Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies, Spring 2017

berkeley review of

Latin American Studies

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY SPRING 2017

Dresser on How to Fix Mexico

Paz y Paz and the 43 What It Means to Ride the Beast

Table of Contents

Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies Spring 2017 Comment

1

Denise Dresser

2

Brittany Arsiniega

12

Mexit: The Return of Distant Neighbors

Lorenzo Meyer

18

Helen Mack and a New Generation

Calixtho Lopes, Kevin Figueroa, and Arlette Jacome, with Beatriz Manz

24

Almudena Bernabeu

28

Art Exhibition

37

Carlos Milani

52

Celso Amorim

60

Karen Chapple and Sergio Montero

64

María del Carmen Thomsen, Pedro Reszka, Andrés Fuentes, and Carlos Fernandez-Pello

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Katrina Dodson

74

Lines from Clarice Lispector

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Why Mexico Fell Apart and How to Fix It

MEXICO LAW

Harley Shaiken

Paz y Paz and the Missing 43

MEXICO

HUMAN RIGHTS LAW

Secrets, Lies, and the Case of Víctor Jara

ART

MONTARlaBestia: Riding the Beast Democracy at Stake

BRAZIL DIPLOMACY

Development on the Peripheries

RESEARCH

Chile & California: The Impact of Wildland Fires

CONICYT LITERATURE WHIMSY

Negotiating Nuclear Safety

Rediscovering Clarice Through Translation

“That’s Where I’m Going”

The Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies is published by the Center for Latin American Studies, 2334 Bowditch Street, Berkeley, CA 94720.

Chair

Harley Shaiken Interim Vice Chair

Program Coordinator

Julia Byrd

Isabel Nogueira

Contributing Editor

Design and Layout

Deborah Meacham

Greg Louden

Special thanks to: Dionicia Ramos, Perla Nation, Lili Spira, Marimar Arango-Gomez, Paloma Corcuera, Ana Sofía Tamborrel Signoret,Yaocí Pardo, Holly Jackson, and Christopher Charman.

The Río Bravo/Rio Grande forms the Mexico–U.S. border in Parque Nacional Cañón de Santa Elena, Chihuahua, and the Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend National Park, Texas. (Photo by Jasperdo.)

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Spring 2017

Comment

Photo by Peg Skorpinski.

Our cover features a striking view of Santa Elena Canyon with the Río Bravo/Rio Grande running right through it. The river has shaped the area for thousands of years, and paintings and mortars indicate the first people may have arrived in 15,000 B.C. The river, of course, is also the international border between Mexico and the United States, so to the south is the Parque Nacional Cañón de Santa Elena, Chihuahua, and to the north, the Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend National Park, Texas.

The Chihuahua desert spans the border and symbolizes the ways in which not just geography, but history, culture, people, and economics link Mexico and the United States. Our challenge ought to be how to make the Harley Shaiken and Claudia Paz y Paz on the Berkeley campus. most of that reality, not where in this many as 500,000 Central Americans a year across Mexico photo we might be able to construct a wall that damages on the hazardous journey to the United States. the relationship.

As we go to press, nuclear risk has jumped to the We begin this issue with three articles that analyze top of the agenda. Think North Korea and “fire and the political turbulence and traumas that Mexico is in fury.” These developments make particularly timely the the midst of. Denise Dresser, a noted political scientist article “Negotiating Nuclear Safety,” by Celso Amorim, and public intellectual, examines “Why Mexico Fell a distinguished Brazilian diplomat and the country’s Apart and How to Fix It.” She concludes all Mexicans longest-serving Foreign Minister. He commemorates the must contribute to the debate motivated by a phrase from 25th anniversary of the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Václav Havel: “An ability to work for something because Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials, which he it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.” helped negotiate.

