Dumbing Down

At a recent gathering in Mexico City, I met young Colombian journalist - Eduardo - and after the introductory pleasantries were over found myself plunged in an intense conversation with him about Latin-American literature. After running briefly through the canon, pausing to pay respects to Felisberto Hernández (arguably Latin-America’s greatest short story writer) the two of us admitted to a special admiration for Roberto Bolaño, agreeing that his works, though quirky, complex and sometimes difficult were never impenetrable and always worth the effort to understand.
 “Trouble is,” Eduardo said, after we had spent a good half hour happily ranging over a selection of Bolaño’s writings, “authors like him don’t really matter. Only the elite reads serious literature nowadays.”
I countered with a personal anecdote from his own country, Colombia. In 1981, I happened to be in Bogotá a few months after publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s wonderful, Chronical of a Death Foretold. Picking up a copy of the first edition at a local bookstore, I remember reading on the reverse of the title page that the initial print-run amounted to a staggering one million and fifty-thousand copies. Surely this was evidence of a readership that extended well beyond any definition of the elite.
 “That was thirty years ago - before I was born,” Eduardo replied. “The world has changed since then. People no longer have time for philosophical reflection or for the effort needed to digest a true work of art.”
 His remark brought to mind a little book by Indian writer, Ved Mehta, called Fly and the Fly-Bottle published almost exactly fifty years before. Mehta was a young scholar of formidable wit and intellect who, on graduating from Balliol College, Oxford had moved to an editorial desk at the offices of the New Yorker on West 43rd Street. From that vantage point, he had observed a controversy played out in the correspondence columns of The (London) Times not between the usual suspects - politicians - but between “Oxford” philosophers. Intrigued, and presumably with the encouragement of his employer, Mehta had jumped on a plane to the UK and secured interviews with the key combatants, among the most prominent of whom were Richard Hare, Bertand Russell, Stuart Hampshire, Ernest Gellner and A.J. Ayer. For good measure, he interviewed contending historians too in what turned out to be a witty survey of British intellectual life of the time. Fly and the Fly-Bottle - a phrase coined by Wittgenstein to describe the purpose of philosophy (“to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle”) - became if not strictly a best-seller, then certainly a rather unusual hit.
 What struck me, however, as I heard Eduardo’s complaint, was not so much the content of Mehta’s book as the fact that it was inspired by letters to The Times. Fifty years ago, the views of intellectuals were thought sufficiently important to merit an airing in the serious - and sometimes in the not-so-serious - press. People took notice of what philosphers, writers, and artists both thought and did. Their involvement in public life was a given. Politicians feared them, wooed them, sometimes even employed them, as Harold Wilson employed C.P. Snow. Many stood in the vanguard of political activism. Bertrand Russell was founding president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) - an organization whose early supporters also included J.B Priestley, Benjamin Britten, Joseph Rotblat, Julian Huxley, Doris Lessing, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, and Michael Tippett. I remember the impact of Wesker’s “working-class” dramas: The Kitchen, Roots, Chips with Everything; the fury of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, the influence on what we thought and felt about ourselves and about the world of such writers as John-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Alan Ginsberg, Adrian Mitchell, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet… They mattered. Together with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cuban revolutionaries, leaders of the Civil Rights movement in the US, they were stars whose light we followed into what became the “counterculture” of the 1960s, exemplified by the sexual revolution, the student rebellions of 1968, the feminist movement, opposition to the Vietnam War, a widespread, crazy but heady belief that we - the young - could change the world and make it better.
 Perhaps my Colombian friend was right. Where had this ferment of ideas, this sense of infinite possibility gone? Why could I not expect to encounter anywhere in the media the kind of polemic about which Mehta wrote so entertainingly half a century ago? What had happened to the poems, plays and novels that galvanized the world in which I grew up?
 On the day after my conversation with Eduardo, I came upon nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’ s new book, Civilization as Spectacle, an extended essay - something of a diatribe - on the dumbing-down of modern culture. Churlish though it would be not to respect Vargas Llosa’s achievement in winning a Nobel prize, he is far from being among my favorite novelists. Nor do I think much of his vacillating political opinions which he expresses with sublime confidence and minimal consistency. He is, however, undeniably clever as well as being a brilliant and thoughtful wordsmith; in short, a serious artist. When a figure of his distinction speaks, it is worth while paying attention.
 Civilization as Spectacle begins with its conclusion, namely that we inhabit a time in which serious art, reflective politics, the urge to question how we should live, activities that have produced the finest flowers of civilization and guided the way in which mankind has sought to frame social and political life, have now all but disappeared from the stage. In their stead we are left with a demand for facile entertainment, for fun, for distraction from the numbing routine that characterizes the daily round. Ours is an age of mass-market superficiality to which even the most talented creators acquiesce, not least because there is no longer any appetite for depth. Light literature, light cinema, light art afford consumers a feeling of being cultured, up-to-date, free-thinking when the opposite is the case; because what such works propagate is not thoughtful engagement with the world but drab conformity, complacency and unthinking mediocrity.
Vargas Llosa backs up these claims with an impressive array of examples and expository argument. Do we really think, he asks, that figures such as Damian Hirst (and, I would add, Tracy Ermin) belong in same the company as Michelangelo and Rembrandt? Are they even involved in the same activity? Describing Hirst as essentially a snake oil salesman, a vendor of costly baubles, Vargas Llosa suggests that his fame and the hallowed tones in which critics and curators speak of his work tell us more about our own civilization than about the quality of the artist. Hirst and his like (the author cites Fernando Pertuz - who came to notice as a performance artist by defecating in public and consuming the output) - owe their reputation not to the originality of their art but to sensationalism and a gift for publicity. Their appeal is of the same kind as that of the tabloid newspapers: dependent on shock, excess, instant effect, and the avoidance of intellectual effort.
 If the plastic arts today are notably trivial and befuddling, literature, music, and cinema lag not far behind. Where, Vargas Llosa asks, are film directors like Buñuel, Bergman, and Visconti, composers like Bach, Mozart, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, playwrights like Chekhov, Ibsen, and Shaw? No doubt they are somewhere, but since their importance is now judged by estimates of their return on investment they are as like as not living in obscurity and will probably die unknown.
 Critics are not of much help since it is hardly possible nowadays to achieve any kind of consensus about what does or does not constitute art, beauty, or even original thinking. Many are doubtless cowed into parroting received opinion through fear of being accused of philistinism or of being mired in the past (history having been recast as a midden for ideas and sentiments of depleted worth). Vargas Llosa has already been attacked in Latin-America precisely for being “out of touch”, an elitist railing against one of the signal triumphs of democracy: a world where, after millennia of cultural snobbery, the voice of demos has finally prevailed.
The demotic argument is not without potential defenders among the most elite of academics - the post-modernists, the cultural relativists, the deconstructionists for whom there can be no absolute truth and therefore no absolutes of aesthetic or intellectual judgement, no “great tradition”. For these avatars of meaning (or meaninglessness), a paragraph of tabloid gossip has the same cultural value as a Shakespearean sonnet; and whoever thinks otherwise belongs to a generation that has already passed into irrelevance.
 Of this Vargas Llosa is well aware. Between those like him (and myself) who believe philosophy, literature and art to be activities of historical and moral consequence, and those, like deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, who confine literature to a self-referential world of texts referring to other texts with no direct relevance to lived experience, there can be little in common. “Whenever I am confronted by Derrida’s obscurantist prose and his suffocating literary or philosophical analyses,” Vargas Llosa grumbles, “I have the impression of miserably wasting my time.” If - as the deconstructionists assert - literature is no more than an assembly of hermetic texts that have nothing to do with the external world and from which, therefore, we can learn or experience nothing beyond themselves, then what is the value of so much textual excavation, such tedious analytical labour?
 Derrida and company, however, can be no more than a rivulet beside the mainstream criticism of Civilization as Spectacle which is that it is little more than a paean to inequality, an elegy for an aristocratic past of refined taste. I doubt whether this is what Vargas Llosa has in mind. It certainly does not coincide with my own views. Writers like Dickens, Thackery, Tolstoy, Gogol, Flaubert, Zola - to name just a handful of 19th century novelists, wrote best-sellers in their own time. Their works were never the province of a tiny elite, no more than those of García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, André Gide, E.M Forster in the twentieth century. My friend Eduardo’s lament, let us recall, was not for a lost aristocracy but for a time when serious literature was also popular literature.
 Frivolous cultural artefacts are not, of course, a 21st century phenomenon. Cervantes began Don Quijote de la Mancha partly as a satire on (or at least in competition with) trashy novels of the time, as did Rabelais‘ with Pantagruel and Gargantua. These masterpieces obliterated the lesser creatures that inspired them. Vargas Llosa’s fear - and mine - is that the reverse may now be happening; that creations of our finest writers, artists and thinkers are giving way on the shelves to banalities with a high sugar content and that hardly anyone is heeding the obesity warning on the labels.

