'Power, like a Desolating Pestilence': Dictatorship and Community in 'The Autumn of the

Patriarch'
Author(s): Alok Bhalla
Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 20, No. 38 (Sep. 21, 1985), pp. 1597-1600
Published by: Economic and Political Weekly
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 PERSPECTIVES

'Power, Like a Desolating Pestilence' chairs with electrical wires, lashed upside
down against walls, kept in dark boxes in
which they can neither sit nor stand nor lie
Dictatorship and Community in 'The Autumn down; their wives are raped in front of them
while they are mocked, their children are
of the Patriarch'
burnt before them while they are forced to
Alok Bhalla live. The modern hel they have created could
not have been spoken of even by the inmates
I surety of our earthly life".'2 of Dante's Inferno. So great has been their
frenzy for power that they have left homes
BEFORE I began working for this paper empty of people, they have littered city
II
Latin America was for me, despite my know- streets with corpses gashed out of shape and
ledge of its past and concern for its present While totalitarian dictatorship in Latin rivers polluted with decomposing bodies.'3
sorrows, a tropical paradise of "abundance America and other places of the world have Those who still live under dictatorships do
in the mountains and beautiful ceremo- become a part of our historical reality and so only provisionally. Their lives, however,
nies";' it was both a mythic place and a their ruthlessness a part of our daily are controlled entirely by the fear of the dic-
place of hope. The Latin America of my im-purgatory, there is still nothing which can tator and his administrators; he haunts their
agination was a contradiction of the stories make them rationally coherent to men ofwalk, shrouds their words, becomes an in-
spread about it by its colonisers as well as reason and conscience. Of course, political timate part of their brain. While they live
of the accounts given of it by its modern historians and cultural critics have told usthey can only hope and pray "Lord, not me.
historians. It was neither Robinson Crusoe's logically enough and often that modern dic- I cannot bear so much pain' Their fear adds
land of cannibals2 nor was it the present tators are either the expected consequence to the power of dictators. So horrible, in-
continent tormented by Somoza and other of the ever deepening crisis of capitalismdeed,
or so repulsive and ruthless have the dic-
sanguinary creatures whose names it is bad the products of the inescapable dialectics tators
of become that they often make us forget
luck to utter. 3 The coloniser's Latin history. But such explanations do not bear the very features of man and of human
America I knew was a construction of the anguished witness to the obscene fact that -society. 14
rhetoric of power;4 the modern Latin the dictators have acquired unrestrained
America I had hoped was an aberration powers to transform men into corpses and MORAL FABLE
which could be left forgotten in some shadow the world around them into a graveyard; in Garcia Marquez's "The Autumn of the
of my conscience. I had, of course, read the the face of the enormity of suffering theyPatriarch" is not merely a documentary
novels of B TRaven chronicling the long have caused, such explanations seem like so
study of Latin America's long history of hor-
history of servitude and revolt5 and the many banal myths and abstractions. For rors. Its remarkable achievement is that it
more ancient history of Las Casas of the an- there is nothing in our ordinary human ex-refuses, unlike Alain Resnais's "Night and
nihilation of the Indians;6 I knew Juan periences or our 'normal' education which
Fog" or the Amnesty International reports,
Rulfo's stories about the loneliness of men prepares us for the horrors dictators inflict
to become so obsessed with the language of
left by hunger at the margins of society7 upon individuals or the mercilessness with torture, so spellbound by the awful accumu-
and I, of course, had learnt about the pro- which they control their societies. We maylations of suffering that our moral instincts
fits of the United Fruit Co8 and have read countless accounts of the desola-
are paralysed and we are tempted to despair
Stroessner's Paraguay with its laws permit- tions they cause or heard repeatedly enoughor cynicim. Instead of presenting us mere-
ting the hunting of its native population the stories
for of the sorrows sustained by their ly with a series of phantasmogoric images
sport. Yet, I had longed to believe that the victims; we may have been told often enoughof anguish and decay which baffle our
Latin American landscape was made up of of the pains inflicted by them or of the tor-
imagination and disorient our reason,
an infinite accumulation of sacred songs ment endured by the bodies of those they Gabriel Marquez crafts a strange folktale
and sun gods, a wild splendour of "jewels pray upon, yet every new account comes as
which speaks for all created things and for
and stones, metals and feathers"9 and of a shock, a new violation of our decencies
righteousness amongst men. 15 "The
secret men who knew how to give names to and our sense of a human community. Every Autumn of the Patriarch" is both a political
things and make fables. Now, even though new dictator is like the monstrous carnevores
novel which anlayses the origin and struc-
all that has changed, even though I have to who take over our dreams, surprising us
ture of dictatorship, as well as, a moral fable.
