By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Oct 4 2011 (IPS)

Look it up in any encyclopedia: what was the first free country in the Americas. The answer is always the same: the United States. But the United States declared its independence when it was a nation with 650,000 slaves that remained slaves for another century and their constitution originally held that a black slave counted as only three-fifths of a citizen.

And if you consult any encyclopedia to find out what was the first country to abolish slavery, the response will always be the same: England. Not true: the first country to abolish slavery was not England but Haiti, which is still paying penance for that sin.

The black slaves of Haiti defeated the glorious army of Napoleon Bonaparte, and Europe never forgave it for this humiliation. Haiti was forced to pay France a gigantic indemnity over a century and a half for the crime of its liberation, but not even this was enough. That black insolence continues to rile the white masters of the world.

*** We know little or nothing of all this.

Haiti is an invisible country.

The first time the world media paid attention was when the earthquake of 2010 killed over 200,000 Haitians. Tragedy catapulted the country briefly into the media limelight.

And so today Haiti is known not for its historic achievements in the war against slavery and colonial oppression or for the unique talent of its artists, magicians of scrap who can transform refuse into things of beauty.

It is worth repeating again so that even the deaf will hear: Haiti was the first independent country of the Americas and the first in the world to defeat slavery.

It deserves far more than the notoriety that blooms on disaster.

***

At present, the armies of many countries, including my own, continue to occupy Haiti. How was this military invasion justified? By claiming that Haiti was a danger to international security.

Nothing new there.

Throughout the 19th century, the example of Haiti was seen as a threat to the security of all countries that continued to practice slavery. Thomas Jefferson said it: Haiti was the source of the plague of rebellion. In South Carolina, for example, it was legal to imprison any black sailor while his boat was in port because of the risk that he might infect others with the anti- slavery contagion. In Brazil, this plague was actually called Haitianism.

In the 20th century, Haiti was invaded by the Marines for being an unsafe country for its foreign creditors. The invaders started by taking over customs operations, seized the National Bank of Haiti and turning it over to City Bank of New York. And since they were there already, they decided to stay another 19 years.

*** The border crossing between the Dominican Republic and Haiti is called Malpaso, the bad step.

Perhaps the name is a sort of warning that you entering the black world of black magic and witchcraft.

Voodoo, the religion that the slaves took with them from Africa and nationalised in Haiti, does not deserve to be called a religion. From the point of view of the owners of Civilisation, voodoo is just a black thing, the product of ignorance, backwardness, and pure superstition. The Catholic Church, which has no shortage of believers ready to sell the fingernails of saints and feathers of archangel Gabriel, worked to get this superstition officially prohibited in 1845, 1860, 1896, 1915, and 1942, but the people just didn’t get the message.

But for a number of years now, Christian evangelical groups have taken up the war against superstition in Haiti. They come from the United States where buildings do not have 13th floors, airplanes have no row 13, and a significant percentage of the people believe that God made the earth in seven days.

In the US, evangelical preacher Pat Robertson explained the 2010 earthquake with the revelation that Haitians’ victory over France was the result of voodoo, because they sought the help of Satan deep in the heart of the Haitian woods. The devil helped them out but then caused the earthquake to even the score.

***

How many years will foreign soldiers stay in Haiti? They came to stabilise the situation and provide assistance but they have spent seven years destabilising and hampering aid efforts in a country that doesn’t want them there.

The military occupation of Haiti is costing the United Nations more than 800 million dollars a year.

If the UN directed these funds towards technical cooperation and social solidarity, it might provide Haiti with a real push to develop its own creative energies and so save the people from their armed saviours, who have a tendency to rape, kill, and spread fatal illnesses.

The last thing Haiti needs is people to multiply its disasters. Nor does it need anyone’s charity. As an old African proverb put it, the hand that gives is always above the hand that receives.

But Haiti does need solidarity, doctors, schools, hospitals, and real collaboration that will make it possible to regain its ability to feed itself, which was destroyed by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other philanthropic organisations.

We Latin Americans owe Haiti this solidarity: it would be the best way to thank this great small nation that in 1804 threw open the doors of liberty for us with its contagious example. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) This article is dedicated to Guillermo Chifflet, who was forced to leave the Chamber of Deputies for having voted against sending Uruguayan soldiers to Haiti.

(*) Eduardo Galeano is a Uruguayan writer and journalist and author of ”The Open Veins of Latin America”, ‘Memories of Fire” and “Mirrors/An Almost Universal History”.

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Jan 15 2009 (IPS)

To justify itself, state terrorism creates terrorists: it sows hatred and harvests alibis. Everything indicates that this bloodbath in Gaza, which its creators claim was designed to eliminate terrorists, will result in a proliferation of them.

Since 1948 Palestinians have lived condemned to perpetual humiliation. They can’t breathe without permission. They have lost their country, their land, their water, their freedom, their everything. They don’t even have the right to elect their own leaders: when they vote for someone they aren’t supposed to vote for, they are punished. Gaza is being punished. It has been transformed into a rat’s nest without an exit since Hamas fairly won the 2006 elections. Something similar occurred in 1932 when the Communist Party won in El Salvador. Drenched in blood, the El Salvadoreans paid for their misbehaviour and since that time have lived under military dictatorships. Democracy is a luxury that not all peoples deserve.

***

The homemade rockets that the militants of Hamas, corralled in Gaza, blindly launch into land that used to be theirs and was usurped by the Israeli occupation, are the offspring of impotence. And desperation, at the verge of suicidal madness, is the mother of the futile boasting that denies the existence of the state of Israel, while the extremely efficient war of extermination has been denying the right of Palestine to exist for years.

Little of Palestine remains. Bit by bit, Israel is erasing it from the map.

The settlers invade, accompanied by soldiers who correct the borders as they go. Bullets sanctify the pillage, in legitimate defence.

There is no war of aggression that doesn’t claim to be a defensive war. Hitler invaded Poland to prevent Poland from invading Germany. Bush invaded Iraq to keep Iraq from invading the world. In each of its defensive wars, Israel swallows up another piece of Palestine, and the snacking continues. This process is justified with land deeds granted by the Bible, with the two thousand years of persecution that the Jewish people suffered, and the panic generated by the sight of Palestinians lying in ambush.

***

Israel is the country that has never complied with UN resolutions or recommendations, never abides by judgements of international courts, and mocks international law. It is also the only country that has legalised the torture of prisoners.

What gives them the right to deny the rights of others? Who is granting them the impunity with which they are carrying out the slaughter of Gaza? The Spanish government couldn’t bomb the Basque country to wipe out ETA, or Britain invade Ireland to liquidate the IRA, with impunity. Perhaps the tragedy of the Holocaust introduced a policy of eternal impunity? Or is it the all-powerful US that gave the green light, and has in Israel the most unfailing of vassals.

***

The Israeli army, the most sophisticated and modern in the world, knows whom to kill. It doesn’t kill by error. It kills for horror. The civilian victims are referred to as ‘collateral damage’, according to the dictionary of other imperial wars. In Gaza, three of every ten instances of collateral damage are children. Then there are thousands of wounded and crippled, victims of the technology of human butchery which the military industry is successfully applying in this operation of ethnic cleansing.

And as usual -it is always this way- in Gaza for every hundred Palestinians killed, one Israeli is killed.

These Palestinians are dangerous people, is the message rained down by the other parallel bombardment, by the mass media of manipulation, which would have us believe that one Israeli life is worth that of one hundred Palestinians. These media would also have us believe that the two hundred atomic bombs that Israel has are humanitarian and that it was a nuclear power named Iran that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

***

Does the so-called ‘international community’ exist?

And if so is it anything more than merchants, bankers, and warriors? Is it anything more than an artistic name the US uses when it does theatre?

In the face of the tragedy of Gaza, world hypocrisy shines once again. As usual, indifference, empty speeches, vapid declarations, high-sounding rhetoric, ambiguous positions pay tribute to sacred impunity.

In the face of the tragedy of Gaza, the Arab countries wash their hands. As usual. And as usual, the European countries wring their hands.

Old Europe, with such a gift for beauty and perversity, weeps one tear after another, while secretly celebrating this masterful game. Because hunting Jews was always a European custom, though for half a century now the Palestinians have been paying the price for this historic crime. The Palestinians, who are also Semites but who were never, and are not, anti-semitic, are paying in their own blood and money some else’s debt.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(This article is dedicated to my Jewish friends assassinated by Latin American dictatorships that Israel supported)

(*) Eduardo Galeano is a Uruguayan writer and journalist and author of ”The Open Veins of Latin America”, ‘Memories of Fire” and “Mirrors/An Almost Universal History”.

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Nov 6 2008 (IPS)

Once in office will Obama prove that his bellicose threats against Iran and Pakistan were just words spoken to lure in a certain category of voter during the election? asks Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist, author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’. In this article, the author asks, will Obama make good on his promise to close the sinister prison at Guantanamo? And end the sinister blockade of Cuba? Will Obama sign and abide by the Kyoto agreement, or will he continue to grant impunity to the biggest polluter on the planet? Will he govern for people, or for automobiles? Will he shift the devastating course of a way of life in which the few steal the destiny of the many? Will Obama, the first black president of the United States, realise the dream of Martin Luther King, or the nightmare of Condoleeza Rice? This White House, which is now his house, was built with the labour of black slaves. Let\’s hope he never forgets that.

Let’s hope so. And let’s hope he isn’t for a moment tempted to repeat the exploits of George W. Bush. After all, Obama had the dignity to oppose the war in Iraq while the Republican and Democratic parties cheered the announcement of this bloodbath.

During his campaign, “leadership” was the most frequently used word in Obama’s speeches. As president, will he continue to believe that his country was chosen to save the world, a toxic idea that he shares with almost all of his colleagues? Will he continue to assert that the US is the leader of the world and believe in its messianic mission to command?

Let’s hope that the current crisis, which is shaking the imperial foundations, will at least serve to provide the incoming government with a healthy dose of realism and humility.

Will Obama accept that racism is permissable when practised against countries that his country invades? Is it not racism to meticulously tally the deaths of the invaders of Iraq while ignoring with Olympian arrogance the far larger number of Iraqi dead? Isn’t it racist that the world has first, second, and third class citizens and first, second, and third class dead?

Obama’s victory was universally celebrated as a victory in the battle against racism. Let us hope that from his first acts as president he accepts and lives up to this beautiful responsibility.

Will the Obama administration confirm yet again that Democrat and Republican are two names for the same party?

Let us hope that the will for change that these elections have consecrated is more than just a promise and a hope. May the new administration have the courage to break with the tradition of the single party disguised as two that at the hour of truth behave almost identically while they pretend to be fighting one another.

Will Obama make good on his promise to close the sinister prison at Guantanamo?

Let us hope so, and that he will end the sinister blockade of Cuba.

Will Obama continue to believe that it is a good idea to build a wall along the Mexican border to keep Mexicans from crossing into the US, while vast sums of money move across without ever showing a passport?

During the campaign Obama never candidly discussed the subject of immigration. Let us hope that from today on, no longer having to worry about losing votes, he will be able and willing to abandon this idea of the wall -which would be far longer and more shameful than the Berlin Wall- and indeed all walls that violate people’s freedom of movement.

Once president, will Obama, who enthusiastically supported the recent gift of 700 billion dollars to the banking industry, continue the usual practice of privatising profits while socialising losses?

I fear that he will, though I hope that he won’t.

Will Obama sign and abide by the Kyoto agreement, or will he continue allow the biggest polluter on the planet to pollute with impunity? Will he govern for people, or for automobiles? Will he shift the devastating course of a way of life in which the few steal the destiny of the many?

I fear he won’t, though I hope he will.

Will Obama, the first black president of the United States, realise the dream of Martin Luther King, or the nightmare of Condoleeza Rice?

This White House, which is now his house, was built with the labour of black slaves. Let’s hope he never forgets that. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Apr 21 2008 (IPS)

The world is painting still lifes, forests are dying, the poles are melting, the air is becoming unbreatheable, and the water undrinkable and at the same time Ecuador is debating a new constitution that opens up the possibility for the first time ever of recognising the rights of nature, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist and author of The Open Veins of Latin America, Memories of Fire and Mirrors: An Almost Universal History. It sounds odd, doesn\’t it, that nature could have rights? Yet in 1886 the US Supreme Court extended human rights to private corporations. They were recognised as having the same rights as people, the right to life, free expression, privacy, and all the rest. But there is nothing odd or abnormal about the bill that would include the rights of nature in the new Constitution of Ecuador. This country has suffered repeated devastation over its history. To give just one example, for more than a quarter of a century, until 1992, the Texaco oil company vomited 18,000 gallons of poison into the rivers, land, and the people. Once this gesture of beneficence in the Ecuadorean Amazon was completed, the company, which was born in Texas, was married to Standard Oil. By then Rockefeller\’s Standard Oil had changed its name to Chevron and was being run by Condoleezza Rice.

At the same time, a country in Latin America, Ecuador, is debating a new constitution that opens up the possibility for the first time ever of recognising the rights of nature.

Nature has alot to say, and it has long been time for us, her children, to stop playing deaf. Maybe even God will hear the cry rising from this Andean country and add an eleventh amendment, which he left out when he handed down instructions from Mount Sinai: ”Love nature, which you are a part of.”

*An object that wants to be a subject

For thousands of years almost all people had only the right not to have rights. In reality, quite a few remain without rights today, but at least now the right to have rights is recognised, and this is considerably more than a gesture of charity by the masters of the world to comfort their servants.

And nature? In a way it could be said that human rights extend to nature because she is not a postcard meant to be viewed from afar. But nature knows full well that even the best human laws treat her as a piece of property, never as a holder of rights.

Reduced to no more than a source of natural resources and good deals, she can legally be gravely wounded and even exterminated without her complaints being heard, and there is no law preventing those who harm her from acting with impunity. At the most, in the best of cases, it is the human victims who can demand a more or less symbolic indemnity, and this will always come after the damage has been done, though the law neither prevents nor deters assaults on the earth, water, and air.

It sounds odd, doesn’t it, that nature could have rights? Sheer madness. As if nature were a person. And yet is sounds perfectly normal in the United States that major businesses take advantage of human rights. In 1886 the US Supreme Court, that model of universal justice, extended human rights to private corporations. They were recognised as having the same rights as people, the right to life, free expression, privacy, and all the rest, as if companies could breathe. More than 120 years have passed since then and it is still the same. Nobody has paid attention to it.

*Cries and Whispers

There is nothing odd or abnormal about the bill that would include the rights of nature in the Constitution of Ecuador. This country has suffered repeated devastation over its history. To give just one example, for more than a quarter of a century, until 1992, the Texaco oil company vomited 18,000 gallons of poison into the rivers, land, and the people. Once this gesture of beneficence in the Ecuadorian Amazon was completed, the company, which was born in Texas, was married to Standard Oil. By then Rockefeller’s Standard Oil had changed its name to Chevron and was being run by Condoleezza Rice. Afterwards, a pipeline carried Condoleeza to the White House, while the Chevron-Texaco family continued to pollute the world.

But the wounds cut into the body of Ecuador by Texaco and other companies are not the only source of inspiration for this great juridical innovation that some are trying to carry forward. Moreover, and this is equally important, the revindication of nature is part of a process of recuperating some of the most ancient traditions of Ecuador and all of Latin America. The bill under consideration would have the state recognise and guarantee to vital natural cycles the right to continue and regenerate. It is not by chance that the constituent assembly started by identifying their objectives of national growth with the ideal of ”sumak kausai”, which means ”harmonious life” in Quechua: harmony among people and between us and nature, which engendered us, feeds us, shelters us, and which has her own life and values independent of us.

These traditions remain miraculously alive despite the heavy legacy of racism which in Ecuador, as in the rest of the Americas, continues to mutilate reality and memory. And it isn’t just the patrimony of its large indigenous population which knew how to perpetuate them over the five centuries of prohibition and scorn. They belong to the whole country, and the entire world, these voices from the past that help us to divine another possible future.

Since the days when the sword and the cross made their way into the Americas, the European conquest punished the adoration of nature, which was seen as the sin of idolatry, with the punishments of whipping, hanging, and burning. The communion between nature and people, a pagan custom, was abolished in the name of God and later in the name of Civilisation. Throughout the Americas, and the world, we are paying the consequences of this divorce. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Mar 27 2008 (IPS)

Until a short while ago, the major media were regaling us daily with cheery statistics about the success of international war against poverty, writes Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguyan writer and journalist, and author of The Open Veins of Latin America, Memories of Fire, and Mirrors/An Almost Universal History. In this article, Galeano writes that the World Bank\’s International Comparison Programme has corrected a few of the errors present in earlier reports. Among other things, they inform us that the poorest of the world\’s poor, the so-called \’\’indigent\’\’, number 500 million more than had been previously calculated. We also learn that the poor countries are quite a bit poorer than the earlier statistics indicated and that their condition deteriorated while the World Bank was selling them the free-market happy pills. And as if that wasn\’t enough, it turns out that the universal inequality between the rich and the poor was also incorrectly measured, and that planet-wide the abyss between the two is still deeper than that of Brazil, an unjust country if there is one.

Until a short while ago, the major media were regaling us daily with cheery statistics about the international war against poverty.

Poverty, it was reported, was beating a retreat, though the poor, ill-informed, didn’t hear about the good news. Now, however, the best-paid bureaucrats of the planet are confessing that they were the ones who had it wrong.

The World Bank has made known that its International Comparison Programme (which seeks to measure the relative social and economic well-being of the world’s countries) has been brought up to date. The Bank, International Monetary Fund, United Nations, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and other philanthropic institutions are all part of the initiative.

