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EDMUNDO PAZ-SOLDAN: Good afternoon. My name is Edmundo Paz-Soldan. I'm the chair of the Romance Studies department. And I'm very excited to introduce you to Martín Caparrós, our Professor-at-Large for the next three years. He was nominated. He was named Professor-at-Large 2019. And because of the pandemic, we took six semesters to-- we took a while to bring him to the campus. I'm very happy that, at last, Martín is with us. He's going to have lots of activities here. He's doing talks. He's going to have a workshop on the chronicle Latin America. He's going to also attend-- visit some classes.
A long time ago, perhaps too long, I was studying in Buenos Aires when I saw a TV show devoted to books, in which a group of young writers was talking about their just published novels. I was fascinated by the fact that there was a TV show devoted to books in Argentina, and also by the revolutionary ideas of this group of writers. One of them was Martín Caparrós, only 23 at the time. He spoke with genuine conviction, and I was very taken by his delivery.
Since then, I have followed his multifaceted career. And I have always been impressed by his energy and by the originality of his ideas in fiction, as well as investigative reporting. I have loved his books, some of which are already canonical in Latin American Literature. Some of these books about-- I don't want to name-- he has published [? 50 ?] books, but some of the books that-- about, for example, just to show you the-- his range, and about a young Argentine woman anarchist trying to start a revolution in Italy, another book about soccer, books about Latin American identity, about Argentine politics and culture. He even has a book about immortality, a recent novel. So when Caparrós commits to a project, you know that it will be an ambitious commitment, that he will not leave any stone unturned.
If he's going to write about hunger in the world, he will travel everywhere to bring us fresh insights and nuanced reporting. He will be in India, as well as Africa, Buenos Aires, or even Binghamton. Right, you were in Binghamton for this book? So he will talk to corporate CEOs about questions of food. But he also will be with trash scavengers in Africa. If he's going to write a novel about Sarmiento, Argentina's most influential president and intellectual, he will go beyond the cultural history we all know and delve into personal and private records that perhaps might illuminate this personality under a new light. If he's going to write his personal history of Latin America, like he did in his recent book, Ñamérica, he will start with the first human beings in the continent, 30,000 years ago.
This is Caparrós approach to writing-- immerse yourself wholeheartedly in your project. So at the end of the day, what we have is a strange new world, something that has always been there but can be seen now in a fresh light. It is no accident that he-- perhaps, it is no accident that he is, right now, writing a book about our present, but from the perspective of a scientist from the future.
I am very excited that the Professor-at-Large Program Committee has accepted a proposal to make Martín Caparrós a Professor-at-Large. And I would like to thank the Department of Romance Studies as its main sponsor, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program, and the division of Nutritional Sciences as their main co-sponsors. The Professor-at-Large program is one of the most intellectually exciting tradition on campus. And I love that the Latin American writer and a member of the World of Romance Studies is part, again, of this tradition.
It hasn't been easy, as I said before, to bring him to campus because of the pandemic. We cancelled it twice-- his visit. But this is now behind, and we now have him this week with us, where he will be giving talks, visiting classes, and conducting workshops. In closing, I just want to read a brief bio of him for those of you who do not know about him yet, about Martín.
He is a distinguished Argentine author, writer, and narrative journalist, and one of the fundamental Latin American voices of our time. He has elevated the genre of the contemporary chronicle to something that is, perhaps, one of the most interesting writing that's happening today in Latin America. In 2017, he was given the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot award by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism for outstanding reporting on America. They specified the work on his nonfiction book [INAUDIBLE]-- work, El Hambre, Hunger-- The Moral Crisis of Our Time, published six years ago.
For that book, Caparrós visits both the richest and poorest people of the Earth in order to explore why hunger is one of today's big unresolved issues. He has written more than 50 books, novels, essays, nonfiction, and has been translated to more than 30 languages. His more recent book, Ñamérica, is a complex and fascinating attempt to describe and analyze the present of Latin America. Thanks for being here. And thanks, Martín for you visiting us. [INAUDIBLE].
[APPLAUSE]
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: [INAUDIBLE]. Your computer is not-- no. Oh, because my notes are in his computer, because my computer is there. So it's a complicated combination. Hi. First of all, I wanted to apologize for my English, which is usually very mediocre, but it's getting worse and worse, because I'm what? I'm horribly jet lagged. So I haven't learned how to sleep here in Ithaca, yet. So, as I said, from mediocrity to disaster-- my English has gone all the way. So I hope you will forgive me, or else I can start speaking Spanish, with which the disaster would be complete. It's your choice.
Anyway-- oh, hi. I wanted to tell you a few things about Ñamérica, this last book I published last year in Spanish. And it's going to be published in some other languages in the next years. I usually don't remember how I imagine-- how I first imagined a book, but this one I do, clearly, which is not very interesting, in fact. I was in a quite boring meeting in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, one of the most complicated countries in Central America, as you know. And there was like a few, maybe a dozen, dozen and a half journalists from different countries in Latin America, and they were all discussing about journalism and Latin America, and saying, I don't know, things about the region and how it was, and stuff like that. And at some point, it was inevitable that I had to say something about it, about Latin America.
And I was ready to utter the usual slogans and clichés that I have been uttering for so long. And I don't know why at that exact moment I felt, like, ashamed. I said, I cannot keep repeating the same things once and again. And at that very moment, I said, what if I spent, I don't know, what time might be necessary trying to think a few things about Latin America that I could say without shame. I mean, trying to see how it is now, not in our souvenirs, not in our slogans, et cetera, et cetera. Was quite a moment, I mean, quite impressive for me.
First thing I did when I went back to my hotel room was to get [INAUDIBLE] [? Latina, ?] which is a classic that most of you have known of the East to see if it was reasonable to try to reassess what Latin America was after this book that has the ambition of doing it and has done it. But it was 50 years ago, and both the continent, or the region, and the public who could see or read about it had changed a lot, really a lot. So I said, well, there is a reason. It's reasonable to try to work on it.