say slowly and reluctantly that there is when our reason sleeps and whose memory The novel opens on a note of restoration.
without a doubt a place called Hell, I find upon awakening startles us in the same way A large crowd, following the flight of
it urgently necessary to affirm the myth I as any loathesomeness does. Like the vultures as they come amazingly "in suc-
once had of Latin America. At the threshold monsters who are a part of the night-side cessive waves, out of the horizon of the sea
of a world too atrocious to think of,'0 I of our soul, dictators are a part of the pollu-
of dust",' 6 breaks into the President's
must reimagine the myth of Latin America tions of our societies. They slouch in the palace and there discovers the half-eaten and
as a place where the relationship between midst of our days threatening us all with
decaying body of the dictator who had ruled
men, society and nature was complex and ceremonies of blood and cruelty, sterile over them for nearly two hundred and fifty
fabulous. I am convinced that such know- eroticism and torment, brutal violation and years. What we first hear is the chaos of
ledge alone will, like Ariadne's thread, help surrender. Over the years they seem to have human voices, the voices of ordinary men
us to find again a way out of Latin America's acquired so much power that they can flog
discovering how to speak spontaneously and
present "nightmare in which torture the body to the very limits of endurance,in the "redeeming grace of companion-
chambers are endlessly repeated"," into a lacerate it with every subtle instrument that ship'" after centuries of tyrannical silence
world of sanity and sanctity. Before begin- the technology of torture has put into theirand suspicion. As they stand around the
ning to consider the Latin America of Gar- hands, and then, after their lust is momen-monstrous body of the general from which
cia Marquez or any of its other novelists, tarily exhausted, they can dismember the sprout "tiny lichens and parasitic animals
poets or artists, it is wise to recall that in body so that all traces of men disappear. from the depth of the sea" (AP, p 6) they talk
Latin America it was once and is still possi- Those who are inflicted by their fury live theto each other. Slowly, at times uncomprehen-
ble to affirm elemental acts of daily and life of the damned of this earth. They are dingly, often unconsciously and puzziling-
common decencies amongst men; such snatched away from all human community ly, they recreate out of their memories and
knowledge is essential "as a pledge/and as and placed in concentration camps, tied toexperiences a history of Latin American dic-

Economic and Political Weekly 1597

Vol XX, No 38, September 21, 1985

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 September 21, 1985
ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL WEEKLY

tatorship. Sometimes their sentences coil his memory ..." (AP, p 168). The Patri- the telegraph service, and the waters of the
around shared memories or crumble into arch makes sure that if there are any men nation . . . " (AP, p 61); the legitimacy of
fragments in incomprehension, sometimes who question the "artifices of national his power is perpetually demonstrated by his
their sentences spill over with marvellous im- history" (AP, p 149) crafted by him and, right to choose his victims, to seize them
ages which make a landscape of mythls or repeatedly affirmed by the newspapers, when he desires and to kill them as he
corrode with bitterness and rage; sometimes slogans, radio programmes and television wants "he regulated love, he decided the in-
they speak as victims, at other times, as col- shows, that there are enough "presidential tensity and term of death" (AP, p 192). Fur-
laborators. The voices of these men suggest security thugs who tangle up the thread of ther, since his power must never be question-
a properly human way of conducting an truth" (AP, p 149) and persuade them to ac- ed, since it must ever seem overwhelmingly
historical and moral discourse. Indeed, the quiesce to his version of reality. Of course, superior there can never be any remission in
voices of men assuring each other, at the if there still remain obdurate men who are his predatoriness or in the torment he in-
beginning of each new chapter recounting unprepared to accept versions of history sold flicts. Not only must he perpetually and
another nightmare, of the final death of the by his gangsters, the Patriarch has, like any ostentatiously demonstrate to the people
Patriarch, give the novel its social and moral number or Latin American dictators from their powerlessness before him by blotting
confidence. They never let us forget the factHernandez Martinez to Pinochet, no hesita- out everything that could make them sense
of victory and release, so that even when tion in torturing them into submission. their creatureliness, but he must also stand
their tales are loathesome one is never lost Thus, unable to believe that people can spon- out clearly apart in his splendour, his desires,
in the loathesomeness of life that the history taneously express joy at the rumour of his his mystery. For this he must ceaselessly ac-
of the Patriarch can evoke. In fact, one feels,assassination he has them "hung from a quire new property and squander it;23 con-