In the new findings, the experts correct a few of the errors present in earlier reports.

Among other things, they inform us that the poorest of the world’s poor, the so-called ”indigent”, number 500 million more than had been previously calculated.

We also learn that the poor countries are quite a bit poorer than the earlier statistics indicated and that their condition deteriorated while the World Bank was selling them the free-market happy pills.

And as if that wasn’t enough, it turns out that the universal inequality between the rich and the poor was also incorrectly measured, and that planet-wide the abyss between the two is still deeper than that of Brazil, an unjust country if there is one.

Another Lie

At the same time, an ex-vice president of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, in a book written with Linda Bilmes, has investigated the costs of the Iraq war.

President George Bush had announced that the war might cost at most about 50 billion dollars, which at first glance didn’t seem too high a price for the conquest of such an oil-rich country.

In round numbers – perhaps squared is the more accurate term – the slaughter of Iraq has lasted more than five years and in this period the US has spent a trillion dollars killing innocent civilians. From above the clouds the bombs kill without knowing whom, as beneath the shroud of smoke, the dead die without knowing what for. The figure cited by Bush only paid for about a trimester of crimes and speeches. The figure lied, in the service of this war that was born of a lie and has been generating more lies ever since.

And Another Lie

After the entire world knew that in Iraq there were no weapons of mass destruction other than those used by its invaders, the war continued, although the pretexts for it had been forgotten

Then on 14 December 2005, journalists asked how many Iraqi civilians had been killed in the first two years of the war.

And President Bush spoke of the issue for the first time. He answered:

– About thirty thousand, more or less.

And then he made a joke, confirming his ever tasteful sense of humour and timing, and the journalists had a good laugh.

The following year he repeated the figure.

He didn’t clarify that this thirty thousand referred to civilian Iraqi deaths that had been reported in newspapers. The real number was far higher, as he well knew, because the majority of deaths are not reported. He also knew that the victims included many children and old people.

This was the only information provided by the US government on its practice of openly firing on Iraqi civilians. The invader country keeps a close tally only of its own dead. The others are the enemy, or collateral damage, and do not deserve to be counted. Anyway, counting them would be dangerous: the mountain of dead bodies might give the wrong impression.

And then some truth

Bush was still taking his first steps as president when on July 27, 2001, he asked his fellow citizens:

”Can you imagine a country that was unable to grow enough food to feed the people? It would be a nation that would be subject to international pressure. It would be a nation at risk. And so when we’re talking about American agriculture, we’re really talking about a national security issue.”

This time the president wasn’t lying. He was defending the fabulous subsidies that protected his country’s fields. ”American agriculture” meant, and still means, nothing more than the ”Agriculture of the United States.”

But it is Mexico, another American country, which best illustrates his insight from that July 27. Since it signed the free-trade agreement with the US, Mexico has not grown enough food to meet the needs of its population and has been exposed to international pressures, making it a vulnerable nation whose national security is in grave danger.

-Today Mexico buys from the United States 10 billion dollars of food that it could produce itself;

-Washington’s protectionist subsidies make competition from other countries impossible;

-Mexican tortillas are Mexican only inasmuch as they are eaten by Mexicans; the corn they are made from is imported from and subsidised by the US, and is transgenic to boot;

-The free-trade treaty had promised prosperity from trade, but Mexico’s primary export has been the ruined peasant farmers that emigrate north.

Some countries know how to defend themselves – only a few. And those few are rich. Other countries are trained to work towards their own ruin — almost all of the others, that is.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Dec 24 2007 (IPS)

A book of mine entitled \’\’Mirrors\’\’ is about to be published. It is a sort of -pardon the audacity- universal history. As Oscar Wilde said, \’\’I can resist everything except temptation,\’\’ and I confess I have succumbed to the temptation of recounting certain episodes of the human adventure in this world, events that are not well known, writes Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan writer and journalist and author of The Open Veins of Latin America and Memories of Fire. In this article, Galeano writes that John Locke, renowned philosopher of liberty, was a shareholder in the Royal Africa Company, which bought and sold slaves. At the dawn of the 18th century, the first of the Bourbons of Spain, Philip V, inaugurated his new throne by signing a contract with his cousin the king of France that allowed the Guinea Company to sell blacks in America. Each king would receive a 25 percent cut of the profits. The names of some of the ships that carried this cargo: Voltaire, Rousseau, Jesus, Hope, Equality, and Friendship. Two of the founding fathers of the US disappeared in the fog of official history. No one remembers Robert Carter or Gouverneur Morris. This amnesia is recompense for their acts: Carter was the first of the champions of independence to free his slaves. Morris, one of the authors of the Constitution, opposed the clause stipulating that a slave was equal to just three-fifths of a person. \’\’The Birth of a Nation\’\’, the first Hollywood mega-production, premiered in 1915 in the White House. The president, Woodrow Wilson, gave it a standing ovation. His writings were repeatedly quoted in the film, a racist hymn in praise of the Ku Klux Klan.

History is an errant paradox. It is the contradictions that keeps its legs moving. Maybe this is why its silences say more than its words, and frequently its words reveal when they are lying.

A book of mine entitled ”Mirrors” is about to be published. It is a sort of -pardon the audacity- universal history. As Oscar Wilde said, ”I can resist everything except temptation,” and I confess I have succumbed to the temptation of recounting certain episodes of the human adventure in this world, from the point of view of those who were left out of the picture.

To put it another way, it has to do with events that are not well known.

I’ll set out a few here, just a few.

*** When they were evicted from the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve moved to Africa, not Paris. Some time later, when their children had embarked on their ways in the world, writing was invented. In Iraq, not Texas.

Algebra was invented in Iraq too, by Mohammed al Jwarizmi, 1200 years ago, and the word algorithm was derived from his name.

Names don’t usually coincide with what they describe. In the British Museum, to give one example, the sculptures of the Parthenon are called ”The Elgin Marbles” though they are really the marbles of Fidias. Elgin is the name of the Englishman who sold them to the museum.

The three novelties that made the European Renaissance possible – the compass, gunpowder, and the printing press – were invented by the Chinese, who also invented almost everything that Europe re-invented.

The Hindus knew before anybody else that the world was round, and the Mayans created the most precise calendar ever devised.

*** In 1493 the Vatican gave America to Spain and black Africa to Portugal ”so that the barbaric nations can be reduced to the Catholic faith”. At the time, America had fifteen times more inhabitants than Spain, and black Africa one hundred times the population of Portugal.

Just as the Pope had ordered, the barbaric nations were reduced, to say the least.

***

Tenochtitlan, the centre of the Aztec empire, was all water. Hernan Cortes demolished the city, stone by stone, and used the rubble to block the canals through which two hundred thousand canoes used to move. This was the first water war in America. Today Tenochtitlan is called Mexico DF. And where water once flowed, now automobiles throng.

***

The tallest monument of Argentina was erected in honor of General Roca, who exterminated the indians of Patagonia in the nineteenth century.

The largest avenue in Uruguay bears the name of General Rivera, who exterminated the last Charrua indians in the nineteenth century.

***

John Locke, renowned philosopher of liberty, was a shareholder in the Royal Africa Company, which bought and sold slaves.

At the dawn of the 18th century, the first of the Bourbons of Spain, Philip V, inaugurated his new throne by signing a contract with his cousin the king of France that allowed the Guinea Company to sell blacks in America. Each king would receive a 25 percent cut of the profits.

The names of some of the ships that carried this cargo: Voltaire, Rousseau, Jesus, Hope, Equality, and Friendship.

Two of the founding fathers of the United States disappeared in the fog of official history. No one remembers Robert Carter or Gouverneur Morris. This amnesia is recompense for their acts: Carter was the first of the champions of independence to free his slaves. Morris, one of the authors of the Constitution, opposed the clause stipulating that a slave was equal to just three-fifths of a person.

”The Birth of a Nation”, the first Hollywood mega-production, premiered in 1915 in the White House. The president, Woodrow Wilson, gave it a standing ovation. His writings were repeatedly quoted in the film, a racist hymn in praise of the Ku Klux Klan.

***

A few dates:

From the year 1234 and through the next seven centuries, the Catholic Church barred women from singing in church. Their voices were considered impure, because of the incident in the Garden of Eden.

In 1783, the Spanish King decreed that manual labour was no longer dishonourable. Until that time practicing any of the ”vile trades” would be punished by forfeiture of noble status.

Until 1986 it was legal in English schools to punish children with belts, sticks, and clubs.

***

In the name of freedom, equality, and fraternity the French Revolution proclaimed in 1793 the Declaration of the Rights of Men and the Citizen. Shortly after, the militant woman revolutionary Olympe de Gouges proposed the Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen. She was executed by guillotine.

Half a century later another revolutionary government, during the First Commune of Paris, proclaimed universal suffrage. At the same time it denied women the right to vote by a near unanimous 899-to-one vote.

***

The Christian Emperor Theodora never said she was a revolutionary or anything of the sort. But 1500 years ago, thanks to her, the Byzantine Empire became the first place in the world where women had the right to abortion and divorce.

***

General Ulysses S. Grant, who led the industrial north to victory in its war with the slaveholder south, was later president of the United States.

In 1875 responding to British pressure, he said, ”Within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection[ism] all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.”

And so in the year 2075, the most protectionist nation in the world will open up.

*** Lootie was the first Pekinese dog to reach Europe. He travelled to London in 1860. The English baptised him thus because he was part of the loot taken from China after the two prolonged opium wars.

Victoria, the drug-trafficker queen, imposed opium at the barrel of a cannon. China was transformed into a nation of drug addicts, in the name of freedom, freedom of trade.

In the name of freedom, freedom of trade, Paraguay was annihilated in 1870. At the end of a five year war, this country, the only country of the Americas that didn’t owe anyone a cent, inaugurated its foreign debt. Its very first loan reached it in smoking ruins. It was destined to pay gigantic reparations to Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. Thus the assassinated country paid its assassins for their service.

***

Haiti also paid giant reparations. Since it won its independence in 1804, the new, razed nation had to pay France a fortune to expiate the sin of its independence. It paid for a century and a half.

***

Big businesses have human rights in the United States. In 1886, the Supreme Court extended the rights of humans to private corporations, and this is still the case.

A few years later, to defend the human rights of its companies, the United States invaded ten countries around the world.

Thus Mark Twain, leader of the Anti-Imperialist League, proposed a new national flag with little skulls instead of stars. Another writer, Ambrose Bierce, observed : War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.

***

The concentration camp was born in Africa. The English pioneered the experiment and the Germans developed it further. Afterward, in Germany, Hermann Goring applied the model that his father had tried out in Namibia in 1904. The masters of Joseph Mengele had studied the anatomy of the inferior races in the concentration camp in Namibia. The guinea pigs were all black.

***

In 1936 the International Olympic Committee did not tolerate insolence. In the games of that year, organised by Hitler, the Peruvian football team defeated the team from Austria, the Fuhrer’s birthplace, 4-2. The Olympic Committee annulled the game.

***

Hitler did not lack for friends. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the racial and racist medical experiments of the Nazis. Coca-Cola invented Fanta, at the height of the war, for the German market. IBM made possible the identification and classification of the Jews, which was the first large-scale use of the punch card.

***

In 1953, a labour protest erupted in communist Germany. The workers flooded the streets and Soviet tanks were deployed to shut their mouths. Bertold Brecht had this suggestion: Wouldn’t it be easier if the government simply dissolves the people and elects another?”

***

Marketing campaigns. Public opinion is the target. Wars are sold with lies, the same as cars.

In 1964 the United States invaded Vietnam because Vietnam had attacked two American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. After the war slaughtered multitudes of Vietnamese, the Secretary of Defence Robert MacNamara, acknowledged that the Gulf of Tonkin attack never occurred.

Forty years later the same history was repeated with Iraq.

***

Thousands of years before the US invasion brought civilisation to Iraq, this barbaric land bequeathed the world the first love poem of world history. Inscribed in the Sumerian language in clay, the poem tells of the encounter of a goddess and a shepherd. For that night Inanna, the goddess, loved as if she had been mortal. Dumuzi, the shepherd, was for that night immortal.

* * *

Errant paradoxes, stimulating paradoxes.

Aleijadinho, the ugliest man in Brazil, created the most beautiful sculptures of the American colonial era.

Marco Polo’s book of his travels, an exercise in freedom, was written in a prison in Genoa.

Don Quixote of La Mancha, another exercise in freedom, was born in a prison in Seville.

The blacks who gave birth to jazz, the freest of all types of music, were the grandchildren of slaves.

One of the greatest jazz guitarists, Django Reinhardt, had only three fully working fingers on his left hand.

The great master of French cuisine Grimod de la Reyniere had no hands. He wrote, and cooked, and ate with hooks. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Aug 1 2006 (IPS)

Uruguay is becoming a world centre of cellulose production, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist and author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’. In this article, Galeano writes that it is a case of export monoculture in the purest colonial tradition: immense artificial plantations that call themselves forests and generate cellulose in an industrial process that floods the rivers with poisons and makes the air unbreathable. As usual, the blessings of nature become the curses of history. Our eucalyptus grows ten times faster than that of Finland, which means that the industrial plantations will be ten times as devastating. At the rate things are going, a large part of the country\’s land will be squeezed until the last drop of water is extracted. It is a tragic paradox: this was the only country in the world that submitted the ownership of water to a plebiscite. An overwhelming majority of Uruguayans decided in 2004 that water was public property. Is there no way to avoid this hijacking of the popular will?

Our countries are modernising. Now the official discourse demands that we honour the debt (though it is dishonest), attract investment (though it is disgraceful), and enter the world (though it is by the service entrance).

Will we continue to believe the usual stories?

Latin America was born to obey the global market, back when the global market was not known as such, when for better or worse we were bound to the duty of obedience.

This sad routine of the centuries began with gold and silver and continued with sugar, tobacco, guano, saltpetre, copper, tin, rubber, cocoa, bananas, coffee, and oil. What are we left from all these splendours? Neither inheritance nor country; rather, gardens turned into deserts, abandoned fields, punctured mountains, poisoned water, empty palaces stalked by phantoms, and long caravans of miserable people condemned to early deaths.

Now it is the turn of cellulose and genetically-modified soya. The history of fleeting glories is repeated once again, as the sound of their trumpets announces our great misfortune.

* * *

Will the past be mute?

We refuse to heed the voices that warn us; the sounds of the world market are the nightmares of countries that submit to its whims. We continue to applaud the confiscation of natural resources that God, or the Devil, granted us. And thus we work for our own ruin and contribute to the extermination of the little nature that is left in this world.

Argentina, Brazil, and other Latin American countries are gripped by the fever of genetically-modified (GM) soya. Tempting prices and soaring profits. For a while now, Argentina has been the world’s number two producer of GM products, after the United States. In Brazil, in one of those turnarounds that ill serve democracy, the Lula administration said yes to GM soya despite the fact that his party said it wouldn’t throughout his campaign.

Bread for today and hunger tomorrow, as certain rural unions and ecological organisations have put it. But we already know that ignorant country bumpkins refuse to understand the advantages of plastic meals and the electric cow, and that ecologists are just a bunch of killjoys who can’t enjoy a good steak.

* * *

The GM lawyers assert that there is no proof that these products are harmful to human health. But if they are so harmless, why do the manufacturers of GM soya refuse to clarify which products contain their product. Or perhaps the GM soya label wouldn’t be the best advertisement.

But there is evidence that these inventions of Dr. Frankenstein damage the health of the soil and reduce national sovereignty. Are we exporting soya or exporting our land? Aren’t we now trapped in the cage of Monsanto and other giant companies whose seeds, herbicides, and pesticides we have become dependent on?

Lands that produced everything for the local markets are now dedicated to a single product for the foreign market. Outward development, and domestic neglect. Monoculture is a prison and always was, and now with GM crops it is even worse. Diversity, in contrast, is liberating. Independence means little more than an anthem and a flag if it is not grounded in food sovereignty. Self- determination begins at the mouth. Only diversity of production can defend us from the sudden collapses in prices that are the custom, the deadly custom, of the world markets.

The vast expanses destined for GM soya are razing native forests and forcing out poor peasant farmers. This highly mechanised form of farming creates very few jobs; instead it exterminates small farm plots and orchards with the poisons it sprays. The exodus accelerates to the big cities, where it is supposed those driven from the land will be able to consume, with luck, as soon as they produce. It’s agrarian reform; or rather, agrarian reform in reverse.

* * *

Cellulose, too, is all the rage in certain countries. Uruguay, to take one case, is becoming a world centre of cellulose production, providing a once cheap material to far-off paper plants.

It is a case of export monoculture in the purest colonial tradition: immense artificial plantations that call themselves forests and generate cellulose in an industrial process that floods the rivers with poisons and makes the air unbreathable.

Here they started with just two huge plants, one of which was already half-built. Afterward another project was added on, and there is talk of another and another after that, while more and more land is turned over to the mass-production of eucalyptus trees. The big international companies have found us on the map and fallen suddenly in love with a Uruguay that lacks the technology to control them, a government that gives them subsidies and waives taxes, its low wages, and its trees that grow in a heartbeat.

* * *

Everything indicates that our little country will not be able to withstand the embrace of these giants . As usual, the blessings of nature become the curses of history. Our eucalyptus grows ten times faster than that of Finland, which means that the industrial plantations will be ten times as devastating. At the rate things are going, a large part of the country’s land will be squeezed until the last drop of water is extracted. The thirsty titans will suck dry both our soil and our subsoil.

