Searching for Modern Mexico - book

The title of the book is "Searching for Modern Mexico: Dispatches from the front lines of the new global economy", written by Nathaniel Parish Flannery

Flannery gives a first hand account of three Mexican states Chiapas, Oaxaca and Michoacan which are marginalized in the globalized economy of the country. He has stayed in these states and observed the economies of coffee in Chiapas, mezcal in Oaxaca and avocados in Michoacan. 

The indigenous people, who account for over one fifth of the total population Mexico, continue to suffer from poverty, backwardness and inequality. This is the main problem in Chiapas and Oaxaca, which have the second and third largest indigenous population. 

One should, of course, give credit to the government’s conditional cash transfer programme “prospera” which provides real relief to many poor families. Mexico was, in fact, a pioneer in Latin America, with the conditional cash transfer program started in 1997, much before the famous Bolsa Familia scheme started by President Lula in 2003.

Tancitaro in Michoacan, is the avocado capital of the world, exporting a million dollars of avocado to US every day. Obviously, the cartels want a share of this revenue and attack the growers and the business owners. The Federal, state and municipal police have not been able to provide safety to the avocado growers or the citizens. So, the avocado growers have  organized their own militias who have managed to beat the cartels and keep them away. 

To protect themselves from the cartels, the Tancitaro militias have acquired arms which are as powerful as the military grade weapons of the cartels. The author has omitted to mention that these arms have been smuggled into Mexico from US where the gun shops in the border states do a roaring business of arms sales. The US, which publicizes the Mexican drug trafficking, does nothing to stop the trafficking of guns which kill more Mexicans than the drugs kill Americans.

Flannery has highlighted the following challenges for modernization: monopolies existing in different sectors (examples:Telecom, banking, beer, bread, and TV) keep prices high while at the same time preventing competition from new entrants into the business; the teachers union which is fighting a fierce battle to keep up its corrupt system of ghost teachers and poor teaching practices and evaluation; the cartels which hold the whole country to ransom by its brutal criminal violence.

The book is one more useful source to understand Mexico which is in the process of modernization, struggling against the traditional and new challenges. Instead of a macro approach, the author has chosen to tell the stories of people at the bottom selling tacos and beer and growing coffee and avocados. Flannery, an expert on Mexico and Latin America, has written many articles and books. 

Macondo to MacOndo

Macondo stands for Magical Realism genre of the Boom writers such as Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar and Carlos Fuentes. These titans dominated the Latin American literary world in the last century. But in the post-Boom period, there is a new crop of writers who have embraced a neorealistic style of portrayal of the Latin American culture. These writers are said to be part of the MacOndo movement in the new era of MacDonalds globalisation.

Rio Fugitivo is the name of the fictional Bolivian town in Soldano's stories just as Macondo was in Marquez's novels.

In his blog, also titled as Rio Fugitivo, Soldano introduces himself saying, " I was born in the same country and year (1967) in which Che Guevara died". 

Edmundo Paz Soldan, the Bolivian writer, is a prominent name in the MacOndo genre. After having read “Turing’s Delirium”, I have just finished reading another one “ The Matter of Desire”. I found this one even more interesting and delightful than the first one.

The Matter of Desire is the story of Pedro from Bolivia, whose father, a revolutionary dies while fighting against the dictatorship. Pedro follows in his father’s footsteps to study in Berkeley and tries to decipher the coded messages in his father’s book titled Berkeley. After graduating in political science, Pedro teaches in a university in New York where he falls in love with Ashley an American student.

Soldan has produced a thrilling story, combining the political reality of Bolivia and the academic culture in the university campus of US in an insightful way.

Soldan studied in Berkeley and is teaching Latin American Literature at Cornell University since 1997

I am going to look for more books of Soldan, for sure…

Turing’s Delirium – Bolivian novel

Turing’s Delirium by Edmundo Paz Soldan, a Bolivian author, is the story of a cryptographer Miguel Saenz, nicknamed Turing. The inspiration is Alan Turing, the famous British crypto analyst and mathematician. Miguel works for the Bolivian government secret service. He has taken to cryptography inspired by his girl friend Ruth who was a child prodigy in mathematics and codes. After marriage, she gets a job for Miguel in the intelligence department of the Interior Ministry which intercepts communications of opposition political parties and dissident groups. She teaches crypto analysis in the university. The couple live and breathe cryptography seeing secrets behind words, numbers and patterns even in the simple and mundane things of daily life. Everything is a symbol, a metaphor, enigma or a code, inviting to be deciphered. Eventually they become enigmas to themselves overtaken by a delirium of their obsession. Miguel is totally lost in the labyrinth of codes that he does not realize the consequences of his work which is used and misused by the intelligence agency to eliminate dissident intellectuals and student rebels. The couple’s rebellious teenage daughter Flavia is into hacking and follows the hackers’s world in online chat rooms and games played with various avatars.