First Published in Open Democracy.

How Argentina Came About

This is an essay on the origins of Argentina. Latin American history is still a subject of intense controversy, and there is scarcely a line of this account that would not be disputed by someone. It is a hazard of the attempt. I have avoided entering into a discussion of the Falklands - Malvinas question which has long resembled a dialogue of the deaf. My modest hope is that readers unfamiliar with Argentina will gain an idea of how, in the light of their history, Argentinians may feel about their territorial integrity; and that Argentinians may accept that Brits are not necessarily the ignorant and unsympathetic neocolonialists sometimes depicted in their national media. I have used the expressions “Indian”, “native”, “indigenous” interchangeably. We lack an adequate vocabulary to refer to the original inhabitants of lands usurped by foreign, usually European, invaders so must fall back on collective descriptors, all of which seem to this writer more or less dehumanizing. I employ them for lack of alternatives.

Borders are more than mere tracings on a map. They are the means by which we identify where we belong, and who we are in relation to others. They define the territory we call our own and within which we share common myths about ourselves with our compatriots. To understand how Argentina acquired her present size and configuration and what these signify to her population, therefore, we need a little history; and we need to season that history with the flavours bestowed by her colonial past, her struggle for independence, and the fate of the peoples who lived there before the first Europeans set foot on her shores.

Like all of South America, Argentina came into being in consequence of a decision made thousands of miles away in Southern Europe. The story begins in 1493. Columbus had just returned with the exciting news that he had come across large islands far to the west of the known world. Immediately, Spain and Portugal began squabbling about rights of possession. In those far off days, territorial disputes between catholic countries went to the Vatican. Pope Alexander VI found a simple solution. Drawing an imaginary north-south line a hundred leagues west of the Azores, he divided the “New World” into two parts: lands east of the line belonged to Portugal and lands west of the line to Spain. John II of Portugal thought this unfair and argued successfully for the line to be shifted further west so that he could enjoy a piece of what we now know as the Americas. Both crowns set their seal on the agreement the following year at the Treaty of Tordesillas and Julius II, the next Pope, confirmed the arrangement in 1506. No one bothered to ask the local habitants if they approved the deal. At the time, no one even knew that the South American continent existed.

The Treaty of Tordesillas underwent several modifications mainly to accommodate Portugal’s success in pushing well beyond her allotted meridian line into the region that became Brazil. Not until the Treaty of San Ildefonso of 1777 was the question of who owned which part of South America finally settled between the two countries. By that time, Spain had organized its American possessions into administrative regions, one of which was the Viceroyalty of the River Plate with its capital of Buenos Aires. Breathtaking in size, it covered all of present-day Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, as well as parts of Bolivia and southern Brazil, and the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas).

For over two hundred years after the Conquest, Spanish America slumbered under an indolent if rather stifling colonial regime. Wealth extraction dominated the imperial agenda, and Spain grew rich on imports of precious metals, timber, and agricultural products from the colonies while sending manufactures in return, many of which were no longer made in Spain but bought elsewhere and re-exported to South America at inflated prices.

The Bourbon Fist

Though never formally part of the Habsburg empire, Spain had been ruled by Habsburg kings who on the whole governed with a light hand. Then, in the early 1700s following the War of the Spanish Succession, the Bourbons took possession of the Spanish throne. More absolutist and authoritarian than their predecessors, they began instituting reforms - increasing the taxation of the colonies and demanding higher revenues for the Spanish coffers. They also assumed tighter political control. Fresh administrators came out from the motherland. Measures were enacted to reduce the power and privilege of the church and the elite. New legislation relieved the “Indians” of some of the worst aspects of their bondage - an initiative in keeping with European values of the time but unpalatable to local mine and land owners. In 1767, the Jesuits - wealthiest of all the ecclesiastical groups in Spanish America - were expelled - not on account of their financial success but because they had promoted education, and social and political awareness among the indigenous population - qualities that were not convenient to the maintenance of colonial control.

Bourbon restrictions and demands for increased revenues stirred much resentment among the privileged classes; and though little could be done about the expulsion of the Jesuits, the new administrators from Spain were made to feel unwelcome by criollos (Latin-Americans of European heritage) who had grown accustomed to organizing their own affairs.

In 1780, a descendent of the old Inca rulers of Peru, who styled himself Tupac Amaru - meaning ‘the Gifted One’- launched a rebellion, but within a year he was captured and made to watch as his wife, children and closest friends were hacked to death. He was then tied by the limbs to four horses and dismembered. A rebellion in New Granada (Colombia) put the Viceroy in Bogotá to flight, but it was repressed without much difficulty, and the political landscape returned to normal. Would-be revolutionaries were cowed into silence by the ferocity of Spanish reprisals.

The sparks that eventually ignited Spanish American revolutionary fervour and that were to lead to the creation of independent states came once again from Europe.

Revolution from Afar

In 1808, the French invaded Iberia. Ferdinand VII of Spain fell into Napoleon’s hands and was despatched to France; and Napoleon placed his own brother, Joseph, on the Spanish throne. Spanish Americans were outraged and rebellion broke out at first, not against the old imperial power, but against the usurper Napoleon. So, at least, the rebels claimed; although some doubtless already had outright independence in mind. In the Viceroyalty of the River Plate, a second incitement to rebellion came in 1806 and 1807 when British forces - anticipating a warm welcome - occupied Buenos Aires and Montevideo under the pretext of defending them from French imperialism. They were quickly repulsed thanks to the efforts not of the Spanish army but of local militia. “We don’t need to swap one master for another” ran one news sheet headline, a remark originally attributed to General Manuel Belgrano, a hero of Argentinian independence. (The battleship torpedoed by a British submarine during the Falklands war, originally the USS Phoenix that survived Pear Harbour, was renamed after this celebrated soldier and scholar when it was acquired by Argentina). This isolated occurrence, scarcely noticeable amid the political and military struggles then taking place in Europe, afforded the people of La Plata a sense of their separate national identity.

Between 1808 and 1810, revolution erupted throughout Spanish America. In Buenos Aires, the revolutionaries overthrew the viceroy and established a ruling junta. Anxious to secure the mineral wealth of Upper Peru, the junta at once sent an army under General Balcarce to eject the Spaniards from the region. After some initial successes, Balcarce was routed and chased from the plateau down to the foothills of Salta, a defeat that resulted in the overthrow of the junta and ushered in a period of confusion and jostling for power in Buenos Aires.

The regime that eventually emerged claimed to govern in the name of the “United Provinces of the Río de la Plata”; but the provinces were not united and the right of Buenos Aires to leadership was far from obvious to local provincial leaders. Several provinces broke away - two of them permanently.

On March 9, 1812, in the midst of the political maelstrom that followed Balcarce’s defeat in Upper Peru, José de San Martín landed in Buenos Aires. A British naval vessel, the George Canning, had given him passage - a small demonstration of British encouragement of independence. Evidently the clashes of 1806 and 1807 had been quietly buried. San Martín was a native of the small town of Yapeyu which lies on the banks of the Uruguay river, but he had spent much of his adult life as an officer of the Spanish army. He had fought for Spain against Napoleon, an experience that earned him the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel when, on arrival in Buenos Aires, he joined the revolutionary army. A successful early action against Spanish shipping on the River Plate was enough to give him promotion and prestige - to both of which he added by helping to foment a peaceful coup against the incumbent government, an unelected body whose dictatorial style had already alienated the public.

From Belgrano to San Martín

The new government believed that independence would not be safe until the mountainous region of Upper Peru (Bolivia) - now controlled by the Viceroy of Peru - had been wrested from the Spanish crown. Accordingly, in September that year, General Manuel Belgrano, who commanded the Argentinian “Army of the North”, was instructed to launch a fresh campaign. Like Balcarce before him he enjoyed some early successes, taking Tucumán immediately and Salta early in 1813; but by October he had followed his predecessor to defeat. The mountains of Upper Peru formed a seemingly impregnable barrier against assault as well as an ideal launching-pad for counter-attacks. Disheartened by his failure, Belgrano resigned his command; and Buenos Aires appointed San Martín to take his place.

