From Noble Savage to Noble Revolutionary:
Myths and Realities in Latin America
The Latin Americans:
Their Love-Hate Relationship with the United States.
By
Carlos Rangel
With forewords by
Carlos J. Rangel, Carlos Alberto Montaner and Jean François Revel
Whoever leads his life,
in politics as in history, by what he’s been told, will be regrettably misled.
ORTEGA Y GASSET
(True) revolution
-which under diverse guises stirs and drives mankind since the dawn of history-
seeks to free man from the myths that oppress him, so that he may live in total
fulfilment…; whereas propaganda wants to appropriate even the infant…, disfigure
man, make him a stranger from himself. It asserts that it does so to promote
Revolution or defend freedom, but its ending is paralysis, subjugation and to
make him a slave.
HECTOR A. MURENA
I find it extremely disturbing
that mainstream ideas about the United States in the rest of the world are in
great measure falsehoods; this inserts an element of error into the entire life
of the planet which exists because, if not only because, of that, in a state of error.
JULIAN
MARIAS
The lie inserted itself
into our peoples almost constitutionally. The damage is immeasurable and
reaches deep within our being. We move at ease within the lie … That is why struggle
against the official and constitutional lie is the first step in any serious
attempt of reform.
OCTAVIO
PAZ
Because
of and for Sofía
Introduction to the new English language edition
On September 17, 2021,
a newspaper editor, adviser to governments and successful investment banker of
my close acquaintance, Russel Dallen, passed away. I had met him in 2016 while
organizing a scholarly panel in Miami to discuss the 40th anniversary
of the publication of the first edition of this book in Spanish (1976). Born in
Mississippi, Russ had a successful life, obtaining degrees in Columbia and Oxford,
becoming savvy in the international world of finance, and developing a
particular affinity for Venezuela, where he spent many years as Publisher and
Editor of two daily newspapers, one in Spanish and one in English.
When it was time for
Russ’ intervention in that panel, contrary to all the other speakers before
him, he presented in English. He deliberately did so, he said, because he
wanted to underscore the universality of the book and its need to be more
widely circulated among English reading audiences.
Russ had originally
read this book as a Fellow at Columbia University while studying under Zbigniew
Brzezinski. Once in Venezuela he read it again, this time in Spanish, and was surprised
when he realized it was that same book from his college days. Up to then he had
not because the title in English was very different from the one in Spanish, to
wit: The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship with the United
States, while in Spanish it was titled Del Buen Salvaje al Buen
Revolucionario.
His was not the only
one puzzled over the years as to the title of the book. While the original
title of the book was faithfully translated into every other language it was published
in (French, Italian, Portuguese, and German), in English that odd title was used.
A title that was, my father himself told me, suggested (imposed) by the NY publishing
house in 1977, believing it would make the book more marketable to their
audiences. The reality is that even the reviewers of the book thought it was a
flawed decision, referencing the original name repeatedly. I have thus renamed
this new translation, to keep the original intention of the title, as: From
Noble Savage to Noble Revolutionary.
This is not a
lighthearted decision. Russ’ insight and anecdote illustrates the unfortunate
fate befallen upon this work, a work which speaks to larger themes on social
and political development relevant to the broad world of today. By titling the book
“The Latin Americans” the book is immediately pigeonholed into a specialized
field of study that marginally interests mainstream political and social thought.
While not equating Rangel’s work to his, the perception would be vastly
different if the translation of Plato’s work was named “The Greeks: Their
Republic.”
In addition, while Ivan Kats’ translation of the book in 1977 was noteworthy, it must be pointed out that his source material was the French version of the text. This present edition is the first translation made directly from the original Spanish. Furthermore, omissions in that translation are now included, most notably thirteen paragraphs from Jean-François Revel’s original foreword. Other changes included grouping the last three chapters on Political Power in Latin America into a single one, losing the singular traits identified by Rangel in the subtle aspects of this issue.
Besides the one from Revel, this edition also includes two other forewords: a
biographical introduction to Carlos Rangel incorporated to the new editions of
the book In Portuguese (2019), Spanish, (2021) and Italian (2022), and a foreword
written in 1996 by Carlos Alberto Montaner, former president of the Interamerican
Institute for Democracy, prolific writer, notable Cuban dissident, and close
friend to Carlos Rangel.
Russell Dallen passed
away on what would have been Carlos Rangel’s 92nd birthday. This
edition is dedicated to Russ, and to the likeminded who seek beyond their
borders to learn about their home. I thank CEDICE Libertad, a Caracas-based
think tank co-founded by Carlos Rangel and dedicated to liberal democracy, its
Executive Director, Rocío Guijarro, the Interamerican Institute for Democracy and
its Executive Director, Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, Laurence Debray, my stepsister Adriana Meneses without whom this project would not have been possible, and Beatrice
Rangel (shared last name, no shared biological genes, but many shared
intellectual ones), for their unwavering support and encouragement to complete
this task.
CJR
Foreword to the 2019 edition:
Carlos
Rangel: Weathering the Storm of History
by Carlos J. Rangel
«Facing unpredictability,
unsafe conditions and an absence of stable and adequate institutional and legal
frameworks, human beings will react by seeking conformity and refuge within a pyramidal
system of personal relationships, with a tyrant at the top of that pyramid (…) that
is why communist countries have reinvented caudillismo, labeling it
there a ‘personality cult’».
Carlos
Rangel, From Noble Savage to Noble Revolutionary
A few months ago,[1] Pedro Almeida,
president of Faro Editorial in São Paulo, Brazil, kindly contacted me to
request permission to publish a new Portuguese language edition of From
Noble Savage to Noble Revolutionary, by Carlos Rangel, my father, and a new
appreciation of the book. More than four decades have gone by since the first
edition of this book was published by Éditions Robert Laffont in France.
The first Portuguese language edition of the book was published by Assea
in Lisbon for Portugal in 1976 and subsequently, in 1982, in São Paulo for
Brazil by the Universidade de Brasilia. Faro Editorial now offers a
third edition to the Portuguese speaking world at a time of uncertain crossroads
for a world immersed in a new ideological conflict: the one between nationalism
and globalism. This text written by
Carlos Rangel between 1974 and 1975 remains relevant today not only to
understand the lead up to our current crossroads, but to place it in its Latin
American context.
It has been said of
Carlos Rangel (1929-1988) that he was an ignored prophet, condemned to
Cassandra’s fate. To a certain extent this is true, mainly in the world of
politics. The prophetic insights of the book are particularly chilling in its
section dedicated to “Forms of Political Power in Latin America”, when he delves
into Chile and Peru showcasing what are clear precedents to what later happened
in the region, almost identically, in countries which wrapped themselves in the
garb of the “XXI Century Socialism” promoted by the São Paulo Forum 25 years
later.
But the limited flourishing
of liberalism today on Latin America has a great debt to Carlos Rangel’s mind;
and the everlasting struggle to strengthen liberal democracy feeds off his
ideas. The context of the book’s origins, its original recognition and condemnation,
and the historical basis of the coalescing of Rangel’s ideas illustrate their
importance and impact in our world today. I am grateful to Faro Editorial
and Mr. Pedro Almeida for the opportunity to share this context and importance in
a new edition of the leading volume in Carlos Rangel’s legacy.
Cold
Showers: The Unmasking of Illusions
In early 1976 Monte
Ávila editions in Caracas published its first edition of the book From Noble
Savage to Noble Revolutionary, a small run with a white cover. Just a few
months earlier, in 1975, the book had been published in France. The French liberal
philosopher Jean François Revel recalls in his memoir[2] the origins of the
book: “When I first met Carlos Rangel in Caracas in August 1974… he asked me to
read a couple pages he had written about the historical destiny and the political
psychology of Latin America. He humbly suggested the pages were, at best, a draft
for a newspaper column. After reading these brilliant pages and driven by the personal
friendship and intellectual brotherhood that immediately began between us, I pressed
him, not without glee, to develop his ideas with all the rigor they deserved in
a comprehensive and detailed book about Latin American civilization. Upon my
return to Paris, I had Éditions Robert Laffont send him a contract. This
explains the paradox that the original edition of the master work on Latin
American political theory first appeared in French.”[3]
The original manuscript
in Spanish was translated into French by Françoise Rosset, translator for Jorge
Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares (author of Morel’s Invention). Revel
states that, by appearing in French, the book targets two audiences that seeded
Rangel’s inspiration: Europe, with its romantic and mistaken conceptions about
Latin America, and Latin America, with its grandiose and mistaken self-conceptions.
Unfortunate conceptions that, of course, also coexist in the United States. In
his memoir, Revel extends himself on this:
The
European left expects from Latin America, and the Third World in general, the
revolution frustrated in their own territories. Thus, during a summer vacation in
1969 in Tunis, in Hammamet, I recall a conversation with Jean Daniel, a chat near
a beach where he had been kind enough to invite me over for dinner. The Editor
of the Nouvel Observteur [Daniel] told me: “As of today, I don’t know where World
Revolution will come from. Perhaps Latin America?” After the failure of May
1968, the French left, expert leader of all things revolution, sought out in
Latin America a branch of the Quartier Latin. That revolutionary European
left found a renewed vitality to its insurrectional dreams in Mexico 1994: the
EZL (Zapatista Liberation Army) [4]. Forgotten
once again was what I like to call Rangel’s Law originally formulated by Carlos
in From
Noble Savage to Noble Revolutionary, appropriate in 1976 and repeatedly observed
since, to wit: any time people, real persons, freely vote in fair elections
they will choose moderate solutions, center-left or center-right parties.[5] The
legendary Latin American extremism is an elitist phenomenon. The intellectuals,
military, fascists, and revolutionaries that have battled amongst themselves for
power with rifle shots and burning rhetoric over centuries are opposing
oligarchies, anxious to satisfy their appetite for domination, (not to mention their
financial appetites).
