Children of Cain

...Immediately her murder was attributed to the CIA...

...Hence the displays of corpses covered with the eloquent signs of torture...

...Among cattle ranchers, they collect a vacuna ganadera, calibrated not to break the "taxpayer" but to "milk" him...

...abhorring disloyalty, he felt revulsion when any of his foes among the montenero guerrilla movement became a collaborator...

...For example, El General's brother, Daniel, leads his turbas divinas—mobs—into the streets, and thus exercises de facto executive veto power...

...as they settle debts of rancor, they eliminate the vile...

...In the transport industry, they chargedrivers for the right of transit...

...In fact, the methodical indoctrination of the military and the monteneros' ruthless kidnappings were motivated by the same animus: each wanted to eliminate the foe—the problem...

...Carrier' had a rebellious streak, it was be-cause she came from a family in which people not only endured prison but also died in the struggle against Somoza...

...To be sure, many contras do hail from the North...

...But the Sandinistas' repression seemed to me less an outgrowth of Leninism than an outgrowth of Nicaragua, with its political culture shaped by its authoritarianism and violent traditions...

...Indeed, Rosenberg not only concludes that Nicaragua is now on its way to a system based on the rule of law, but she makes an even broader claim: "Revolutions at least produce a few fleeting hours of hope...

...For Rosenberg, the central problem is "a disregard for law and politics as a way to solve marked social contrasts...

...Distributors of cigarettes, soda, and beer pay a "tax" as well...

...Lest we forget, he was also a Baptist minister, another reason one could have expected less brazen behavior from a representative of a movement seeking to appeal to America's conscience...

...The Americans of the eighteenth century were fortunate in several respects, not least in being able to live through what Wood calls "radical" changes and come out with their optimism undiminished...

...El Salvador was also renowned for its cocoa plantations, the wealthiest and most despotic on the isthmus...

...But what exists in Colombia is not a war between the vile and the less vile...

...From the start, moderates in the Sandinista government favored democratic reform over dictatorial orthodoxy, and counseled prudence in the conduct of foreign policy, but they were ignored by the comandantes, who still believed in an inexorable historical logic...

...Her awareness of this problem makes her descriptions of Argentine life rich and believable, and her facile conclusions perplexing...

...The guerrilleros, after all, combine the coercive power of the state with the business acumen of a successful corporation...

...Pizarro's fate was almost identical to that of Colonel Enrique Bermudez in Nicaragua, though Rosenberg omits this fact from her chapter on that country...

...Previously unimaginable things have happened, too...

...Humberto Ortega, decidedly not an oligarch, is still el General in a country with a strong military tradition...

...She has tuberculosis, raises her two children, and has to suffer her uncle's shouts of "Whore...

...Conversely, advocacy of the contra war was premised on precisely the notion that there was no other way to bring about the democratization of the Sandinista regime...

...Since then, thousands have died in El Salvador...

...Unfortunately, it is often unbelievable—as it is here, where the plausibility of Rosenberg's outlook for Latin America is inversely related to the reader's knowledge of the region...

...The oligarchs have proved steely in their resolve to keep their enormous share of the economy, yet dissipated in their personal habits...

...invasion of Panama to vote for Violeta Chamorro, on the calculation that if the FSLN committed electoral fraud a reinvigorated imperial power would redress the wrong manu militari...

...According to the judge who presided over the trial of the military officers accused of murdering six Jesuits in 1989, 70 percent of the evidence necessary to try the murders was unearthed by Gomez, with the support of Democratic Congressman Joe Moakley and Ambassador Walker...

...and almost invariably they have a failed marriage in the background...

...He was forever under investigation, and the reactions of press, Republicans, and segregationists were predictably harsh...

...How insignificant is this connection in reality...

...The Americans Wood describes in this excellent book were not so sure...

...The Salvadoran guerrillas, Rosenberg says, are not like Shining Path...

...Rosenberg also states that Carrion Sr...

...Middling sorts in America appropriated the principal virtues of the two extremes and drained the vitality from both the aristocracy and the working class...

...Undoubtedly, such sentiment did exist, but it was never as extensive in reality as in the imagination of foreign intellectuals...

...He was there to save his country...

...Villalobos removed his military uniform, put on a suit and tie, and helped negotiate apolitical resolution to the crisis...