Travelling with a 2,000-strong division over the wild spaces of the Argentinian pampas, San Martín took over a month to reach Tucumán where Belgrano had installed the remnants of his defeated army. At once, the new commander set about re-training the troops according to the standards of discipline he had learned during his years in Europe. He talked extensively to Belgrano about the military situation before the outgoing general retired to Buenos Aires, and he reached the conclusion that the struggle to push Spain out of South America could not be won overland through Upper Peru. The terrain was too difficult and too easy to defend. Instead, he set about building a solid defence force in Tucumán against Spanish incursions, while relying on a local gaucho leader, Martín Guemes, to keep the royalists on the defensive by launching guerrilla sorties on Spanish outposts and lines of communication. Guemes and his band of irregulars fought efficiently and cheaply - forcing royalists and rich local criollos to pay for the war effort.

Before his departure, Belgrano had also reminded San Martín of the need to seek the support of the local people - most of whom were circumspect about the revolution and dubious about the motives of the revolutionaries. Many were devoutly religious and respectful of the divine right of kings as taught by the church. “You will not have to make war solely with arms, but also with public opinion,” Belgrano told him.

“...our enemies have made war against us by calling us heretics, and by this means have been able to call the uninformed to arms, telling them that we were attacking religion... I assure you that you would find yourself in much greater difficulty if they should see in the army under your command that you are opposed to religion.... Do not forget that you are a Christian, apostolic, Roman general... remember not only the generals of the people of Israel, but also those of the pagans, and the great Julius Caesar who never neglected to invoke the immortal gods and for whose victories Rome decreed prayers.”

Once the front line had been stabilized and the Spaniards held to the highlands, San Martín did something entirely unexpected. Pleading ill-health, he retired to Córdoba, some 500 kilometres to the south, to recuperate. In fact, he had no intention of returning to Tucuman. To a confidant he explained: “Our country will not make any progress in the north, for here only a defensive war is feasible and for this the brave gauchos of Salta and a couple of squadrons of veterans suffice. To attempt anything else is to throw men and money down a bottomless pit.”

While in Córdoba, he indicated to Buenos Aires that, being too indisposed for military action, he would be happy to accept the governorship of Cuyo, one of the remote Andean provinces of Argentina. Quiet, sparsely-populated, distant from the upheavals of revolution, Cuyo was an outpost - the kind of place where a moderately distinguished but aging politician might be content to spend his final years in public life. Its capital, Mendoza, sat tranquilly amid vineyards and palm trees, a country town still small enough for the most of the citizens to know each other by name. For a soldier of the revolution, it seemed an odd choice, a form of retirement from worldly affairs, almost an admission of defeat. Again San Martín confided his reasoning. The long-term key to defeating the Spaniards, he asserted, was for a “ small, well-trained army to cross over to Chile and finish the Goths there...” and afterwards “...allying our forces, to go by sea to Lima. This is our course and no other.” Mendoza was to be the launching pad. If Lima could be captured then the whole of Spain’s South American empire would fall.

Despite San Martín’s show of confidence, the concept of transporting an army equipped with guns and baggage overland to Chile must have seemed dangerously risky. Only pack-mules, refugees and the occasional hardy traveller journeyed over the southern Andes. The trails were poor and the climb arduous. Some of the paths were so narrow as to afford room only for marching in single file. Chile - the remotest region of the Spanish empire - looked more like a detour than a direct route to Lima and to defeat of the Spaniards. Moreover, San Martín’s natural reticence and austerity combined with his suspect health gave little cause for supposing him capable of visionary exploits.

The new Governor of Cuyo soon dispelled doubts about his health and energy. His prime concern was to build a fresh army, and to seek the necessary funds both locally and from Buenos Aires; but he took to heart the advice he had received from Belgrano and worked equally at the business of government. He began by putting the province’s finances and public services on a sound footing; and he also played a role akin to that of Azdac in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle in the administration of justice. Tales of his eccentric but wise decisions abound. A farmer who spoke against the revolution was ordered to deliver ten dozen pumpkins to the army canteen. Having issued an instruction forbidding officers to enter the gun-powder plant in boots and spurs, he was himself refused entry by a guard - whom he promptly rewarded with an ounce of gold.

Preparations

The years 1815 and 1816 constituted a dark period for the independence movement throughout Hispanic America. In New Granada (Colombia), the Spanish were carrying all before them; an earlier Chilean revolution had collapsed; and Morelos, leader of the Mexican uprising had been executed. Further south, the situation looked equally bleak. Towards the end of 1815, the Argentine Army of the North under San Martín’s replacement, General Rondeau, suffered a massive defeat at Sipé-Sipé; and it seemed probable that the Spaniards would now push forward into the rest of the country. Unable to respond militarily, San Martín opted for ruse. He set up a network of agents in Chile and Upper Peru whose role was twofold: to obtain intelligence on Spanish movements; and to disseminate stories of the size of the rebel army stationed in Mendoza and the imminence of a major counterattack.

On the Spanish side, General Osorio, who had won back Chile for the Spanish cause, was replaced by Francisco Marcó del Ponte, a pompous aristocrat who styled himself:

Don Francisco Casimiro Marcó del Ponte, Diaz y Mendez, Knight of the order of St James, The Royal Military Order of St Hermenegildo and the Fleur-de-Lys, Member of the Royal Equestrian Order of Ronda..... Field Marshal of the Royal Armies, Supreme governor, Captain-General, President of the Royal Audiencia .....etc. etc.

Marcó’s grandiosity was matched by his incompetence as a political and military leader. He ruthlessly suppressed the Chilean population, jailing and torturing all sections of society indiscriminately and thereby alienating the sympathies even of Chilean royalists. At the same time, he became a prey to every fabrication that it pleased San Martín to feed him. As a result, plans for a Spanish invasion of Río de La Plata from Upper Peru and Chile were constantly postponed and in the end failed to materialize.

Meanwhile, in Buenos Aires, Juan Martín de Pueyrredón was elected Supreme Director of the United Provinces of Río de La Plata and, unlike his predecessor, he backed San Martín’s proposed strategy of invading Chile by way of the Andes.

San Martín was already busy with preparations. He placed the province on a war footing, forming even children into regiments who performed military exercises and carried their own flags. Foreign residents were encouraged to enlist. The English, who were numerous, raised a company of light infantry at their own cost. Under his orders, weapons and gun-powder factories, iron foundries and a textile mill sprang up, the latter to make cloth for uniforms, which the women of Mendoza were engaged to sew. He founded an army medical corps under the command of two military surgeons, one English, the other Peruvian, another of engineers, and so on. Countless requests for materials went to Pueyrredón in Buenos Aires who responded as well as he could:

"The 4,000 blankets from Cordoba are on their way, but I could only get 500 ponchos... an order has gone out to send 1,000 arrobas (11,500 kilograms) of jerked beef for December delivery... Herewith the clothes and shirts you requested... forty saddle blankets... two bugles sent separately in a small box - the only two I’ve been able to find. In January you’ll get another 1,387 arrobas of jerked beef... 2,000 sabers are on their way. Also 200 tents… Here is the World, the Devil and the Flesh... How will I ever pay off the debts incurred for all this… Maybe I’ll just declare bankruptcy, repudiate all the bills and run off to Mendoza so you can feed me on the beef I’m sending you. For heaven’s sake don’t ask me for anything else, unless you want to hear I’ve been found hanging from a beam in the fort.”

Thirty-thousand shoes were made for the horses, without which they would not have been able to cross the rocky mountain passes. Vast quantities of charquicán were prepared - an iron ration consisting of powdered beef mixed with fat and dried chile pepper. Each soldier received enough of this to provide nourishment for eight days.

Not least amongst San Martín’s resources was Father Luís Beltrán, a locally-born mendicant friar. Self-taught scientist, mathematician, engineer and a born innovator, Beltrán took charge of the arsenal and soon had three hundred workers under his orders. He cast cannon, melted down church bells to make guns and bullets, taught workers how to make saddles, horseshoes, knapsacks, bayonets and swords, built special wagons and pulleys for conveying artillery across rivers and canyons, and even made portable suspension bridges.

San Martín’s young wife, Remedios, threw herself into fund-raising - and no well-to-do Cuyo family escaped her request for a donation. The entire province - no more than 50,000 strong - transformed itself into a military-industrial enterprise and, as so often happens, acquired a sense of purpose and unity as well as prosperity in the process. San Martín’s popularity grew along with his reputation as an inspiring leader.