Claudia Paz y Paz, the courageous former attorney We also report on another research project that general of Guatemala and member of the expert group became all too relevant: “Chile and California: The Impact of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to of Wildland Fires.” The article reflects work done by a investigate the disappearance of the 43 students, discusses collaborative research group of professors and researchers their investigation, the role of the federal government in at UC Berkeley and at Chilean universities. It was funded limiting it, and what it means for Mexico. through an innovative program organized by CLAS and Lorenzo Meyer, one of Mexico’s foremost historians, funded by Conicyt, Chile’s National Commission for puts the tensions of the relationship between Mexico and Scientific and Technological Research. the United States in historical context. He points out We conclude with an article by the scholar and awardthat for Mexico, “the best foreign policy must be a solid winning translator Katrina Dodson about the Brazilian domestic policy.” writer Clarice Lispector and how “translation is a way We feature photos from “MONTARlaBestia: Riding of deep reading.” The article comes with a warning: “Be the Beast,” an art exhibit the Center for Latin American careful with Clarice. It’s not literature. It’s witchcraft.”

Studies (CLAS) has been proud to display in partnership — Harley Shaiken with the Mexican Museum. These trains have carried as CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Why Mexico Fell Apart

MEXICO

Why Mexico Fell Apart and How to Fix It

By Denise Dresser

E

l Telepresidente (TelePresident), El Copetudo (The Pompadour), El Copetesaurio (The Pompadinosaur) — these are some of the nicknames given to Enrique Peña Nieto, a president with a 6-percent approval rating, the lowest level of acceptance in 20 years. These are the epithets with which he has been baptized after promising to “Move Mexico,” and he has indeed done so, but in the wrong direction. The country has moved from delirium to disenchantment. From blissful honeymoon to acrimonious divorce. Where we no longer speak of the “Mexican Moment,” but rather of the “Mexican Morass.” Where the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party) can still win elections, but with declining margins and worse perceptions. An era of political regression and social resistance in the face of its implications.

Because the Peña Nieto project entailed only an attempt to recentralize power, but not an effort to reconstruct and remodel the state. An ambitious but illfated project based on reforms, but not enough of them; built upon corruption and undone by it. It didn’t seek to make the pie bigger, but to slice it up among party stalwarts and privileged contractors. It didn’t really seek more competition, but state-administered rent-seeking that ended up shoring up crony capitalism. It didn’t seek to combat impunity, but rather to take advantage of it.

Today, Mexico is saddled with a government that was featured on the cover of Time magazine as “Saving Mexico” with 11 structural reforms that were celebrated at the time of their approval, but diluted or sabotaged at the time of their implementation. These 11 structural reforms were approved by opposition parties that didn’t even read what they were approving, but bought into the Peña Nieto >>

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Spring 2017

President Enrique Peña Nieto toasts the queen of Spain at a state dinner in 2014.

(Photo courtesy of Presidencia de la República Mexicana.)

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Why Mexico Fell Apart

Photo by Luis J. Romero.

A Mexico City monument to the 43 disappeared students from Ayotzinapa.

narrative because their survival seemed to be at stake.

Accepting top-down reforms without seeking bottom-up consensus. In the case of energy and telecommunications reform, accepting a regulatory framework that is too weak to contain the voracity of participating consortiums.

In the case of education reform, accepting a rollout that didn’t consider the views of entrenched unions unable to comprehend what the reform entailed.

And then came the summary executions by the military in Tlatlaya. The disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa and the involvement of the municipal, state, and federal police in a case that to this day remains unsolved. The corruption and conflict of interest revealed by the Casa Blanca — and the houses in Malinalco and Ixtapan de la Sal — and the OHL scandal. The massacre of civilians by the federal police in Tanhuato. Growth estimates that are falling and homicide rates that are rising. The recent and fundamental report on inequality written by Gerardo Esquivel, which shows how 16 Mexican multimillionaires have a fortune equivalent to 9 percent of the country’s GDP. The liberalization of gasoline prices, at a time of economic anxiety, coupled with the devaluation of the peso, a psychological measurement of the stability of the country for many.

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And in the face of the crisis of impunity, insecurity, and inequality, the response from those who work at Los Pinos, the presidential residence, is to feel misunderstood.

To argue that they have encountered a strong “resistance” from Mexico’s veto centers and vested interests, when it is precisely those vested interests that propelled Peña Nieto to power. The select beneficiaries of government contracts and bids and largesse. The select beneficiaries of a president who vowed to be a reformer on paper, but failed to be one fully in practice. In a recent closed-door meeting with a handful of journalists, Peña Nieto refused to accept that his government was corrupt and attributed the dramatic decline in his popularity to a worldwide phenomenon in which social media fuels anti-systemic views.

