The Kirchner-Perón paradigm

15/10/2010

I guess I slept on the futon last night, I thought to myself. The familiar sugary coating on my teeth and the pounding headache reminded me I’d had a few too many vodka Speeds the night before, and I guess that morning, too. The television was on—El muro infernal—a game show that had contestants trying to jump through a moving wall. Dubbed episodes of The Simpsons had been the usual routine, and I’d finally begun to consider the argument that Homer was funnier in Mexican Spanish—but as my senses started to come back to me, I noticed something else was wrong.

It reeked of smoke. It was like someone was having a campfire in our apartment.

I stumbled around to see if I could identify the source, and only got increasingly more confused when I couldn’t find it. That’s when I opened the doors to our balcony on Tacuarí and realized it was suffocating all of Buenos Aires.

That was April 2008, not April 17, 2007. But it could've been.

In March of 2007, President Cristina Kirchner had tested the resolve of Argentina’s farmers by raising export taxes on certain commodities—soybeans being particularly contentious, apparently to encourage them to switch to growing staple foods like wheat and corn for domestic consumption. Naturally, I figured the farmers were out to prove they wouldn’t be bullied.

Back to 2008.

A few weeks earlier I’d been woken up by a cacerolazo; there isn’t a really a direct translation of cacerolazo—it’s basically a protester banging on a saucepan—or well, more like a lot of protesters banging on a lot of saucepans. The farmers’ response, I’d thought… then I found out these protesters were supporting the government.

“Malditos piqueteros,” a waitress later muttered. (Damn picketers)

“What are they protesting?” We asked curiously.

“They don’t even know,” she replied. “They’re paid to do it.”

It wasn’t just the Argentine cynicism I’d grown to love—I later had this confirmed by several people. Paid protesters who got rides to the capital and a decent day’s pay had become standard practice during the Fernando de la Rúa administration (1999-2001).

So then who was burning what—and why?

“Oh, the smoke? No that’s not a protest. That’s just an annual thing the farmers do in the Paraná River delta. They burn it for grazing—for the cattle.”

There was a line about the French in an Iris Murdoch novel that immediately came to mind: “French logic is very simple. Whatever the French are doing is logical because the French are doing it.” I only needed to replace “the French” with “the Argentines”.

But dismissing these actions as esoteric and moving on was a copout.

A little distance and reflection usually reveal our first impressions to be premature. Because even though we like to think we’re living everything for the first time—that we aren’t bound or predetermined to make the same mistakes again, contemporary events we perceive as original usually have strong parallels in our past. Kind of a trite aphorism, I know; but it sticks with me when I think of the trials and tribulations of Mr. and Mrs. Kirchner—like I’ve seen or read this before.

It’s not really all that farfetched. They are Peronists after all, and that would logically lead you to believe they would uphold the fundamental beliefs of their forefather Juan Domingo, right?

Of course being a Peronist doesn’t mean you have to be facsimile of Perón; the Presidency of Carlos Menem proved that. But Kirchner behavior and decision-making does suggest at least a hint of continuity.

The most obvious example is the Kirchner’s ongoing battle with the media conglomerate Grupo Clarín. Over the last few years, Grupo Clarín has quite clearly shown their support for the farmers I mentioned above, irking the Kirchner clan to the point that they resorted to using every tool at their disposal in an effort to split up the company. To their credit, the newspapers haven’t been taken over as they were by Juan Domingo, and the Kirchner’s inability to eliminate or at least strong-arm their opposition has been some combination of shameful and embarrassing.

The second example is their manipulation of trade unions. Perón, the consummate populist, learned early on how to harness the power of the urban working class. It was their loyalty and numbers that demanded an end to his incarceration in 1945, and the Partido Justicialista counts on that loyalty to this day. However, the recent loss of CTA (Central de Trabajadores Argentinos) support has revealed organized labor might also be shifting their allegiance. The CTA came about in 1992 because of opposition to policies of the Menem administration, but at the moment their key membership or affiliation is with a large number of workers in the informal economy, those same workers who may of woke me up with their pots and pans.