Independence declared

On July 9, 1816, after a congressional meeting in Tucumán, the United Provinces of the River Plate formally declared their independence from Spain. San Martín sent his aide-de-camp, Alvarez Condarco, overland to Chile with a copy of the declaration for delivery to Marcó del Ponte. San Martín’s instructions to Condarco were typically succinct and not without macabre humour: “You are to go via Los Patos which is the longest road. If they don’t hang you, they’ll send you packing at once, in which case you’ll return via Uspallata which is the shortest path. Without taking a note, you are to memorize both routes so that you can make a map on your return.” As expected, Marcó had the document burned in public - but he released Condarco thereby allowing him to complete his mission.

In September, San Martín invited the Pehuenche Indians, who occupied part of the eastern slopes of the Andes, to a conference at the fort of San Carlos, south of Mendoza. San Martín’s first biographer, General Bartolomé Mitre, describes the scene:

“With the invitation, San Martín sent them many mules laden with spirits and wine, with sweetmeats, cloth, and glass beads for the women, horse gear and clothes for the men. In savage pomp they came; the warriors, followed by their women, rode up to the fort on the day appointed in full war costume, flourishing their long lances. Proceedings commenced with a sham fight in the Indian fashion, whereby they dashed at full speed round the fort, from whose walls a gun was fired every five minutes and was answered by Indian yells. Then the chiefs entered the fort and were told by San Martín that the Spaniards were foreigners who intended to rob them of their lands, their cattle, their women and children; and that he desired to pass though their country with an army, to go by the Planchon and Portillo passes to the country on the other side of the mountains, there to destroy these Spaniards. The Indian chiefs listened to his request and granted him the permission he required, after which they, with their warriors, gave themselves up to an orgy which lasted eight days.”

San Martín had no intention of taking the routes confided to the Pehuenches, who owed allegiance to neither side in the war of independence, but he anticipated, rightly, that they would sell the information to the Spaniards.

By mid January 1817, San Martín pronounced the Army of the Andes ready for action. On the 12th, the soldiers - 5,000 in total - marched through the streets of Mendoza to the sound of drums, while the citizens cheered and waved flags. In the main square, the soldiers gave a ceremonial salute to the Virgen del Carmen - patron saint of the army. San Martín formally accepted a special flag embroidered by the women of the city. Clutching the flag, he ascended a platform and addressed his troops.

“Soldiers, this is the first flag of independence to be unfurled in South America.” Cries of “Viva la Patria” rang through air as the troops hailed the flag and swore fidelity to the principles for which it stood. Next came a twenty-five gun salute followed by a bullfight and a rodeo, with gauchos, regular cavalry and even some native riders vying with each other in splendour, exuberance and skill in the saddle. San Martín looked on. “These are the madmen our country needs,” he remarked.

Up and Over

A week later, the army set out. The vanguard and rearguard under generals Soler and O’Higgins (future leader of an independent Chile) were to take the long route over the mountains through the pass of Los Patos. General Juan Gregorio de Las Heras was appointed to lead the second division through Uspallata - the only pass suitable for heavy guns and ammunition. Other, smaller detachments were sent further north and south. As befitted the commander-in-chief, San Martín took the more arduous Los Patos route. All rode mules which were more sure-footed than horses on the mountain paths.

Despite San Martín’s careful preparations, the ascent proved more taxing than even he had expected. Of the 10,500 mules, 16,000 horses and 700 head of cattle taken on the march, only 4,300 mules and 511 horses survived the journey, all in poor condition. On the Los Patos route, five mountain ranges had to be crossed, and the trail led between some of the highest peaks of the Andes. Some soldiers died from cold and lack of oxygen; others became sick with fatigue and exposure. Half-way through the march, at eight thousand feet, in the midst of a violent hailstorm, San Martín came close to despair. As night fell, the marchers settled as best they could in the freezing temperature, San Martín taking refuge in a cave where the combination of cold and fear that he might have launched his army on an impossible mission deprived him of sleep. By morning the storm had blown over, but San Martín sensed that he must make a gesture to revive the flagging spirits of his soldiers. He ordered his band to play anthems of the revolution over breakfast; and for an hour the music echoed through the barren landscape of ice and rock.

Though the struggle was far from straightforward, San Martín succeeded in fulfilling his main objective which was to secure his homeland from any possibility of a return to its former colonial status. Eventually he also reached Lima with his army as he had planned. He did not, however, manage to drive the Spanish army from Peru nor liberate Upper Peru which is probably one of the principal reasons why Argentina’s borders do not include areas of present-day Bolivia that were formerly part of the Viceroyalty of the River Plate. It was left to Simón Bolívar and his great lieutenant José Antonio Sucre to complete the task of freeing South-America from its colonial yoke.

While the war against Spain was still underway in the west and the north of South America, civil war broke out between the Argentine provinces and the capital, Buenos Aires, with declarations of independence coming, at various times from Santa Fé, Entre Ríos, Tucumán, Santiago del Estero, Catamarca, Córdoba, La Rioja and the Banda Oriental (Uruguay). Paraguay fell into the hands of a local caudillo, José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, a morose, sinister dictator who closed his country to the outside world ostensibly to protect it from economic and political subservience to Buenos Aires. In 1816, Uruguay was invaded by Portuguese/Brazilian forces and subsequently annexed and renamed Cisplatina (literally ‘this side of the River Plate’). José Gervasio Artigas, a charismatic Uruguayan gaucho, led campaigns against both the centralists of Buenos Aires and the Portuguese invaders. After a prolonged struggle, the Portuguese prevailed and Artigas was forced to seek asylum with Francia in Paraguay. Nevertheless, he laid the foundation for Uruguay to become an independent state, and he is remembered as the father of the nation. After his departure, Uruguayan irregulars continued the fight against the Portuguese and although neither side prevailed, statehood was finally achieved in 1828 at the Treaty of Montevideo, which was partially drawn up and diplomatically fostered by Great Britain. By this time, Bolívar and Sucre had completed their mission to free the rest of Spanish South America of colonial rule.

Not yet Argentina

Argentina was now fully independent, but not yet Argentina. Two obstacles stood in the way of a settled nation: a lack of internal unity between the provinces, and the fact that huge swathes of the country, including virtually the entire region south of the Province of Buenos Aires and a large area of the north bordering Paraguay and Bolivia were marked on maps of the time as “Territorio Indígena” (lands belonging to native peoples).

The intermittent civil war and struggle for power between centralists and federalists is a complex tale, made more convoluted by war against a short-lived confederation of Peru and Bolivia, and by periods of interference from foreign powers, notably France and Great Britain, which included prolonged naval blockades of the River Plate. A visitor to the region as late as the 1850s would not have known for certain which nation she had reached nor how it was governed. Not until 1862, when Bartolomé Mitre was elected president, did Argentina emerge as a more or less unified country.

Border stability took a little longer. In 1864, Argentina entered an alliance with Brazil and Uruguay in a savagely destructive war against Paraguay. The Paraguayan War lasted for six years and ended in a devastating defeat for Paraguay whose losses amounted to fully sixty percent of the population and, according to some estimates, up to ninety percent of adult males. Argentina’s share of the post-war spoils amounted to significant chunks of Paraguayan territory, which today make up the Argentinian provinces of Misiones and Formosa.

Once the Paraguayan War drew to a close, the authorities in Buenos Aires turned their attention to the “territorios indígenas”. During the colonial period, where there were mines to work or haciendas to run native peoples had been enslaved or indentured; but in areas of no obvious profit to Spain or to the local criollo elite, they had often been left alone or had defended themselves with enough vigour to discourage attack. Hence why San Martín felt it necessary to requested permission from the Pehuenches for the Army of the Andes to pass through their land en route to Chile.

After independence, hostility between the two very different populations began to grow as the “Europeans” pushed into native lands, and the native peoples pushed back. Some became adept at conducting raids or “malones” on criollo communities for the purpose of carrying off goods, cattle and women. Nevertheless, the native peoples gradually gave ground in the face of increasing determination by central government to occupy every corner of the land inherited from Spain. In the late 1870s, the Conquest of the Desert - as the campaign in the south became known - hardened into a programme that some (though not all) historians have called genocide. Native tribes of the south were broken up and their populations reduced or dispersed. Contrary to a widespread belief, however, many survived and their descendants continue to live in small groupings, though often in very poor circumstances.

By 1890, it was all over. Native resistance had ended and Argentina had stamped her presence throughout her mainland territories.

All that remained to clear up was a dispute with Chile over land at the southernmost tip of the continent. It took nearly a century and was resolved in 1984 under the auspices of the same authority that awarded the continent to Spain and Portugal in 1493: the Vatican.

