Bad Habits
Galeano, Eduardo
The Upside-Down World Eduardo Galeano Bad Habits A small gesture of national dignity set off a raging scandal early this year. Throughout the world, the press gave the story top billing as if it...
...This poison, prohibited in the United States, was sold in Canada...
...Bush uses September 11 to explain everything...
...A year ago, Thomas Dawson, spokesman for the IMF, stated: "We have many distinguished alumni in Latin America...
...In that time, how many Brazilian children died...
...Under NAFTA, corporations rule...
...Let's accept the unacceptable as if it were part of the natural order of things and no other order were possible...
...But bad habits are not destiny, and more and more countries are refusing to play the fool in this grand universal farce...
...Of all of the inhabitants of Mount Olympus, Hermes was the most deceitful, the trickster who conned everyone, the thief who stole everything...
...Or if the tariffs and subsidies the rich countries imposed at home but prohibit elsewhere were introduced in the South...
...tried to kill Fidel Castro...
...It is a long and sad history of serial divorce...
...And it is worth remembering that this event not only opened the way to a long military dictatorship but also killed and buried the social reforms that the democratic government of Jango Goulart was introducing to make the most unjust country of the world less unjust...
...That's how the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is being sold...
...A new rhetoric, a new attitude...
...In contrast, as few will remember, the most serious terrorist act in Brazilian history, the coup of 1964, took place with the political, economic, military, and media participation of the United States...
...It is inconceivable for us to imagine the story the other way around...
...It was the same old rhetoric...
...mental laziness from imagining ourselves without them...
...Throughout the world, the press gave the story top billing as if it were a freak event, like, "Man bites dog...
...So what was the scandal...
...It took forty years for this impulse for justice to revive...
...In 1995, another U.S...
...Back at the beginning of time, old Zeus, the boss of all bosses, made no mistakes...
...Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist, is the author of "The Open Veins of Latin America, " "Memory of Fire, " and "Soccer in Sun and Shadow...
...Now Argentinean President Nestor Kirchner warns, "We're not just a doormat any more...
...Nonetheless, we should bear in mind that the routines of indignity in Latin America have a lot to do with the bad habit of amnesia- amnesia, for example, of U.S...
...visitors what the United States required of Brazilian visitors: to obtain a visa and have their picture and fingerprints taken at the border...
...participation in that terrorist coup, though the major participants already confessed to it and documents prove it...
...With machetes in hand, the people prevented the company from continuing to poison the land and the water table...
...The sun chills the world, liberty oppresses, integration breaks things apart: Like it or not, it can't be avoided...
...Even the most hardheaded are convinced that in this vast humiliation machine, where the powerful practice financial extortion, military violence, and trade protectionism with impunity, dignity is either shared or nonexistent...
...Or if the government of Cuba had organized numerous assassination attempts against U.S...
...What was abnormal was that everyone else simply accepted the conditions that President Bush imposed on the rest of the world with the exception of a privileged few who were held beyond suspicion of terrorism and evil-doing...
...Or if the Venezuelan embassy in Washington had pushed and applauded a coup against George W Bush, like the one the U.S...
...Because of provisions contained in NAFTA, the company received an indemnity of $17 million...
...had weapons of mass destruction...
...Bad habits: indignity, amnesia, resignation...
...Zeus gave him sandals with gold wings and named him the god of commerce...
...It was Hermes, later called Mercury, who engendered the World Trade Organization, NAFTA, the FTAA, and other creatures conceived in his image...
...embassy in Caracas supported against Hugo Chávez...
...In mid-1998, the Canadian government lifted the ban, paid Ethyl an indemnification of $13 million, and said it was sorry...
...However, the most recent regional meetings-in Cancún and Monterrey-were battered by the gusts of a new wind...
...However, as everyone knows, no Brazilian had anything to do with bringing down the World Trade Center...
...A terrorism that kills with hunger is no less abominable than that which kills with bombs...
...This article is published with permission of IPS Columnist Service...
...Our countries get along very badly with their peoples and get along even worse with their neighbors...
...This is the new rhetoric...
...Many condemned this normal act as an expression of perilous insanity, but what was abnormal was not what the Brazilian President Lula did but the fact that he was the only one to do so...
...After so many years of solitude, the weak are beginning to understand that divided they fall...
...Metalclad sued the Mexican government for this act of "expropriation...
...This matter of the border check, which caused such a flap, is little more than a case of retributive justice, and it would be ridiculous to see it as belated historic revenge...
...Ethyl reacted by suing the Canadian government for damaging its reputation by banning this product and for "expropriation...
...company, Metalclad, couldn't reopen a toxic waste dump in the Mexican state of San Luis Potos...
...Presidents, in response to the numerous times the U.S...
...Bad habits: fatalism...
...Canada's lawyers warned their government that the jig was up, there was nothing to be done...
...Brazil required of U.S...
...Fear keeps us from changing...
...This tragedy, which President Bush continues to exploit as a shield of perpetual impunity, obligates his country to defend itself without ever letting its guard down...
...And what would happen if the countries of the South refused to accept a single condition imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank unless they began imposing the same conditions on the United States as well, the major debtor of the planet...
...From the life and work of NAFTA over its first ten years, consider just a few of the revealing indications of what awaits us if the FTAA comes into being, if so-called free trade, humiliating and sovereign, is extended throughout the Americas...
...In 1996, the government of Canada prohibited the sale of a neurotoxin dangerous to human life: It was an additive to gasoline manufactured by the U.S...
...For example, what would have happened if Iraq had invaded the United States on the pretext that the U.S...
...Take your pick: this or this...
...firm Ethyl...
...Only a few, like Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle, believe that we can still hope to be happy beggars...
Vol. 68 • April 2004 • No. 4
