Left Behind

It was four years ago that three authors — the Venezuelan Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the Cuban Carlos Alberto Montaner, and the Peruvian Alvaro Vargas Llosa — produced for a Latin American audience an amusing guide to the defective habits and moronic language that intellectuals in that part of the world are wont to use. A surprise success in Spanish, the Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot has at last been translated into English. And it offers, with its judicious selection of idiotic passages from thinkers and leaders over the last hundred and fifty years, an opportunity for readers in the United States to grasp the extent to which Latin American intellectual and political life is driven by nationalistic resentments, inferiority complexes, and repressed grudges against the powerful neighbor to the north.

The enterprise attempted by the three authors is not new. Some thirty years ago, the Venezuelan Carlos Rangel wrote an essay, “From the Good Savage to the Good Revolutionary,” pursuing the same goal. Rangel achieved a certain international success thanks to the intervention of the well-known French writer Jean-Francois Revel, who sponsored a French translation with a prologue in which Revel explained that the leftist revolutionary myth in Latin America always comes with a corollary: The United States is the enemy, an imperialist exploitative society responsible for the poverty, backwardness, and under-development of the two dozen republics south of the Rio Grande.

A similar analysis has been performed over the years by Roberto Campos (a former diplomat and politician, and Brazil’s most prestigious economist), who has long waged a thankless war against the anti-democratic and anti-free-market impulses in Latin America. And one should not forget the Brazilian philosophy professor and popular author Olavo de Carvalho, whose scholarly and comic 1997 O Imbecil Collectivo — the “Collective Imbecile” — became a best-seller by exposing the fatuous projection of resentment that prompts so much left-wing thought in Brazil.

But though the idea behind the Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot is not new, Mendoza, Montaner, and Vargas Llosa have added to it the clever notion of letting the idiots speak for themselves. Passage after passage, dredged from the past, demonstrates the near-universal use of the United States and its economic system as convenient scapegoats for all the frustrations, disappointments, and resentments of South American intellectuals and politicians — a shadow projection of the feelings of inferiority that plague the Latin American consciousness.

The examples are overwhelming, hilarious, and terribly sad:

* From the Nobel prize-winning Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “If it weren’t for Cuba, the U.S.A. would already have reached Patagonia.”

* From Alan Garcia, a president of Peru known for his corruption and ineffectiveness: “I confess here that I only possess one pair of shoes, not because I want to play being poor or exaggerate, but because I really do not need more.”

* From Carlos Andres Perez, a president of Venezuela impeached and expelled for corruption: “If you see me becoming rich, call me a thief.”

* From Che Guevara, the Argentinian guerrilla leader and minister of the economy of Cuba under Fidel Castro: “Ten percent is the development growth index which is anticipated for the coming years in Cuba. What do we think will be Cuba’s GNP per capita in 1980? It will be $ 3,000 dollars. More than the USA!”

The only eminent Brazilian who appears in the Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot is the ex-metal worker “Lula” da Silva, a sort of idealistic Neanderthal who is the perennial head of Brazil’s labor party (the Partido dos Trabalhadores) and perpetual candidate for president. In a 1993 speech while visiting Havana, Lula castigated “neo-liberalism” as at the same time a “myth” and a “demonic reality” that is turning to even greater poverty all the poor nations of the world.

In fact, however, Brazil has much to offer a collection of perfect idiocy like the one assembled by Mendoza, Montaner, and Vargas Llosa. More serious than Lula’s rantings in Cuba was a 1987 assertion by then-president Jose Sarney that Brazil would not pay its foreign debt “with the hunger of our people.” The result of Sarney’s default in foreign debt payments was injury to Brazil’s credit and international credibility for the next ten years. In 1992, the senator for Sao Paulo, Fernando Henrique Cardoso — an ex-professor of sociology and proponent of the “Dependency Theory” that blames all Brazil’s woes on its economic thralldom to the United States — grandly announced that the only two evils plaguing the country were “tax evasion by the rich and the payment of the foreign debt.” (Elected to the presidency two years later, after a short stint as minister of finance during which he drastically suppressed runaway inflation with orthodox economic prescriptions, Cardoso asked Brazilians “to forget everything I wrote.” He then began to lead the country, albeit with much vacillation, on the road to globalization, privatization, and neo-liberalism.)

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, left-wing socialism in Latin America retreated for a while to a deserved position of quiescence. Lately however, the same intellectual disease has re-emerged with renewed malignancy. At the heart of these latest versions of collectivism, we find the old, old paranoia about the United States, appearing in fascinating new forms.

There is, for instance, a belief held simultaneously in certain New Age leftist and diehard military circles that the region around the Amazon will soon be overrun by United Nations troops, led by U.S. Marines, under the ecological pretext of saving from destructive exploitation the tropical jungle, but with the real aim of taking possession of its hidden mineral wealth and biodiversity.

There is, for another example, a movement among leftist Catholic clerics (inspired by the old liberation theology, passing under the guise of a “preferential option for the poor”) who insist on speeding up official land-reform programs by force and who take their cue from events in the Mexican province of Chiapas.

Then, too, there are the tattered remnants of the old Communist parties (Trotskyite and orthodox Stalinist). Together with the lunatic wing of Latin American labor parties, they dream of a “Third Wave” revolution to supersede the failed Leninist revolution of Russia and Maoist revolution of China — thereby raising Latin America to a new world leadership of the downtrodden.

Finally, there is, across Latin America, a vague stirring of introverted, autarchic, or isolationist feelings. Strongly supported by business and government circles who fear foreign competition, it is directed against economic globalization and is similar to the anarchic spirit that rallied noisy youthful crowds in Seattle and Washington against the IMF, the World Bank, and the process of economic evolution toward a world market.

Different as they are, what all these new movements have in common is their roots in the old Latin American idiocy — as proved by their shared use of the oldest slogans, catchwords, and elaborate but vicious arguments sketched by Montaner, Mendoza, and Vargas Llosa in their Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot.

The only qualification one could offer to their formidable dissection of the collective unconscious is that perfect idiocy of this type is not a uniquely Latin American privilege. Indeed, this kind of ideological contamination has a worldwide reach. In each region, it uses local ingredients to feed its universal mental parasites — with the United States invariably pictured as using its political, economic, and military power to force its capitalist exploitation upon unwilling, subordinate peoples.

The present mercantilist and patrimonialist social structure of Latin America is a harsh legacy of the traditional absolutism of church and state in Spain and Portugal. What now stands in the way of social, political, and economic development, however, is the ideology of the perfect Latin American idiots — with their lethal combination of right-wing nationalism, left-wing socialism, and romantic utopianism.

The nations of South America can only evolve into modern democracies and free-market economies if they undergo a purging of the ideological demons that fill the mental environment created by our intellectual elites. A collective psychoanalysis may be the only way to achieve that. But, short of getting the entire continent on the psychoanalyst’s couch, the Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot makes an excellent start.

The former Brazilian ambassador to Nigeria, Poland, Norway, and Israel, J. O. de Meira Penna is president of the Instituto Liberal de Brasilia and the author of several books on political theory and Jungian social analysis.