And Las Malvinas (The Falkland Islands): a thorn in the side of a nation whose founding myths are about the struggle against European colonialism and the defence of territory awarded in perpetuity by God’s representative on earth. Whoever has flown into Ezeiza, the international airport of Buenos Aires, will have seen on their way into town a large billboard with the words: “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” (The Falklands belong to Argentina). No one is going to forget.

Sources on the period and geographical area addressed in this piece are vast though many of the best and most enlightening are in Spanish. Among the best readily-available works in English are those of Professor John Lynch, in particular: The Spanish American Revolutions 1808-1826, London (various editions), San Martin: Argentine Soldier, American Hero (New Haven 2009), Spanish Colonial Administration 1782-1810: The Intendant System in the Viceroyalty of the Rio De La Plata (New York 1958), Spain under the Habsburgs (Oxford 1964). A fascinating contemporary source in English is The Memoirs of General Miller (London 1828) available in electronic format from Google. Among countless works in Spanish, Bartolomé Mitre’s Historia de San Martín y de la Emancipación Sudamericana (Buenos Aires 1938) is indispensable despite being controversial in many respects. For the colonial period, an excellent general survey is Henry Kamen’s Spain’s Road to Empire, London 2002 which covers all Spanish colonial possessions, including those of the far east. Material specifically on the La Plata region is harder to come by. A superb if highly opinionated view of how Argentinians think and feel about themselves and others is Marcos Aguinis’ Un país de novela - Viaje hacia la mentalidad de los argentinos (Buenos Aires 1988).

Note: This article was first published in Open Democracy

A little rebellion, now and then....

Martin Wolf’s “Seven Ways to fix the system’s flaws” reads more like a paean to our existing economic arrangements than a serious attempt at visualizing how we might reorganize our economy so as to avoid some of the more critical ills to which they have led us: a savage increase in inequality, a financial crisis wrought by the rich and paid for by the poor, high levels of national and individual indebtedness, environmental destruction on a massive scale, and so on. Wolf recognizes many of the ills, but his solutions involve little more than tinkering.

Where he is undoubtedly correct is in pointing out the mismatch between regulation, which remains largely at national level, and the multinational reach of global business. We should remember, however, that international regulation is far from impossible, and that it has occurred before, notably at Bretton Woods following WWII, which gave rise to the IMF and the World Bank. The main reason why consensus may be much more difficult to achieve now is that there are many more significant players round the table as well as substantial differences between countries in how capitalism is interpreted.

Neo-liberal capitalism - the West’s version - gives primacy to the market, to which we are all expected to be subservient because it supposedly functions best without the malign influence of human intelligence. Its weaknesses are now widely recognized. Left to themselves, markets turn out not to work efficiently: they tend towards monopoly or oligopoly (look at the UK’s banking and newspaper industries for example), while consumers are expected to make choices based on perfect information (there is no such thing), and to be rational in their economic behaviour (when we all know that economic benefit is not the only priority in people’s lives and that decisions that may seem bizarre to an economist may be entirely rational from other perspectives). Free-trade, the neo-liberal mantra for international exchange, opens national borders to a free-for-all in which employees are reduced to the status of commodity inputs, and are as exposed to price fluctuations and as substitutable as common widgets.

State-directed capitalism on the Chinese model, or highly-controlled capitalism (the other BRIC countries) are proving successful alternatives in terms of growth and competitiveness. China’s system, in particular, rests on a strong sense of collective nationalism as distinct from the individualism of the West.

Is the difference between these models so great? Yes and no.

Yes because state involvement in the BRICs is much more overt and dirigiste than in the West.

No because much of our corporate world relies on state largesse despite a general pretence that this isn’t so and that government does not and should not interfere with the private sector. Taxpayers in the UK, for example, foot the bill for health and education, police and fire services, transportation infrastructure, bank rescue and resuscitation, incentives for new investment etc; and they also directly subsidize a vast array of industries including rail, air travel (through aviation fuel), bio-tech (through R&D grants), and so on.

One wonders if there is any significant business in the UK that does not depend for its success to some great extent on the state. In other words - and here comes the heresy - there is no such thing as a purely private sector activity. In a modern state, all so-called private capital investments are joint ventures with the taxpayer. It follows, therefore, that the state should have a voice in how they are run. In this respect, the Chinese have got it right.

So much for the theory. What of the practice? Wolf confines himself to exhortation: “Serious mistakes must not be repeated,”…”control of executive pay and corporate decision-making (must occur) without government intervention…” His arguments are not just indelibly stained by the status quo, they are also fueled by a belief (currently finding expression in the row over RBS boss Stephen Hester’s near £1 million bonus) that if we fail to bribe the great figures of UK PLC with absurd amounts of cash and kind they will flee the nest and thereby leave us in an even worse mess than the one into which they have already led us. It’s called blackmail; and it bludgeons most of our politicians and economic soothsayers into cowardly submissiveness. What would really happen if the feared scenario occurred, if we refused to pay Stephen Hester his £1 million and the entire RBS Board subsequently resigned? The answer is “nothing very much”. The remaining salaried executives would hold the fort while a new CEO and Board were recruited; and meanwhile RBS would continue to function just as well and maybe even better. CEOs and Boards don’t run large organizations on a daily basis. The staff do that. Apple Computer hasn’t collapsed with the sad demise of Steve Jobs; and Microsoft seems to manage okay without Bill Gates at the helm. These two are undeniably great entrepreneurs. Après Hester & Co. le déluge? Don’t buy it.

Executive compensation is not so to difficult to control via marginal tax rates. Currently the UK top marginal rate of 50% kicks in at a “mere’ £150,000. That’s loose change to top executives who count their earnings in £millions. Why not introduce higher rates for higher earnings - with a discouragingly high marginal rate for income over a certain sum (say £1.5 million)? The main arguments against such a procedure are that it would frighten away the incomparable geniuses who run our major corporations, and that it would raise hardly any revenue anyway.

Revenue raising, however, is not the point. Think of it this way. Executives who are paid at stratospheric levels earn enough in a few years not to have to work again no matter what may happen to the company they lead. Provided they do not break the law, they are thus relieved of any serious financial penalty for the outcome of their actions. Some - they do not need to be named - end up playing monopoly with the livelihoods of employees and shareholders alike. Absurdly high remuneration is a gateway to irresponsibility - even if not all recipients head through it.

One of the most serious charges against our brand of capitalism is that it fosters the privatization of profits and the socialization of losses. Corporate efficiency is all-to-readily conflated with national or regional welfare as if the two were synonymous. In fact, they are different and can sometimes be mutually antagonistic. In a capitalist economy it is always efficient for the firm to produce at the lowest possible cost, and its techniques for doing so include maximizing sales, reducing labour costs (sometimes by shifting production elsewhere), and externalizing social costs. But it is not necessarily efficient at the national level for people to buy superfluities (and create the associated waste), nor for a nation to cope with employment instability, the displacement of small farmers and business-owners by multinationals, the ravages of industrial pollution, and the societal disruptions that accompany extremes of inequality. Inequality itself is arguably a spur to capitalist enterprise, but it may also become a charge on the social fabric. We need a way to assess the cost-benefits of corporate activity and to embed them in our tax system in a way that encourages community and environmental responsibility and discourages the reverse. As others have pointed out, the survival of our species may depend on our meeting this challenge. Human welfare and care of the environment will, in the end, have to displace individual enrichment as the principal objective of economic activity.
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, wrote that “a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” What we need is not a little tinkering with the existing system à la Wolf, but a root-and-branch reappraisal of its fundamental purpose. A little rebellion maybe...
Note: this article was first published in Open Democracy.

