A CONTINENT IN AGONY

...they were first castrated, then burned to death...

...He was a prophet whose time had come...

...Catholic peasant leagues for a time fought Juliao's leagues to a stalemate...

...Freire, along with other progressive intellectuals, was exiled after the military seized power in Brazil in 1964...

...Unless there are drastic economic changes, at least half of those 625 million will be surplus to the needs of the economy, producing nothing, consuming enough to eke out a short life in poverty, ignorance, and poor health...

...And the Naval School of Mechanics in Buenos Aires has reportedly developed an original form of group torture: In the presence of his companions a prisoner is stripped naked and cut in two from the groin through the top of his head on a butcher's band saw...

...This leads to a third form of violence from the side rf*u" —A fhe police apparatus, the .wpression and destruction of the democratic rights of the people which they have struggled so long to get...

...Government, is helping destroy the Indians by financing their resettlement in a reservation far from their cultural and economic habitat...

...Only the servants of international capital (including the repressive armed forces) continue to enjoy significant benefits, but at the cost of growing alienation from workers and the bourgeoisie...

...The Organization of American States (OAS) condemned Uruguay last year for "constant and grave violations of human rights" after the OAS Commission on Human Rights found that Uruguay has more than 6,000 political prisoners, that one Uruguayan in 500 is a political prisoner, and that one Uruguayan in every hundred has been tortured...

...The alliance between economic interests, military power, and technocratic rationality provides a formidable power structure that cannot be abolished just by 'wishing it away.' " Given the powerlessness of the Latin American masses, the protection of the church is obviously better than no protection at all...

...The bottom tier is occupied by the countries that produce raw materials and semi-processed mineral and agricultural commodities...

...Freire in exile spent some years in Chile, taught briefly at Harvard, then made Geneva his base to propagate his approach to adult education in East Africa and Ceylon...

...Their doctrine is strictly classist, with racist overtones: Privilege is reserved to themselves and to the moneyed classes who support them and whose fate it is to engage in perpetual conflict with the underprivileged...

...In Alto Parana, Paraguay, the survival of 50,000 Indians is threatened as agribusiness buys up land (Gulf and Western, 135,000 acres...

...Even development, though important, takes second place to security...

...Los Chicago Boys" of the Milton Friedman school of dog-eat-dog economics insisted — as a condition for the stop-gap financing needed to build up massive counterinsurgency forces and to service the external debt — that the drive to industrialization be reversed...

...The three postwar decades have wrought profound changes in Latin America — few of them for the better...

...In Brazil alone, there are now 40,000 or more such groups — a network so autonomous (and almost invisible) as to defy all official attempts at disruption...

...The churches have played an unanticipated part in this awakening of the oppressed...

...Some figures from a study recently sponsored by Cardinal Evaristo Arns of Sao Paulo illustrate the dimensions of people's suffering...

...Brazil, which broke new ground in the hemisphere in applying the theory and practice of neofascist dictatorship, was also the country where the churches first took an open stand in op'Only the servants of international capital-enjoy significant benefits...' position...

...Sao Paulo, a city of twelve million, enjoys a per-capita income far above the national average...

...And wherever right-wing terror has raged — in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and most recently Peru — the grass-roots communities have begun to flourish, encouraged by Catholic priests and nuns and by Protestant ministers, many of whom have sacrificed their liberty or their lives to the cause of human dignity...

...It is a community organization with its own indigenous leadership and a humanist (usually also religious) commitment...

...It is a complex phenomenon to which many factors have contributed, but undoubtedly the most important was a series of events that began in Brazil's Northeast in the late 1950s...

...Since World War II, most of the top leaders of Latin American armed forces have been trained by Pentagon instructors in the Canal Zone and in war colleges within the United States...

...The priests were given no choice...

...co-prosperity sphere...

...Chile was needed only to supply raw materials...

...The dominant countries concentrate on the most dynamic industries, such as electronics and telecommunications, and on scientific and technological innovations that guarantee long-term control of the system...

...In a joint statement issued last May, the clergy of the Catholic diocese of Verapaz accused the army of having conspired with landlords to draw several hundred Indians into an ambush, slaughtering more than a hundred men, women, and children in cold blood and wounding many more, because the Indians refused to give up land an earlier government had granted them...