Today, he is the lamest of all lame ducks. A duck that limps, painfully, slowly, on one foot. With two long years remaining in his term. Two years that most Mexicans view as without hope, without leadership, without exit.

Disapproved by public opinion and the international press.

A failed presidency at the helm of a state that cannot fulfill its primordial duties to assure security, stability, growth, human rights, equality, the rule of law. July 2017 was the most violent month in Mexico’s history.

Spring 2017

And it’s not just a question of society’s “bad mood,” as the president has argued. The numbers don’t lie. The data doesn’t lie. Look at the downgrading of Mexico by Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. The level of indebtedness that former Minister of Finance and current Minister of Foreign Affairs Luis Videgaray promoted. The head of the Central Bank’s resignation in the face of an impending crisis of the sort we endured at the end of the Salinas term in 1994.

It is true that part of the problem is not Peña Nieto’s own doing. Not the fall in the price of oil nor the uncertainty created by the election of Donald Trump and his expressed intention to use Mexico as a whipping boy. But the Peña Nieto administration is responsible for permitting Mexico’s internal debt to grow to 50 percent of GDP, for allowing government spending to be channeled — in an opaque fashion — to salaries for high-level bureaucrats, to electoral cycles, to corrupt deals, to the intense promotion of his own image. The Mexican government spent, but the economy didn’t grow. The Mexican government spent, not on public investment, but rather on state-sponsored cronyism.

Mexico’s problems have been compounded by the global context, yet a large part of the blame resides on economic mismanagement by Videgaray and his team, who never fulfilled their promises to rationalize public spending. Who reneged on their commitment to maintain

a balanced budget. Who with their actions — politically and clientelistically motivated — increased the debt in an irresponsible fashion. Who by doing so generated a level of distrust that undermined investor confidence in structural reforms. Who by their decisions and omissions produced a deficit of credibility among domestic and international investors that led to capital flight and speculation against the currency.

Thus, they have exacerbated the recalcitrant reality of a country with one of the highest levels of inequality in the world. A country with a permanent subclass of 50 million people who live below the poverty line. A country saddled with alarming figures. The wealthiest 1 percent receives 21 percent of the income. The wealthiest 21 percent concentrates 64.4 percent of the country’s total wealth. The wealth of the 16 richest Mexicans grew 32 percent between 2007 and 2012, and this growth exceeds that of many other fortunes across the globe. In 2002, their wealth represented 2 percent of GDP; in 2014, it was equivalent to 9 percent of GDP. And in the first four places are men who have made their fortunes in sectors regulated by the state. They are “creatures of the state,” which they are subsequently able to capture due to lack of regulation or an excess of fiscal privileges. While GDP per capita grows 1 percent annually, the fortune of the 16 wealthiest Mexicans multiplies by five. >>

Mexican government debt has jumped to more than 50 percent of gross domestic product.

Mexican Government Debt as Percent of GDP

53.5

(Data: OECD; accessed 08-04-2017) 49.7

49.2

46.4 44.3 42.5

45.0

41.9

40.8

38.0

37.9 35.5

34.9

CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Why Mexico Fell Apart

Inequality and excessive concentration of wealth are structural problems that have grown over time.

They are systemic problems because rent-seeking and the permissiveness of fiscal policy have been rules, not exceptions. This is not a tale of rapacious neoliberal markets, but instead of manipulated, inefficient markets.

Growth cannot take place within the context of a state that lacks the credibility to provide equity, regulate monopolies, and assure accountability regarding the Casa Blanca corruption scandal and so many other instances of crony capitalism. Mexico’s lackluster performance, coupled with corruption, has led to the emergence of widespread social discontent headed by independent journalists like Carmen Aristegui, by human rights defenders, by activists who are calling for the decriminalization of marijuana and the end of the war on drugs, by students, and by those who decry the gasolinazo, a 20-percent increase in state-set fuel prices for the many, accompanied by the preservation of privileges for the few.