...In a surprise outcome, the Sandinistas lose, but Carrion Sr...

...Nor was power returned to the oligarchy: it was never really taken away...

...A more hardened montenera disagreed...

...To make the point that in Colombia it is safer to be a guerrilla fighter than a leftist politician, Rosenberg offers the example of Carlos Pizarro: the dashing son of a Colombian admiral, who was the candidate of the M-19, whose guerrillas signed a peace treaty with the government in 1990, piled their guns in a heap under a Colombian flag, and registered as a political party...

...Rosenberg argues that the incalculable profits of the drug trade led the traffickers to invest in land, and thus to make common cause with large ranchers and the army in order to dodge the guerrillas' tax-collectors...

...Daniel Ortega was particularly confused by two aspects of his electoral defeat: (1) Pinochet had fared better in his plebiscite...

...F or Spanish Americans, political violence has been both the enigmatic object of an ancient query and a brutal reality that haunts each generation...

...For to grab a neighbor's property, and to defend one's own with the sword was not enough...

...Today, a typical businessman in El Salvador is likely to believe that repression is a more cost-effective way to manage labor unrest than salary adjustments...

...lost a "mansion" to the revolution...

...repudiates the revisionist deviations of the Albanian Communist party...

...Wood has little to say about the constitutional roots of the Civil War, aside from pointing to the asymmetry between the North, where equality was seen as universal, and the South, where it excluded slaves...

...At best, it will be filled with daily battles for democracy, some of which will end in defeat...

...n Nicaragua, the future is equally uncertain, notwithstanding a neat dialectical story with a happy ending told by Rosenberg...

...it is a war between traditional potentates from the Conservative and Liberal parties, the drug lords, and the guerrilla comandantes...

...Leonel Gomez, a courageous critic of public corruption and human-rights violations, has returned home under the personal protection of the American Ambassador William Walker...

...Finally, military officers like Colonel Emilio Ponce, a former high-ranking official of "the brutal treasury police," began talking about democracy and the importance of winning over the people...

...B ut Powell was not just any politician...

...Excessive drinking, it should be added, has become a serious problem among the region's elites, be they of the left or the right, as has divorce...

...Rosenberg also takes us to El Salvador—minuscule but teeming with people, naturally rich but torn to pieces...

...The problem is that Powell was quite thoroughly corrupt...

...He was shot once in the head, at close range...

...All of which was made possible through the usual forms of graft: kick-backs, no-show jobs for relatives, and what today are called "campaign finance irregularities...

...A few days later, the culprits were captured in Managua, where retributions awaited Marcial...

...True, to the extent that Mussolini was not Hitler...

...Ana Maria had been living in Managua, preparing to attend a guerrilla congress in El Salvador, where, backed by the Cubans, she was to wrest command away from the obdurate Marcial...

...In fact, most women of the Nicaraguan upper class know the importance of a minimum of self-reliance for their children, and few condescend to put their daughters through the embarrassing ordeal of a debutante ball...

...If Rosenberg judged that the appeal of the contras was limited, she also discovered that anti-American sentiment was widespread as a result of the war...

...From Jack Johnson to Marcus Garvey to W.E.B...

...The real mansions belonged to the PellaisChamorro-Benard clans, and were never confiscated...

...A necessary—though not sufficient—condition for such hope is the willingness of observers to abandon all effort at precise assignation of culpability between the camps they perceive as the "left" and the "right...

...At any rate, Rosenberg is wide of the mark in her claim that the FSLN turned over power to the "oligarchy" by allowThe American Spectator April 1992 73 ing the electoral victors to assume office...

...The same can be said, however, of Villalobos, now forced to speak the language of negotiations after a series of unfavorable turns: the breakup of the socialist bloc, the Sandinista loss in Nicaragua, and the ramifications of Castro's struggle to maintain his position as caudillo of socialism in one country...

...ADAM CLAYTON POWELL, JR.: THE POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF AN AMERICAN DILEMMA Charles V. Hamilton Atheneum/545 pages/$24.95 reviewed by ARCH PUDDTNGTON 74 The American Spectator April 1992...

...The government, for its part, agrees to bargain with Daniel, in no small measure because President Violeta Chamorro, mother of two prominent Sandinistas, has a familial stake in the durability of the pact...