...Since the global corporations control world markets, this involved still greater dependency, and acquiescence in a three-tier economic structure — a planned international division of labor — developed by the multinationals...

...The Northeast's sugar was once the base of Brazil's wealth, and the region has vast tracts of fertile and watered land...

...G. MacE...

...By 1971, they accounted for 70 per cent of total net profit in five major sectors of Brazil's economy — rubber, automobiles, machinery, household appliances, and mining — as well as 84 per cent of private-sector drug sales...

...warships sailed south to help the military if that should prove necessary, and an enthusiastic President Johnson sent his best wishes and recognized the plotters as the legitimate government even before Goulart had left the country...

...that this oppression is man-made, not God-given, and that it can be ended by cooperative action...

...all chose the oven...

...Savagery has reached similar levels in Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras...

...Unemployment is officially estimated at about 20 per cent, and the real figure is substantially higher...

...Protestantism because it entered with British, German, and North American business and looked to the commercial community for its base and support...

...Brazil, with the world's sixth-largest population (more than 115 million) and eighth-largest gross national product, offers, according to Business Week, what is probably the highest rate of profits in the world — and it has the largest foreign debt of any client state, $30 billion in 1978...

...G. MacE...

...Of the population of the capital, 52 per cent, and of the adjoining municipalities, 73 per cent suffer from undernourishment...

...Freire's best-known book is Pedagogy of the Oppressed (published in paperback at $3.95 by Seabury Press, 815 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10017...

...Even Colombia, which still maintains a facade of democracy, has laid the groundwork for what it euphemistically calls "controlled democracy...

...Conscientization If Latin America's urban and rural poor are acquiring class consciousness and a sense of their own power after centuries of exploitation, credit is primarily due to the application of the Freire method of conscientizacao—an adaptation of the Socratic method for teaching literacy to adults by politicizing them and helping them recognize that they are victims of oppression...

...foreign aid agency and later the Alliance for Progress to defeat the "red menace...

...The economic plan now in effect calls for a work force of six million (including dependents) in a nation with ten million inhabitants and a growing population...

...In the past decade these positions have been reversed...

...The massive input of capital and technology by multinational corporations in the 1970s freed ever greater numbers of people from working — and from eating...

...The resulting coalition terrified the local oligarchs and the U.S.-based multinational corporations eager to open up rich markets...

...The transformation in the churches' role was facilitated by the parallel decline in the economic and political power of local oligarchies as they were marginalized by global corporations...

...But it would be anachronistic to look to the church for leadership of a liberating movement — especially a church with the paternalistic traditions of that of Latin America...

...policymakers and entrepreneurs began to suffer acute indigestion resulting from their efforts to swallow the hemisphere in one bite, they turned from regional to bilateral strategies, stressing differences among the various nations and adjusting policies to maintain the Balkanization that has been the plague of Latin America...

...The number of priests and ministers ready to risk their lives is small, but it is enough to serve as a leaven in the church and to give suffering millions hope for a better tomorrow...

...At the same time, many Latin Americans have come to see the region as one beset by common — and catastrophic — problems...

...businessmen, journalists, and Government officials I kept encountering in hotel bars and at conventions in Havana, Caracas, Bogota, or wherever...

...His latest work is Pedagogy in Progress (published in hardback at $8.95 by Seabury...

...One measure of the decline in purchasing power is the infant mortality rate in Sao Paulo...

...Reflecting on his experience, Freire came to realize that ignorance and apathy are a direct product of the economic, social, and political domination — and of the paternalism — to which the poor are subjected...

...It is a process of creeping fas-cistization, which starts with the cutback of democratic rights such as freedom of opinion, speech, press, assembly, and organization, and ends in unleashed terror and torture...

...Such partially developed countries as Brazil and Mexico are allocated secondary, more backward, and generally "dirtier" industries...

...Having fallen by 30 per cent from 1940 to 1950 and another 32 per cent from 1950 to 1960, it increased by 45 per cent between 1962 and 1975...

...But neither of those conditions applies today: The system squeezes more and more from the poor, and at the same time the peasants and slum dwellers have become "conscientized" (see Page 19) as never before, claiming ever more aggressively their right to live as human beings...