as in any moral fable, that after so much horizontal beam like parrots tied hand and tinuously and brutally extend his control
madness and decay human beings have been foot with thier heads down for hours on end over the productive and sexual energies of
given another chance of discovering with ... thrown into the moat of the courtyard the people; and as a final and unques-
others what constitutes a human being in a and the others saw him quarted and devour- tionable demonstration of his superiority, he
free and good society. People can begin onceed by the crocodiles ... skinned alive . . ." must proliferate the world with ever increas-
again to talk to each other, express "grief (AP, pp 35-6) till they confess to his fiction ing numbers of corpses "he saw the dead,
and remembrance"''8 which are not possibleof a conspiracy. Because he can seize history, the dead, the dead, there were so many
under a totalitarian government, exchange he can deny people a common purpose and everywhere that it was impossible to count
stories and make confessions, speak ironi- a recognisable set of moral or political them in the clay pits, piled up in the sun on
cally or humorously, and so establish their reasons for united action. in the classic man- terraces, stretched over the vegetables in the
lives with other people as one of the pre- ner of all dictators, he succeeds in under-market, flesh and blood people general sir,
conditions for the making of a democratic mining the confiden-ce men may have inwho knows how many, because there were
society.'9 As they exchange their stories they themselves; he demoralises them, makes many more than he would have wanted to
begin to recognise the grotesqueness of the them feel humiliated, undone. Unable to see among the host of his enemies thrown
Patriarch and to understand their history not agree upon a shared world within which they out like dead dogs in garbage bins ... but
as fate but as a product of human intentions, can define themselves, men begin to feel he didn't react, he gave in to no entreaties
greed, egotism, lust and fear. disoriented. Each one gets lost in his own until he felt himself absolute master of all
Life under the Patriarch's rule of 250 years uncertainty and fear, each becomes suspici- his power again ..." (AP, pp 243-44).
had been different. If the people now speak ous of the other and withdraws. Of course, The Patriarch has the power to rape and
to each other without permission about their the result is that the more isolated they get exhaust people because he can, in addition
history as they have lived and experienced from one another the more socially and to taking possession of a large part of the
it, and if they can discover without permis- politically impotent they begin to feel. With- available land and capital as his legitimate
sion that they can share a common world out any identity other than that which the spoils of earlier wars, take control of the
because the act of making a community is dictators can enforce upon them, they army and the police, afnd win the support
primary to all men, then they can also begin become phantoms; or, in one of the most of the media and the church (which till
to understand the mechanics of power used terrifying words in the vocabulary of Latin recently in Latin America had supported the
by the dictator to keep them entangled in America, one can say that men 'disappear'. oligarchies).24 The Patriarch had gained his
another kind of life. The Patriarch like all The only real creature who remains is the wealth and come to power in the 19th cen-
rulers who desire total power over men, dictator and he alone can make distinctions tury after having survived a long period of
denies the people their own sense of history between truth and falsehood, fact and fic- federalist wars, bloody rivalries and suc-
by abolishing their shared and inherited tion, guilt and innocence.2' cessive coups. A brave, shrewd and cruel man
chronology and enforcing upon them a new who could boast of having left around in his
PHAROAH'S SONS
temporal order.20 He makes it seem as if wanderings quite a few corpses, he emerged
time had begun with him and would endure The Patriarch can abolish the concept of from that period of uncertainty as the
only because of him, till people forget thatfreedom from the realm of human affairs strongest of the Caudillos because he could
they had another past and refuse to believe and deny it a dwelling place "in men's heartsensure all the roaming bands of "barbarian
that another future is open to them. People as desire or will or hope or yearning . . .",22
mercenaries" (AP, p 53) that he could gather
begin to regard him as a magician who can once the notion that the ordinary consciencean unlimited amount of wealth through
not only make their destinies, but can also of people is adequate to make ethical or violence and distribute it casually amongst
correct "earthquakes, eclipses, leap years and social discriminations is destroyed, the them. Without any principle and with "no
other errors of God . . ." (AP, p 8). Thus, Patriarch acquires total permission to do more motives than his barbarous appetite for
one of the men recalls that "during our time what he wants. He can remove people from command" (AP, p 60), he had later made
