Chilean Déjà vu?

If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave
 —Chilean president-elect Gabriel Boric upon being elected on Sunday

Is history repeating itself in the Land of Poets?

In Chile’s 1970 presidential election, the choice was narrowed down to extremes on the left and right. There was a popular, moderate incumbent president (a Christian Democrat), but under the constitution in effect at the time he was not allowed to run for re-election. Instead, his party’s standard-bearer was a weak candidate, so the choice boiled down to right and left. In those days Congress determined the winner of the three-man race, and the Christian Democrats threw their support to socialist Salvador Allende. His election was followed by three years of instability caused by (depending on your point of view) either Allende’s radical reforms and policies or by his opponents’ overreaction to them. In 1973 he was overthrown by a military coup, and a junta ruled the country for the next 17 years.

Superficially, something similar to 1970 seems to have just happened again. But there are key differences. Under a different constitution—one written originally under the Pinochet dictatorship—a first-round presidential election on November 21 drew several candidates from a variety of parties across the political spectrum. The largest single vote-getter was the Republican Party’s far-right nominee José Antonio Kast with 27.91 percent of the vote. Not far behind was the far-left candidate of Apruebo Dignidad (an alliance whose name means “I approve of dignity”) Gabriel Boric with 25.72 percent. Given the overall makeup of the first-round voting and the opinion polls, it was no surprise that, in the second-round vote held this past Sunday, Boric was the winner—although the margin of his victory (more than 11 percent) was indeed notable.

Boric’s party is the left-wing Social Convergence, and his coalition has the support of Chile’s Communist Party. Do we need to worry about a right-wing reaction as happened in 1973? Probably not. One major difference between Boric and Allende is that Boric actually received a majority mandate from voters. Perhaps even more significant is that there has been a huge generational shift in Chile. Protests in the streets in 2019 led to the election of a Constitutional Convention after a plebiscite in which 78 percent of voters chose to replace the country’s current charter. Given the makeup of the elected convention, the new constitution will be much more leftist-oriented than any in the country’s history.

Sometimes it helps us North Americans to draw comparisons between the United States and other countries. For example, we might say that electing Gabriel Boric as president of Chile would be comparable to Americans electing… who? Bernie Sanders? Elizabeth Warren? Comparisons like that are not ideal because, for one thing, what is considered left-wing in the U.S. is often much different than what the label represents in other countries. For another thing (and to be unkind) Sanders is as old as dirt, and Warren is no spring chicken either. It is a strange feature of U.S. politics these days that the American political duopoly keeps throwing up geriatric candidates to the voters. As a result, the de facto leaders of America’s left in government are dinosaurs from another age.

This is not the case with Gabriel Boric. At 35, he barely met the minimum age qualification to run for president. A former student leader while studying law at the University of Chile, he was in the forefront of the protests leading to the Constitutional Convention. He and those around him are of an entirely new generation which sees the world much differently than their parents and grandparents did. While the appeal and lure of socialism have long tantalized certain segments of previous generations, anyone who spends much time around young people these days knows that as a political philosophy it is much more mainstream among that age group than it has ever been before.

During his campaign, Boric repeatedly promised to “bury neoliberalism,” i.e. free-market capitalism. That is unsettling for those of us who associate free markets with democracy and personal freedom. On the positive side, though, he cites as his models Europe’s Nordic countries (which are firmly capitalistic, despite what some may think) and Uruguay—as opposed to Fidel Castro’s Cuba, which was Allende’s model.

Decades from now, will Chileans be happy with their political choice? Maybe. Maybe not. In any event, they will at least know it was their own choice and not, as in North America, a legacy bequeathed them by elderly leaders who will by then be long gone.

Hand of God

Note: This particular entry is being cross-posted on both my book and expat blogs.

Because of my personality type, I find myself compulsively scanning newspaper headlines from several different countries on a daily basis. Usually, there is a logical degree of variation, from country to country, as to what lands on the front pages. Sometimes, though, the same news dominates the front page everywhere. Normally, that tends to happen only there has been a major disaster of some kind or a particularly dramatic development in the United States. Sometimes it is the death of someone famous.

Rarely have I seen such uniformity in top headlines as I have seen today on the covers of papers in Ireland, the UK, the rest of Europe, Chile, Peru, the rest of Latin America and even the US. It is a testimony to the unifying power of the sport of soccer that the top story everywhere was the sudden death of Argentine soccer god Diego Maradona of an apparent heart attack at the age of 60.

I say “even the US” because soccer does not have quite the hold in my own country as it does in the rest of the world. This is despite the fact that many of us would have played the sport in our youth and would be quite familiar with the rules. Certain countries, i.e. the ones that use the word “soccer” (the US, Canada, Australia, Ireland), have their own homegrown sports they call “football.” Most everywhere else, though, that word and its variants (fútbol, le foot, fußball) refer to what is universally called “the beautiful game.” While Maradona’s demise was widely reported in the US, he did not make the front pages of, for example, The Bakersfield Californian or The Seattle Times. He did make the front page of The New York Times, though well below the fold. He likely would have made the front page of The Wall Street Journal, but that paper does not publish on Thanksgiving. (Happy Thanksgiving, by the way, my fellow Americans.)

An impressive number of papers made a playful reference to God’s hands in their headlines, as exemplified by the UK’s Daily Express: “RIP: The eternal, flawed genius… now safe in the hands of God.” These are all not-so-subtle references to a famous/notorious goal he scored in Mexico City on June 22, 1986. It was in a quarter-finals match between Argentina and England. The goal should not have counted because Maradona used his hand. In fact, he should have received a yellow card for the infraction. Amazingly, no referee had a clear view, so the goal was allowed. Combined with a subsequent Maradona goal, it meant a 2-1 victory for the Argentines.

Afterwards, Maradona proclaimed that his first goal of the match had come thanks to “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God.” The goal was henceforth known as the “Hand of God” goal. The second one became known as the “Goal of the Century.”

In Asif Kapadia’s documentary Diego Maradona, released last year, the soccer titan drew a link between that win over England and the Falklands War a few years earlier: “We, as Argentinians, didn’t know what the military was up to. They told us that we were winning the war. But in reality, England was winning 20‑0. It was tough. The hype made it seem like we were going to play out another war. I knew it was my hand. It wasn’t my plan but the action happened so fast that the linesman didn’t see me putting my hand in. The referee looked at me and he said: ‘Goal.’ It was a nice feeling like some sort of symbolic revenge against the English.”

Maradona’s passing comes at a time when his life and career and even the Falklands War are all fresh in my mind. That is because the la Guerra de las Malvinas, as the Argentines called that conflict, is a plot element in Searching for Cunégonde, and there is even a reference to the soccer player in the novel. In Chapter 14 our hero Dallas’s search for his long-missing friend Antonio leads him and his new British friend Donal to Mendoza, Argentina, and to a man named Alberto. To keep their quest from ending in failure, they need to gain the wary Alberto’s confidence. It appears that the pair have run out of luck until, by chance, Donal and Alberto discover a mutual bond over their passion for international football.

“There is a young Argentine player you need to watch out for,” says Alberto. “He is only twenty years old, but he is already better than George Best ever was. Listen to my words. Remember the name Maradona.”

Indeed, at that point Maradona had wrapped up five years playing for a club called Argentinos Juniors and around that time signed a contract worth US$4 million with Boca Juniors. At not quite 16 years old, he had become the youngest player ever in the history of the Primera División. He had scored 115 goals in 167 appearances. Early on he was dubbed el Pibe de Oro (the golden kid). So Alberto did not need to be a gifted prophet to see Maradona’s bright future all the way back in 1981. What he probably did not foresee was the star’s later life beset by addictions and health problems.

Sadly, I will now never get the chance—as if I was ever likely to—to ask the great man if he was at all flattered to be featured in my novel. I suppose there is still hope, though, to someday ask actor Rob Lowe what he thought of his brief mention.

In the end Dallas and Donal get the information seek from Alberto, so at least that part of their quest is successful. As Dallas narrates, “I continued thanking him as he walked us back to the street. Locking the gate after us, he said to Donal, ‘Remember my words, Gringo! Watch out for Maradona!’ ”

Prescient words indeed.

Expat Literary Hero

 They began to raise their voices.
 «Now we have a Fascist dictatorship!»
 «Instead of a Communist one!»
 People sitting near us looked uncomfortable. As for me, I was becoming, strangely and unexpectedly, aroused.
  —Excerpt from Chapter 11 of Searching for Cunégonde

There is something empowering about writing fiction. When you pen a novel, you experience the illusion of being God. You create people. You make them do what you want. You have total control of their fates. You can bestow them with good fortune or you can punish them with senseless tragedy. Their destinies are pretty much literally in your hands.

In practice, it doesn’t really feel that way. Characters—even ones you create yourself—have a way of taking on lives of their own. I think most authors have the strange experience of finding they are channeling their characters rather than controlling them. Your own characters sometimes do things you did not plan or want. Events sometimes take a turn you didn’t see coming when you started out.

