Tyrant Memory – a political novel about El Salvador

From the title of the book, I expected something like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “The General in his Labyrinth” in which Bolívar's life is brought out through the narrative of his memories. No.. the memory in Moya’s novel is that of Haydée Aragon, a simple and innocent housewife who has no political, literary or intellectual interests. She is just another victim of  the tyrannical rule of a military dictator of El Salvador. She starts recording her memory as a diary just to pass time and make use of the 'beautiful notebook' she had impulsively bought during a shopping in Brussels. 

Haydée spends her time mostly in Fiesta, Canasta and Siesta, typical of her upper class. She goes for coffee, cakes and gossip with other matrons like Doña Teresita, Doña Angelita and Doña Rosita. She laughs and cries with the dialogues of characters in the radio soap operas. She is a pious soul who would not miss a single mass at the local church. She is a valuable client at the neighbourhood beauty salon. She goes for extra make ups before visiting her husband in jail in order to make him feel good. Since she has live-in maid and cook, there is virtually no work at home, except trying out some exotic recipes. The family chauffeur drives her around. Wherever she goes, she is recognized and respected because of the prestige of her family. 

The quiet and predictable routine of Haydée goes for a toss when her husband Pericles Aragaon is detained by the country’s tyrant for subversive writings. Her visits to him in the jail awaken her to the political realities. She gets to meet the families of other political detainees some of whom are tortured and executed. Her husband has been spared since he had earlier served as secretary of the tyrant and later as his ambassador to Belgium. But when the dictator starts becoming more intolerable, Pericles resigns his post and returns to the country to become a left wing journalist writing against the dictatorship.

Haydee’s elder son Clemen is a broadcast journalist in a radio station. He is in the forefront cheerleading a coup against the dictator. But when the coup fails, his name enters the execution list and he is on the run. Her second son in high school is also drawn into student agitations against the government. Her daughter is in Costa Rica married to a communist leader.

Haydee’s father is a coffee baron. He and his oligarchic friends get fed up with the oppression of the dictator and his greedy tax increases and turn against him. Her father-in-law is a colonel and governor of a province and is loyal to the president. 

Her daughter-in-law takes to alcohol and a colonel as lover when her husband is in hiding. The colonel is in charge of tracking down the antigovernment activists.

Many of Haydee’s relatives and friends become victims of the dictatorship. Some are in jail, some in hiding and others are executed.  On the other hand, there are a few who support the dictator and even become informers. The society is polarized and people lose trust in each other. The antigovernment relatives do not attend social events which have the presence of pro-government guests.

Surrounded by these happenings around her, Haydee is naturally and inevitably driven to politics. She joins the protest movements and distributes copies of political manifesto which she hides inside her bra and stockings. She helps with the distribution of money to those on strikes protesting against the tyranny.

  

The general who is the dictator of the country is called as Warlock (El Brujo) because of his eccentric beliefs in occult, reincarnation, vegetarianism and theosophy. According to him "it is a greater crime to kill an ant than a man, for when a man dies he becomes reincarnated, while an ant dies forever." The character is based on the real life story of Maximiliano Hernández Martínez who was the dictator of El Salvador in the period 1935-44. 

Horacio Castellanos Moya, the author of the novel, was born in Honduras but brought up in El Salvador. His mother was Honduran and father Salvadorean. He has written several short stories and novels besides journalistic articles covering the civil wars of Central America. Some of his writings became controversial and he had to flee El Salvador. He has been living in exile in US after having lived in Mexico for many years. His exile experience in Mexico is brought out in his other novel  “The dream to return”. I enjoyed reading this one too. 

Moya, the author

The tyranny portrayed in “ Tyrant Memory” is mild and much less tragic in comparison to the shock I felt in another Salvadorean writer Mario Bencastro’s novel “A shot in the Cathedral”. 

In “Tyrant Memory”, the dictator leaves the presidency when the protests and strikes paralyse the country. He goes into exile as in reality in 1944 when President Martinez fled. The lack of US support was a decisive factor in the despot’s exit.

