The Old Gringo-Hater

...San Martin, Sucre, Bolivar, Santander, and O'Higgins provide the foundation for a credible national myth...

...They ask public employees to work, at least once in a while...

...San Martin, who had once scandalized Bolivar in Guayaquil by proposing the importation of a European king, set down the following instruction in his will: "The saber that has accompanied me throughout the South American war of independence, shall be delivered to the General of the Argentine Republic, Don Juan Manuel de Rosas...

...nor would it have to fear the numerical preponderance of its own primitive inhabitants [the Indians and mestizos...

...No other people on earth has felt it necessary to immolate thou sands of victims annually to assure the balance of the heavens...

...But no more...

...Both placed great value on lineage...

...From Mexico to Chile, family secrets of racial and ethnic impurity still abound: the Spanish American does not want to be reminded of the fact that he is a racial admixture...

...And at ceremonial gatherings, they wanted seating arrangements commensurate, with their keen sense of dignity...

...From Mexico to Chile, family secrets of racial and ethnic impurity still abound: the Spanish American does not want to be reminded of the fact that he is a racial admixture...

...Fuentes is more subtle when examining works of art directly, and his interpretation of Spanish-American baroque is imaginative, even if it lacks historical perspective at times...

...Miranda had had a premonition about Bolivar: "I don't want this dangerous young man in my army," he had said...

...First he used Balboa, and even offered him his daughter in matrimony...

...These "Reflections" begin with a declaration of failure and a celebration of triumph...

...and the "insolence" of a Jew bedding a Christian woman could cost him his life...

...This self-delusion was to be perfected by Spanish Americans, even at the height of rebellion against the mother country...

...Nicaraguan and Salva-doran immigrants who arrive by land say that the most perilous stretch of their journey is not the "scar," as Fuentes calls the border, but Mexico itself, where they are frequently abused and exploited by officials, con artists, and middlemen...

...Domingo...

...One of Santander's admirers, writing in the 1930s, was able to determine, after a thorough genealogical investigation, that indeed, many, many years back there had been an Indian "element," but so minor and remote that it could not detract from Santander's illustrious lineage...

...In its later phase, the Reconquest turned increasingly dogmatic, until a dichotomy emerged between—as Fuentes puts it—inquiry and inquisition...

...Wolf also noted that the Aztecs had much in common with the Spaniards...

...Fuentes cites Bolivar's having said that, "after Jesus Christ and Don Quixote...

...Fuentes elegantly explains the religious and psychological meaning of the Aztecs' War of Flowers—whose purpose was to take prisoners for sacrifice in order to keep the last of the five suns in the sky...

...According to Fuentes, the Reconquest brought the Christians unity—first the good kind, then the bad...

...The immigrants, Fuentes implies, are only returning to the land that was once robbed from them...

...Encounters that involve national sovereignty are simply "unjust"—the quintessential case being the encounter between the United States and Mexico, followed in decreasing order of importance by the former's encounters with Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic...

...you shall be respected...

...But they failed, and were shot, then hanged...

...Now, Franco, to be sure, was a Phalangist in domestic matters and a cynic in foreign affairs...

...Finally, in 1828, Bolivar proclaimed himself dictator in Bogota...

...It is Franco's political heir, Fraga, who now lends moral support to Fidel Castro, and Franco's fellow Galicians who are investing in the Cuban economy...

...yet was obsessed with having England present...

...Next came the rumor that Pizarro had killed the judge...

...The older Bolivar was determined to keep Argentina, the United States, and Haiti from the Panama Congress of 1826...

...and to give non-French respectability both to the court at Cadiz and to the idea of a liberal constitution at a time when Spain was under Napoleonic aggression...

...I'm the third biggest fool in history," in order to portray him as self-effacing...

...Fuentes links the robustness of Spanish-American culture to a series of mutually enriching "encounters" with the "other"—the Christian Reconquest of Moslem Spain that ended in 1492, the Spanish conquest of the New World that Arturo Cruz, Jr., a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Consuelo Cruz Sequeira write frequently on Latin American politics and history...

...They plunged Peru into a civil war, which culminated in the execution of the former and the assassination of the latter...

...Political adversaries of the Colombian liberator Santander, for example, frequently denigrated the hero's slanted eyes—a mark of Indian ancestry...

...The young Bolivar delivered his superior, Miranda, to the Spaniards in 1812 in exchange for a passport to Curacao...

...But respect, in fact, had little to do with the policy, enunciated in preparation for World War II, which was an opportunistic application of the American truism, "good fences make good neighbors...