These are interesting things to ponder but are probably best left for my book blog where I announced this week the publication of my fifth novel Searching for Cunégonde. More pertinent to this space is the fact that, when one writes a story set in a particular time and place, one is generally constrained by real-world events and situations.

The new book continues the adventures of Dallas Green, the protagonist of Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead and Lautaro’s Spear. More pertinent to this space is the background provided by the real world to his story. In all three books, he is a picaresque hero journeying through the strange world in which he finds himself. The first novel was set in 1971, the time of the Vietnam War, the military draft in the U.S., and political unrest in Central America. The second book took place in 1980, the year of a U.S. presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan’s election, the sixth Deauville American Film Festival, and a constitutional referendum in Chile.

The new tome splits its narrative mainly between two different time periods. One strand picks up directly after the end of Lautaro’s Spear in December 1980 and proceeds through the following year. These bits alternate with events in the year 1993. This larger scope allowed me to draw in all sorts of historical references. Dallas experiences several weeks of comfortable living under the Pinochet dictatorship as well as venturing into Argentina, also governed by a military junta. There is then a return to California which not only provides a contrast between South and North America but also an implicit comparison between the rural San Joaquin Valley and the suburbs of the Bay Area. Indeed there are a number of contrasts drawn in this story, for example two very different funerals in two very distinct cultures.

By the time this leg of Dallas’s journey ends, he has become all too acquainted with the violent latter days of Ireland’s Troubles. He has also become a nearly unwitting participant in the bad old days of the Cold War, and he even gets to witness the single most symbolic moment of the fall of Communism.

If I have made Dallas’s exploits sound as if they are all about politics, then I have misled you. In this book, as in the others, the heart of the story is really in the friendships. There is some romance as well, or at least as much romance as a neo-Lost-Generation baby-boomer can manage in a cynical world. He finds himself in bed with an interesting array of lovers and not-quite lovers.

At one point someone compares him to the hero of Voltaire’s Candide, thus tipping my hand. That is how I have always seen him—someone more or less politically innocent, wandering the world with wide eyes and bearing witness to the strangeness and wonder of the wider world.

Appropriately enough for this blog, in the course of this novel Dallas becomes an expat. I tried to capture at least a bit of the disorientation that comes with adjusting to a different culture and functioning in a different language. In the end, though, the goal was always to entertain. Mainly to entertain myself, but in the hope that others might be inadvertently entertained as well.

The paperback edition of Searching for Cunégonde is available from major online booksellers, including Amazon and Barnes and Noble. The digital version is available from Amazon’s Kindle store, Barnes and Noble’s Nook store, Kobo, Google Play and Apple iBooks. For those links and other information, kindly consult my book blog.

Tory Tide

“The trouble with socialism is that it would take too many evenings.”
 —Oscar Wilde, on the potential time drain of central planning

Way back in 2013 (that’s six years ago, for those not completely awake) some lazy blogger chanced his arm by bringing up an article in The Economist magazine about political trends among young people in Britain.

“The writer concludes,” wrote this blogger, “by describing how he spoke to young people of varying backgrounds, regions and levels of political engagement and asked if there were any politicians that appealed to them. ‘The reaction was strikingly uniform,’ he writes, ‘silence, then contemplation, then a one-word answer—“Boris”—before a flood of agreement: “Oh yeah, I’d vote for Boris Johnson.” The chaotic, colourful mayor of London, a rare politician who transcends his Tory identity by melding social and economic liberalism, appears to have Britain’s libertarian youth in the bag. The 2020 election beckons.’ ”

Did I mention that was written six years ago? Well, fair play to the staff writer who penned that prescient Economist piece and, especially, to the insightful blogger who highlighted it. (Yes, ’twas I.)

In fairness, it was not a perfect forecast. The election was held in December of 2019, not 2020. More importantly, while Johnson’s brand of classic (as opposed to modern) liberalism was undoubtedly a factor, it was not the main thing about him that propelled his party to one of the most decisive and unanticipated victories in UK politics for quite some time.

What the magazine writer and the blogger could not have anticipated was that the almost-2020 election would be dominated by something called Brexit. In another country under other circumstances, the election could well have been a second referendum on whether Britain should really be leaving the European Union. Because of the quirkiness of the UK political system, the choices felt more like a carnival con man’s shell game than a straightforward binary choice. The two major parties were each internally divided between Remainers and Brexiteers. The one viable and unambiguously pro-Remain party (the Liberal Democrats) should have been positioned to replace one of the major parties, but somehow it was led by a seemingly nice Scottish woman, who not only managed to alienate voters in general but who ended up losing her own seat in Parliament.

If you were a Remainer who couldn’t stomach the Lib Dems, then your logical choice should have been Labour, whose position was to promise a second referendum and thus a chance to reverse the 2016 referendum that kicked off the Brexit process in the first place. Yet Labour’s vote fell way, way below the number of Remain votes three years ago, and in fact, Labour was routed worse than has happened for decades. Had that many people been won over to the Brexit side? Doubtful.

For his part Johnson, upon taking over Conservative Party leadership from the hapless Theresa May in July, was bedeviled by divisions in his own party. That plus successful machinations by other parties meant that his only hope of achieving an orderly Brexit was to win a decisive Tory majority. He succeeded smashingly.

How did he do it? For one thing, he went head-to-head with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in promising to spend shed-loads of government money. More importantly, though, he relentlessly and tirelessly repeated one single, simple message over and over and over: Get Brexit Done.

Unlike Labour, whose leader did his best to avoid talking about Brexit or to even take a personal position on it (he voted to leave the EU in 2016), voters had a clear idea what they were voting for with the Conservatives. The “Get Brexit Done” mantra was inspired in that, while obviously sitting well with Brexit supporters, it also had an appeal for the mass of voters who, after three years, just wanted the whole mess finally ended, one way or another.

There is another major contributing factor to Labour’s disastrous performance—one which Joe Biden was quick to seize upon in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in the States. Since the departure of Ed Miliband as Labour leader four years ago, the party has been permeated and controlled by the far left. Corbyn’s life and career have been devoted to socialism and left-wing causes, including violent insurgents such as the Irish Republican Army. Despite the state of lawlessness and extra-constitutional rule in Venezuela, he has yet to denounce or even criticize Nicolás Maduro’s regime. If he had become prime minister, the country could have looked forward to a wave of high taxes and wholescale nationalizations.

Particularly troubling have been the defections and internal criticism within the party itself having to do with Corbyn’s tolerance for a growing anti-Semite element. The situation got so bad that Britain’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis took the unusual step of publicly speaking out.

We seem to be in an age where political parties strive to cast their opponents as not just wrong on policy but as illegitimate and disqualified from even holding office. We see this approach in the U.S. with the Democrats’ impeachment proceedings and in the Republican response. Dems say it is not safe to leave the president in office for the eleven months until the next election. The GOP suggests that one-party partisan impeachment is a sign that Democrats themselves are anti-democratic.

In Boris Johnson’s case, he did not have to invent an opposition that was virtually disqualified from governing. Could one or other of the American parties next year find itself in a similar situation?

October Rising

In the late 1970s I spent a year living and studying in Chile. Ever since, I have followed news from that country with great interest, and to this day, I maintain contact with some of the people I knew there.

You might think that this would mean I have some insight into the country’s current turmoil, yet I am totally perplexed and not certain exactly what to think about it. I guess this should not be surprising. After all, I was born and have lived most of my life in the United States, and yet current events in that country are completely baffling to me. The funny thing is that I know many people who have never lived in U.S. who are absolutely much more certain about what is going on there than I am. Go figure.

Chile's then-unused La Moneda presidential palace in 1977

Here are some things that I do know about Chile. (Conveniently, I have lately been revisiting many of my old memories, as the novel I am currently writing has a couple of chapters set in Santiago in the early 1980s.) Unlike much of the rest of Latin America, throughout its history Chile has mostly been a stable country with a truly democratic political system. There have been, however, periods where this was not true. Between 1927 and 1931 General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo headed an authoritarian government. In 1973 General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government of Salvador Allende and led a military dictatorship that lasted until 1990.

My own personal first-hand experience with the country was during the early years of the Pinochet regime. Even though it was a dictatorship and there was a suspension of many civil liberties, I did get a clear sense of the divisions in Chilean society. Supporters of the government, that is to say, conservatives were quite vocal about their views. Alternative views were, not surprisingly, less forthcoming, but non-supporters of the regime were more than willing to share their opinions once I gained their confidence. What was striking were the completely disparate accounts of what life had been like a mere couple of years earlier under Allende’s government. It was difficult to believe that people were all actually talking about the same country. What was consistently clear, though, was that there was much turmoil. In the early 1970s the middle classes were out in the streets and banging their pots on their apartment balconies in protest of the left-wing government. Under Pinochet, of course, there were no protests, and a military night-time curfew ensured no one was out late at night.