Scotland and Quebec - A Reply to a Scottish Nationalist

There are reefs to negotiate before you reach the promised land. In many ways, your opinions remind me of the intelligent and impassioned material published on and from Quebec during the 1980s and 1990s - when I lived in Canada. Both the arguments and the fervour are remarkably similar, though thankfully yours lack the edge of anglophobic bitterness evident in some Quebecois writings of the time.
Familiar, too, are Alex Salmond’s demands for more money from central government (see here and here).
Maurice Duplessis was the first Quebec premier to demand “notre butin” (our booty) from the Canadian federal government; a cry that was taken up by several of his successors - not least Jacques Parizeau - the Quebec Premier who very nearly won the 1995 independence referendum. In demanding extra cash, Salmond employs the same arguments as those used by Parizeau, including the apparently powerful one of “it’s our money in the first place”. Those demands can, however, be a two-edged sword, because in the population at large they can create an awareness not necessarily of simple dependence of the smaller entity on the larger but of a strong symbiosis between the two. Whatever the arguments in favour of Scottish independence, it would be idle to pretend that Scotland derives no advantages at all from the present dispensation. Far better to look at the weaknesses of the independence case and to deal with them than to pretend they aren’t there.
One disagreeable interjection in the 1995 Parti Quebecois referendum campaign was Parizeau’s comment that if electors voted - however narrowly - for secession they would be “like lobsters thrown into boiling water” - in other words, there would be no going back: Quebec’s destiny would be in his and the Party’s hands. Some said he was intoxicated - not by alcohol but by the prospect of victory and national power. The comment undoubtedly cost him precious votes.
In those years, Quebec was far nearer to Independence than Scotland has ever been (since the Union, of course). Yet, in the end, voters didn’t buy it. Parizeau blamed the loss of the 1995 vote firmly on the “ethnic” population - a racist comment that he later regretted. Racism, however, was never entirely absent from the drinking water in those years. The phrase “Quebecois de vieille souche” (Quebecker of French ancestry - which, amongst other things, also meant “white”) was no longer widely used - but for many the term “Quebecois” had precisely the same meaning. Ironically, Quebec’s immigrant population had grown as part of a policy designed to enhance the Province’s economic strength. I don’t know what percentage of Scotland’s current population consists of immigrants or people whose roots lie in other parts of the UK - but you will doubtless have a good feel for their presence in the Scottish mosaic. Are they significant? Are their concerns being addressed or are they marginalized in this debate? If the referendum fails will they be blamed?
The 1995 Quebec referendum could have gone either way. Almost immediately afterwards, however, Quebeckers’s appetite for independence began to wilt at the edges. In the recent Canadian federal election, the Bloc Quebecois (the federal arm of the Party) was massacred - winning only 4 seats - down from 48 before the election. The jubilation at that result - right across Canada, including Quebec - is enormous. Canadians may have decided after all that they are stronger together than apart. Unity can be an ideal too, and championed with no less fervour than you display in advocating independence.
As a Canadian, I feel relief that Quebec independence is, at least for the time being, in the long grass (it could, of course, find its way back in the future). As a Brit - that’s how I always describe myself - I would be sorry to see Scotland’s departure from the Union because I believe it would weaken all four of its members. That doesn’t mean I don’t respect the independence movement. If Scotland becomes convinced that it should secede, then undoubtedly it has a right to so (though I hate to think how the terms of separation would be negotiated).
Over the life of this new Scottish parliament, we can expect a huge effort to persuade the people that independence is in their best interests. How much persuasion is legitimate? When does persuasion start leaning too heavily on hyperbole?
Apart from Canada, I have also worked and lived for extended periods in the so-called developing world - notably in Latin America and Africa. I wonder if those who desire to break up countries like Canada and the UK know how privileged we are to belong in such a society, how benign are our conditions of life, how extraordinary our opportunities for personal fulfilment, how exceptional our tolerance of “others”, how remarkable our freedoms?
UK politics infuriates me. Much of it is trivial, tribal, centred on picayune squabbling and point scoring. I find the sight of adults baying at each other across the parliamentary benches nauseating. The fact that huge amounts of time and effort - and acres of newsprint - have been devoted to the expenses scandal but almost none to the free-market ideology that lies behind the international financial crisis strikes me as perverse. Still, what we have here is far better than in too many other places in the world.
Like you, Gerry, I would like to see the golden city on a hill that you describe for Scotland. There is nothing in your vision that doesn’t equally apply to all four countries of the Union. I believe that we have a much greater chance of achieving that vision together than any of us do apart.

Thursday, May 5, 2011 - UK

The only minority administration I have lived under was of 1985-87 in Ontario, Canada. David Peterson’s Liberals headed the government with some help from the left-of-centre New Democratic Party (there was no formal coalition). It remains the best government of which I have personal experience. In the 1987 election, Ontario’s Liberals won a substantial majority, dined out on the proceeds and eventually lost public support.

One hopes that Scotland’s SNP with Alex Salmond does not follow a similar pattern. Minority government has worked well for Scotland. It remains to be seen whether the SNP will be able to maintain its discipline and the allegiance of the electorate now that it fully controls the legislative agenda.

In its leader, of course, the SNP has the most charismatic politician not just in Scotland but in the whole of the United Kingdom. An important part of Salmond’s armory is that he - and the party he leads - offer a strong vision of where they are heading and what they stand for. Unlike the hapless LibDems, they have shown themselves unwilling to compromise on their fundamental platform. When, for example, Salmond stated that there would be no student fees in Scotland, he stuck to it. Margaret Thatcher had a similar reputation for “not turning”. The electorate responds favourably to politicians who mean what they say.

Although I would prefer Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom, were I living in Scotland I would certainly have voted for the SNP not just because of the clarity and strength of its campaign, but also in the light of its record in office, and the fact that its position on issues such as student fees, the NHS, Iraq, and climate change reflect my own more than that of any of the three major UK parties. I admit to feeling a little envious of the Scots that they have a party so willing to stick to principles that the LibDems and the Labour Party, in particular, have been so ready to traduce for short-term political advantage.

The Tories will be quietly congratulating themselves on Thursday’s results; possibly even salivating over the prospect of an eternity of Tory governments once the constituency boundaries have been re-drawn. Scottish independence,moreover, could cement Tory hegemony in England for the foreseeable future, which is why I wouldn’t take Cameron’s vow to fight for the UK entirely at its face value. If he “loses” Scotland, he will gain England as compensation and, for the time being, Wales and Northern Ireland also; though if that happens Wales may also start to think the unthinkable.

The LibDems have evidently preferred power to principle. Their justification for compromise on fundamentals has been that they have joined with the Tories “in the national interest....so as to clean up the financial mess left by the Labour Party”. This mantra - repeated already so often that it has ceased to have any resonance or meaning - is neither credible nor adequate as an excuse for the transformation of the LibDems under Clegg into servants of an extreme right-wing Tory Party that is openly committed to the wholesale privatisation of the public realm.

Thursday’s election has made clear the extent to which the LibDems have forfeited public trust. They will likely not regain it while Clegg remains leader. They have been thoroughly outmanoeuvred by Cameron and Co. - not least least on electoral reform. AV - on which much of the party’s hopes came to rest - was never a LibDem proposal. It was, as Clegg himself admitted, “a miserable little compromise”, satisfying to no one and vulnerable, therefore, to attack from both left and right of the political spectrum (though it is questionable whether the old Labour hacks who supported the “No” campaign represent anything that could be remotely described as “left”). Miserable little compromises are not the stuff of which successful leaders are made. The contrast with Alex Salmond is stark. This electoral disaster for the LibDems begs the same old question that has haunted them since their launch in 1988: What on earth does the Party stand for?

What of the Labour Party? Under Blair and Brown, it turned to the extreme right as an apostle of neo-liberalism, thereby (among other things) granting the banks free reign to impoverish us, making ruinous PFI deals with the private sector, and placidly presiding over the continued evisceration of our manufacturing industry; and it turned to the far left by passing anti-terrorism legislation so draconian and all-encompassing that almost anything more dramatic than breathing could (and still can) result in arrest. Much of the good that the last Labour Government may have done in restoring our NHS and investing in education has been clouded by its anti-libertarian record, its foolish engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its subservience to the interests of capital. Leaving the issue of authoritarianism to one side, we might well ask if any significant difference exists between the Labour and Conservative Parties on any of the fundamental issues that matter to the electorate. If, as I suspect, the answer is ‘No’, we are left with the same question we have posed with respect to the LibDems: what on earth is Labour for? Ed Miliband has so far failed to offer a credible reply. For the moment the Party offers no sign of the vision and drive so evident in Alex Salmond’s SNP. Unless Labour rediscovers its raison-d’être, those who continue to believe in its founding principles, as I do, had better start looking round for an alternative party.

Mexico's Drugs War

Mexico City

An end-of-year drink at the house of some friends. Our hosts - Nacho and Sandra - are a young couple with two small children - Carla and Tomás. The telephone rings. Sandra picks up the receiver, listens for a moment, grimaces and hangs up. The caller, she tells us, said he was: “Colonel Roberto Ordoñez of the Zetas”. He claimed to have four-year-old Carla in his “possession” and wanted a million dollars for her return. Happily, both children were playing in the garden under their parents’ watchful eyes.
The Zetas are the most feared and violent criminal gang in Mexico, a drug cartel with a lucrative sideline in kidnapping for ransom.
“We’re used to the threats,” Sandra explained.
The couple, well-known artists, are back home only for the holidays. They now live in the United States which has an open-door policy for people of exceptional ability - their talents having made them targets in their own land. Even on this short visit - they are in town for just a few days - the criminals know they are here and have their local telephone number. Tomorrow the family leaves for the coast, and by the time anyone reads this, they will be safely back across the border.
Countless less well known Mexicans have also fled their homes, if not to the United States then elsewhere in the country so as to escape the seemingly ineluctable criminalisation of their town or neighbourhood.