...If Gladys is so beaten down that she has come to believe that the patron is always right, then her perfect opposite is the young urban guerrillero Javier, who is far from despair but almost irretrievably lost to madness...

...One must always answer in the affirmative...

...Indeed, many Nicaraguans felt emboldened by the U.S...

...Demobilization everywhere entails extreme danger for the demobilized...

...n Colombia, astronomical prof/ its from the drug trade have begun to alter even the elemental values of the old society...

...The comparison is reminiscent of one frequently made in the seventies, when it was argued that the Sandinistas, or at least the Ortega faction, were not like the Salvadoran guerrilla front, whose leaders were prepared to kill anyone, even one another, for the sake of ideological purity...

...No one knows who killed them or Bermudez, just as no one knows for certain who killed Pizarro, who in his twenty years of warfare accumulated a long list of enemies—among the right, the drug-traffickers, the army, rival guerrillas, and the relatives of his victims...

...and (2) campesinos voted three-to-one against the FSLN...

...Not too long ago it was even worse...

...Of these, only one appears alive in the book...

...But this is not surprising, since for five centuries the North has offered refuge to los de abajo in rebellion against the powerful...

...when she visits her lover...

...Even in Switzerland, social difference produced oligarchies behind the facade of popular sovereignty...

...In Cuba, the leaders of the revolution are in the habit of marrying three and four times, although not Fidel, who is married to the island...

...At any rate, even after a historic peace accord, the future of El Salvador remains highly undetermined...

...and CONSUELO CRUZ SEQUEIRA 70 The American Spectator April 1992 that Pol Pot had the right idea, but lacked party guidance...

...The result was a rupture in the guerrilla front, and the formation of the more intelligent, more liberal faction known as the National Resistance...

...They blackmail small enterprises in the petroleum industry, and share the revenues of the municipal areas under their control...

...Rosenberg claims that the Salvadoran left lacked ideological coherence: its leaders disagreed about the use of strikes, the proper balance between urban and rural action, and potential alliances with known Marxist organizations...

...Known as sicarios, they believe that in the course of business they help society...

...As the civil rights revolution moved from the courts to the streets to Congress, Powell, a Democrat with high seniority, was ideally positioned to influence the course of his people's history...

...She drank their vodka, rode in their sports cars, bathed in their swimming pools, and suffered their frivolities...

...Which is not to say, as Rosenberg argues, that the contras found support only among wealthy businessmen and campesinos from the North...

...Powell would invariably hide behind a racial shield and accuse his tormentors of much worse, or blame his troubles on the threat he posed to the racial status quo...

...In truth, he "lost" (actually, put up for rent) a well-appointed house straight out of a Florida middle-class suburb...

...They split, for example, on how best to cope with the election of Ronald Reagan ("Some wanted to overthrow the government before Reagan took office, while others thought the time was not yet right...

...delighted in taunting white politicians of all stripes...

...some are richer than others, and thus not peasants at all...

...While comparison with such firebrands as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown does insult to his memory, there's no question that Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr...

...We must learn to see the dead not as evidence to use against a foe, an ideology, or a system, but as the implacable advocates for the critical self-examination of the living...

...Thus, in 1975, when Roque Dalton, the best poet of his generation, returned from Cuba to live in secrecy in El Salvador, he was promptly eliminated by a guerrilla commando force which is thought to have included Joaquin Villalobos, now the principal military strategist for the FMLN...

...Jealousy, an element not to be underestimated in politics, was also a factor in the assassination of the poet, who wasbelieved to have the personal support of Fidel...

...Other assertions are implausible...

...As Javier explains, not all campesinos are the same...

...He was fighting subversion and communism, not trying to get rich...

...The aristocracy lost its monopoly of civility and politeness and the working class lost its exclusive claim to labor...

...It was in Segovias, for example, that campesinos gave support and shelter to General Sandino's first column as it retreated after the Liberal General Moncada signed a pact with the Americans...

...The fusion of democracy and individualism was furthered by the merging of the old social classes into what was, in effect, a single middle class: In America, in the North at least, already it seemed as if the so-called middle class was all there was...

...This is possible, even probable...

...he claimed the mantle of racial leadership at a delicate point in Negro history...