Later, Revel continues:
That Noble Savage
appeared in French before its Spanish language edition is not a simple anecdote
but is important as it relates to the substance of the book. [The target readers]
were in fact, at a minimum, both European and Latin American. Both inspiration
sources for Rangel are, conjoined and complementary: Latin America’s
misconceptions about itself and Europe’s misconceptions about Latin America.
Latin America’s aberrations and delusions have always been encouraged by the narcissistic
projections of Europeans. For these, America is like a mirror of their own
obsessions, repulsed by North America, infatuated by South America.
The western intellectual
elite was still in the throes of hangovers from the drunken bouts of the Spring
of ’68, the idealistic backlash to political assassinations in the U.S., Mexico
’68 (Tlatelolco and the Olympics), etc., as it sought ways to justify Prague,
the Cultural Revolution –and did not how to react to the genocidal Pol Pot. Amid
these existential contradictions appears Regis Debray and asserts that there is
a “Revolution within the Revolution” (1974) adjudicating that it has had its
noble rebirth in Latin America. The increasingly impossible hope of a communist
utopia in Europe can keep a candle lit in the exotic tropical jungles whence
coffee, cocoa and tobacco came from. Revolutionary romanticism thus elevates the
likes of Ché Guevara, that tropical Fouché from La Cabaña, Camilo
Torres, the rebel priest sacrificed to the all-powerful catholic church to the
glee of atheist intellectuals and, of course, Fidel Castro, the courageous
David challenging the imperial Goliath.
Carlos Rangel was
scorned by many because his book came to light during that period of political
agitation at the peak of the Cold War.[6] His argument that
communism was an empty promise and an excuse to justify totalitarian regimes
was unwelcome in that Latin American moment and, frankly, in the Western
intellectual circles. A reviewer of the U.S. edition wrote “at least it was
published on recycled paper, so no trees were cut”. His calls to defend and strengthen the
institutions of liberal democracy as the best way to achieve prosperity were
ignored while the seductive illusions of socialism took over the political
landscape of the region.
Who was that Rangel
arguing backwardness as something noxious instead of ennobling? And who proposed
that the reasons for backwardness were internal, not imposed by Yankee
imperialism? That the “liberation” and the “revolution” were myths made to perpetuate
“consular caudillos”? There were those who read into the book to reinforce
their own myths and colonial or pseudo-socialist prejudices with ironic or
pompous cadences. For example: “in a
striking work of demythologization, the Venezuelan author and former diplomat
exonerates the U.S. from responsibility for the failures of Latin America.” (Foreign
Affairs, April 1978); “As a vigorously argued polemic, this
will delight many on the non-revolutionary end of the political spectrum, but
its points merit consideration regardless” (Kirkus, November 1, 1977); “His provocative,
stimulating and unabashedly pro-American book, is often stronger on assertion
that evidence. (Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1978, p.155). Even Helen Wolff,
president of her namesake editorial house, was somewhat superficial in
commenting to the New York Times about her publication calendar for the last
quarter of 1977 when mentioning “The Latin Americans, by Carlos Rangel,
a Venezuelan. It’s about the love-hate relationship with the United States,
which takes an unusual slant by being pro-American” (NYT, September 30, 1977).
In his country Carlos
Rangel was accused of reactionary, pro-Yankee, far right and even of being a CIA
agent. In a memorable incident, his book was publicly burned in a plaza at the
main university of the country, Universidad Central de Venezuela for
“dishonoring the historical virtue of the indigenous nation”. Rangel accuses Latin
American universities of failing to educate and graduate professionals in an
efficient manner and that is why when –within the framework of a democratic
society—he headed to a public forum to debate his book in that same university,
he was mobbed by militants and agitators and spat upon along with his wife at
the time, the journalist Sofia Imber. As
the professional and democrat he was, he arrived to the debate, wiped his face
and took his seat.
The principal postulate
of the book falls by the wayside in those reactions. Rangel establishes that
Latin America has had all the conditions needed for success and that its fault lies
in not confronting the reasons for its failings, with a tantalizing “until now”,
written twice in the introduction to the book. But to achieve that success,
Latin America collectively needs to psychoanalyze itself, so to speak, to clear
away the mental clouds that lead it astray from its potential; to clear the
myths that perpetuate its fateful self-oppression manifested in a perverted
rule of law and a rationalization attributing to capitalist countries the
backward state of “third world” countries – including in Latin America. Rangel sought
with this book to begin the conversation such psychoanalysis requires and
suggests that the treatment needed to alleviate this patient’s ills is large
doses of democracy. Of true democracy: messy, pluralistic, independent of
Leninist pressures, and with a free press.
Carlos
Rangel, liberal
Rangel was not right
wing in the Manichean sense of the words.
He was not left wing either. He was a liberal. What is a liberal? One of
his favorite authors was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Moynihan defines
liberalism as follows: “the essence of liberalism consists in an optimistic
belief in progress, in tolerance, in equality, in the rule of law, and in the
possibility of attaining a sustained measure of human happiness here on earth.”
Rangel detested Somoza, Trujillo,
Stroessner what Pinochet represented. Also Castro, Gualtieri, Videla, Ernesto
Cardenal… any and all tyrants and tyrant wannabes that perpetuated (and perpetuate) the myth that
nations need a strong, centralized and all powerful government, and for whom representative
democracy is an unnecessary luxury. Rangel had to stand up against those who
did not want him interviewing representatives of the Venezuelan left to deny
them a public voice. Because he was a believer in freedom of expression, tolerance
and diversity of ideas he had to wander with his television opinion shows from
network to network when he would not budge to the will of the owners. Rangel denounced
a complicit business society where the main competitive skill was befriending
the government. In a famous speech in 1984 to leading members of the Venezuelan
business elite, he essentially accuses them of being accomplices to keeping the
country from economic development—and receives a loud standing ovation.[7] In a widely circulated
TV interview he suggests that the ownership of state enterprises should be
transferred to the workers of those enterprises as a method to decrease the
size of the state. That is being liberal… and challenges the notions of “left”
and “right”. To understand the origins of his liberal train of thought we must
approach Rangel’s personal history within the historical context of his
upbringing; to understand, “who is that Carlos Rangel?”
-0000-
In 1949 the Soviet Union challenged the world, by detonating its first atomic bomb and raising the stakes between the new world powers. Rangel identifies the failings and faults democracy faces in Latin America, setting them in the global context of a rivalry between liberalism and totalitarianism, identified in their respective hegemonies of capitalism and communism: the U.S. and the Soviet Union. His book narrates how, upon the end of WWII, there was a shift in the Soviet communist party which had allowed itself some leeway during the war as it sought allies to prevail over Nazi power. At the end of the war this quickly changed and the leader of the U.S. Communist Party, Earl Browder, was the first sacrificial lamb to what Rangel calls a renewed sectarism of the left, a practice rejecting and excluding anyone who does not follow the orthodox party line, that of the Soviet Communist Party. Browder was condemned in an article published in, Cahiers de Communisme, the journal of the French Communist Party, signed by Jacques Duclos, the party’s leader. Years later it became known that the article had in fact been written in the offices of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s secret services agency, in Moscow. Rangel reports the consequences of these events as a witness to them.
Earlier, in November 1948, a military junta had toppled Rómulo Gallegos,
the democratically elected president of Venezuela, who was close to José
Antonio Rangel Báez, Carlos Rangel’s father. This early paternal influence
associated to the democratic fever sweeping the country from 1945 to 1948 will leave
an indelible mark in him about the promise of democracy.
The so-called Venezuelan democratic triennium originated with a
previous coup, in 1945, which toppled the then military president, Gen. Isaías
Medina Angarita, who had ascended to office by the indirect vote of a
restricted electorate. A young and savvy political leader, Rómulo Betancourt, had
realized that within the armed forces there were ambitious individuals, among
them one called Marcos Pérez Jiménez, itching to topple president Medina.
Betancourt knew that if that were to happen the transition to a universal
democracy (of which the Medina government was reluctant anyway) would be
stalled and pacts with those young officers. This is also to the advantage of
Pérez Jiménez, associating himself to the credibility of a civilian-military
alliance, credibility he would lack if he were to execute his simple and ambitious
military takeover. In October 1945 the coup unfolds, Medina is toppled, and
Betancourt heads the “revolutionary” government junta.
The world was changing at an accelerated pace, signaled by the terror
inducing glow from a few months before in Japan, and the rebalancing of a new
global equilibrium. Long distance communications, quasi-instantaneous news and
new modes of transportation revolutionized thoughts and aspirations. In Venezuela,
the three years after the coup of ’45 will offer a democratic syllabus to the
country, as a debate on the framing of a new constitution airs directly to
ubiquitous transistor radios. Once this constitution, which guarantees
universal voting and social rights, is approved, popular elections are held. In
February 1948 Rómulo Gallegos, a renowned writer and intellectual, became the
first constitutional civilian president of the country since 1859 after being
overwhelmingly elected to office two months earlier. But the new democratic
constitution and the revolution of popular expectations do not please Pérez
Jiménez, who conspires once again and executes a coup merely nine months after
Gallegos assumed office.
