At the end of the eighteenth century, Napoleon’s soldiers discovered that many Egyptian children believed the Pyramids had been built by the French or the English.
At the end of the twentieth century, many Japanese children believed the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been dropped by the Russians.
In 1965, the people of Santo Domingo resisted an invasion of forty-two thousand U.S. Marines for 132 nights. People fought house by house, hand to hand, with sticks and knives and carbines and stones and broken bottles. What will Dominican children believe a little while from now? The government celebrates this heroic resistance not as a Day of Dignity but as the Day of Brotherhood, placing an equal sign between those who kissed the hands of the invaders and those who bared their breasts to the tanks.
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Does history repeat itself? Or are its repetitions only penance for those who are incapable of listening to it? No history is mute. No matter how much they burn it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is. The right to remember does not figure among the human rights consecrated by the United Nations, but now more than ever we must insist on it and act on it. Not to repeat the past but to keep it from being repeated. Not to make us ventriloquists for the dead but to allow us to speak with voices that are not condemned to echo perpetually with stupidity and misfortune. When it’s truly alive, memory doesn’t contemplate history, it invites us to make it. More than in museums, where its poor old soul gets bored, memory is in the air we breathe, and from the air it breathes us.
To forget forgetting: the Spanish writer Don Ramón Gómez de la Serna tells a story of a fellow who had such a bad memory that one day he forgot he had a bad memory and remembered everything. To remember the past, to free us of its curse, not to tie the feet of the present but to help the present walk without falling into the same old traps. Up until a few centuries ago, the Spanish word for “remember” also meant “wake up,” and it’s still used in that sense in some rural parts of Latin America. A memory that’s awake is contradictory, like us. It’s never still, and it changes along with us. It was born to be not an anchor but a catapult. A port of departure, not of arrival. It doesn’t turn away from nostalgia, but it prefers the dangers of hope. The Greeks believed memory was the sister of time and the sea, and they weren’t wrong.
Impunity is the child of bad memory. All the dictatorships that have ever existed in Latin America have known this well. They’ve burned entire mountain ranges of books, books guilty of revealing an outlawed reality and books simply guilty of being books, and mountains of documents as well. Military officers, presidents, priests: the history of burnings is a long one, dating from 1562 in Maní de Yucatán when Father Diego de Landa threw Mayan books into the flames, hoping to reduce indigenous memory to ashes. To mention only a few bonfires: in 1870, when the armies of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay razed Paraguay, the historical archives of the vanquished were torched; twenty years later, the government of Brazil burned all the papers that testified to three and a half centuries of black slavery; in 1983, the Argentine brass set fire to all the records of their dirty war against their countrymen; and in 1995, the Guatemalan military did the same.
EXTERMINATORS OF THE PLANET
Crimes against people, crimes against nature: the impunity enjoyed by the masters of war is shared by their twins, the voracious masters of industry, who eat nature on earth and, in the heavens, swallow the ozone layer. The most successful companies in the world are the ones that do the most to murder it; the countries that decide the planet’s fate are the same ones that do their best to annihilate it.
NO-RETURN PLANET
Effluence, affluence: inundating the world and the air it breathes are floods of crud and torrents of words—expert reports, speeches, government declarations, solemn international accords that no one observes, and other expressions of official concern for the environment. The language of power diverts blame from consumer society and from those who impose consumerism in the name of development. The large corporations who, in the name of freedom, make the planet sick and then sell it medicine and consolation can do what they please, while environmental experts, who reproduce like rabbits, wrap all problems in the bubble-wrap of ambiguity. The state of the world’s health is disgusting, and official rhetoric extrapolates in order to absolve: “We are all responsible” is the lie technocrats offer and politicians repeat, meaning no one is responsible. Official palaver exhorts “the sacrifice of all,” meaning screw those who always get screwed.
All of humanity pays the price for the ruin of the earth, the befouling of the air, the poisoning of the waters, the disruption of the climate, and the degradation of the earthly goods that nature bestows. But hidden underneath the cosmetic words, statistics confess and little numbers betray the truth: one-quarter of humanity commits three-quarters of the crimes against nature. Each inhabitant of the North consumes ten times as much energy, nineteen times as much aluminum, fourteen times as much paper, and thirteen times as much iron and steel as someone in the South. The average North American puts twenty-two times as much carbon into the air as an Indian and thirteen times as much as a Brazilian. It may be called “global suicide,” but this daily act of murder is being perpetrated by the most prosperous members of the human species, who live in rich countries or imagine they do, members of countries and social classes who find their identity in ostentation and waste. The widespread adoption of such models of consumption faces a small impediment: it would take ten planets the size of this one for poor countries to consume as much as rich ones do, according to the well-documented Bruntland Report, presented to the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987.