...The leaders of the Sandinista Revolution, to be sure, did try to impose uniformity (and not without crucial support from the Soviet bloc)—Sandinista women, Sandinista children, Sandinista students, Sandinista church, Sandinista culture, Sandinista neighborhoods...

...The early colonizers retaliated with name-calling, a spontaneous though not unimaginative release of bitter frustration...

...Perhaps their humble requests will be granted in another 500 years, if we finally abandon the cruel imagining that makes of foreign powers both the source of our darkness and the lantern of our hopes...

...He deciphers, for example, the meaning of the bullfight, and presents it to us in a language at once clear and exuberant...

...Yet among the cultures permitting human sacrifice, the Mexica [Aztecs] are unique...

...The ardent champion of national sovereignty even criticizes U.S...

...Pre-Columbian America, despite dramatic differences, bore striking similarities to Iberia...

...Enough...

...But why England and not Haiti...

...Encounters that he cannot describe in terms of racial, linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences—like the Spanish Civil War—he casts in the language of dogmatism, as a clash between the forces of "dark" and "light...

...Hernan Cortes conquered Mexico...

...And they ask governments and speculators to squander and misappropriate only a fraction of external loans...

...Fuentes appears unaware that the Reconquest entrenched the divisive Iberian tradition of suspicion and intrigue, which began to coexist in the late fifteenth century with the impulse to unite in faith in God and Sovereign...

...Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has used the occasion to chart the "mutual discovery" of Spain and America since Columbus...

...Encounters within a national culture—say, between Peruvian society and the Shining Path—are relegated to oblivion...

...And from the metropolis to the colonies went haughty Spaniards—unaccustomed to the rigors of the Indies yet disdainful of their predecessors...

...Yet all the liberators, San Martin included, were caudillos—and behaved very much like the conquistadores...

...began in the same year, the nineteenth-century wars of independence, the Mexican Revolution, and the influx of Hispanic migrants into the United States...

...Fuentes does not even hint at the kinds of divisive suspicions that alienated the creoles from one another...

...And what happened to San Martin, the supposed foe of strongmen...

...But in fact, the holy battles of the Reconquest were sustained, by fragile alliances between Christians and Moors, Christians and Christians, Moors and Moors...

...Already in the Iberia of those days, all wanted to be small kings in the name of liberty and great kings in the name of authority and order...

...In the first episode, Fuentes deals with the formative elements of Spain...

...But he once again distorts them by cleaving the world into good and evil, darkness and light...

...His account of the Spanish Civil War pits the retrograde Franco against the enlightened Republicans...

...Then he found a pretext to charge Balboa with treason, sent Francisco Pizarro to apprehend him, and ordered his throat slit...

...It was early in the morning, so his corpse lay all day in the mud, and all night under a full moon...

...On his way from Popayan, Sucre was assassinated, probably by Colombian liberals...

...it asks them to follow a set of rules...

...Creole resentment was in itself complex...

...Fuentes seems also to forget that inquiry and inquisition occurred simultaneously...

...The American economy does indeed "demand" migrant workers, mostly because they are willing to do jobs their American counterparts will not even consider...

...D 6 6 ark and light"—this is the thematic thread that connects the nineteenth to the twentieth century in Fuentes's narrative...

...Among the creoles (American-born people of pure Spanish blood), these reforms generated expectations of prosperity—and hence resentments...

...Take the infamous Pedrarias, sent to establish order in Panama...

...Santander was imprisoned, then sent into exile...

...Fuentes seems not to notice that imitation of prestigious foreign originals is not unique to Spanish America, or that political failure can have cultural causes...

...But in the end, it was Pizarro who died, in part as a result Of the avenging efforts of the three Almagro men who once had shared a cape...

...On the other, it led to the expulsion of the Jews...

...And yes, sadly, immigrants traditionally have come to the U.S...

...Pedrarias did that, and more...

...Mining was carried out at great human cost, while, ironically, the infusion of bullion decapitalized Spain and capitalized Protestant Europe, as the latter sold manufactured goods to Spain, which in turn surrendered the capital that would help make countries like England great commerFrench and North American political philosophy...

...Let us join ourselves in soul and body to the English," Bolivar proposed, "for then, our America would no longer have to fear that tremendous monster [Black Haiti] that has devoured the island of Santo behaved like their ancestors the conquistadores...

...Indeed, linguistic prowess became essential to effective socio-political competition cial and financial powers...

...But this is of little consequence to Fuentes, since FDR also accepted Mexico's nationalization policy...

