Land of Jekyll and Hyde
by Carlos Fuentes, March 22, 1986
The Nation magazine
edited by Katerina Vanden Heuvel
Thunder's Mouth Press, 1990, paper
Much of Carlos Fuentes' life has been closely bound to the
United States, but his perspective is uniquely international.
He was born in Washington, where his father was a member of the
diplomatic corps. In the 1950s he worked in Mexico's Foreign Ministry
and later served as Mexican Ambassador to France. He is the author
of several novels, including Terra Nostra, The Old Gringo and
most recently, Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins. In 1984
he won Mexico's National Prize in Literature.
The perception of the United States in Latin America has undergone
enormous variations ever since history brought us together as
inevitable neighbors. The American Revolution inspired our own
founding fathers to draw political legitimacy from revolt. The
Constitution of the United States became the model for our own
republics, but the limitations proved to be fictional ones, whereby
a legal country disguised a real country. Latin American conservatives
in the early nineteenth century were the militant foes of the
United States. They saw it as an uncompromisingly revolutionary
state, unwilling to reach any kind of conciliation with exiled
Tories, ready to repel their contra attacks and to send them expeditiously
to face firing squads.
Latin American conservatives saw the United States as a multiple
menace to their interests: it was a Protestant power in the hemisphere,
and it was a modernizing, democratic, capitalist and egalitarian
power. Those were the worst sins in the conservative book, where
virtue spelled Catholicism, Counter Reformation, royal absolutism,
the divine right of kings, patrimonialism and privilege. But most
of all, conservatives from Mexico to Argentina feared the expansionist
policies of the new American republic.
They were soon joined in this fear by Latin American liberals,
who initially identified with all those U.S. virtues that the
conservatives regarded as vices. But the annexation of Texas and
the entire Southwest after the Mexican War of 1846, and the interventionist
policies following the Spanish-American War of 1898, convinced
liberals that the conservatives were right: the gringos were the
Admiration changed to fear and fault finding. At the turn
of the century most Latin Americans readily adopted the views
expressed in "Ariel," the enormously influential essay
by the Uruguayan writer Jose Enrique Rodo. The United States stands
for progress and material achievements, Rodo wrote, but it is
a barren spiritual landscape. Cultural primacy in this hemisphere
belongs to the Latins, who may be materially poor but are spiritually
rich. The brutality of U.S. interventions in Nicaragua, Mexico,
Haiti, Honduras, Cuba and the Dominican Republic during the first
three decades of this century magnified and justified this attitude.
I believe that, by and large, it was my generation that upset
Rodo's perception. Pablo Neruda had sung with and to Whitman;
Octavio Paz made us conscious of Pound, Cummings and Crane, whom
he translated. Julio Cortazar not only translated the complete
stories of Poe; he brought jazz to Latin America. Gabriel Garcia
Marquez proclaimed his admiration for Hemingway and Faulkner,
and Jorge Luis Borges translated the Wild Palms in 1956. I wrote
on Melville and movies. And indeed, a great deal of the work of
Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Manuel Puig is an ironic extension
of the Hollywood dream.
Having grown up in the United States, I was willing and able,
in spite of catcalls from my compatriots, to praise the democratic
process of the United States, its capacities for self-criticism,
self-government, self-negotiation, even self-flagellation and
self-consciousness. In the New Deal era I witnessed the best in
the United States: the value it set on its human capital, its
energy and enthusiasm for solving problems, its choice of dialogue
instead of confrontation on Latin American issues. When the United
States joined the effort to win World War II, Roosevelt's noninterventionist
policies in Latin America had already won the support of most
of the people there. We were finally willing to admit that there
was a conjunction of the actions and the ideals of the North Americans.
This illusion has been painfully shattered over the past thirty
years. Two democratically elected governments in this hemisphere-Guatemala's
in 1954 and Chile's in 1973-were overthrown with the full connivance
of U.S. administrations. Who could then believe that the United
States truly favored the democratic process in the continent?
Washington placed two indigenous Latin American revolutions-Cuba's
in 1959 and Nicaragua's in 1979-in the context of the East-West
conflict and then forced them to live up to that self-fulfilling
prophecy. The lesson was clearly understood by Latin Americans:
the United States does not care about democracy in Latin America.
It worries more about the independence of formerly dependent Latin
American republics and will risk anything- including the stability
of other, friendly republics-to realign its client states.
The perversion of language that accompanies this perversion
of politics is best illustrated by Reagan's rhetoric on the Nicaraguan
contras. By calling them "freedom fighters" and "the
moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers," he may hoodwink
members of Congress and part of the media, but he merely reminds
Latin Americans that the contras are paid and manipulated by the
United States government, that they are recruited and commanded
by Somoza's former National Guardsmen and that they are criminals
who not only kill Nicaraguan farmers, women and children but are
also particularly adept at killing one another. Their internal
brutality is perfectly documented by Christopher Dickey in his
recent book, With the Contras.
So we are left with this final image of the United States:
a democracy inside but an empire outside; Dr. Jekyll at home,
Mr. Hyde in Latin America.
We will continue to praise the democratic achievements and
the cultural values of the society of the United States. But we
will continue to oppose its arrogant and violent policies in Latin
America. We will do so painfully, because we love so many things
in the United States. We will not confuse the United States and
the Soviet Union, or indeed accept their moral equivalence. The
problem is far more tragic: the Russians act as an empire inside
and outside. They are perfectly coherent. The United States, by
acting like the Russians in its sphere of influence, becomes profoundly
incoherent and hypocritical.
Latin Americans must not simply ship Mr. Hyde back to Washington.
We must defeat him in his old stamping grounds, the Caribbean
and Central America. Then we can all sit down and talk with Dr.
Jekyll, his alter ego having been exorcised by his friends in
from The Nation magazine,1865-1990