PROHIBITED OBJECTS

By Eduardo Galeano Reprint | | Print |

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MONTEVIDEO, Nov 10 2005 (IPS) - What is natural about these poor-icidal natural disasters? Is their nature so perverse? Or are we mistaking the executioner for the victim? Is it nature that is poisoning the air, polluting the water, razing the forests, and driving the climate into the madhouse? asks Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist and author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’. The disaster of cyclone Stan in Chiapas would have been only half as severe, experts assert, if the region had still been protected by its forests. In Cancun, where Wilma left nothing standing and beaches stripped of sand, the immense megahotels of the tourist business had annihilated the dunes and mangroves that had protected the coast. And those other hurricanes that sweep desperate people from the South to the North — are these natural disasters as well? Misfortunes are disguised as acts of fate and presented as natural. But is it natural for a country to condemn its poorest children to gamble their lives chasing hope at the cost of humiliation and rootlessness?

So far so good, only that was not the end of it. We had to change planes in Miami, where we spent about forty minutes, the time it took to complete the calvary of lines, forms, questioning, digital impressions, photos, and the strip tease before boarding. Hours later, when we reached Uruguay, we found that two of our bags had been violated. The lock of one had disappeared. On the other, the security seal had been broken. Inside, thanks to Bush, we found an explanation. The violation occurred in Miami. ”Prohibited objects”: this was the issue. Inside of each bag there was a notice from the Transportation Security Administration: ”Your bag was among those selected for physical inspection. During the inspection, your bag and its contents may have been searched for prohibited items. We appreciate your understanding and cooperation.”

* * *

Helena has the fortunate or unlucky habit of seeing reality before it happens. She sees it while she sleeps. Asleep, she saw it shortly before our baggage suffered this attack from official curiosity. She saw us in line in an airport where we were required to pass our pillows through a machine. In the pillows the machine was able to read the dreams that we had dreamt upon them. It was a detector of dreams dangerous to public order.

* * *

What did the security agents that opened our bags find? I’m afraid that they grew suspicious not because of what they found but rather what they didn’t find. The bags did not contain arms of mass destruction. This is why they deserved to be invaded. Like Iraq. And to top it off, there was not a single object that was prohibited, or even one of those that were recommended, indeed indispensable, for a man’s wallet or a woman’s purse:

* There were many books, but there was not among them a complete collection of the speeches of the president of the planet, who from his first oratorical forays in Texas stood out for his sublime prose, his mystic fervour, his limpid honesty, and his involuntary sense of humour.

*The agents did not find among our papers a single job contract like those used by Walmart, the universal model of success, which prohibits unions and other nuisances that are the enemy of worker productivity.

*They did not find a single document by the international wisemen capable of proving that water, right up to rain itself, should be privatised, as happened in Bolivia until it was deprivatised by the people.

*We were not carrying a single free-trade tract of the sort regularly decreed by the all-powerful country that has never practised and never will practice anything like free trade.

*We also failed to pack electrodes or other instruments of torture necessary for the interrogations that this country has conducted, and still conducts, to promote freedom of expression.

*In our suitcases there were no wrappers from MacDonald’s, Burger King, or any other enterprise sanctified by its noble mission to fight hunger by propagating obesity.

* Nor was there a single automobile, which was sure to draw attention in a country where even infants have the right to drive and can pollute the atmosphere from the day they are born without the name Kyoto ever reaching their ears.

* Also revealing was the absence of genetically-modified seeds like those converting the farmers of the world into happy functionaries of the Monsanto company.

*Equally revealing was the absence of the genetically-modified press, whose journalists call the daily terrorist acts of consumer society natural catastrophes.

* * *

We had been run down by hurricanes, and visited some of the countries hardest hit by the madness of cyclones, droughts, and floods, which are becoming ever more frequent and more ferocious.

What is natural about these poor-icidal natural disasters? Is their nature so perverse? Are they born crazy? Crazy and perverse? Or are we mistaking the executioner for the victim? Is it nature that is poisoning the air, polluting the water, razing the forests, and driving the climate into the madhouse?

In Honduras we visited the ruins of Copan, one of the Mayan kingdoms mysteriously toppled six centuries before the Spanish conquests — or not so mysteriously. Researchers tend to believe, and with growing reason, that the cause was an ecological disaster. In the case of Copan, at least, it is clear at least that the forests had been reduced to deserts that produced stones instead of corn. But isn’t that what is happening now? Only, in Honduras the extermination advances at a clip of 75,000 trees per day, according to priest Andres Tamayo, who lives in the service of the heavens and the earth. In the Americas, and in many other parts of the earth, the natural forests, green feasts of diversity, are being brutally reduced to nothing or converted into pastures of profits or false industrial forests that are drying out the earth.

Can we not see ourselves in the mirror of the past? Is memory a prohibited object?

The disaster of cyclone Stan in Chiapas would have been only half as severe, experts assert, if the region had still been protected by its forests. In Cancun, where Wilma left nothing standing and beaches stripped of sand, the immense megahotels of the tourist business had annihilated the dunes and mangroves that had protected the coast.

***

And those other hurricanes? The unstoppable wind storms that sweep desperate people from the South to the North — are these natural disasters as well? In Tegucigalpa, in San Salvador, in Oaxaca, we saw long lines of barefoot women from distant villages, carrying children, standing in front of currency exchange offices. They were waiting for money wired from the United States, from husbands, brothers, or children.

Misfortunes are disguised as acts of fate and presented as natural. But is it natural for a country to condemn its poorest children to gamble their lives chasing hope at the cost of humiliation and rootlessness?

Throughout Latin America, it must be acknowledged that the philanthropists of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have succeeded in increasing exports — exports of human flesh.

Are these emigrants or were they expelled? Many of these people, the so-called ”wet backs”, die on their way North, whether from thirst or bullets, or return mutilated to their villages. Those that survive and reach the Promised Land work themselves to the bone at any job in any condition, day and night, so that far away their despoiled families can survive, with neither land nor food, in the land that banished them. It is a hard road. They too are prohibited objects. (IPS/COPYRIGHT IPS)