...Asa description of these lives and efforts, the book is a success...

...In early colonial days, El Salvador was the most prosperous province of Central America, and as such was exploited by the bureaucratic capital in Guatemala...

...according to James LeMoyne, former bureau chief of the New York Times, the country's political culture is one of "perennial conquest...

...according to Rosenberg, was the "product of years of methodical indoctrination," while the viciousness of the monteneros "seemed more the spontaneous expression of a wild, formless anger...

...She found that, The American Spectator April 1992 71 when drunk (every weekend), they utter inanities they think clever...

...is elected as a Sandinista representative to the congress...

...For her, the officer was "part of a system that kidnapped defenseless people, maintained them in inhuman conditions, and killed them...

...An obstacle to peace among them is the fact that for the guerrillas it is especially dangerous to demobilize...

...DuBois, blacks had witnessed the persecution of outspoken leaders whose only crime, it appeared, was to speak and act independently...

...Above all, however, the pact is maintained because it is the quintessential power-sharing arrangement of the Nicaraguan elites...

...And they contribute to prosperity by eliminating inflexible judges and politicians...

...He enjoyed the good life, and shamelessly used his congressional post to satisfy his appetite for wine, women, song, and foreign travel...

...He was particularly admired by urban blacks, just emerging as a political force and more drawn to Powell's cynicism and insolence than to Martin Luther King's sermons on the brotherhood of man...

...The assassination in turn intensified the suspicions that attend jealousy and tactical disagreements...

...It was not enough even to kill...

...Orientation is everywhere the urgent objective for the children of Cain...

...According to one of four versions of his death, Marcial committed "suicide" with a rifle shot to the ribs...

...Most Americans today would say the latter...

...In Peru, where far too many people must choose between despair and ideological dementia, Gladys Meneses, at the age of 23, is despondent...

...Rosenberg thinks disregard for law and politics is the problem in Colombia, but, as in Argentina, she overdraws the distinction between left and right: "The traffickers have, at various times, formed alliances with the guerrillas...

...This is hyperbole: the grandees of the Mexican political class live in exquisite fortresses, and in Cuba, the potentates live in hidden palaces...

...The Sandinista revolution, says Rosenberg, was inevitable if democracy was to have a chance in Nicaragua...

...and argues CHILDREN OF CAIN: VIOLENCE AND THE VIOLENT IN LATIN AMERICA Tina Rosenberg William Morrow & Co./404 pages/$25 reviewed by ARTURO J. CRUZ, JR...

...The happy ending is an American predilection with a universal appeal...

...But "false necessity" has been invoked time and again to justify either the sanctity of a status quo, or radical attempts to transform it...

...He didn't rape...

...His comrades accused Villalobos, who not only survived all suspicion but thrived...

...There is blame enough for all, and such efforts frequently contribute to the very violence being repudiated, as they become ammunition in conflicts that are atavistic yet profoundly complex...

...The promise of a slow, brutal agonymutilation—was needed to paralyze the impudent...

...They even came to look upon Castro as a revisionist...

...The age of ideas was not an age of ideologies, and innovation was not feared in a world confident that the future would be better than the past...

...And as Rosenberg concludes, "Sendero doesn't want people to make the peasants' life better, but to make it worse, to the point of being intolerable...

...As a member of Sendero Luminoso, or the Shining Path, Javier dreams of tennis shoes available only on the other side of the desert, in Pinochet's Chile, and considers the massacre in Tiananmen Square a "very hopeful and uplifting event...

...Fair as the driven snow and with a "sweet face," La Gringa tears out the eyes and tongues of her enemies...

...He does not explore the problem of loyalty that is posed by the double allegiance inherent in a federal republic: Is the patria to which patriotism is directed the state or the union...

...He would skewer not only reactionaries like John Rankin of Mississippi but also progressives like Fiorello LaGuardia or, for that matter, FDR himself...

...In the end, the war did not unify the country against the regime in power, nor did it unite Nicaraguans against the United States, as Rosenberg claims...

...Of course, the guerrilla movements are also in the business of kidnapping, primarily members of the urban upper middle class...

...His vision of the world was terribly Neanderthal, but he was convinced of what he was doing...

...Javier worships the memory of "Comrade Mao" and "Comrade Stalin...