After the coup of ’48 and the tragic death of his father in 1949,
Carlos Rangel distances himself from his country, leaving at age 21 to pursue
his university studies abroad in the United States. Three years later, in a
bout of rebelliousness, independence and youthful impulse, he elopes to Paris
with his gringa girlfriend, the young
plastic artist Barbara Barling, to the City of Lights, upsetting both high-brow
families. He arrives thus to a world of party purges, ideological depuration, intrigue,
and suspicion while he continues his studies at La Sorbonne, another hot bed of
leftists.
In Paris, in the Quartier Latin, there are exiles of all kinds, refugees from dictatorships and
tyrants in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. Rangel meets there many Venezuelans
fleeing Pérez Jiménez’s dictatorship, who is oppressing ever fiercely in Venezuela.
Among those is Luis Anibal Gómez, who in a recent extended essay[8] recollects the time when he met and became friends
with Rangel:
He lived near Parc MontSouris, close to the Ligne de Sceaux, he had a car. It was
an unselfish friendship, inspired by sincerity and frankness. He –also immersed
in the Sartrian atmosphere of the moment—told me he agreed with almost all
about Marxism, except with respect to art. He did not believe in committed art
and I, for one, detested those paintings of soviet generals, packed with medals
feeding pigeons in the park.
Unwavering I responded that what we were interested in was toppling
Pérez Jiménez, no matter what, while soviet generals could feed their pigeons;
and that everything else would be fixed or not later. It was all about
priorities.
He agreed. He would not be a militant in our group, but someone more
useful by not seeming to be one or participating with us, rather remaining at
the margins, a bit desuus de la melée. He would be crypto
communist in the slang of the times.
He then confided that through friends and influences it was possible he could
be appointed to a position in the Venezuelan Embassy in Rome. He had to respond
within a few days… I told him I would think about it… And I did, more to his
benefit than to the party’s interests: the world of espionage was alien to us,
exotic, very dangerous. We were not qualified, neither he nor I, to navigate
the murky waters of espionage and treachery. My opinion was negative.
Carlos Rangel would
become a perfect example of the saying that describes his generation well: “he who
is not socialist when young, has no heart; he who is socialist when old, has no
brain.” At the time Rangel was 24 years old, the U.S. had just obliterated a
small island in the Pacific with the horrifying hydrogen bomb, and the Soviet
Communist Party was perfecting techniques to infiltrate with subversive
propaganda the western world. Communism
had not demonstrated yet its internal structural fallacies that lead it
relentlessly to fierce totalitarian rule, and in western intellectual circles
it was accepted as a possible alternative economic model. Stalin’s crimes were hidden
from public view and those of the Soviet regime were yet to be revealed by Solzhenitsyn.
There was vigorous intellectual debate on the virtues and failings of
capitalist and communist systems; a debate handicapped by the hidden advantages
of communism which in its orthodoxy does not allow freedom of expression, ideas
and the press -that is, real discussion- and encourages subversive infiltration
and “useful idiots,”[9] while in capitalist
liberal regimes self-criticism is oxygen.
Gómez describes a
notable anecdote involving Rangel occurring towards the end of 1952 within the
semi-clandestine activities of Venezuelan exiles in Paris. The Congress of
the People for Peace had been scheduled for that December in Vienna. This event
had been fostered by the soviet intelligence services, the KGB, as an
opportunity to disseminate the anti-U.S. propaganda generated by the Korean war.
The Congress was to be presided by Jean-Paul Sartre,[10] who had described this
war as one between capitalism and the proletariat.
…when
the invitation to participate in the Vienna Conference circulated, the Adecos[11] as well
as us [congregated in] the Maison de Savants, a venue with halls for rent
located in the Quartier Latin. [The Adecos] had called in their minions
from other countries, so there were more than fifty attendees. The event
unfolded with the structure our group had set: let everyone give their opinion.
The extreme left would be presented by myself and Manuel Caballero, as expected
by the cliché the Adecos had of us.
After a
long while, when all had given their opinions, Carlos made a master recapitulation
and proposed a full endorsement for the Congress. Everyone voted in favor of
his proposal, expect for the two Adeco leaders.
To
isolate them was not in our unity plans, even though it was a democratic
decision that, by the way, surprised us with its world of lessons. All cordial
treatment [with the Adecos] ended, and we became irreconcilable enemies.
This congregation of dissidents,
even in Gómez remembrances biased in favor of the Venezuelan communists, in
effect accomplished what the directorate of the Soviet CP had formalized in the
Comintern of 1947. The sectarian directive for the left: purge any tinge of
“browderisim” and indiscipline in alliances with other leftist movements, as dictated
by Duclos in his article from a few years before; and Rangel was a witness to
that directive in action.
The president of the Venezuelan
delegation to the Congress will be General José Rafael Gabaldón, persecuted
opponent of Juan Vicente Gómez (Venezuelan dictator from 1908 to 1936), founder
and first president of the Venezuelan Democrat Party (PDV), one of the first
modern parties in the country, associated to Gen. Isaias Medina Angarita, the
president toppled in 1945. Gen. Gabaldón was also the father of Arnaldo
Gabaldón, a leading figure during the guerrilla movement of the so-called Armed
Struggle period in Venezuela, who would die accidentally in a guerrilla camp in
1964. Gen. Gabaldón’s speech in 1952 to the Congress was called “Defending
Peace and Latin America.” [12]
The playwright Bertolt
Brecht participated in the Congress as well, and his words there can be used to
describe the future of countries which will suffer attracted by the mirage of
communism: “Mankind has an amazingly short memory as to tolerated misery. Its
capacity to imagine future misery is almost even less.” Brecht will die in 1956
under mysterious circumstances in East Germany, aged 58.
In 1953 Rangel returns
to Venezuela. The country is under political repression by the dictatorship and
the typical mercantilist complicities of this type of regime prevail. Lacking
opportunity to flex his intellectual capabilities, together with his brother
and other partners he dedicates himself to commerce, including residential construction
and a Honda Motorcycle dealership. But his Paris experiences and record evidently
make him nervous and he sleeps next to his wife Barbara with a revolver under
his pillow. In an incident described by
Gómez, Rangel hides him in the house’s basement, to keep him safe from the dictator’s
security forces, which were persecuting Gómez for being a notorious militant of
the Venezuelan CP.[13]
Finally, as 1955 neared
its end, Rangel decides to self-exile, sells his home and, embarking in a
merchant steamship moves to New York, returning to the city that had welcomed
him years before during the traumatic aftermath of the war. In 1950 during his college
days, as he narrates in this book, Rangel had worried about a turn to the hard
right in the U.S. and an incipient threat of political persecution driven by
Senator Joseph McCarthy. He now arrives to a prosperous city at its peak of creativity
and to a country rejecting that populist discourse from Senator McCarthy by a
censure vote and his fall in disgrace. Certainly the cold war rages on, but the
obvious prosperity of this city is a grand showcase of the better opportunities
granted by liberalism. In late 1956, with the brutal Russian invasion to Hungary,
Rangel’s conviction that communism is not an option to improve the welfare of society
is sealed. From that moment onwards Rangel, with his experience of a life in
the shadows under a dictatorship from the right and his knowledge of the
intentions of the Soviet Communist Party from the left, becomes a fierce
defender of liberal democracy which, through his own eyes, has seen as the best
alternative system of government.
Residing in New York he delves into study and is adjunct professor of Spanish and Latin-American Literature, deepening his permanent interest in the works of Miguel de Unamuno and other thinkers of the same vein.[14] At that moment he thought of remaining in the U.S. and pursuing an academic career, but the events in Venezuela took him to another place. Naturally he was in touch with the Venezuelan expat community in New York. One of his acquaintances, Carlos Ramírez MacGregor, was close to some members of the new transitional government of Venezuela, which organized after a popular revolt in 1958 overthrew the dictator Pérez Jiménez, and is named Ambassador to Belgium. MacGregor invites Rangel to become his Cultural Attaché in the Belgian embassy. After the transition, and with a newly installed, democratically elected, government, Rangel returns to Venezuela.
In
his memoirs on Rangel, Gómez[15] recalls their
reencounter in the early 60s:
Back here [in
Venezuela] once again, Carlos stated to me his change of perspective as to the Cuban
revolution, extensive to all of Marxism and the revolution. I listened to him,
and I responded:
-
Do you think that is sufficient to end our friendship?
-
No, I only wanted you to know…
A firm believer in freedom
of speech and the debate of ideas, during this period he heads the editorial
staff of the magazine Momento, which he models as a combination of Time
Magazine and Life. He hires his friend Luis Aníbal Gómez and a staff
which includes the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the
Christian Democrat leader Rodolfo José Cárdenas, and the future president of
Venezuela, Luis Herrera Campíns. But
there is a final ingredient that will firmly set the liberalism of Carlos
Rangel.
From 1964 to 1968
Carlos Rangel embarks in a political career within the new Venezuelan
democratic model; a model and ambitious vison of a great Venezuela, a modern
country based on an industrial economy, firmly integrated to world commerce and
promoter of the values of representative democracy and respect for human rights,
the latter encapsulated in the so-called Betancourt Doctrine, which rejects any
form of dictatorship. Rangel wanted to be part of that project, runs and is
elected to the Municipal Council of Caracas, the capital city, nominated by the
Acción Democrática party, the social democrats. As council member he will live and
breathe the toils of a politician and the negative effects of populism on
government administration. He walked barrios, gave away handouts, inaugurated
public works, debated budgets, and drafted edicts. He was appointed President
of the City Council, which led to more petitioners and solicitors of all kinds.