So I started-- let's say, my plan clearly was, well, what is America? What is Latin America now, right? So I started with my first usual movement, in this case, which is to get lost. I cannot stress enough the utility of getting lost, right? When I try to write about the city, for instance, the first thing I usually do is to take different buses, which I don't know where they lead me, and get lost, spend a day or two going to places that I don't know of, not the places that I have already read about or known about. But just go to places-- I mean, to unknown or unthought of places.
And, of course, in this case, the equivalent of that, something that I do as much as I can, is to get lost on the net-- in the net, on the net? What do you say? On the-- on? On, OK. Just to let me lead by the chance of the clicks, and get to places, and to read things and articles and even books or things that I couldn't have looked for before. So I started doing that. And amongst all the things that I found at the beginning, maybe the one that seemed to me most important and perhaps fertile, at the first moment, was the evidence of an enormous change that happened in Latin America since Galeano wrote his book 50 years ago.
At that moment, it was a rural region. I mean, it was clearly a rural region. More than 50% of the population lived in rural areas. And nowadays, Latin America, which is not very-- it's a bit counterintuitive, but Latin America is the region of the world with the most high proportion of urban population. It's like 81-82%. Which means that there has been an enormous change in the structure-- the social, cultural, political structure of the continent. I mean, one in three Latin Americans has moved from the countryside to the cities in the last 20 or 30 years. It's enormous. It's really enormous. It's a tectonic movement that we are not very much aware of, usually.
It's true to call that cities, maybe, like an-- how do you say-- an exaggeration. They have moved to places that became, what, this kind of a chaos, disaster, disorganization that are our cities now. But, well, this is what we are. So the first thing I decided to do with this information was to try to visit the cities. And to try to-- how do you say-- chronicle them. Is there the verb, to chronicle, it exists? To chronicle these cities.
I need to say, now, maybe, that lately my method for nonfiction or my genre-- I do not , how do you say-- it's a mix between chronicle and essay. Usually chronicles, in Latin America, were very narrative. But they didn't dare to analyze, or to reflect, to think about the things that they were just telling. And a few years ago, maybe 15 years ago, I started to try to mix those two genres, the chronicle part and the essay. I used to say that I write [SPEAKING SPANISH] I don't know if you-- chronicles that think, essays that tell, to just show this crossing.
So I wanted to go to the cities in order to be able to write one side, write chronicles about them, but at the same time to be able to see which were the main traits, the main subjects on which I would have to write for the more essay part of the book. Try to get to know which were these common traits that deserve a particular chapter in the book, because the book was going to be like a crossing between these big cities. I mean, the book is it's done like that. One chapter is a big city. One chapter it's a matter. It's an issue. Well, I'll tell you which ones are in a moment.
So I went to seven or eight of these cities-- Buenos Aires, Caracas, Bogotá, El Alto, and Bolivia, Managua, Louwana, Mexico, Miami, maybe some else, but I don't remember exactly. And, of course, these are cities of improvisation, chaos, energy, conflict. The cities where the state arrives [INAUDIBLE] always far behind the people that formed them. These cities that are established as rings around the old established city. And all these migrants come and form rings around them in the neighborhoods where there is no, very often, there's no electricity, or no running water, and no presence of the state. The state comes after, sometimes, and sometimes, it never does.
And this migration to the cities, is a part of a larger wave of migration, which is the one I call the fifth wave. When I started to think about this wave of migration, I had one of the defining traits of the America, of Latin America, that I was looking for. And because now I would like to tell you about four or five of these defining traits. And the first one I think is this. Migration has defined America in a way absolutely, maybe not comparable-- how would you say-- incomparable with other places.
For starters, now, in America, is the region of the world with the most high-- the higher proportion of migrants per inhabitant, which is strange. I mean, it's strange because America has been formed by immigrants. And now, it's the other thing, [? brown, ?] that happens. But I would like to put this migration within a context of a continent that is pure migration, following a pattern as clear as no other has. In most places in the world, people have just come in an inordinate manner. I don't know.
I live in Spain. For instance, in Spain, there was people that came many thousand years ago from Spain, and then some Celtics, and then some Goths, and Romans, and Moors, and Basques, and no one knows exactly when and how it did happen. And this is an example of how populations got-- what do you say-- done. Whereas in America, the waves of migration are so clear. It's so ordered, the way it was that it's a completely different story. I'm not going to tell you that, but there was this first wave, maybe 20,000 years ago, when the Bering Strait was walkable-- how would you say-- iced or something.
And then some people from Central Asia came, and they walked, and walked, and they didn't know where they were going. I mean, it's an image that I liked, that one. I mean, the fact that people just started to walk, but they didn't know they were going somewhere else. They were just walking. And they came to this continent, which was previously empty of human life, without knowing that they were-- of course, they didn't know that they were coming into another continent. And they didn't have the idea of populate a continent. They just came, and maybe someone-- and the groups were very tiny, were, like what, 50 people, 100 people, at most.
And sometimes, a group stopped, I don't know, beside a lake because the salmons there were easy to fish. And then maybe two generations or three generations later, someone said, no, I don't want to stay with these people. I think that the deer is easier to hunt in that valley, and they-- and it's a very long process, because, as you know, afterwards, the Bering Strait just got closed so no one else could come. And for 15,000 years, these were the only people in the continent.
And then came the second wave, the Spanish conquest, of course, which was bloody and horrid. And at the same time, it built the structures we still live in. It's funny, because now there is a lot of discussion about the conquest. It has come back to public light, mostly because of what the Mexican President said. Lopez Obrador saying that Spain has to apologize for what they did 500 years ago and stuff like that, which is like a classic story of nationalism, a classic tale of nationalism, but not very well crafted. I mean, it's plenty of mistakes.