It is a tragic paradox: this was the only country in the world that submitted the ownership of water to a plebiscite. An overwhelming majority of Uruguayans decided in 2004 that water was public property. Is there no way to avoid this hijacking of the popular will?

* * *

It should be recognised that cellulose has become something like a patriotic cause, while the defense of nature does not spark great enthusiasm. Worse still, in our country, ill with cellulosis, certain words which were never bad words, like environmentalist and ecologist, have become insults used to crucify enemies of progress and saboteurs of jobs.

The disaster is celebrated as if splendid news. Dying from pollution is worth more than dying of starvation. Many unemployed believe that they have no alternative but to chose between two calamities, and the hawkers of illusions show up offering thousands and thousands of jobs.

But publicity is one thing, and reality quite another. Brazil’s Landless Movement (MST), the organisation of peasant farmers without land, has issued eloquent data whose validity is not limited to Brazil: cellulose cultivation generates one job for every 185 hectares, whereas family farming creates five jobs for every ten hectares.

But the companies promise the very best: torrents of jobs, millions and millions in investment, strict oversight, clean air, clear water, and pristine land. It is worth asking: why don’t they install these marvels in Punta del Este, to improve the quality of life and stimulate tourism in our main seaside resort? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Jul 7 2006 (IPS)

One country bombed two countries. Such impunity might astound were it not business as usual. In the few timid protests made, it was stated that mistakes were made. How much longer will horrors be called mistakes?, asks Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist and author of The Open Veins of Latin America and Memories of Fire. In this article, Galeano writes that this slaughter of civilians began with the kidnapping of a soldier. How much longer will the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier be allowed to justify the kidnapping of Palestinian sovereignty? How much longer will the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers be allowed to justify the kidnapping of the entire nation of Lebanon? For centuries the slaughter of Jews was the favourite sport of Europeans. Auschwitz was the natural culmination of an ancient river of terror which had flowed across all of Europe. How much longer will Palestinians and other Arabs be made to pay for crimes they didn`t commit? Those who dare denounce this murder are called anti-semites. How much longer will the critics of state terrorism be considered anti-semites? How much longer will we accept this grotesque form of extortion? Are the Jews who are horrified by what is being done in their name anti-semites? Are Arabs, as Semitic as the Jews, anti-semites? Are there not Arab voices that defend a Palestinian homeland but condemn fundamentalist insanity? Isn`t it clear that in the war between Israel and Hezbolla it is the civilians, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Israeli, that are dying? And isn´t it clear that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the invasion of Gaza and Lebanon are the incubators of hatred, producing fanatic after fanatic after fanatic? We are the only species of animal that specialises in mutual extermination. We devote 2.5 billion dollars per day to military spending. Misery and war are children of the same father. How much longer will we accept that this world so in love with death is the only world possible?

One country bombed two countries. Such impunity might astound were it not business as usual. In the few timid protests made, it was stated that mistakes were made. How much longer will horrors be called mistakes?

This slaughter of civilians began with the kidnapping of a soldier. How much longer will the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier be allowed to justify the kidnapping of Palestinian sovereignty? How much longer will the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers be allowed to justify the kidnapping of the entire nation of Lebanon?

For centuries the slaughter of Jews was the favourite sport of Europeans. Auschwitz was the natural culmination of an ancient river of terror which had flowed across all of Europe. How much longer will Palestinians and other Arabs be made to pay for crimes they didn`t commit?

Hezbolla didn´t exist when Israel razed Lebanon in earlier invasions. How much longer will we continue to believe the story of this attacked attacker, which practises terrorism because it has the right to defend itself from terrorism?

Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon. How long will Israel be allowed to exterminate countries with impunity?

The tortures of Abu Ghraib, which triggered a certain universal sickness, are nothing new to us in Latin America. Our militaries learned their interrogation techniques from the School of the Americas, which may no longer exist in name but lives on in effect. How much longer will we continue to accept that torture can be legitimised, as the Israeli Supreme Court ruled it could, in the name of the legitimate defense of the homeland?

Israel has ignored forty-six resolutions of the General Assembly and other UN bodies. How much longer will Israel enjoy the privilege of selective deafness?

The United Nations makes recommendations but never decisions. When it does decide, the United States makes sure the decision is blocked. In the UN Security Council, the US has vetoed forty resolutions condemning actions of Israel. How much longer will the United Nations act as if it were just another name for the United States?

Since the Palestinians had their homes confiscated and their land taken from them, much blood has flowed. How much longer will blood flow so that force can justify what law denies?

History is repeated day after day, year after year, and ten Arabs die for every ten Israelis. How much longer will an Israeli life be measured as worth ten Arab lives?

In proportion to the overall population, the 50,000 civilians killed in Iraq –the majority of them women and children– are the equivalent of 800,000 Americans. How much longer will we continue to accept, as if customary, the killing of Iraqis in a blind war that has forgotten all of its justifications?

Iran is developing nuclear energy. How much longer will be believe that this is enough to prove that a country constitutes a danger to humanity? The so-called international community is not concerned in the least by the fact that Israel has 250 atomic bombs, despite that fact that the country lives permanently on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Who calibrates the universal dangerometer? Was Iran the country that dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima?

In the age of globalisation, the right to express is less powerful than the right to apply pressure. To justify the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, war is called peace. The Israelis are patriots and the Palestinians are terrorists, and terrorists sow universal alarm.

How much longer will the media broadcast fear instead of news?

The slaughter happening today, which is not the first and I fear will not be the last, is happening in silence. Has the world gone deaf? How much longer will the outcry of the outraged be sounded on a bell of straw?

The bombing is killing children: more than a third of the victims. Those who dare denounce this murder are called anti-semites. How much longer will the critics of state terrorism be considered anti-semites? How much longer will we accept this grotesque form of extortion? Are the Jews who are horrified by what is being done in their name anti-semites? Are Arabs, as Semitic as the Jews, anti-semites? Are there not Arab voices that defend a Palestinian homeland but condemn fundamentalist insanity?

Terrorists resemble one another: state terrorists, respectable members of government, and private terrorists, madmen acting alone or in those organised in groups hard at work since the Cold War battling communist totalitarianism. And all act in the name of various gods, whether God, Allah, or Jehova. How much longer will we ignore that fact that all terrorists scorn human life and feed off of one another? Isn`t it clear that in the war between Israel and Hezbolla it is the civilians, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Israeli, that are dying? And isn´t it clear that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the invasion of Gaza and Lebanon are the incubators of hatred, producing fanatic after fanatic after fanatic?

We are the only species of animal that specialises in mutual extermination. We devote 2.5 billion dollars per day to military spending. Misery and war are children of the same father. How much longer will we accept that this world so in love with death is the only world possible? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Jul 1 2006 (IPS)

Someone, I don\’t know who, summed up the 2006 World Cup as follows: -The players behaved in an exemplary fashion. They didn\’t drink, they didn\’t smoke, they didn\’t play, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist and author of The Open Veins of Latin America and Memories of Fire. Those who from time to time made a goal did not play beautiful football, and those who did, didn\’t score. Africa was edged out early on, and before long Latin America was exiled as well. The World Cup became a Eurocup. The results rewarded what is now called practical sense: high defensive walls and way up front a lone scorer, imploring God for a favour. As is usually the case in football and life, he who plays best loses while he who plays not to lose wins. The finale of penalty shots only added to the injustice. Until 1968, difficult games were decided with the flip of a coin. In a way, this is still true. The penalty shots seemed too much a matter of sheer chance. Argentina was better than Germany, and France was better than Italy, but a few seconds mattered more than two hours of play, and Argentina had to go home and France lost the Cup. ….. There was little imagination on display. The artists left the playing to weight lifters and Olympic runners, who in passing would kick a ball or a rival.

It is also the last game of the best, the most admired, the most loved player, who is now bidding farewell to football. The eyes of the world are upon him. And suddenly this king of the party becomes a raging bull and charges a rival, downing him with a head butt to the chest, and then walks away.

He is ejected by the referee and sent off to the jeering of the crowd that would have been an ovation, leaving not by the grand entrance but the tunnel to the dressing rooms.

On the way, he passes the gold cup reserved for the winning team. He doesn’t even look at it.

*****

When this World Cup started, the experts said that Zinedine Zidane was old. Mariano Pernia, the Argentine who plays on the Spanish team, said:

-The wind is old, and it keeps blowing.

And France defeated Spain, and in this and the following games Zidane was the youngest of all.

Afterwards, at the end of the Cup, after what happened happened, it was easy to attack the villain of the movie. But it was, and it remains, hard to understand. Is it true? Is it a nightmare, an image from a dream. How could he abandon his followers when they needed him most? Horacio Elizondo, the referee, was right to give him the red card, but why did Zidane do what he did?

It would seem that the Italian defender Marco Materazzi served up some of those racist insults that madmen usually shriek from the stands. Zidane, a muslim, son of Algerians, has known how to defend himself since childhood, when he received similar attacks in the poor suburbs of Marseilles. He knows them well but they sting him like the first time. And his enemies know that provocation works. More than once he has lost his temper is a similarly ugly manner, and Materazzi is not, let us say, renowned for his pristine ways.

This World Cup was marked by the slogans endorsed by the teams at the start of the games against the universal plague of racism, and Zidane was one of the players who made this possible.

It is a burning issue. On the eve of the Cup, far right French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen proclaimed that France didn’t recognise itself in its players because they were almost all black and because its captain, that Arab, didn’t sing the national anthem. Just earlier, the coach of the Spanish team, Luis Aragones, had called French player Thierry Henry ”a black shit”, and the perpetual president of South American football, Nicolas Leoz, presenting his autobiography, said that he was born in a town of five hundred people and three thousand Indians.

*****

But can one reduce to an insult, or a string of insults, this tragedy of the player who chose to lose, the star who renounced glory when it was brushing up against him?

Maybe, who knows, maybe his act of rage, without Zidane willing or even knowing it, was a howl of impotence.

Maybe it was a howl of impotence against the insults, the jabs, the spitting, the surreptitious kicks, the expert simulation of fouls and pain, impotence against the theatre of performers who whack you and then act like they were never there.

Or perhaps it was a howl of impotence against the devastating success of dirty football, against the dishonesty, cowardice, and avarice of the football that globalisation, the enemy of diversity, is forcing on us. In the end, as the World Cup went on, it became clearer and clearer that Zidane was not part of this approach. And his magic, his mastery, his melancholy elegance, deserved to be defeated, because today’s world, which mass produces models of success, deserved this mediocre World Cup.

*****

And yet is can also be said that Italy deserved to win the Cup, because all of the teams, some more than others, played Italian- style, with the same game plan, four defenders in a lock-tight formation, with goals scored on counterattacks.

Italy did what it had to do. In the end, this ”catenaccio” (door bolt) defence produced many a yawn but also four world trophies. In this Cup only two goals were scored against Italy, one in a penalty shot, the other it scored against itself. And its best players were in the back field, not up front: Buffon, the goalie, and Cannavaro, centre back.

Eight players from Juventus made the final in Berlin: five played for Italy, three for France. It was a strange coincidence that Juventus was the team most involved in the game-fixing scandal that broke just before the Cup. From Clean Hands to Clean Feet: the Italian judiciary decided to banish to the lower ranks of Serie B and Serie C the country’s most powerful teams, including Lazio, Fiorentina, and Milan, owned by the virtuous Silvio Berlusconi, who has committed fraud with impunity in both football and politics. The magistrates proved a series of schemes ranging from buying referees and journalists, falsifying contracts and juggling bank balances, to manipulating television programmes.

A government minister floated the idea of amnesty if Italy won the championship. Italy won. Will it all be swept under the carpet, again, as usual? Zidane was thrown out for far less.

*****

Someone, I don’t know who, summed up the 2006 World Cup as follows:

-The players behaved in an exemplary fashion. They didn’t drink, they didn’t smoke, they didn’t play.

Those who from time to time made a goal did not play beautiful football, and those who did, didn’t score. Africa was edged out early on, and before long Latin America was exiled as well.

The World Cup became a Eurocup.

The results rewarded what is now called practical sense: high defensive walls and way up front a lone scorer, imploring God for a favour. As is usually the case in football and life, he who plays best loses while he who plays not to lose wins.

The finale of penalty shots only added to the injustice. Until 1968, difficult games were decided with the flip of a coin. In a way, this is still true. The penalty shots seemed too much a matter of sheer chance. Argentina was better than Germany, and France was better than Italy, but a few seconds mattered more than two hours of play, and Argentina had to go home and France lost the Cup. …..

There was little imagination on display. The artists left the playing to weight lifters and Olympic runners, who in passing would kick a ball or a rival.

The Cup was so tedious that the owners of the business had no choice but to think up ways to inject enthusiasm into the dreary spectacle. One of the ideas generated by FIFA was to punish 0-0 ties. Another was to enlarge the goals to increase scoring. And finally, from the school of ”If you don’t like the soup, have two bowls”, there was the idea of holding the Cup every two years.

But professional football, that mirror of the world, is played to win, not to be enjoyed, and the calculation of costs makes a mockery of the useless imaginary pirouettes of the bureaucrats that rule world football. Fortunately all football is not professional. All you need is to step out into the street or onto the beaches to see that the ball can still roll along with joy.

In professional football, the kind on television, there is little joy to be seen. We seem condemned to nostalgia for the old days when there were five forwards, and to the sad recognition that now there is just one. And at the rate we are going, not even he will remain: one day there will be only defenders.

Zoologist Roberto Fontanarrosa has proved it: the forward and the panda are endangered species. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Apr 1 2006 (IPS)

The Berlin Wall made the news every day. From dawn to dusk we read about it, heard about it, and saw it: The Wall of Shame, the Wall of Infamy, the Iron Curtain, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist, is author of The Open Veins of Latin America and Memories of Fire. In this column, Galeano writes that eventually, this wall, which deserved to fall, fell. But other walls have sprung up, and continue to spring up, and though they are far larger than the Berlin Wall, little or nothing is said about them. Little is said about the wall the United States is erecting along its border with Mexico, or the double razor wire fences around Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish enclaves on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco. And next to nothing was said about the West Bank Wall, which perpetuates the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and will soon be fifteen times longer than the Berlin Wall. And the Moroccan Wall, which for twenty years has perpetuated Morocco\’s occupation of Western Sahara, goes unmentioned altogether. This wall, continuously mined and surveilled by thousands of soldiers, is sixty times longer than the Berlin Wall. Why is it that some walls are so vocal and others are so mute? Would it be because of the walls of uncommunication that the major media erect each day?

The Berlin Wall made the news every day. From dawn to dusk we read about it, heard about it, and saw it: The Wall of Shame, the Wall of Infamy, the Iron Curtain.

Eventually, this wall, which deserved to fall, fell. But other walls have sprung up, and continue to spring up, and though they are far larger than the Berlin Wall, little or nothing is said about them.

Little is said about the wall the United States is erecting along its border with Mexico, or the double razor wire fences around Ceuta and Melilla, the Spanish enclaves on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco. And next to nothing was said about the West Bank Wall, which perpetuates the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and will soon be fifteen times longer than the Berlin Wall.

And the Moroccan Wall, which for twenty years has perpetuated Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara, goes unmentioned altogether. This wall, continuously mined and surveilled by thousands of soldiers, is sixty times longer than the Berlin Wall.

Why is it that some walls are so vocal and others are so mute? Would it be because of the walls of uncommunication that the major media erect each day?

*** In July 2004 the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that the West Bank Wall violated international law and ordered it torn down. Thus far, Israel hasn’t found out about it.

In October 1975 the same court found that there was no ”tie of territorial sovereignty between the territory of Western Sahara and the Kingdom of Morocco”. To say that Morocco was deaf to the court’s finding is an understatement. It was far worse: the day after the decision was issued, Morocco began the invasion, the so-called ”Green March”, and before long it had seized vast areas and expelled the majority of the population in a wave of blood and fire.

And so it goes.

*** A thousand-and-one UN resolutions have confirmed the Saharawi people’s right to self-determination.

What good were they? A plebiscite was to be held so the population could decide its on fate. To insure victory, the Moroccan monarch filled the invaded territory with Moroccans. But before long not even the Moroccans were deemed trustworthy. And the King, who had said Yes to the plebiscite, said Who knows? And later he said No, and now his son, who inherited the throne, also says No. The denial is the same as a confession. By denying the right to vote, Morocco confesses that it stole a country.

Will we continue to accept such developments? To accept that in a universal democracy we subjects have a right only to obedience?

What was the effect of the thousand-and-one UN resolutions against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory? And the thousand-and-one resolutions against the blockade against Cuba?

As the old saying goes: ”Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.”

*** These days patriotism is a privilege of dominant countries. When the dominated countries try it, patriotism smells suspiciously like populism or terrorism, or simply deserves no attention.

The Saharawi patriots who have fought for thirty years to regain their place in the world have won diplomatic recognition from 82 countries, including my country, Uruguay, which recently added its name to the large majority of the countries of Latin America and Africa.

But not Europe. No European country has recognised the Saharawi Republic. Including Spain. This is an instance of serious irresponsibility, or perhaps amnesia, or at least disaffection. Thirty years ago the Sahara was a colony of Spain, and Spain had a legal and moral duty to protect its independence.

What did the imperial rule leave behind? After a century, how many professionals did it train? Three: a doctor, a lawyer, and a trade expert. That is what it left behind. That and a betrayal. It served up this land and its people on a platter to be devoured by the Kingdom of Morocco.

*** Why is it that eyes refuse to see that which breaks them?

Is it because the Saharawi were merely a medium of exchange offered for businesses and countries that bought from Morocco what Morocco sold, though it wasn’t its own?

