The Corruption of Memory
Galeano, Eduardo
Just like the Mexican buildings that collapsed in the earthquake, Latin American democracy has been robbed of its foundations. Only justice could have provided the solid underpinnings; but...
...Drug trafficking comes from mobilization of ground troops he TV a way of life that requires the massive consumption of chemical consolations...
...Last year, Cuba suffering from radiaree medical treatment...
...One year before, Bush did not turn into Hitler when he invaded Panama, and he did not punish himself in the name of the world...
...The light devours and mutilates concerned about Cuba...
...Are Colombians violent by nature...
...They ended up in common graves...
...Rubber Stamp and bank note...
...the inspectors who grew rich looking the other way...
...Economic logic is what the World Bank report invokes...
...The frontier city of Matamoros is one place where the consequences are plain to see: the drinking water is thousands of times more toxic than in the United States...
...The paper-pick- _ ers break up this lightning-bug of a stone, and give pieces to their The aftermath of the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City...
...Or is this obstinate violence the child of scorn and desperation...
...Why is it that when the economy grows, people shrink...
...the officials who authorized skyscrapers in the most sunken area of the city...
...All the Latin American countries to emerge from military dictatorship, from years of blood and dirt and fear, have sprinkled holy water on the foreheads of torturers and murderers...
...water near the General Motors plant is 6,000 times worse than the U.S...
...The Bank's Harvard-trained 0 chief economist, Lawrence Summers, admitted to being the author...
...Even while celebrating the annihilation of its enemies, the system cannot fail to suspect that it is condemned to beget them...
...Never has the distribution of bread and fish been so anti-democratic: there's enough for all, but few eat...
...but impunity could not rule if it were not deaf...
...Just as drug trafficking isn't made from a sow's ear, neither do guerrillas leap forth from the Devil's mouth...
...and it is carried everywhere by the wind and Mexico City, September, 19 rain and flies and birds...
...The state is being dismantled in Latin America...
...Who's ever heard of Goiania...
...he's a successful exponent of capitalist realism...
...Colombia grows tulips for Holland and roses for Germany...
...But there is a latent threat in each of the victims of this system which struggles against the consequences of its own acts...
...Goiania City, Brazil, Sep- tember, 1987: two paper- pickers come a- cross a metal tube in an empty lot...
...corporations have crossed the border into Mexico in recent years...
...The official statistics later claimed 500...
...The international technocracy earns its high salaries by coining euphemisms...
...Attracted by tiny wages and the freedom to pollute, several U.S...
...me indifference on the hough the manufacturys, as we know, very 85: the earth trembles...
...We've been raised to believe that misfortune is a question of fate...
...The magic stone shines, turns the air blue, and makes everything it touches sparkle...
...In the South, state terrorism is a necessary evil...
...The super extravaVol XXVII, No 3 Nov/DEc 199337 37 VOL XXVII, NO 3 Nov/DEC 1993REPORT ON CORRUPTION ganza left scads of dead Iraqis, though TV avoided any unpleasant images...
...but what has been elevated to the category of divine law is the law of profit, and it rules with impunity...
...Beyond the walls of order and civilization, that undeclared war justifies everything...
...The occupying troops produced a president, Guillermo Endara, sworn in at Fort Clayton, a U.S...
...Last year 50 riots erupted in Latin America's most overcrowded prisons...
...Seventeen centuries ago, Saint Ambrosio, priest and doctor of the Catholic Church, outlawed usury among Christians but authorized it as a weapon against barbarians...
...Today, what is bad for the North is good for the South, in accordance with the right of the few who usurp nearly everything to wage war against the many who have practically nothing...
...In that barrio on the outskirts of Goiania, no one knew the meaning of the word radioactivity, and no one had ever heard of cesium-137...
...Those who reestablished order were congratulated...
...Social injustice gets reduced to a police matter...
...It's no news...
...Saddam Hussein, once a favored child of the West, suddenly turned into Hitler because he invaded Kuwait...
...New ones fell as if they had no foundations, because they had none...
...The TV counted 100 bodies...
...On its altars we sacrifice nature and human dignity...
...Three out of every four citizens voted against him...
...Years have passed and nothing has been done to those responsible: the developers who built and sold these modern sand castles...
...Brazilian physicist Ennio Candotti has made the point that the richest and most powerful countries can no longer maintain their levels of well-being without exporting devastation to other lands...
...Illegitimacy could not scream any louder...
...Never before have so few been able to manipulate or suppress so many...