But the dictatorship portrayed in “A shot in the Cathedral” is vicious and brutal. The reason for this is simple. President Reagan supported the Salvadorean dictatorship in the eighties with arms and aid in the name of his anticommunist war. The US redoubled its support to the Salvadorian dictatorship to prevent "another Nicaragua" after the victory of Sandinista revolution in 1979 in Nicaragua. 

The decade of 1980s is known as the Lost Decade in Latin America because of the loss of economic growth caused by the neoliberalistic policies imposed on the region by the Washington DC-Wall Street combine. But the Central American countries lost much more than GDP growth. They lost hundreds of thousands of people in the proxy wars imposed on them from Washington DC.

The small Central American and Caribbean countries get hit by seasonal hurricanes from time to time. But the wind blowing from Washington DC could be more devastating and deadly for them. 

India’s exports to Latin America increased to 13.2 billion dollars in 2019

India’s exports to Latin America increased to 13.2 billion dollars in 2019 (January-December) from 13 bn in 2018, according to the just-released trade figures of ITC Geneva. 

Brazil came back to retain its rank as the largest market for India’s exports in Latin America after having ceded that position to Mexico for three years from 2016 to 2018.

The top destination of India’s exports were as follows:

Brazil  4.06 billion dollars,  Mexico 3.68 bn, Colombia 1.03 bn, Chile 869 m, Peru 739 m, Argentina 613 m and Central America(6 countries) 991 m.

Major exports were: vehicles 3.2 bn, chemicals 2 bn, equipments and machinery 1.3 bn, pharmaceuticals 991 m, textiles 865 m and diesel 793 m

Pharmaceutical exports reached a record of 991 million dollars in 2019 from 880 m in 2018. India is the fifth largest global supplier to the region. Main destination of pharma exports were: Brazil 282 m, Chile 99 m, Peru 81 m, Mexico 65 m, Colombia 59 m, Venezuela 46 m, Guatemala 46 m and Dominican Republic 43 m.

Imports had declined to 22 bn dollars in 2019 from 26 bn in 2018. The fall in prices of oil and minerals was the main reason for the decline in imports.

Principal sources of imports were: Venezuela 5.58 bn, Mexico 5.56 bn, Brazil 2.96 bn, Argentina 2.07 bn, Peru 1.88 bn, Chile 1.15 bn, Bolivia 885 million, Colombia 734 m, Dominican Republic 483 m and Ecuador 311 m.

Main item of imports: crude oil 11.35 billion dollars, gold 4.2 bn, vegetable oil 1.9 bn, copper 1.08, equipments and machinery  869 million dollars, wood 343 m and chemicals 294 m

In 2019 most of the oil supply of 11.35 billion came from just two countries: Venezuela 5.6 bn and Mexico 4.4 bn.

The major sources of gold were: Peru 1.75 bn, Bolivia 881 m, Dominican Republic 460 m, Brazil 419 m and Colombia 405 m.

As usual, Argentina was the most dominant supplier of vegetable oil and Chile was the source of copper.

Imports of raw sugar declined steeply to 274 million in 2019 from 1 billion dollars in 2017. Raw sugar is imported from Brazil, refined and reexported to other countries.

India was the 
seventh largest destination for Latin America's global exports. 
#1 market for vegetable oil exports
#3 for crude oil 
#4 for gold

Latin America's imports were 1.07 trillion dollars and exports 1.06 tn in 2019. 
Mexico was the top trader with imports of 467 bn and exports of 472 bn. 
Brazil's imports were 177 bn and exports 223 bn. 
Surprisingly Chile is the third largest trader with imports of 65 bn and exports of 64 bn. Argentina's imports were 65 bn and exports 49 bn
Peru imports 42 bn and exports 45 bn
Colombia imports 40 bn and exports 42 bn

Note: Latin America consists of 18 Spanish-speaking countries  9 in South America, 6 in Central America, 2 in Caribbean (Cuba and Dominican Republic) and Mexico plus the Portuguese-speaking Brazil.

Coffee and Communism in the volcanic land of El Salvador

Coffee and Communism had formed an explosive mix in the tragic history of El Salvador, according to Augustin Sedgewick in his book "Coffeeland: A history" 

Coffee created wealth for the rich and found the largest export market in US.