there was no one who doubted the legitimacy their homes and expropriate their properties, himself "safe forever from the anxieties of
of his history, or anyone who could have destroy families and neighbourhoods, tor- power" (AP, p 5&) by exterminating his rivals
disclosed or denied it ... there was no other ture children and abduct any woman for his and critics, and by creating a private army
nation except the one that had been made private sexual pleasure; he can make men from amongst those who had served him
by him in his own image and likeness where feel like vermin and transform them into cor- best by their ferocity. Further, in order to
space was changed and time corrected by the pses. His confidence rests in his ability to contemplate his power everyday without the
designs of his absolute will, reconstituted by take what he wants-land, "uncountable burden of conscience, he had promoted the
him ever since the most uncertain origins of livestock . . . the local streetcars, the mails,
most corrupt of his supporters to positions

1598

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ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL WEEKLY September 21, 1985

of power in the media of course helps

they could repeatedly give secular and
spiritual approval to all his actions. Having Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina,
enriched himself by corruption, murder and
every conceivable form of crime, he could
buy, like every other Latin American dic-
tator, the fidelity of men who guarded him,
did his killing for him and created fake
slogans for him about "progress w ithin
order" (AP, p 237) or "peace within order"
(AP, p 227), by sharing the loot with them
and giving them permission to carry out
their own form of robbery, rape, blackmail
and torture. Thus, he had once, after a
cyclone had devastated the country (and this
is a strange fictional anticipation of the
looting that Anastasio Somoza and his men
did in Managua after the city had been
almost destroyed by an earthquake in 1977)
"distributed the shipments of food and
medicine and the material for public relief
from foreign aid among the members of the
high command, ever since the families of his
ministers had Sunday outings at the beach
with the Red Cross portable hospitals and
field tents, they had sold the shipments of
blood plasma, the tons of powdered milk to
the ministry of health and the ministry of
health resold them to charity hospitals, the
officers of the general staff gave up their am-
bitions in return for public works contracts
and rehabilitation programmes ... what the
hell, only the one who has it has it, he said
to himself ..." (AP, p 105).25 Given this
history of the archetypal Latin American
dictator, it is entirely appropriate that the
latest real-life incarnation of the lawless
army and the inhuman supporters of the
Patriarch should be known in El Salvador
as the "Pharoah's Sons".26
GROOMED BY MARINE OFFICIALS
The most important factor, behind the
survival of the Patriarch's measureless realm
of pain is the support given to him by the
US. Indeed, one can say of him, as one can
about all the various and successive dictators a majority of the people into things and
in Latin America, that he is a "ruffian
groomed by marine officials". 27 The
marines first come in order to help him con-
tain internal unrest, but they stay on so as
to show his followers "how to be decent peo-
ple ... they taught them how to walk with
shoes on, to wipe themselves with paper, to
use condoms, they were the ones who taught
me the secret of maintaining parallel services
to stir up distractive rivalries among the
military, they invented for me the office
of state security, the general investigative
agency, the national department of public
order, and so many other messes that I
couldn't even remember myself, identical
organisms that he made to look different in
order to rule with more relaxation ...
(AP, p 114). Having learnt from the Ameri-
cans the needs of a 'democratic' civilisation
and the difficult art of keeping it from
withering away, the Patriarch needs them all
the more to sustain him in power. The US
and him, the
as it has always
churchhelped actions,
so to
all its clients in Honduras, Haiti, Paraguay, novel is, perhaps, a tribute to the countless
number of people like Manuela Sanchez, the
Uruguay or Brazil, with loans for a variety beauty queen of the "dogfight district"
of fictitious programmes for the 'rational' (AP, p 63), who refuses to exchange her or-
development of the society, means of extrac-
tion of natural wealth, instruments of tor-
ment for actual and potential dissenters and
training for torturers. In return for such help, with blood. It is the voice of such people that
the Patriarch creates a stable society in which
local thugs can carry out for their own pro-
fit and that of their US sponsors a pro-
gramme of smooth and efficient appropria-
tion of wealth.28 The sense of grotesque
unreality that marks the economic and
military relationship between the Patriarch
and the Americans is magnificently realised
in the scene in which the Americans, as part
payment for their loans and the interests on
them, carry off the Caribbean "in numbered
pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in
the blood-red dawns for Arizona .. ." (AP,
p 245).