This was the state of affairs when Peña Nieto extended the ill-fated invitation to Donald Trump to visit Mexico prior to the United States’ elections. When the Mexican president became responsible for what I deemed “humillación a domicilio.” This public humiliation was

accentuated by Trump’s announcement at their joint conference that the wall would be built, and Peña Nieto simply stood by in sullen silence. Accentuated by his subsequent tweet, arguing that Mexico would not pay for the wall, and that he had insisted upon it in private.

Accentuated by the fact that only six hours after saying that he liked Mexicans a lot and we were wonderful people, Trump stabbed us in the back by giving a virulent anti-immigrant speech in Arizona. And confronted by this turn of events, Peña Nieto has often seemed weak, pusillanimous, lost.

As Slate magazine wrote, perhaps a president with such low approval ratings truly doesn’t know what he’s doing. A head of state who invites a bully to his home and puts out a welcome mat. A leader who, instead of growing in the face of a dangerous external threat, has shrunk. By appeasing. By staying silent. By not putting all of Mexico’s negotiating chips — and it has many — on the table from the very beginning, clearly, strongly, and firmly.

Along with this dismal state of affairs in terms of the bilateral relationship, the population of Mexico has witnessed a growing deterioration at home. Selective austerity with large cuts to education, justice, public investment, the fight against corruption, and programs to

Enrique Peña Nieto hosts then-Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump in August 2016.

Photo by Dario Lopez-Mills/Associated Press.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Photo by Alan Zabicky.

Spring 2017

Everyday corruption: Mexican police often expect free goods from local merchants.

prevent violence, but increases in the budget for Congress and the judiciary. A historic level of government revenue via taxation and a government that continues to spend so much and so badly that it must resort to taxing gasoline to support its profligate behavior. With cuts that aren’t focused where they should be, and thus, the belt-tightening seems like a demand that the political class places on the population, but not on itself. The Peña Nieto administration and political parties that still support it don’t have enough resources for bridges or schools or ports or hospitals or highways, but do have enough funds to provide the Senate with a 7.6-percent increase in its budget.

In other latitudes, governments have fallen and for much less. For less grievous mistakes, for less blatant corruption. But Mexico doesn’t have a mechanism for impeachment or removal, so the best that we can aspire to is damage control until the next presidential election in July 2018.

It’s the Corruption, Stupid And the root of this implosion is largely corruption.

Conflicts of interest, covered up. Private enrichment with public goods, allowed. The illegal and unconstitutional actions of the army vis-à-vis civilians and human rights violations, permitted. And such behavior is due to the

following paradox: democracy in Mexico has not meant more controls but more corruption. “Alternancia,” the rotation of different political parties in power, has not stopped abuses; it has exacerbated them, normalized them.

Today, 78 out of 100 Mexicans believe that corruption will increase this year.

Because pluralism and “alternancia” do not combat corruption per se. Democratization in Mexico has led to the dispersion of power and the opening of many windows to do business with public resources. A weak rule of law allows it. Greater decentralization of the budget entails greater discretion in its use. More influence of Congress over the disbursement of the budget entails a higher probability of payoffs — moches — for public works.

National and local legislative bodies are not a check and balance for corruption, but rather part of the machinery that makes it possible. And then there are 32 governors with a great deal of money and zero accountability.

All these political players are beneficiaries of the enormous cash liquidity in the national economy with few fiscal controls. Beneficiaries of the increase in public spending and of what the Minister of Finance has channeled into public works. Of the bags of cash to pay for political campaigns. Of the cartloads of money that flow from the president’s office to political parties and the media. Along >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Why Mexico Fell Apart

Photo by Moises Castillo/Associated Press.

Mexico’s former governor of V eracruz, Javier Duarte, is led to an extradition hearing in Guatemala.

with the national and local media — full of governmentsponsored fake news — publishing stories and photos of governors inaugurating clinics packed with hugging indigenous women. Corruption in Mexico is a mechanism of mutual protection. And opposition parties don’t denounce corruption as vehemently or as consistently as they should, because instead of avoiding the PRI’s behavior, they have emulated it.

Governors have perfected the state-by-state model for pillaging. Take the case of Veracruz and its governor, Javier Duarte, who fled the country and was caught in Guatemala. Veracruz is a microcosm of how an omnipotent governor could become a despoiler. The governor handed over millions of pesos to 73 apocryphal companies to buy blankets, medicine, school supplies, and shoes.