A few years ago, Javier Corcuera interviewed in a Baghdad hospital a victim of the bombing of Iraq. A bomb had destroyed her arm. Just eight years old, after eleven operations, the girl said:

”If only we didn’t have oil.”

Maybe the people of the Sahara are guilty because off their long coastline lies the greatest treasure of fishes in the Atlantic Ocean and because beneath the immensity of its seemingly empty sands lie the world’s largest phosphate reserves and perhaps oil, natural gas, and uranium.

This prophecy could be, though isn’t, in the Koran:

”Natural resources will be the curse of the people.”

*** The refugee camps in the south of Algeria are in the most desertic of all deserts. It is a vast void, surrounded by nothingness, where only rocks grow. And yet in this place, and in the liberated areas, which are not much better, the Saharawis have been able to construct the most open and the least machista society in the entire Muslim world.

This miracle of the Saharawis, who are very poor and very few, cannot be explained solely by their tenacious will to be free, which is abundant in these places where everything is lacking. It is also largely a factor of international solidarity.

And the majority of assistance comes from the people of Spain. Their vital solidarity, memory, and dignity are far more powerful than the waffling of governments and the cynical calculations of business.

Note: solidarity, not charity. Charity humiliates. Do not forget the African proverb: ”The hand that receives is always lower than the hand that gives.”

*** The Saharawis wait. They are condemned to perpetual anguish and perpetual nostalgia. The refugee camps carry the names of their kidnapped cities, their lost meeting places, their haunts: El Aaiun, Smara.

They are called children of the clouds because they have always chased the rain.

For more than thirty years they have also pursued justice, which in our world seems rarer even than water in the desert.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
LA PAZ, Jan 26 2006 (IPS)

On January 22, 2002, Evo was expelled from Paradise. Or rather: Deputy Morales was thrown out of Parliament. On January 22, 2006, in the same grand chamber, Evo Morales was sworn in as the president of Bolivia. Or rather: Bolivia is beginning to realise that it is a country with an indigenous majority, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist and author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’. In this article, Galeano writes that long before the expulsion of Evo, his people, the indigenous, had been expelled from the official nation. They were not sons of Bolivia; they were merely its labour force. Until just over fifty years ago, the indians could neither vote nor even walk on the sidewalk in cities. It was with good reason that Evo said in his first presidential address that the indians were not invited to the foundation of Bolivia, in 1825. In recent times, Bolivia has experienced a period of popular insurrection. This process of continuous uprisings, which has left a trail of dead, culminated with the Gas War, but went much farther back. It went farther back and stretches far ahead to the election of Evo, against the tempest and tides.

Or rather: Deputy Morales was thrown out of Parliament.

On January 22, 2006, in the same grand chamber, Evo Morales was sworn in as the president of Bolivia.

Or rather: Bolivia is beginning to realise that it is a country with an indigenous majority.

At the time of Evo’s expulsion, an indian deputy was rarer than a green dog.

Not so four years later: today there are many legislators who chew coca leaves, an age-old custom prohibited in the sacred halls of parliament.

*** Long before the expulsion of Evo, his people, the indigenous, had been expelled from the official nation. They were not sons of Bolivia; they were merely its labour force. Until just over fifty years ago, the indians could neither vote nor even walk on the sidewalk in cities.

It was with good reason that Evo said in his first presidential address that the indians were not invited to the foundation of Bolivia, in 1825.

The same holds true for the rest of the Americas as well, the United States included. Our nations were born lies. From the beginning, the independence of the countries of the Americas was usurped by a minuscule minority. Without exception, all of the first Constitutions left out women, indians, blacks, and the poor.

The election of Evo Morales is, at least in this sense, the equivalent of the election of Michelle Bachelet in Chile. Evo and Eva. For the first time Bolivia has an indigenous president, and Chile a woman president. And similarly Brazil has the first black minister of culture. After all, doesn’t the culture that has saved Brazil from sadness have roots in Africa?

In these lands sick with racism and machismo, there will be some who see all of this as downright scandalous.

But what is scandalous is that it didn’t happen sooner.

***

The mask comes off, the face appears, and the torment rages.

The only language worthy of faith is that born of the necessity of speaking. The most serious flaw of Evo is that the people believe him, because he radiates authenticity even when speaking in Spanish, which is not his mother tongue, he makes an error here and there. The PhDs, who flout their mastery of echoing distant voices, accuse him of ignorance. Peddlars of promises accuse him of demagogy, and those in the Americas who trumpeted one God, one king, and one truth accuse him of being a tyrant. And the assassins of the indians shake with panic in fear that their victims are like them.

***

Bolivia seemed to be no more than the pseudonym of those who ruled the country, and sucked it dry as they sang their anthem. And the humiliation of the indians, transformed into a custom, seemed to be fated.

But in recent times, months, years, this country has experienced a period of popular insurrection. This process of continuous uprisings, which has left a trail of dead, culminated with the Gas War, but went much farther back. It went farther back and stretches far ahead to the election of Evo, against the tempest and tides.

In the case of Bolivia’s gas, an ancient tale was being acted out again: the plundering of the country’s treasures, which has continued for more than four hundred years, from the middle of the 16th century. Where the silver of Potosi once lay, a hollow mountain stands; along the Pacific coast where saltpetre was found, all that remained was a map without a sea; and where the tin of Oruro had been, all that was left was widows.

This, and this alone, they left behind.

***

The uprisings of recent years were riddled with gunshots, but they succeeded in preventing Bolivia’s gas from ending up in foreign hands, and in blocking the privatisation of water in Cochabamba and La Paz. They toppled governments ruled from abroad, and said no to payroll taxes and other sage edicts issued by the International Monetary Fund.

From the point of view of the civilised media, these explosions of popular dignity were acts of barbarism. A thousand times I must have read or seen or heard that Bolivia in an ungovernable, incomprehensible, intractable, unviable country. The journalists that repeat this are wrong: they should confess that Bolivia is, for them, an invisible country.

*** There is nothing unusual about it. This blindness is not only a bad habit of arrogant foreigners. Bolivia was born blind to its self because racism clouded its vision, and there is no lack of Bolivians who prefer to see themselves with eyes that scorn.

But it will not be for nothing that the indigenous flag of the Andes pays homage to the diversity of the world. According to tradition, the flag was born of the encounter between the female and the male rainbow. And this rainbow of the earth, which in the native language means ”woven of rippling blood”, has more colours than the rainbow of the sky. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Dec 12 2005 (IPS)

An old proverb teaches that it is better to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist, and author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’ In this article, Galeano writes that a certain Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga, who was not born in America but knows it inside out, says that this proverb is true and a good idea, but what happens when they poison the river? he asks. Or if someone buys the river, which used to belong to everyone, and bans fishing? Or what happens when what is happening now happens? Teaching is not enough.

Bishop Pedro Casaldaliga, who was not born in America but knows it inside out, says that this is true and a good idea, but what happens when they poison the river? he asks. Or if someone buys the river, which used to belong to everyone, and bans fishing? Or what happens when what is happening now happens?

Teaching is not enough.

Arms of a woman

Juan Antonio Medina was sitting watching television in his house.

He had never thought very highly of advertisements, but this one featured a line that wasn’t bad at all: ”a charmed woman is a safe woman.”

The images that followed were of small revolvers and pistols, switchblades, pepper sprays that stop men dead in their tracks, and other diminutive devices perfect for a lady’s purse in troubled times.

And then Juan Antonio Medina realised he had heard the expression wrong: ”An armed woman is a safe woman.”

The International Community

A chicken, a duck, a turkey, a pheasant, a quail, and a partridge were summoned and traveled together to the summit.

The king’s chef welcomed them:

-I called you here, he explained, so you can tell me what sauce you would like to be eaten with.

One of the birds dared to speak:

-I don’t want to be eaten at all.

The chef quickly set them straight:

-That is out of the question, he barked.

The International Expert

I have heard this story in a number of places attributed to different people, and because of this any resemblance to reality must be sheer coincidence.

Here is the version I heard in the Dominican Republic:

One day the children were running circles around Dona Maria de las Mercedes, clucking and throwing grains of corn to her chickens. She sat where she sat every day, when a car appeared, dazzling, out of a cloud of dust on the road from Santo Domingo.

A man in a jacket and tie, briefcase in hand, asked her:

– If I guess exactly how many chicks you have, will you give me one?

The woman made a face.

The man promptly fired up the global positioning system on his 60 gigabyte Pentium 4 laptop, linked up to the satellite photography programme, and activated his pixel counter.

-You have one hundred and thirty-two chicks, he said.

And he bent down and scooped up a chick.

Maria de las Mercedes Holmes then asked the man:

-If I guess what line of work you’re in, will you give me the chick back?

The man made a face. The woman guessed.

-You are an expert at an international organisation.

She took her chick back and then said to him:

-It wasn’t too hard to figure it out: you came without giving any notice, entered my farm without asking permission, told me something that I already know, and then charged me for it.

Customs

A candidate from the left travelled to the town of San Ignacio in Honduras during the 1997 electoral campaign. He climbed the stairs to the podium and before a small audience proclaimed that the left doesn’t bribe the people, that it doesn’t sell favours for votes.

-We do not give meals! Or jobs! Or money! he boomed.

-Then what the hell do you give? a drunk called out, just awakened from his nap under a tree in the plaza.

Traditions

Word and act had never met.

When word said yes, act did not.

When word said no, act did yes.

When word said more or less, act did less or more.

One day word and act came across one another in the street.

Because they didn’t know each other, they couldn’t recognise each other.

And because they didn’t recognise each other, they didn’t exchange greetings.

Directions

I was wandering lost through the streets of Cadiz, thanks to my acute sense of disorientation, when a good man rescued me. He instructed me how to get to the old market, and to any other destination in the wide world:

-Let the road lead you.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
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)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Oct 5 2005 (IPS)

Did Christopher Columbus discover America in 1492? Or was it the Vikings before him? And before the Vikings, what about the people who lived there? Didn\’t they exist? writes Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan writer and journalist, is the author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’. In this article, Galeano writes: We have been told, and still are, that it was the pilgrims of the Mayflower that populated America? Was it empty before? Because Columbus didn\’t understand what they were saying, he concluded the Indians didn\’t know how to speak. Because they wore no clothes, were gentle, and gave away everything they had, he concluded they lacked the capacity for reason. And because he was certain of having discovered the Orient by the back door, he believed they were Indians from India. After, during the second voyage, the admiral promulgated an act establishing that Cuba was part of Asia. The document of 14 June 1494 stated as evidence that the crew of their three ships recognised it such. Whoever said otherwise was given thirty lashes, fined 10,000 maravedies, and had his tongue cut out.

Official history relates that Vasco Nunez of Balboa was the first man who saw both oceans, standing on a peak in Panama. Were the inhabitants of that area blind?

Who gave corn and potatoes and tomatoes and chocolate and the rivers and mountains of America their names? Hernan Cortes? Francisco Pizarro? Were the people who were already living there mute?

We have been told, and still are, that it was the pilgrims of the Mayflower that populated America? Had it been empty before?

***

Because Columbus didn’t understand what the Indians were saying, he concluded that they didn’t know how to speak. Because they wore no clothes, were gentle, and gave away everything they had, he concluded they lacked the capacity for reason. And because he was certain of having discovered the Orient by the back door, he believed they were Indians from India.

Afterwards, during the second voyage, the admiral promulgated an act establishing that Cuba was part of Asia. The document of 14 June 1494 stated as evidence that the crew of the three ships recognised it such. Whoever said otherwise was given thirty lashes, fined 10,000 maravedies, and had his tongue cut out.

The notary, Hernan Perez de Luna, attested, and the sailors who could write signed at the bottom.

***

The conquistadors demanded that America be something it wasn’t. They saw not what was before them but what they wanted to see: the fountain of youth, the city of gold, the kingdom of emeralds, the country of sugar cane. And they treated the Americans as if they were what they imagined the pagans of the Orient to be.

Christopher Columbus saw on the shores of Cuba sirens with men’s faces and chicken feathers and supposed that not far from there men and women had tails.

In Guyana, according to Sir Walter Raleigh, there were people with eyes in their shoulders and mouths in their chests. In Venezuela, according to Pedro Simon, there were Indians with ears so long they dragged on the ground.

On the Amazon, according to Christopher of Acuna, the natives’ feet were shaped backwards, heels forward and toes behind, and according to Pedro Martin de Angleria, women mutilated one breast to be able to fire their arrows better.

Angleria, who wrote the first history of America though he never set foot there, also affirmed that in the New World there were people with tails, as Columbus had recounted, but according to him these tails were so long the natives could sit only in chairs with holes.

***

The Black Code prohibited the torture of slaves in the French colonies. But it wasn’t to torture them but to educate them that slaves’ masters whipped their blacks and cut their tendons when they fled.

The Laws of the Indias, which protected the Indians in the Spanish colonies, were quite moving. But the gallows and pillory set up in the centre of every Main Square were even more affecting.

The reading of the Request for Obedience was very convincing. This occurred on the eve of the assault on each village and explained to the Indians that God had come to the world and left Saint Peter in his place, and that the successor of Saint Peter was the Holy Father, and that the Holy Father has shown favour on Queen of Castilla who rules all this land, and that for this reason they should go from here or pay tribute in gold, and that if they don’t or if they stay war would be declared on them and they would be made slaves along with their wives and children. But the Request was read in the middle of the night from the mountain in Spanish and without an interpreter, in the presence of the notary but no Indians, as they were asleep, miles away, and hadn’t the faintest idea what was awaiting them.

***

Until not long ago, October 12 was Race Day.

But does such a thing even exist? What is race but a useful lie to exploit and exterminate one’s neighbour.

In 1942, when the US entered the Second World War, the American Red Cross decided that the blood of black people would not be accepted in its blood banks. In this way they prevented the mixing of races, which was prohibited in the bedroom, from occurring through injection.

Has anyone seen, by chance, black blood? ***

Afterwards, Race Day became the Day of Encounter.

Were colonial invasions encounters, whether those of yesterday or those of today? Shouldn’t they be called rapes or violations instead?

Perhaps the most revealing episode in the history of the Americas occurred in 1563 in Chile. The fortress of Arauco was besieged by the Indians and had no food or water, yet Captain Bernal refused to surrender.

From the stockade he screamed out, ”There will be more and more of us!”

”With what women will you make them?” the Indian chief asked.

”With yours. We will make them bear children who will be your masters.”

***

The invaders called the original Americans cannibals, but the real cannibal was the Cerro Rico de Potosi, whose mouths ate Indian flesh to feed Europe’s capitalist development.

The invaders called them idolaters because they believed that nature is sacred and that we are the brothers of all those with feet, paws, wings, or roots.

And they called them savages. But they were not wrong about this. The Indians were such savages that they ignored the fact that they had to obtain a visa, a certificate of good behaviour, and a work permit from Columbus, Cabral, Cortes, Alvarado, Pizarro, and the pilgrims of the Mayflower. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano
Oct 5 2005 (IPS)

Did Christopher Columbus discover America in 1492? Or was it the Vikings before him? And before the Vikings, what about the people who lived there? Didn’t they exist? writes Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist and writer, author of ”The Open Veins of Latin America” and ”Memories of Fire”.

In this article, Galeano writes: We have been told, and still are, that it was the pilgrims of the Mayflower that populated America? Was it empty before?

Because Columbus didn’t understand what they were saying, he concluded the Indians didn’t know how to speak. Because they wore no clothes, were gentle, and gave away everything they had, he concluded they lacked the capacity for reason. And because he was certain of having discovered the Orient by the back door, he believed they were Indians from India.

After, during the second voyage, the admiral promulgated an act establishing that Cuba was part of Asia. The document of 14 June 1494 stated as evidence that the crew of their three ships recognised it such. Whoever said otherwise was given thirty lashes, fined 10,000 maravedies, and had his tongue cut out.

/NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN AUSTRALIA, BRAZIL, CANADA, NEW ZEALAND, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM/

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Sep 8 2005 (IPS)

Wars give noble reasons for why they occur: international security, national dignity, democracy, freedom, order, the mandate of Civilisation, or the will of God. Not one has the honesty to confess: I kill to steal, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist and author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’. In this article, Galeano writes that the denial of the evidence, a practice unjustly attributed to drunks, is in fact the most notorious characteristic of the president of the planet, who thank God doesn\’t drink a drop. He continues to sustain, day after day, that the war in Iraq has nothing to do with oil. A certain Lawrence of Arabia wrote from Iraq in 1920: \’\’The people of England have been led to Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be difficult to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information.\’\’ I know that history never repeats itself, but sometimes I wonder. And the obsession with Chavez? Does oil have nothing to do with this frenetic campaign to kill in the name of democracy the dictator who won nine clean elections? And the continuous alarms raised about the nuclear threat from Iran, are they unrelated to the fact that the country has among the largest natural gas reserves in the world?

”The motive?” Ellery replied, shrugging his shoulders. ”You already know the reason.”

Ellery Queen, Adventure in the House of Darkness

MONTEVIDEO, Sep (IPS) – Wars give noble reasons for why they occur: international security, national dignity, democracy, freedom, order, the mandate of Civilisation, or the will of God.

Not one has the honesty to confess: I kill to steal.

***

No fewer than three million civilians died in the Congo during the four-year war that has been on hold since the end of 2002. They died for coltan, though they didn’t know it, a rare mineral that is, like its odd name, a combination of colombo and tantalite, two rare minerals.

Coltan was virtually worthless until the discovery that it was indispensable in the manufacture of cell phones, spaceships, computers, and missiles. Since then, it has been worth more than gold.