But coffee became a curse for the poor indigenous people who were deprived of their traditional land source for food and were forced to work as plantation workers in miserable conditions.

Communism gave hope to the poor but that brought in US intervention which caused even more death and destruction. 

Sedgewick makes an interesting connection of the Salvadorian coffee to Global communism and Manchester capitalism.

Friedrich Engels, from a wealthy German family  goes to Manchester in 1842 to oversee the textile mill set up by his father. Manchester was the global capital of Industrial Revolution at that time when British factories took in one third of world’s raw materials and produced forty percent of world’s manufactured exports. Engels is impressed by the capitalist achievement but is shocked by the poor conditions of the workers. He puts these in his book “ The condition of the working class in England”. Later in 1948, he coauthors with Karl Marx the Communist Manifesto which changes the history of the world including El Salvador. 

Born in a poor working class family of Manchester, James Hill leaves the city in 1899  at the age of eighteen to become a salesman of Manchester textiles in the far off El Salvador. There he ventures into coffee cultivation in Santa Anna, near the Izalco volcano which used to erupt daily, reminding him the tall factory chimneys of Manchester. The volcanic soil of the surrounding hills is good for coffee which accounted for ninety percent of the country’s exports at the time of his arrival. The coffee plantations run by the people of European origin use the native Indian labour with low wages and hard work. The coffee barons take away the community lands and forests of the Indians, with governmental facilitation (in the name of privatization of land), depriving the Indians their source of maize, fruits, fuel and medicine. Some of the coffee planters take extraordinary steps to prevent the poor workers from free fruits and eatables which are  available freely in the coffee plantations. They cut down the fruit trees and remove beans and other food crops which are grown inside the plantations and plant useless and even poisonous plants. Unable to feed themselves from the land, the Indians have no other alternative but to join as workers in the coffee plantations. 

Hill succeeds as a Coffee King and joins the list of fourteen oligarchic families which control the economy and politics of El Salvador. Farabundo Marti, the communist leader, fights against the exploitation and oppression of the agricultural workers. Born in a landlord’s family, Marti espouses the cause of the poor even as a college student. After being thrown out of the Law School and sent into exile, he joins Sandino and becomes his trusted lieutenant in the fight in Nicaragua against the dictatorship. Thereafter, he comes back to lead an armed uprising of the workers. But the poorly armed workers are massacred by the National Guards with their latest machine guns imported from US. Several thousands of the are massacred in what is known as “La Matanza” (The Slaughter) in 1932. Marti and his fellow leaders are executed by firing squads.  

Later, the followers of Marti form a Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN),  which takes up arms against the military dictatorship in 1979. They are inspired by the success of Sandinistas who overthrew the Somoza dictatorship Nicaragua. But the military dictatorship massacres thousands of people with the active support of the Reaganadministration in the name of anti-communism. The civil war of the country comes to an end with the peace deal in 1992. Later, Mauricio Funes of FMLN becomes president in 2009. He is succeeded by Sanchez Ceren, a former guerilla fighter, who gets elected as president in 2014. 

The Izalco volcano in the heart of the coffee plantations in Santa Ana area used to erupt many times daily from 1770 to 1966. It was known as the El Faro del Pacifique ( Light of the Pacific). It has stopped eruption since 1966. The Salvadoreans hoped that the 1992 Peace Agreement had put an end to the eruption of clash between communism and coffee.

But the coffee vs communism war has now been replaced by the gang war between Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio18 gangs. 

The civil war of the eighties drove some youth to flee to US. But these poor and illiterate youth fell in the trap of the drug gangs in LA and become gangsters themselves. The US deported these gangsters back to El Salvador where these have formed two large notorious gangs Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) and Barrio18. These hold the country to ransom by their brutal crime and violence making El Salvador as one of the top murder capitals of the world. The rivalry between these two became so violent at one stage in 2012, the government of El Salvador intervened and brokered a ceasefire between them. In order to bring the two sides to the negotiating table, the government relaxed conditions in the prisons in which the members of the two gangs were held. Following this peace deal, the murder rate had dropped immediately. But this truce broke down in 2014 and crime has gone up again.Now the Salvadoreans flee to escape the gang violence and try for asylum in US. 

