Latin America: A Media Stereotype

SOME TIME AGO, I read an interview with the famous German novelist Günter Grass—he was on a visit to Nicaragua at the time—In which he said that the countries of Latin America would not resolve their problems until they followed “the Cuban example.” This is the prescription that many novelists and intellectuals propose for our ills, but I was surprised to hear it (if he was correctly quoted) from the author of The Tin Drum.

Günter Grass is one of the most original of contemporary novelists, and I hasten to say that his are among the books I would take were I forced to retreat to a desert island; I would take his alone if I were required to choose but one modern European writer. My admiration for him is political as well as literary. His active defense of democratic socialism, his campaigning alongside Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, his energetic rejection of all forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, have always seemed to me to be a model of good sense and a healthy counterweight—constructive and reformist in the best sense of the term—to the apocalyptic position of so many modern intellectuals who, for reasons of either opportunism or naiveté, have endorsed dictatorship and crime as serious political options.

In this connection, I recall a polemic in West Germany a few years back between Grass and Heinrich Böll, concerning a bouquet of flowers the latter had sent to a rather ferocious young woman “revolutionary” who had struck the West German chancellor in public. Grass explained that, in contrast to Böll—a kind Christian gentleman in whose pallid tales one would never discern the hand of a person in favor of violence—he did not believe that physical assaults were the best way to resolve political differences, and he would have thought that the German people by now should be aware of the danger of using force as an ideological argument. That position, genuinely democratic and progressive, seemed to me to add far greater moral weight to any condemnation of dictatorships of the right by Günter Grass than there is in such condemnation by those writers who believe that brutality is objectionable in politics only when employed by one’s adversaries.

NOW, HOW CAN we square this with Grass’s recommending “the Cuban example” to countries like my own? Here is an interesting double standard, an instructive schizophrenia: what is good and suitable for the Federal Republic is neither good nor suitable for Latin America, and vice versa. For West Germany—that is to say, for Western Europe and the developed countries—the ideal is a democratic, reform-minded political system of elections and representative institutions, freedom of expression and the right to organize political parties, in a society at once respectful of individual sovereignty and open, free of censorship and cultural paternalism. For Latin America, on the other hand, the ideal is revolution, the violent seizure of power, the establishment of a single state party, forced collectivization, the bureaucratization of culture, and concentration camps for dissidents. To which one must add: subordination to the interests of the Soviet Union.

What could lead an intellectual like Günter Grass to make such a distinction? Most likely, the traumatic experience of confronting Latin American poverty. That sorry spectacle—the gross inequalities that blacken our societies, the selfishness and insensitivity of our privileged classes, the slow death to which legions of poor people in our countries are condemned—is almost inconceivable to a Western European. The poverty, yes, and the savage conduct that is the trademark of our military dictatorships.

But from an intellectual one has the right to expect a will to objectivity, even in moments of maximum emotional agitation. A Marxist-Leninist dictatorship is no guarantee against hunger; it can even complement the horror of underdevelopment with genocide, as the Khmer Rouge, in Cambodia, has surely illustrated. It can also mean oppression so asphyxiating that thousands, maybe millions, of men and women are ready to abandon everything they have and plunge into the sea, so determined to escape that they are willing to defy the sharks. This we have seen in Vietnam and, more recently, in Cuba. An intellectual who believes that freedom is necessary and possible for his own country cannot decide that it is a superfluous luxury for others. At least, he cannot do this until he has become sincerely convinced that hunger, illiteracy, and exploitation render men unsuitable for freedom.

And it is precisely here, I believe, that we come to the point at issue. When an American or European intellectual—or a liberal newspaper or institution—advocates for Latin American countries political options and methods he would never countenance in his own society, he is betraying a fundamental doubt about the capacity of the Latin American countries to achieve the liberty and the respect for the rights of others that prevail in the Western democracies. In most cases, the problem is an unconscious prejudice, an inchoate sentiment, a sort of visceral racism, which these persons—who generally have unimpeachable liberal and democratic credentials— would sharply disavow if they were suddenly to be made aware of it. But in practice—that is to say, in what they say, do, or fail to do, and, above all, in what they write about Latin America— that essential doubt appears and reappears at every turn. Also, it explains the inconsistencies that continually creep into journalistic commentary or interpretations of our histories and our problems. Or proposals by Western intellectuals—such as Günter Grass—to resolve our problems with a kind of regime that would be completely unacceptable to them in their own countries. (In this connection, it is impossible not to recall my discovery, in Spain during the late fifties, that while the Franco regime exercised a strict “moral” censorship over every type of publication, including scientific books, it nonetheless permitted Spanish publishers to produce pornographic literature destined exclusively for export to Spanish-American countries. Apparently the mission of the Spanish censors was to save local souls; the Spanish-Americans could go to hell by the most expeditious route possible!)