Let's say, first mistake is the construction of a pre-Columbine-- what do you say, pre-Columbian-- pre-Columbian paradise. I mean, they speak as if the Aztec state was like a heaven of peace, when it was exactly the contrary. They made thousands of human sacrifices. And that's the only reason why 500 hungry Spaniards were able to take this state, because there were so many thousands of locals that wanted to get rid of these tyrants that they supported the Spaniards. Later on, of course, they realized the mistake they had made.
But at the moment, it happened because there was absolutely no pre-Columbian paradise, as they want to show us, to convince us now that, that was. And, of course, because what happened in during the colonial times, it's important for the formation of America. But our states have already lasted 200 years. In 200 years we had time to build our own societies, and all the responsibility for anything that could happen in these countries, is ours, not Spanish. It's a classic nationalist tale, the fact that trying to convince everyone that the fault-- how do you say-- that the fault is of-- goes to the foreigners, to others, to the ones that are not us.
But anyway, I will go faster through the waves, because I wanted to just say that [INAUDIBLE]. The third wave is the most violent and vile. Africans kidnapped in their places, often by other Africans, to be enslaved and forced to work all their lives for others. It was 16th, 17th century. That was the third wave. And these three waves started to form which is the Latin American population in a big-- the mix between these three waves started to constitute what we are.
But there was a fourth wave, which is this-- poor Europeans, Southern Europeans which arrived in the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20's, they went-- they were much more geographically limited, because they went mostly to the south of the continent. But they were a much more, much, much more than the other-- all the other waves put together. There were several millions, when the other ones were a very short number of people.
For instance, in the whole of the 16th century, there were around 100,000 Spaniards that came to America. 100,000-- it's nothing. And they ruled the continent for a long while, these migrants from the end of the 19th century, the ones that didn't come here to the States and went to south of the continent, just like finished the mix that constitutes Latin America. And it's, I said, it's strange, because usually, those mixes are not that precise and clear.
Nowadays, we can talk about this later, but nowadays, when some, well, we'll talk about this later. The fifth wave, then, is the first that is expelling people. That is the big change in the last decades is that for the first time, Latin America is not receiving but expelling. There is, of course, this is internal wave from countryside to cities, but there is a very huge quantity of people that had left the continent. And to leave your country, it's a very strong statement about your country. I can't imagine a stronger one than to say, I can't live like I should in my place. I'm going to go to some other place in order to try to do it.
And it's also the choice of an individual solution over a collective solution. People who migrate are saying I am not able to solve my problems within my community, and I am going to try to solve it somewhere else out of this community. And it's also a very heavy loss for the communities that lose them. Usually the people that migrate are, by definition, among the most energetic and proactive people because they take the decision of going somewhere, et cetera, et cetera. So this is a heavy loss for their communities to get rid of these people.
That's a big wave. That's a big wave is the one that explains something that I always find funny. I suppose that you have heard sometimes this Latin American or Spanish politicians that boast about the fact that Spanish is now the second most spoken language in America, in the United States. I always say, if I was them, I would try to-- how do you say-- to keep it quiet. I mean, try to [SPEAKING SPANISH] to make a secret of that. Because the fact that Spanish is the second language in the States is the most visible evidence of this failure, of the fact that so many people had to leave their countries and come here. So if I was one of these politicians from those countries, I would try to, well, better not to know, better not to say. But they boast. They say, oh.
So it's not like they are-- hmm? Anyway, I say that-- is there any possibility to get some water somewhere? [INAUDIBLE]. I'm sorry. Because I'm starting to--
There was-- I was saying that Lopez Obrador wasn't-- that it was not reasonable to fault the Spaniards for what is happening now in America. But it's right that they had like a decisive contribution to what Latin America is now, which was the setting of an economic model. The Spaniards, I think, they set the model that is still the most central in our countries, which is to extract and export commodities-- I mean, minerals, or agricultural products, or this kind of things-- from the mines in Potosi, silver mines in Potosi, to, nowadays, to the petrol, or a cup of copper, or soy, or a Coke, or coffee, or sugar, or banana. It's like the same system all around, all through the last 400 or 500 years.
And this is really central in the structure of America. Still, it has a decisive influence on the Latin American social structure. And because-- and I wanted to say that because it now counts a second trait that I wanted to consider, a second idea about the region, which is that Latin America is the most unequal region in the world. You have read and heard that many times, and it's true. I mean, it's true according to these coefficients that are supposed to measure that, the Gini coefficient. Thank you so much.
The Gini coefficient, for instance-- you have heard of Gini, Corrado Gini. It's an incredible story. It has not-- [SPEAKING SPANISH] because he was the statistician, the official statistician of Mussolini. He was an eugenicist, and he was, like, kind of a fascist, an unbridled fascist. And now it's a quote of his name, is quoted by most progressive people deploring inequality. So it's a very strange evolution for his name, but never mind.
I said that Latin America is the most unequal region in the world. And that was one of the chapters that I wanted to work on in Ñamérica. And I arrived first to a very stupid conclusion, or a very stupid assumption, which is that Ñamérica-- or Latin-- I should have to tell you why I call it Ñamérica, but I told you, I'll tell you later. Latin America, or Ñamérica, is an equal because it can. Ñamérica is the [INAUDIBLE], which sounds pretty stupid.
You can say it. But I think it's right. I mean, they can because they are powerful, can afford it. Since the very beginning, I mean, when the economic core of a society is the extraction and exploitation, You can afford very easily to be unequal, because extraction doesn't need too much labor.
And it's a very unsophisticated labor. And it's less and less labor now with the developments of new techniques and stuff like that. So the rich Latin American don't need their approval in order to work, because many of them-- I mean, it's enough with a small part of them. Do you follow?
And at the same time, as they export what they get, they don't need their poor to consume either, because their markets are abroad. So they don't need their poor nor to work, neither to consume. They don't need them. They really don't need them. And that's why they can be so unequal, I mean.