...Before dying, Rosas had met in London with his most severe critic, the liberal Juan Bautista Alberdi, who had by then reassessed the dictator in the light of what can be the most disappointing of political experiences: a corrupt democracy...

...They engaged in holy wars and treacherous alliances...

...After military victory against the Spanish forces, Iturbide began to look for a monarch...

...had managed to escape the assassins, returned to bury him...

...And those who defended Santander did so in a manner as telling as the accusation itself...

...And they appeal to the creole predilection for things European...

...The political and economic models that Spanish Americans have copied from abroad, Fuentes reasons, failed because they were imitations, while Spanish-American culture survives precisely because it is the product of an, ancient and incessant blending of races, customs, and languages...

...Spanish-American independence, too, was a complicated matter, and not necessarily the result of a new national identity, as Fuentes believes...

...Spaniards began arriving in the colonies again, frequently to take away from creoles the middle-rank government positions ceded to them by the declining Hapsburgs...

...But little of that effort survives today...

...The villains of this phase were the Catholic monarchs, who decided in favor of orthodoxy...

...But the Mexican economy "demands" the presence of American companies, which provide jobs for Mexican laborers...

...F uentes's overview of Spain under Roman rule vividly describes Christianity's absorption of paganism, localism, and mysticism, but leads into a facile analysis of the Reconquest...

...The next day, Sucre's major domo, who...

...This irony escapes Fuentes, even though, like a conservative creole from the nineteenth century, he now looks to reunion, with a democratic, prosperous Spain for part of the solution to the economic and political problems of her former colonies...

...Both had a class of sophisticated intellectuals who addressed the major gods and their esoteric concerns, while the hard-working majority worshipped local, more practical deities...

...For Fuentes's "young and poor" revolutionaries succeeded not in creating new institutions, but in entrenching old ones—pacts between ruling families, elite-sharing of the national budget, primacy of the army and its general, and the traditional unleashing of violent mobs on civil society...

...Rosas was even buried with it, in England, 28 The American Spectator October 1992 where in exile he used to dress like a gaucho and drink mate while looking at the green, rolling hills of his farm...

...An interminable flow of intelligence—true and false—made its way across the Atlantic, particularly from the colonial subjects to the metropolis...

...Let us have compassion for one another—you the people who obey...

...intrigues, and by his own creatures...

...Upon hearing of Pizarro's death, his lieutenant Valdivia, conquistador of Chile, wept, but in his loyalty, Valdivia stands out as the noble exception to the rule...

...But he was also the man who later enthroned the "young king" who proved instrumental in Spain's transition to democracy...

...Bolivar himself died soon thereafter, at Santa Marta, in 1830, at night, enveloped in Catholic rites...

...After an earthquake in 1834 exposed Bolivar's coffin, there were many who wanted to throw his remains into the sea...

...1 The American Spectator October 1992 29...

...Fuentes does concern himself with the sovereignty of the little countries when Mexico's is not at stake...

...The historian Hubert Bancroft related that in Mexican families, if the Spanish father wanted to silence his Spanish-American son, he would say: "You are a creole...

...Two years later, an avenging Santander returned from exile in Europe, determined to crush loyalists of the dead Bolivar...

...I the man who rules alone...

...In 1521, he begins, authoritarian systems were imposed in both Spain and her colonies...

...More enlightening is the aficionado William Lyon's view: that since its beginnings in the Reconquest, when aristocratic Spanish combatants practiced their lancing on bulls before clashing with the Moorish occupiers, bullfighting has engendered a strict The American Spectator October 1992 25 code of skill and honor by which all Spaniards have constantly measured themselves against, not only brute nature, but also the universal human temptation to settle for trickery instead of prowess...

...But if Fuentes has to disregard the inglorious example of Mexican imperialism, he can still go to South America, where epic wars of independence took place...

...Among the causes for independence, he emphasizes the emergence of a new identity among Spanish Americans, particularly those under the influence of in the New World, the exaggerated eloquence of Bartolome de las Casas being only the most obvious example...

...If the Spanish conquistadores literally traveled on the backs of their Indian allies, it was partly because the Aztec overlords had already trained them as beasts of burden...

...or at the ways in which they Fuentes correctly celebrates the grand scale of the wars...

...Soon, Bolivar's own allies, encouraged by Santander, the Colombian hero, made an attempt on his life...

...San Martin, who died in France in 1850, had been impressed by the Argentine dictator's ability to withstand a French blockade...

...On the other, there was the cloudy Mexican independence movement, which Fuentes has to bypass in order to sustain his sweeping narrative...

