The Americanistas

Mario Benedetti, poet, short story writer and novelist, died in Montevideo, Uruguay on Sunday. He’s known for his short story collection Montevideanos, the novel La Tregua, and one of my personal favorites: the novella set during Uruguay’s Dirty War: La Vecina Orilla.

Here’s an early appreciation, in Spanish, from Buenos Aires daily La Nación.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez famously gave Barack Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America at the recent Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. The spectacle surrounding the gift catapulted Galeano’s book to the top of Amazon.com’s best-seller list. Galeano later thanked Chávez for giving his anti-colonial diatribe an Oprah-book-club-like boost. The Uruguayan writer joked that Dracula and himself shared the honor of creating the vampire genre.

When asked if Obama would read the book, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs replied, “I think it’s in Spanish, so that might be a tad on the difficult side.”

Obama effectively closed that chapter at the recent White House Correspondent’s Dinner. The event is a Washington tradition begun in the 1920s. Every U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge has attended the event. The dinner is part comedy roast, fund raiser and tribute. The press likes to call it the moment the president becomes “Comedian-in-Chief.”

About 10 minutes into his monologue, Obama began a joke saying he was fulfilling his campaign promise of turning around U.S. relations with the world, citing meetings with the Japanese and British prime ministers. Obama continued, “But as I said during the campaign, we can’t just talk to our friends. As hard as it is, we also have to talk to our enemies, and I’ve begun to do exactly that. Take a look at the monitor there.”

The jumbo-tron cut to a picture of Obama sitting in the Oval Office with a man dressed as a pirate. (Not sure if the costume was modeled on Captain Hook or Captain Morgan.) The audience laughed.

Obama then added, “Now, let me be clear, just because he handed me a copy of Peter Pan does not mean that I’m going to read it — (laughter) — but it’s good diplomatic practice to just accept these gifts.”

Too bad. Obama would have gained a lot of insights from Galeano’s book.

The full joke sequence can be viewed here (put the cursor at about 3:57):

  

Percy Fawcett

It’s like one of those things that you hear or learn about and then start seeing everywhere. Case in point: The Lost City of Z.

A few weeks ago, remaining curious after attending a lecture about the Amazon, I came across the name Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett. He was a British archaeologist and explorer that came to be known as “David Livingstone of the Amazon.” The South American rainforest became his obsession—and ultimately the cause of his death.

In 1925, Fawcett disappeared in Brazil, along with his 21-year-old son and a friend, while searching for what he claimed would be “the great discovery of the century”: A lost civilization he called “Z.”

Artistic rendition of Raleigh's mythical claims.

The Amazon. A place so exotic in the imagination of European explorers that Sir Walter Raleigh claimed to have seen natives with “their eyes in their shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts.”

The most authoritative account of Fawcett’s life-long obsession is The Lost City of Z, a book by New Yorker contributor David Grann.

In the book, Grann writes: “Fawcett had determined that an ancient, highly cultured people still existed in the Brazilian Amazon and that their civilization was so old and sophisticated it would forever alter the Western view of the Americas. He had christened this lost world the City of Z.”

Fawcett wrote a letter explaining what he intended to find:

The central place I call “Z” — our main objective — is in a valley surmounted by lofty mountains. The valley is about ten miles wide, and the city is on an eminence in the middle of it, approached by a barrelled roadway of stone. The houses are low and windowless, and there is a pyramidal temple. The inhabitants of the place are fairly numerous, they keep domestic animals, and they have well-developed mines in the surrounding hills. Not far away is a second town, but the people living in it are of an inferior order to those of “Z.” Farther to the south is another large city, half buried and completely destroyed.

It seems that Fawcett expected to find a living, working city lost in the depths of the Amazon jungle. But Fawcett wasn’t some off the wall wack-job.

His more scientifically driven claim that the Amazon had once harbored a sophisticated sedentary even monumental civilizations like the Aztecs, Inca, or Egyptians. Grann explains:

In the last few years, a team of researchers led by the archeologist Michael Heckenberger uncovered 20 pre-Columbian settlements in the Xingu region of the southern basin of the Amazon — the very region where Fawcett believed he would find the City of Z and where he disappeared. These settlements, which were occupied roughly between 800 and 1600 AD, included houses and moats and palisade walls. There were causeways and roads, which connected the settlements together. There were plazas laid out along cardinal points, from east to west, and roads positioned at the same geometric angles. (Fawcett had reported that Indians told him legends that described “many streets set at right angles to one another.” ) According to the scientists, each cluster of settlements contained anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 people, which means that the larger communities were the size of many medieval European cities.

He continues:

Other scientists are fueling this revolution in archeology, which is upending the view of the Amazon as a place that could never sustain what Fawcett had envisioned: a prosperous, glorious civilization. Anna Roosevelt, a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, who is an archeologist at the University of Illinois, has uncovered in a cave near Santarém, in the Brazilian Amazon, the remains of a settlement at least 10,000 years old — about twice as old as scientists had estimated the human presence in the Amazon.

Now, Grann’s account of the doomed Fawcett expedition is being made into a blockbuster film starring Brad Pitt.

Today, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s book: The Open Veins of Latin America, a book that’s one of Chávez’s favorites and he often quotes from. I wonder if Obama will flip through it, at least. It’s definitely a classic of 1960s-style leftist scholarship, forcefully written, a kind of encyclopedic account of how Europe and the United States treated Latin America as a big commodity piñata to be plundered at will. And how the United States and Europe (especially the English) manipulated the region’s politics and wielded a big stick in order to whack at will at this piñata.

If a bit outdated and too willing to turn a blind eye to Latin America’s own faults, the book is still worth reading. At the fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, Obama criticized Latin Americans for being too willing to point the finger north whenever they need an explanation for their problems, so that flaw in the book would probably not agree with the States’ first black president. Here’s a sample few sentences:

“In these lands we are not experiencing the primitive infancy of capitalism, but its vicious senility. Underdevelopment isn’t a stage of development, but its consequence…underdevelopment arises from external development, and continues to feed it.”

In other words, Latin America’s underdevelopment subsidizes rich countries’ overdevelopment. I think that recent dramatic reductions in poverty in Brazil and Mexico show that whatever the history of plunder, it’s not beyond Latin American governments to act against inequality and poverty. When they take decisive action to reduce economic inequality (with cash reward programs like Bolsa Familia in Brazil and Oportunidades in Mexico), it is possible for capitalism and social democracies to develop side by side. It’s too bad so much of the Summit of the Americas spotlight has been gobbled up by the thaw in relations between the United States and Cuba, and the warm handshakes exchanged between Obama and Chávez. Not that this diplomatic dance isn’t interesting, but if Obama were to point to these social welfare programs as models for how Latin America can move forward without divisiveness or class polarization, then other governments might emulate these programs, which redistribute wealth with accountability and transparency. To receive payments under these programs families in Mexico and Brazil must keep their children enrolled in school and take them for regular health checks and immunizations.