Years later, during a
conversation I had with him, Rangel commented that the worst part of public
life was having to receive people that constantly flowed into his offices to ask,
ask, and ask. He told me in part out of frustration for not being able to fulfill
fair requests, in part out of frustration for having to listen to privileged
elites that believe they are entitled to national treasure, and in part by his
frustration as a political cronyism developed that trained everyone to submit
to a paternal state: “it is a depressing spectacle, the line of people in front
of a government minister’s home waiting from the predawn hours to try and give
him a little piece of paper with their request when he leaves in the morning.” Despite
having been offered numerous cabinet posts afterwards, Rangel never accepted again
a political appointment or position, except as part of an occasional diplomatic ceremonial delegation.
But what he did learn
from his political career experience those years was the cause-effect
relationship that democratic systems and effective rule of law have on opportunity
for economic and industrial development of a nation and its citizens. This
period also served as a profound study (in theory as well as in practice) about
the nature of the state, leading him to the conclusion that a limited state is
a key factor leading to the prosperity of a country. From here begins his
research as to why the territories south of the Rio Grande in relation to their
neighbor to the north cannot be characterized as anything else but a failure. That
is the fundamental question.
Two
eras, two confrontations:
communism vs capitalism / nationalism vs globalism
An ideology’s attractiveness
is the conviction that its values and interest structure are the ones that are
“right.” Right, broadly speaking, as the one to improve the present and
future destinies of a collective. From the beginning towards the middle of the
19th century the ideology of communism arises as an answer to the
“dark side” of capitalism. Capitalism had generated a surge in creativity,
productivity and the era known as the Industrial Revolution. It also had
resulted in an unprecedented technological disruption. This disruption manifested
itself in thousands to millions of people left out of this created prosperity
–be it by the exploitation of their labor or by their obsolescence within the
new economy—located in growing urban centers with insufficient infrastructure
for the demographic explosion created by these conditions. The new prosperity
also created a great and visible income disparity as the middle class expanded, as
well as expectations of the possibility of being part of that growing
prosperity.
The conditions of the
new working class in Europe from the middle towards the end of the 19th
century were miserable, particularly in contrast to those of the new middle
class. The political movements that sympathized with that working class were those
that fed expectations of participating in the middle-class bonanza and nurtured
jealousy and hatred with sarcasm and satirical terms such as “petit bourgeoisie” (the use of sectarian derogatory terms to characterize political enemies is common in totalitarian aspirational practice, to strip the targets of those terms of their humanness and make them "the others")
The Industrial Revolution
predates the political and governmental organizations that adapt to the
consequences of that revolution. The demographic, economic and social
convulsions brought upon a world of isolationist nations with mercantilist
elites resistant to change will eventually lead to WWI and the Russian Revolution.
The basic principle of
mercantilism and that of its stepchildren, communism and fascism,[16]
is that all commercial relationships are zero-sum, while the primary principle
of capitalism is that commercial relationships are win-win propositions. The
first and second world wars were the outcome of conflicts between countries and
social groups stuck in the zero-sum view (including, for example, racial purity
and “class struggle”). The most transcendental worldwide action of the second postwar
period was the recognition of the need to create a win-win global society. That
was the underlying force driving the Marshall Plan and establishing the United
Nations and multilateral institutions; a force that generated the longest
period of growing prosperity the world has ever known and that would fell the
Soviet Union with their zero-sum view based ideology.
Capitalism is the
economic interpretation of liberalism, while communism is, in essence, a
reinterpretation of mercantilism. At its core, mercantilism is based on the atavist
instinct that in a fight between two tribes one dies and the other one
survives. That instinct is unerasable, it is human nature; but, as is the case
with many instincts and nature, it can be subjected to laws and norms. That is
why for a liberal society the rule of law, which begins with contract law, is intrinsic
to its nature; and the greatest protection of the rule of law occurs under
democratic government with its inherent system of checks and balances. Likewise, states based upon mercantilist principles are strengthened
when the rule of law and democracy are weak, that is, under a totalitarian
regime. At the fall of fascism, the alternative mercantilist ideology left in
the mid-20th century was communism, sustained by totalitarianism,
just as mercantilism in its origins was sustained by autarchic monarchies.
The period between
1917 and 1989, from the Russian Revolution to the Fall of the Berlin Wall, was
a period when the economic models derived from liberalism and mercantilism
clashed directly. Among the defenders of liberalism during that period was Carlos
Rangel, who shows up in 1976 with his book, From Noble Savage to Noble
Revolutionary. With this book, Rangel identifies the vices and deficiencies
that challenge democracy in Latin America and establishes the global context of
the region within the confrontation between mercantilism and liberalism and
their economic models at the time: communism and capitalism.
In Latin America this
confrontation is well characterized by Rangel as tinged by the history of the
region. The legacy of the Spanish conquest, colonization and monarchic regime
inserted itself congenitally into the Latin American psyche as a deep affinity
with mercantilist principles. Oligarchs since colonial times and throughout the
internecine wars afterwards were engaged in elite substitutions with the
purpose of taking over perceived natural or class riches. These struggles for
power do not contemplate -as Revel suggests in his comments cited above- the
creation of wealth, only the distribution (or appropriation) of wealth.
Communism injects
itself into this context at the beginning of the 20th century and at
the creation of modern political parties. Of these, one that has great long-term
consequences is the Peruvian APRA party (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria
Americana), founded by Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre in 1924, and which emerges as
a tailor-made socialism for Latin America. Because of its geographic and
cultural distance, Latin-American communism will be heterodox from the Soviet hard
line. That is why, out of this common socialist seedling (typical political parties in the region were modeled after the Soviet CP, with a Central Committee and a powerful Secretary General), true democratic parties
will sprout, some keeping their roots, others in opposition but maintaining
consensus of the liberal democratic model to which APRA adhered. A consensus on
the goal, if not on the means to achieve it.
Many ills of the
region can be attributed to the congenital mercantilist deficiency, for example,
endemic corruption. To a (mercantilist) bureaucratic official on duty,
corruption is justified as a simple exercise of his right to distribute wealth
as he sees fit, including to his own pocket. That is why, in ill-structured bureaucracies
of “liberal” governments, opportunities for illicit enrichment are taken advantage
of by officers justifying their self-dealing with that atavist mentality. Any
honest officer is challenged by a prisoner’s dilemma that encourages
corruption, where (a) the fool is the one who does not take advantage of his
power and position to enjoy ill-gotten gains, (b) is under pressure to complicitly share
the feast, and (c) is perceived as corrupt anyway by external agents (press and
citizens) even if he is not, because he belongs to a structure “that everyone
knows is corrupt.”[17]
When the caudillo
Fidel seizes power, the influence of orthodox communist ideology increases, now
with a Latin-American flavor, bringing home the Duclos directive to purge the
so-called pseudo-socialists. The fertile mercantilist ground in the region
finds a great ideological ally with Fidel, the Soviet CP representative (Rangel
calls him “consul”), in these territories. The “third-world” construct becomes
the explanation as to why the “dispossessed” exist, as Carlos Alberto Montaner
writes in his foreword to the 2005 edition of this book. An explanation that proclaims
that there exists poor distribution of wealth and power originated by the
elites internally and by capitalist countries internationally. This explanation
states that rich countries, in particular the northern neighbor, have depredated
the poor countries; and within this last category Latin America is included,
against all reality, relative to the rest of the world at the time. These
themes will be further explored in depth in Rangel’s second book “Third World
Ideology.” That is the emotional rhetoric of the times, and emotion drives politics
more than reason. Until the pernicious nature of zero-sum mercantilist
influence is not recognized, the illusion of the “dispossessed” and the
seductive power of communism as a solution will remain, with its consequences
of descent into totalitarian rule, repeating history time and time again.
In Chapter 10, Rangel
describes the process that Chile went through between the years 1970 to 1973,
virtually identical and premonitory of a period nearly 20 years later between
the years 1999 and 2002 in Venezuela. Both democratic backsliding processes culminate
with an institutional rupture, with the caveat that in Chile, because of the
precarious economic situation that country was in, said rupture was accepted by
society and consolidates, whereas in Venezuela, amidst an oil boom, the support
to the rupture collapsed, with the eventual consequences of entrenching an open
and fierce totalitarian dictatorship.
As a final point, it
must be pointed out that Rangel identifies another pernicious and universal deficiency
with effects intrinsic to “The Noble Savage”: Telurism. Telurism posits that
even the most recent arrivals to a region will identify with the historical and
indigenous past of their new territory and will consider themselves defenders
of the spirit of the place, the “Genius loci.” From this concept the origins of
a new convulsion can be traced which, confronting telurism and mercantilism with
diversity and liberalism, shakes our contemporary world: nationalism vs.
globalism.
Economic globalism
seeks to efficiently balance the comparative advantages of the labor, commodity,
and consumer markets, and to maximize win-win relationships between all
markets. The economic globalism movement is a direct consequence of liberal
ideology and the capitalist model. To establish rule of law with supra-national
jurisdiction, international treaties, including trade agreements, are an
essential part of globalism. As a direct consequence of economic
interdependence among nations, the chances of war breaking out are diminished, since
no one wants to destroy their customers or suppliers. Because of globalism,
barriers and borders between countries go down, creating great disruption in
their respective internal markets.