Almost all of the known reserves of coltan are in the sands of the Congo. More than forty years ago, Patrice Lumumba was sacrificed on the altar of gold and diamonds. His country continues to kill him each day. The Congo, an extremely poor country, is rich in minerals, and this gift of nature keeps on turning into an historic curse.

***

Africans call oil the shit of the devil. In 1978 oil was discovered in southern Sudan. Seven years after, it was learned that the deposits were more than double what had been thought, and that the largest quantities were located in the west of the country, in the region of Darfur. It was here another slaughter recently occurred, and continues. Huge numbers of black peasant farmers –two million according to some estimates– have fled or succumbed, by bullet, knife, or hunger, to the advance of the Arab militias that the government has supported with tanks and helicopters.

This war has been disguised as an ethnic and religious conflict between the Arab Islamic herdsmen and the black, Christian, animist farmers.

***

But it just so happens that the towns that have been burned to the ground and the crops that have been razed stood in the very places where oil wells now stand.

***

The denial of the evidence, a practice unjustly attributed to drunks, is in fact the most notorious characteristic of the president of the planet, who thank God doesn’t drink a drop. He continues to sustain, day after day, that the war in Iraq has nothing to do with oil.

A certain Lawrence of Arabia wrote from Iraq in 1920: ”The people of England have been led to Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be difficult to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information.”

I know that history never repeats itself, but sometimes I wonder.

***

And the obsession with Chavez? Does oil have nothing to do with this frenetic campaign to kill in the name of democracy the dictator who won nine clean elections? And the continuous alarms raised about the nuclear threat from Iran, are they unrelated to the fact that the country has among the largest natural gas reserves in the world? And if not, how can this fixation on this nuclear threat be explained? Was it Iran that dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima?

***

The Bechtel company, based in California, was granted a forty- year concession for the water of Cochabamba. All of the water, even rain water. No sooner did it take charge than water prices tripled. The people exploded and the company had to pull out of Bolivia. President Bush took pity on the poor firm and to console it granted it the water of Iraq. Such generosity on his part.

Iraq deserves annihilation not only because of its fabulous oil wealth but also because, irrigated by the Tigris and Euphrates, it is the richest source of fresh water in the Middle East.

***

The world is thirsty. Chemicals poison the rivers and droughts exterminate them, consumer society uses more and more water, as water grows less drinkable and less abundant. Everyone is saying it, and everyone knows it: wars are fought over oil today, and water tomorrow.

In reality the water wars are already being waged. They are wars of conquest but the invaders don’t drop bombs or disembark troops. They are wars waged by international technocrats in civilian clothes who impose a state of seige on poor countries and demand privatisation or death. Their weapons — the lethal instruments of extortion and punishment — make no noise and take up little room.

***

In recent years, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, two teeth of the same claw, imposed water privatisation in sixteen poor countries, including some of the poorest in the world: Benin, Niger, Mozambique, Rwanda, Yemen, Tanzania, Cameroon, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The logic was crystal clear: either hand over your water or you will receive no debt forgiveness or new loans.

The experts had the patience to explain that they weren’t doing this to dismantle their sovereignty but to help to modernise countries that had fallen behind because of the inefficiency of their governments. And if the majority of the population found it couldn’t pay the new water bills, so much the better: this would awaken their dormant capacity for work and personal advancement.

***

Who is in charge in a democracy? The international functionaries of high finance who no one voted for? At the end of October last year, a plebiscite decided the fate of water in Uruguay. The vast majority of the population voted overwhelmingly that water is a public service and a right of all.

It was a victory for democracy over the tradition of impotence which teaches us that we are incapable of managing water or anything else, and over the defamation of public property, disparaged by politicians who used and misused it as if that which belongs to everyone was nobody’s.

The plebiscite in Uruguay made no waves in the international scene. The major media did not cover this battle in the war of water, lost by those who always win; and Uruguay’s example did not spread to any other country. It was the first plebiscite on water, and who knows, may prove to be the last. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Jul 12 2005 (IPS)

\’\’NEW YORK, MADRID, LONDON: TERRORISM STRIKES ANEW.\’\’ This was the headline of many of the world\’s newspapers reporting the recent explosions in London. They didn\’t mention either Afghanistan or Iraq. Weren\’t –aren\’t– the bombings there terrorist attacks as well, which in the case of Iraq occur daily? asks Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist and author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’. In this article, Galeano writes that the military industry needs to produce fear to justify its existence. It is a vicious circle: the world becomes a slaughterhouse which becomes a madhouse which becomes a slaughterhouse … Iraq, bombarded, occupied, humiliated, becomes the preeminent school for crime of our day. Its invaders, who call themselves liberators, have set up there the world\’s most prolific nursery of terrorists. \’\’The Devil provides the weapons.\’\’ At last a true saying. God couldn\’t be such a bastard. It must be the Devil that provides the weapons, or at least the weapons of mass destruction, the real ones, the ones Iraq didn\’t have and that are ripping the world apart: the bombardment of lies from the factories of public opinion; the chemical weapons of consumer society that are maddening the climate and polluting the air; the poison gas from the factories of fear that make us accept the unacceptable and turn indignity into a feature of destiny; the deadly impunity of the serial killers become heads of state; the double-edged swords of the major powers which multiply in tandem poverty and arguments against poverty while they sow anti-personnel mines and sell prostheses, and rain from the sky bombs and contracts for the reconstruction of the countries they annihilate.

In 1776 the Declaration of Independence of the United States affirmed that all men are created equal. Then a few years later the first Constitution refined this notion, establishing that for the purposes of the census, each black would be counted as three-fifths of a person. What fraction of a person are Iraqis counted as today? Some people are more equal than others? So they say.

State terror, the prolific father of all terrorisms, finds the perfect alibi in the terrorisms that it generates. It sheds crocodile tears each time the shit hits the fan, then feigns innocence of the consequences of its actions. But the owners of the world do not need to worry: the atrocities that the fanatics and madmen commit provide them their justification and grant them impunity.

***

”Lies have short legs.” Not so: lies have very long legs. So long they outrun the denials of the liars. After shouting to the four winds that Iraq was a danger to humanity, Bush and Blair admitted publicly that the country they invaded and annihilated had no weapons of mass destruction. In subsequent elections in the US and UK, the people repaid them with re-election.

***

”Crime doesn’t pay.” Alas, not even such proverbs know what they are saying. The world spends no less than 2.2 billion dollars per day –yes, per day– on the military industry, industry of death, and day by day that figure rises. Wars require weapons, weapons need wars, and wars and weapons need enemies. There is no more lucrative business on the face of the earth than this practice of industrial-scale assassination. Its subsidiary, the industry of fear, devoted to the manufacture of enemies, is today the primary source of profits for entertainment and communications companies. In Hollywood there isn’t a single film that doesn’t feature an explosion as its screen writers pile fright upon fright: as if earthly terror was not enough, they add threats from other planets. The military industry needs to produce fear to justify its existence. It is a vicious circle: the world becomes a slaughterhouse that becomes a madhouse that becomes a slaughterhouse… Iraq, bombarded, occupied, humiliated, becomes the preeminent school for crime of our day. Its invaders, who call themselves liberators, have set up there the most prolific nursery of terrorists, fed by hopelessness and desperation.

***

”The early bird gets the worm.” Does this mean the guerilla leaders? The successful bankers? In reality, the saying calls on the poor labourers to wake up early, and comes from the times when it was work that paid. But in today’s world, work is worth less than garbage.

Of the two motors of the universal system of power –the system that was called capitalism back when I was born– only one works now: greed has disappeared, at least for labourers. Today no one has the faintest hope of getting rich by working. The twin engines of power now are fear and fear: fear of losing one’s job, fear of not finding a job, fear of hunger, fear of homelessness. The unions used to defend the workers, back in times that now seem pre-historic. The most famous multinational companies, Walmart and MacDonald’s, openly and unapologetically deny workers their right to unionise and throw into the street whoever dares to attempt it. For the international organisations that fight for human rights, this scandalous violation provokes no response. The atrophy of the unions, or their outright prohibition, has started to become normal. The labour movement, the fruit of two centuries of workers’ struggle, is in crisis around the world, as are all the instruments of collective and peaceful defence of people who live off their labour and who now, abandoned to their fates, to survive are obliged to accept whatever their employers want: twice the hours for half the pay.

The unions, weakened and persecuted, can do little to help, and God, it would seem, is busy elsewhere. President Bush needs Him day and night for his divine mission of planetary conquest, in which God guides his every step. How do they communicate? By mail, fax, telephone, telepathy? That is a state secret.

***

”The Devil provides the weapons.” At last a true saying. God couldn’t be such a bastard. It must be the Devil that provides the weapons, or at least the weapons of mass destruction, the real ones, the ones Iraq didn’t have and that are ripping the world apart: the bombardment of lies from the factories of public opinion; the chemical weapons of consumer society that are maddening the climate and polluting the air; the poison gas from the factories of fear that make us accept the unacceptable and turn indignity into a feature of destiny; the deadly impunity of the serial killers become heads of state; the double-edged swords of the major powers which multiply at the same time poverty and arguments against poverty, while they sow anti-personnel mines and sell prostheses, and rain from the sky bombs and contracts for the reconstruction of the countries they annihilate. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Feb 1 2005 (IPS)

It was in prison that this adventure in freedom was born. In the jail of Seville, \’\’where every discomfort has its place and every sad sound its home\’\’, Don Quixote of La Mancha was engendered, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist, and author of \”The Open Veins of Latin America\” and \”Memories of Fire\”. In this article, Galeano writes that every person contains other possible people, and each world contains its anti-world. This hidden promise, the world that we need, is no less real than the world we know and suffer. This truth is well-known, and fully lived, by the beaten down who still practice the madness of returning to the path, time and time again, because they continue to believe that the path is a challenge that awaits them, and because they continue to believe that righting wrongs is a worthy folly. The impossible helps the possible come to pass. To put it in terms of Don Quixote\’s pharmacy: the magic of this balm of Fierabras is so powerful that at times it saves us from the curse of fatalism and the plague of despair. Isn\’t this, in the end, the great paradox of the human voyage on this earth, that the navigator steers by the stars though he knows he will never reach them?

It was in prison that this adventure in freedom was born. In the jail of Seville, ”where every discomfort has its place and every sad sound its home”, Don Quixote of La Mancha was engendered. His ‘father’ had been arrested for debt.

Exactly three centuries before, Marco Polo had dictated his book of travels in the prison of Genoa, as his fellow prisoners listened and so travelled with him.

*** Cervantes set out to write a parody of the chivalric novel. No one, or almost no one, read them any more. They had fallen out of fashion. His spoof was an effort deserving of a greater cause. Nevertheless this useless literary adventure far exceeded its original project, it travelled far higher and far further to become the most popular of all time and of all languages.

This Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance deserves our eternal gratitude. The tales of chivalry had scorched the brain of Don Quixote, but he, who lost himself reading, saves those who read him. He saves us from solemnity and boredom.

*** Famous stereotypes: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the knight and his squire, madness and sanity, the dreamer with his head in the clouds and the rustic labourer with his feet on the ground. It’s true that Don Quixote goes completely insane whenever he mounts Rocinante, but when he dismounts he speaks with the purest common sense, and at times it seems he plays the madman only because that is what the reader or author expects of him. And Sancho Panza, the ignorant, the rough, is able to exercise with exemplary skill his governorship of the island of Barataria.

*** He was so fragile that he seemed, and was, more lasting. Each day he rides with greater hunger and not only for the plains of La Mancha. Tempted by the ways of the world, the character escapes from the author and is transfigured in his readers. And so he does what he didn’t do, and says what he never said.

Don Quixote never spoke the most famous of his lines: ”They’re barking, Sancho, a sign that we are riding.” Which anonymous author was the author?

*** Wearing his tin armour, mounted on his starving nag, Don Quixote seems destined to ridicule and failure.

This madman makes himself into a character from the chivalric novels which he believe are books of history. Yet he does not always tumble from his mount in his impossible charges, and at times even administers an honest beating to the enemies he faces and invents. It is ridiculous, and one must doubt, but it is an endearing form of ridiculous. A child believes a broom is a horse while his game lasts, and so the reader accompanies and shares the outlandish antics of Don Quixote for as long as he reads. We laugh at him, yes, but we laugh with him far more.

*** ”Don’t take anything seriously that doesn’t make you laugh,” a Brazilian friend advised me a while ago. Pop language takes seriously the ravings of Don Quixote and expresses the heroic dimension that people have granted this anti-hero. Even the Dictionary of the Real Spanish Academy recognises this quality: a quijotada is ”the action of a quixote” and a quixote is one who ”places his ideals above convenience and works disinterestedly and committedly in the defence of causes he considers just, but without success.”

Twice Cervantes sought work in the Americas and twice he was rejected. Certain sources state that the purity of his blood was in doubt. Statutes prohibited travel to the American colonies by anyone who had Jewish, Muslim, or “heretic” blood in his veins, which one had to be free of for seven generations.

Cervantes couldn’t travel to the Americas, but his son Don Quixote could. And there he did very well.

*** In 1965 Che Guevara wrote his final letter to his parents. To say goodbye, he did not quote Marx. He wrote: ”Once again I feel beneath my heels the ribs of Rocinante. I return to the road with my shield on my arm.”

*** In his misfortunes, Don Quixote evoked the golden age, when everything was held in common and there was neither yours or mine. Afterwards, he said, the abuses began, and it became necessary for errant knights to take to the road to defend maidens, shelter widows, and rescue orphans and the needy.

The poet Leon Felipe believed that the eyes and conscience of Don Quixote ”see and organise the world not as it is but as it should be. When Don Quixote takes the innkeeper thief for a courteous hospitaller knight, the insolent prostitutes for lovely maidens, the inn for an elegant hotel, black bread for white bread, and the whistle of a gelder for welcoming music, he is saying that the world should have neither thieves nor mercenary love nor scarcities of food nor run-down inns nor horrible music.”

*** A few years before Cervantes invented his feverish paladin of justice, Thomas More came up with utopia. In his book, the word was derived from u-topia, literally meaning ”no place”. But perhaps this kingdom of fantasy becomes real in the eyes that foretell it, and is incarnated in them. George Bernard Shaw was right in saying there are those who see reality as it is and ask why, and there are those who imagine reality as it had never been and ask why not.

It is clear, and the blind can see, that every person contains other possible people, and that each world contains its anti-world. This hidden promise, the world that we need, is no less real than the world we know and suffer.

This truth is well-known, and fully lived, by the beaten down who still practice the madness of returning to the path, time and time again, because they continue to believe that the path is a challenge that awaits them, and because they continue to believe that righting wrongs is a worthy folly.

*** The impossible helps the possible come to pass. To put it in terms of Don Quixote’s pharmacy: the magic of this balm of Fierabras is so powerful that at times it saves us from the curse of fatalism and the plague of despair.

Isn’t this, in the end, the great paradox of the human voyage on this earth, that the navigator steers by the stars though he knows he will never reach them? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Dec 1 2004 (IPS)

In a world organised around the daily confirmation of the power of the powerful, nothing is rarer that the coronation of the humiliated and the humiliation of the crowned. But in football, at times, this rarest of events does happen, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and novelist and author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’. In today\’s world many people find football the only area of identity in which they recognise themselves and in which they really believe. Whatever the reasons may be, collective dignity has a lot to do with the passage of a ball flying through the air. The results of this therapy are quite surprising: it seems capable of reviving lost feelings of fraternity and belonging: sports, especially football, is one of the few places that can provide shelter to those who have no place in the world, and it contributes significantly to re-establishing bonds of solidarity broken by the culture of alienation/separation that is dominant in today\’s world.

In 2002, Clint Mathis, American football star, announced that his team was going to win the World Cup. It was only logical, and natural, he explained because, ”We’re pretty much the lead country in everything.” The leading country in everything finished eighth.

In football, rarities occur. In a world organised around the daily confirmation of the power of the powerful, nothing is rarer that the coronation of the humiliated and the humiliation of the crowned. But in football, at times, this rarest of events does happen.

Indeed, looking no farther than this year, in 2004 a Palestinian team was the champion of Israel for the first time in history, and for the first time in history a Chechen team was champion of Russia. In the Olympics, the football team of Iraq –convulsed in war– won game after game and made it to the semi-finals, in a series of surprises, against every prediction and all evidence, and was the crowd’s favourite.

* * *

The Arab team Bnei Sakhnin and the Chechen team Terek Grozny, blazing champions of Israel and Russia, have certain things in common with the Iraqi team.

They are all teams that in some way represent peoples who don’t have the right to be what they want to be, that suffer the damnation of living in submission to a foreign flag, stripped of their sovereignty, bombed, humiliated, pushed to desperation.

And as if this were not enough, all three are modest teams, poor, nearly or completely unknown, and without any famous players. They are errant teams, playing in foreign lands and before empty stands. The village of Sakhnin, in Galilee, never had anything like a stadium, though the Israeli government promised one a number of times. Terek played in the Grozny stadium, which has been closed since the Chechen independence fighters planted a bomb beneath the seat of the country’s Russian-picked president. And in Iraq, there are only battle fields; no football fields are left. The occupation troops, which at this point have already forgotten the pretext for their criminal invasion, have converted sports areas into cemeteries or hospitals. Where the Baghdad stadium once stood, now there is a military base holding American tanks. The Iraqi team trained in fields where flocks of sheep grazed.

* * *

A powerful symbol, a great mystery: no one knows why (though theories abound), but in today’s world many people find football the only area of identity in which they recognise themselves and in which they really believe. Whatever the reasons may be, collective dignity has a lot to do with the passage of a ball flying through the air.