Then there’s the forced resignation of Central Bank President Martin Redrado last January; at the time I remember thinking about Perón’s nationalizing of the Central Bank. He used it to pay off the Bank of England, just as Mr. and Mrs. Kirchner wanted to use $6.6 billion in reserves to pay debt due later in the year. The difference is that Redrado had enough autonomy and respect to draw international attention to the issue. The Central bank’s reserves tripled under his tenure and he restored a sense of stability to a country still remembered by most of the world as the personification of economic mismanagement. When Perón nationalized the bank, he was essentially acting with impunity.

I’m probably going too far, but when Nestór Kirchner had his angioplasty this September, I could only think of an ineffective though prescient Isabel Perón’s final days as President—waiting for the impending change that appeared inevitable. Mr. and Mrs. Kirchner are a resilient pair, though, and I’m not yet convinced Ricardo Alfonsín, Eduardo Duhalde, or Mauricio Macri have what it takes to beat a healthy Nestór in 2011.

But “yet” is the operative world.

The black eye that led me back to a Nobel Laureate

09/10/2010

Sitting on the flat roof of the house we were renting in the neighborhood of Cayma, with typically sunny blue skies and the towering Chachani and Misti volcanoes keeping watch over the varied houses below, I had a bottle of Arequipeña in one hand and copy of Pantaleón y las visitadoras in the other.

Short of reading that particular novel in Iquitos or somewhere else in the Peruvian Amazon, Arequipa—the birthplace of Mario Vargas Llosa, was as appropriate a place as any to delve into the canon of a man now rightfully recognized by the Nobel Committee as a literary giant.

At the time, though, I didn’t really get it.

It was a funny little novel—clever, satirical—but not the type of work that justified including his name with Gabriel García Marquez and Octavio Paz. It also didn’t help that the low budget b-movie production of the same name became hard to dissociate from the novel. Then again, I did see it around the time the embarrassingly bad film version of Love in the time of cholera was released, which reminded me how easily an amateur production can ruin a masterpiece.

Still, I needed something more to be sincerely enthusiastic about reading the two works I was told were crucial to appreciating Llosa: La Casa Verde and La Ciudad y los Perros.

That something more came in the form of a black eye and non-fiction too compelling to ignore.

I hadn’t known then, of course, that Llosa and Márquez had once been good friends—only to see that friendship take a thirty year hiatus when the Peruvian delivered what by most accounts was a sucker punch.

The reason, I assumed, must have been political.

Llosa is fairly right of centre in his politics, and if you read any of his son’s work—The Che Guevara Myth, for example, well, “de tal palo, tal astilla”—the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But though Márquez would become chummy with Castro while Llosa grew to admire Margaret Thatcher and eventually run for President— this was over… a woman.

The woman was Llosa’s wife, Patricia. And the story goes that Márquez and his wife suggested Patricia leave Llosa after her husband had a temporary lapse with a Swedish woman. The subsequent reconciliation of husband and wife led to the wife telling the husband everything that transpired—including the part about his buddy Gabo’s advice. Cue the punch outside a film premiere in Mexico City in 1976.

On the occasion of Márquez’s 80th birthday in 2007, the Colombian’s good friend Rodrigo Moya both wrote about the event and released the picture he had taken thirty years earlier. Moya’s piece is definitely worth a read, and though to my knowledge not available in English, does at least include the infamous photo of the black eye taken back in 1976:
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/03/06/index.php?section=cultura&article=a05n1cul

The pride of my Peruvian friends would brim when they spoke of how their man beat up Márquez; it was something like what I felt when I first heard of Morley Callaghan knocking out Hemingway. Sure, the defeated in both cases might have more international recognition, but no man is completely immune to nationalistic schadenfreude, or at least good gossip.

That punch inspired me to read La Casa Verde—a novel as complex and worthy of praise as 100 Years of Solitude, then La Ciudad y los Perros, which in its portrayal of military school drew from Llosa’s own experiences, encouraged me to reread Pantaleón y las visitadoras, and to acknowledge how misguided my initial response had been.

I find it disingenuous to claim Saul Bellow as ours, so Canada is still waiting for its turn, with Atwood or Ondaatje the most likely candidates. And when that happens, our Prime Minister will certainly come up with a variation of President Alan García’s observation: “It’s a big day for Peru.” When that happens, I’ll likely start rereading.

No black eye will be necessary.

Choosing when choices aren’t allowed

04/10/2010

Grace McGarvie is a retired social sciences teacher from the suburbs of Minneapolis who has—over fifty years—collected more quotations than Bartlett’s. But as she diligently added the bon mots of poets and heads of states, she managed to find the time to coin a few wise ones of her own—like this:

“Republicans are against abortion until their daughters need one. Democrats are for abortion until their daughters want one.”