Nationalism, on the
other hand, seeks to exacerbate the special, exclusive nature and identity of
the inhabitants of a national territory, appropriating the telurist sentiment
of said inhabitants and feeding off their atavist tribalism. Nationalism pretends
to base its economic success in zero-sum relationships. But the great internal market
disruptions brought upon by globalism easily lead to resentments similar to
those that fed late 19th century communism. With the ideological
collapse of communism, nationalism is the new flag waved, the new anchor of
mercantilism which, in its parallel iteration in the early 20th
century was known as fascism. Since its commercial relationships are based on
zero-sum principles, the chances of totalitarian rule and wars increase when
nationalism surges.
Ideologies in conflict
are interests in conflict. The end of communism did not represent the end of its
archetype, mercantilism. Just as communism surged out of the disruptions caused
by the “unbridled” capitalism of the 19th century, a consequence of
the ascendency of aspirational reason over atavist emotion, the current surge
in nationalism is an answer to the perceived “unbridled” globalism of today.
Legacy
of Carlos Rangel
More than four decades
since its publication in 1976, this book has become mandatory and essential
reading to understand the political history of Latin America. Any person searching for the reasons as to the
differences in the development of the U.S. and the rest of the continent to the
south of its border, the rise of “caudillos”, and the embedded populist sentiment
in the region needs to read this book that, more than history, in parts reads
as a manual. Even if was not widely celebrated or distributed at the time of
publication, historical perspective has reclaimed Rangel’s important
contribution to the social and political discourse and established him as an
important contributor to liberal thought worldwide.
If our focus was
limited by Cold War blinders, we would center our answers regarding the
hegemony of communist ideology in greater Latin America as a reaction to the
obvious success of its great neighbor to the north. This answer is not fully satisfying,
however, because the differences between both regions precede the advent of
communism. Communism did strike a resonant chord in the mercantilist heart of
the region, and communism has been bandied by some as the solution to the
region’s failure and by others as the reason for it. But the reason for that
failure must be sought for more deeply, and that is what Rangel does in this
book.
Rangel was right when
he indicted the legacy of the Spanish conquest and colonization as the great
culprit of the cultural defects of Latin American people. The fevers from that
legacy, manifested in predatory mentality, paternal machismo, autocratic
mercantilism, and sectarian classism, have not broken from the political body of
these nations. Cultural defects are as hard, or harder, to change than the genetic
makeup of a body. That has not kept some from trying and continuing to try to
do so. Yet, the context of what is trying to be accomplished must be understood.
There will always be a vision for an ideal society, a utopia, which some
envision as a communist one, others as a capitalist one; but the mercantilist
defect, as a sand tossed into gears, grinds those utopic visions into harsh realities.
In the case of communisms, the vision degenerates into a huge state monopoly led
by a privileged minority elite, and collective misery under economic, social
and political repression. In the case of capitalism, mercantilist distortions can
generate powerful oligarchies, great economic inequality, and a high level of
frustrated expectations, an exploitable brew for rapacious populists of any ideology.
Self-interest is
natural to humans and, when allowed to flourish, favors generalized prosperity.
That is a basic premise of capitalism, as posited by Adam Smith and derived from
the liberal revolutions of the 18th century. Simultaneously, Adam
Smith warned about the danger of monopolies and their capacity to distort prosperity,
limiting opportunities and creating toxic inequalities. Both socialist tyranny
and mercantilist oligarchy, two sides of the same coin, exercise repression by
concentrating political and economic power in one or just a few monopolized
sectors. The elements of liberal democracy -freedom of expression, rule of law,
representative government, power alternation, multiplicity of interests and
equal opportunity- are natural checks to the potential abuse from oligarchies
and tyrannies. The purpose of politics is to improve the welfare of society as
a whole and, without a shadow of a doubt, history has demonstrated that under
the rule of liberal democracy societies have prospered more than under mercantilist
oligarchies or socialist tyrannies.
That is the solution
Rangel proposed in his writings and public life: greater and better doses of
real democracy. It is in this sense that Rangel’s message is clearly current in
an alarming manner. His diagnosis about the origins of the fever which has led
to Latin America’s failure has yet to be accepted by the patient, which will
not heal unless it takes its medicine: big doses of true democracy.
Foreword to the Second Edition (2005):
A book that is also a banner
by Carlos Alberto Montaner
Nearly thirty years ago, in 1976, the first edition of
From Noble Savage to Noble Revolutionary appeared, written by Carlos
Rangel, an author then hardly known outside his Venezuelan borders. I remember
that I received one of the first copies in my office in Madrid, sent by his
wife Sofía Imber, an extraordinary woman about whom I had very good references conveyed
by certain mutual friends living in Caracas, who admired and described her, in
all fairness, as “an authentic force of nature.”
I confess that I opened the book fearing I would
receive one of the typical ideological diatribes of the undemocratic left.
Somehow, the misleading title promised another brutal attack on Yankee
imperialism, ruthless colonialism, or voracious multinationals and deceptive
formal democracy. Those were the language, adjectives and approach commonly
used in those post-Vietnam times, in which the USSR seemed to be the glorious
and inevitable destiny of the planet, and in which Fidel Castro and the Cuban
revolution were the revered reference for the Latin American continental left.
Simply put, at that time the communists and their allies were winning the Cold War
that had begun after the Nazis and fascists were defeated in 1945.
Wonderful confusion. As I read, my eyes lit up with
joyous surprise. Beginning with Jean-Françoise Revel's brilliant prologue it
was evident that I faced a very well written text targeting the pernicious
Latin American self-victimhood tradition. Rangel denounced the false essence of
the theory of dependency (something that years later Fernando Henrique Cardozo,
one of its most devoted apostles, would humbly accept when he stopped being a
Marxist sociologist to become the serious and moderate president of Brazil),
placed the responsibility of our relative failures upon ourselves, revealed the
doctrinarian contradictions of Marx's followers, trashed the childish view of a
good guys and bad guys’ story, and dared to passionately defend Western ways of
life -including democracy and the market economy- that had transformed some
nations into the richest corners of the planet, while openly criticizing the
totalitarian barbarism of the left, without ignoring, of course, the
authoritarianism of the right, which also disgusted the Venezuelan essayist.
After the hasty reading of the book -hastened by my
enthusiasm- I wrote to Rangel a letter full of praise and asked permission to
include as a portico to a book of mine on the subject of the two centuries of
the founding of the United States, which was about to about to be published in
Madrid, “200 Years of Gringos,” (Sedmay, Madrid, 1976 / University Press of America,
Landham, MD, 1983) a phrase in his book that seemed especially provocative and
audacious: “And who can doubt that if this democratic power, guardian of the
hemisphere had not existed (out of self-interest, but that It is another concern)
Latin America would not have been a victim in the 19th century of the European
colonialism that Asia and Africa knew; and later, in our own time, of the even
worse imperialisms that the twentieth century has seen? But none of this is
taken into consideration when formulating the fashionable hypotheses about the
causes of the Latin American backwardness (and the North American advance), but
rather it is affirmed without nuances and without contradiction that the North
American political, economic and cultural influence has caused our underdevelopment.”
Naturally, Rangel responded with a joyous telegram
that sealed our friendship forever, authorized me to quote his text, and a
short time later asked me to present -"baptize," the Venezuelans say-
his volume in Madrid, a task which I carried out with immense pleasure, among
other reasons, because in Spain after the then recent death of Franco, we were
transitioning towards democracy and the confusion about Latin American reality
was almost absolute. Although a good part of the Spaniards had abandoned the
Third World mentality, the worst stereotypes and political prejudices about
that region of the world still circulated, and Rangel's work would help clarify
the panorama to some extent.
Three decades later, the unavoidable question is why
Venezuela, the country in which the entire ruling class read or knew of
Rangel's work, voluntarily fell (at least in its beginnings) for the trappings
of Chavismo, a quintessential manifestation of the third world ideology
denounced in this book. And the answer points to several reasons:
unfortunately, the essay was perceived as an ideological argument disconnected
from the national reality. Very few people saw it as something it also was: a
stern warning against political adventurism by the collectivist anti-Western
left. In that fabulously rich Venezuela of the mid-seventies, when the country
grew exponentially, becoming the destination and dream not only for half of Latin
Americans, but also for quite a few Spaniards, Italians and Portuguese, almost
no one realized that a society that harbors mostly wrong ideas or absurd
judgments ends up committing serious mistakes. As the gringos often say:
"if you don't know where you’re going, you’ll end up in the wrong
place."
Venezuelans, like the rest of Latin America, without
excluding almost the entire ruling class incardinated in the two great
political formations of their country, had a populist vision of power and
society. They assumed that the role of government was to plan and command, not
to obey laws and institutions. They thought that the purpose of governing was
to distribute the existing wealth, without enhancing the conditions for society
to create wealth. They promoted dependency, not individual responsibility. They
cultivated the political patronage of a citizenry expecting gifts and
privileges from the ruling party, reiterating to the crowd from all platforms, classrooms,
and in many media, a message affirming that it had been victimized by the evil
dispossessing of some goods that supposedly it was entitled to by right and of
which it was iniquitously deprived, a sensation summed up in a curious word the
poor began to be called: "dispossessed." Someone - the bourgeoisie,
capitalism, the middle classes, "the Americans" - had apparently
taken what was rightfully theirs from the vast majority of poor Venezuelans.