...And as the new military dictators began to justify their rule by the neofascist ideology of "national security," the churches were compelled to choose between state control and open resistance...

...Throughout the continent state and private universities are subject to continuous purges, and many schools are now run by members of the armed forces...

...This has been done systematically not only in Brazil but in the countries that have followed its lead — Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and others...

...The peasants were offered a choice of castration or being burned alive in a bakery oven...

...Some officers are growing restive under their military dictatorships, recognizing that the "wisdom" of the ruling generals is destroying their countries...

...Recent compilations list 2,500 Chileans who have "vanished...

...The projection for the year 2000 is 625 million...

...With their easier access to credit and their advanced technology, the multinationals can readily buy out local firms and establish oligopolies, increasing profit levels to two or three times the earnings available in the United States...

...On the other hand, Latin American politicians and "intellectuals" — the only Latin Americans who then had a voice — insisted it was utterly absurd Gary MacEoin's books include "Revolution Next Door: Latin America in the 1970s"and "No Peaceful Way: Chile's Struggle for Dignity...

...But the logic of the system excludes moderate solutions...

...Traditionally, the churches had been identified with privilege and power — Catholicism because it had come to the hemisphere as an adjunct of the Spanish and Portuguese states and continued to see its function as legitimating whatever regime was in power...

...The "free enterprise" promoted in the 1950s proved to be freedom for the fox in the chicken coop...

...The Brazilian regime, in particular, has made several attempts to ease repression only to find that popular demands swiftly rise to explosive levels, so that the lid must be clamped down again...

...to draw sweeping generalizations that encompassed Mexico and Argentina, and still worse to equate a Swiss-style democracy like Uruguay with such Andean states as Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, dominated by masses of "unabsorbed" and "primitive" Indians...

...Gunnar Myrdal doubts that public opinion in the dominant powers — particularly the United States — would tolerate such a genocidal solution...

...In response to world opinion, more sophisticated and macabre techniques have recently been adopted: Suspects are not arrested, they simply "disappear...

...It was possible to maintain pseudo-democracies, with parliamentary forms manipulated by the oligarchs, so long as basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter were met for most of the people and so long as their level of political awareness remained low...

...Paraguayans charge that the InterAmerican Foundation, an "aid" agency of the U.S...

...Committed to self-examination, conscientiza-tion, and dialogue, it is neither a church nor a civic organization in conventional terms...

...In the late 1940s, I constantly heard variations on that theme from the U.S...

...The readjustment process that required more than a decade in Brazil was telescoped into a quarter of that time in Chile...

...Government — became alarmed...

...The junta that overthrew Allende arrested 45,000 A surplus of people The population of Latin America has increased from 63 million in 1900 to 166 million in 1950 and 350 million today...

...suspects, tortured most of them, and killed or exiled thousands...

...In the final analysis, people must liberate themselves...

...Servicing of the foreign debt has compelled Brazil, as it has compelled other countries, to accept conditions of "austerity" imposed by the World Bank and other lenders...

...Brazil, for example, already has a major automobile industry...

...Those who have jobs have seen the purchasing power of their income decline by 60 per cent since 1964, when it was already barely at subsistence...

...Reduced internal demand forced those dominated countries which — like Brazil — had acquired a significant industrial base to look abroad for markets...

...Pope Pius XII, an ardent Cold Warrior, helped mobilize the local church to join with the U.S...

...Hunger itself, as Gunnar Myrdal has observed, does not inspire revolution...

...The dissenting officers do not favor a restoration of real democracy but a "return to the barracks" that would permit continuing manipulation of government through pliable civilians who could serve as scapegoats when things went wrong...

...To fill the vacuum left by the regime's destruction of social and religious organizations, the clergy developed a new way to organize — the "grass-roots community," a neighborhood group consisting often of twenty or fewer families...

...The military officers who seized power in Argentina in March 1976 have followed the same bloody road...

...He qualified for Chile's top education post by graduating from special courses in the United States in artillery, combat, communications, torpedoes, and sonar...

...But that land is concentrated in a few hands and grows crops for export, leaving hungry millions to eke out a subsistence in the parched interior when it rains, and to flee south and west in drought years...