When there is another kind of organization-- well, the richer need their poor in order maybe to work to produce things and to be able to be prepared to produce some stuff or to consume in the internal market what they are trying to sell. But if you don't need them nor for production or extraction, neither for exportation, well, you don't need them. So they just can afford to live in societies where 20%, 30% of the population are absolutely out of the social structures that were supposed to contain them, people that have no particular jobs, or legal jobs, let's say, that have no access to many of the services that a state should provide-- health, or education, or security, or whatever.
Maybe you have heard this rich Latin Americans, more or less, rich Latin Americans complaining because they have to pay taxes, and they don't receive almost anything against those taxes. Now they say, well, you all in France, they pay lots of taxes, but the education is free, and the health is free, too, and the [INAUDIBLE]. And they complain because they don't receive anything from the state against their taxes. It's very common. But they do receive something from the state against the taxes, which is to contain, to control this poor that are abandoned because they are not producing, because they are not consuming. So they need the state to-- in Spanish, I call it, [SPEAKING SPANISH] you don't say contain-- control.
And they control through existentialism, through plants, and food sometimes, or stuff like that. That's the usual situation. Or when it doesn't work anymore, then there is repression that comes into the scene. That's the uses of the states in our countries, which is quite a sad one. But it's-- without them, this 20%, 30%, 35% of the population, which is absolutely marginalized, would have destroyed everything many years ago.
Another trait that we used to accept is that Latin America is the most violent region in the world. And that, of course, had to be another chapter in Ñamérica. So I started to take a closer look to that. And the first thing I saw was very surprising, because I realized that if I counted the victims of violence throughout the 20th century, I could say exactly the contrary, that Latin America was the most pacific region of the world. And I am not joking. Throughout the 20th century, in Europe, which is reason and harmony and all these things, there were like 85 million victims of violence-- 85 million. In Asia, about 100 million. In Africa, with all these independence wars and civil wars and so, about 15 million.
And in America, in the 20th century, there was a bit less than 2 million victims of violence which is enormous, but it's enormously less than in any other part of the world, in this period. So it was, again, like counterintuitive. One thinks, now, we are very violent, a very violent continent. The Latin American dictatorships, in my country, for instance. But in terms of quantity, it was very reduced. I mean 30,000 desaparecidos in Argentina is, maybe, I don't know, one afternoon in Moscow of 1935 or 36, which is a comparison that we shouldn't be doing. But anyway, the fact is I arrived to that numbers and I was amazed.
It wasn't we-- weren't we did most violent region in the world? And then I realized that I was talking about, let's say, public violence, political violence, state violence, state against other state, which is war, or against state against its citizens, which is repression, dictatorship, et cetera, and that something happened in Latin America in the '90s-- '80s, but mostly in the '90s. The big time of privatization all over the continent produced also a privatization of violence, which is a strange phenomenon. But it happened at that time. I mean, a tiny group of entrepreneurs, which wanted to do the same thing that all rich Latin American have done throughout history, which is to extract and export some primary matters, some commodity, in this case, coke from Colombia, realized that to keep on doing business, they had to have some kind of armed structure to go with because it was a very fought-for business. So they had to.
And it created kind of a spiral of violence that started in Colombia with these private enterprises-- not controlled-- fueled, let's say, by this violence. And then it went to Mexico. And then to the three northern countries of Central America, as we said, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras. So these five countries, and Venezuela for other reasons, have had in the last two or three decades a very huge number of victims of violence. You know that the victims of violence are measured in kill-- how do we say in-- homicides per 100,000 people per year. In Colombia, or in Mexico now, it's 25 homicides per 100,000 people per year, whereas the world median average is about five. In the states it's a little bit more than five. I think it's like six or something.
But it's true. There are five countries in Latin America that are well above the world average of victims of violence. But the rest, the other 14 countries let's say, they are not. I mean, they are average. Some ones are a little bit below. Some ones are a little on top of it, which means that, once again, Latin America is not the most violent region in the world. It has some of the most violent countries in the world, which is completely different.
And there was another trait that I wanted to address. Another one is what I could call the utopian region. I think Europeans have been impressing their utopian dreams in Latin America since 1492, with some strong moments, of course when Columbus arrived and said this is the paradise, blah, blah, blah. But other moments in the 18th century with the Jesuits and the [SPEAKING SPANISH] thing, and in the 19th century with the independencies and the surge of pure republics that were not tainted by the monarchies, European monarchies, et cetera. And of course, in the 1960s and 70s with the Cuban Revolution and all these things.
And this has been reproduced in the last two decades when there was much talk about a new Latin American left, or what someone, some people called the pink wave, these governments in a few countries, more than a few countries, in some countries, that were supposed to be left-wing governments. I have, since the beginning, I think, strongly contested the idea that they were leftist at all. I didn't believe them. But that's maybe a biographical problem. I mean, in Argentina, the ones that took this stand, the [INAUDIBLE] couple, they had been neoliberals just six years before. So it was hard to believe that all of a sudden they discovered the, I don't know, the nationalism and the statism and the revolution, and so on.
But I think that, usually, some of them-- well, we're speaking about being to the left, close to the left, much more than what they were effectively changing in their countries. But this was like a kind of a feeling, an impression. What amazed me a lot when working for this book, was the finding that it's supposed to be objective, in the measure of what we can call objective, the figures that some organizations give you, like [INAUDIBLE] or this kind of Latin American branches of the United Nations, and stuff like that.
And these figures say that in the good years of the beginning of the century where there was all this left-wing governments between 2000 and 2015, let's say, the countries with leftist governments didn't-- how you say-- oh-- haven't improved the situation of their poor more than the countries with right-wing governments. The situation of the lower classes in Latin America has improved, more or less, at the same level in-- no matter if the country in which it happened was a left-wing government or a right-wing government. It was much more driven by the prices of these commodities that our countries exported.