In this rarefied ideological atmosphere, when the
price of oil fell for a prolonged period -coupled with the poor management of a
legendarily inefficient public sector- a substantial part of the population
felt frustrated and cheated by the democratic era that emerged after Marcos
Pérez Jiménez fell in 1958. Very few people stopped to reflect that, with all
its defects and flaws, that criticized Venezuela, that victim of corruption,
improvisation and public mismanagement, had nevertheless exhibited the longest period
of peace, prosperity and development the country had ever known since the
establishment of the republic. There is no doubt that it was a nation that
suffered from certain problems, but there was not even one that could not have
been corrected within democratic norms and political rationality.
It was at that time that the so-called puntofijismo[18]
consensus began to disintegrate into a blur. It was then that citizens
increasingly and (unconsciously) began to dream of the revolutionary solution.
What was that? It was to trust the inveterate superstition that a
well-intentioned caudillo, surrounded by archangelic and dedicated comrades in arms,
oblivious to the conventional corrupt political leaderships, would seize power
to correct mistakes, punish the guilty and bring wealth and collective happiness.
Hence, in 1992, when Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez and other military coup
leaders tried to overthrow President Carlos Andrés Pérez by force and left several
hundred dead lying in the streets, the popular reaction instead of indignation
was one of complacent acquiescence. According to polls at the time, 65 percent
of Venezuelans said they sympathized with the coup. The message was
transparent: at that point in history, a significant number of Venezuelans were
unaware that the essence of democracy and the rule of law is not the periodic
electoral rite, but humble compliance with the law, even when we feel deeply
dissatisfied with a government's achievements.
Carlos Rangel's suicide in 1988 was a severe blow not
only for Sofía, his family and his friends, but also for Latin American thinking
and for all Venezuelans. When the Berlin Wall was brought down just a year
later, I remember that I couldn't help but think how much Carlos would have
enjoyed the disappearance of communism in Europe and the total discrediting of
Marxism: history had confirmed his best reasoning and intuition. However, I am
sure that he would have suffered terribly from the 1990s onwards, when
Venezuela placed itself on a dangerous incline and began an irresponsible slide
into the abyss. In any case, this new edition of From Noble Savage to Noble Revolutionary
is a good starting point to begin an in-depth examination of the reasons that
led Venezuela to the deplorable state it is in today, and to the seek formulas
contributing to rescue the country from the growing oppression it suffers
precisely because of the imposition of ideas that were painstakingly demolished
by Rangel. When almost no one dared to defend individual responsibility and
Western values, Carlos Rangel had the courage to write this landmark work.
Yesterday this was a very important book. Today it must serve as a banner for
Venezuelans who are not resigned to losing their freedoms.
Foreword to the First Edition (1976)
by Jean-François Revel
This book you are about to read is the first
contemporary essay on Latin American civilization that provides a truly new and
probably accurate interpretation. That is (first condition of an accurate
interpretation), the author begins by dispelling false explanations, dishonest descriptions,
and complacent excuses. From Noble Savage to Noble Revolutionary is
indispensable not only for understanding Latin America, but of a good portion
of the contemporary world where the same failures, the same impotence, the same
illusions are to be found. Beyond his immediate object and specific case,
Carlos Rangel's work constitutes a broad reflection on the discrepancies
between what a society is and the image such a society has of itself. At what point
does this dissonance become so wide as to be incompatible with a grip on
reality? This is the question we seek to answer as we examine the history of
Spanish America to confront its "myths" with its
"realities".
Testimonials from foreigners, particularly Europeans,
are chiefly responsible for the myths of Latin America. In this regard, Europe
has been a most prolific fabulist, naturally, since it was the colonizing power
and cultural shaper of Latin American society. Today, lacking soldiers and
priests to spare, it sends its self-obsessed delusions.
That is because we Europeans have persistently used,
much more so than trying to know, the two Americas to satisfy our own needs.
Economic, imperial, abd ideological cravings; appetites for adventures, dreams,
and exoticism; desires to convert, to stimulate or to hate… How many false fantasies
has our narcissism fostered this way!
Fantasies of ourselves projected onto ourselves, in
fact, since it was Europe that populated the American continent, ruled and
administered it directly for centuries, deported African slaves to America,
exterminated, separated or ruled over (depending on whether they were more or
less dense) indigenous populations. We pretend to forget that American
civilizations, as they exist today, are the result of European imperialism,
either from conquest, or from that which we could qualify as “flight” imperialism:
millions of migrants expelled from Europe to America fleeing misery or
persecution.
Whatever the mixture of aberrant guilt, competitive
spirit, inferiority complexes or blissful paternalism that guides our concepts
of the two Americas, it must be recognized that this mixture primarily engenders
myths; that a powerful mental self-censorship filters our perception of most
information, even the most elementary, that comes to us from these countries.
In the 20th century, these myths have crystallized (simplifying) around two
main beliefs: North America is reactionary; Latin America is revolutionary.
Now, while the "myths and realities" of
North America are, in spite of it all, objects of constant debate in which a
small part of reality manages to surface, our perceptions of Latin America fall
almost exclusively into the realm of legend. From the beginning, the
inclination to know these societies, to understand them or simply to describe
them, was overwhelmed by our need to use them to buttress our own fables.
It would not be so bad, if only our legends had not
become, over the years, poisons that the Latin Americans themselves imbibe. The
latter are not guiltless, let us be precise, of fabricating and propagating
their own myths. But they find a prodigious stimulus to do this when the
mirages in their imagination, those excuses they have forged, are certified as
authentic by the universal conscience from abroad.
My embarrassment, in writing this prologue at the
author’s friendly request, is that I owe most of what I now think about Latin
America to his book. It is common that prologues are written by masters, not by
disciples. So, more illuminating than my own Eurocentric comments, here are
some extracts and paraphrases from letters that Carlos Rangel wrote to me while
he was working on his book so that we can immediately grasp his key themes:
“As I said to you at the time of our meeting in Caracas,
a de-mythologizing job needs to be done. Not that all that is said about Latin
America is false, but the sum of it creates a false idea. In part this is
because for centuries, distorted images of the reality of this continent have
been used as ingredients for controversies, anxieties, and daydreams of
European civilization. Columbus himself laid the first stone of that building
of myths, both by the motivations of his adventures and by the reports he made
of them to the Catholic Monarchs, in which he claimed to have perhaps
discovered the Earthly Paradise. Later, Father Las Casas and other friars completed
the image of the “noble savage”, very much alive today, and launched the “dark
legend” about the supposed absolute evils of Spanish colonization, a legend
that was amplified by England, France and Holland -rival powers- to undermine
Spain all the more easily since the latter did everything possible up to the
1800’s to keep its American provinces isolated from the rest of the world.”
Whatever its abuses and crimes may have been, it is
not true that Spanish colonization was exclusively an accumulation of outrages over
three centuries. During his voyage throughout various regions of the Spanish
Empire in America on the eve of its dissolution, Baron Alexander von Humboldt
was surprised by the degree of progress, culture, and knowledge that he found
in a city as insignificant as Caracas at that time. This explains why there, as
well as in other parts of the continent, exceptional minds such as a Bolívar or
a Miranda arose whom, Carlos Rangel demonstrates when analyzing their thinking,
were at the level of the most remarkable contemporaneous theorists and statesmen
from Europe or North America. However, and contrary to what happened almost naturally
in North America and, for better or worse, in Europe the ideas of these men failed
in Spanish America to insert themselves into their institutions, customs or
methods of government.[19]
How to explain this failure? Because make no mistake:
the history of Latin America since the early 19th century, in contrast to the
history of North America, is a history of failure. Why? This is the question
this book seeks to answer, since that failure and its causes are perpetuated to
this day even as the myths that surround it may evolve as, for example, in the transformation
of the myth of the Noble Savage into the myth of the Noble Revolutionary.
Several reasons for this failure, far or near, can be
considered. The North Americans did not have to integrate the sparse indigenous
people they found in the territories they occupied: they segregated or
exterminated them. In contrast, the need to integrate the much more numerous and
better organized indigenous peoples of the southern civilizations was a key
factor and persists in being the cancer of the
"America-that-has-failed", that is, Latin America. In North America
the locals were marginalized. In Spanish America they became, in contrast, the
bulk of the workforce and the engine of the economy.
In a different letter, Rangel highlights, in effect:
“The
colonizer who came from Spanish Europe created a society in which the Indians
reduced to servitude were an organic and indispensable part, the men provided their
work, the women their sex. Hispanic Americans are at the same time descendants
of conquerors and of conquered people, of masters and slaves, of rapists and
raped women. For us, the myth of the Noble Savage is a mixture of pride and
shame. At our extreme, we will not recognize ourselves except in him, and even
children or grandchildren of recent European immigrants, will identify as
“Tupamaros”, (from Túpac Amaru, a descendant of the Incas who in the 18th
century led an Indian revolt against the Viceroy of Peru). Thus, the Noble
Savage is transformed into the Noble Revolutionary, the redeemer, the one whom
the New World must give birth to, the "New Man" our Promised Land
carries in its womb: the Che."