The giants of oil, the sorcerer’s apprentices of nuclear energy and biotechnology, the large corporations that make weaponry, steel, aluminum, automobiles, pesticides, plastics, and a thousand other products like to shed crocodile tears over the suffering of nature. These companies, the most devastating on the planet, figure among those that make the most money. They also spend the most money—on advertising that magically turns pollution into philanthropy and on high-minded favors for politicians who decide the fates of countries or the world. Explaining why the United States refused to sign the Convention on Biodiversity at the Rio summit in 1992, President George Bush was unequivocal: “It is important to protect our rights, our business rights.”
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The Language of International Experts
In the context of evaluating the contributions made by reframing the projects currently under way, we will focus our analysis on three fundamental questions: the first, the second and the third. As can be deduced from the experience of those developing countries where some of the measures which are the object of our study have been put into practice, the first question has many points of coincidence with the third, and one or another of these appear to be intrinsically linked to the second, such that it could well be argued that the three questions are related to one another.
The first …
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Whether he signed or not mattered little, because such international accords are worth less than a bounced check. The Rio summit was called to keep the planet from dying. But, with the exception of Germany (and even it acted only halfheartedly), none of the great powers kept the agreements they signed, for fear that their companies would lose their competitive edge and their governing politicians would lose elections. And the great power that complied least was precisely the most powerful of all, whose essential objectives were stated clearly in President Bush’s confession.
The colossi of the chemical, oil, and automobile industries, so central to the theme of the Rio summit, paid a large portion of the cost of the conference. You can say anything you like about Al Capone, but he was a gentleman: good old Al always sent flowers to the funerals of his victims.
Five years later, the United Nations called
another meeting to evaluate the impact of the Rio summit. In those five short years the planet’s skin of vegetation had been stripped of its tropical flora over an area two and a half times the size of Italy, and fertile lands the size of Germany had turned arid. A total of 250,000 species of animals and plants had become extinct; the atmosphere was more polluted than ever; 1.3 billion people were without proper homes or food, and 25,000 were dying each day from drinking water contaminated by chemical poisons or industrial waste. Not long before, twenty-five hundred scientists from a broad array of countries, also called together by the United Nations, concluded that in the near future the planet will face the greatest climate changes in the last ten thousand years.
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Morgan
They don’t have peg legs or eye patches, but bio-pirates are roaming the Amazon jungle and other tropical lands. They force their way on board, snatch the seeds, patent them, and turn them into successful commercial products.
Four hundred indigenous villages of the Amazon recently decried the seizure of a sacred plant, ayahuasca, “our equivalent,” they said, “of the Christian host.” At the U.S. Patent Office, International Plant Medicine Corporation patented ayahuasca for making psychiatric and cardiovascular medicine. From now on, ayahuasca is private property.
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Those who suffer most from this punishment are, as usual, the poor—poor people and poor countries condemned to expiate the sins of others. Economist Lawrence Summers, with a doctorate from Harvard and a post high in the World Bank hierarchy, bore witness to this fact at the end of 1991. In an internal document leaked by mistake, Summers proposed that the World Bank encourage the migration of dirty industries and toxic waste “toward less developed countries,” for reasons of economic logic that had to do with “the comparative advantages” those countries enjoy. Those advantages turned out to be three: pitiful wages, vast expanses where there’s still lots of room for polluting, and the low incidence of cancer among the poor, who have a habit of dying young from other causes.
The publication of that document caused quite a furor: such things are to be done but not said. Summers imprudently set to paper what the world has been doing in practice for a long time. The South functions as the garbage can of the North. The factories that most pollute the environment migrate south, and the South is the dump where most of the industrial and nuclear shit the North generates ends up.
Sixteen centuries ago, Saint Ambrose, priest and doctor of the Church, prohibited usury among Christians and authorized it against barbarians. The same thing happens nowadays with the most lethal pollution. What’s bad in the North is good in the South; what’s outlawed in the North is welcome in the South. In the South lies the vast kingdom of impunity; there are no controls or legal limits and, when there are, it’s never hard to discover their price. The complicity of local governments rarely comes free, and then there’s the cost of waging advertising campaigns against the defenders of nature and human dignity, dismissing them as advocates of backwardness who only want to scare off foreign investment and sabotage economic development.
At the end of 1984, in the city of Bhopal, India, forty tons of deadly gas leaked from a pesticide factory run by the chemical company Union Carbide. The gas spread through the shantytowns, killing 6,600 people and harming another 70,000, many of whom died shortly thereafter or were maimed for life. Union Carbide in India did not abide by any of the security regulations it must adhere to in the United States.
In Latin America, Union Carbide and Dow Chemical, like the other giants of the world’s chemical industry, sell many products that are outlawed in their own country. In Guatemala, for example, crop dusters spray the cotton plantations with pesticides that can’t be sold in the United States or Europe. These poisons filter through the food chain into everything from honey to fish and finally reach the mouths of babes. As early as 1974, a study by the Central American Nutrition Institute found that the milk of many Guatemalan mothers contained up to two hundred times the pesticide limit considered dangerous.