What is obscene about this entire process
of profit making is that since the demand
for it is insatiable because power depends
upon it, the quantity of violence necessary
to accumulate it has to exceed the limits
of probability. This is because the need of
the Patriarch and the US for unquestioned
predatory control over Latin America and
its people for maximisation of profit must
necessarily produce resistence and so in-
crease their anxieties about their loss of
power. Indeed, the Patriarch and the Ameri-
cans can achieve total dominance only by
obliterating, through extreme terror, every- Gabriel Garcia Marquez says in an article
thing that makes the community of man
with its common laws and reasons, its rituals
and customs, its entire affective world of
love, friendship and family. Together they
can succeed in creating a world in which
there are no memories, no traditions and no
ethics, a world of man furious for power
and of victims only if they can transform
themselves into monsters. Even if the fear
of becoming beastial doesn't deter the
Americans or the endless number of dicta-
tors whom the Patriarch represents, what
saves us from despair or madness is that
there are men, both in the fictional world
of "The Autumn of the Patriarch" and in
the history of Latin America. who are not
willing to acquiesce to their victimhood.
Some of them are poets like Rubin Dario
who has both a fictional presence and an
historical existence, who carry memories of
a world full of "fierce young men who had
challenged the suns of the red summer the
snows and the winds of the icy winter night
and dew and hatred and death for the eter-
nal splendour of immortal nations ..
(AP, p 192). "There are others like Toussaint
L' Ouverture, Simone Bolivar, Emeliano
Zapata, Augusto Sandino and Archbishop
Romero who have the courage to bear
witness both to the horror and, through
the lives we ought to live. But the
that
dinary suitors for the Patriarch's sexuality
which is mingled with nausea and her pover-
ty for the Patriarch's gifts which are tainted
we hear after the death of the Patriarch, and
which, in recalling the world of everyday af-
fairs, returns to us our humanity. It may be
objected that this is not a political solution,
but I am convinced that in a world which
is so barbaric, our affirmations of and con-
cerns for family and tradition, friendship
and community become acts of courage and
are a necessary precondition for the mak-
ing of a new society.
Notes
1 Ernesto Cardenal, "Homage to the
American Indians", trans Monique and
Carlos Altshul (Baltimore and London: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973),
p 46.
2 For an interesting note about how Friday
in "Robinson Crusoe" continues to be
thought of not as an American Indian but
an African, see Hugh Honor, "The New
Golden Land: European Images of America
from the Discoveries to the Present Time"
(New York, Pantheon Books, 1975),
pp 153-54.
3 Max Halliday, 'The Mind of Somoza', The
Nation, November 4, 1978, pp 460-62. Also
about the famous raid on the palace in
Managua that "in Managua ... when
Somoza approaches, everyone flees". "San-
dinistas Seize the National Palace!" New
Left Review, No 111, September/October,
1978, p 82.
4 For the colonialist's images of Latin
America see V G Kiernan, "Lords of
Human Kind: European Attitudes to the
Outside World in the Imperial Age" (1969,
rpt Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972),
pp 286, 324.
5 B Traven's novels about the peon uprisings
are as follows: "Government". "The Car,
reta"' "March to the Monteria", "The
Rebellion of the Hanged" and "General
from the Jungle".
6 Bartholome De Las Casas, 'The Horrors of
the Conquest', in "The Borzoi Anthology
of Latin American Literature", ed Emir
Rodriquez Monegal (New York: Alfred A
Kuopf, 1977), Vol 1, pp 22-30.
7 "The Burning Plains and Other Stories",
trans George D Schade (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1970).
8 Cf Stephen Schelsinger, 'The Gautamala
Papers: How Dullet Worked the Coup
d'Etat", The Nation, October 28, 1978,
pp 425, 439-44.
9 Pablo Neruda, "Towards a Golden City",
their
Nob'e Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus

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September 21, 1985
and Giroux, 1972), p 31.