And, of course, I say if a government that defines itself as left-wing doesn't raise the situation of their poor more than another one defined as right-wing, what does it mean to be left, to be the [INAUDIBLE]. I mean, the only definition in which we can agree, I think, easily, of what it is to be [INAUDIBLE] is to better the distribution of wealth. And if you don't do it more than the right-wing governments, it means that you are not what you pretend to be. That was, for me, a strange finding, because well, we usually accept that some of these governments [INAUDIBLE] maybe the Bolivian government was the one who did the most to better the situation of the poor people there.
But even though their difference with the raising of the lower classes in Peru is not very strong. And it's strange because Peru was a country where there was a succession of, let's say, right-wing governments in all this period. That was another trait that was a surprise. And that's also why I think that the strongest political movement in America right now is a feminist movement, is the one that really got changes, important changes, in the last 20 years, which is, we can discuss it. It's almost logic in a time in which we lack of political imagination. Feminism does not need to imagine a different order.
Basically, it needs to extend the existing order to everyone, which is different from imagining a different order. You don't need to. But what feminism does is to include everyone in the order, in the existing order or something like that, which is absolutely different-- which is absolutely necessary, but it's different. It's different. It's something that can be done in a time of no political imagination, which is something I would like to talk about in a minute.
I'm almost finishing-- should I finish? I don't know the time. I didn't see the time.
EDMUNDO PAZ-SOLDAN: [INAUDIBLE]
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: It's OK?
EDMUNDO PAZ-SOLDAN: I think maybe five more minutes [INAUDIBLE]
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: OK. Another trait is that it's also, I mean, discussed in the book, is the point of Latin America is now a Democratic region. After long moments of its history in which democracy was not very strong there, now most of the countries are clearly Democratic, or so we think. The problem is democracy somehow is becoming a problem. I mean, it's becoming something of a problem. My generation cherishes democracy because we lived through very dark times when we didn't have democracy. We know what it was not to have it, and we somehow fought to get it back. And we respect it, I think, still, a lot.
But for anyone below 40 years old or something, democracy is just the regime where they have lived all their lives, and it's life that should be like they are. I mean, lives that they are not satisfied of and very logically not satisfied. So they have no particular respect for democracy. It's just that. It's just the regime where they have lived all their unsatisfactory lives. And that reflects in these studies that some organizations do. Usually less than half the population of Latin America says that democracy is important for them. And they prove it in any Democratic exercise.
For instance, there has been a very important election in Chile, as you know, two months ago, and with the most important participation since the beginning of the restarting of democracy in Chile, in the last 30 or 40 years. They had 54% of people participating, of participation in elections, which means that 40-- not 40-- 54%, which means that 45% didn't want to vote. They didn't want to vote in an election which was decisive for its country. You could say that it's not strange because the [INAUDIBLE] model of democracy, the United States, never gets to a participation of more than half. But when a system-- it's based on the fact that it represents the majority and it doesn't represent the majority, it's a problem.
And I think that in many countries in Latin America, the patience about democracy is wasting. It's a bit going-- finishing. And it's a problem, because the alternatives are not very promising. And well, I know what will come of that. The problem, and I tried to finish with that, is that, as I said, the alternatives are not clear, are not promising, are not there. There are no alternatives. And this is a trait, a very characteristic trait of these times in Latin America, and I think in the whole of the world. I mean, I think that there are times in history in which societies can build an ideal future that suits them and that gives them enthusiasm and makes them try to fight for it.
Maybe in the 19th century, it was a Republic. In the 20th century, for many, it was socialism. There were ideas of future that were worth fighting for and doing things for. But sometimes, in history, there are some moments in history, in which societies don't have that idea, usually because they have already wasted the previous one, or realized it in a wrong way or whatever. And I think that we are living in one of those. We live in one of those moments of history in which we don't know how we would like our future to be. We don't have an idea of how to construct a desirable future. That's why we look at the future not as a promise, but as a threat.
Everything we think about our future is a threat. It's an ecological threat, demographic threat, political threat, technological. What is going to happen with our jobs? What is going to happen with [? IA? ?] Everything is a threat because we don't have an idea for a desirable future, as I said. And in Latin America, particularly, the situation is tough. It shows, because, quite often, a country explodes. There is a situation in which many people in some country feel that they cannot stand it anymore. And then they take to the streets, and they demonstrate, and they fight against the police, and so-- but all of that works according to what I call the logic of [SPEAKING SPANISH] the logic of the bang-- I don't know how to say it in English-- because all this energy just disperses. It doesn't go anywhere because there is no clear idea of construction.
In the same kind of movement when it has an idea of what future it would like to build, goes in some direction and looks for this advancement. But not having this idea, what we have are these [INAUDIBLE] that pop and just don't produce anything. That's what has been happening in Latin America in the last, maybe, 10 years, with the very interesting exception of Chile. I don't know if you can imagine how much it pains me as an Argentinian to say that Chile is an interesting exception, but it is.
It's the only [SPEAKING SPANISH] that has built up something. And now we have to see, I think that tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, Boric is going to be the new president. And there is something very-- that I really like about him, which is that he doesn't come as they did, this pink wave governments did-- he doesn't come from any of the usual institutions of Latin American politics.
He doesn't come from an old party. He doesn't come from the army. He doesn't come from an old syndicate. So it's absolutely new. It's absolutely new. And at the same time, what he's proposing to do is very mild. I mean, it is not a revolution at all. I mean, if it goes very well, it will put Chile, which is the most privatized country in the continent, at the level of some-- I don't know-- maybe, if it goes very well, it could put it at the level of some second rate welfare European state, or something like that.
I mean, they privatized the pensions and the education and maybe some parts of the health. That is his ambition, which is enormous. And at the same time, it's not a change of society at all. But it's already very much.
Anyway, I have spoken a bit too much. Should I read a part-- a tiny part of the book, or is too late?