Bayer, the world’s second-largest producer of pesticides, has been untouchable since the days when it was part of the I. G. Farben consortium and used unpaid labor from Auschwitz. At the beginning of 1994, a Uruguayan environmental activist became a Bayer stockholder for a day. Thanks to the solidarity of German friends, Jorge Barreiro was able to raise his voice at an annual stockholders meeting graced with beer, sausage, mustard, and aspirins. Barreiro asked why the company sold toxic agricultural chemicals in Uruguay that were banned in Germany, three of which the World Health Organization considered “extremely dangerous” and another five “highly dangerous.” The usual transpired. Every time someone raises the issue of selling in the South poisons prohibited in the North, the executives of Bayer and the other global chemical companies have the same answer: they aren’t breaking any laws in the countries where they operate, which could be technically true, and besides, their products are not dangerous. They never explain the enigma of why these balms of nature can’t be enjoyed by their own countrymen.
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Maps
In the United States, the environmental map is also a racial map. The most polluting factories and the most dangerous dumps are located in the pockets of poverty where blacks, Indians, and Latinos live.
The black community of Kennedy Heights in Houston, Texas, exists on land ruined by Gulf Oil’s wastes. The residents of Convent, the Louisiana town where four of the dirtiest factories in the country operate, are nearly all black. Most of those who went to the emergency room in 1993, after General Chemical rained acid on the northern part of Richmond on San Francisco Bay, were black. A 1987 study by the United Church of Christ confirmed that the majority of the population living near hazardous waste dumps was black or Latino.
Indian reservations take in nuclear waste in exchange for money and the promise of jobs.
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Maximum production, minimum cost, open markets, high profits—the rest is unimportant. Many U.S. industries had already set up shop on the Mexican side of the border long before the two countries signed a free-trade agreement. They turned the border zone into a vast industrial pigpen. All the treaty did was make it easier to take advantage of Mexico’s abysmal wages and the freedom to poison its water, land, and air. To put it in the language of the poets of capitalist realism, the treaty maximized opportunities to make use of the resources of comparative advantage. Four years before the treaty, the waters near the Ford plant in Nuevo Laredo and the General Motors plant in Matamoros already contained thousands of times more toxins than the maximum allowed on the other side of the border. And in the vicinity of the Du Pont plant, also in Matamoros, the filth was such that people had to be evacuated.
Progress spreads across the globe. Japanese aluminum is made no longer in Japan but in Australia, Russia, and Brazil, where energy and labor are cheap and the environment suffers in silence. To provide electricity for the aluminum industry, Brazil has flooded gigantic tracts of tropical forest. No statistic can register the ecological cost of that sacrifice. After all, it’s normal: Amazonian flora and fauna have suffered many sacrifices, mutilated day after day, year after year, in the service of lumber, cattle, and mining companies. Such organized devastation makes “the lungs of the earth” ever more vulnerable. The gigantic fire in 1998 that razed the forests of the Yanomami Indians in Roraima was not just the devilish work of El Niño.
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Development
A bridge with no river.
A tall façade with no building.
A sprinkler on a plastic lawn.
An escalator to nowhere.
A highway to the places the highway destroyed.
An image on TV of a TV showing another TV on which there is yet another TV.
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Impunity is fed by fatality, and fatality obliges us to accept whatever orders are dictated by the international division of labor—like the fellow who jumped from the tenth floor to obey
the law of gravity.
Colombia grows tulips for Holland and roses for Germany. Dutch companies send tulip bulbs and German companies send rose seedlings to immense plantations on the savannah of Bogotá. When the flowers are ready, Holland gets the tulips, Germany gets the roses, and Colombia gets low wages, damaged land, and poisoned water. Thanks to these floral arrangements of the industrial era, the savannah is drying out and sinking, while the workers, nearly all of them women and children, are bombarded by pesticides and chemical fertilizers.
The rich countries grouped in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development cooperate in economically developing the South by sending it radioactive garbage and other toxic expressions of kindness. The very countries that outlaw the importation of polluting substances shower them generously on poor countries. Just as with pesticides and herbicides banned at home, they export hazardous waste to the South under other names. The Basil Convention banned such shipments in 1992, yet there are more today than ever before. They come disguised as “humanitarian aid” or “contributions to development projects,” as Greenpeace discovered on several occasions, or they come as contraband hidden inside mountains of legal industrial waste. Argentine law bans the entry of hazardous waste, but to solve that little problem all you need is a certificate of innocuousness issued in the country that wants to get rid of the waste. At the end of 1996, Brazilian ecologists managed to put an end to the importation of used car batteries from the United States that for years had come into the country as “recyclable material.” The United States exported used batteries and Brazil paid to receive them.
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