The story is absorbing with lots of twists and turns with some unforgettable characters. There are elaborate descriptions of the techniques, events and history of communication codes especially during the world wars. 

Soldan gives a vivid portrayal of Bolivia which is one of the most politically volatile countries in Latin America with numerous military coups and dictatorship. The corrupt oligarchic governments had privatised utility services and let foreign multinational companies to make huge profit margins, as part of the neoliberalistic policies. The indigenous poor and the urban middle class rose against the political oppression and economic misery. The farmers protested against eradication of coca leaf farms. The millennials of the digital age joined the protests by hacking and attacking the sites of the governments and corporations. In Soldano’s words,” In Bolivia one faces problems that are premodern, modern and postmodern”.

The theme of the novel is a familiar one. It is yet another Latin American story of dictatorship, oppression and revolt. But for me, this is the first Bolivian novel and this is my introduction to Soldan, the Bolivian author. Soldan teaches Latin American literature in Cornell University, US. He belongs to the new generation of post-Boom Macondo writers who are part of the MacOndo movement. He has written more than a dozen novels and short story collections. Rio Fugitivo is the fictional Bolivian town in his novels, like Macondo in the novels of Garcia Marquez.

In the story, Miguel’s old boss Alberto turns out to be originally a German cryptologist, captured and used by CIA before being sent to Bolivia. His new boss Ramirez-Graham had worked in the NSA in US. The reality of today’s Bolivia trumps this fiction. Erick Foronda, who had worked as consultant to the US embassy in Bolivia for 25 years as a CIA agent, is now the private secretary to the interim President of Bolivia Jeanine Áñez. He was in Washington DC during the first two years of Trumps' presidency. It is alleged that he was part of the internal and external conspiracy which has overthrown the leftist President Evo Morales and has brought back to power a right wing pro-US oligarchic regime. Morales made history by becoming the first native Indian to be elected as president in South America in 2006. Till then, the native Indians who form sixty percent of the population, were kept marginalized and poor in the last five hundred years by the oligarchic regimes of European origin. The American ambassador had campaigned against Morales in Bolivian presidential elections in 2005. President Morales expelled the US ambassador and DEA in 2008 accusing them of conspiring to destabilize his government. He also recalled the Bolivian ambassador to US. There were no ambassadors for eleven years. It is only in 2020 that the two countries have appointed ambassadors. And it is back to business as usual, as in the bad old days. 

In the Latin American world of Magical Realism, the line between fiction and reality becomes blurred. Bolivia is back to the bad old days of Turing’s Delirium.

Diplomats, Presidents and Revolutionaries of Latin American literature

I have just finished reading the book “ Modern Latin American Literature – A very short introduction” by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, a formidable scholar with encyclopaedic knowledge of the writers of the region

  

What fascinates me is the link of Latin American literature with diplomacy and politics. Some of the poets and writers were honoured with postings as diplomats by the Latin American governments. A few got elected as Presidents while many suffered death, imprisonment, torture and exile. Not surprisingly, dictators, caudillos, disappearances, violence, exile, and suffering were the dominant themes in the poems and novels.

Diplomats

Pablo Neruda was Chilean Consul in Rangoon, Barcelona and Madrid, Consul General in Mexico City and Ambassador in Paris. Gabriela Mistral, another Chilean poet, was appointed as Consul in Naples, Madrid and Lisbon. 

Octavio Paz was a junior diplomat in Paris and Delhi and later posted as ambassador in India. Carlos Fuentes, son of a Mexican diplomat, was ambassador to France. 

Miguel Angel Asturias, the Guatemalan writer, who was the first Latin American novelist to win the Nobel prize in 1967, was ambassador in Paris. 

Ruben Dario, the Nicaraguan poet and hailed as the Father of Modernismo in Latin American literature, was ambassador in Paris. Interestingly he was a kind of honorary consul of Colombia in Buenos Aires for some time.

Vinicius de Moraes, the Brazilian poet famous for the international hit song " The girl from Ipanema" was a career diplomat of Brazil. His postings include Los Angeles, Paris and Rome. 

Jorge Carrera Andrade, the Ecuadorian poet, was a diplomat. He served as Ecuadorian Consul in Peru, France, Japan and US. Later he became Ambassador to Venezuela, UK, Nicaragua, France, Belgium and Netherlands. 