What do we know about the current series of protests? We know they began as a student-led protest against an increase in fares of the Santiago subway system and that they then exploded into violence that included looting, vandalism, arson, and fatalities. One million people turned out which works out to about one out of every seven Santiago residents. As a result, conservative President Sebastián Piñera declared a state of emergency and then initiated a government shake-up.

The city center of Santiago in 1977

Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady notes the irony that this has happened at a time when Chile’s economic statistics are very positive. The official poverty rate has recently declined to under 9 percent, down from 68 percent in 1990. Furthermore, public transportation is heavily subsidized, and student fares were not actually affected by the recent increase. As a way of explanation, she cites a heavy leftist influence in Chilean schools to explain the young’s readiness to take to the streets. She also points to Cuban and Venezuelan influences.

Is it a paradox that instability should strike Chile when it is doing better economically than its neighbors? No. There was strong growth in the post-Pinochet 1990s, but in this century the middle class has seen its fortunes slip with rising prices and stagnant wages. Also, Piñera (who last year succeeded Socialist Michelle Bachelet as president) is one of the wealthiest people in the country and so makes a convenient target for student protestors. Objective commentary on the ground there suggests that the people’s grievances are real and justified while at the same time being exploited by the hard political left. Some also talk about intellectual and political laziness of millennials fed by materialism born of the years of economic prosperity.

Where will all of this lead? I for one do not have a clue. The political hard right had its way with an authoritarian hand for the better of two decades in the last century.

Is the hard left now gearing up for its turn?

Democracy’s Fraying Fabric?

“[T]he difference between Republicans and Democrats? Republicans know they’re right; Democrats entertain the possibility that they might be wrong… And that’s why you see liberals drawn to the arts because it’s more of an open-minded type of thing.”
 —Filmmaker/actor Rob Reiner, speaking to Laura Ingraham on her Fox News Channel show, January 21 

“While #Liberals scream about the 50’s blacklist, my #Repub actor friends are terrified of losing their ability to provide for their families”
 —Tweet from actor James Woods, August 22

Last June I made an admittedly unlikely comparison between President Trump and former Chilean president Salvador Allende. My point was not that the two men were anything at all alike in their politics or their character. Rather, the similarity was in how, from the moment each came to power, the entrenched political establishments of their respective countries immediately began working to cleanse the system of the unwanted interloper.

It turns out that I am not the only one to whom it occurred to draw a parallel between Chile in the early 1970s and the United States in the late 2010s. A couple of months ago a book called How Democracies Die was published. The authors are Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, professors of Government at Harvard University. Their tome is clearly meant to be a stark warning. The book’s cover consists entirely of its alarming title in large white letters on an intensely black background. In the introduction they write, “[I]n 2016, for the first time in U.S. history, a man with no experience in public office, little observable commitment to constitutional rights, and clear authoritarian tendencies was elected president. What does all this mean? Are we living through the decline and fall of one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies?” So we definitely know at the very outset where the authors are coming from.

Their approach is to examine failed democracies—notably Europe in the 1920s and 1930s and Latin America in the 1970s—and look for warning signs that can flag dangers to democratic institutions. In the first chapter, they list the four main warning signs—rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game, denial of the legitimacy of political opponents, toleration or encouragement of violence, and readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media. They emphasize the importance of shared understandings among all sides about what is and is not acceptable, calling these understandings “the guardrails of democracy.” They point out that some of “history’s most tragic democratic breakdowns were preceded by the degrading of basic norms,” giving Chile under Allende as an example. After his election, partisan hostility intensified—exacerbated by the fact that Allende had won with only 36 percent of the popular vote and had no majority in Congress. His opponents dug in, in a way that one might call The Resistance, while Allende found inventive ways to implement his policies that did not require legislative votes. Thus Chile’s guardrails of democracy failed, and “the military seized power. Chileans, who had long prided themselves on being South America’s most stable democracy, succumbed to dictatorship.”

Levitsky and Ziblatt see a similar situation in Trump’s first year as president. While their thesis is that breakdown occurs because of failure on both sides of a political divide, they mostly find fault with the president. Interestingly, though, their indictment of him relies more heavily on his rhetoric than on his actions. They tend to assume that the president actually means—and would act on—every utterance and tweet. So far, at least in my estimation, his behavior has been much more moderate and conventional than his all-too-numerous off-the-cuff statements and infamous late-night tweets. For example, while Trump’s rhetoric about building a wall is highly provocative, the notion of enhanced border security was entirely mainstream just a few years ago. His aggressiveness on tariffs has economists and journalists in a tizzy, but in the last presidential election no candidate (including Hillary Clinton) was defending major free-trade agreements.

The authors’ solution for reining in the president and saving democracy requires Republicans to hold him in check and for voters in general to withhold support. While Democrats do not escape criticism, it is clear the writers consider Republicans most responsible for the nation’s polarized state. They seem to consider the mere fact of Trump being in office as a democratic failure. But look again at their four warning signs. Weak commitment to democratic rules? President Obama had many executive orders overturned by the courts, suggesting he was not entirely immune to the same temptation to inventiveness as Allende. Trump too has been rebuked by courts, mainly because of his immigrant ban, but to date he has always respected the courts’ rulings. Denial of legitimacy of political opponents? Democrats and the press have been casting doubts on the validity of Trump’s election since November. There has been persistent talk of impeachment and/or declaring the president medically incompetent, sounding not unlike the urging for a coup. Toleration of violence? Curtailing civil liberties of opponents? Of people invited to give a political speeches on campuses these days, the ones more likely to need security—or have their speech canceled due to safety fears—tend to be conservative. Yes, you can find examples on the other side as well, but that is my point—and ostensibly Levitsky and Ziblatt’s as well: the democratic breakdown involves all sides, not just one.

In the end, the authors run into the same problem in the academic debate as do participants in the political debate. It is impossible to present yourself as an unassailable authority or a reasonable arbiter when you so clearly identify with one of the sides. And you always wind up putting the onus of responsibility on the other guy.

Looking Back, Literarily

A legendary reclusive filmmaker. An enigmatic cook and restaurant proprietor, who is clearly more than he seems. Two mysterious deliveries to be made behind the Iron Curtain. A desperate search for a long-missing old friend. An unexpected love affair on the coast of Normandy. Dallas Green’s life has only gotten more interesting in the years since his wild youthful adventure in Mexico, as told in the novel Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead. In the year 1980, he is now a photographer, living and working in San Francisco, where he adjusts to a world very different from that of his rural roots. He may be older, but that does not necessarily mean he is any wiser, as his continuing romantic misadventures attest. Lautaro’s Spear is Scott R. Larson’s third book, following the fantasy novel The Three Towers of Afranor.
 —Blurb on various web sites that are, or will soon be, selling my new book

Yes, this means that another book is done and dusted. Officially, the release date is September 29, but I see the Kindle version is available already from Amazon’s US site. Other digital and paper versions should follow shortly. Links to the various sellers around the globe will be updated on my book blog, so check there if you are interested.


Unlike the last book, this one takes place in the real world. Well, at least in a world as real as what goes on inside my head. The year is 1980, and the action moves from San Francisco to France to Germany and back again. This is a sequel to Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead and follows the progress of that book’s misguided teenaged protagonist, Dallas Green, a few years later, as he negotiates his late twenties.

I sometimes regret making Dallas the narrator of these books. It is actually a lot of work to write in character for nearly 300 pages while, at the same time, keeping the prose halfway readable. The reason I wrote the original novel in the first person was that I saw the book as my own personal Huckleberry Finn. If Mark Twain could write in Huck’s dialect, well, then I could write in Dallas’s. Instead of a raft on the Mississippi, Dallas and his friend Lonnie explored the world from the vantage point of a ’65 Chevy traveling the roads of California and Mexico. In the new book, Dallas goes on another journey, but he is a bit older and, hopefully, wiser—although not that much wiser. He is still a bit innocent, so he can also be compared to another seminal literary character, Voltaire’s Candide. He is something of a blank slate when it comes to politics, and he finds himself a bit out of his depth as he wanders into different political and social environments.

For some readers of a certain age, I suppose it will be an exercise in nostalgia. For younger ones, I flatter myself in thinking it might be some sort of history lesson.

I hate it when writers try to impose their opinions about current events onto some past era, although I understand it is a very hard temptation to resist. Writing about America in the 1980s, I could have easily have been lured into drawing parallels between that year’s presidential election and the one that occurred last year—if only I could have actually made heads or tails out of what happened last year. The comparisons, though, wrote themselves anyway. History now looks back at Ronald Reagan very differently from the way many people now look at Donald Trump yet, before he was elected, Reagan was seen by many as quite scary and his election came as a genuine surprise. This is not to say that Reagan and Trump are by any means similar human beings or that Trump will ultimately be seen as successful as Reagan was, but it is worth trying to keep some long-term perspective while in the middle of day-to-day political passions.

