Mirrors (49 page)

The architecture of death is a specialty of the military.

In 1977 the Uruguayan dictatorship erected a gravestone in memory of José Artigas.

This enormous structure was a high-class prison: word had it that the hero might escape, a century and a half after his death.

To decorate the mausoleum and dissemble the intention, the dictatorship wanted to cover it with sayings from the founding father. But the man who had led the first agrarian reform in the Americas, the general who liked to be called “Citizen Artigas,” said that the most downtrodden should become the most privileged. He insisted that our rich patrimony should never be sold off at the low price imposed by need. And he repeated again and again that his authority emanated from the people and did not extend beyond them.

The military found not a single quotation that would not prove dangerous.

They decided Artigas had been mute.

The walls of black marble feature nothing but dates and names.

TWO TRAITORS

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento despised José Artigas. No one else did he hate so much. “Traitor to his race,” he called him, and it was true. Artigas, though white and blue-eyed, fought alongside mestizo gauchos and blacks and Indians. And he was defeated and went into exile, and he died in solitude and oblivion.

Sarmiento was also a traitor to his race. Just look at his portraits. At war with what he saw in the mirror, he preached and practiced the extermination of dark-skinned Argentineans and their replacement by blue-eyed Europeans. And he was president of his country, a torch-bearer of civilization, covered in glory and accolades, immortal hero.

CONSTITUTIONS

The main avenue in Montevideo is called “18 de julio” to honor the day the constitution of Uruguay was born. And the stadium where the very first soccer World Cup was played was built to commemorate the centenary of that foundational document.

The Magna Carta of 1830, identical to the constitution planned for Argentina, denied citizenship to women, the illiterate, slaves, and anyone who was “a paid servant, a day laborer, or a rank and file soldier.” Only one out of ten Uruguayans had the right to be a citizen of the new country, and 95 percent of the population did not vote in the first elections.

So it was throughout the Americas, from north to south. All our countries were born of a lie. Independence disowned those who had risked their lives fighting for her, and women, poor people, Indians, and blacks were not invited to the party. The constitutions draped that travesty in the prestige of legality.

Bolivia took a hundred and eighty-one years to discover that it was a country made up mostly of Indians. The revelation occurred in 2006 when Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian, was elected president by an avalanche of votes.

That same year Chile found out that half of all Chileans are female, and Michelle Bachelet became president.

AMERICA ACCORDING TO HUMBOLDT

When the nineteenth century was taking its first baby steps, Alexander von Humboldt entered America and revealed its innards. Years later, he wrote:

• On social classes:

Mexico is the country of inequality. The monstrous inequality in rights and riches is striking. The greater or lesser degree of whiteness of skin decides the rank which man occupies in society.

• On slaves:

In no place does one feel so ashamed to be European as in the Antilles, be it the French, British, Dutch, or Spanish ones. To discuss which country treats the blacks better is like choosing between being stabbed and being skinned alive.

• On Indians:

Among all religions, none masks human unhappiness like the Christian religion. Whoever visits the ill-fated Americans living under the priests’ lash will never again want to learn anything about Europeans and their theocracy.

• On the expansion of the United States:

The North Americans’ conquests disgust me. I wish them the worst in tropical Mexico. Much better would it be if they stayed home instead of spreading their insane slavery.

ORIGIN OF ECOLOGY

That strange and valiant German was concerned about sustainable development long before it came to be called that. Everywhere he went he was astounded by the diversity of the natural world and horrified by how little respect it commanded.

On the island of Uruana in the Orinoco River, Humboldt noticed that the Indians left behind a good part of the eggs the turtles laid on the beach so that reproduction would continue. But he saw that the Europeans did not follow that wise custom, and warned their greed would endanger a rich resource that nature had placed within reach.

Why was the level of Venezuela’s Lake Valencia falling? Because the native forest had been leveled to make way for colonial plantations. Humboldt said the old trees had delayed the evaporation of rainwater, prevented soil erosion, and kept the rivers and lakes in harmonious balance. The murder of those trees was the cause of the merciless droughts and relentless floods:

“It is not just Lake Valencia,” he said. “All the region’s rivers are drying up. The mountains are deforested because the European colonists cut down the trees. The rivers are dry for much of the year, and when it rains in the mountains they become torrents that destroy the fields.”

MAP ERASED

One evening in 1867 the Brazilian ambassador pinned the Grand Crucifix of the Imperial Order of the Cross on the chest of Bolivia’s dictator Mariano Melgarejo. Melgarejo had the habit of giving away chunks of the country in return for medals or horses. That evening his eyes welled up with tears and, then and there, he gave the ambassador sixty-five thousand square kilometers of rubber-rich Bolivian jungle. With that gift, plus another two hundred thousand square kilometers seized by force, Brazil got all Bolivia’s trees that cried tears of rubber for the world market.

In 1884 Bolivia lost another war, this time against Chile. They called it the War of the Pacific, but it was the Saltpeter War. Saltpeter, a vast carpet of brilliant whiteness, was the fertilizer most coveted by Europe’s farmers and a key input for the military industry. John Thomas North, a British businessman who at parties liked to dress up as Henry VIII, polished off all the saltpeter that had belonged to Peru and Bolivia. Chile won the war, and he picked up the spoils. Peru lost a great deal, as did Bolivia, deprived of an outlet to the sea, four hundred kilometers of coastline, four ports, seven bays, and one hundred and twenty thousand square kilometers of desert rich in saltpeter.

But this many-times-mutilated country was not formally erased from the map until a diplomatic incident occurred in La Paz.

Maybe it happened or maybe not. I’ve been told the story many times and this is how it goes: Melgarejo, the drunken dictator, welcomed the representative of England by offering him a glass of
chicha
, a fermented corn liquor that was and remains the national drink. The diplomat thanked him and praised
chicha
’s virtues, but said he would prefer hot chocolate. So the president kindly served him an immense jug of hot chocolate filled to the brim. He held the ambassador prisoner throughout the night until he finished the last drop of that punishment, and at dawn he was paraded about town sitting backward on a mule.

When Queen Victoria heard the story in Buckingham Palace, she asked for a map of the world. She then asked where the hell Bolivia was, crossed the country out with a piece of chalk, and passed sentence:

“Bolivia does not exist.”

MAP GOBBLED

Between 1833 and 1855 Antonio López de Santa Anna was president of Mexico eleven times.

During that period Mexico lost Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and a good chunk of Colorado and Wyoming.

For the modest sum of fifteen million dollars, and a number never counted of Indian and mestizo soldiers killed, Mexico was reduced by half.

The dismemberment began in Texas, called Tejas back then. There, slavery had been outlawed. Sam Houston led the invasion that reestablished it.