Besides these, there have been some other lesser known poets and writers who got diplomatic postings.

Presidents

Romulo Gallegos (1884-1969), the Venezuelan author of the famous novel “Dona Barbara”, was forced into exile in US and Mexico by the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gomez. Later he came back and got elected as the President of Venezuela in 1948. But he was deposed within a year by a military coup which forced him into exile again.

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Bartolome Mitre, the Argentine writers were elected as Presidents in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both had suffered exile and had to live in the neighbouring countries for some years. 

Daniel Ortega, the poet who wrote the famous poem “I Never Saw Managua When Miniskirts Were in Fashion”, when he was a political prisoner at the young age of 23 is the current President of Nicaragua.  While in jail, he received visits from Rosario Murillo, a poet. The prisoner and visitor fell in love; Murillo became Ortega's wife. She has published several books of poems. One of them is called as ¨Amar es combatir ¨- to love is to combat. Many members of the Sandinista government were poets and writers. Ernesto Cardinal, the poet priest who was a Sandinista revolutionary wrote, “the triumph of the revolution is the triumph of poetry”. But the Ortega power couple are now strangulating freedom of expression with their family dictatorship.

  

Mario Vargas Llosa ran in the Peruvian Presidential elections but got defeated by Fujimori.  Huidobro ran for presidency of Chile but did not make it.

Revolutionaries 

The Latin American literature has been shaped by the politics of the individual countries, the region and the world. The major political events which influenced the writers were: Independence of Latin American countries in the 1820s, The Soviet revolution in 1917, Spanish civil war (1936-39), Cuban revolution (1959), Sandinista revolution (1979) and the right wing military dictatorships of the sixties and seventies. Many writers were Leftists and Communists while a few became critics of Communism and Castro and Ortega authoritarianism. It is a pity that Luis Borges of Argentina, one of the greatest writers, missed the Nobel prize because of his right wing sympathies.

  

Because of exile, many writers  worked from outside their home countries in places like Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Buenos Aires and Mexico City. Havana was the hub of Latin American literature after the Cuban revolution. Casa de las Americas of Havana brought together Latin American writers, held symposia and gave literary prizes. But later when the Castro regime became a dictatorship allied with Soviet Union, Havana lost its appeal. Many Cuban writers fled into exile.

Many Latin American writers along with those from Europe and North America took part  in the Spanish civil war supporting the republicans against the fascist dictator Franco. 

Pablo Neruda, the leading poet of twentieth century Latin America, organized a congress of antifascist intellectuals in Spain in 1937 and wrote a book of political poems “Espana en el Corazon”. This was read even in the in the battlefronts of Republicans during the war. It was called as a poet's war, since there were so many poets from Spain and other countries participating in the war. In 1939, as consul in Paris Neruda helped repatriation of thousands of Spanish refugees by ship to Chile. In 1944, he was elected as Senator and the next year joined the Communist Party. He was a roving cultural ambassador for the communist party.  He wrote Cancion de Gesta in praise of the Cuban revolution. But later he had conflicts with the Castro regime.

The Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen (1902-89) wrote political poetry and participated in the Spanish Civil war and was a communist. He joined the Castro government and served as president of the Writers Union.

Paz had Marxist leanings and joined the Spanish civil war. But later he broke with the Mexican Left after the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939. He remained as a critic of Communism for the rest of his life. He resigned his ambassadorship in India to protest against the Mexican government’s killing of student agitators in 1968.

  

Jose Marti (1853-95), the Cuban poet, lead the war of independence of Cuba. From New York, he mobilised Cuban exiles and lead an armed liberation group into eastern Cuba in 1895. He died as a martyr felled by the bullets of Spanish at the age of 42 . Marti has since then become the icon for Cuban and Latin American revolutionaries.

Miguel Angel Asturias, the Guatemalan author wrote about the dictatorship of Estrada Cabrera in his novel “ El senor President”. He was stripped of Guatemalan citizenship and forced into exile during rightwing dictatorships. Roa Bastos’s novel "Yo el supremo” (I, the supreme) was about Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship of Paragauay. Bastos spent his years of exile in Buenos Aires and Paris. 

Isabel Allende and Julia Alvarez have written several poignant novels on the dictatorship of Pinochet and Trujillo.

Twenty first century

The region has become free from military dictatorships in the new century and there have been no major revolutions and wars. After the collapse of Berlin Wall and the mutation of Cuban and Sandinista revolutions into authoritarianism, Communism has lost its appeal. 

The region has not yet produced any literary titans in this century, after having captivated the world with its unique Magical Realism in the sixties with celebrity writers of the “Boom” such as Luis Borges, Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz. 