These days, the American media warn Latin Americans about the Debt Trap, when they take credit from China for infrastructure and other projects. Let us see how the American Debt Trap worked out for El Salvador, which had borrowed six million dollars in 1922 from Chatham Phoenix National Bank and Trust of New York with guarantee from the State Department.

El Salvador had to accept three conditions.

1^st Condition- An American Customs Inspector was appointed in El Salvador to collect part of the export tax on coffee.

2^nd An American chief of Agriculture was posted in Salavodrean Ministry. He made the Salvadoreans plant commercial crops for exports so that these exports could be taxed and US would get a share of the tax. This meant the land under production of corn and beans had to be diverted for commercial crops. The result was that production of staples had gone down and the country had to import food. The price of corn and beans had doubled and tripled. The poor farmers had to give up their land to the big planters and go to work in the coffee and commercial crop plantations for daily wages to be able to buy food. 

3^rd- An American chief of National Guard (armed police) was posted in El Salvador. He increased the number of Guards and got them paid on priority basis from the export revenue and the external loans. Some of the guards were sent to US for training and brainwashed about the evils of communism and were taught the dirty tricks to kill and torture communists.

But the American method of debt trap in El Salvador is benign in comparison to their occupation of Dominican Republic where they sent the Marines to enforce debt repayment. 

The book starts with the 1979 kidnapping of Jaime Hill, grandson of the founder, by a revolutionary group which collects a ransom of 4 million dollars and uses it for their insurgent activities. This is insignificant in comparison to the 6 billion dollars aid given by US to El Salvador which was used for death and destruction in the country. The book ends with Jaime Hill taking up charity work to help the poor Salvadoreans.

Alexandra Hill, the daughter of Jaime Hill is the foreign minister of the country in the Nayib Bukele administration since June 2019. She has worked with UN and regional organisations dealing with rehabilitation of drug victims. Bukele had started his political career with FMLN. After his expulsion from the party, he joined a new centre-right party and won in their ticket beating the candidate of FMLN in the presidential elections of 2019. s.

Sedgewick, who has done extensive research on the global history of work, food and capitalism has filled the book with lot of stories and theories throughout the book. Here is one such story:

A small Denver necktie maker called Los Wigwam Weavers lost its best young male loom operators to the war effort in the early 1940s.The owner, Phil Greinetz, hired older men to replace them, but they lacked the dexterity needed to weave the intricate patterns in Wigwam’s ties. Next he hired middle-aged women, and while they could produce ties to his standards, they lacked the stamina to work a full shift. When Greinetz called a company-wide meeting to discuss the problem, his employees had a suggestion: Give us a 15-minute break twice a day, with coffee. Greinetz instituted the coffee breaks and immediately noticed a change in his workers. The women began doing as much work in six and a half hours as the older men had done in eight. Greinetz made the coffee breaks compulsory, but he decided he didn’t need to pay his workers for the half hour they were on break. This led to a suit from the Department of Labor and, eventually, to a 1956 decision by a federal appeals court that enshrined the coffee break in American life. The court ruled that because the coffee breaks “promote more efficiency and result in a greater output,” they benefited the company as much as the workers and should therefore be counted as work time. As for the phrase coffee break, it entered the vernacular through a 1952 advertising campaign by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau, a trade group organized by Central American growers. Their slogan: “Give yourself a coffee-break … and get what coffee gives to you.”

Sedgewick has put the coffee story of El Salvador in the context of the commodity's global history. Coffee, which was native to Ethiopia came to be commercially cultivated in Yemen. The Ottomans started the mysterious custom of coffee drinking and set up coffee houses in the cities conquered by them to demonstrate the ‘civility of their rule’. The Europeans copied from the Ottomans and the coffee houses generated a new social class which discussed literature, philosophy, politics and revolution. The Americans took to coffee to increase productivity. In Latin America, Brazil became the king of coffee, Colombia became the queen and Central America became as pawns.

The book, published on 7 April this year, is available for Indian readers in kindle although the hard copy has to wait out for end of the Corona closure of the world.

