thousands and thousands of throats. He vivas liberty, he vivas the heroes and martyrs of Mexican independence, and last and most emphatically he vivas Mexico itself, again and again, accompanied by the roar of his people. Then the bell ringing and fireworks commence.
All that shouting and bellringing is intended as a kind of grand re-enactment of Miguel Hidalgo’s first cry of liberty. In 1810 on the night of the 15th Hidalgo stood outside his parish church and decried the colonial Spanish government, declaring death to the Spaniards and the birth of a new and egalitarian Mexico.
Less than a year later, though, Hidalgo had been captured, executed, dismembered and exhibited. Independence from Spain was still ten years away for Mexico. A number of other figureheads for the revolution arose; virtually all of them were at some point exiled from Mexico. Many were executed during or after the war.
So why Hidalgo? Why celebrate the beginning of the war of independence and not the end of it? Next year Mexico will celebrate its bicentenary, again basing the date on Hidalgo’s cry for freedom and not on the actual advent of Mexican independence. Bolivia did the same thing earlier this year, leapfrogging all its neighbours by counting its anniversary from the beginning of its struggle, not the end of it.
Perhaps the reason is that Agustin de Iturbide, who you could say ended the war of independence, was not the radical that Hidalgo was; he became the first emperor of Mexico, his new country representing little of the equality that Hidalgo had envisioned (Iturbide was also executed).
Perhaps by dying early in the struggle Hidalgo evaded the fate of Iturbide, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and Porfirio Diaz, all of whom started as military heroes and ended up as deposed tyrants. Hidalgo started the war but didn’t have to finish it, didn’t have to stitch together an awkward harmony out of the disparate elements of the independence movement. He didn’t have to govern; he was already dead and popular.
Perhaps Hidalgo’s charisma and personality are what have immortalised him. An errant priest who read French enlightenment texts, spoke indigenous languages and fathered two children, Hidalgo exemplified all of the quirks that a hero of the people could need.
Whatever the reason, the hero has been chosen, and his cry has been immortalised with a national holiday. The holiday should fall on the 15th, but the date too has been chosen; the 15th was already booked for the aforementioned Porfirio Diaz’s birthday (which is no longer significant). Figures like Diaz rise and fall but Hidalgo remains forever the hero of the independence he never knew.
…Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán
Probably the most despicable of the Spanish conquistadors, Guzmán arrived in Mexico after most of the initial conquering had taken place. He defamed Hernán Cortés and insinuated himself into (very corrupt) government, before marching into the west to pillage, torture, enslave and slaughter – accounts of his rampage read like a Cormac McCarthy novel. He also found time to found a few settlements, before he was arrested and spent his remaining days in a Spanish prison. The most significant settlement was given the name of his birthplace in Spain – Guadalajara.
…Mariachis
Traditionally a large band of spiffily-dressed troubadours playing all string instruments, mariachi culture has evolved to include brass instruments and groups of varying sizes and styles. They still wear big hats, and still tend to make their living serenading lovers, or playing weddings and 15th birthdays (although they can be hired on the spot for any occasion from the plazas in which they congregate).
…The Mexican Hat Dance
Mexico’s national dance, the Jarabe Tapatío is a relatively recent invention; the musical medley was composed in the 19th century and the standard choreography was developed in the early 20th century. The dance is (of course) one of courtship, the man approaching and dazzling the woman with his machismo, then disgracing himself with drunkenness, before recovering to conquer his woman (is there any other narrative?).
…Tequila (almost)
The real home of tequila is Tequila, sixty kilometers from Guadalajara. Although the blue agave plant had long been used to produce modestly alcoholic beverages, it was Hernán Cortés that introduced distilling to the area (before Guzmán ruined his fun), sealing the area’s celebrity fate and putting it forever on the booze world map.
…José Clement Orozco
One of Mexico’s big three social-realist muralists, Orozco was born in Guadalajara and is now buried there. Influenced by Goya, Orozco’s murals are grand, bleak things, eschewing idealistic themes such as the triumphs of socialist man in favour of depicting human suffering and struggle; “instead of red and yellow sunsets I painted pestilential shadows… and instead of nude Indians, drunk women and men”. His doom and gloom style can be found in most of Guadalajara’s most famous buildings.
…Gael García Bernal
Politically aware, down-to-earth, multilingual chicmagnet who has played Che Guevara twice (as if he wasn’t loved enough), Bernal was born in Guadalajara, studied in London (where he mixed drinks and worked in construction to support himself) and now lives in Madrid (I think) with his girlfriend and baby son. Bernal is still very active within latin cinema, which is perhaps not surprising given there are about fifty million women in Mexico who nurse daily fantasies of doing the hat dance with him.
…one more gringo
When I stepped off the plane in Guadalajara I already had a job, an apartment, and a cat lined up; such things I’d been told were impossible for foreign teachers in Mexico, but largely thanks to couchsurfing and a friend I had met in Kansas City this was the easiest settling-in-to-a-new-place that I’ve ever done. Apart from the jetlag; I’ve never been so lagged in my life. For a week all I could do was lie awake watching lightning illuminate the nighttime windows. During the days I tried to make myself explore; I’d drag my enormous head, my heavy hands about the neighbourhood, and then spend the muggy afternoons in a daze. As the jetlag passed though the city around me began to sink in. First impression; the people are incredibly, incredibly warm and friendly. Second impression: they speak way too much English, which may scupper my plans to become magnificently and completely fluent within the year…
