Latin America: At War with the Past

By Carlos Fuentes

A passionate argument for the geopolitical autonomy of Latin America, Carlos Fuentes's 1984 CBC Massey lectures trace the region's unique historical and cultural tensions and call upon foreign powers to cease interference in a sphere of influence they rarely fully understand.

Fuentes sees the turbulence in Latin America ending not with political solutions, but economic ones. Foreshadowing the end of the Cold War, the signing and expansion of NAFTA, and the Mexican peso crisis of 1994, Fuentes urges further co-development in a progressively interdependent world and the creation of a new global economic and financial system. The new world economic order is not an exercise in philanthropy, he contends, but in enlightened self-interest for everyone concerned.

Forthright and intelligently reasoned, Carlos Fuentes's Latin America is a timeless book about the challenges facing emergent democracies and the opportunities for growth that exist within the countries themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2001
• ISBN: 9780887848629

Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) was one of the most influential and celebrated voices in Latin American literature. He was the author of 24 novels, including Aura, The Death of Artemio Cruz, The Old Gringo and Terra Nostra, and also wrote numerous plays, short stories, and essays. He received the 1987 Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's highest literary honor. Fuentes was born in Panama City, the son of Mexican parents, and moved to Mexico as a teenager. He served as an ambassador to England and France, and taught at universities including Harvard, Princeton, Brown and Columbia. He died in Mexico City in 2012.

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The Massey Lectures Series

The Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The series was created in honour of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, former governor general of Canada, and was inaugurated in 1961 to provide a forum on radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time.

This book comprises the 1984 Massey Lectures, Latin America: At War With the Past, broadcast in December 1984 as part of CBC Radio’s Ideas series. The executive producer of the series was Bernie Lucht.

Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes is a novelist, diplomat, essayist, lecturer, art critic, and playwright. He was born in Panama in 1928 and educated in Latin America, the United States, and Switzerland, where he worked with the International Law Commission and the International Labor Organization. In the 1970s he served as Mexico’s ambassador to France.

Fuentes’s first novel, Where the Air is Clear, was published in 1958 and he has since written more than thirty books including Aura, Old Gringo, Burnt Water, The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World, The Crystal Frontier, and This 1 Believe: An A to Z of Life. He has received many awards for his accomplishments, among them the Cervantes Prize in 1987, and in 1999, the Belisario Domíinguez Medal of Honor, the highest award bestowed by the Mexican government. Fuentes was the Robert F. Kennedy Professor of Latin America at Harvard from 1987-1988 and has received honorary doctorates from institutions such as Harvard, Georgetown, UCLA, Dartmouth, and Cambridge.

LATIN

AMERICA

AT WAR WITH THE PAST

CARLOS FUENTES

Copyright © 1985 Carlos Fuentes

and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and

retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First published in 1985 by CBC Enterprises

Published in 2001 by House of Anansi Press Ltd.

CBC and Massey College logos used with permission

House of Anansi Press is committed to protecting our natural environment.

As part of our efforts, this book is printed on Rolland Enviro paper:

it contains 100% post-consumer recycled fibres, is acid-free,

and is processed chlorine-free.

11  10  09  08  07      3  4  5  6  7

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Fuentes, Carlos

Latin America: at war with the past

(CBC Massey lectures; 1984)

ISBN-13: 978-0-88784-665-6

ISBN-10: 0-88784-665-3

1. Latin America—History. 2. Latin America—Foreign relations—

United States. 3. United States—Foreign relations—Latin America.

I. Title. II. Series; CBC Massey Lectures series

F1410.F83     2001     280     COO-933189-1

Cover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Printed and bound in Canada

LATIN

AMERICA

I

ONE of my earliest photographic memories is of my father, a young man of twenty-five with hornrimmed glasses and a straw boater, straddling the Mexican-American border at towns with hot, dusty names: Laredo/Nuevo Laredo; El Paso/Ciudad Juárez; Nogales, Arizona/Nogales, Sonora.

He had just started his career as a freshman lawyer on the Mexican-American Border Claims Commission, created in the mid-twenties, in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, to listen to the grievances of Americans affected by Pancho Villa’s incursions into New Mexico and of Mexicans affected by Black Jack Pershing’s incursions into Chihuahua as Pershing searched in vain for Villa in mountains that the Mexican revolutionist knew like the back of his hand.

This image of my father standing with one foot in Mexico and the other in the United States became a picture of my own self, a symbol of my own imagination.

The three-thousand-mile border between Mexico and the United States is more than a border between Mexico and the United States: it is the border between the United States and all of Latin America, for Latin America begins at the Mexican border.

It is the only frontier between the industrialized and the developing worlds.

It is the frontier between two memories: a memory of triumph and a memory of loss, best expressed by Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz’s famous exclamation: Poor Mexico! So far from God and so near to the United States!

It is the frontier between two cultures: the Protestant, capitalist, Nordic culture, and the southern, Indo-Mediterranean, Catholic culture of syncretism and the baroque.

Our faces see themselves across this frontier, which then becomes the frontier each one of us carries within him.

Every Latin American has a personal