by EDUARDO GALEANO (trans. by Lisa Boscov-Ellen)
I want to dedicate this tribute to the living memory of two people named Carlos: Carlos Lenkersdorf and Carlos Monsiváis, very dear friends who are no longer, but remain.
I begin by saying thank you: Thank you, Marcelo, for this gift, this joy. I say thank you in my own name and also in the name of the many Southerners who will never forget their gratitude to Mexico, the country of their exile, refuge of the persecuted in the years of filth and fear of our military dictatorships.
And I want to emphasize that Mexico deserves, for that and for many other reasons, all of our solidarity, now that this dear land is a victim of the hypocrisy of the global narco-system, where some stick their nose and others provide the corpses, and some declare a war and others receive the bullets.
…
And the Chilean Santiago Arcos attested from jail:
-The poor have enjoyed glorious independence as much as the horses that charged against the king’s troops in Chacabuco and Maipú.
All of our nations were born in lies. Independence abandoned those who put their lives at risk fighting for it; and the women, the illiterate, the poor, the indigenous and the blacks were not invited to the party. I suggest taking a look at our first Constitutions, which give legal prestige to this mutilation. The Constitutions granted the right of citizenship to the few who could buy it. The others continued to be invisible.
Simón Rodríguez had a reputation for being crazy and so he was called: The madman. He said crazy things, such as:
-We are independent, but we are not free. The wisdom of Europe and the prosperity of the United States are, in our America, two enemies of freedom of thought. Our America must not slavishly imitate, but rather be original.
And also:
-We teach children to be inquisitive, so that they will become accustomed to obeying reason: not authority like the feebleminded, or custom like fools. He who does not know, anyone can deceive. He who does not have, anyone can buy.
Don Simón said crazy things and did crazy things. There in the early eighteen twenties, his schools mixed boys and girls, poor and rich, indigenous and whites, and also joined head and hands, because they taught to read and add and also to work with wood and earth. Latin sacristy was not heard in their classrooms and they defied the tradition of contempt for manual labor. The experiment did not last long. A clamor of outraged voices demanded the expulsion of this satyr that had come to corrupt the youth, and Marshal Sucre, president of the country we now call Bolivia, demanded his resignation.
From then on, he traveled on the back of a mule, making a pilgrimage along the coasts of the Pacific and across the Andes, founding schools and asking intolerable questions to those newly in power:
-You, who imitate everything that comes from Europe and the United States, why do you not imitate originality, which is most important?
This old vagabond, bald, ugly and potbellied, the most courageous and lovable of the thinkers of the Americas, was more alone every day, and he died alone.
At eighty years old, he wrote:
-I wanted to make the earth a paradise for all. I made it a hell for myself.
World Upside Down for more