Abortion and objectivity—they’re like oil and water.

It’s Manichean for most, and there’s a good chance—wherever you stand, that your opinion on that one question will give pretty good insight into your beliefs on myriad others:

You support the killing of the innocent but the sanctity of life when it comes to murderers?

You’re pro-life but support capital punishment?

Americans get wrapped up in Roe v. Wade, Canadians in Morgantaler, for many Latin American women, politics is secondary to what can at times be a harsh reality.

1,600 women in Argentina took to the streets last week to demand the courts decriminalize abortion; they were joined by other women throughout the region, which aside from Cuba and Mexico City is pretty draconian when it comes to this particular choice.

In Argentina, where abortion is only legal in cases where a woman suffering from a severe handicap is raped, or in which her life is at risk, 4 in 10 pregnancies are terminated…by whatever means available.

The health of the mother be damned in El Salvador.

What about gang rape? Nope.

I remember reading an article a few years ago about a woman named Sofía who was raped in the outskirts of San Salvador, used the resources available to her to end the pregnancy, and was forced to confess like a criminal when she went to a public gynecologist to stop the bleeding.

True, Sofía did get lucky. If I remember correctly, she got three years probation as opposed to the two year prison sentence she could have received. The rapists—of course—were never apprehended.

It’s no different for women in Chile. For obvious reasons, statistics aren’t always easy to come by, but from what I’ve found, the Chilean Ministry of Health reported 33,000 abortion-related hospitalizations in 2005. An incredibly popular President Bachelet did try to use that popularity—along with her medical background, to effect some changes, but the opposition was predictably fierce. And because she promised she wouldn’t try to overturn the laws during the 2005 Presidential campaign, she faced down charges of hypocrisy for championing access to the “morning after pill.”

With the conservative Sebastian Piñera now at the helm, and Bachelet at the UN, changes won’t be forthcoming.

In Brazil, where many thought she would cruise to victory in the recent elections on the coattails of President Lula da Silva, Dilma Rousseff was forced to radically change her position on the subject days before the election to salvage any possibility of winning outright in the first round of voting. After telling Marie Claire magazine a year ago that she favored changes for public health reasons, because “there is an enormous amount of women in Brazil who die from abortion in precarious circumstances,” she suddenly had a change of heart at the last minute—well aware she couldn’t sacrifice the huge Catholic and evangelical vote.

That she didn’t win outright is probably a testament to many Brazilian voters’ ability to see through the obvious insincerity.

Of course Rousseff’s vacillating isn’t in any way unique, and sacrificing her beliefs for politics couldn’t have been a decision she made lightly—but as the women of Latin America have their realities, so do the politicians. The latter can only legislate to the extent their constituents allow; the former continue to do what they need to survive.

And no law will ever change that.

The bed was made in 2005, and it’s still uncomfortable to lie in it

28/09/2010

There are a lot of English expressions I’ve never really understood. I mean, like anyone else I’ll say them, but as the words come out of my mouth I realize how ridiculous and—well, stupid they are. Most of these observations have already been made by way cleverer people, but still…

“You just want to have your cake and eat it too.” –eating the cake you “have” seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do, right? As opposed to?

“It always in the last place you look.” –I owe my brother-in-law for this one. Of course it is. Why would you keep looking if you’d already found what you were looking for?

Finally, though, and a little more germane to the topic: “you made your bed, now you have to lie in it.”

It’s the first expression that came to mind when I read this Sunday’s Venezuelan parliamentary election results. The opposition, in its recent incarnation as the MUD (la Mesa de la Unidad Democrática), suffered for having sat out the 2005 elections, and as result found themselves playing a rigged game; because the rules changed with The Suffrage and Political Participation Law Chávez forced through the opposition-less legislature last December, and the MUD has had to live with the consequences.

The reality on Sunday was, as a journalist reminded a furious President Chávez, that regardless of how the popular vote shook out, the seats were already predetermined to disproportionately benefit the PSUV.

And so, despite a difference of barely 100,000 votes, the PSUV won 98 of the 165 seats.

I guess the first expression that really came to mind was “cosechan lo que siembran” (you reap what you sow). But that’s kind of harsh.