...The rubble is gone, they've rebuilt what was destroyed, and everything continues as if nothing had ever happened...
...the engineers who lied murderously in their calculations...
...Usury follows a similar pattern...
...Old buildings withstood neighbors...
...Impunity feeds off fatalism...
...Governments should exist only to pay off the foreign debt and to guarantee social peace, which in proper English means to stand watch and to punish...
...If the price of aluminum included the ecological cost of production, the industry would be priced out of the market...
...Now we know it was in the thousands...
...The mask of impunity is woven with threads of impotence and resignation...
...Others were guilty of thefts which seem like jokes compared to the frauds perpetrated by our most successful businessmen and bankers, or compared to the commissions charged by certain politicians every time they sell off a piece of the country...
...The Indians who work on the coastal plantations of Guatemala breastfeed their children with the most toxic milk on the planet...
...writer Bud Flakoll says that news and entertainment are becoming ever more alike...
...And many were imprisoned by mistake, or just in case...
...On the news, as in the movies, there are good guys and bad guys, victims and executioners...
...Japan, for example, no longer makes aluminum...
...tion sickness, and gave them fi The next day the paper-pickers start to vomit...
...New ones fell as if they had no foundations, because they had none, or had them only on the blueprints...
...Aluminum is produced in countries like Brazil, where energy is cheap and the environment suffers in silence...
...The most recent amnesia law was passed in El Salvador in March of this year...
...Take the war in Iraq, the largest and most expensive television show in history: a million extras, a billion dollars a day...
...but instead of justice we have obligatory amnesia, a corrosive corruption of memory...
...Now the means of communication justify the ends...
...We're like the guy who to obey the law of gravity jumped from the tenth floor...
...Many of the crimes are the direct work of state terrorism, backed up by the complicit silence of the mass media...
...German companies send rose cuttings to BoyacA...
...The jails-branch offices of hellcan't contain them...
...Latin America is the land of impunity...
...The owners of this fin-de-sidcle world have achieved astonishing levels of perfection in the technology of information and death...
...After all, the United States had previously invaded Panama 20 times this century...
...Many died, no one knows how many...
...Drug traffickers are the best students of neoliberal economics: they understand the laws of the market and provide the supply that demand requires...
...Dutch companies send tulip bulbs to the plains of Bogot4...
...Last year in Colombia there were 26,000 murders and 2,000 kidnappings...
...the low pollution levels of lightly populated countries...
...since the Vietnam War...
...In the South, state terrorism is a necessary evil...
...Many We don't know, nor will we died in that moment of horror i fragile city in the world...
...To capture the infidel General Manuel Noriega, his former employee in the CIA, Bush bombed the poorest neighborhoods of Panama City and followed that up with the largest ' mobilization of ground troops Street children--and a guardian--consuming cocaine in Rio...
...Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Bank Note Project Killed Herzog...
...Some raised their voices in protest, because such things are done but not said...
...The South has long been the garbage dump of the North, a toilet for nuclear and industrial shit...
...But Lawrence Summers is no surrealist poet...
...When dig through the rubble, the go Later, it stopped saying...
...The memorandum said nothing new...
...Over 200 pesticides on the World Health Organization's black list are used in Uruguay, a country that has one of the highest cancer rates in the world...
...Are they people with happy trigger fingers whom violentologists ought to place under a microscope...
...Chernobyl resounds in the ears of the world...
...Over the last 20 years, the gap between North and South has doubled in size...
...Of the dead, some had committed crimes which were child's play compared to the feats of more than one decorated general...
...The most lucrative business in the world is the result of a way of life that generates anxiety, solitude and anguish through the vertigo of unbridled competition, where the success of a few implies the failure of many...
...This way of life-projected daily on the small screen as a universal panacea-requires the massive consumption of chemical consolations...
...If war exists," that pious man said, "the right to usury exists...
...We don't need the ends to justify the means anymore...
...The inhabitants of Mexico City have the highest concentration of lead in their blood...
...After five centuries, scorn for human life has become habitual...
...1970...
...After the flowers have bloomed on these immense plantations, Holland gets its tulips, Germany gets its roses, and Colombia is left with low wages, damaged soil, and a diminished supply of poisoned water...
...At the end of 1991, the Economist and the ' New York Times published a World Bank internal memorandum...
...The rest are still in charge...
...80% of humanity pays the bill for the extravagance of the chosen few...
...The most atrocious acts of humiliation against people and violation against nature are in reality attempts to corroborate and perpetuate this world order...