Contrary to the 1776 revolution from which the United
States resulted and in which North Americans, even while rejecting political
tutelage from England, never ceased to recognize themselves as beneficiaries
and continuators of English civilization, Latin America mythically wanted to eliminate
completely the legacy of what was, however, its only culture:
“In Latin America, the War of Independence was a flare
of anti-Spanish hatred, a violent anger of children who were too long
subjected, a ritual sacrifice of the father. It was also a civil war (very few
peninsular Spaniards participated in the fighting), as if the two halves of the
Latin American soul had come out to confront each other on the battlefields…”
But this "revolutionary" society fails. Neither
at decolonization nor later has it managed to become a modern, dynamic,
rational community. Having rejected and destroyed the structures of the Spanish
Empire, it was unable to create any others that were both stable and somewhat
human. The history of Latin America in the 20th century extends those contradictions
begat at its conception. It continues to gyrate around false revolutions and
anarchic dictatorships, corruption and misery, ineffectiveness and exacerbated
nationalism.
Meanwhile, the insolent success of the USA, has become
a factor seeding additional bitterness, and not just because of the concrete
results of the North American hyperpower, since:
"It is an unbearable scandal that a handful of
Anglo-Saxons, which arrived in the Hemisphere much later than the Spanish,
devoid of everything and in a climate so severe that they barely survived the
first winters, have become the world's leading power."
If the history of Latin America is that of a failure Rangel
states, while presenting his thesis, what is needed then is,
“an inconceivable collective psychoanalysis of Latin
Americans so that Latin America can face the true causes of the contrast
between the two Americas. This is the reason why, knowing well it to be false,
every Latin American political leader is forced to uphold that our evils find
sufficient explanation in North American imperialism, which of course has
existed and still exists, but came afterwards
as a consequence, not as a cause of our helplessness. As Schumpeter says,
even robbery, as morally hateful as it is, raises the question of the origin of
the thief's strength and the weakness of his victim.”
Despite its economic laggardness, characterizing Latin
America as part of what for thirty years we have called the Third World has
never been fair. To begin with because Latin America is essentially Western, regardless
of its pre-Columbian past, given its languages, its vision of the world, its
culture and its population. In addition -and this is a lesson I have personally
learned from Carlos Rangel's book- because Latin American underdevelopment is
political before it is economic. More precisely, in Latin America its economic
underdevelopment is a consequence of its political underdevelopment, and not
the opposite, as happens in the true Third World.
Be that as it may, this double underdevelopment has
precipitated the "revolutionary" vocation of Latin America, since
"revolution" is seen as a shortcut to overcome a situation characterized
by the inability to build modern democratic states and prosperous economies capable,
for the same reason, of reducing foreign domination. But the Latin American
“revolutions” have either been of such virulence that they have ruined what
they tried to save, like the Mexican Revolution of 1911, which lasted ten years
and still kept in poverty those it sought to save: the peasants; or conceal
under a verbose “social language” an incompetence that generates sudden
disaster, as in the Peruvian “socialism” of 1969-74; or the “justicialism” of
Perón, who twenty years ago ruined at an astonishing speed, and it seems irredeemably,
the most prosperous economy in Latin America; or the Cuban Revolution, which
has done nothing more than transfer a country from North American domination to
Soviet satelliteization.[20] In another work note,
Rangel wrote to me:
“The Cuban Revolution has given new virulence to all
the misunderstandings about Latin America. Fidel Castro filled with joy the
hearts of all those who felt humiliated by America’s strength. Just as when the
"Noble Savage" was fashionable, the eyes of Europe have turned towards
us, not to discover scientific truths, but to find validation of entirely
European prejudices, myths and frustrations. Disgusted by Stalinism, and victim
of an inferiority complex to North America, Europe was delighted to discover
Fidel, and continues to see in ‘Che’ the ‘Noble Revolutionary'. We Latin
Americans receive this rhetorical flood with a degree of pleasure, but at the
same time with irritation. The attention paid to us is flattering, but originates
from great frivolity, great conceit and great condescension.”
It would have been presumptuous of me to try to
summarize in this prologue the conclusions of a book whose merit lies,
precisely, in making us aware of the complexity of a subject in which, until
now, simple views have prevailed. I preferred, aided by some preparatory texts
that do not appear in the work, to help the reader follow -hopefully with the
same deep interest I had- the progress in Carlos Rangel’s reflections as they
unfolded; and to articulate the great questions which Rangel responds
brilliantly with From Noble Savage to Noble Revolutionary.
I reiterate in closing, that the scope of this book
goes well beyond Latin America. Since, even if Latin America is in itself an
interesting and important field of study, its problems and its delusions are mirrored
in other continents. Its resentments and fears towards the US are an
exacerbated version of passions that Europe also holds and knows well. Its
difficulties in acclimating to liberal democracy, the failure of Chilean
“democratic socialism” and the rise of a “national-militarist socialism” that serves
to mask and make new forms of caudillismo acceptable, are parallel to those
also found in other parts of the world. If Latin America, with its western
cultural heritage and its relatively favorable situation, cannot find a path
without relinquishing the ideals and achievements of the Liberal Revolution, it
would be a very bad omen for the rest of the planet, since it would mean that
the greatest part of humanity cannot be governed except by authoritarianism and
terror.
From Noble Savage to Noble Revolutionary
Introduction
Spanish, not Latin
Latin Americans are not satisfied with what we are,
but at the same time have not been able to agree on what we are or what we want
to be. What exactly does this Latin American essence we share from the
Rio Grande to Patagonia consist of? One possible answer is to say that there is
not one Latin America, but 20 (title of the well-known [1962] book by Marcel
Niedergang), and even throw Brazil (and even Haiti) into the bag. But every Hispanic
American knows, when meeting a Brazilian, that he is facing him, not
next to him; that both of them look at the world from different and
eventually conflicting perspectives.
On the other hand, the ten thousand kilometers separating
northern Mexico from southern Chile and Argentina are a geographical distance,
not a spiritual one.
Of course, there are, in such a vast territory,
marginalized human groups inhabiting in one or other of these countries who do
not partake in the dominant Hispanic culture. The fact that these groups are vestiges
of the pre-Columbian inhabitants, of the “legitimate owners” of the territory, their
ancestors who were (and themselves continue to be) victims for them of a
foreign conquest and domination; and the additional fact that the blood of
these slaves flows, mixed, within the veins of an enormous proportion of
Hispanic Americans, are facts that tend to confuse the conscience of the
continent, injecting into it elements of undefinition, mythology, racism, guilt
and inferiority complexes, etc.
But simplifying, for the moment, one of the most
anguishing and fundamental debates among the many that have tortured Latin
America, I will say that it is precisely Spanish America itself the one
that, from the conquest to this day, has posed this problem as an active
subject in which aboriginal cultures and the human beings protagonists of those
cultures are passive objects. The so-called Indians, because of their
presence in America at the time of discovery; because of what from their
culture could not but help but become part of the Hispanic societies forged in
their conquest, colonization and evangelization; because of the immense tragedy
of their defeat, massacre and slavery; because of their participation in the
process of miscegenation; and because of their persistent presence, have
contributed to a very important part of Latin American consciousness (and also its
guilty conscience). But, in spite of all fashionable indigenist talk,
Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador,
Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico,
Santo Domingo, Uruguay and Venezuela add up to a single culture, the Hispanic
American culture, implanted in 18 independent nations and are one nation
politically subjected to the United States.
The Spaniards found a variety of cultures and even
aboriginal civilizations in those territories. Afterwards they imported black
Africans. Immigrants of various origins later integrated in various proportions
into each country. The Anglo-Saxon, hemispheric and world hegemony has had a
profound impact, more pronounced in some countries than others, but globally generalized.
However, a bit surprisingly if you will, but in a palpable way, Spanish America
exists and can be examined without the need to divide it into twenty or even
three or five.
It would be clearly abusive, instead, to generalize
about a “Latin America” which included Brazil as a component. Brazil is
different from Spanish America not because of its Lusitanian origin and its
Portuguese language, but also because of the way the territory was conquered
and colonized, and for having been the Seat of the Portuguese Empire for many
years after which, instead of suffering a traumatic rupture with Lisbon, it
achieved independence by an act of government, by edict, keeping intact the
political and administrative structures of the Empire.
To summarize, there are points of contact,
similarities, and relationships between Brazil and Spanish America, but the sum
of the differences is more important than those of the similarities, since it
also includes the spectacular consolidation of Brazil into one single gigantic
nation, bordering all the other countries in South America, except Ecuador and
Chile; and this in contrast to the fragmentation of Spanish America into 19
pieces.
It goes without saying that this continental scale is
in itself of defining importance, and being undoubtedly the consequence of
different antecedents, it carries within itself the seeds of increasingly
pronounced divergence, and even confrontation. In trying to understand Latin
America, you cannot ignore Brazil (just as you cannot ignore the US); but for
Spanish America, Brazil appears as a either a potentially or currently
dangerous, or a potentially or currently friendly, neighbor; in any case different,
other.
On the other hand, Spanish America, despite its
geographical immensity and its apparent heterogeneity, is an identifiable set,
with enough common features, for it to be useful to generalize about it, a
“clear and distinct” subdivision of the world in which we live in.
This distinction of Spanish America obviously comes
from the imprint that its conquerors, colonizers, and evangelizers gave to it.
It is one of the most amazing feats in history, but it is evident, irrefutable.
There is controversy over the exact number of "Travelers to the Indies,"
but in any case they were only a handful of men, adding all the sailors,
warriors and friars. And those few men, in less than sixty years, before 1550,
had explored the territory, had conquered two empires, had founded almost all
the urban settlements that still exist today (plus others that later
disappeared), and had propagated the Catholic faith and language of the culture
of Castile in a manner not only lasting but, for better or for worse,
indelible.
