Eduardo Galeano - Upside Down - A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

At least now we hardly ever hear the old refrain about history being infallible. After all we’ve seen, we know for sure that history makes mistakes: she gets distracted, she falls asleep, she gets lost. We make her and she looks like us. But she’s also, like us, unpredictable. Human history is like soccer: her finest trait is her capacity for surprise. Against all predictions, against all evidence, the little guys can sometimes knock the invincible giants for a loop.

On the woof and warp of reality, tangled though it be, new cloth is being woven from threads of many radically different colors. Alternative social movements don’t just express themselves through parties and unions. They do that, but not only that. The process is anything but spectacular and it mostly happens at the local level, where across the world a thousand and one new forces are emerging. They emerge from the bottom up and the inside out. Without making a fuss, they shoulder the task of reconceiving democracy, nourishing it with popular participation and reviving the battered traditions of tolerance, mutual assistance, and communion with nature. One of their spokesmen, ecologist Manfred Max-Neef, describes these movements as mosquitoes on the attack, stinging a system that repels the hug and compels the shrug: “More powerful than a rhinoceros,” he says, “is a cloud of mosquitoes. It grows and grows, buzzes and buzzes.”

Latin Americans

They say we missed our date with history, and it’s true we’re usually late to appointments. Neither have we been able to take power, and the fact is we do sometimes lose our way or take a wrong turn, and later we make a long speech about it.

We Latin Americans have a nasty reputation for being charlatans, vagabonds, troublemakers, hotheads, and revelers, and it’s not for nothing. We’ve been taught by the law of the market that price equals value, and we know we don’t rate much. What’s worse, our good nose for business leads us to pay for everything we sell and buy every mirror that distorts our faces.

We’ve spent five hundred years learning how to hate ourselves and one another and work heart and soul for our own ruin. That’s what we’re up to. But we still haven’t managed to correct our habit of wandering about daydreaming and bumping into things or our inexplicable tendency to rise from the ashes.

The Landless

Sebastião Salgado photographed them, Chico Buarque sang to them, José Saramago wrote about them: five million families of landless peasants wander the deserted vastness of Brazil “between dreams and desperation.”

Many of them have joined the Movement of the Landless. From encampments improvised by the sides of roads, rivers of people flow through the night in silence into the immense, empty farms. They break the padlocks, open the gates, enter. Sometimes they’re greeted by bullets from hired guns or soldiers, the only ones working on those unworked lands.

The Movement of the Landless is guilty. Not only does it show no respect for the property rights of sponging landlords; even worse, it fails to fulfill its duty to the nation. The landless grow food on the lands they occupy when the World Bank commands the countries of the South not to grow their own food but rather to be submissive beggars on the world market.

In Latin America, they are a species at risk of expansion: organizations of the landless, the homeless, the jobless, the whateverless; groups that work for human rights; mothers and grandmothers who defy the impunity of power; community organizations in poor neighborhoods; citizens’ coalitions that fight for fair prices and healthful produce; those that struggle against racial and sexual discrimination, against machismo, and against the exploitation of children; ecologists, pacifists, health promoters, and popular educators; those who unleash collective creativity and those who rescue collective memory; organic agriculture cooperatives, community radio and television stations, and myriad other voices of popular participation that are neither auxiliary wings of political parties nor priests taking orders from any Vatican. These unarmed forces of civil society face frequent harassment from the powerful, at times with bullets. Some activists get shot dead. May the gods and the devils hold them in glory: only trees that bear fruit suffer stonings.

The Zapatistas

Mist is the ski mask the jungle wears. That’s how it hides its persecuted children. From the mist they emerge, to the mist they return. The Indians of Chiapas wear majestic clothing, they float when they walk, and they speak softly or remain silent. These princes condemned to servitude were the first and are the last. They’ve been run off the land and out of the history books, and they’ve found refuge in mist, in mystery. From there they’ve emerged, wearing masks, to unmask the power that humiliates them.

With the odd exception, like the Zapatistas in Chiapas or the landless in Brazil, these movements rarely garner much public attention — not because they don’t deserve it. To name just one, Mexico’s El Barzón emerged spontaneously in recent years when debtors sought to defend themselves from the usury of the banks. At first it attracted only a few, a contagious few; now they are a multitude. Latin America’s presidents would do well to learn from that experience, so that our countries could come together, the way in Mexico people came together to form a united front against a financial despotism that gets its way by negotiating with countries one at a time. But the ears of those presidents are filled with the sonorous clichés exchanged every time they meet and pose with the president of the mother country, the United States, always front and center in the family photos.

It’s happening all across the map of Latin America: against the paralyzing nerve gas of fear, people reach out to one another, and together they learn to not bow down. As Old Antonio, Sub-commandante Marcos’s alter ego, says, “We are as small as the fear we feel, and as big as the enemy we choose.” Such people, unbowed, are having their say. There is no greater authority than one who rules by obeying. Marcos represents the sub, the under — the underdeveloped, the underfed, the underrated, the under-heard. The indigenous communities of Chiapas discuss and decide, and he is but the mouth that speaks with their voices. The voice of those who have no voice? People obliged to remain silent do have a voice, a voice that deserves to be heard. They speak by their words but also by their silence.

Official history, mutilated memory, is a long, self-serving ceremony for those who give the orders in this world. Their spotlights illuminate the heights and leave the grass roots in darkness. The always invisible are at best props on the stage of history, like Hollywood extras. But they are the ones — the actors of real history, the denied, lied about, hidden protagonists of past and present — who incarnate the splendid spectrum of another possible reality. Blinded by elitism, racism, sexism, and militarism, the Americas continue to ignore their own plenitude. And that’s twice as true for the South: Latin America has the most fabulous human and vegetal diversity on the planet. Therein lies its fecundity and its promise. As anthropologist Rodolfo Stavenhagen puts it, “Cultural diversity is to the human species what biological diversity is to the genetic wealth of the world.” If Latin America is to realize the marvels promised by our people and our the land, we’ll have to stop confusing identity with archeology and nature with scenery. Identity isn’t frozen in museums and ecology can’t be reduced to gardening.