10 This is a rephrasing of Czeslaw Milosz's
statement in "The Witness of Poetry"
(Cambridge, Mass and London: Harvard
University Press, 1983). Milosz says that the tion of a democratic state. Also see Christo-
one difference between the 19th and the
20th centuries is "the crossing of a certain 20 Cf Elias Canneti, "Crowds and Power"
threshold; thing too atrocious to think of
did not seem possible" (p 51).
11 Octavio Paz, "The Labyrinth of Solitude;
Life and Thought in Mexico", trans Lysan-
der Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961),
p 212.
12 W'illiam Wordsworth, ' 'The Prelude", Bk 11,
Lines 179-80.
13 There is plenty lot that has been written Press, 1954).
about terror in Latin America. In addition
22 Hannah Arendt, 'What Is Freedom?' in
to the frequently issued reports by the
"Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises
Amnesty International see the following
works issued recently: Mort Rosenblum,
'Terror in Argentina', New York Review of
Books, October 28, 1976, pp 26-8; Carolyn 23
Forche, 'El Salvadore: An Aide Memoire', 24
American Poetry Review, Vol 10, No 4,
July/August 1981, pp 3-7; Jacobo Timmer-
man, "Prisoner Without a Name, Cell
Without a Number" (1981; rpt Harmond-
sworth: Penguin, 1982); Joan Didion,
"Salvador", (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1983).
14 Cf Hannah Arendt, "Totalitarianism" (1951:
rpt New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1968). I might as well add here that I believe
all dictatorships treai men in the same
morally abhorrent ways. I am concerned
with the effect they have on man and socie-
ty. My concern is not with the mechanics
of how they got into power.
15 Cf Walter Benjamin, 'The Story Teller:
Reflections on t1e Works of Nikolai Leskov',
in "Illuminations", trans Harry Zohn (New
York: Schocken Books, 1969). There are two
statements of Benjamin's which amc relevant
here: "The righteous man is the advocate
of all created things and at the samie time
he is their highest embodiment" (p 104).
And "the story teller is the figure in which
the righteous man encounters himself"
(p 109).
16 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "The Autumn of
the Patriarch", trans Gregory Rabassa (New
York: Harper and Row, 1976), p 6. Here-
after-referred to as AP in the text.
Some interesting reviews of the novel are
the following: Luys A Deiz, "The Museum
of Horrors". The Nation, December 25,
1976, 695-96; Martin Kaplan,. 'Somer-
saulting Reality'. The American Scholar,friends. The entry point for heroin was
Spring 1977, 266-69; Jean Franco, 'Rumour
at the Top', TLS, October 10, 1975, p 1172;
Dean Flower, 'Fiction Chronicle', The Hud-
son Review, Vol XXX, No 2 (1972), 299-312.
17 Arendt, "Totalitarianism", p 174.
18 Arendt, p 150.
19 The dissolution of bonds amongst men
often helps dictators. For a discussion of
how dictators isolate and atomise men see
Franz Neumann, 'Notes on the Theory of
Dictatorship'. in "The Democratic and the
Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Pigs invasion, but after its failure continued Report (On US Aid to Chile)', The Nation,
Legal Theory", ed Herbert Marcuse (New
1600
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ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL WEEKLY
York: The Free Press, 1957), p 245. The assasinate Castro. Interestingly, one of his
defence of the family, community or love sponsors was William Pawley who had once
is obviously not being offered as a political owned the Havana bus system and several
principle but as a pre-condition for the crea- Cuban sugar refineries, and had also served
as a special assistant to Truman's Secretary
pher Lasch, "Haven in a Heartless World". of State. Amongst the other CIA agents in-
volved in this racket of State Power, heroin
(1962; rpt l-armondsworth: Penguin, 1973), and assassination were Paul Halliwell who
pp 426-63. See also Milan Kundera's lovely had served as an intelligence officer in the
variation of the idea that history can be China of Chaing Kai-shek, Theodore
changed to suit the dictator in his novel Shackley who later took over the organisa-
"The Book of Laughter and Forgetting". tion of heroin traffic by the Meo tribesmen
in Laos and, E Howard Hunt who was to
21 Cf Arendt, "Totalitarianism", pp 135-57.
become famous in Nixon's Watergate scan-
Also see Carl J Freidrich, "Totalitarianism"
dal. In 1968, Trafficante turned-up in
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Saigon (pp 186-87).