The opposition sat out in 2005 to restore democracy, not to weaken it.

But if they had stuck around, and won at least the 64 seats they won this time, they never would have bequeathed the power to change the constitution to el comandante.

And what would that have meant?

No Suffrage and Political Participation Law, which, in the current context, means the PSUV and MUD would be tied at 80 seats each.

So is the glass half full or half empty? It’s kind of hard to say. Aristóbulo Istúriz, a key member of the National Directorate of the PSUV, promised they’ll legislate “till the final day,” and that the opposition should “prepare themselves.” (http://aristobulo.psuv.org.ve/)

A little ominous? Threatening?

The PSUV maintains its majority till January, which means they’ll be eager to make as much use of it as they can.

“I don’t know a country where 98 is less than 64. In no country in the world…We know this campaign that just finished is just the preamble to our commitment for 2012, which is the ratification of Commander Chavez,” he continued.

He has a point.

This is being celebrated as an opposition victory, but it’s a bit early. They’ve really only won back what they lost four years ago, and at the cost of angering a President all too willing to make the most of his slightly weakened grip on power.

So, until the Presidential election in 2012, we’ll call a spade a spade, or call bread, bread, and wine, wine (llamar al pan, pan, y al vino, vino): Señor Chávez and the PSUV will not go gently into the night; 2012 is a long way away—the MUD should be happy to make it to January.

The journalists of Juárez: “What do you want from us?”

22/09/2010

Every profession has its aphorisms which with time and repetition add to an ever-expanding list of clichés; the obscure become a type of shibboleth or test—like a secret handshake that proves membership in an exclusive club. The more common are expressed ad nauseum so that the masses can easily identify a raison d’être. Sometimes they even become decrees—or oaths.

Doctors have theirs.

They trace it back to ancient Greece.

When I think of journalists, I don’t have to go back that far.

Around the turn of the 20^th century, as Finley Peter Dunne was publishing his Mr. Dooley articles in Chicago, he came up with a variation of this: ‘to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’

Over time it gave muckrakers everywhere a clever reply to everyone’s favorite question: What do you do?

It’s noble, inspirational—almost heroic—and for present-day journalists in Ciudad Juárez, completely unrealistic. I limit the scope to Juárez instead of the state of Chihuahua or even all of Mexico, because the recent actions taken by those at Juárez’s El Diario deserve special attention:

http://www.diario.com.mx/notas.php?f=2010/09/19&id=ce557112f34b187454d7b6d117a76cb5

When Dunne wrote his political satire, he did so knowing he might make some enemies—just not the type of enemies who would prevent him from doing his job. Writing about American politics wasn’t and isn’t something that keeps its practitioners up at night worrying about their safety. And even as many journalists, like soldiers, go into warzones knowing they could lose their lives, they often do so with a sense of perceived neutrality; the danger is in the environment, not in the reaction to what they report.

In Juárez the façade of safety that neutrality offered is long gone, leaving the staff at El Diario to ask in a recent editorial, “What do you want from us?”

The “you” here means the cartels—or “the de facto authorities” as they call them:

“You are, at the moment, the de facto authorities in this city, because the legally-instituted authorities haven’t been able to do anything to stop our colleagues from dying, despite our having reiterated our demands repeatedly.”

The colleagues to which they’re referring are Luis Carlos Santiago Orozco and Armando Rodríguez Carreón. Orozco, a 21 year-old photographer, was shot with one of his friends last Thursday—luckily this friend and colleague, also a photographer, survived. Carreón was murdered in the presence of his wife and nine-year-old child in 2008. Not surprisingly, the case remains open.

The Committee to Protect Journalists recently released a report entitled “Silence or Death in Mexico’s Press”. Their statistics support the title: “More than 30 journalists and media workers have been murdered or have vanished since December 2006. As vast self-censorship takes hold, Mexico's future as a free and democratic society is at risk.”

El Diario stated in their editorial that they aren’t giving up; they’re just no longer willing to see their staff added to La Nota Roja—the section in Mexican dailies that describes recent violent crimes.

A press itself afflicted can do nothing to comfort their fellow citizens in a period of violence that long ago surpassed excessive. I’d contend that the Committee to Protect Journalists has understated the significance of the threat. If the imposed silence is allowed to prevail, Mexico’s “future as a free and democratic society” won’t be at risk, it will have disappeared altogether.