EDMUNDO PAZ-SOLDAN: [INAUDIBLE]
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: OK. [SPEAKING SPANISH]. He says that I don't-- that I ask you to intervene, and then I read [INAUDIBLE]. OK?
[APPLAUSE]
EDMUNDO PAZ-SOLDAN: Questions? Comments? [INAUDIBLE]. Questions, comments? [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: Can you tell us why you call it in Ñamérica?
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: Yeah, because I didn't say at the beginning, because I don't know why. I didn't say at the beginning that the book is not about Latin America. The book's about the Spanish speaking countries of Latin America. Because when I started to work, I found out that Brazil was too different. I mean, it was-- it's too big. It's too powerful.
And it's really different. It has a different story and history. It has different proportions and characteristics. And that very often I had to write things in-- things like-- well, in Latin America blah, blah, blah, except for Brazil, that blah, blah, blah. Or whereas in Brazil, [INAUDIBLE] and I said, well, I'm writing two books at the same time. It was a bit stupid. So I decided to concentrate the book on these Spanish speaking countries, which have a common history, a very important common history, which means-- I mean, the common language means history, culture, religion, ways of viewing the world, et cetera, et cetera. So I concentrate on those countries.
We don't think of that, because we are used to-- but the fact that there are 20 countries in the region that speak the same language is very strange. I mean, it doesn't happen in any other place of the world. I can cite the opposite. Countries where 20 languages are spoken-- I mean, India, for instance. But 20 countries who spoke the same-- which spoke the same language, it doesn't exist. So I think it's a curious enough and important enough phenomenon just to take it particularly. And I needed-- but I needed a name.
And because Latin America, of course, includes Brazil, so I couldn't use it. And I didn't know what to say, because the option, the accepted option, let's say, is Hispanoamerica. But Hispanoamerica, it's a shitty world, really. I mean, I think that I wrote in the book that it's a word that no one has ever said for free. You say it when you're paid for it, when you're a speaker on an official ceremony, or whatever. And that no one has ever got up a morning feeling so-- that's so Hispanoamericano. [SPEAKING SPANISH].
I needed another word. And I thought that if the link between these 20 countries was Spanish and the symbol of Spanish is the ñ, well, I wanted to play with this possibility. And that's why Ñamérica appeared. It could have been worst, much worst.
AUDIENCE: Well, just talking a little bit about Brazil, but also of other countries in Latin America, I was wondering, I just said like, the capacity to imagine a different future-- well, I'm from Brazil-- and I think that today in Brazil, perhaps, you could say that a neofascist movement represented by the supporters of Jair Bolsonaro are imagining a fossil future, which is how the [INAUDIBLE] of past, like a violent past--
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: [SPEAKING SPANISH]
AUDIENCE: --of a past-- [SPEAKING SPANISH] more violence. So I was just wondering if these other countries in Latin America, could you say-- we could say that there's no fascist movement, as in Chile against Boric, there was no fascist. In Bolivia, they have a lot of big representation, are reimagining a kind of future that, sometimes I think in Brazil, we are trying to not allow the laws to be changed. [INAUDIBLE] more like Republican perspective to the fact what's written in the Constitution.
And those movements, they are very strong-- we have very strong will to change what the political reality of the country was during the Democratic years, if you can [INAUDIBLE].
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: [? Which ?] movements? There's no way to change and--
AUDIENCE: But what was Brazil like during the Democratic years, since democratization in the 80s--
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: Si.
AUDIENCE: What they want to do is to dismantle-- to dismantle the laws that were created, the Constitution that was created, and come back to a military dictator. So there is an imagination of a future that solves the recovery of the past. And I wonder if in other parts of Latin America, we could say that, too? That the political imagination of a radical transformation of the future is now this new far right movements.
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: I don't know. I don't know what to say, because it's true that this kind of movements are arising, not only in Latin America, all over. I live in Spain where this Vox party, which is a far right is getting almost as many votes as the traditional right-wing party, El Partido Popular, which has governed very longly-- for a very long time, since [INAUDIBLE]. And even in, well, in Argentina, too, there is a candidate, which is someone who just spends his interventions in TV or so, like-- how would you say-- shouting Bible quotes, ridiculous Bible quotes. The first times I heard him, I said, this guy's crazy. He's not going to-- and in the last elections in Buenos Aires city, he had 15% of the vote.
So there is something there that I just don't know. I mean, I-- it's as if the failure also of this, I'd say, fake leftist parties had aroused-- had moved the idea of change, as you said, of construction of a different future, to the left-- to the far right. But it's just an impression. I mean, I cannot be more specific than that.
AUDIENCE: So in the beginning, you criticized the [INAUDIBLE], but immediately after it [INAUDIBLE] immediately after, you very lucidly analyzed how [INAUDIBLE] in [? both ?] economic model that did influence the inequality in America, and I don't think you mentioned this, but later on, dictatorships also established economical [? weight ?] in America. And after the [INAUDIBLE], for example, also during [INAUDIBLE] economic [? ways ?] in America that they came from somewhere else, [? not ?] North America. So it's unclear to me if you think that only the Americans are to blame, or that there is another that is imposing inequality.
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: I'm sorry, I didn't understand the last part of the question.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, it's unclear to me if you think that only Latin Americans are to blame or if there is actually an other with some injustice that affects the economics? [INAUDIBLE] the beginning [INAUDIBLE] the US [INAUDIBLE] or--
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: Well, when I said that, in fact, the basic system of extraction and exportation has been set by the Spaniards 500 years ago and it's still there, it's-- I believe it. But at the same time, we had 200 years to change it. I mean, if we didn't change it, it's not the fault of those who established it 500 years ago. Now it's already the fault of those who didn't change it in the last 200 years. And I usually don't like this kind of explanations that are too much based on foreign powers. It's easy to say, yeah, I don't know, International Monetary Fund, or the imperialism, blah, blah, blah.