If there is a political theme running beneath the surface of my novel, it is the way people tend to divide themselves politically, sometimes with disastrous consquences. Dallas’s journey not only involves the late 20th century culture wars in America but also the residual rift in Europe after World War II and how political divisions in South America led to horrible violence.

Well, look at me, trying to make my silly old book sound profound. I hope some interesting insights did slip into the story but, in the end, my tale is ultimately about how we—mainly young men—get into all kinds of devilment out of boredom, confusion, and just trying to make some sort of sense of this crazy world.

Bolivarian Oblivion

“What’s so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela is that I can see how a better world is being created … The transformations that Venezuela is making toward the creation of another socio-economic model could have a global impact”
 —Linguist/activist Noam Chomsky, in 2009

“These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger. Who’s the banana republic now?”
 —Senator Bernie Sanders, on his web site in 2011

“The election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.”
 —Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, in 2012

“[Venezuela president Hugo] Chavez showed us that there is a different and a better way of doing things. It’s called socialism, it’s called social justice and it’s something that Venezuela has made a big step towards.”
 —Soon-to-be UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, in 2013

“Venezuela’s problem isn’t too much socialism—it’s not enough. The country, whose former president Hugo Chavez proclaimed ‘21st century socialism’, is deep in crisis. It has the world’s highest inflation rate—720 percent and rising. Its currency has plummeted to less than 1 percent of its official value, making it hard to import food. Hunger is endemic. Buying food at subsidised shops where price controls operate involves queuing for four hours, only on certain days, and sometimes still getting nothing. Medicines and sanitary products are scarce. Chronic power blackouts have seen factories close and public sector workers move to a two-day week. Growing numbers are emigrating, or depend on products sent by relatives abroad.”
 —Dave Sewell, writing in the Socialist Worker last August

Politicians from all the British political parties—including Labour—have been condemning the chaos, violence and ongoing power grab in Venezuela by the country’s wanton president, Nicolás Maduro. Notably absent among them, though, is Labour’s leader Jeremy Corbyn. Members of his own party are urging him to speak up. He has not spoken publicly about Venezuela since praising Maduro two years ago. He did, however, recently delete a post from his web site praising Venezuela for “seriously conquering poverty by emphatically rejecting … Neo Liberal policies.” In Spain, by contrast, Socialist leader Pedro Sánchez has said he “strongly condemned the destruction of the democratic freedoms that is taking place in Venezuela.”

In Ireland a group representing Venezuelan citizens living here has gone on record as rejecting the Constituent Assembly whose members were elected on Sunday. The assembly, whose members will come exclusively from Maduro’s Socialist party, will be able to dissolve the congress, which is controlled by the political opposition but which has been stymied by Maduro’s authoritarianism and packing of the courts. A reported ten people died in violence that erupted from protests in the the Venezuelan streets on election day. Two opposition leaders, Leopoldo López and Antonio Ledezma, have been arrested in their homes.

In the interest of fairness, on its morning news program today, Ireland’s state broadcaster RTÉ interviewed a recently returned observer of Sunday’s election, Adrian Kane, who is an organizer for Ireland’s Services Industrial Professional and Technical Union (SIPTU). Kane defended the integrity of the vote—which has been criticized by other observers—citing glowing reports of past Venezuelan elections from The Carter Center and other organizations and saying that everything looked fine at the five polling stations he had visited.

He also dismissed the following comment on social media from Luis Rondon, one of five directors of the electoral council: “For the first time since I took up this commitment to the country, I cannot guarantee the consistency or veracity of the results offered.” The quote was from a Reuters report citing mathematical inconsistencies in internal electoral council data reviewed by Reuters and the 8.1-million-voter turnout reported by the government. Kane also seemed unaware that The Carter Center, which he had cited, had issued a statement which read, in part, “We condemn Sunday’s process to elect a National Constituent Assembly. The process was carried out in the complete absence of electoral integrity, posing serious problems of legitimacy, legality, and procedure. The measures taken by the government to prevent freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the right to peaceful demonstrations contravene the democratic values of plurality and the democratic and participatory clauses protected in the Venezuelan constitution.”

Kane blamed the violence entirely on the political opposition, saying it was “engaged in acts of terror” and calling the government response “restrained.” He accused the media of spreading a false narrative about Maduro wanting to be a dictator.

I can understand the allure that figures like Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez have for idealistic people who would like to see the world become more fair and just. The problem is that the cascading series of laws, rules and regulations necessary to enforce that fairness inevitably meet opposition from not only sectors of society that stand to lose but also from the very ones who are meant to be lifted up. More critically, as we see in Venezuela, the burden of government control invariably translates into bad economics and a lower standard of living, which mostly afflicts the less well off. The standard ideological response is to blame a colonial past and poverty. The problem for that excuse in Venezuela’s case is that the country is blessed with oil wealth that has been controlled by its own government. Apologists are left to mutter about a period of low oil prices.

Less understandable is why many, though by no means all, erstwhile admirers and defenders of Chávez and Maduro are so stubborn about conceding they made a mistake with their earlier praise. No one likes to advertise the fact they were wrong about something. That is only human nature. Still, it looks even worse to appear more concerned about your own ego than about people dying in the streets and about families suffering from economic deprivation for no good reason.

My guess is that the Corbyns of the world, along with the young starry-eyed idealists in the political trenches, will come around to condemning what’s happening in Venezuela—once they have found a way to rationalize an explanation that has nothing at all to do with the government-directed economic policies they themselves espouse.

Autoimmune Response

“ ‘Washington Post’ Reporter Frustrated Every Space In Parking Garage Taken Up By Anonymous Source”
 —Headline from The Onion, May 30

The improbable rise and election of Donald Trump has flummoxed people so badly that they struggle to find some comparable historical figure to help make sense of him. Quite a few of the more excitable ones quickly reached for the almost-always-inadvisable Hitler comparison, as well as fascists like Benito Mussolini. Some went for Argentina’s populist crook Juan Perón. Others likened President Trump to his putative bromance partner Vladimir Putin. I myself wrote in this blog of a potential similarity to Italy’s buffoonish media magnate Silvio Berlusconi.

Lately another comparison has occurred to me, and I am confident few others have thought of it—Chile’s Salvador Allende. Sounds nuts, right? Politically, two men could not be further apart. If you have any admiration at all for one of them, you will certainly have no time at all for the other.

The late Chilean president has been on my mind because my novel authoring efforts have again transported me back to South America in the early 1970s. (Yes, I have indeed seized upon a topic that allows me to plug my available-real-soon-now third book.) Events of that era in Chile figured into the plot of my first novel, Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead. They figure even more prominently in the sequel, which follows the further adventures of twentysomething Californian Dallas Green, who insists he is not interested in politics but keeps getting drawn into political situations anyway.

Indulge me with this Trump/Allende thing. First, let’s note the stark differences between them. Allende was a veteran politician and the head of a well-established political party, which was the Socialist Party. Trump is a businessman whose political views over time have been all over the map. His first ever elective office was president of the United States. He was elected on a platform that was pro-business and nationalistic. Allende, as a self-avowed Marxist, was very much into state control of the economy and spoke the language of international solidarity. The two are clearly poles apart ideologically—and that assumes Trump even has a real ideology.

So why do I see a correlation between the two? For one thing, both were presidents elected legally but by electoral minorities. Allende received just 36.6 percent of the popular vote, a slight purality ahead of Jorge Alessandri, the conservative independent candidate, who received 35.3 percent. The Chilean Congress functioned as an effective Electoral College, and the centrist Christian Democrats threw their votes to Allende. They came to regret that strategy. Nearly three years later they joined the rest of the political opposition to declare Allende’s presidency illegal. As for Trump, he of course won the Electoral College despite receiving only 46.1 percent of the popular vote.

In another parallel, both Allende and Trump caused alarm by perceived ties to foreign leaders. In Allende’s case, he was well known to be a personal friend of Fidel Castro. He was photographed several times holding an AK-47 Castro had given him as a gift. When the military came to oust him, he used that weapon to take his own life. (For years his supporters insisted he had been murdered, but eventually his family conceded that he had died by his own hand.) In Trump’s case, many observers were puzzled—if not outright unnerved—by the fact he was given to praising Vladimir Putin’s leadership and did not subject the Russian leader to the same outbursts he directed at most other world leaders. This hysteria continued to the point where Trump’s former campaign is being examined with an eye to possible collusion with the Russians and Trump himself has been reported to be a target for his possible interference.

The fundamental similarity between Trump and Allende is that each, in his own way, represented a threat to his society’s establishment. In Chile’s case, the conservative establishment—with support from the U.S. government—resisted him at every turn. Things reached a crisis when Congress condemned Allende for disregarding judicial rulings, ruling by decree, unlawfully confiscating land, and allowing his supporters to arm themselves while others were not so allowed. Three weeks later the military removed him and took control of the country.

