Carlos Fuentes: Myself with Others: Selected Essays

Since independence in the 1820s, we have been obsessed with catching up with the Joneses: the West. We created countries legal in appearance but which disguised the real countries abiding — or festering — behind the constitutional façades. Latin America has tried to find solutions to its old problems by exhausting the successive ideologies of the West: Liberalism, positivism, and Marxism. Today we are on the verge of transcending this dilemma by recasting it as an opportunity, at last, to be ourselves — societies neither new nor old, but simply, authentically, Latin American, as we sort out, in the excessive glare of instant communications or in the eternal dusk of our isolated villages, the benefits and the disadvantages of a tradition that now seems richer and more acceptable than it did one hundred years of solitude ago.

But we are also forced to contemplate the benefits and disadvantages of a modernity that now seems less promising than it did before economic crisis, the tragic ambiguity of science, and the barbarism of nations and philosophies that were once supposed to represent “progress” all drove us to search for the time and space of culture in ourselves. We are true children of Spain and Portugal. We have compensated for the failures of history with the successes of art. We are now moving to what our best novels and poems and paintings and films and dances and thoughts have announced for so long: the compensation for the failures of history with the successes of politics.

The real struggle for Latin America is then, as always, a struggle with ourselves, within ourselves. We must solve it by ourselves. Nobody else can truly know it: we are living through our family quarrels. We must assimilate this conflicted past. Sometimes we must do it — as has occurred in Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, and Nicaragua — through violent means. We need time and culture. We also need patience. Both ours and yours.

Nationalism in Latin America

Second, the identification of nationalism as the legitimate bearer of change in Latin America. The cultural conflict I have evoked includes the stubbornness of the minimal popular demands, after all these centuries, which equate freedom with bread, schools, hospitals, national independence, and a sense of dignity. If left to ourselves, we will try to solve these problems by creating national institutions to deal with them. All we ask from you is cooperation, trade, and normal diplomatic relations. Not your absence, but your civilized presence.

We must grow with our own mistakes. Are we to be considered your true friends only if we are ruled by right-wing, anti-communist despotisms? Instability in Latin America — or anywhere in the world, for that matter — comes when societies cannot see themselves reflected in their institutions.

Democracy in Latin America

Change in our societies shall be radical in two dimensions. Externally, it will be more radical the more the United States intervenes against it or helps to postpone it. Internally, it will of necessity be radical in that it must one day face up to the challenges we have so far been unable to meet squarely. We must face democracy along with reform; we must face cultural integrity along with change; we must all, Cubans, Salvadorans, Nicaraguans and Argentines, Mexicans and Colombians, finally face the question that awaits us on the threshold of our true history: Are we capable, with all the instruments of our civilization, of creating free societies, societies that take care of the basic needs of health, education, and labor, but without sacrificing the equally basic needs of debate, criticism, and political and cultural expression?

I know that all of us, without exception, have not truly fulfilled these needs in Latin America. I also know that the transformation of our national movements into pawns of the East — West conflict makes it impossible for us to answer this question: Are we capable of creating free national societies? This is perhaps our severest test.

Rightly or wrongly, many Latin Americans have come to identify the United States with opposition to our national independence. Some perceive in United States policies the proof that the real menace to a great power is not really the other great power but the independence of the national states. How else to understand U.S. actions that seem meaninglessly obsessed with discrediting the national revolutions in Latin America? Some are thankful that another great power exists, and appeal to it. All this also escalates and denaturalizes the issues at hand and avoids considering the third failure I want to deal with today: the failure to understand redistribution of power in the Western Hemisphere.

Latin America and the Redistribution of Power

It could be debated whether the explosiveness of many Latin American societies is due less to stagnation than to growth, the quickest growth of any region in the world since 1945. But this has been rapid growth without equally rapid distribution of the benefits of growth. And it has coincided, internationally, with rapidly expanding relations between Latin America and new European and Asian partners in trade, financing, technology, and political support.

Latin America is thus part and parcel of the universal trend away from bipolar to multipolar or pluralistic structures in international relations. Given this trend, the decline of one superpower mirrors the decline of the other superpower. This is bound to create numerous areas of conflict. As former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt eloquently expressed it from this same rostrum: “We are living in an economically interdependent world of more than 150 countries — without having enough experience in managing this interdependence.” Both superpowers increasingly face a perfectly logical movement toward national self-assertion accompanied by growing multilateral relationships beyond the decaying spheres of influence.

No change comes without tension, and in Latin America this tension arises as we strive for greater wealth and independence, but also as we immediately start losing both, because of internal economic injustice and external economic crisis. The middle classes we have spawned over the past fifty years are shaken by a revolution of diminishing expectations — of Balzacian “lost illusions.” Modernity and its values are coming under critical fire while the values of nationalism are discovered to be perfectly identifiable with traditionalist, even conservative, considerations.

The mistaken identification of change in Latin America as somehow manipulated by a Soviet conspiracy not only irritates the nationalism of the left. It also resurrects the nationalist fervors of the right — where, after all, Latin American nationalism was born in the early nineteenth century.

You have yet to feel the full force of this backlash — which reappeared in Argentina and the South Atlantic crisis last year — in places such as El Salvador and Panama, Peru and Chile, Mexico and Brazil. A whole continent, in the name of cultural identity, nationalism and international independence, is capable of uniting against you. This should not happen. The chance of avoiding this continental confrontation is in the fourth and final issue I wish to deal with today, that of negotiations.

Negotiations Before It Is Too Late

Before the United States has to negotiate with extreme cultural, nationalistic, and internationalist pressures of both the left and the right in the remotest nations of this hemisphere (Chile and Argentina), in the largest nation (Brazil), and in the closest (Mexico), it should rapidly, in its own interest as well as ours, negotiate in Central America and the Caribbean. We consider in Mexico that each and every one of the points of conflict in the region can be solved diplomatically, through negotiations, before it is too late. There is no fatality in politics that says: Given a revolutionary movement in any country in the region, it will inevitably end up providing bases for the Soviet Union.