I do not mean only the communion the fan experiences with his team each Sunday from the stands of the stadium, but also, above all, the game played in the paddocks, in the little fields, on the beaches, the few public spaces still not devoured by urbanisation run amok. Enrique Pichon-Riviere, an Argentine psychiatrist and passionate student of human pain, can confirm the efficiency of football as a therapy for the illnesses born of scorn and loneliness. This sport is a shared endeavour, played in teams; it contains an energy than can greatly help the scorned to love themselves and save them from the solitude that they feel condemns them to being perpetually incommunicado.

In this regard, the experience of Australia and New Zealand is very revealing. There, the native languages do not have a word for suicide for the simple reason that suicide did not exist in aboriginal life. A few centuries of racism and marginalisation and the violent eruption of consumer society and its implacable values have succeeded in making the rate of suicide among aboriginal youth and children the highest in the world.

Given this terrifying panorama, with such deep roots, and such broken ones, there is no magic potion that can act as a cure. But the testimony of those admirable people working against death does concur on one fact. The results of this therapy are quite surprising: it seems capable of reviving lost feelings of fraternity and belonging: sports, especially football, is one of the few places that can provide shelter to those who have no place in the world, and it contributes significantly to re-establishing bonds of solidarity broken by the culture of alienation/separation that is dominant in today’s Australia, New Zealand, and the rest of world.

* * *

It is not a chemical miracle. Enthusiasm and delight are the drugs for this cure. The eleven players of each team are many more than eleven. In each player, a whole crowd plays. These are rituals of affirmation of the humiliated, both men and women, boys and girls.

Little by little women’s football has been carving a larger space for itself in the sports media, where for the most part men cover men and don’t know what to make of this invasion of women and girls.

On a professional level, the development of women’s football today has found a certain resonance. But there is no echo, or only enemy echoes, from the game that is played for the pure pleasure of playing.

In Nigeria, the women’s team is a national treasure and source of intense pride. It is ranked among the top in the world. But in the Muslim north of the country, men are against it because he sport draws maidens into depravity. In the end they accept it, though, because football is a sin that can bring them fame and save their families from poverty. Were it not for the gold promised by professional football, fathers would prohibit their daughters from wearing these indecent outfits required by a satanic sport that leaves women sterile, because of the game itself or punishment of Allah.

In Zanzibar and Sudan, the brothers of these female players, guardians of the family honour, administer beatings to punish this mania of their sisters who think they are men enough to dribble a ball and commit the sacrilege of revealing their bodies. Football, a game for men, denies women fields to play and practice. The men refuse to play against the women. Out of respect for religion, they say. Maybe so. Or maybe when they play, they lose.

Across the ocean, in Bolivia, there is no problem. Women play soccer in the towns of the high plains without taking off their numerous skirts. They wear over them their coloured jerseys and are still able to make goals. Every game is a party. Football is a free space open to these women, prolific in children, overwhelmed by slaving in the fields and mills, and subjected to frequent beatings by their drunk husbands. They play barefoot. The winning team is given a sheep. So is the losing team. These silent women laugh and laugh more throughout the game and continue laughing uncontrollably throughout the banquet. They celebrate together, the winners and losers. No man would dare set foot inside. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Nov 1 2004 (IPS)

A few days before the election of the president of the planet in North America, in South America elections and a plebiscite were held a little-known, almost secret country called Uruguay. In these elections, for the first time in the country\’s history, the left won; and in the plebiscite, for the first time in world history, the privatisation of water was rejected by popular vote, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist and author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’. In this article, Galeano writes that it will not be easy. Reality will promptly remind us of the inevitable distance between the desired and the possible. The left is coming to power in a shattered country which in the distant past was at the vanguard of universal progress but today is one of the furthest behind, deep in debt and subjected to the international financial dictatorship. Today we have very little manoeuvring room. But what is usually difficult, even impossible, can be imagined and even achieved if we join together with neighbouring countries, just as we have joined together with our neighbours. The winners have a tremendous burden of responsibility, for those who voted and those who they voted for. This rebirth of faith and revival of happiness must be watched over carefully. We should recall every day how right Carlos Quijano was, who said that sins against hope are the only sins beyond forgiveness and redemption.

A few days before the election of the president of the planet in North America, in South America elections and a plebiscite were held in a little-known, almost secret country called Uruguay. In these elections, for the first time in the country’s history, the left won; and in the plebiscite, for the first time in world history, the privatisation of water was rejected by popular vote, asserting that water is the right of all people.

******

The movement headed by president-elect Tabare Vazquez ended the monopoly of the two traditional parties –the Blanco and the Colorado parties– which governed Uruguay since the creation of the universe.

And after each election you would hear this exclamation: ”I thought that we Blancos won but it turns out we Colorados did, ” –or the other way around. Out of opportunism, yes, but also because after so many years of ruling together, the two parties had fused into one, disguised as two.

Tired of being cheated, this time the people made use of that little-used instrument, common sense. The people asked, Why do they promise change yet ask us to chose between the same and the same? Why didn’t they make any of these changes in the eternity they have been in power?

Never had the abyss between the real country and electioneering rhetoric been so evident. In the real country, badly wounded, where the only growth is in the number of emigrants and beggars, the majority chose to cover their ears to block out the oratory of these Martians competing for the government of Jupiter with highfalutin words imported from the moon.

******

About thirty or so years ago, the Broad Front (Frente Amplio) sprouted on these southern plains. ”Brother, don’t leave,” the new movement implored: ”There is hope.” But crisis moved faster than hope, and the haemorrhaging of the country’s youth accelerated. The dream of a Switzerland of the Americas ended and the nightmare of violence and poverty began, culminating in a military dictatorship that converted Uruguay in a vast torture chamber.

Afterwards, when democracy was restored, the dominant politicians destroyed the little that remained of the system of production and converted Uruguay into a giant bank. And as is often the case when it is assaulted by bankers, the bank went bust and Uruguay found itself emptied of people and filled with debt.

In all these years of disaster after disaster, we lost a multitude. And as if in a bad joke, not content to just force its youth from the country, this sclerotic system also prohibits them from voting — one of a small number of countries that do so. It seems inexplicable, but there is an explanation: Who would these emigrants vote for? The owners of the country suspect the worst, and with good reason.

In the final act of his campaign, the vice presidential candidate for the Colorado Party announced that if the left won the elections, all Uruguayans would have to dress identically, like the Chinese under Mao.

He was one of the many involuntary publicity agents of the victorious left. Not even the most tireless electoral workers did as much for this victory as the tribunes of the homeland who alerted the population to the imminent danger if democracy were to fall to the tyrannical enemies of freedom and the terrorists, kidnappers, and assassins who oppose democracy. Their attacks were extremely efficient: the more they denounced the devils, the more people voted for hell.

Largely thanks to these heralds of the apocalypse, the left won by absolute majority, without a runoff. The people voted against fear.

******

The plebiscite on water was also a victory against fear. Uruguayans were bombarded with extortion, threats, and lies: a vote against privatising water will condemn you to a future of sewage- filled wells and putrid ponds.

As in the elections, in the plebiscite common sense triumphed. In their vote, the people asserted that water, a scarce and finite natural resource, must be a right of all people and not a privilege for those who can pay for it. The people also showed they know that sooner rather than later, in a thirsty world, the reserves of fresh water will be as or more coveted than oil reserves. Countries that are poor but rich in water must learn to defend themselves. More than five centuries have passed since Columbus. How long can we go on trading gold for glass beads?

Wouldn’t it be worthwhile for other countries to put the issue of water to a popular vote? In a democracy, a true democracy, who should decide? The World Bank, or the citizens of each country? Do democratic rights exist for real, or are they just the icing on a poisoned cake?

In 1992, Uruguay was the only country in the world to put the privatisation of public companies to a popular vote: 72 percent opposed. Wouldn’t it be democratic to do the same in every country, given that privatisation affects the future of generations?

******

For centuries, Latin Americans have been trained in impotence. A pedagogy passed down from the colonial times, taught by violent soldiers, timorous teachers, and frail fatalists, has rooted in our souls the belief that reality is untouchable and that all we can do is swallow in silence the woes each day brings.

The Uruguay of other days was the exception. That Uruguay instituted free public education before England, women’s suffrage before France, the eight-hour work day before the United States, and divorce before Spain — seventy years before Spain, to be exact.

Now we are trying to revive this creative energy and would do well to recall that the Uruguay of that sunny period was the child of audacity, and not fear.

******

It will not be easy. Implacable reality will promptly remind us of the inevitable distance between the desired and the possible. The left is coming to power in a shattered country which in the distant past was at the vanguard of universal progress but today is one of the furthest behind, in debt up to its ears and subjected to the international financial dictatorship, which doesn’t vote but simply vetoes.

Today we have very little manoeuvring room. But what is usually difficult, even impossible, can be imagined and even achieved if we join together with neighbouring countries, just as we have joined together with our neighbours.

******

In the Broad Front’s very first demonstration, which flooded the streets with people, someone shouted, half-joyous, half-scared, ”Let’s dare to win.”

Thirty or so years later, it came true.

The country is unrecognisable. Uruguayans, so unbelieving that even nihilism was beyond them, have started to believe, and with fervour. And today this melancholic and subdued people, who at first glance might be Argentineans on valium, are dancing on air.

The winners have a tremendous burden of responsibility, for those who voted and those whom they voted for. This rebirth of faith and revival of happiness must be watched over carefully. We should recall every day how right Carlos Quijano was that sins against hope are the only sins beyond forgiveness and redemption. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
CARACAS, Aug 1 2004 (IPS)

A strange dictator this Hugo Chavez — both suicidal and masochistic. He created a constitution that allows the people to throw him out and then risked this very outcome in the first recall referendum in the history of Venezuela, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and novelist and author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’ He was not punished, Galeano writes in this article. Indeed, it was the eighth election Chavez had won in five years. Obedient to his own constitution, Chavez accepted the referendum, which was called for by the opposition, and placed his fate in the hands of the people: \’\’You decide.\’\’ Until now, presidents interrupted their terms of office only in the event of death, a putsch, an uprising, or a parliamentary decision. The referendum introduced a novel form of direct democracy. It was an extraordinary event: How many presidents, anywhere in the world, would dream of doing what Chavez did? And how many would continue to be president after doing so?

A strange dictator this Hugo Chavez — both suicidal and masochistic. He created a constitution that allows the people to throw him out and then risked this very outcome in the first recall referendum in the history of Venezuela.

He was not punished. Indeed, it was the eighth election Chavez won in five years, and with a level of transparency that Bush could only dream of. Obedient to his own constitution, Chavez accepted the referendum, which was called for by the opposition, and placed his fate in the hands of the people: ”You decide.”

*** Until now, presidents interrupted their terms of office only in the event of death, a putsch, an uprising, or a parliamentary decision. The referendum introduced a novel form of direct democracy. It was an extraordinary event: How many presidents, anywhere in the world, would dream of doing what Chavez did? And how many would continue to be president after doing so?

This tyrant invented by the major media, this fearsome demon, just administered a powerful infusion of much-needed nutriments to democracy, which in Latin America, and not only in Latin America, is sickly and enervated.

One month earlier, Carlos Andres Perez, that angel of God, a democrat revered by the major media, proclaimed to the four winds there would be a coup d’etat. He evenly and clearly stated that the only possible path for Venezuela was ”the path of violence”; he scorned the referendum because ”it isn’t a part of Latin American idiosyncrasy”. Latin American idiosyncrasy — in other words, our precious heritage: the deaf-mute populace.

***

Until a few years ago, Venezuelans went to the beach when elections were held. Voting was not, and is not, obligatory. But the country veered from total apathy to total enthusiasm. The torrent of voters, enormous lines of people waiting, on their feet, in the sun, for hours and hours — they simply overwhelmed all the structures set up for voting. The democratic flood also made it difficult to implement the latest technologies for avoiding fraud, in this country where the dead have the bad habit of voting and where some among the living vote several times in each election, perhaps because of Parkinson’s disease.

*** ”There is no freedom of expression here!” the televisions, radios, and newspaper headlines blared with complete freedom of expression. Chavez did not silence a single mouth that spewed lies and insults day after day. The chemical warfare destined to foul public opinion was waged with complete impunity. The only television channel closed in Venezuela, channel 8, was the victim not of Chavez but of those who usurped his presidency for a few days in the fleeting coup of April 2002.

And when Chavez returned from prison and took back his presidency before throngs and throngs of people, the Venezuelan media did not report it. All day long the private TV channels showed only Tom and Jerry. This exemplary television deserved the prize the King of Spain awards for the best news coverage. The king financed a film made of those turbulent days of April. It was pure deceit. It showed violent Chavez supporters opening fire on an innocent demonstration of unarmed members the opposition. It was later conclusively proved that the demonstration never took place, but that apparently was not deemed a significant enough detail: the prize was not revoked.

***

Until yesterday, in Saudi Venezuela, that petroleum paradise, official census figures showed that there were 1.5 million illiterate and 5 million Venezuelans without official documents and thus without civil rights. These and many other invisible people are not willing to return to Nowhereland, the country where No-ones live. They won their country, which had been so foreign to them. This referendum has proved, once again, that they will stay there. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Jul 1 2004 (IPS)

The information obtained through torture is not credible, or barely so, for the simple reason that pain transforms anyone into an author of fiction; the powers that use torture, on the other hand, reveal their true identity through this grim practice: in the chambers of torment, the commanders take off their masks, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’. In this analysis, Galeano writes that the occupying forces preach democracy and freedom but practice crime and torture. The rest is pure theatre: the ceremonies, proclamations, speeches, promises, the transfer of sovereignty. Torture generates information that is of minimal usefulness and questionable veracity. Yet it has been and continues to be used because it is efficient in punishing heresy, causing humiliation, and sowing fear. The monks of the Inquisition knew this very well, and so does the top military brass of today\’s imperial adventures. Power does not use torture to protect the population but to terrorize it. Will it be as efficient as power thinks it is? Galeano asks.

The confessions of the tortured are worth little or nothing. Since the days of the Inquisition it has been clear that the information obtained through torture is not credible, or barely so, for the simple reason that pain transforms anyone into an prolific author of fiction.

The powers that use torture, on the other hand, reveal their true identity through this grim practice: in the chambers of torment, the commanders take off their masks.

So it is in Iraq, for example. To take over the country despite the Iraqis and against their will, the occupying forces acted with realism: they preach democracy and freedom but practice crime and torture. The ends justify the means. Does anyone believe there is another way to steal a country?

The rest is pure theatre: the ceremonies, proclamations, speeches, promises, the transfer of sovereignty – from the United States to the United States.

Power cannot tell things as they are: for example, when it says ”terrorism in Iraq”, it should usually say ”national resistance to foreign occupation”.

* * *

When the Abu Ghraib scandal blew up after the pictures were published, a chorus of psalms of self-absolution was heard from the heights of political and military power: These are isolated cases. – The men and women involved are pathological. — It’s just a few bad apples, a handful of perverted individuals dishonouring the uniform.

As usual, the killer blames the knife. But the soldiers or policemen who drove a prisoner insane by jolting him with electricity, or submerging his head in shit, or spreading his buttocks, are only instruments, functionaries paid to perform tasks during office hours. Some work reluctantly, others with fervour, like the enthusiastic young women who took pictures of themselves humiliating tortured Iraqis as if they were hunting trophies. But all of them, apathetic and zealous alike, are bureaucrats of pain acting at the service of a gigantic machine for crushing humans.

Insane? Perverted? Perhaps. But the excuse of being ”pathological” does not absolve the imperial power which needs torture to secure and widen its dominion because this power is far more insane and perverted than the tools that it employs. And there is nothing abnormal about an atrociously unjust power using atrocious methods to perpetuate itself.

* * *

Nor is there anything abnormal about these atrocious methods not being called by their name. Europe knows well that where the captain commands, the sailor doesn’t. The European Union’s declaration against the torture in Iraq doesn’t mention the word torture. This disagreeable term was replaced by the word ”abuses”. Bush and Blair spoke of ”errors”. The journalists of CNN and other mass media couldn’t use the banned word.

Years before, in order for Palestinian prisoners to be ‘legally’ tortured, the Supreme Court of Israel authorised the use of ”moderate physical pressure”. The courses in torture that have been taught to officials of Latin America for many years use the term ”interrogation techniques”. In my country, Uruguay, which was world champion in this field during the years of the military dictatorship, torture was called, and is still called, ”illegal physical pressure”.

According to Amnesty International, the sale of torture equipment is excellent business for a few private companies in the US, Germany, Taiwan, France, and other countries, although these industrial products are referred to as ”means of self-defence” or ”anti-crime items”.

* * *

In contrast, the word torture was mentioned explicitly by pollsters who asked questions of the US population in 2001, shortly after the attack on the World Trade Centre. Almost half of the respondents answered that torture did not seem bad ”if used against terrorists who refused to say what they knew”.

Six years earlier, however, it never would have occurred to anyone to torture terrorist Timothy McVeigh when he refused to name his accomplices. The bomb he set off in Oklahoma City killed 168 people, including women and children, but he was white, not Muslim, and he was a decorated veteran of the first Gulf War, which is where he learned to make human puree.

* * *

Anything goes in the fight against the terrorists. Bush said so on many occasions, and Blair echoed him. Both continue to toast the success of their crusades. They still say: ”The world is a much safer place,” while the world explodes in vast and expanding cycles of violence.

* * *

Guantanamo is the symbol of the world that awaits us. Six hundred suspects, some minors, languish in this concentration camp. They have no rights. No law protects them. They have neither lawyers, nor trials, nor sentences. No one knows anything about them, and they know nothing about anything. They just survive at a naval base the US usurped from Cuba. It is supposed that they are terrorists. Whether they are or aren’t is a detail that lacks any importance.