Chinese credit, investment and trade with Latin America in 2019

 In 2019, the Chinese credit to Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) countries was 1.1 billion dollars, down from 2.1 bn in 2018, 

Greenfield FDI announcement was 12 bn, up from 1.7 bn in 2018, 

Mergers and Acquisitions was 4.3 bn, down from 9.2 bn in 2018 

Trade was 315 bn dollars, up from 306 bn in 2018- both exports and imports have gone up

Credit

The 1.1 bn sovereign credit in 2019, focussed on hard infrastructure and energy sector development including:

- 600 million dollars lent to the Dominican Republic for improvements to the country’s electricity distribution system, 

-236 million to Argentina for purchase of rail cars, 

-200 million to Suriname to upgrade its International Airport 

-104 million to Trinidad and Tobago to develop the Phoenix Park Industrial Estate in which Chines companies will put up manufacturing/assembly work.

The cumulative total of Chinese credit to the region since 2005 is estimated at 137 billion dollars of which 119.4 bn was given in the decade 2010-19.

The sovereign credit given by China Development Bank (CDB) and China Eximbank to LAC governments and state-run companies fell to 1.1 billion in 2019 from its peak of 36.6 billion dollars in 2010 and mid peak of 21.5 billion in 2015. 

The reasons for the steep decline: 

-Venezuela, the biggest debtor has reached its saturation point with 62 billion dollars while its repaying capacity has been severely degraded by domestic crisis and US sanctions. 

- Instead of big ticket items in a few countries, the Chinese have now started giving small amounts to more countries

- financing is given in many cases directly to Chinese companies instead of giving direct to LAC governments

Besides CDB and Eximbank, the Chinese are giving credit through other regional funds such as the China-LAC Industrial Cooperation Investment Fund (CLAI Fund), China-LAC Cooperation Fund (CLAC Fund) and Special Loan Program for China-Latin America Infrastructure.

In addition to co-financing projects and regional funds, China’s four major commercial banks Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, and China Construction Bank are increasingly active in Latin America 

Investment

The annual greenfield FDI announcement had climbed from 3.1 bn in 2010 to 10.1 bn in 2014 and had gone down again to 1.7 bn in 2018 before the dramatic jump to 12 bn in 2019.

Among the largest deals announced in 2019 were: 

- Cosco Shipping investment of 3 billion in Peru’s Chancay port project

- TBEA Group’s  2.3 bn JV with Bolivian state company for Lithium production. This is subject to the ongoing political changes in the country

- Huawei’s project to build a second electronics factory in the Sao Paolo state of Brazil with an investment of $800 million

- Hutchison Port Holdings announced a new $450 million cargo port in Veracruz, Mexico, using blockchain technology to allow for more transparent monitoring of the flow of cargo.

- China Three Gorges Corp’s 438 million dollar San Gabán III hydroelectric project

Mergers and Acquisitions

In 2019, Chinese companies spent 4.3 billion on M&A deals in LAC, the lowest sum since 2016 when it was a record 17.5 bn dollars after which it went down to 9.2 bn in 2018.

The major deals were:

- A consortium of three Chinese companies (Hubei Energy Group Co., CNIC Corp., and China Three Gorges Corp.) purchased the Chaglla hydroelectric dam in Peru from Brazilian Odebrecht, for 1.39 billion

- Joyvio Agriculture Development Co Ltd, a private Chinese agricultural processing company, bought a nearly-complete stake (99.8%) in the Chilean Australis Seafoods SA for $985.8 million

- China General Nuclear Power Corp bought the Brazilian Gamma project, which consists of two solar parks and a wind farm, from Italian firm Enel for 779 million. 

Trade

China’s trade with LAC region increased to 315 billion dollars in 2019 from 306 bn in 2018. China’s exports increased to 151 bn from 148 bn while its imports went up to 164 bn from 158 bn.

Mexico has overtaken Brazil as the largest destination of Chinese exports to the region. In 2019, China exported 46 bn to Mexico as against 35 bn to Brazil. But Brazil remains as the largest exporter to China with 79 bn while Mexican exports were just 14 bn.