Spanish, then, and not "Latin" is the America,
whose myths and realities I propose to expose; But the name “Latin America”, a construct
by the French or the Anglo-Saxons, is so prevalent that to renounce it, or to insist
every time when using it that Brazil is methodologically excluded, would be an awkward
and difficult complication, even pedantic. Let the reader understand, then,
that unless otherwise stated, the Latin America addressed in this book is the
America that speaks Spanish.
From Failure to Compensatory Mythology
From 1492 to 1975 almost five hundred years have gone
by, half a millennium of history.
If we were to qualify those almost five centuries of
Latin American history in the most succinct way, beyond all anecdotes, all
controversies, all distractions, and going to the heart of the matter before
breaking it down, the most accurate, truthful and overarching statement that
can be made about Latin America is that up to this day it has been a failure.
This assertion may seem outrageous, but it is a truth
that we Latin Americans keep quietly buried in our conscience, usually because
it is painful, but that comes out and becomes apparent every time we have lucid
moments of sincerity. In other words, it is Latin Americans themselves who
qualify our history as a disappointment. The greatest hero of Latin America, Simón
Bolívar, wrote in 1830: “I have been in
command for twenty years and from that time I have obtained but a few certain conclusions:
1. (Latin America is ungovernable for us; 2. He who serves a revolution plows
at sea; 3. The only thing to be done in Latin America is to emigrate; 4. This
country (La Gran Colombia, later fragmented between Colombia, Venezuela and
Ecuador) will unfailingly fall into the hands of maddened rabble and then pass
on to almost insignificant tyrants of all colors and races; 5. Devoured by all
crimes and snuffed by our own ferocity, the Europeans will not deign to conquer
us; 6. If it were possible for a part of the world to return to primitive
chaos, such would be the final time of (Latin) America.”
In these six points Bolívar condenses succinctly Latin
American pessimism in its extreme form, the extreme adverse judgment of Latin
Americans about our own society. But we must underscore that at least some of these
desperate prophecies of Bolívar were completely fulfilled, which is why they
cannot be attributed solely to the depressive state of an aging, disappointed
and bitter man, but are judgements, rather, exemplifying all the sociological perspicacity
and all the political vision of the Liberator.
Since 1830 other data and points of reference have accumulated,
in addition to those available to Bolívar when formulating his judgment on the
future of Latin America:
1. The great success of the USA, in the same “New
World” and within the same historical timeframe.
2. The inability of Latin America to integrate its
population into reasonably coherent and cohesive nations in which, even if not
absent, social and economic marginalization has been at least mitigated.
3. The incapacity of Latin America to exert external
action, war, economic, political, cultural, etc., and its consequent
vulnerability to foreign actions or influences in each of these areas.
4. The notorious lack of stability of the Latin
American forms of government, except for those based on caudillismo and
repression. [21]
5. The absence of notable Latin American contributions
in the sciences, letters, or the arts (even though exceptions may be cited,
which are none other than that).
6. Unrestrained population growth, greater than that
of any other region on the planet.
7. That Latin America does not feel indispensable, or
not even too needed, so that in moments of depression (or sincerity) we come to
believe that if the whole of it all just sank into the ocean without a trace,
the rest of the world would only be marginally inconvenienced.
Nearly a century and a half after Bolívar, one of the
first Hispanic-American intellectuals (Carlos Fuentes, 1928-2012) would write:
“For Latin America the outlook is much graver: as the widening gap between the
geometric and technocratic development of the world and the arithmetic
development of our ancillary societies becomes gigantic, Latin America becomes
an expendable world for imperialism. Traditionally we have been
exploited countries, soon we will not even be this: it will not be necessary to
exploit us, because technology will be able -to a large extent it already can-
industrially replace our mono-productive offerings. Will we be, then, a vast
continent of beggars? Will ours be a hand stretched out in expectation of the
crumbs of American, European, and Soviet charity? Will we be the India of the
Western Hemisphere? Is our economy a mere fiction maintained by pure
philanthropy?”[22] Just as Bolívar's,
Fuentes’ pessimism is unbearable for Latin American self-esteem. Fuentes
himself goes from those terrifying reflections to postulating revolutionary
action, an indispensable rupture for rescuing or creating a less pitiful Latin
American entity, a modest but proprietary and viable project which allows us to
be a part of the world, if not indispensable or distinguished, at least
independent.
In any case, from Bolívar to Carlos Fuentes, every
Latin American, profound and sincere, has recognized, at least, at times, the
failure –until now- of Latin America.
Human collectives, faced with the realization that
others formulate enviable projects and carry them out successfully, can try to
either emulate or reject the values implicit in those projects and coveted
success. It is also possible (and this is the case in Latin America) to try
emulation and, not having achieved the expected success, to take refuge in a mythology
that explains its failure and that becomes a magical invocation for its future reparations.
[1] In early 2019 – This introduction is adapted for the new English
language edition and is also included in a new Spanish Language edition
published in Caracas, Venezuela in 2021.
[2] “Mémoires : Le voleur dans la maison vide”, J-F Revel,
Éditions Plon (1997).
[3] Upon being contracted by Éditions Robert Laffont,
Rangel moved to London, England, for a year to work and research the book, away
from the daily fray he was writing about.
[4] This
passage in Revel’s memoir, published in early 1997, reflects the continuous
idealization about the “revolution” of many European and Western opinion makers.
What Revel describes is an intelligentsia in search of an idol, of an
archetypal David, noble and feeble, to vanquish the evil and powerful Goliath. Shortly
after the skirmishes with the EZ in Mexico, the Venezuelan Hugo Chávez burst onto
the world stage, a democratically elected leftist in one of most powerful and
irrefutably democratic countries in Latin America. The redeemer of the
revolution had arrived.
[5] Chávez
presented himself to the electorate as a center left “anti-party” candidate,
accepted by the business and political elites of the time. Even so, the 1998
elections had one of the highest abstention rates in the history of Venezuelan
elections. Chávez attained his victory with only 33.34% of the electorate.
[6] In late
1977 the English language edition appeared as a Helen & Kurt Wolff imprint,
of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. The book was also published in Portuguese (1976)
and Italian (1980).
[7] The full
text of this speech, titled “The Crisis and its Solutions”, is included in his
third book: “Marx and the real socialisms and other essays” (1989).
[8] «Carlos
Rangel - Última vuelta de tuerca», Luis Aníbal Gómez, 2017 (unpublished)
[9] A methodology
clearly laid out in Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto.
[10] On October
22, 1964, Sartre will be awarded the Noble Prize in Literature. This generated
great controversy because when Sartre found out he was being considered he sent
a letter to the awards committee requesting that he not be nominated for the
prize. Unbeknownst to Sartre, the committee had already decided the award in
September, an irreversible decision. Upon the announcement, Sartre published an
essay in Le Figaro, on October 23rd, in which he describes his
correspondence with the Academy rejecting the prize. He expands about rejecting
institutional awards, in particular those considered as an acceptance of the bourgeois
model, and of his solidarity with the socialist-communist model. Curiously, this
essay includes a mention about his sympathies towards the “Venezuelan
revolutionaries” (the guerrilla fighters of the Armed Struggle at the beginning
of the democratic era in Venezuela), essay that Rangel will reference in a
section of his book.
[11] The
“adecos” are members of the Acción Democrática party (AD), which
self-identified as social democrats.
[12] As an
interesting factoid, one of the first military campaigns conducted by General
Gabaldón was to repel in the early 20th century (1901 – as reported
by the by the NYT and SF Call) an invasion from Colombia led by Carlos Rangel’s
grandfather, who was opposed to the dictatorship of Cipriano Castro and which
Gabaldón defended. Cipriano Castro would be toppled a few years later by Juan
Vicente Gómez, leading to the repression against Gabaldón and the
rehabilitation of Carlos Rangel’s grandfather.
[13] Gómez, Op.
Cit.
[14] The last
essay of his last book is an appreciation of Unamuno.
[15] Gómez, Op.
Cit.
[16] Of course, communism and fascism take it a step further, postulating
that social relationships (and all its derivatives) are also zero-sum.
[17] This expectation of corruption makes for a convenient political weapon,
from campaign rhetoric to judicial prosecution of political enemies throughout
the region.
[18] TN: Puntofijismo was the outcome of an agreement between three of
the major parties at the time of the democratic transition after the dictator
Pérez Jimenez was overthrown in 1958 by a popular revolt. Those three parties (which
excluded the other political player at the time, the Venezuelan Communist Party)
agreed to work together to strengthen institutional democratic mechanisms. They
also agreed to include members of all three parties in any resulting government
after the elections were held in late 1959, as a unity coalition. The agreement
was known as “Pacto de Punto Fijo” (Punto Fijo Pact), named after the
house belonging to one of its signatories at th e time, the leader of the Christian
Democrat party (COPEI), Rafael Caldera, where it was signed.
[19] Repeatedly, Carlos Rangel uses the notion of Spanish America, and Latin
America, since the latter includes Brazil, whose history is different, while
all the legacy countries of the old Spanish Empire share fundamental features.
[20] NT: Of course, the “Chavista Revolution” in Venezuela 20 years later
will continue this pattern.
[21] NT: Rangel expanded analysis of this and the previous “point of
reference” in two internationally published essays: “Mexico and Other
Dominoes,” (Carlos Rangel Commentary Magazine, June 1981), and “La
Névrose Latino-Américaine,” (Carlos Rangel, Commentaire, Janvier 1980).
[22] Carlos Fuentes, The New Hispanic American Novel, Mexico,
Joaquin Mortiz Publications 1969
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