...In the prevailing circumstances of inadequate health care and family instability, at least six children must be produced to provide some assurance that two will survive until the parents need them...

...The major stress at all levels is on counterinsurgency, crowd control, and guerrilla warfare...

...Francisco Juliao, a lawyer-politician with a sympathy for the underdog, began to promote peasant leagues in the 1950s, and soon they were so widespread and powerful in the Northeast that the local oligarchs — and even the U.S...

...most are believed dead...

...As U.S...

...And only the military are equipped to determine the needs of security and, therefore, the national welfare...

...I am less sanguine...

...The more sophisticated indoctrination of the higher officers is based on the doctrine of "national security" developed in the 1950s by Brazilian General Golbery do Couta e Silva, who drew his inspiration from Italian fascism, German nazism, French military theories of counterinsurgency, and U.S...

...Hundreds of thousands of others have been trained by military specialists in national war colleges and in the field...

...State Department evaluation prepared on the eve of the World Football Championships held last June in Buenos Aires, and similar figures have been reported by other sources: 12,000 to 17,000 political prisoners (the dictatorship admits to only some 4,500) and another 6,000 "disappeared and presumed assassinated...

...Brazilian Presbyterian theologian Rubem Alves has advised lovers of freedom to plant olives, not pumpkins...

...The "conscientization" process was adopted to mobilize the peasants, and they were quickly persuaded that their interests and those of Juliao's leagues were identical...

...The Cold War is alive and thriving in the military instruction manuals...

...Admiral Hugo Castro, who became Chile's education minister after he had demonstrated his zeal as a book burner at the Technical University of Valparaiso, says his objective is to destroy Marxism first, then "every kind of politics...

...Extensive materials on Freire's thought and work are available from Basic Choices, Inc., 1121 University Avenue, Madison, WI 53715...

...To perpetuate their monopoly on decision-making, the military must destroy or domesticate all organs of opinion — political parties, legislative and judicial organs, trade unions, student and other civic organizations...

...This period has also witnessed rapid population growth (see Page 17) without commensurate increase in income, the depression of real wages to accumulate the capital required by constantly changing technology, the displacement of unskilled labor from the stagnating countryside to festering urban slums, the intensification of repression, and the institutionalization of torture to maintain a system of order without justice — a process the Trilateral Commission has comfortably described as "the campaign to curb an excess of democracy...

...Paulo Freire, a Roman Catholic educator in Brazil's Northeast, was an intellectual power in his homeland in the late 1950s...

...A Spanish magazine, Cambio 16, has published what it claims to be a U.S...

...No quick liberation is possible," Alves insists...

...Conditions in Latin America, bad as they are, do not yet approach the subhuman circumstances that have long prevailed in parts of Asia...

...Other countries — most recently, Peru — are heading in the same direction...

...In those years immediately after World War II, they were busy eliminating the last traces of European economic influence among our southern neighbors and completing the incorporation of the continent into the greater U.S...

...What is new and radically different in the hemisphere is the emerging self-awareness and class solidarity of the have-nots...

...Not long ago, vigilantes seized a group of peasants and two priests in El Salvador...

...Florida Peach, 43,000) to sell the valuable timber and plant soybeans for export...

...Massive U.S...

...The ferment aroused among the rural and urban masses by the process of conscientization is likely to continue and intensify, and from time to time it will force readjustments of the kind that seem imminent, at this writing, in Nicaragua and El Salvador...

...At the lower levels of the armed forces, indoctrination is directed principally toward instilling a rabid anticom-munism...

...It is a doctrine that posits confrontation at the level of total war between nations and within nations...

...The minimum wage would have to be tripled to restore the purchasing power it had in 1958...

...The world economic crisis that began in 1967 and has not yet peaked brought profound economic and political change to Latin America...

...Besides malnutrition, sanitation is a key to infant mortality: Only slightly more than half the homes in Sao Paulo have piped water, and only 30 per cent have drains...

...efforts to encourage population control in Latin America have failed...

...Citing the educational system as a major culprit in maintaining the "culture of silence," Freire developed a perspective on education calculated to respond to the concrete realities of Latin American life...

...Even those countries that maintain some of the outward trappings of democracy and the rule of law — Colombia and Mexico, for example — find it necessary to apply ever more force to maintain socioeconomic systems in which most people starve while a few enjoy incredible affluence...