...Sucre's wife rescued his remains, and, trusting in no one, entombed her husband in a convent...

...In between heroic exploration and cowardly hermeticism grew the obsession with limpieza de sangre, or "cleanliness of blood...

...Both 26 The American Spectator October 1992 camps fell prey to suspicion...

...Fuentes, the advocate of cultural encounters, fears a loss of the Hispanic identity to the melting pot...

...But the remark is obviously profoundly egotistical, too, and Bolivar is a figure far more complex than the great pluralist incorporator of Fuentes's imagination...

...Spaniards—in vast numbers the offspring of Jews, Moors, and Christians—set out to prove that the content of their character was pure because pure was the content of their veins...

...When Charles set out to bring Protestant heretics into the fold, the result was imperial overextension and an increase in Spain's dependence on gold and silver from Mexico and Peru...

...He hoped that Ferdinand the Beloved, or one of his heirs, might sit on the Mexican throne...

...He ought not to worry: American society does not ask immigrants to shed their identity...

...Bolivar, "the Caesar of Colombia," was defeated by his own If the Spanish conquistadores literally traveled on the backs of their Indian allies, it was partly because the Aztec overlords had already trained them as beasts of burden...

...In his ongoing rivalry with Santander, Bolivar fortified Paez, the leader of the Venezuelan llaneros (cowboys...

...The liberator's ancestors, his admirer asserted conclusively, had been encomenderos, members of the Order of Santiago, and fighters of "savages...

...Besides, under a dictatorship, who can speak of liberty...

...On the one hand, the creole elites were in awe of the American Revolution, and even hoped that Spanish America would surpass the paradigm of the North...

...and those who didn't were soon convinced when Iturbide sent in his troops...

...It is worth recalling that the Mexican military leader, Agustin de Iturbide, was a descenThe American Spectator October 1992 27 dant of Spaniards on all sides, a fighter of radical insurrectionists, and an officer of the viceroy who had maintained intimate correspondence with his superior even as he began to plot against him...

...In addition, Fuentes portrays San Martin as a champion of "institutions," and as a foe of caudillos, or "strongmen...

...As Bolivar was on his way to exile, Antonio Jose de Sucre—victor in the Battle of Ayacucho, which gained Peru's independence from Spain—decided to return to Quito to be with his wife...

...Almagro's supporters speculated that Pizarro's agents in Panama had already bribed the judge...

...Fortress walls went up in the Indies, and in Spain, Charles's son Phillip retreated to El Escorial, his "citadel of orthodoxy...

...In late August, the Discovery Channel began to air his thoughts in a five-part series entitled The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World...

...and his son, Alfonso the Wise, who sought to advance his father's view of a multicultural Spain...

...and at home, Charles V crushed a social revolution, which had begun as a conservative uprising of the localities against the royalist center...

...Almagro's supporters, rallying around the figure of Almagro's mestizo son Diego, "El Mozo," were so poor that three of them who shared a house also shared a cape, and took turns wearing it to go out in public...

...The purpose of this myth, as Raymond Carr has argued, was to establish the Iberian roots of Spanish constitutional development...

...The sovereigns wanted Pedrarias to reward Balboa, but also to keep him under control...

...Competition among the conquistadores was cutthroat...

...They ask the wealthy to pay some taxes...

...Perhaps he forgets that under the reign of Alfonso the Wise, Jews and Christians could not occupy the same house...

...Now the Americans put aside what Fuentes calls their "puritanical arrogance," and accepted one dictator after another—Somoza, Batista, Trujillo...

...and they learn to fear the IRS, though never as much as they feared the secret police and guerrilleros of their countries of origin...

...The policy, moreover, was a tacit declaration of historical failure...

...Radical ideas were an important factor, but by no means the principal one: it is important to remember that in the late eighteenth century, the Bourbon monarchs began to implement a series of administrative and economic reforms in the colonies...

...This last theme is not developed by Fuentes, not even as background to the politics, economics, and culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries...

...Today, immigrants break their backs toiling...

...There was a young Bolivar and an older Bolivar, and in each there was greatness and pettiness...

...Matador and toro confront one another at the "hour of truth"—an event that Fuentes correctly identifies as both "social" and "erotic...

...That so many lives in Latin America should be empty of hope is pathetic, since the masses ask little of their elites...

...It also exposed Spanish ports to English, French, and Dutch pirates...

...Reconquered Spain, too, was fragmented at every step, though in more subtle and profound ways, which Fuentes does not convey...