Usually, it's local. I mean, all these structures, in order to intervene in a country, need a local sector, that it's much more active and attainable than this foreign, almost, abstractions. And what I say is, of course, in the last, I don't know, century, there has been many modifications to this core economic system. But the core is still there. And we are still countries that live from the extraction and exploitation, which also changes the way our politics work, in that sense, which is important to attain fortune in our countries is to have the political power needed to get-- how do you say-- to catch this sources of riches.
I mean, it's not the classic system of building enterprises, the classic system described by, I don't know, by Marx or any other, which is the original accumulation and the extraction of [SPEAKING SPANISH]-- I don't know how you say-- the-- oh, I'm sorry [SPEAKING SPANISH].
That's a classic structure. An economic power gets enough economic power-- an economic sector gets enough economic power to get political power. Whereas in our countries, it's political power which can get you economic power, because this political power is the possibility of getting your hands on these sources of riches, or minerals, or extensions of land, or whatever, which means that the politics in our countries work in a very different way also, because they are the possibility to conquer still these sources of riches. Right? I don't know.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. I wanted to ask you if it's possible to connect traits, mainly ask if we could see this idea of utopia-- can you define the idea of utopia-- living behind the idea of utopia, this lack of ideals, and this question about democracy and fascism, and if we could turn that into a question, or also a question, about which is the right government for the end of times, for the end of the world? Because I feel that is what was there what you mentioned.
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: Which is the right government for the end of the world?
AUDIENCE: Exactly, yeah.
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: I don't get it.
AUDIENCE: You spoke about the cessation of growing violence and threat and all these situations, but speak about we are close to something terrible happening.
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: Si.
AUDIENCE: And in fact, Brazil's current president, his name is Messiah, which makes this idea of how we are thinking within the end of times, in a sense. And it connects with the other questions that someone asked over here. [INAUDIBLE] how the possibility of a future is taken over by the right wing discourse on salvation.
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: I see. I would say-- I don't know. But I think, most-- something more plain that-- which is that this construction-- I mean, the construction of an idea, of a future takes time. It takes time to consolidate, to mix different ideas, different movements, different wishes that are a bit like everywhere. And at some point, they crystallize in a central idea that leads lots of people. And I think that it has been like that for at least since the beginning of the modernity. And I think that before, also.
So I tend to think that this is not different from all those other moments. The big problem of apocalypses is that they never get to realize. And maybe it's because they are clever. I'm thinking these days, I started to think that apocalypse are as clever as-- how do you say-- viruses? Yeah. Because they know that they cannot kill you-- viruses, they know that they can't kill you, everybody. Because if they kill everybody, they cannot keep on living.
And apocalypses do the same. If they kill everybody, they cannot keep living. They need us to be there to keep on imagining new apocalypse. They never realize. So I do think that, but who knows. OK. [INAUDIBLE].
EDMUNDO PAZ-SOLDAN: Well, perhaps I can compliment what I think he was saying. I was thinking about one of the reasons of the ascendance of the far right has to do with the power today of evangelical churches. But religion, especially in Brazil, obviously in Brazil, there's a big support for Bolsonaro comes from Evangelical churches [INAUDIBLE]. It's not only same happening-- started to happen in places like Mexico and Argentina, the big movements that aren't only bent on one thing to take the presidency, but they have big campaigns against women's rights, against abortion, things like that, and they occupy a big space. And religion has always been very important in America. But now with the power of evangelical movements, that sometimes get [INAUDIBLE] evangelical movements in the US, or they are very connected to religion in the US, but also are very reactionary strength in the American Society today.
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: Yeah. Yeah, well there is a whole chapter in the book about this religious war that is going on in Latin America, now, which is very, very heavy. I mean, because it's strange [INAUDIBLE] would upset the French, because it's a strange war between two religions that cannot accuse the other one of being unfaithful or heretics or whatever because, they are very close, finally. I mean, they believe in the same God. They have lots of things in common. So it's not your classic religious war.
But at the same time, it's absolutely open and unmerciful. And it's quite amazing, because as you've seen in Latin America until, I don't know, the 70s, the homogeneity of the religious feeling was complete. In most countries, 90 something percent of the people said they were Catholics. I mean, all of them were Catholics, except maybe in Uruguay, or a little bit in Argentina or Chile. The rest of the continent was so monolithically Catholic that it was quite incredible.
And the religion has had an enormous role in our history. It's even hard to imagine-- how do you say-- established and intervening was for centuries in our continent, in the lives of everyone. Everything they did was ruled by religion-- everything. I mean, what they had to eat, how they sleep, how they-- which days they work, which days they don't, how they have to have children, how they have to educate everyone. I mean, everything was ruled by religion that had agents all over. The priests were all over the place, and they control that everyone followed their rules.
It was like a very, very homogeneous and monolithic ideology that worked for so long. And then now, 30, 40 years ago it started, there are a few countries in which 30%, 40% of the people say they are not Catholic anymore, which is enormous as a lost for the Catholic Church. I even suspect that they had named a Papal Peronista because of that, because they wanted to make a sign to one of their last strongholds, and say, well, we are choosing a Pope from your place because you are important to us. And they chose this Peronista, which is-- well, it's a whole other story why they are-- why it's useful for them to have a Peronista se Papa.
It's a very important-- it's something that is going to be important in the next few years in Latin America. And the point is that against this theology, this almost, I would say, this theology that Catholics offer to people, I mean, the salvation in the next world, heaven, et cetera, et cetera, evangelicals offer salvation, offer advantages right here, right now. Some author called it a theology of prosperity. The fact that they are proposing-- I mean, they are saying, well, God, is enough powerful to get you a job, to get you the-- I don't know-- to get your son out of the drugs he's having, or to get anything you need for your life today, not a promise for something that is supposedly going to happen in another world. And that works.