...The poor see large families as their only social security against illness and old age: Children cost little to raise and can contribute labor or produce some income from early childhood...

...But the prospects of major upheaval throughout Latin America still seem remote...

...The person of the priest was once untouchable...

...But his teachings and consciousness-raising activities had brought about a major and apparently irreversible change in Brazilian society...

...This third form of violence today characterizes an increasing number of Latin American countries...

...The costs are enormous...

...The hemisphere-wide destruction or taming of trade unions, political parties, student Ellen Wipperfurth associations, and other social organizations produced a vacuum that cast the churches, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, into a role they had not sought...

...Dorothee Solle, the German theologian, has aptly summed up these developments as "the spiral of violence": "The first and predominant form of violence," she writes, "consists in the denial of a human life for the majority, cutting them off from jobs, housing, food, health, and education...

...There was no need for a second sub-imperial power in the Southern Cone...

...The second form of violence is the counterviolence of the oppressed...

...They alone have the objectivity to make prudent judgments on education, social policy, and the direction of the economy...

...Journalists are well represented among the victims: twenty-eight killed, forty missing and unaccounted for, seventy jailed, and 400 exiled in less than two whatever threatens the stability of the established order must be destroyed' years...

...Treatment of drinking water or other forms of involuntary sterilization have been discussed as means of reducing the population without altering basic economic, political, and social structures...

...The image that comes to mind is that of Jonathan Swift's giant Gulliver, who awakes one morning to find that a host of tiny Lilliputians has totally immobilized him in bonds of unbreakable thread...

...Whatever threatens the stability of the established order must be destroyed...

...Persuaded that the universities, the intellectuals, the politicians, the liberal professions, even major segments of the churches, have been infected by the Marxist virus, the military insist that only they can be trusted to guard "traditional Christian principles...

...From Chile his ideas spread through South and Central America, and they are attracting increasing attention in the United States...

...Inspired, in part, by the progressive impact of Vatican Council II, Catholic and Protestant leaders began jointly to develop an analysis of the causes of poverty and a recognition that their first obligation was to help create conditions in which people could free themselves from apathy and hopelessness — the movement that has come to be known as the theology of liberation...

...As priests and lay church leaders have come to the support of peasants and Indians in their defense of their land and organized the workers in the city slums, the reaction of the military and the paramilitary vigilantes has intensified in country after country...

...Even the traditional land-owning oligarchy has lost much of its political clout, and the lower and middle sectors of the bourgeoisie, which a generation ago promised to expand into a middle class as we use the term, are becoming proletarianized...

...now it is common to torture and mutilate priests before killing them...

...Chile, whose oligarchs' had hoped that the overthrow of Salvador Al-lende's government would bring a major infusion of technology and capital to make it a second Brazil, discovered it was destined not for "Brazilianiza-tion" but for "Guatemalanization...

...The Alliance for Progress of the 1960s was the alliance of the shark and the sardines...

...Cold War policies...

...The imposition of such drastic — virtually genocidal — austerity on an increasingly aware population requires the use of brutal force...

...Still, "to cover basic minimum expenditure on food, housing, transport, clothing, etc., a worker earning the minimum wage in 1975 needed to work 466 hours and 34 minutes a month, or 15 hours and 55 minutes a day, thirty days a month...

...He dedicated his life to eliminating the hunger and misery he himself had endured as a child...

...But the Catholic leagues eventually came under the influence of Paulo Freire, then state minister of education...

...to think and work in terms of a new order that not they but their children and grandchildren will enjoy...

...Observed from this perspective, the military dictatorships that today control most Latin American countries are not historical accidents but logical results of an integrated process...

...The multinational corporations won control of dynamic industrial sectors from which they had previously been wholly or partially excluded, and in due course the Americans were joined by Japanese, West German, and other firms...

...These conditions are enforced by severe repression — officially tolerated vigilante murders, removal of elected officials, rigid control of the media, arrest without warrant, torture of suspects, and the ever-present counterinsurgency forces to harass dissidents, especially students...

...By 1964, conditions were ripe for a military coup against the fumbling liberal government of President Joao Goulart...

...Guatemalan Indians are under similar oppression...