...Gladys is also exploited, by her neighbor...

...i/ n his heyday, he was regarded by many as America's most notorious black militant...

...Furthermore, Sandinista official Alejandro Bendafia recently authored a devastating critique of the FSLN's campesino policy, as part not of an academic discussion but of an attempt to destroy the political future of Jaime Wheelock, who as minister of agrarian reform accumulated land pari passu as Humberto Ortega acquired tanks...

...He liked to think of himself as the most important Negro in America, which he wasn't, and as a formidable deal-maker in Congress, which he was...

...Roberto D'Aubuisson, alleged mastermind of the assassination of Archbishop Romero and founder of the rightist ARENA party, died in February of cancer...

...Finally, the FARC, the oldest and most powerful of the guerrilla armies, protects the poppy fields for heroin production, a new interest in the diversified portfolio of the Cali cartel...

...If Mrs...

...Leninism," she asserts, "is repressive by its very nature...

...Rosenberg forgets that Leninism tends to gain hold in societies that are already repressive, producing nasty hybrids: not for nothing has sandinismo been called "scientific somocismo" by Carlos Coronel, a former Sandinista...

...The dialectic—writ small in the relationship between Sandinista comandante Luis CerriOn Cruz and his father—is this: The son, idealistic and socially committed, and the father, who is concerned for his children 72 The American Spectator April 1992 but is also a multimillionaire in the midst of poverty, are alienated...

...Oxford historian Malcolm Deas, who specializes in Colombia, thinks the connection is quite complex...

...once in power, however, he repeats the mistakes of the older generation, most particularly those of the not-well-intentioned Somozas...

...Nor did he lose a "financial empire...

...The disappearance of class divisions clearly saved America from the instability of the new European republics, which were undermined by conflict between bourgeois and proletarian interests...

...Powell even managed to alienate President Truman by referring to Bess as the "last lady" for attending a tea sponsored by the Daughters of the American Revolution—who had denied Powell's wife of the moment, the jazz pianist Hazel Scott, the right to perform at Constitution Hall...

...A naval officer who participated in Argentina's guerra sucia, or "dirty war," is particularly well-evoked: Enamored of personal authority, he was habitually benevolent towards prisoners...

...His funeral took place on a rainy morning, when even the volcanoes disappeared from sight...

...In the meantime, the father, though dispossessed by the revolution, learns to appreciate its noble aspects...

...Young men abound who repent for the sin of theft but kill with scientific precision...

...Gradually, the two generations increase their mutual understanding and initiate a dialogue...

...Powell found many willing listeners whenever he insinuated that the issue of corruption Arch Puddington, formerly an assistant to Bayard Rustin, works for Radio Free Europe–Radio Liberty in New York was contrived by whites to thwart the rise of strong black leadership...

...Whether in films or in books, it is applauded around the world, particularly when carried off by a skillful writer like Rosenberg...

...A variant of the traditional accusation was invoked to justify this execution: the poet was a double-agent, working for the CIA and Cuban intelligence...

...In the dialectic writ large, it is in their moment of defeat, according to Rosenberg, that the Sandinistas execute their most "revolutionary" coup: "By turning power over to the oligarchy, they brought to Nicaragua the bourgeois democracy they had so scorned...

...He wasn't corrupt...

...These enemies are, in the main, los de abajo—the peasants at the bottom of the hierarchy—and anyone who stands by their side...

...The son becomes a guerrillero in defiance of the father...

...In Children of Cain, Tina Rosenberg travels to Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, El Salvador, and Nicaragua to determine the motives of the violent, comprehensible only as part of their efforts—most often vain—to orient themselves in their nations' politics...

...That anger, moreover, "was the entirely 'rational outgrowth of years of bronca {rage] in Argentine politics, a grand tradition of intolerance, vindictiveness, and resentment...

...If it were only so, one could hope that education could transform souls for the better...

...One montenera described him as "a kind of worthy enemy...

...To whites he may have been an arrogant loudmouth, but to blacks Powell was an uncompromising opponent of discrimination, a man prepared to stand up for them in every forum and against all adversaries...

...But at least they were not made uncomfortable by a period of exciting uncertainty...

