Carlos Fuentes: Myself with Others: Selected Essays

What happens between the daybreak of revolution in a marginal country and its imagined destiny as a Soviet base? If nothing happens but harassment, blockades, propaganda, pressures, and invasions against the revolutionary country, then that prophecy will become self-fulfilling.

But if power with historical memory and diplomacy with historical imagination come into play, we, the United States and Latin America, might end up with something very different: a Latin America of independent states building institutions of stability, renewing the culture of national identity, diversifying our economic interdependence, and wearing down the dogmas of two musty nineteenth-century philosophies. And a United States giving the example of a tone in relations that is present, active, cooperative, respectful, aware of cultural differences, and truly proper for a great power unafraid of ideological labels, capable of coexisting with diversity in Latin America as it has learned to coexist with diversity in black Africa.

Precisely twenty years ago, John F. Kennedy said at another commencement ceremony: “If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.” This, I think, is the greatest legacy of the sacrificed statesman whose death we all mourned. Let us understand that legacy, by which death ceased to be an enigma and became, not a lament for what might have been, but a hope for what can be. This can be.

The longer the situation of war lasts in Central America and the Caribbean, the more difficult it will be to assure a political solution. The more difficult it will be for the Sandinistas to demonstrate good faith in their dealings with the issues of internal democracy, now brutally interrupted by a state of emergency imposed as a response to foreign pressures. The more difficult it will be for the civilian arm of the Salvadoran rebellion to maintain political initiative over the armed factions. The greater the irritation of Panama with its unchosen role as a springboard for a North American war. The greater the danger of a generalized conflict, dragging in Costa Rica and Honduras.

Everything can be negotiated in Central America and the Caribbean, before it is too late. Non-aggression pacts between each and every state. Border patrols. The interdiction of the passage of arms, wherever they may come from, and the interdiction of foreign military advisers, wherever they may come from. The reduction of all the armies in the region. The interdiction, now or ever, of Soviet bases or Soviet offensive capabilities in the area.

What would be the quid pro quo? Simply this: the respect of the United States, respect for the integrity and autonomy of all the states in the region, including normalization of relations with all of them. The countries in the region should not be forced to seek solutions to their problems outside themselves.

The problems of Cuba are Cuban and shall be so once more when the United States understands that by refusing to talk to Cuba on Cuba, it not only weakens Cuba and the United States but strengthens the Soviet Union. The mistake of spurning Cuba’s constant offers to negotiate whatever the United States wants to discuss frustrates the forces in Cuba desiring greater internal flexibility and international independence. Is Fidel Castro some sort of superior Machiavelli whom no gringo negotiator can meet at a bargaining table without being bamboozled? I don’t believe it.

Nicaragua

The problems of Nicaragua are Nicaraguan, but they will cease to be so if that country is deprived of all possibility for normal survival. Why is the United States so impatient with four years of Sandinismo, when it was so tolerant of forty-five years of Somocismo? Why is it so worried about free elections in Nicaragua, but so indifferent to free elections in Chile? And why, if it respects democracy so much, did the United States not rush to the defense of the democratically elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, when he was overthrown by the Latin American Jaruzelski, General Augusto Pinochet? How can we live and grow together on the basis of such hypocrisy?

Nicaragua is being attacked and invaded by forces sponsored by the United States. It is being invaded by counterrevolutionary bands led by former commanders of Somoza’s national guard who are out to overthrow the revolutionary government and reinstate the old tyranny. Who will stop them from doing so if they win? These are not freedom fighters. They are Benedict Arnolds.

El Salvador

The problems of El Salvador, finally, are Salvadoran. The Salvadoran rebellion did not originate and is not manipulated from outside El Salvador. To believe this is akin to crediting Soviet accusations that the Solidarity movement in Poland is somehow the creature of the United States. The passage of arms from Nicaragua to El Salvador has not been proved; no arms have been intercepted.

The conflict in El Salvador is the indigenous result of a process of political corruption and democratic impossibility that began in 1931 with the overturn of the electoral results by the army and culminated in the electoral fraud of 1972, which deprived the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats of their victory and forced the sons of the middle class into armed insurrection. The army had exhausted the electoral solution. This army continues to outwit everyone in El Salvador — including the United States. It announces elections after assassinating the political leadership of the opposition, then asks the opposition to come back and participate in these same hastily organized elections — as dead souls, perhaps? This Gogolian scenario means that truly free elections cannot be held in El Salvador as long as the army and the death squads are unrestrained and fueled by U.S. dollars.

Nothing now assures Salvadorans that the army and the death squads can either defeat the rebels or be controlled by political institutions. It is precisely because of the nature of the army that a political settlement must be reached in El Salvador promptly, not only to stop the horrendous death count, not only to restrain both the army and the armed rebels, not only to assure your young people in the United States that they will not be doomed to repeat the horror and futility of Vietnam, but to reconstruct a political initiative of the center-left majority that must now reflect, nevertheless, the need for a reconstructed army. El Salvador cannot be governed with such a heavy burden of crime.

The only other option is to transform the war in El Salvador into an American war. But why should a bad foreign policy be bipartisan? Without the rebels in El Salvador, the United States would never have worried about “democracy” in El Salvador. If the rebels are denied political participation in El Salvador, how long will it be before El Salvador is totally forgotten once more?

Friends, not Satellites

Let us remember, let us imagine, let us reflect. The United States can no longer go it alone in Central America and the Caribbean. It cannot, in today’s world, practice the anachronistic policies of the “big stick.” It will only achieve, if it does so, what it cannot truly want. Many of our countries are struggling to cease being banana republics. They do not want to become balalaika republics. Do not force them to choose between appealing to the Soviet Union or capitulating to the United States.

My plea is this: Do not practice negative overlordship in this hemisphere. Practice positive leadership. Join the forces of change and patience and identity in Latin America.

The United States should use the new realities of redistributed world power to its advantage. All the avenues I have been dealing with come together now to form a circle of possible harmony. The United States has true friends in this hemisphere. Friends, not satellites. These friends must negotiate the situations that the United States, while participating in them, cannot possibly negotiate for itself, and the negotiating parties — from Mexico and Venezuela, Panama and Colombia, tomorrow perhaps our great Portuguese-speaking sister, Brazil,* perhaps the new Spanish democracy, reestablishing the continuum of our Iberian heritage and expanding reestablishing the continuum of our Iberian heritage and expanding the Contadora group — these negotiating parties have the intimate knowledge of the underlying cultural problems. And they have the imagination for assuring the inevitable passage from the U.S. sphere of influence, not to the Soviet sphere, but to our own Latin American authenticity in a pluralistic world.