(2) Ricardo 'Monkey' Morels. He was an
assassin, a drug trafficker and a CIA agent
in Bolivia. He got his coke supply from
in Political Thought" (Harrnondsworth:
Col Luis Arce Gomez who was one of the
Penguin, 1977), p 149.
organisers of the 'cocain coup' in Bolivia
Canneti, "Crowds and Power", pp 470-72. in 1968. Gomez had once employed the
Cf Penney Lernoux, 'Pawns and Bishops: famous Nazi killer Klaus Barbie to set-up
Torture, Murder and A Church Divided', death squads to eliminate Bolivian opposi-
The Nation, September 30, 1978, pp 302-6; tion people. It is certain that Blarbie had
Bjorn Kumm, 'The Loyala Opposition: El himself come to Miami to arrange for drugs
Salvador's Rebel Priests', The Nation, and guns. This trail leads to the people who
December 30, 1978, pp 728-30. For an in- helped kill the Chilean exile Letelier for
teresting discussion of the role of the Gen Pinochet whose connections with the
priesthood in Latin American politics, Nixon, Kissinger, CIA group need not be
see Graham Greene's, "The Honorary mentioned.
Counsul".
26 Phillipe Bourgois, 'What US Foreign Policy
25 Peter Davis, 'Where Is Nicaragua: Mirror Faces in Rural El Salvador: An Eyewitness
of Our Midlife Crisis', The Nation, January Account', Monthly Review, Vol 34, No 1,
28, 1984, pp 76-88. Somoza and a doctor May 1982, p 23.
named Pedro Ramos used to pay blood
donors about $ 10 for each unit of blood 27 This was what Carleton Beals had said
about Somoza Sr in one of his earliest
plasma and then sell it for at least three
times the amount. It is estimated that they reports about Nicaragua. See 'Sandino,
Somoza and Carter', The Nation,
looted the country for about $ 12 million
September 9, 1978, p 194. For Beal's fine
a year. When Pedro Joaquin Chamorro's
six-part report 'With Sandino Nicaragua',
paper exposed the scandal he was murdered.
see The Nation, Vol 126, February 22 to
The centre where blood was collected wac
March 28, 1928.
popularly known as casa de vampiros.
For a superb and thorough discussion ot 28 American economic and military involve-
the long history of interconnections between ment in Latin America throughout the cen-
dru traffic, right-wing military dictators, tury has been amply documented and is
the CIA, American banks, business and the beyond doubt. For a convenient summary
Mafia in Latin America, see Pennv Lernot\, of the history, see Noam Chomsky and Ed-
'The Golden Gateway for Drugs: The ward S Herman, "The Washington Connec-
tion and Third World Fasicm: The Political
Miami Connection', The Nation, February
18, 1984, pp 186-98. The following two ex- Economy of Human Rights"' Vol 1 (Boston:
amples of this connection would suffice: The Free Press, 1979); Eric R Wolf and Ed-
ward C Hansen, "The Human Condition
(1) Charles (Lucky) Luciano. He began
in Latin America" (New York: Oxford
his career during the prohibition in the
1930s. Later he set-up a profitable and University Press, 1972); George Black, 'Cen-
powerful heroin trade with the help of tral America: Crisis in the Backyard', New
Gen Chaing Kai-shek, his relatives- and Left Review, No 135, September/October,
1982, pp 5-34; George McAlmon, 'So
Callous as a Nation', Monthly Review,
Havana under the dictatorship of Fulgencio
No 8, Vol 35, January 1984, pp 30-35;
Batista. Luciano (helped by Meyer Lansky
Harold Jung, 'Behind the Nicaraguan
and Vito Genovese) also controlled
Revolution', New Left Review, No 117,
tIavana's gambling and prostitution joints.
After Luciano's death in 1962, his gang was September/October, 1979, pp 69-89; Edwin
taken over by Trafficante. Unfortunately for McDowell, 'Brazil: Famine in Backlands',
Trafficante, Castro's revolution in 1959 The Atlantic, Vol 253, No 3, March 1984,
deprived him of his lucrative business. It was pp 22-28; Walter LaFeber, 'US and Central
natural for him, therefore, to join the CIA America: How We Make Revolution Inevi-
in its anti-Castro activities. Trafficante not table', The Nation, January 28, 1984,
only helped recruit people for the Bay of pp 69-72; Christopher Hitchen, 'Minority
to collaborate in the various CIA plots to July 9-16, 1984, p 38.
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