Anthony Pagden teaches at UCLA. His most recent books are La ilustración y sus enemigos and, as editor, The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union.
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Vol. 13 No. 11 · 13 June 1991
pages 26-27 | 3354 words
Basismo
Anthony Pagden
- The Cambridge History of Latin America. Vol. VII: 1930 to the Present edited by Leslie Bethell
Cambridge, 775 pp, £70.00, October 1990, ISBN 0 521 24518 4
- Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America by John King
Verso, 266 pp, £29.95, November 1990, ISBN 0 86091 295 7
- Democracy and Development in Latin America: Economics, Politics and Religion in the Post-war Period by David Lehmann
Polity, 235 pp, £29.50, April 1990, ISBN 0 7456 0776 4
Mexico, Mexicans sometimes say, is too far from God and too close to the United States of America. The same could be said of the whole of Latin America. Ever since the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, a piece of political effrontery which sought to deny a role in the affairs of the hemisphere to any extra-continental power, most North American administrations have looked on the entire Southern continent as their ‘backyard’. But, as Reagan’s near maniacal obsession with El Salvador and Nicaragua makes plain, their special interest has always been reserved for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, the areas discussed in this, the latest stage in Leslie Bethell’s collective attempt to capture ‘Latin America’s unique historical experience’.
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Letters
Vol. 13 No. 12 · 27 June 1991
From Malcolm Deas
‘Too far from God and too close to the United States.’ Whenever I read that remark, I know that I am in for a parade of worn-out received ideas about Latin America. Anthony Pagden’s review (LRB, 13 June) is just that.
Barely a sentence in it is reliable. It is not true that ‘no serious efforts to produce political destabilisation, whether from without or within, have been made in Mexico since the Revolution,’ nor that Mexican politics for more than half a century have been a matter of ‘barely perceptible movements’. It is not true that the nations of Central America and the Caribbean ‘have been ever since their creation in a state of near-anarchy or civil war’. It is far too sweeping to say that most Latin American staples were in the hands of foreigners, usually North Americans, until the Sixties – Dr Pagden’s ideas on the economic development of the region are so crude that one must seriously doubt that he has read the volume of the Cambridge History of Latin America that he is ostensibly reviewing.
‘Certainly the United States has never taken a benevolent or a sophisticated view of the political processes in Latin America (or, indeed, anywhere else in the world) …’ What arrogant rubbish. Certainly? Never? Anywhere else in the world? Would you have printed that sentence in a review about ‘anywhere else in the world’? I think not.
Was Allende’s Chile really just an ‘attempt to bring about social democracy through “normal” – that is, European and North American – democratic procedures’? I suggest you ask a ‘normal’ Chilean. The ‘élite’ of no Latin American nation I know speaks ‘that hideous hybrid known as Spanglish’, and why the hell shouldn’t they drink Coca-Cola and eat cornflakes if they want to? What do they have for breakfast in King’s College, Cambridge? Swan stuffed with widgeon?
‘Few Latin American states possess established political parties, or sophisticated political classes … Few Latin American élites observe the rules of the political game, complex and promethean, which goes under the name of “democracy”, or few of them have even so much as a clear sense of what such rules might be.’ Why not just call them poor benighted dagoes and have done? He gets little things wrong as well. Bolivar certainly didn’t dream very resolutely about a ‘European liberal republic based on a wide suffrage’.
It is a pity that Roger Garfitt’s much more enlightening piece on Colombia in the same issue also contains errors of historical fact: the Sixties and most of the Seventies were not ‘years of tortures and disappearances’; it was certainly possible to discuss Colombia’s glaring social inequalities and the shortcomings of its two-party system without being ‘branded as an agitator’ – it was rare to find a Colombian politician or intellectual who didn’t; the Colombian Army is nowhere near 200,000 strong; pajaros were not horsemen; they went by car … Perhaps it doesn’t matter about the pajaros, but to misrepresent two decades of any country’s history surely does.
You also failed to understand your own cover. It is part drug-baron – the left-hand side is a caricature of Pablo Escobar – but the other half is not a ‘strongman’, as you put it, but a caricature of President Cesar Gaviria. It isn’t very funny, but you have missed the point entirely. Perhaps you consulted Dr Pagden.
Malcolm Deas
St Antony’s College, Oxford