In the current American case, it is the modern liberal establishment that cannot abide Trump. Talk of impeachment began before he was even inaugurated. From the outset, his administration has been undermined by a tide of leaks, not only from his own staff but from intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The leaking campaign extended as high as then-FBI director James Comey, who acknowledged in testimoney before Congress that he had leaked his version of a conversation with Trump with the (successful) intention of triggering a special counsel investigation. That investigation is headed by Comey’s personal friend and longtime colleague Robert Mueller. He has a sterling reputation, not unlike Comey’s, although Comey’s has suffered some since his recent testimony, where he came off more as an insider schemer than the boy scout had seemed before. As for Mueller, some are now looking askance at the fact that his hires for the probe are tending heavily toward those on record for having donated generously to Democratic candidates and political action committees. Moreover, the investigation is unusual in that, as far as I can remember anyway, it is the first one which is trying to establish whether a crime was actually committed as opposed to investigating a crime that has already been established as having been committed.

If there is one overriding similarity between Allende and Trump, it is that their presidencies both evoke the image of a foreign organism pushing its way into the body politic like a pathogen, causing a furious reaction from antibodies trying to ward off the infection. In Allende’s case, it was conservative society, businesses and the military that reacted. In Trump’s case, it is the Democratic party, the corporate media and, most of all, the legions of entrenched career government employees to whom some refer as the “deep state.”

What seems to be forgotten in the heated political environment is that, in a democracy, the political leader you revile was put there by millions of people. Allende may have been a threat to Chilean democracy, but he was supported by a large segment of the population. Many of his supporters wound up being imprisoned, tortured, killed or forced into exile.

What has gotten precious little acknowledgement since the U.S. election is the fact that nearly 63 million people voted for Donald Trump. Those voters had not seen their most serious concerns, fears and problems recognized and treated seriously by politicians of either major party. Rightly or wrongly, they tried to send a message by electing a president opposed by the establishments of both parties. If they turn on the news or pick up a newspaper—and who knows how many of them even bother anymore—what do they see?

Maybe some number of them read the president’s tweets and/or blogs sympathetic to him and still urge him on. Those who do not, on the other hand, must see little sign that their message in November was received or taken to heart by anyone in Washington or the corporate media.

Historical Precedents

“He praises dictators like Vladimir Putin and picks fights with our friends—including the British prime minister, the mayor of London, the German chancellor, the president of Mexico and the Pope.”
 —Hillary Clinton, criticizing Donald Trump in a speech on June 2

“Do I have a problem when a sitting secretary of State and a foundation run by her husband collects many, many dollars from foreign governments—governments which are dictatorships? Yeah, I do have a problem with that. Yeah, I do.”
 —Bernie Sanders, criticizing Hillary Clinton on CNN’s State of the Union on June 5

You cannot really call the current U.S. election campaign fun, but I do my best to find interesting or amusing bits where I can. Some things I enjoy are the various historical analogies people try to impose on the candidates.

Donald Trump in particular has been fertile ground for people reaching for historical comparisons. From the beginning a lot of people have likened him to the fascist leaders who rose in Europe in the 1930s, like Mussolini or, most provocatively, Hitler. I dealt with the Trump-as-fascist thing in this space seven months ago and do not have much reason to revise what I said then. He and his followers do not really fit the pattern of previous major fascist movements, which were characterized by heavy emphasis on detailed theory and ideology. Trump fits more in the populist mode which, to my mind anyway, usually involves an opportunist spotting a mob and running to get in front of it. Some people like to conflate fascism and populism, but populism is hard to pin to any particular ideology since it always focuses on whatever a large group of people are feeling disenfranchised about at a particular time. It often tends to be anti-globalist and anti-immigration but more out of an isolationist sentiment. That is different than the racism of Hitler, who used protection of ethnic Germans as a pretext for dominating the countries around him. Scottish historian/pundit Niall Ferguson made a very good case a few weeks ago for how populism and fascism are different in a UK Times piece (sorry, behind a paywall). While fascism led to World War II, Ferguson notes that the isolationist mindset of populists means that they are extremely adverse to getting into wars. Given Clinton’s record, which has always tilted toward the hawkish, that puts pacifist voters in the interesting position of considering a Republican who may well be less likely than the Democrat to use the military.

Having dismissed the fascist comparison, what other Trump comparisons can we find out there? An interesting one lately comes from conservative columnist (and recently resigned Republican) George Will, who compares to Trump to Charles Lindbergh of all people. In his analogy Vladimir Putin is Hitler, and Trump is the American celebrity who admires him and invokes the same slogan as Lindbergh, “America First.” Again, this comparison makes Trump the choice of those who are anti-war.

The comparison that really piques my interest has shown up here and there in publications like The Atlantic and Politico, where some writers have called him an American Peronist. This is a reference to Juan Domingo Perón, who was president of Argentina from 1946 to 1955 and again from 1973 to 1974. An admirer of Mussolini, Perón best fits as a variant of the fascists. Presumably he gets brought up as a possible precursor to Trump because of his ability to whip up a crowd and tendencies that many see as dictatorial. Personally, though, I do not know if I would bring up Perón if I were a Clinton supporter.

For one thing he was known for using no-holds-barred tactics against his political opponents. Anyone paying attention to John Podesta’s recently released emails (courtesy of Wikileaks) or the recently released Veritas video in which a Clinton ally is heard to discuss hiring people to incite violence at Trump rallies? Perón and his second wife, Eva Duarte, also promoted their political fortunes through a charitable foundation that was not above strong-arming the well-heeled for generous donations.

The most interesting Perón/Clinton comparison is that, as with his latter-day successors Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Perón’s wife succeeded him in the presidency. It was not Eva, though she was extremely popular and would likely have succeeded him if she had not died of cancer at the age of 33. Instead her consolation was to become the subject of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Evita, of which one of the musical numbers is “And the Money Kept Rolling In (And Out).” It was Perón’s third wife, Isabel Martínez, who ended up succeeding him on his death in 1974. Her brief term was a disaster. Plagued by poor health, she eroded Argentines’ constitutional rights in a fight to eradicate leftist terrorism, presided over record trade and budget deficits, and watched inflation climb from 12 to 80 percent in a year. She was deposed in coup in 1976 and was suceeded by an army general, Jorge Rafael Videla, who proceeded to initiate Argentina’s notorious Dirty War against its own citizens.

These sorts of historical comparisons can be fun, but at the end of the day they are of no real help for figuring out how to vote. Worse, too much studying of history can be so discouraging that it may actually provoke the dangerous decision not to bother voting at all.

Slammer Samba

“How much did they charge you bro??”
 —Tweet from an angry Michael Conlan to President Vladimir Putin, after the Irish boxer lost his bout with Russia’s Vladimir Nikitin on Tuesday in a controversial judges’ decision

In the weeks leading up to the sporting world’s most highly anticipated quadrennial event, the Rio Olympics gave every indication of being a looming disaster. With such low expectations, it was probably all but impossible that Brazil’s Cidade Maravilhosa would not exceed expectations and all the hoopla about the Zika virus would mostly be forgotten. What we really did not see coming, though, was the way Brazilian law enforcement would turn out to be such a well-oiled crime-solving machine.

The cops very quickly got to the bottom of the scam by American swimmers to try to get out of a minor drunken vandalism spree. What was really impressive, though, was how the Brazilians nailed one of the most powerful figures in European sport and tossed him in jail. On Wednesday Brazilian police arrested Pat Hickey, president of the Olympic Council of Ireland (OCI). He is also a member of the International Olympic Committee and head of European Olympic Committees. According to the OCI, he has “temporarily” stepped down from all Olympic functions “until this matter is fully resolved.”

What was he arrested for? Scalping, say the police. A couple of weeks earlier another Irishman, Kevin Mallon, was arrested at a Rio hotel while selling OCI-registered Olympics tickets to a group of around 20 people. Police seized 781 tickets and said they were being sold at prices of up to 7,200 euro (more than $8,000). Mallon’s company, THG, is not an authorized seller for Irish tickets, but the authorized company, PRO10, said that Mallon was “distributing” the tickets as a favor. After Mallon’s arrest, the Irish government’s sports minister, Shane Ross, met with Pat Hickey to suggest that the OCI’s investigation into the matter include an independent outsider. That suggestion was haughtily batted away by Hickey, who insisted that the OCI was more than content to investigate itself with no interference. Things changed when the police arrived at Hickey’s hotel in the middle of the night and eventually found him in his son’s room after his wife had said she did not know where he was.

If he is charged and convicted, Hickey could face a punishment as severe as seven years in jail. Brazilians, in apparent contrast to the Irish, take the crime of ticket touting very seriously.