It is in Guantanamo that General Ricardo Sanchez tried out 32 forms of torture, called ”intimidation and pressure tactics”, that were later applied in the prisons of Iraq.

* * *

Since the Twin Towers fell, torture has received numerous eulogies. There was a wave of juridical opinions and newspaper pieces openly favourable to or showing veiled approval for this mode of institutional violence — though it is almost never called that. These tributes to this disgraceful practice, which came from those in power or from sources nearby, sustain that torture is legitimate when defending an exposed population from the threats against it. Their reasoning is that morally-dubious ways of fighting become necessary to resist the unscrupulous assassins who practice and promote terrorism and who never tell the truth.

However, if this were so, who should be tortured? Who are the men that pronounced the biggest lies of this 21st century? Who have killed the most innocents, without any scruples, in their terrorist wars against Afghanistan and Iraq? Who contributed most to the proliferation of terrorism in the world?

* * *

Today there are many who reacted to the Abu Ghraib crisis with surprise or indignation, but torture was not used either casually or mistakenly against the Iraqi population. The occupation troops used it as if it were customary procedure, ordered by superiors, fully aware of what they were doing and why.

The question of ”Why?” deserves an answer. There is no proof whatsoever that torture ever helped prevent a single terrorist attack. In the case of Iraq, it has not led to the capture of any of the most important fugitives. The most important, Saddam Hussein, was caught not because of torture but rather a paid informer.

Torture generates information that is of minimal usefulness and questionable veracity. And yet it is efficient. That is why it has been and continues to be used. Efficiency is a prized element in the world’s reigning value system, and torture is efficient in punishing heresy and causing humiliation. Above all it is efficient in sowing fear. The monks of the Spanish Inquisition knew this very well, And so does the top military brass of today’s imperial adventures. Power does not use torture to protect the population but to terrorize it.

Will it be as efficient as power thinks it is? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Mar 1 2004 (IPS)

On the first day of this year, freedom in this world turned 200. But no one noticed, or almost no one. A few days later the country where this birth occurred, Haiti, found itself in the media spotlight, but not for the anniversary of universal freedom but because there had been a bloodbath that culminated in the ouster of President Aristide, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and novelist and author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’. But the international experts are far more destructive than invading troops, Galeano writes in this column. Placed under strict orders from the World Bank and IMF, Haiti obeyed every instruction. The government paid what it was told to even if it meant there would be neither bread nor salt. Their credit was frozen despite the fact the state had been dismantled and the subsidies and tariffs that had protected national production had been eliminated. Rice farmers, once the majority, soon became beggars or boat people. Many have ended in the depths of the Caribbean, and more are following them to the bottom, only these shipwreck victims aren\’t Cuban so their plight never makes the papers. Today Haiti imports all of its rice from the US, where international experts, who are rather distracted people, forgot to prohibit tariffs and subsidies to protect national production.

On the first day of this year, freedom in this world turned 200. But no one noticed, or almost no one. A few days later the country where this birth occurred, Haiti, found itself in the media spotlight, but not for the anniversary of universal freedom but because there had been a bloodbath that culminated in the ouster of President Aristide.

Haiti was the first country to abolish slavery. However, the most widely-read encyclopedias and almost all educational textbooks attribute this honourable deed to England. It is true that one fine day the empire that had been the champion in the slave trade changed its mind about it. But abolition in Britain took place in 1807, three years after the Haitian revolution, and it was so unconvincing that in 1832 Britain had to ban slavery again.

There is nothing new about this slight of Haiti. For two centuries it has suffered scorn and punishment. Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner and champion of liberty at the same time, warned that Haiti had created a bad example and argued it was necessary to ”confine the plague to the island”. His country heeded him. It was sixty years before the US granted diplomatic recognition to this freest of nations. Meanwhile in Brazil disorder and violence came to be called ”haitianism”. Slave owners there were saved from this fury until 1888 when Brazil abolished slavery — the last country in the world to do so.

* * *

And Haiti went back to being an invisible nation — until the next bloodbath. During its brief sojourn on TV screens and front pages earlier this year, the media showed confusion and violence and confirmed that Haitians were born to do evil well and do good badly. Since its revolution, Haiti has been capable only of mounting tragedies. Once a happy and prosperous colony, it is now the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. Revolutions, certain specialists have concluded, lead straight to the abyss; others have suggested, if not stated outright, that the Haitian tendency to fratricide derives from its savage African heredity. The rule of the ancestors. The black curse that engenders crime and chaos.

Of the white curse nothing was said.

* * *

The French revolution had abolished slavery, but Napoleon revived it.

”Which regime was most prosperous for the colonies?”

”The previous one.”

”Then reinstate it.”

To reinstate slavery in Haiti, France sent more that 50 shiploads of soldiers. The country’s blacks rose up and defeated France and won national independence and freedom for the slaves. In 1804, they inherited a land that had been razed to make sugar cane plantations and consumed by the conflagrations of a fierce civil war. And they inherited ”the French debt”. France made Haiti pay dearly for the humiliation it inflicted on Napoleon Bonaparte. The newly born nation had to commit to pay a gigantic indemnification for the damage it had caused in winning its freedom. This expiation of the sin of freedom would cost Haiti 150 million gold francs. The new country was born with a rope wrapped tightly around its neck: the equivalent of 21.7 billion in today’s dollars, or 44 times Haiti’s current yearly budget. It took it far more than a century to pay off the debt, which ballooned with usurious interest rates. Finally in 1938 Haiti made the last payment. Since then it has belonged to the banks of the US.

* * *

In exchange for this fortune, France officially recognised the new nation. No other countries did so. Haiti was born condemned to solitude.

Not even Simon Bolivar recognised Haiti, though he owed it everything. In 1816 it was Haiti that furnished Bolivar with boats, arms, and soldiers when he showed up on the island defeated and asking for shelter and help. Haiti gave him everything with only one condition: that he free the slaves — an idea that had not occurred to him until then. The great man triumphed in his war of independence and showed his gratitude by sending a sword as a gift to Port-au-Prince. Of recognition he made no mention.

In reality the Spanish colonies that had become independent countries continued to allow slavery, although some had laws against it. Bolivar proclaimed his own such law in 1821, but news of it didn’t travel far. Thirty years later, in 1851, Colombia abolished slavery; Venezuela followed suit in 1854.

* * *

In 1915 the Marines landed in Haiti. They stayed 19 years. The first thing they did was occupy the customs house and duty collection facilities. The occupying army suspended the salary of the Haitian president until he agreed to sign off on the liquidation of the Bank of the Nation, which became a branch of City Bank of New York. The president and other blacks were barred entry into the private hotels, restaurants, and clubs of the foreign occupying power. The occupiers didn’t dare reestablish slavery but they did impose forced labour for the building of public works. And they killed a lot of people. It wasn’t easy to quell the fires of resistance. The guerilla chief, Charlemagne Peralte, was exhibited in the public square, crucified on a door to teach the people a lesson.

This civilising mission ended in 1934. The occupiers withdrew leaving a National Guard, which they had created, in their place to exterminate any possible trace of democracy. They did the same in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. A short time afterwards, Duvalier became the Haitian equivalent of Somoza and Trujillo.

* * *

And so, from dictator to dictator, from promise to betrayal, one misfortune followed another.

Aristide, the rebel priest, became president in 1991. He lasted a few months before the US government helped to oust him, took him, subjected him to a certain treatment, and then sent him back, in the arms of Marines, to resume his post. Then once again, in 2004, the US helped to remove him from power, and yet again there was killing. And yet again the Marines came back, as they always seem to, like the flu.

But the international experts are far more destructive than invading troops. Placed under strict orders from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Haiti obeyed every instruction, without cheating. The government paid what it was told to even if it meant there would be neither bread nor salt. Their credit was frozen despite the fact the state had been dismantled and the subsidies and tariffs that had protected national production had been eliminated. Rice farmers, once the majority, soon became beggars or boat people. Many have ended in the depths of the Caribbean, and more are following them to the bottom, only these shipwreck victims aren’t Cuban so their plight never makes the papers.

Today Haiti imports all of its rice from the United States, where international experts, who are rather distracted people, forgot to prohibit tariffs and subsidies to protect national production.

* * *

On the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, there is a large sign that reads: Road to Ruin.

On the other side is the black hell. Blood and hunger, misery and disease.

In this much feared hell, everyone is a sculptor. Haitians have the habit of collecting tin cans and scrap metal that they cut and shape and hammer with old-world mastery, creating marvels that are sold in the street markets.

Haiti is a country that has been thrown away, as an eternal punishment of its dignity. There it lies, like scrap metal. It awaits the hands of its people. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Jan 1 2004 (IPS)

A small gesture of national dignity set off a raging scandal early this year: Brazil required of US visitors what the US required of Brazilian visitors: to obtain a visa and have their picture and fingerprints taken at the border, writes Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and novelist and author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’. In this article, Galeano writes that everything was explained by September 11, which President Bush continues to use as a shield of perpetual impunity. However, though no Brazilian had anything to do with bringing down the World Trade Centre, the most serious terrorist act in Brazilian history, the coup of 1964, took place with the political, economic, military, and media participation of the United States. It is inconceivable for us to imagine the story the other way around. What would have happened, Galeano asks, if Iraq had invaded the US on the pretext that it had weapons of mass destruction. Or if the Venezuelan embassy in Washington had pushed and applauded a coup against George W. Bush? And what if the countries of the South refused to accept a single condition imposed by the IMF and World Bank unless they began imposing them on the US as well, the major debtor of the planet.

A small gesture of national dignity set off a raging scandal early this year. Throughout the world the press gave the story top billing as if it were a freak event, like, ”Man bites dog.”

So what was the cause? Brazil had required of US visitors what the US required of Brazilian visitors: to obtain a visa and have their picture and fingerprints taken at the border.

Many condemned this normal act as an expression of perilous insanity. Perhaps, if the world were not so misconditioned, things would be seen in another light. At bottom, what was abnormal was not what the Brazilian president Lula did but the fact that he was the only one to do so. What was abnormal was that everyone else simply accepted the conditions that Bush imposed on the rest of the world with the exception of a privileged few that were held beyond suspicion of terrorism and evil-doing.

* * *

Everything was explained by September 11. This tragedy, which President Bush continues to use as a shield of perpetual impunity, obligates his country to defend itself without ever letting its guard down.

However, as everyone knows, no Brazilian had anything to do with bringing down the World Trade Centre. In contrast, as few will remember, the most serious terrorist act in Brazilian history, the coup of 1964, took place with the political, economic, military, and media participation of the United States.

This matter of the border check, which caused such a flap, is little more than a case of retributive justice, and it would be ridiculous to see it as belated historic revenge. Nonetheless, we should bear in mind that the routines of indignity in Latin America have a lot to do with the bad habit of amnesia — amnesia, for example, of the fact that US participation in that terrorist coup was explicitly proved through both documentation and the confessions of the major participants. And it is worth remembering that this event not only opened the way to a long military dictatorship but also killed and buried the social reforms that the democratic government of Jango Goulart was introducing to make the most unjust country of the world less unjust.

It took forty years for this impulse for justice to revive. In that time, how many Brazilian children died? A terrorism that kills with hunger is no less abominable than that which kills with bombs.

* * *

Bad habits: indignity, amnesia, resignation. Fear keeps us from changing; mental laziness, from imagining ourselves without them.

It is inconceivable for us to imagine the story the other way around. For example, what would have happened if Iraq had invaded the United States on the pretext that the US had weapons of mass destruction? Or if the Venezuelan embassy in Washington had pushed and applauded a coup against George W. Bush, like the one the US embassy in Caracas orchestrated against Hugo Chavez? Or if the government of Cuba had organised 637 assassination attempts against US presidents, in response to the 673 times the US tried to kill Fidel Castro?

And what would happen if the countries of the South refused to accept a single condition imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank unless they began imposing the same conditions on the US as well, the major debtor of the planet. Or if the tariffs and subsidies the rich countries imposed at home but prohibit elsewhere were introduced in the South? And so on…

* * *

Bad habits: fatalism. Let’s accept the unacceptable as if it were part of the natural order of things and no other order were possible. The sun chills the world, liberty oppresses, integration breaks things apart: like it or not, it can’t be avoided. Take your pick: this or this. That’s how the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is being sold.

* * *

Back at the beginning of time, old Zeus, the boss of all bosses, made no mistakes. Of all of the inhabitants of Mount Olympus, Hermes was the most deceitful, the trickster who conned everyone, the thief who stole everything. Zeus gave him sandals with gold wings and named him the god of commerce. It was Hermes, later called Mercury, who engendered the World Trade Organisation, NAFTA, FTAA, and other creatures conceived in his image.

NAFTA, the North American Free-trade Area comprising the US, Canada, and Mexico, was set up ten years ago. The hand of Hermes guided its every step. From the life and work of NAFTA over its first ten years, consider just a few of the revealing indications of what awaits us if the FTAA comes into being, if so-called free trade, humiliating and sovereign, is extended throughout the Americas.

In 1996, the government of Canada prohibited the sale of ”a neurotoxin dangerous to human life”: it was an additive to gasoline manufactured by the US firm Ethyl. This poison, prohibited in the US, was sold only in Canada. Ethyl, which dedicated many a year to the noble mission of poisoning foreign countries, reacted by suing the Canadian government for damaging its reputation by banning this product and for ”expropriation”. Canada’s lawyers warned their government that the jig was up, there was nothing to be done. Under NAFTA, the corporations rule. In mid-1998, the Canadian government lifted the ban, paid Ethyl an indemnification of 13 million dollars, and said it was sorry.

In 1995, another US company, Metalclad, couldn’t reopen a toxic waste dump in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi. With machetes in hand, the people prevented the company from continuing to poison the land and the water table. Metalclad sued the Mexican government for this act of ”expropriation”. Because of provisions contained in NAFTA, in 2001 the company received an indemnity of 17 million dollars.

* * *

The United Nations Organisation was born at the end of World War Two. John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Orson Welles were among the 1500 journalists covering the great event. The founding charter of the UN established ”equal rights for large and small nations”. And the big promise: building on the sovereign equality of all of its members, the new international organisation would change the path of human history.

Sixty years later, the results are plain to see: the change was for the worse.

* * *

But bad habits are not destiny, and more and more countries are refusing to play the fool in this grand universal farce.

A year ago, Thomas Dawson, spokesman for the IMF, stated: ”We have many distinguished alumni in Latin America.” It was the same old rhetoric. Now Argentinean president Nestor Kirchner warns, ”We’re not just a door mat any more.” This is the new rhetoric.

A new rhetoric, a new attitude. Our countries get along very badly with their people and get along even worse with their neighbours. It is a long and sad history of serial divorce. However, the most recent regional meetings –in Cancun and Monterrey– were battered by the gusts of a new wind. After so many years of solitude, the weak are beginning to understand that divided they fall. Only a few, like Uruguayan president Jorge Batlle, believe that we can still hope to be happy beggars. Even the most hardheaded are convinced that the vast humiliation machine, where the powerful practice financial extortion, military violence, and trade protectionism with impunity, dignity is either shared or non-existent.

But we must hurry up, before we end up looking like the pictures coming back from Mars. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Oct 1 2003 (IPS)

Power feeds on fear. Without the demons that create it, it would lose its source of justification, impunity, and fortune, writes Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan writer and journalist, author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’. Fear distracts and deflects attention. Were it not for the services it performs, the obvious would be plain for all to see: that power looks at itself in the mirror and incites fear by telling us what it sees, Galeano writes. Patriotism is a privilege of those in power. When practised by those who are ruled, is it reduced to mere terrorism? To take two examples, the suicide attacks by desperate Palestinians evicted from their country, or the national resistance to the foreign forces now occupying Iraq: are these terrorism and nothing more? Power disguised negates common sense. If it weren\’t thus, could there be any doubt that the current government of Israel is practising terrorism, state terrorism, and is spreading madness? The more land this country devours and the more humiliation it inflicts on the Palestinian people, the more criminal responses it will generate.

Power feeds on fear. Without the demons that create it, it would lose its source of justification, impunity, and fortune. Its Satans –Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and whichever appears next– are in reality the geese that lay the golden egg: they create fear. What then do they deserve? Executioners to end their lives, or doctors to improve them?

Fear distracts and deflects attention. Were it not for the services it performs, the obvious would be plain for all to see: that power looks at itself in the mirror and incites fear by telling us what it sees. Danger, danger, shrieks the dangerous.

***

Patriotism is a privilege of those in power. When practised by those who are ruled, is it reduced to mere terrorism? To take two examples, the suicide attacks by desperate Palestinians evicted from their country, or the national resistance to the foreign forces now occupying Iraq: are these terrorism and nothing more?

***

A world upside down gives things names with an inverted logic. Power disguised negates common sense. If it weren’t thus, could there be any doubt that the current government of Israel is practising terrorism, state terrorism, and is spreading madness?

The more land this country devours and the more humiliation it inflicts on the Palestinian people, the more criminal responses it will generate. And these attacks, which kill innocent people, are used as an excuse to kill many more innocent people and commit as many atrocities as possible.

If there were any common sense left in the world, it would be unthinkable that Ariel Sharon could do what he is doing with complete impunity, as if it were absolutely normal to invade and attack other people’s land, erect a wall to shield what it has usurped, announce publicly its intention of assassinating Yasser Arafat, a democratically-elected head of state, and bomb Syria knowing that the US will veto, as is its custom, any condemnation by the UN Security Council.