...Fuentes, celebrant of the Spanish conquest, also extols FDR's Good Neighbor Policy, because it "respected Latin America and its internal dynamics...

...to be exploited, but at least they come in the reasonable expectation that their children will have a better life...

...And the vast majority comply, because if they do, they can also struggle legitimately for civil rights—while those left behind will lead hopeless lives...

...Fuentes, however, seems determined to explain artistic innovation by once again pitting good against evil—although that most Spanish of artistic achievements, Don Quixote, shows us that the world, as Milan Kundera put it, is a "welter of contradictory truths...

...Democracy," Fuentes declares, "would have to wait...

...Ironically, Paez would later deny Bolivar entry into Venezuela...

...Pizarro's men told their leader that Almagro loyalists had traveled to the coast to welcome the judge, and gain his ear...

...Later, he would die a horrible death—forced by the Araucan Indians, as legend has it, to drink liquid gold...

...Less provocative is Fuentes's connection of political authoritarianism, religious dogmatism, and artistic emancipation...

...I shall say nothing to you about liberty," he told Colombians, "for if I keep my promises, you shall be more than free...

...Santander, for example, survived in the interior of Venezuela from 1816 to 1817 only because he had nothing anyone would want to steal...

...The hatred would not go away...

...Central America was thus annexed to the Mexican Empire...

...And both blurred the line between valor and cruelty...

...In its initial phase, it was led by humanist champions like Ferdinand III, who protected the culture of his vanquished enemies...

...In his view, the liberating armies were forced by cruel royalists to retaliate in kind...

...Fuentes is at his weakest in examining the years since Spanish-American independence...

...Anguished baroque statues, for example, are not necessarily "looking out on a changing world," as Fuentes claims...

...As the anthropologist Eric Wolf wrote three decades ago, In moments of human crisis, men often can find no greater gift for their gods than one of their kind...

...The champions of unity, Ferdinand and Isabella, wed in secret, aware that their marital alliance threatened the grandees of the time...

...They ask the politicos to steal with a touch of shame...

...Besides, the American economy "demands" their presence...

...In between the two deaths, a judge was dispatched to Peru...

...And so it would be in the New World...

...and had nobles, commoners, slaves, and a center bent on subordinating the peripheries...

...Pizarro and his associate Diego de Almagro were another case in point...

...More likely, as the Venezuelan critic Mariano Picon-Salas has argued, they are remembering the horrible pain of death by pestilence...

...Yet officers on the side of "good" were often killed by their own followers...

...What actually had to wait was the myth-making—wait until Spanish Enlightenment liberals would argue that the Hapsburg kings had destroyed the Spanish medieval cortes by suppressing a rebellion in Padilla in 1520...

...In Central America, many felt the same way...

...Creoles wanted to be viceroys and brigadiers, and they wanted titles of nobility...

...and Consuelo Cruz Sequeira The Old Gringo-Hater On the quincentenary of the discovery of America, Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes takes to cable TV to rediscover some hoary myths about Latin America: nice caudillos, multicultural inquisitors, and the democratic pluralists of imperial Spain...

...Even a cursory examination of the conquest reveals the conquistadores caught in a web of inconsistencies—legalism and disobedience, utopianism and self-serving interest, rumor and fact...

...On the one hand, the completion of the Reconquest led to a transoceanic adventure impelled by curiosity, greed, and faith...

...El Cid, the mythical slayer of infidels, was a soldier of fortune who also fought for the Moors against the Christians, and for the Moors against other Moors...

...Ever since the second decade of the twentieth century, Americans had tried to manage customs-houses, banks, and railways for countries like Nicaragua in the hopes of creating honest and efficient institutions...

...attempts to stop illegal immigration...

...Alfonso also took away from the Jews one of their vital trades: the distillation of spirits...

...f 500 years are half a divine day in the tradition of the ancient Hebrews, then this year marks God's high noon for the New World...

...Fuentes exalts the Hispanic Trojan Horse-25 million Latin Americans in the United States...

...Indeed, Bolivar felt that San Martin and O'Higgins were capable of anything for the sake of power...

...Jews could not hold positions of authority over Christians...

...So Rosas went about with the saber of the great liberator...

...The Sandinista revolution, he states, though "new, young and poor," managed "to remain independent, in spite of intense North American hostility, educating the people, creating institutions where there were none, unleashing the forces of a new civil society, and respecting the results of free elections...

...But while Fuentes manages to convey the ring's sense of timelessness, he also purges its culture of political history...

...San Martin's crossing of the Andes, for example, had a classical aspect to it, reminiscent of Alexander's and Napoleon's campaigns...