I have never been much of a sports fan, but there has always been something inspiring about the Olympics. Most of the athletes are quite young and are amateurs in the true sense of the word, i.e. they compete for the love of the sport. Who cannot be moved by the triumphs of Jamaica’s Usain Bolt or the U.S.’s Simone Biles? Ireland has taken justifiable price in the winning of two water-borne silver medals: Annalise Murphy for Laser Radial Sailing and the thoroughly captivating Cork brothers Gary and Paul O’Donovan for men’s lightweight double sculls rowing.

The is, however, always a dark side. This year it was the near-total-banning of Russia because of systematic “state-dictated” doping. In the end 278 Russian athletes (out of 398) were cleared to compete.

The dark side for Ireland—apart from the ticket scandal—was in boxing. One middleweight boxer was disqualified for failing a drugs test. Previous gold medal winner Katie Taylor lost her bout in a controversial decision. And Ulsterman Michael Conlan lost his bantamweight quarterfinal bout in a decision so clearly wrong that the International Boxing Association subsequently pulled some of the referees and judges. Despite “winning” against Conlan, the Russian Vladimir Nikitin was so badly battered that he could not take part in the semifinal round. He still took home a bronze medal anyway.

When looking at all of this, it is easy to become cynical—especially when it comes to the greed of some of the Olympic officials. It just goes to show that there is always temptation when people secure in their positions get to handle lots of other people’s money.

Still, fair play to the Brazilians. They really have a thing for corruption these days. Not only did they nail the ticket touts, but the last I checked 352 out of the 594 members of Brazil’s Congress are currently being investigated or facing corruption charges. Moreover, two ministers in Acting President Michel Temer’s cabinet were recently forced to resign for obstructing Operation Car Wash, an investigation into money laundering, kickbacks and bribery involving the state-controlled oil company Petrobras. The investigation has also ensnared former President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. Meanwhile his successor, Dilma Rousseff, is facing an impeachment trial over manipulating government accounts.

It almost—I said almost—makes the current U.S. political scene look halfway normal by comparison.

The Social Disease

“Thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared. He made massive contributions to Venezuela & a very wide world.”
 —Future leader of the UK’s Labour Party Jeremy Corbin, tweeting his eulogy for the recently deceased Venezuelan president in 2013

“If we were to have two parties in Cuba, Fidel would head one and I the other.”
 —Raúl Castro, joking with American officials in April, as quoted by The Economist

It is hard to miss the irony. At the moment when socialism is attracting a whole new generation of willing adherents in the United States and western Europe, that very same economic system is melting down in a devastating way in Venezuela.

The IMF recently reported that Venezuela’s inflation rate, the highest in the world, was headed toward 720 percent. Shop shelves are empty, with shortages in everything, including electricity. Crime, already high, has skyrocketed. The country’s currency, the Bolivar, is so worthless that even armed robbers refuse to take it. They break into houses looking for dollars and other foreign currency. With President Nicolás Maduro stonewalling every way he can the huge majority of opposition representatives elected to the National Assembly in December, it is hard to see how a military coup is avoided. Not that a coup would solve much, since the military was thoroughly staffed with loyalists by Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez. A replacement president could hardly be less competent than Maduro, but the fact is his cluelessness only hastened what was inevitable anyway.

One of the excuses regularly trotted out for economic failures in the developing world is that the global system is inherently unfair. Certain countries were lucky enough to be sitting on valuable natural resources and others were not, thereby explaining the wealth gaps between countries. But Venezuela is sitting on top of huge oil reserves. The Chávez and Maduro governments rode high on their revenues but obviously did not make the best us of them. The recent drop in oil prices was all it took to send the whole country into a tailspin. Other excuses we can expect to hear for Venezuela’s demise is sabotage by the United States and other crimes of imperialism dating all the way back to the Spanish conquistadors.

We may also hear that what was being implemented in Venezuela was not true socialism. That is always the problem with testing economic theories with real world examples. Human societies are never going to practice pure forms of economic systems. The most hard-core socialist country will always have elements of capitalism, and the most free-market liberal economy will have elements of socialism. All you can do is look at specific economic policies in specific countries and judge how well they worked.

Meanwhile in Brazil, former Marxist guerrilla (and successor to the Workers’ Party’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) Dilma Rousseff was suspended from her presidential duties last week, pending an impeachment. Corruption is so prevalent in Brazil, you might well ask, what does one have to do there to actually get impeached for corruption? The answer is to be presiding over a disaster of an economy. Apparently, President Rousseff was cooking the books to hide how much money from the state oil company has gone astray. That’s the problem when the government is so involved in the economy. When large sums of money are passed around, there is always the temptation to pocket some of it or to pay someone off. When corruption happens in the private sector, there is at least some hope that the government will keep people honest. When it is the government itself moving the large sums around, there is virtually no hope.

What about Cuba, the one full-blown surviving Communist country in the Americas? Does its recent rapprochement with the U.S. represent a victory for the island nation or a capitulation? For nearly six decades Cubans have been frozen in a time warp that many left-leaning North Americans find quaint and even admirable but which has not tempted any that I know of to actually emigrate there. The U.S. embargo has always been blamed for the island’s lack of economic progress—even after it had long become ineffective. President Obama was not the first U.S. leader to make back-channel overtures to the Castro brothers about ending an estrangement that had gone on way too long. He was merely the first to agree to the Castros’ demands, i.e. lifting its designation as a supporter of terrorism (specifically, Colombia’s FARC and the North Korea regime) and releasing Cuban prisoners in the U.S. (Many of the dissidents released in Cuba in exchange have since be re-arrested.) I guess Fidel and Raúl just had to live long enough until there was a U.S. president young enough to have grown up with a Che Guevara poster on his wall.

Will the expected influx of western companies and tourists eventually bring Cuba into the modern economic world? Probably not as long as the Castro brothers are alive. But after that, who knows? Assuming those two don’t outlive us all.

Personally, I am more interested in seeing what happens as these young enthusiastic supporters of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbin mature and become more prevalent in U.S and British politics. Maybe Fidel and Raúl will decide to retire in Florida.

Fact and Fiction

When I left Chile in the late 1970s, I was consumed with a need to process what I had experienced and what I had thought I had learned. That processing took the form of having chats with friends and by writing. In particular, I wrote a series of articles for my hometown newspaper—which I began during my time abroad and continued after I returned.

But I had an urge to do more. I had been studying literature while in Concepción, and I was flush with enthusiasm for Latin American writers and the art of the novel. As some writers—mainly writers of fiction—like to say, fiction can get at deeper truths that straight journalism cannot. That may be overstating it, but certainly fiction can get at truths differently and can touch different levels of our minds than a simple documented accounting.

In the years after my return to North America, I had it in mind to write a novel about a Latin American country. It would deal with a political situation comparable to Chile’s in the years immediately preceding my time in that country. It would be about a country polarized between two different political cultures and belief systems and about a man who rises to become the leader of that country, thereby causing the level of polarization to rise to the point of violence—making him a martyr. And all of this would be seen through the eyes of a young North American named Thomas Dowd. Clearly, this character was inspired by the journalist/filmmaker Charles Horman, who was seized and subsequently killed during the golpe against Salvador Allende in 1973 and who would be the subject of the 1982 film by Costa-gavras, Missing.

That particular novel never got written. During the ensuing years, I always seemed to have jobs that made heavy demands on my time and mental juices. And, as time passed, my original story idea seemed less interesting. It wasn’t really the ideal vehicle for getting at some of the themes I was really interested in, i.e. the strangely symbiotic yet mutually alienating nature of the culture clash between Anglo America and Latin America and, particularly, the frustration (for the Anglo-Saxon mind anyway) of the persistent ambiguity in the Latin American world. Even though I lived in Chile only a few short years after the Allende presidency and resultant coup, while there I got completely different and contradictory versions of what had actually happened and how things had actually been, depending on whom I talked to.

The ambiguity one experiences by living in a place is in sharp contrast to the narratives spun by people who need to fit events into a political agenda. And in the Pinochet era, Chile was one of those places that got a lot of spinning. A vivid memory of my return to Seattle was a visit to an aunt whom I loved dearly. She was a very well read and very well informed woman, but she never asked me a single question about my time in South America. Instead, she handed me a copy of The New Yorker, which she had been saving, and told me that it had an article about Chile that I should read so I would truly understand the country where I spent the previous year. I found myself trying to tell my friends—especially my politically engaged ones—that Chile was a real place with real people, not a parable to be taught.

So my story idea evolved. Instead of seeing things through the eyes of Thomas Dowd, he would not actually appear in the novel. Instead, his presence would haunt it. The story would be about two acquaintances of his in the small California town he came from. They would be two teenagers looking for escape and who would decide, nearly on an impulse, to head south of the border in 1971 to look for him. We would experience a bit of Latin America through their young, somewhat naive perspective. Their 1965 Chevy would carry them on a journey down pot-holed Mexican roads more or less as Huck and Jim traveled the Mississippi on their raft.