China’s imports of soybeans, corn and other agrocommodities are likely to be affected by the recent Chinese agreement to buy more ( 200 bn) of these from the US in the next two years.

Global Economic diplomacy projects

More countries from LAC region have signed on to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the  total is now 19. BRI signatories include Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela, Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Cuba, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada,  Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panama.

Ecuador has become the first Latin American signatory to Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)

Sources

More information and analysis available in the following:

Scaling back: Chinese Development Bank Finance in LAC,  2019 by Margaret Myers and Kevin Gallagher

https://www.thedialogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Chinese-Finance-to-LAC-2019.pdf

China -Latin American economic Bulletin 2020 Edition by Rebecca ray and pedro henrique Batista Barbosa 

https://www.bu.edu//gdp/files/2020/03/GCI-Bulletin_2020.pdf

Trade map of ITC, Geneva

Mexican Arjuna - Francisco Madero

Francisco Madero, who was President of Mexico in the period 1911-13, was a spiritualist since his younger days seeking wisdom from many sources including Bhagwat Gita. He wrote articles with a pseudonym Arjuna. In his “Commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, Madero wrote that the paradox of action-inaction was solved by the key word: duty. “‘Renouncing the fruit of our actions’ should be understood to mean that we should not perform any meritorious action in view of the reward we expect from it but because we consider it to be our duty”. He was inspired by Krishna’s advice, “Hear my words, O prince! in truth I tell you that whoever acts according to dharma [the proper order of the world, the duties of one’s station in life], without desire for the fruit of his action, renounces his action at the same time as he performs it”.

Madero presented himself as a heroic Arjuna in the struggle for democracy, being guided and given courage by the wisdom of Gita. Some of his readers such as Jose Vasconcelos (famous philosopher politician), referred to him as “ Arjuna of Mexico”.

What was Madero's Arjuna dilemma? He was a liberal and progressive fighting against injustice and dictatorship. But the conservatives on the other side who were supporting dictatorship and maintaining their wealth and position were from the same oligarchic families to which he belonged. After becoming President he had dilemmas between punishing and pardoning the conservative conspirators. His choice of pardoning of General Huerta was a fatal mistake. The General turned against him, overthrew him and got him killed.

Madero's commentary on Gita written in 1910 was published in the Mexican Spiritual magazine Helios in 1912, while he was serving as President. It was later reprinted in the Mexican philosopher Jose Vasconcelo’s book “Estudios Indostanicos”.

In a letter to his wife, Madero said that he had come to identify even more with Arjuna, his pseudonym, and went on: I have the feeling that my life is not in danger. But if something happens, I will go to my grave satisfied that I have done my duty. I send you my Bhagavad Gita. Guard it carefully along with the notes I drew from it. 

In 1911, Madero changed his pseudonynm to “Bhima” and wrote a Spiritualist Manual in which he discussed politics purely as a product of morality: “There can be no doubt that if all good men were to cast off their egoism and get involved in public affairs, the people would be governed wisely and the most worthy and virtuous men would be those occupying the highest posts”.

In 1913, President Madero was overthrown in a military coup in which the American ambassador Henry Lane Wilson had a crucial role. While being taken to jail, he was assassinated. An unconfirmed legend says that when he left the Presidential Palace, Madero was carrying his “Commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita.” 

Madero is known in Mexican history as “ the apostle of democracy” who put an end to the long dictatorship of President Porfirio Dias from 1877 to 1911.  When Madero stood in the 1910 elections against Diaz, he was arrested and put in jail. Madero escaped from the prison to US and lead a succcessful uprising against the fraudulent election of Diaz who was forced to resign in May 2011.  Madero won the October 2011 election and became the youngest president, at the age of 38. 

Madero was an unusual politician. Born in one of the five wealthiest families, he got education from US and France. He had studied courses in agriculture and in business management. He was a benign and enlightened landlord, businessman and philonthrophist. He was the first Mexican President to legalize labour unions and the right to strikes. He took to spiritualism and heard the voices including those of his dead brother. He was a vegetarian and teetotaler. He practised homeopathy.

This Mexican connection to Mahabharat is brought out in the book “ Mexico: Biography of power” written by the Mexican scholar Enrique Krauze.