The wave of violence currently sweeping Mexico reaches virtually every part of the Republic, but it is centred on the northern states - notably those sharing a frontier with the United States.

Proceso - Mexico’s premier investigative journal - runs regular in-depth reports on the drug cartels - or “narcos”. Its 26 September edition - largely dedicated to drug trafficking - includes a headline: “Where the Narco rules”. The place: Ciudad Juarez, in the state of Chihuahua, a border town with a credible claim to be the world’s most dangerous city.
The story focuses on a press photographer from local newspaper El Diario sent to cover yet another murder, this time in a shopping centre two blocks from the newspaper office where he works. A grey car riddled with bullet holes stands in the parking lot, its wind-screen and side-windows shattered. Inside, slumped against the steering wheel, is 21-year-old Luis Carlos Santiago, an apprentice journalist from the same newspaper. He is the second reporter from El Diario to be murdered - the first being Armando Rodriguez who, a year earlier, was gunned down outside his house while taking his daughter to school.
Journalism is a risky business in northern Mexico - but then so is almost any other way of life: on the day of Santiago’s murder, twenty-four others were also slaughtered - including two whole families machine-gunned in their homes.
A three-way war is underway for control of Ciudad Juarez between the army and two rival drug cartels; and anyone who gets in the way is likely to be killed. The scale and bloodiness of the war are spine-chilling. Media reports are common of weddings, festivals and parties being interrupted by the arrival of hit-men carrying sacks of severed heads that they roll out onto the dance floor. In 2010 alone, Ciudad Juarez suffered over 3,000 drug-related murders. Almost a quarter of a million people are believed to have fled the city and its environs. Even the mayor, José Reyes Ferriz, lives in Texas. On Independence day (September 15th) only the police and the military showed up for the public ceremony; and the traditional cry of Viva Mexico rang out from the Town Hall into a space emptied by fear, and by threats from mobsters.
Violence in the eastern state of Tamaulipas receives less coverage than Chihuahua - but it may be even more lethal and widespread. Stories emerge of as many as 200 deaths in a single encounter, of stretches of road strewn with the corpses of men, women and children, of piles of bodies thrown into ditches. Most reports are unofficial and reach the outside world in the form of anonymous blogs, private letters, and verbal accounts made by people who have left. Few are willing to speak up publicly. No records are kept of murders. No one knows where many of the bodies of the slain end up, only that they are not in official graveyards. Politicians, police, journalists, and local bureaucrats are said to be in the pay of drug traffickers. Informers are everywhere, ready to report attempts to clean up or to dispute authority over the area. Government employees in rural ministries can work solely during daylight hours and via main highways. Travel on secondary roads is foolhardy. The local press has been silenced.
Abasolo , a small town 100 km north west of Ciudad Victoria, the State Capital, lost its mayor in August. He simply disappeared. So too the mayor of the little town of Cruillas. In Hidalgo the mayor was assassinated, his replacement has been warned against entering his office, and the Gulf Cartel has imposed a curfew on the inhabitants. A growing number of towns and villages lack a police force - the previous officers having all resigned or fled.
Tamaulipas has many of the characteristics of a criminal dictatorship, the difference being that control is disputed by the Zetas and their rivals the Gulf Cartel. In effect, no one is in charge, unless it be Thanatos the god of death.

Michoacan and Sinaloa are two “drug” states not adjacent to the US border. Drug-running in the former is in the hands of the Michoacán Family, La Familia. Cartel chief, Nazario Moreno González - El Chayo - was reportedly shot dead by troops in December 2010 after a street battle that for two days virtually closed down the state capital, Morelia. If El Chayo is truly dead, then he has undoubtedly already been replaced by another member of the gang. Like the Hydra of Lerna, decapitation merely produces more heads.
Perhaps more than any other figure of the Mexican underworld, El Chayo reflected the strange nether world of the drug barons - a world in which conventional values are reversed yet remain recognisably of the same order - like a photographic negative. He famously published a magazine - Pensamientos (Thoughts) - which he used as a vehicle to set out a personal credo in words that could be mistaken for those of a passionate evangelist. Here is an extract from one of his pieces:
Brothers in Christ, Mexicans, Michoacanos, fellow tropicals, we have so much in common: a humble birth, a harsh childhood, hard labour, little leisure, troubled dreams... Everything we do springs from this..... I dreamed of being someone, of fighting for my loved ones, so that everyone in future would enjoy all the things that I lacked in the days when injustice made me tremble with frustrated rage....thanks be to god that my dreams haven’t changed and now form part of my reality... - and from there I have come to an evangelistic, militant Christianity that the Crusaders would have recognised.
Easy though it may be to dismiss this as the self-justifying ramble of a criminal, the expression of outrage at the social and economic injustices of a deeply unequal country is something with which many Mexicans will sympathise.
Sinaloa is the home of the cartel of the same name, and headquarters of Mexico’s most famous drug baron - Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo. Since his escape from a federal prison in 2001, El Chapo has become something of a Robin Hood figure, a glamorous anti-hero with a reputation for daring and for generosity towards the poor. Countless articles have been written about him, as well as at least one book - Malcolm Beith’s The Last Narco. He is reputed to have a vast and complex network of legitimate as well as illegitimate business, with up to 150,000 people in his employ. In 2009, he made the Forbes list of world’s richest people - an accolade that drew a furious response from Mexican president Felipe Calderón who claimed that the magazine was glorifying criminality. Ever since El Chapo’s jail break, both the previous government and the present one claim to have devoted substantial resources to recapturing him. With the enormous wealth at his command, El Chapo can probably bribe his way out of trouble. He can also, without doubt, fight his way out: all the cartels are known to be equipped with modern weaponry imported - largely - from the United States, but also from other supposedly “respectable” countries like Germany.
Alone among the cartel leaders, El Chapo appears to have a significant section of the general public on his side, not least because many see him as an enemy of the feared Zetas and with a greater chance of bringing them to heel than the federal government.
He is not, however, the only cartel chief to capture the public imagination. Several are celebrated in popular songs - or corridos - composed, performed and recorded by professional groups. It is not uncommon for a drug lord to commission a corrido and, for obvious reasons, no one dares decline. Nor is it wise for local radio stations to refuse to broadcast such songs - despite official attempts to ban them from the airwaves.
There is sense in some quarters that the drug cartels - especially those able to project a social conscience (however distorted) - may be winning the battle for public opinion.
Almost immediately on taking office in December 2006, President Calderón launched a crackdown against the cartels, using the military rather than the police as the main instrument of attack. Part of the rationale for this offensive lay in the increasing bloodshed wrought by the gangs themselves as they fought each other for control over drug supplies and trade routes to the United States. Pressure is also likely to have come from the US administration for Mexico to clean up its act - though Mexicans point out that the US is the world’s largest market for illegal drugs and that a ‘clean-up’ will be unlikely to work unless something is done to restrict demand.
In any case, while Calderón’s anti-drugs war has claimed some successes, notably the capture or killing of several prominent narcos, the overall level of conflict has increased alarmingly. Since Calderón’s campaign began, over thirty-five thousand drug-related murders have been recorded - with the number of deaths steadily increasing. A further ten thousand people have been reported as missing - though the number of these is likely to be much larger. Reforma newspaper runs a macabre “Execution Metre” - an annual “organised crime” death count presented in graphic format. It shows a rise in “executions” every year since 2006, with steep increases over the last two years. Latest official figures for 2010 give a total of 15, 273 executions - making it the most violent year in the country’s peacetime history.
Many interpret these figures as evidence that the government’s war against the cartels is failing; and there are suspicions, too, that some of the leaders - El Chapo being one - are enjoying government protection.
Conspiracy theories abound, with some ministers such as Genaro García Luna, Minister of Public Security, suffering repeated press barrages for his alleged links with mobsters. The distrust of government, however, is not based on hard evidence. It stems from a failure of authority to deal with the savagery that prevails in so many Mexican states, from a sense of living in a country where criminality wins out over the law, from a feeling of powerlessness feeding a suspicion that the government itself is a participant in the lawlessness both through the corruption of ministers and its tactic of responding to violence with violence so that citizens can hardly tell the difference between the behaviour of the official and the unofficial armed forces.
If anything seems clear in this chaos of brutality, religiosity and perverse idealism, it is that President Calderon’s war against the cartels is about a lot more than the drug trade. Unlike the leaders of revolutionary groups such as the Zapatistas, or the kidnappers of national politician Diego Fernández de Cevallos who left a well-written if tortuous justification of their action, the narcos come from the poor and marginalised classes who - a century after the Mexican Revolution - continue to account for over half of the country’s 110 million people. For everyone, from top to bottom of the cartel hierarchies - the petty traders, couriers and hit-men, the marijuana and poppy growers, as well the bosses and their wives and mistresses - the drug trade provides a path out of poverty and access to a life-style unobtainable, indeed not even thinkable, in the world of so-called legitimate activity. Here lies the challenge not just to Mexico but to a wider world.
Capitalism has proved over time to be a prime force for the creation of wealth. By the same token, it has shown a tendency to concentrate that wealth in relatively few hands - particularly in the neo-liberal version that holds sway in a large part of the West. Extremes of inequality can produce in people who are marginalised by the economic or political system a belief that they no longer have a stake in “society”, that the prevailing order is one of injustice and cruelty from which they can expect nothing positive, and that their only recourse is to hold it in contempt. This effect may well lie at the heart of Mexico’s problem; and it also offers a warning that no country can afford to ignore.
In the words of Isaiah Berlin:
Men will suffer for centuries in societies whose structure is made stable by the accumulation and retention of all necessary power in the hands of some one class. Ferment begins only when this order breaks down for some reason...Lack of adequate status, humiliation of the parents, and the sense of injury and indignation of the children are what drives men to social and political extremism.
Mexico’s drug war represents a challenge not just to Mexico but to the West. The turmoil has already spilled into the United States and possibly also to the country’s southern neighbours - Guatemala and El Salvador. Europe, too, has recently become a target market for the Mexican cartels.
In the end, this is a war about fundamental human justice in almost every conceivable sense of that phrase. The solution, if there is one, will require an international response; solidarity with Mexico as the country struggles to find a path to peace, and maybe something more - recognition that neither peace nor justice can be achieved while so many millions of our fellow human beings lack the wherewithal to live a dignified life. Four hundred and fifty years ago, in 1562, the great French essayist Montaigne heard the message in Paris from the lips some of the first South Americans to cross the Atlantic.
....(the visitors) noted that though there were some men among us of great wealth, many were ragged, half-starved beggars; and they found it strange that people who suffered such injustice did not rise up and take the rich by the throat or set fire to their houses.
That may well be what the cartels are about.