I have finally finished that novel. You can find links to it by clicking here. I had a title for it long before it was completed. It is called Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead. That was something a friend of mine happened to say once in response to some comment I had made about Mexico, and it stuck in my head. It was not only a nice shorthand for the fact that Latin America is well into its post-imperialism phase but also for the universality of our mortality.

With that mouthful of a title and the above summary of my book’s genesis, I have done my best to make it sound meaningful and profound. The fact is, however, that the book is really a bit of a romp. I gave it every bit of male late-adolescent testosterone that I had left. The characters are not very well behaved and they get into well more than the odd spot of trouble. I indulged myself in a fair amount of guilty pleasure by portraying behavior and attitudes that were politically incorrect even in that time, let alone now.

As I was writing it, the parallels with the current day were striking to me. Issues like border security, immigration, political polarization, privacy concerns and U.S. foreign policy hang over the story’s action—just as they still preoccupy people these days.

Mostly, though, the book turned out to be a cockeyed tribute to my childhood best friend. I want to be clear that the two main characters in the book are definitely not him and me, but a fair amount of his personality—at least as it was in his wayward youth—found its way into the character of Lonnie McKay. And there is more than a bit of our own personal inter-dynamics in the relationship between Lonnie and the narrator. But, sadly, we never went to Mexico together.

After some really bad luck in his life, my friend died last autumn. It’s too bad he never got to read the completed book. He would have gotten a kick out of it and would have given me a hard time over parts of it. But in my more spiritual moments, I think that he was the one giving me the push from the afterlife to finally get it finished.

Life in the Time of Gabo

“La vida no es la que uno vivió, sino la que uno recuerda, y cómo la recuerda para contarla.”
 —Gabriel García Márquez

Traveling abroad (for me anyway) used to mean constantly keeping one eye alert for a newsagents/tobacconist/kiosk/shop/whatever that sold foreign newspapers. I was always on the lookout for The International Herald Tribune (since renamed The International New York Times) for a bit of recent news from the States and the rest of the world.

But those were the old days. Now I find myself watching for the café, bar or hotel with the sign promising “Free WiFi” so I can use my iPod Touch to refresh all the same myriad news sources I use daily in the comfort of my own home.

So it was that, during our Easter holiday last month in Italy, I kept looking for opportunities to read obituaries and comments on the life of Gabriel García Márquez. I had seen the breaking news alert about his death just before putting the iTouch in airplane mode ahead of the flight for Naples, and the news haunted me from the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum to the cliff-hugging road on the Amalfi Coast.

I will not claim to have any particularly meaningful insights into the man himself. I can attest, however, that his work came to be very important to me during a consequential period of my life.

By the time I went to Chile in 1977, I had already completed both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree. Because my previous university work had not been done in Chile, however, the University of Concepción limited my selection of courses to undergraduate ones. This meant that, to a large extent, I was repeating coursework I had already done at other universities. It also meant that I was four to seven years older than my classmates.

The Institute of Languages at the University of Concepción in 1977

It was by no means uninteresting, but it wasn’t particularly challenging. Moreover, I was sometimes in the uncomfortable position of being used by the professors to shame the local students. I still remember the annoyed young glances coming my way as a prof would say, “Look how well this North American can write, and Spanish isn’t even his first language.” It was an unfair comparison since I was older and further along in my education than my classmates, although one professor did explain to me privately that her frustration with her students actually had nothing to do with me. She said that Chilean universities were facing a generation which had largely missed out on a viable secondary education because of the disruption and tumult during the presidency of Salvador Allende and subsequent coup and military crackdown.

Being North American led to other odd situations. For example, I got a very strange assignment from a literature professor who happened to be a rabid fan of the American author Joseph Heller. Because I was from the United States, he insisted that my class paper had to be on the novel Catch-22, which meant that I had to read and dissect a book originally written in English but in Spanish translation. In a country that had spawned two Nobel literature laureates (Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda), the last thing I ever expected was to be spending my year in South America studying and writing about a North American writer translated into a foreign language.

The one true academic bright spot was getting permission in the second semester to take a graduate seminar on Latin American literature. There were just two of us working with Professor Rodríguez and, as it happened, the other student had been my teacher the semester before. The seminar topic was García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) which, at that point, had been in print for ten years and was already an international classic. In hindsight, the idea of spending four or more months studying and writing about a single book may seem kind of obsessive. But I had already learned that the academic study of literature was nothing if not obsessive—especially when it came to literature in the Spanish language. Texts were routinely scoured for all kinds of meanings and messages—overt, covert, coded, insinuated, what have you—as if we students were characters in a Dan Brown novel tracking down the Holy Grail. It meant that we did not merely read the Colombian’s novel. We lived it and breathed it and bathed in it—day in and day out for week upon week.

It could have been a long few months if I had not cared very much for the book. But as countless other readers have found, there is a reason that García Márquez’s style, like that of many other Latin American writers of the 20th century, is called Magic Realism. The continuous and interweaving stories of the mythical Colombian village of Macondo (based on the author’s own home of Aracataca) were mesmerizing and seductive. The multi-generational epic of the Buendía family with its repeated use of given names had a way of drawing us in and making us see every development in the story as more profound than it probably really was. It had the addictive quality of a really good soap opera. In the end, the draw of the book was the way it could be escapist fantasy and social and political commentary all at one time.

A half-decade later I would return to Concepción on a visit and call on Professor Rodríguez. He would flatter me by recalling the paper I wrote for the seminar and the way I had noticed that the word soledad in the title was comprised of the words sol (sun) and edad (age) and how that could be a clue to the author’s underlying message. I remembered how the book had made such an impression on my classmate that she seriously considered giving the baby she was expecting the name Amaranta, after multiple characters in the novel. In the end she didn’t, but in the letters she later wrote me, when mentioning her daughter, she would parenthetically append an explanatory “ex Amaranta” after her name.

When I made that return visit, the mother of “ex Amaranta” was no longer living in Chile. In a strange way we had changed places. After being her student and then classmate, I had ended up becoming her English tutor. She subsequently moved to the United States. Our paths would cross a few more times over the years. She would wind up living and teaching in my home state of California, while I would wind up living in Europe. But always that book by Gabriel García Márquez would always bind us—that and her seemingly spiritual fascination with certain filmmakers, notably Ettore Scola and Roman Polanski.

In the weeks following García Márquez’s demise, I relived the experience of being immersed in his writing while at the same time being amused by all the arguing over his politics. Yes, he was an unrepentant leftist and an apologist for Cuba’s repressive Castro regime. And yes, I would love to know the real story of why the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa (whose work may actually better stand the test of time and whose politics certainly will) gave him a black eye very publicly at a movie premiere in 1976. Was it over political differences or was it about the comforting shoulder provided during a tricky time in the Vargas’s marriage?

One of the things I read was by a blogger whom I respect very much. She said that, after enjoying Cien años de soledad years before, she recently picked it up and found it unreadable. That sent a shiver up my spine since I have it, in both Spanish and English, on my iPad waiting for a fresh perusal. Will I risk destroying many fond memories by trying to read it again? It’s a risk I’m willing to take. After all, for me the true beauty in those memories has as much to do with the very real city of Concepción as with the mythical village of Macondo.

Land of Dreamers

“The credibility of the organization is in serious question by any credible observer. The record of the OAS in Venezuela is an embarrassment.”
 —José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch

In February a 17-year-old girl was attacked and robbed in San Cristóbal, a Venezuelan city on the border with Colombia. It was the kind of unfortunate incident that could and does happen in virtually any city in the world on any given evening. But in San Cristóbal it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Since the previous year the city’s University of the Andes’s Botanical Gardens had become overrun by drug dealers and criminals. This was part of a national trend that has resulted in Venezuela having one of the highest crime rates in the world. In San Cristóbal many of the criminals’ victims were students, and they lobbied for better security—in vain. After the February 3 attack, word of it spread and the next day students came out to protest. The police response was to arrest protestors and send them to a detention center hundreds of miles away in a city called Coro, where they were reportedly mistreated.

The student response was more protests—not only in San Cristóbal but across the country, including the capital Caracas. They’ve been going on ever since. Government forces have pushed back with force, using tear gas and water cannons. As of this writing, the reported death toll is 36. The government’s political opponents were quick to jump on the protest bandwagon. The most prominent was 42-year-old politician and economist Leopoldo López, and he was soon put behind bars by the government.

Obviously, the protests are not simply about unhappiness over the crime rate. Under the administrations of the late Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolás Maduro, oil-rich Venezuela is an economic basket case. Inflation is sky high and shoppers at markets face queues at times numbering more than a thousand. Maduro, who not only lacks his mentor’s charisma (which was always lost on me) but is clearly incompetent, won election to the presidency only narrowly and not without suspicions. And, given the government’s tight control on the media, the election could hardly have been considered very fair in any event.

According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady, the masked thugs on motorcycles who have been inflicting the most harm on the protestors are paramilitaries organized by the Chavista government.