...But fundamentally, all the guerrilla leaders were determined to reorganize El Salvador according to the core principles of Marx and Lenin...

...As mistakes are acknowledged, a new synthesis emerges, which eventually makes elections possible...

...Bermudez, the former military chief of the contras, tried to organize his former soldiers into a political force after the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas...

...Rosenberg states that the comandante was brought up by a mother who, given the local context, was a "bit of a rebel": she expected her children (not their maids) to make their beds, and sided with her daughter when she refused to be introduced in society...

...S o is there hope for the children of Cain...

...At least they bring about one glorious moment when a people can rise up and say: We can change our destiny...

...He always delivered his pitch with a wink and a leer, as if to say that what really disturbed his antagonists was the public spectacle of a black man having so much fun in Washington...

...Their houses are contiguous—the miserable and the less miserable on either side of the same wall...

...Certain fronts of the FARC and National Liberation Army (ELN) guard jungle labs for money...

...Instead, a new pact was negotiated, which today is constantly revised by the Chamorro government...

...The rebel movement was authentic, and wide enough to sustain on its campesino shoulders a "comically inept" leadership...

...La Gringa's choice of methods and targets does not violate the mission of the Shining Path...

...But the narco-guerrilla connection is tiny compared to the narco-right...

...Rosenberg perceives the change in Ponce's language as part of an inauthentic democratic conversion that coincided with the arrival of a billion dollars in military aid...

...The mourners were few, and the only Sandinista leader in attendance was the very one who had apprehended him: Tomas Borge...

...According to the OAS, more than one hundred demobilized contras and contra messengers were executed in the mountains of Nicaragua in the first quarter of 1991...

...And tradition, according to Rosenberg, is so powerful that it accounts for the rage of the monteneros in Argentina, the economic "success" of Pinochet in Chile, and the undemocratic behavior of the FSLN in Nicaragua...

...The military's brutality, Arturo J. Cruz, Jr., a visiting research fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Consuelo Cruz Sequeira write frequently on Latin American politics...

...As Rosenberg points out, he was a share-holding executive, but in an emporium that was diminutive compared to the vast holdings that were preserved intact by the truly wealthy, who were quick to enter into a tacit pact with the victorious FSLN...

...And the divisions in the American republic that were more or less identical to those in Switzerland led, as in Switzerland, to civil war—namely, the political divisions inherent in any federal constitution that fails to achieve equilibrium between central authority and local autonomy...

...Later still, after the guerrilleros were united in Havana and the FMLN was created under Fidel's tutelage, the legendary "Marcial"—the Ho Chi Minh of Latin America--ordered the death of his comrade "Ana Maria," who was stabbed eighty-three times with an ice pick while Marcial was on a visit to Libya...

...Finally, Rosenberg found that the wealthy of El Salvador live protected by walls "higher" and "thicker" than the rich have anywhere else...

...As a reward for renouncing violence and accepting democratic rules, Pizarro was shot to death on a commercial airliner seven weeks later...

...when sober, they feel misunderstodd by the world...

...The party now acknowledges the need to "co-opt" former contras if it is ever to become a significant political force in the countryside...

...For all his addiction to fast cars and fast women, Powell's real failing was a deplorable standard of political morality...

...To divert attention from the corruption charges periodically brought against him, Powell became a master at exploiting urban black obsessions with conspiracy...

...Though frightening, Javier is a more benign version of the horrifying comandante people call La Gringa...

...They also came, for example, from Chontales—the birthplace of the Ortegas' mother, and the region where in the nineteenth century the oligarchs of Grenada recruited campesinos to fight off William Walker's invasion...

...Its founding father, however, was soon killed in a mysterious airplane crash...

...Ruben Zamora, arguably themost lucid member of the democratic left, has been in his country for four years, where he functions as one of the most important representatives in Congress...

...At worst, it will bring the complete resumption of violence...

...Important details about the Carrier' Cruz family, central to this account, are inaccurate, and occasionally patronizing...

...This fact has perplexed many...

...Before his death, D'Aubuisson, "the country's most beloved politician," in the words of Rosenberg, allowed his political heirs to engage in face-to-face negotiations with the guerrilla movement...

...Rosenberg claims to have mingled with them...

...But like all the others, it will bring only temporary peace to the rival blocs, and more violence to the country...