Note: This piece was originally published in Open Democracy

Rethinking Labour - A Reply to Anthony Barnett

I agree with your analysis, Anthony, although I wouldn’t characterize the Cruddas et al. exposition as childish, merely suggest that it suffers - in common, I’m afraid, with most of this debate - from a failure to confront the obstacles that stand in the way of what Jonathan rightly calls the destructive effects of capitalist globalization.

It seems to me that there is a double confusion here.

The political/philosophical confusion is symbolized for me by the left’s obsession with Burke. We find it again in the Cruddas et al piece: England's radical traditions are rooted in the political struggle for the liberty that Edmund Burke describes as ‘social freedom'.” Really? The most casual reader of - say - Reflections on the Revolution in France - will not fail to note that Burke’s radicalism stopped at Magna Carta. He believed in inherited power and entrenched inequality, opposed any idea of political progress ...A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views...!!!, opposed democratic elections ....an election (of a head of state) would be utterly destructive of the unity, peace, and tranquillity of this nation..., and did not deign to exclude anti-semitism from his personal Weltanschauung ....like Jew brokers contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation....the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils.... (All quotations from Reflections.....).

Burke was not a democrat in any sense that Keir Hardie would have recognized, and the attempt by certain Labour party intellectuals to co-opt him strikes me as evidence of how threadbare are the philosophical underpinnings of modern (New Labour) thinking.

This is not a minor issue. It suggests that the Party lacks ideological grounding, and that its leading thinkers do not really know what it should stand for. Hence why the so-called “centre ground” that Labour likes to claim for itself (in common with the other two Parties), has shrunk to a tiny patch of earth about the size of a dinner plate, on which the main issues of dispute are confined to marginal differences in the speed but not the direction of shuffle: should we cut a bit faster or a bit slower...? The debate takes place at a numbingly trivial level and is voiced largely by politicians who have already bought wholesale the neo-liberal agenda that has so damaged the fabric of our society as well as that of more impoverished communities world wide.

There has been much hand-wringing since the onset of the financial crisis. Many have been the calls for radical change. Except at the margins, however the UK political landscape offers no alternative to what Saint-Simon called the “withering away of the state...”; the idea that where ends are agreed, the only issues that remain are of means and these can best be addressed not by politicians and philosophers, but by commercial entrepreneurs and technocrats. The process is exemplified in this country by the single-minded commitment of governments since Thatcher to dispose of every piece of public property and enterprise that can be sold, and to hand to the private sector responsibility for delivering social and economic welfare, and administering ancillary areas of national life.

One hopes that Anthony is correct and that Labour’s fresh young leader is, indeed, ahead of his party in rethinking its future trajectory. The task will not be easy - less because of the resistance Ed Miliband may meet within his own Party than because he will need to break out of the neo-liberal straight-jacket.

This is much easier said than done. Free market advocacy remains part of Labour’s contemporary discourse. Cruddas et al. certainly rail against neo-liberalism, but they offer nothing in its place beyond a vague call for transforming the political terrain... and a statement - more a pious hope - that the neo-liberal era is coming to an end... Anthony Painter’s comment in his post that the global free market is high risk with too many losers... is spot on, but it begs the question of what - in a “globalized world” - we can do about it.

We could do worse than begin by asking what is meant by “free and open markets” or “Free Trade”. In theory, the concept assumes that the playing field is level and that signed-up countries play the game by the same rules. Neither is true. Playing fields are never level and much tilting takes place below the visible horizon or in a form that is difficult to monitor: local subsidies, manipulation of exchange rates, differential tax regimes and regulatory environments, national economic development policies, the nods and winks of political leverage, and so on. Measuring these differences is nigh on impossible; and counteracting them, therefore, infeasible.

Even if the playing fields were level, however, the underlying absurdity of “free trade” would remain. Use of the word “free” in this context is, in itself, misleading. Once a government enters into a free trade accord, the transactions to which the arrangement refers cease to be free. Circumstances may change - as they do frequently - and what may once have seemed a beneficial agreement may come to seem onerous. Too bad. An agreement is an agreement; and in this case it is supported by theory. Ever since David Ricardo we have known that Free Trade medicine is good for us. In the UK, as Cruddas et al. point out, we no longer own our productive sector - a consequence of “free and open markets”. People are thrown out of work on the nod of a Chief Executive who lives thousands of miles away. That, too, is apparently good for us even if, as has been the case for some time, inequality has been rising along, with levels of personal indebtedness among the worst off.

Lest we suspect that the medicine in the bottle may be snake oil, political pundits of all three parties constantly remind us that “free” markets are essential to our prosperity. People thrown out of work by competitive closures are supposed to adopt a Panglossian view of matters, reassured that everything is as it should be in the best of all possible economic paradigms. Yet the most successful developing economies - those of Brazil, China and India, and the Asian Tigers, all operate managed trade regimes. The United States has always protected her own markets, and continues to do so in sectors such as agriculture and agro-industry, even while trumpeting the advantages of free trade in sectors where the country is clearly competitive.

What this means, among many other things, is that while free trade seems highly convincing on paper, in practice the world fails to conform to its cosy promise of rising general prosperity. Trade is undoubtedly fruitful and healthy; but if it is to be truly free, then it should be subject to the wishes of the people not bound to a piece of paper signed and sealed for all time and unchangeable regardless of circumstance. At present, no matter how deep the popular misgivings about open markets, and the agonizing of those who lament its effects, voters have nowhere else to go. No one is offering to tear up those pieces of paper and replace them with something that may in time help us to take back control of our economy.

That, in essence, is the political challenge. Is any Party both prepared to confront the current orthodoxy and able to offer a convincing alternative vision of how we should conduct our economic affairs? Unless, Labour rises to this challenge, the calls for a new, invigorated Party - one truly representative of the people and capable of addressing their fears and aspirations - will fall on barren soil.