It seemed that it's working a lot. And, of course, the fact that Catholic churches are too related to power, are too safe, are too-- their rituals are a bit too stiff. Whereas, evangelicals are like something that happens. It's alive. And it's a big fight. It's going to define a lot of things in the next years. And nonetheless, because of what you said, because some of these evangelical are aligning themselves with the most sort of far-right wing governments or parties. [SPEAKING SPANISH].
[APPLAUSE]
Is it early?
EDMUNDO PAZ-SOLDAN: [INAUDIBLE] two minutes.
MARTÍN CAPARRÓS: OK. I wanted to read-- it's a bit of the book, a tiny bit. It explains a bit of what it is. And it's a translation to English from Will [? Van ?] [? der ?] [? Hyden ?] that I hope will translate the whole book. OK?
It's something we should be and never happens. We are our own failure of ourselves. It often seems that being Latin America as it should be that never comes into being. It's a deception. It never happens. And we bemoan it. We bemoan it a lot as if it were an error committed by someone or something. We believe in that integrated should be and are surprised when faced with the disintegrated actuality of being. We deem ourselves to perpetual failure because we are not what we should be, instead of accepting that this is what we are.
We don't stop to think, for example, that we've now spent two centuries stubbornly persisting in the work of our own disintegration, a point of absolute pride for us. Through the last two centuries, the intrepid endeavor of our nations, our intellectuals, our populations, and our executioners consisted of seeking out and/or creating differences between territories and peoples among whom those differences weren't all that clear and making America, dividing it into nations.
Inventing nations is, first and foremost, establishing differences between lands that were one and the same. Convincing ourselves that Argentine from Corrientes who speaks Guarani is something radically distinct from a Paraguayan who speaks Guarani and lives on the opposite side of the river, and that one should even go to war with the other when they are at wars or remember them and sing about them when they are not. And that Peruvian who speaks Quechua on one shore of Lake Titicaca is the enemy of a Bolivian who speaks Quechua on the other side. And the Colombian who speaks the best Spanish in Cucuta should fight against and reject a Venezuelan who speaks so similarly across the bridge in San Antonio. And on and on like that throughout the continent, nations, the great modern myth, their borders.
There were times, so many, when borders didn't exist because countries, countries didn't exist. Lines were blurred. Spaces were confused. Territories were mixed. The border was one more thing that was sold to us as eternal, natural, as if there couldn't be a world without borders. That is false. It's how most of Earth was for most of history. Something very similar happens with countries.
Common sense pretends that they are immutable entities. The nation is before anything, after all, eternal. And yet, two centuries ago, our nations didn't exist. And there's no guarantee, absolutely no guarantee, fortunately, no guarantee, that they will still exist in another two. Countries are very complex, very fragile pacts that tend to be made and unmade, and that to exist while they exist, need to convince you that they always existed. That they are not temporary but permanent. That some gods, or fate, or who knows what, all-powerful entity has breathed a mortal essence into them.
The construction of differences. There were no countries per se, no kingdoms per se, no nothing per se. There were no prior legitimizes, because independence consisted of removing them. Everything was yet to be built. That's why it was so important to create countries, to create differences with the rest of the territory, stories that would justify the fact that up to this point, the power is ours. It is quite an original process, the invention of nations in a place where there were no clear reasons, where the language was the same, the religion was the same, the government was not.
Some people like that there are nations. Others of us like it less, but that's not the point for now. Like it or not, the truth is that nations exist, and that any idea of Latin America must consider that partition, those differences so laboriously constructed. Our great achievement was convincing ourselves that nations are unto themselves, natural, real, when really they are like most everything a matter of discourse. For 200 years, we've been trying so patriotically to prevent that Latin American unity from coming into existence, but then we bemoan its absence.
But it's precisely this shared past and the relative youth of our nations that allows us to think of Latin America as if it did exist. There's no other continent that continues to live in the effects of a common path like this one, which still share so many traits. The regions into which we tend to divide the world tend to be assembled according to physical proximity. We think of Europe and we group Italy and Norway, Romania and Germany, Russia and Portugal together in one concept. They are unified by the fact that they are limited by same oceans, and just in case, by various forms of the cross. Far more differentiates them.
Whereas here, we are talking about units that before being founded, were shaped by the same language, the same religion, the same culture, the same population, and similar stories. That creates the illusion of a possible unified whole, and every so often, the need to understand what we are, if we think of ourselves as one. Which doesn't mean that Latin America is a future should be. Latin America isn't an instruction. It's an historical reality worth unpacking, understanding.
Let's consider the metaphor of the choir. A choir is a gathering voices that become one voice. In other words, the question, what is Latin America? What is it to be Latin American? It seems a silly question, but I've learned to respect silly questions above all others. I think that when you reach the silly question, it's because you're beginning to approach with the matter, to get close to the nucleus, and then that apparently silly question winds up central.
Everything consists, then, in knowing what it would to be Latin American. In other words, what beyond nations, those laboriously construct differences, make us kindred, unites us, brings us together. To put it bluntly, what the hell do we have in common? And that's what the book tries to answer, too.
[CLAPPING]
A.D. White Professor-at-Large speaks on, “Ñamérica: On the complex and fascinating present of Latin America,” on March 8, 2022, in 120 Physical Sciences Building. Caparrós is a distinguished Argentine author, writer, and narrative journalist, and one of the fundamental Latin American voices of our time. His expertise interconnects with a range of cross-disciplinary topics including inter-American dialogue, food insecurity, and climate change. In 2017, he was awarded the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot award by the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, for outstanding reporting on America; specifying work on his nonfiction book-length work, “El Hambre” (Hunger: The Mortal Crisis of Our Time, 2016). This event is part of Caparrós’s first visit as an A.D. White Professor-at-Large (ADW-PAL) to Cornell. He was elected as an ADW-PAL in 2019. His appointment runs through 2025.