These resources and goods never reached their avowed destination due to an elaborate system designed to create “partnerships” so that Duarte and his team could channel public money into private hands. The Veracruz model is also the Mexican model. The PRI’s standard operating procedure for creating fake businesses, channeling money to them, and closing them later. What no longer surprises, but does cause indignation, is the indifference of the authorities. The lackadaisical attitude of the Attorney BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

General’s Office, that had received 32 official complaints from the Federal Audits Office but never acted on them, probably because Duarte had funneled money into Peña Nieto’s presidential campaign and other elections. As was the case with so many other governors, Duarte stands accused, but a full investigation and trial remain pending.

And while the PRI waits for the Duarte storm to pass and for the scandal of this week to cover up the scandal of last week, the PRI’s modus operandi is becoming increasingly obvious: turning the country’s fragile democracy into a partisan kleptocracy and using its time in government to squeeze those who finance it via their taxes. The PRI is used to stealing, and the population is used to being ripped off.

Mexico was the birthplace of the perfect dictatorship, and now it is the home of the perfect pillage.

Analyst Edgardo Buscaglia is right: organized crime in Mexico is frequently in the government itself. At the state level. Among government ministers. Among municipal presidents. Among those who enabled drug kingpin “El Chapo” Guzmán to escape not once, but twice. That’s why it’s not surprising that so many governors are in hiding or have been able to escape prosecution. Because in Mexico, the judicial system doesn’t prosecute thieves, it protects them.

Spring 2017

The 2018 Election Today, the words used to describe the Mexican political system are “disappointment,” “incomplete democracy,” “truncated transition,” “failed representation,” “institutionalized impunity,” “simulation,” and “regression.” Instead of responding to public interests, the political class promotes private ones. Instead of resolving problems, the institutional framework kicks them forward. Instead of generating incentives for representation, current rules impede it from happening.

Instead of empowering citizens, the transition has ended up strengthening oligarchs.

Applauded but incomplete rules for electoral competition only perpetuate the rotation of party stalwarts, inaugurated by the PRI but emulated by other parties, thus creating a skin-deep democracy that preserves the privileges of a political elite that jumps from post to post, without ever having to be accountable.

Perhaps that explains why only 4 percent of the population trusts political parties and only 10 percent of the electorate believes that legislators legislate in their name. Mexicans look at political parties and see a story of “PRIzation,” of organizations that promised to embody something

>>

Photo by America Rocio/Associated Press.

Cash found in the office of an assistant to the governor of Tabasco in 2013.

different but ended up acting the same way. Mexicans see parties with some differences in what they offer, but many similarities in how they behave. They see pluralism in terms of political promises, but unilateralism in how they govern.

They see political parties that are corrupt, that refuse to be accountable, that refuse to reduce outrageously high public financing for themselves, that instead of combatting impunity, too often benefit from it.

Mexico’s dysfunctional democracy was created to assure elite rotation, but not citizen representation. It was created to promote competition among parties, but not to hold them accountable. It was instituted to achieve the sharing of power, but not to hold that power up to public scrutiny. The many electoral reforms that accompanied the transition have produced political parties that are like cartels and operate as such. They have become employment agencies for a political class financed by citizens, but impermeable to their demands. Today, 60 percent of Mexicans do not know who to vote for or if they will. This is the context in which the 2018 presidential election will take place, with opposition leaders in the lead in current polls, including Margarita Zavala and Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

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Dignified, irreproachable, respected — that is how Margarita Zavala, the probable candidate of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN, National Action Party), was viewed as First Lady during her husband’s tenure. Always with the precise word, the perfect gesture, the proper tone. Always with the sensibility that her husband so frequently seemed to lack. Margarita was and has been that. The discreet wife. The loyal wife. The “Good Wife” as in the television series of the same name.

But that position of unconditional loyalty towards her husband is what might make her presidential bid unviable. Because of what she knew and did not speak up about. Because of what she allowed to happen.

