Carlos Fuentes: Myself with Others: Selected Essays

But we, the true friends of your great nation in Latin America, we the admirers of your extraordinary achievements in literature, science, and the arts and of your democratic institutions, of your Congress and your courts, your universities and publishing houses, and your free press — we, your true friends, because we are your friends, will not permit you to conduct yourselves in Latin American affairs as the Soviet Union conducts itself in East European and Central Asian affairs. You are not the Soviet Union. We shall be the custodian of your own true interests by helping you to avoid these mistakes. We have memory on our side. You suffer too much from historical amnesia. You seem to have forgotten that your own republic was born out of the barrel of a gun. We hope to have persuasion on our side, and the help of international and inter-American law.

We also have our own growing apprehension as to whether, under the guise of defending us from remote Soviet menaces and delirious domino effects, the United States would create one vast Latin American protectorate. Meeting at Cancún on April 29 (1983), the presidents of Mexico and Brazil, Miguel de la Madrid and João Figueiredo, agreed that “the Central American crisis has its origin in the economic and social structures prevalent in the region and [that] the efforts to overcome it must … avoid the tendency to define it as a chapter in East — West confrontation.” And the prime minister of Spain, Felipe González, on the eve of his visit to Washington, defined U.S. involvements in Central America as “fundamentally harmful” to the nations of the region and damaging to the international standing of the United States.

Yes, your alliances will crumble and your security will be endangered if you do not demonstrate that you are an enlightened, responsible power in your dealings with Latin America. Yes, you must demonstrate your humanity and your intelligence here, in this hemisphere we share, or nowhere shall you be democratically credible. Where are the Franklin Roosevelts, the Sumner Welleses, the George Marshalls, and the Dean Achesons demanded by the times?

Friends and Satellites

The great weakness of the Soviet Union is that it is surrounded by satellites, not by friends. Sooner or later, the rebellion of the outlying nations in the Soviet sphere will eat, more and more deeply, into the innards of what Lord Carrington recently called “a decaying Byzantium.” The United States has the great strength of having friends, not satellites, on its borders. Canada and Mexico are two independent nations that disagree on many issues with the United States.

We know that in public life, as in personal life, nothing is more destructive of the self than being surrounded by sycophants. But just as there are yes-men in this world, there are yes-nations. A yes-nation harms itself as much as it harms its powerful protector: it deprives both of dignity, foresight, and the sense of reality. Nevertheless, Mexico has been chosen as a target of “diplomatic isolation” by the National Security Council Document on Policy in Central America and Cuba through fiscal year ’84.

We know in Latin America that “isolation” can be a euphemism for destabilization. Indeed, every time a prominent member of the administration in Washington refers to Mexico as the ultimate domino, a prominent member of the administration in Mexico City must stop in his tracks, offer a rebuttal, and consolidate the nationalist legitimization of the Mexican government: Mexico is capable of governing itself without outside interference.

But if Mexico is a domino, then it fears being pushed from the north rather than from the south; such has been our historical experience. This would be the ultimate accomplishment of Washington’s penchant for the self-fulfilling prophecy: a Mexico destabilized by American nightmares about Mexico. We should all be warned about this. Far from being “blind” or “complacent,” Mexico is offering its friendly hand to the United States to help it avoid the repetition of costly historical mistakes that have deeply hurt us all, North and Latin Americans.

Public opinion in this country shall judge whether Mexico’s obvious good faith in this matter is spurned as the United States is driven into a deepening involvement in the Central American swamp: a Vietnam all the more dangerous, indeed, because of its nearness to your national territory, but not for the reasons officially invoked. The turmoil of revolution, if permitted to run its course, promptly finds its institutional channels. But if thwarted by intervention it will plague the United States for decades to come. Central America and the Caribbean will become the Banquo of the United States: an endemic drain on your human and material resources.

The source of change in Latin America is not in Moscow or Havana: it is in history. So let me turn to ourselves, as Latin Americans.

Four Failures of Identification

The failure of your present hemispheric policies is due to a fourfold failure of identification. The first is the failure to identify change in Latin America in its cultural context. The second is the failure to identify nationalism as the historical bearer of change in Latin America. The third is the failure to identify the problems of international redistribution of power as they affect Latin America. The fourth is the failure to identify the grounds for negotiations as these issues create conflict between the United States and Latin America.

The Cultural Context of Latin America

First, the cultural context of change in Latin America. Our societies are marked by cultural continuity and political discontinuity. We are a Balkanized polity, yet we are deeply united by a common cultural experience. We are and we are not of the West. We are Indian, black, and Mediterranean. We received the legacy of the West in an incomplete fashion, deformed by the Spanish monarchy’s decision to outlaw unorthodox strains, to mutilate the Iberian tree of its Arab and Jewish branches, heavy with fruit, to defeat the democratic yearnings of its own middle class, and to superimpose the vertical structures of the medieval Imperium on the equally pyramidal configuration of power in the Indian civilizations of the Americas.

The United States is the only major power of the West that was born beyond the Middle Ages, modern at birth. As part of the fortress of the Counter-Reformation, Latin America has had to do constant battle with the past. We did not acquire freedom of speech, freedom of belief, freedom of enterprise as our birthrights, as you did. The complexity of the cultural struggles underlying our political and economic struggles has to do with unresolved tensions, sometimes as old as the conflict between pantheism and monotheism, or as recent as the conflict between tradition and modernity. This is our cultural baggage, both heavy and rich.

The issues we are dealing with, behind the headlines, are very old. They are finally being aired today, but they originated in colonial, sometimes in pre-Conquest, situations, and they are embedded in the culture of Iberian Catholicism and its emphasis on dogma and hierarchy — an intellectual inclination that sometimes drives us from one church to another in search of refuge and certitude. They are bedeviled by patrimonial confusions between private and public rights and forms of sanctified corruption that include nepotism, whim, and the irrational economic decisions made by the head of the clan, untrammeled by checks and balances. The issues have to do with the traditions of paternalistic surrender to the caudillo, the profound faith in ideas over facts, the strength of elitism and personalism, and the weakness of the civil societies — with the struggles between theocracy and political institutions, and between centralism and local government.