...The electronic dictatorship bestows immunity on the worldwide military dictatorship of the ruling powers: those who have the monopolies on guns and television, the consumers of consumer society who devour the earth, and in the heavens gobble up the ozone layer...
...and the low incidence of cancer among people who die young anyway...
...part of the mass media, even tt But the entire neighborhood is vomiting and swelling ers of public opinion are alwa and burning up inside...
...Translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried...
...average, and in the river where Stepan Chemical dumps its waste the water is 50,000 times more toxic...
...The poor, suddenly endowed with light, cele- took in the children of Goiania brate...
...army base...
...Three and a half years later, this unpresentable character out of a Botero painting organized a plebiscite...
...Old buildings withstood the quake...
...and kills...
...Whoev- the quake...
...If groups of individuals are consumer societies instead of peoples, and consumption is outlawed for 80% of humanity, then world order depends on the relentless application of the technologies of repression and oblivion...
...And there is nothing strange in the fact that the very same people who cheer the trials of human rights violators in Eastern Europe applaud impunity in Latin America...
...Colombian sociologist Maria Cristina Salazar is researching the devastating consequences of these industrial floral arrangements: the plains of BogotA are drying out and sinking...
...The system produces poor people, then declares war on them...
...The clinic that discarded the cesium tube functions normally...
...As news, Latin vion...
...We'll have to write a new dictionary for the century to come...
...nobyl...
...Drug trafficking, which was the alibi in Panama, remains the pretext of choice for violating national sovereignty in Latin America...
...gs collapse in less than ever know, how many n the largest and most people first began to ,vernment said 5,000...
...According to the document, 0 the World Bank ought to stimulate the migra- dildo tion of dirty industries to less developed coun- (Who tries for three reasons: economic logic, which the a favors dumping toxic waste in poor countries...
...What we call universal democracy has little or nothing to do with democracy, in the same way that socialism in the Soviet bloc had little or nothing to do with socialism...
...Only 10 of them have been punished...
...The social contradictions in this country of the richest rich and the poorest poor are more explosive than all the bombs that go off daily in Medellfn...
...George Bush led the call for punishment in the name of the world: "The world," he declared, "cannot wait any longer...
...To keep the invisible hidden, we need more guns and more uniforms, while public financing of education, health and housing take a free fall, and food subsidies disappear altogether...
...The fi more were maimed for life...
...er rubs it on his skin shines in the night...
...With impunity, Volkswagen and Ford make and sell cars 36 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 36 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON CORRUPTION without the catalytic converters mandatory in Germany and the United States...
...The kingdom of impunity extends south from the banks of the Rio Grande and the Mediterranean, and down the peaks of the Himalayas...
...According to a recent study by the Texas Center for Policy Studies, the Meireles...
...But the business of drugs, an industry of death no less virtuous than the arms industry, would not exist if it were not fed by prohibition and if the market did not give it a reason to be...
...Only justice could have proThere is nothing strange in the fact that the very same people who cheer the trials of humanrights violators in Eastern Europe applaud impunity in Latin America...
...They hammer it open and find a glowing blue stone inside...
...Nothing happened to those responsible...
...U.S...
...first bodies they pulled VOL XXVII, No 3 Nov/DEc 1993 35 Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan essayist, is the author most recently of We Say No: Chronicles 1963-1991 (Norton, 1992...
...The entire barrio glows like a America is condemned to obli lamp...
...35 VOL XXVII, No 3 Nov/DEC 1993REPORT ON CORRUPTION out carpeted an entire baseball field...
...A thousand houses and building This was the worst nuclear catastrophe after Cher- three minutes...
...The riots left 900 people dead, nearly all of them prisoners, nearly all of them executed in cold blood...
...invasion number 21 was televised as a docudrama on this time-honored tradition...
...This event was met with the sa They'd eaten mangoes and coconut: that must be why...
...The numbers of the desperate and the imprisoned multiply...
...but instead of justice, we have obligatory amnesia...
...With impunity, Bayer and Dow Chemical make and sell in Latin America the fertilizers and pesticides outlawed in Germany and the United States...
...Human rights organizations in Colombia recently published a detailed list of 250 military brass and 100 police officers responsible for murders, disappearances, massacres and torture between 1977 and 1992...
...vided solid underpinnings...
...and the workers and lands of Boyaci are sick from the large-scale use of insecticides and chemical fertilizers...
...Colombia, for example, usually plays the villain, and the consumer the innocent victim...
...Collection rtist...
Vol. 27 • November 1993 • No. 3
