Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

Under the military in Latin America, they burned books. Under democracy, they cook them. Military dictatorships disappeared people. Financial dictatorships disappear money.

One fine day Argentina’s banks refused to give account holders their money.

Norberto Roglich always kept his savings in the bank so they wouldn’t get eaten by mice or stolen by thieves. When he got robbed by the bank, Don Norberto was quite ill — years take their toll — and his meager pension fell short of his medical bills.

He had no choice. He marched into the financial fortress and without asking anyone’s permission went straight to the manager’s desk. In his fist he gripped a grenade. “Give me my money, or I’ll blow us all to kingdom come.”

The grenade was a toy, but it worked a miracle. The bank gave him his money.

Later on, Don Norberto got arrested. The prosecution asked for eight to sixteen years. For him, not the bank.

Playing teacher’s pet, doing whatever she was told, Argentina sold off everything, even the lions in the zoo and the paving stones from the sidewalks, and still she owed a candle to every saint. At the beginning of 2003, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which had done so much to gut the country, sent a mission to look over the books.

One of the members of this financial swat team, Jorge Baca Campodónico, was in charge of tax evasion. An expert on the topic he was, having often committed it himself. Interpol grabbed him as soon as he landed in Buenos Aires.

There was a warrant out for that one.

Not for his bosses.

According to today’s dictionary, “good stock” is not proud lineage but a firm whose price is on the rise, and it’s in the stock market where “values” get undermined.

The “market” is no longer that beloved neighborhood spot for buying fruit and vegetables. Now “Market” is a frightful and faceless lord, who sees all, claims to be eternal, and does not hesitate to punish. His oracles say, “The Market is nervous,” and they warn, “We mustn’t upset the Market.”

The “international community” is the name of the big bankers and their warrior chiefs. Their “aid packages” sell leaden lifesavers to the countries they drown, and their “peace missions” pacify the dead.

In the United States, the Ministry of War is called the “Defense Department,” and “humanitarian bombing” is the name for the downpour of missiles they rain on the world.

On a wall, written by someone, written by everyone, I read: “My voice aches.”

While words lose their meaning, the sea and sky lose their color, the green and blue they were painted through the kindness of algae giving oxygen for three billion years.

And the night loses its stars. Protest signs have been seen in the world’s great cities: “They won’t let us see the stars.” Signed: “The people.”

And in the firmament, there are banners crying: “They don’t let us see the people.” Signed: “The stars.”

Advanced in years, Dona Chila Monti hovered on the border between Earth and Heaven, closer to the harp than the guitar.

Her son Horacio knew it, but it was still a shock when he saw her eyes rolling, her heart fluttering, and her hands all atremble. With the bit of breath she could muster, Dona Chila managed to mutter, “I’ve been robbed.”

Horacio asked which of her things had been stolen, and instantly her vision, her breathing, and her steady hand returned. As did her tongue. Indignant, she said, “Things? You know I don’t have anything. What could they take? When God calls me, I’ll go with nothing but the clothes on my back.”

And she spelled it out: “Not things. The crooks stole my ideas.”

In 1921 the peons of Patagonia went on strike. The estate owners called the British ambassador, who called the Argentine president, who called the army.

Firing Mausers, the army put down the strike and the strikers too. The peons were pitched into common graves on the estates, and at shearing time no one who knew how to shear the sheep was still alive.

Captain Pedro Vinas Ibarra commanded the operation at one estate. Half a century later, by which time the captain was a retired colonel, Osvaldo Bayer spoke with him. He got the official story. “Oh, yes,” the officer recalled “Anita Estate. That battle.”

Bayer wanted to know why that battle had left six hundred workers dead and not a single soldier killed, wounded, or even scratched.

And the armed wing of order kindly explained: “The wind. We were upwind. That’s why our bullets flew true. Their shots into the wind went awry.”

In 1839 the U.S. ambassador to Honduras, John Lloyd Stephens, bought the Mayan city of Copàn, gods and all, for fifty dollars.

In 1892, near New York, an Iroquois chief sold four sacred belts that his people had held forever. Like the ruins rising from the weeds of Copàn, those seashell belts related a people’s history. General Henry B. Carrington bought them for seventy-five dollars.

In 1937, to whiten the Dominican Republic, General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo murdered eighteen thousand blacks, all Haitians, just like his own mother’s mother. Trujillo paid the Haitian government twenty-nine dollars a head in reparations.

In the year 2001, following several trials for his crimes, Chilean General Augusto Pinochet paid a fine of $3,500. A dollar for every person killed.

In 1499, in the bonfires of the Inquisition, Archbishop Cisneros of Granada put the torch to books that preserved eight centuries of Islamic culture and thirteen centuries of Jewish culture in Spain.

In 1562, in the Yucatan, Fray Diego de Landa condemned eight centuries of Mayan literature to the flames.

Elsewhere in the world, other conflagrations had occurred before and many occurred thereafter, memories consumed by fire.

In the year 2003, when the invading army completed its conquest of Iraq, they surrounded the oil wells, oil depots, and Oil Ministry with tanks and troops. Soldiers whistled and looked the other way, however, when the museums were sacked and the books of fired clay that recounted the first fables, the first stories, the first written laws in the world were pillaged.

Next, Baghdad’s National Library went up in smoke, and half a million books were reduced to ashes. Many of the earliest publications in Arabic and Persian, died there.

He was his family’s headache, the worst student in his class. The disgrace had no solution, until the father of that wretched student put on a banquet for his teacher. At the end of a long evening of food and flattery to delight his pride and palate, the teacher went home weighed down with gifts. By morning, the worst student had become the best.

A word more, a word less, this story from over four thousand years ago has never gone out of style, proving that bribery is one of Civilization’s oldest customs.

It was found on the banks of the Euphrates. The Sumerians told it, through symbols that look like bird tracks drawn with pointed canes on one of the thousands of clay tablets that disappeared from the Baghdad Museum.