***

The way this world works, people and countries must list themselves on the stock markets, and their value depends on the geography of power. How many innocent people were blown to bits in the last war in Iraq? The victors haven’t had time to count their civilian victims, who existed but no longer exist, because they have been so busy looking for weapons of mass destruction, which neither exist nor existed.

There are then no official figures. The most serious unofficial counts, however, indicate no fewer than 7,700 civilian deaths, many of them children, women, and the elderly. How much are these lives worth? As a percentage of the population, the number of Iraqis murdered is the equivalent of 94,000 Americans. What would have happened if the invading country had been the country invaded? A similar number of US victims would be a perpetual focus of the media. The Iraqi victims, on the other hand, deserve nothing more than silence.

Up at the top, everyone knows that stealing was the only motive behind this premeditated, cold-blooded killing. But the assassins continue to say that they did what they did in self-defence, and they have neither repented nor been arrested. Crime does pay. From the summits of power, they threaten the world with new feats, minting dangers, inventing enemies, and sowing panic.

***

President Bush loves quoting references to the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelations, but he would do better to merely quote the news, which is more current but otherwise just about the same.

This hair-raising book of the Bible contains a prophecy from the distant past that is full of both exaggeration and incorrect numbers, but you have to admit that it resembles current events quite a bit. ”At the great Euphrates River a third of the men were exterminated by fire, smoke, and sulphur.” And then: ”A third of the world was scorched, and a third of all trees, and all green grass, and a third of all the creatures of the sea perished. Many people died from the water of the rivers which had been made bitter.”

The author of Revelations, Saint John or whoever it was, attributed these disasters to divine rage. He had never heard of smart bombs, carbon dioxide, acid rain, chemical pesticides, or radioactive waste. And he couldn’t have imagined that consumer society or the technology of devastation would be more fearsome than God’s wrath.

***

Bombs against people, bombs against nature. And money bombs? What would become of this model of the-world-as-its-own-worst-enemy if there were no financial wars?

In their more than half a century in existence, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have exterminated far more people than all terrorist organisations past and present. They have powerfully contributed to making the world the way it is today. And now this world, boiling with indignation, is scaring its authors.

”The World Bank, apostle of privatisation, is undergoing a crisis of faith,” writes the Wall Street Journal. In a recent report, the Bank discovered that the privatisation of public services that its functionaries imposed and continue to impose on poor countries is not exactly manna from heaven, above all for countries abandoned to their fates. Alarmed by the consequences of its actions, the Bank now says, ”private investment must be supervised,” though it fails to explain how. The poor also worry the IMF, which has spent its life strangling them: ”It is necessary to reduce social inequalities,” concludes the director of the Fund, Horst Koehler, after musing on the matter. The poor are at a loss how to say thank you for such kindness. ***

These organisations run a financial dictatorship within a democratic order; there is nothing democratic about them: five countries make all the decisions in the IMF, seven in the World Bank. No one else can do a thing.

The trade dictatorship isn’t democratic either. There are no votes in the World Trade Organisation unless required by statute.

This colonial organisation of the planet would be at grave risk if the poor countries, which comprise the overwhelming majority of its members, could vote. Instead, they are present at the banquet only to be eaten.

National dignity is a profitless activity condemned to disappear, like public property, in the underdeveloped world. But when such dignity exerts itself, another cock crows. This happened recently in Cancun at the WTO Ministerial. The scorned and lied to countries united in a common front for the first time after many years of solitude and fear. And they shipwrecked the meeting, which as usual was convened so the majority could exercise its right to obedience.

This is happening all over now, showing that power isn’t as powerful as it says it is.

***

No one knows this better than Alice in Wonderland:

”Off with her head!” the queen shrieked at the top of her lungs, but no one made the slightest move.

”Who’s going to do what she says?” asked Alice, ”Why, they’re only a deck of cards.” (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Oct 1 2003 (IPS)

A gigantic explosion of gas — this was the popular uprising that shook all of Bolivia and culminated in the resignation of President Sanchez de Lozada, writes Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan writer and journalist, author of \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire.\’\’ In this article, Galeano writes that the gas was to have been shipped to California, for a minuscule price in exchange for a few miserable gifts. Sanchez de Lozada called this false privatisation \’\’capitalization\’\’, but the country, tired of living to fuel foreign progress, demanded that the gas be used for Bolivia. These fast-moving times are marked by astounding achievements in Bolivia. In 2000 an uprising deprivatised the nation\’s water. A few months ago another popular explosion forced the government to annul the payroll tax that the IMF had demanded be implemented. And popular disobedience derailed a juicy deal for Pacific LNG, comprised by Repsol, British Gas, and Panamerican Gas, known to be a partner of Enron. As for the fugitive Sanchez de Lozada, he lost the presidency but he won\’t be losing much sleep. Though he has the killing of over 80 demonstrators on his conscience, this champion of modernisation is not bothered by anything that can\’t turn a profit.

A gigantic gas explosion: this was the popular uprising that shook all of Bolivia and culminated in the resignation of President Sanchez de Lozada, who fled, leaving behind him a trail of corpses.

The gas was to have been shipped to California, for a minuscule price in exchange for a few miserable gifts, across Chilean land that used to be part of Bolivia. This last detail was just salt in the wound for a country that for more than a century had been demanding, in vain, restoration of the sea access it lost in 1883 in the war that Chile won.

But the route of the gas was not the primary cause of the fury that erupted throughout the country. There was another, which the government responded to with bullets, as is its custom, leaving the streets strewn with dead. The people rose up because they refused to allow to happen with gas what had previously happened with silver, saltpetre, tin, and everything else.

***

In 1870 an English diplomat in Bolivia was the victim of a disagreeable incident. Dictator Mariano Melgarejo offered him a glass of chicha, the national drink made from fermented corn. The Englishman thanked him but said he preferred chocolate. So Melgarejo, with his customary delicacy, made him drink an enormous vat of chocolate and then paraded him on a mule, seated backwards, through the streets of La Paz. When Queen Victoria, in London, heard of the incident, she had a map brought to her and pronounced ”Bolivia doesn’t exist,” crossing out the country with a chalk ‘X’.

I’d heard this tale many times. It may or may not have happened exactly this way. But this phrase, attributed to British imperial arrogance, could also be read as an involuntary synthesis of the tormented history of the Bolivian people. The tragedy repeats itself like a revolving wheel: for five centuries the fabulous riches of Bolivia have been a curse to the people, who are the poorest of South America’s poor. Indeed, for its own people, ”Bolivia doesn’t exist”.

***

For over two centuries, back in colonial times, the silver of Potosi was the primary nourishment of the capitalist development of Europe. ”It’s worth a Potosi” meant something was priceless.

Midway through the 16th century, the most populous, most expensive, and most spendthrift city in the world sprouted and grew an the foot of the mountain that oozed silver. This mountain, called Cerro Rico, swallowed indians. ”The streets are thronged with people,” wrote a rich miner from Potosi: entire communities were emptied of men, marched as prisoners from every direction to the opening into the mines. Outside it was freezing. Inside, it was hell. Only three of every ten men led in left alive. But these short-lived inhabitants of the mines generated the fortunes of Flemish, German, and Genovese bankers, creditors of the Spanish crown. It was these indians who made possible the accumulation of capital that transformed Europe into what it is today.

What remained in Bolivia of all this? A hollow mountain, an incalculable number of indians worked to death, and a few palaces inhabited by phantoms.

***

In the 19th century, when Bolivia was defeated in the so-called War of the Pacific, it not only lost its access to the ocean and found itself locked into the heart of South America. It also lost its saltpetre.

Official history, which is military history, has it that Chile won the war. But real history confirms that the winner was British businessman John Thomas North. Without firing a shot or wasting a penny, North won the lands that had belonged to Bolivia and Peru and made himself the king of saltpetre, which at the time was the fertilizer necessary for the tired fields of Europe.

In the 20th century Bolivia was the primary supplier of tin to the international market. The tin cans that made Andy Warhol famous came from the mines, which produced both metal and widows. In the depths of the mineshafts silica dust gradually asphyxiated the workers, who ruined their lungs so the world could have cheap tin.

During the Second World War, Bolivia contributed to the allied cause by selling its precious mineral at a tenth of its usual price. Workers’ pay was slashed to almost nothing, a strike ensued, and the machine guns opened fire. Simon Patiño, owner of the business and master of the country, didn’t have to pay compensation because killing by machine gun is not a workplace accident.

At the time Don Simon paid fifty dollars a year in taxes on his profits, but he paid much more to the president of the nation and his cabinet. He had been a dirt poor man touched by the magic wand of Fortune. His grandchildren entered the European nobility and married counts, marquis, and the relatives of kings.

When the revolution of 1952 dethroned Patino and nationalised tin, little was left of the mineral — the meagre leftovers from half a century of boundless exploitation in the service of the world market.

***

More than 100 years ago historian Gabriel Rene Moreno discovered that the Bolivian people were ”cellularly incompetent”. He had compared the weight of an indigenous brain and that of a mestizo and found that they weighed between five, six, and ten ounces less than the brains of members of the white race.

Time passed, and the country that doesn’t exist remains ill with racism. But the country that wants to exist, where the indigenous majority is not ashamed of what it is, doesn’t spit the mirror.

This Bolivia, tired of living to fuel foreign progress, is the true country. Its history, ignored, abounds in defeat and betrayal but also in those miracles that scorned people are capable of when they stop scorning themselves and fighting each other.

These fast-moving times are marked by astounding impressive achievements.

***

The year 2000 featured a situation unique in the world: an uprising deprivatised the nation’s water. The so-called ”water war” took place in Cochabamba. The peasants marched from the valleys and blockaded the city, which also rose up. They were met with bullets and tear gas as the government declared martial law. But the collective rebellion continued, unstoppable, until in the final clash the water was wrested from the grip of the Bechtel corporation and restored to the people and their fields. (Bechtel, based in California, is now receiving relief from President Bush, who has awarded it multi-million-dollar contracts in Iraq.)

A few months ago another popular explosion throughout Bolivia vanquished nothing less than the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF made them pay dearly for the defeat –more than thirty assassinations by the so-called forces of order– but the people succeeded in their task. The government had no option but to annul the payroll tax that the Fund had demanded be implemented.

Today there’s the gas war. Bolivia contains enormous reserves of natural gas. Sanchez de Lozada called this false privatisation ”capitalization”, but the country that wants to exist showed it has a good memory. Would it allow a rerun of the old story of the country’s riches evaporating in foreign hands? ”Gas is our right,” proclaimed posters at the demonstration. The people demanded and continue to demand that the gas be used for Bolivia and that the country not submit again to the dictatorship of its

underground resources. The right to self-determination, so often invoked, so rarely respected, begins with this.

Popular disobedience derailed a juicy deal for Pacific LNG, comprised by Repsol, British Gas, and Panamerican Gas, known to be a partner of Enron, renowned for its virtuous ways. Everything indicated that the corporation stood to make ten dollars for ever one invested.

As for the fugitive Sanchez de Lozada, he lost the presidency but he won’t be losing much sleep. Though he has the crime of killing more than eighty demonstrators on his conscience, it wasn’t his first bloodbath. This champion of modernisation,is not bothered by anything that can’t turn a profit. In the end, he speaks and thinks in English — but not the English of Shakespeare: that of Bush. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

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By Eduardo Galeano and - -
MONTEVIDEO, Sep 1 2003 (IPS)

The cross and the sword are raised high as in old times, and with good reason: in the last few months, homophobia has come under serious attack, writes Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan writer and journalist \’\’The Open Veins of Latin America\’\’ and \’\’Memories of Fire\’\’. Earlier this summer, the US Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that criminalised homosexuality, effectively voiding similar laws in 12 other states. And in New Hampshire, for the first time in the history of Christianity the faithful and the clergy of the Episcopal Church elected a bishop who is openly gay. Galeano writes in this article for IPS that all of these acts of \’\’grave immorality\’\’, of liberty and mental health, are not gifts: they are victories, the result of the persistent battle of gays and lesbians against discrimination and violence. Armed with the rainbow banner, a symbol of human diversity, they are overturning one of the most sinister heresies of the past. The walls of intolerance are beginning to fall.

Richard Nixon, that eminent historian, had it right. In 1972, when he was president of the United States, he delivered to his closest collaborators the following crash course on the decadence of Greece and Rome:

”You know what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them! Sure. Aristotle was a homo. We all know that. So was Socrates. You know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags.”

In 1513, a few centuries before this magisterial lesson, Vasco Nunez de Balboa threw fifty indians to a pack of dogs, which disembowelled them ”because the only thing they need to be women are teats and they can give birth”.

In Panama, as in many other parts of America, homosexuality was allowed — until the conquistadors burst in. That night in 1513, Balboa initiated the land in the punishment of the unspeakable sin of sodomy.

Those were the times of the Holy Inquisition. Times it would seem would never end. In Spain, the Inquisition lasted three and a half centuries. The heresy of difference, in all of its forms, was punished by torture or death in many places in Europe and America. Many homosexuals, men and women, were burned alive. The pyre reduced them to nothing but ash ”so there would remain no memory of them”.

All that’s far behind us, one would assume. But the smoke still rises.

The Holy Family

Rather than ask forgiveness of its victims, the Catholic Church repeats its ancient curses. Recently the Holy Inquisition, which is now called the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, launched from the Vatican a global campaign against homosexual marriage, ”a gravely immoral act that goes against the plan of God and natural law”.

Immediately the high functionaries of the Church in the world echoed the voice of their commander. In Uruguay, Archbishop Nicolas Cotugno declared that ”homosexuality is a contagious disease” and recommended the isolation of all carriers, comparing homosexual marriage to the union of men and animals.

The church is preoccupied with sexuality, and has been for centuries. One Pope after another, it established a rigid barrier between sin –which includes almost everything– and the little we are left for comfort, since we have to reproduce somehow. From the High Pontiff to the last parish priest, there is no man of the cloth who is not a sex expert. Yet as all have taken the vow of chastity, it is hard to understand how they can reach such complete knowledge about an activity they are proscribed from practising.

Reading the last condemnation of the Vatican, one is tempted to ask the celestial sexologists a question or two: If heterosexual marriage is a ”natural law”, why don’t you marry? And if homosexuals are violators of ”God’s plan”, why did God make them that way?

Another specialist in Good and Evil, President George W.Bush, is right along side the Vatican in condemning homosexual marriage and opposes adoption by couples that don’t constitute a normal marriage, ”between a man and a woman”.

The president, who is not a Catholic, has made this papal crusade his own. It isn’t the first time Bush and the Pope have discovered they are birds of a feather. Both enjoy direct communications with the On High, albeit on different telephones. On certain occasions, like the war against Iraq, they receive contradictory orders. On others they form a common front. They have been, and remain, united on such sacred matters as the promotion of sexual abstinence among youth and the battle against abortion and the use of contraceptives.

With his habitual broad-mindedness, Bush in these areas is in harmony not only with the Vatican theocrats but with fundamentalist Islamists as well: puritans united will never be defeated. And whenever these issues come up before the United Nations, Bush has voted common cause with his sworn enemies: Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, and even Iraq, before it received the hurricane of missiles launched in the name of God and of oil.

Eppur si muove

The cross and the sword are raised high as in old times. And with good reason: in the last few months, homophobia has come under serious attack. Everywhere, that which the Pope calls ”deviant behaviour” and ”the legalisation of evil” is spreading.

Earlier this summer, the United States Supreme Court handed down a historic sentence striking down as unconstitutional a Texas law that criminalised homosexuality. The ruling effectively voids similar laws in twelve other states.

Meanwhile in New Hampshire, for the first time in the history of Christianity the faithful and the clergy of the Episcopal Church elected a bishop who is openly gay. Massachusetts is on the verge of legalising homosexual marriages. In Vermont, the Civil Register already recognises the legitimacy of these unions. In Ontario and British Columbia, Canada, since early this year homosexuals can marry. Homosexual marriages are now permitted in Belgium, as they are in Denmark, Holland, and Sweden. Versions of legal marriage exist in Norway, Finland, Iceland, France, Germany, Hungary, Croatia, and certain regions of Spain. And in the city of Buenos Aires, for the first time in Latin American history, the union of couples of the same sex are now celebrated.

All of these acts of ”grave immorality”, of liberty and mental health, are not gifts: they are victories, the result of the persistent battle of gays and lesbians against discrimination and violence.

Among all the pleasures worthy of hell, homosexual love is still the most ferociously repressed. Machismo and armed stupidity have disguised this atrocity as normality and converted it into custom.

In more than 70 countries, homosexual relations are illegal. In many, the punishment is prison. In some, whipping or the death penalty. In others, where the death penalty is not legal, paramilitary squads and sick fanatics perform their purification ceremonies: they sweep the streets torturing, mutilating, and murdering those who merely by existing constitute a public scandal.

Gays and lesbians are damned on earth and in heaven. Five years ago the prime minister of Malaysia proclaimed that they are a threat to national security. The door is kept locked in the Great Beyond, as well. As I heard the mother of a young lesbian say, ”What hurts me most is that we won’t be together in paradise.”

But all of these scorned men and women, these rare souls, are generating some of the best news history has ever seen. Armed with the rainbow banner, a symbol of human diversity, they are overturning one of the most sinister heresies of the past. The walls of intolerance are beginning to fall.

This affirmation of dignity, which dignifies us before everyone, arises from the courage to be different and the pride of being so.

As Milton Nascimento sings :

Any way of loving is worth it, any way of loving is worth loving

(Cualquier manera de amor vale la pena, cualquier manera de amor vale amar.) (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

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