One suspects that the situation in Venezuela would have gotten more worldwide attention if not for the even more dramatic events involving Ukraine. Reporting in the general international press has been sketchy at best. Some reports I have heard paint the student protestors as “middle class” or “conservative,” suggesting a bourgeois-vs.-poor narrative.

A rare high-profile mention of the situation came during the Academy Awards ceremony a few weeks ago when Best Supporting Actor Jared Leto expressed solidarity in his acceptance speech with “the dreamers” in Ukraine and Venezuela. Fellow actors Kevin Spacey and Forest Whitaker later tweeted their criticism of the Venezuelan government. Previously vocal Hollywood supporters of Chavez—Sean Penn, Danny Glover, Michael Moore—stayed silent. A photo showing Penn—who has deservedly earned praise for his relief work in Haiti—holding a sign in Spanish supporting Maduro showed up on Twitter, but it was pretty obvious that it had been composed à la Photoshop. More significant was criticism from musicians Willie Colón and, especially, Rubén Blades, whose political activist credentials are impeccable. Clearly stung, Maduro insisted on television that Blades had been misled by fascists. According to none other than Madonna (in a February tweet), “Fascism is alive and thriving in Venezuela” and “Maduro is not familiar with the phrase ‘Human Rights’!”

Events in Venezuela have divided Latin American countries. The protests have been ignored by the Organization of American States, which met in Washington on Friday. In an unusual move, Panama made Venezuelan opposition lawmaker María Corina Machado a temporary member of its delegation so that she could address the body, but delegates voted not to include her in the formal agenda. After hours of arguing, she was finally allowed to speak briefly in an ad hoc capacity. The delegates also took the unusual step, in a 22-to-11 vote, of barring the media from the session. The U.S., Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, Peru, Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Paraguay and Chile supported her appearance. Brazil, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Argentina and various Caribbean countries joined Venezuela in opposition. Her plea for a resolution demanding that Venezuela release its political prisoners and respect freedom of speech went nowhere. Machado’s supporters fear that she could face arrest after her return to Venezuela.

Brazil’s rebuke of Machado apparently reflects the fact that Brazil is heavily invested in the Venezuelan economy. But it is a sad irony, given that Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff herself was once a student leader who stood up to authority and who, as a result, was tortured by her country’s military.

In the end, a lot of people choose sides based on ideology rather than on respect for democracy or human rights. That is how yesterday’s firebrand who used to fight authority can, later in life, become the defender of authority that abuses its power.

If you find that thought as depressing as I do, then you may take some pleasure from the YouTube video on this page of the Peruvian newspaper El Comercio. Filmed last week at a debate at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, it went viral in South America. A young Venezuelan woman is applauded by the audience when she tears into leftist Senator Alejandro Navarro, a defender of the Chavista regime. After telling of a journalist friend who was threatened for writing about the government, she yells at the senator, “Go live in Venezuela. I give it to you, I give you my home.”

Even if you don’t understand Spanish, her body language says it all.

Simon Says

There is a new biography of Simón Bolívar out. It is written by Marie Arana, a Peruvian-born author, editor and journalist. Her previous books include the memoir American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood and the novels Cellophane and Lima Nights.

Her Bolívar book is timely since its subject is a figure much evoked around the recent transition from the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro.

I happened to hear Arana interviewed by Scott Simon on National Public Radio last month, and one particular exchange has stayed with me. After Arana began with a brief summary of Bolívar’s military successes against the Spanish, Simon—taking his cue from the book—said, “Almost the major factor that separated Simon Bolívar from the American founding fathers is, Bolívar believed that you couldn’t fight a revolution for freedom if you kept slavery.”

Arana then told about Bolívar travelling to the United States and being irked by the slave market in Charleston. She concluded by saying, “And though he loved George Washington… he couldn’t do things the same way.”

The discussion then moved on to the Liberator’s tempestuous love life, his frustrated later years and the eventual rebirth of his legend.

There is nothing inaccurate about Arana’s and Simon’s comparison of Bolívar versus the U.S.’s founding fathers. The latter did leave slavery in place after the American Revolution while the former was against slavery. But it does leave a strangely distorted impression of the two. If you knew nothing more about North and South American history than what was provided in this interview, you would have no doubt that Bolívar was eminently superior to Washington, both morally and militarily.

But the fact is that, while Washington refused to accept an offer of becoming a monarch and only reluctantly agreed to stand for president which he relinquished after two terms, Bolívar ignored constitutions he himself implemented and ultimately declared himself dictator. Thousands of prisoners and civilians were slaughtered under his orders and, in the end, he was preparing to flee to exile in Europe when he died of tuberculosis at 47. Yes, it is to his credit that he proclaimed that “slavery is the worst human indignity” and that he freed the slaves he himself had inherited. More generally, however, he offered freedom to slaves only on the condition that all men between 14 and 60 serve in his army.

The bottom line, in terms of history, is that the nation Washington helped found has gone on to prosper under democratic principles ever since. As Arana notes, Bolívar did achieve impressive military victories against the Spanish and did free a larger territory from colonial rule than did Washington. But Bolívar’s dream of a united Gran Colombia fell apart disastrously, and the various countries that comprised it have been struggled—with varying degrees of success—to retain democracy and raise the living standard of their populations ever since.

The point isn’t, or shouldn’t be, which of the two leaders was “better.” Although separated by just a few years, their times and places in world history are very different. But Arana falls prey to an annoying habit of many in academia and the media and, frankly, at NPR. She concentrates on a couple of points of comparison that are not really representative to the overall accomplishments of the two men.

Moreover, she applies a double standard in her comparison. One gets judged by his deeds, complete with blemishes. The other gets judged mainly by his lofty but failed goals.

Don’t Cry for Me Venezuela

On Palm Sunday we re-watched Alan Parker’s 1996 film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita. It got me to wondering whether some creative team might someday make a similar musical biopic about Hugo Chávez.

After all, the public manifestations of grief in the streets of Venezuela after the president’s death were not unlike those that followed the demise of Eva Perón, as depicted in Parker’s movie.

I am by no means the first to suggest that Chávez’s policies and political style amounted to a Venezuelan flavor of Peronism. Like the Peróns in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Chávez was personally very popular. And like them, he pursued policies that were essentially fascist but justified them with socialist rhetoric. A further parallel: his cult of adoration is likely to live on because of his untimely death, at 58. Eva Perón, who succumbed to cancer at 33, is still evoked by many in Argentina as some sort of combination of saint and champion of the people.

In the days after Chávez’s death, the UK’s Financial Times provided a very helpful overview of the state of the left in Latin America. Its author, John Paul Rathbone, pointed out that there are two strains of leftism in the region—a division that was highlighted by an event that was overshadowed by Chávez’s prolonged demise. After five years of waiting for permission to leave Cuba, writer and pro-democracy blogger Yoani Sánchez went on a tour, beginning in Brazil, to promote her cause.

Wrote Rathbone, “At a São Paulo bookshop, about 200 young socialist activists burst into the room proclaiming her a CIA spy. One protester chanted: ‘Mercenary.’ It was the same kind of invective that Chávez, Cuba’s closest ally, had levelled against Caracas’s middle class, which he condemned as los escuálidos or the ‘squalid ones.'” But she was also reassured by many Brazilians that those activists were not representative.

Citing the Mexican intellectual Jorge Castañeda’s 2006 Foreign Affairs article, the FT piece differentiates between the “modern, open-minded, reformist and internationalist” strand of leftism represented by Brazil, Peru and Uruguay and the “nationalistic, strident and closed-minded” strand represented by Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. (He also tentatively includes the basket case which is Argentina under Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in the latter category.)

To me Chávez was always a thug who, paradoxically, managed to achieve power at the ballot box after failing to achieve it through a military coup. (Usually, it’s the other way around.) While he clearly used thuggish methods to stay in power—notably by muzzling both the press and the political opposition and though some level of corruption in the electoral process—there is no denying that he had sufficient popular support to be considered his country’s legitimate leader. It just goes to show that one should never underestimate how important it is for people to have a leader who gives voice to what they are feeling and who, unlike previous presidents, looks like them.

That Chávez remained, and remains, so popular is a head scratcher for those of us who deal more in numbers than in emotions. Despite (or because of?) price controls implemented ten years ago, there are food shortages and food inflation at a whopping 1,284 percent. The murder rate last year was 73 per 100,000 people. Despite the various give-away programs that made him beloved, living standards are generally below where they were when he came to power in 1998. And this in a country that is sitting on top of incredible oil wealth. Some of that wealth has found its way into social programs, but a lot has been squandered through corruption and subsidies to other countries that subscribe to the political philosophy of Chavismo.

One report had Chávez’s personal net worth at the time of his death at $2 billion. If that’s true, it might be worth finding out who has control of all that money now and asking them if they are interested in underwriting a new Broadway musical.