Perhaps this double standard best explains the insulting, mendacious, and slanderous reporting often heaped upon democratic Latin American governments by the Western media. In truth, these regimes are often presented as if they were as bad as the vilest dictatorship. Not long ago I had occasion to protest an article in the London Times by Colin Harding, one of the newspaper’s Latin American “specialists,” who presented himself as judge, jury, and executioner of Peruvian democracy. But the problem is not restricted to the London Times: the most prestigious organs of information in the Western world—dailies like Le Monde, in France, and El País, in Spain—bulwarks of the democratic system, which hold no brief for those in their own countries who propose totalitarian solutions, in their reporting on Latin America sometimes slant their interpretations in the same way, and for the same reasons, that Günter Grass did. To judge by what they write, one would have to conclude that in the Latin American countries, the bad news is the only “story” worth reporting. This is a policy applied not only to countries suffering under dictatorships—where, after all, it would have a certain justification—but also to those that have managed to emerge from authoritarian regimes and are trying to consolidate their newly won democracy. From these, it would appear, the only things worth reporting are errors and horrors.

THE VIOLATIONS OF human rights that occur—regrettably—in democracies like Peru and Colombia when they have to respond to guerrilla actions or terrorism are always emphasized in the press, whereas one has to search long and hard in the same organs to find any comparable reporting on the violation of human rights in countries where they murder in the name of the revolution and openly proclaim that pistols and bombs—rather than ballots—are the appropriate instruments of political life. The worst slanders to which democratic Latin American governments are subject by their domestic opponents are routinely met with full faith and credit in the foreign press, while any official denial or clarification is treated with exaggerated suspicion, at times as if it were nothing more than a tacit admission of guilt.

The reporting on the Shining Path, the Peruvian terrorist group, is a particularly egregious example. Here is an organization that engages in assassinations, attacks banks and other public institutions, and blows up electrical pylons. These several hundred or, at most, few thousand persons have attained in the Western press more recognition than has, say, the entire population of the Dominican Republic, a country that for some years now has been offering Latin America the admirable example of a democracy in which political parties take turns in government, where there is respect for political differences, where issues are debated in a civilized manner, and—more notable still in the present economic environment—where considerable gains are registered in the battle against underdevelopment. That a country that suffered a horrendous dictatorship and, later, foreign intervention and civil war has been able over a relatively short time to establish and consolidate a democratic regime seems not to arouse the slightest interest in the great democratic organs of the Western world. These are the same journals that pay assiduous attention to the slightest incident involving the Peruvian government in its struggle against terrorism.

Why is this the case? Because these incidents in Peru confirm an existing image, whereas the Dominican situation flies in the face of a stereotype, profoundly rooted in the Western subconscious, by which we are seen as barbarous, uncultured peoples, constitutionally incapable of liberty and eternally condemned to choose between some variant of Augusto Pinochet and Fidel Castro. One need possess no special power of prediction to know that if, to its own misfortune and that of all Latin America, the Dominican Republic were also to fall victim to armed insurrection and terrorism, the condescending commentators of the Western press would rush in to show—even at the price of serious distortions or outright untruths—that Dominican democracy had never really existed; that what we had actually been looking at these past fifteen years was nothing more than a façade, behind which an authoritarian regime had squared off against the rebellious masses.

Do I exaggerate a bit to make my point? Perhaps. But I challenge any researcher to examine the reporting on Latin American countries in the major Western newspapers just mentioned. Without doubt, the balance of the stories will tend to confirm a skepticism concerning our democratic capabilities—indeed, to reinforce it.

This issue is important, because it involves one of the most extraordinary paradoxes of our time. We Latin Americans who believe that the solution to our problems is to break the cycle of dictatorships (be they of the right or of the left) must face the fact that the sinister obstacles confronting us in our struggle to install and defend democratic systems include not merely the conspiracies of reactionary castes and the insurrectionary impulses of the left but also the lack of understanding—not to say the contempt—of those we take as models and whom we also believe to be our allies. This does not mean that we must abandon all hope. But we do need to discard certain illusions. The battle for liberty in Latin America will be won strictly by Latin Americans themselves. This must be affirmed against totalitarian countries that wish to annex us to their sphere of influence and (as surprising as it may seem) against certain organs of information and no small number of democratic intellectuals in the free world.