Some new writers of this century have rebelled against the Macondo old guards with their own  counter movement of MacOndo, in the era of MacDonald culture of globalization of the region. Other groups such as Nueva Onda (new wave) and Crack reject the exoticism of Garcia Marquez. These young writers are less concerned with a cultural identity and are more preoccupied with individual identity. 

More...

Shimone Jaini, a young Indian researcher has written a thesis La Encrucijada: Where Literature and Politics meet in Latin America. A short version of this is in this link

https://www.indiawrites.org/latin-america/latin-america-where-literature-intersects-politics/

Abhay Kumar, an Indian diplomat-poet's article on poet diplomats
https://www.rediff.com/news/column/how-diplomacy-and-poetry-are-linked/20121030.htm

Abhay Kumar has written a book " The alphabet of Latin America- a carnival of poems". The book, to be launched in the second half of 2020, contains poems on Latin American cities, culture, writers and history.

Bolivar: The epic life of the man who liberated South America – book by Marie Arana

This is the second biographical book I have read on Simon Bolivar, my Latin American hero. Marie Arana, an American author of Peruvian origin, has made the biography more as an interesting story with her skills as writer of novels. It is different from the biographies written by historians. Arana’s portrayal of the real life of Bolivar in a magical way fits in with the tradition of Magical Realism of Latin America. The colourful and eventful life of Bolivar has come out vividly in the literary style of Arana. 

The book starts with the arrival of Bolivar on the afternoon of 10 August 1819, after having spent thirty six days of traversing the flooded plains of Venezuela, six days marching over the vertiginous snows of the Andes and after crossing the icy pass at thirteen thousand feet at Paramo de Pisba. In this risky and most arduous journey, he had lost a third of his troops to frost and starvation. Bolivar had shown extraordinary stamina to withstand hunger, sleep deprivation and suffering in the battlefield. He had traversed 75000 miles of hard terrain during all his campaigns with his legendary capacity for endurance. He was called as Iron Ass for his capacity to withstand long horse rides. He had suffered defeats, betrayals and setbacks many times in his military and political ventures. There were many attempts on his life. But he managed to bounce back with strong determination, inimitable courage and strong resilience of spirit.

Bolivar had a personal magnetism around him and aroused his troops with inspiring oratory and made them follow him blindly. Besides showing courage in leading his troops in battles he was equally comfortable in ball rooms as a dancer and spirited conversationalist quoting Rousseau in French and Julius Caesar in Latin.

He had single handedly conceived, organized and lead the liberation of five (Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador  and Bolivia) South American nations.  He dreamed of  a united Latin America based on democracy, development and justice. But his vision was far ahead of his times and was not shared by others.

  

Despite coming from a rich family with assets and after having become the president of the five countries he had liberated, he died as  a pauper. He did not have the money even to buy a passage by ship to Europe or proper medical treatment and recovery.

Bolivar was a hero of convictions and high moral principles. He gave speeches, drafted documents and  wrote letters in a fiery, lyrical and moving way. At the same time, he was a man of contradictions with serious flaws. He was dictatorial, impulsive, ruthless and a womanizer.  His talent as a brilliant war-time commander was not useful to build democracy during peace time.

In the end, Bolivar died as a frustrated, betrayed, disappointed, disgruntled and sick man disowned and unwanted by the countries he had liberated. During the end of his life, he made bitter statements such as “America is ungovernable”, “He who serves a revolution ploughs the sea”. 

Eventually Bolivar was forced into exile, the eternal theme in real life and the literature of Latin America whose history is filled with the exile of many presidents, poets and revolutionaries. 

Many years after his unceremonious death in a remote corner of Colombia, he was reinstated by Venezuelan presidents as an icon and glorified as Liberator. Chavez immortalized Bolivar by renaming the country as Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. He tried to imitate Bolivar with his own brand of Twenty First  Century Socialism and made a mess of Venezuela pushing the country from democracy to dictatorship and from prosperity to poverty.

Besides Bolivar, the colourful character of Manuela Saenz has also come out well in the book. Manuelita deserves the title “ La Libertadora del Libertador” with her audacious bravery and uncompromising commitment and unconditional love to Bolivar. She had inspired Bolivar when he was depressed and saved him from an assassination  attempt. She added more colour to the life of Bolivar with her boisterous parties, wearing of military uniform and uncommon courage while standing up to her critics. When she heard about the death of Bolivar, she said, “ I loved the Liberator when he was alive. Now that he is dead, I worship him”

  

Arana’s book is a useful addition to understanding Bolivar and Latin America.