Because of the failure of the PAN over 12 years. She is not just any ordinary citizen, a political tabula rasa. She cannot be an option that denounces the Establishment because she has been part of it. She was a collaborator, an accomplice, a co-conspirator of Felipe Calderón’s government. She listened, counseled, applauded. She wasn’t simply a spectator; she’s too smart for that. But precisely because she wasn’t simply a passer-by, the questions and criticism about her husband’s tenure need to be directed at her, too.

From a privileged vantage point, she saw the mistakes that Calderón made, and yet, she has not acknowledged them nor distanced herself from them. And therefore, she has not been able to develop an independent position that explains why and for what purpose she wants to be president. For many, she is offering a facsimile version of her husband’s time in office. She still doesn’t understand this. She believes that Peña Nieto is so reviled that Felipe Calderón will be revalued, but she is mistaken. Yes, in contrast with the current government, Calderón’s administration isn’t remembered for the corruption that it encouraged, but condemned for the violence it produced.

The selective application of the rule of law it allowed.

Calderón is criticized for the insecurity, the violence, and the counterproductive war on drugs he launched.

Therefore, to win and govern successfully, prudence, tact, amiability, and a rebozo won’t be enough. Margarita lacks a vision for Mexico capable of generating fire in the belly, indignation with the status quo, trust in public policies that can shake up a disillusioned, disenchanted, divided country. And that will not be achieved with what we have seen from her campaign up to now: small proposals, with little boldness and scant imagination. If Margarita wants

Schoolgirls get a visit from Margarita Zavala, former First Lady of Mexico and current frontrunner for the PAN nomination.

Photo by editorialtripie.

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Photo by Marco Ugarte/Associated Press.

Spring 2017

A crowd gathered in Mexico City to support Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s resistance to the declared results of the 2006 election.

to transcend, she should learn from Alicia Florrick, the protagonist of the “Good Wife.” In the end, she didn’t care about being a loyal spouse, but about being a winner.

And the current frontrunner in the polls? Andrés Manuel López Obrador, running for the third time, seems to be transitioning from the rancorous Republic to the amorous Republic. From the raised fist to the extended hand. From the Tropical Messiah to the pragmatic politician. That is how he is trying to reinvent himself, reposition himself. No longer the provocateur who is going to ignite the prairie, but the politician who promises to put out the fire. No longer the rabble-rouser who damned the institutions to hell, but the realist who seeks to remodel them. The preacher is ceding terrain to the conciliator. The social leader wants to become the professional politician.

All this would be good, if it were a sign of political learning. If López Obrador’s shifting stance demonstrated that he has finally recognized the mistaken decisions he has made since the 2006 presidential race. Back then, his maximalist position provoked a political diaspora towards his rival Felipe Calderón and later led to the PRI’s restoration to power, due to the conservatism he inspired,

due to the rejection by political moderates that ensued. By acting as he did, by taking hold of the Paseo de la Reforma for months, by inaugurating his parallel “legitimate” presidency, by embracing a conservative populist agenda, López Obrador resurrected the traditional stereotypes associated with the Mexican left. The Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD, Party of the Democratic Revolution) and the Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (Morena, National Regeneration Movement) viewed as the parties of the angry, of the recalcitrant. A left that is too fiery and, thus, unelectable.

Now, in his third bid to win the presidency, perhaps the conditions — and López Obrador himself — have changed. The candidate who was once deemed “a danger for Mexico” is trying to reinvent himself as the only man who can save it. Helped by president Peña Nieto’s lack of popularity and the corruption he does not combat. Helped by an electorate that largely hates the PRI, distrusts the PAN, and seems willing to give López Obrador a chance.

Meanwhile, he is attempting to slide towards the center of the political spectrum to position himself to finally head a successful presidential race. continued on page 47 >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Paz y Paz and the Missing 43

A display of missing Ayotzinapa students.

(Photo by Jorge Mejia Peralta.)

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Spring 2017

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Paz y Paz and the Missing 43

By Brittany Arsiniega

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n September 27, 2014, in the early hours of the morning, 43 students from a rural teacher’s college were forcibly disappeared near Iguala, in the state of Guerrero, Mexico. More than two years later, their whereabouts are still unknown.

Their families continue to demand answers from President Enrique Peña Nieto’s government, whose legitimacy has been marred by its failure to adequately investigate the tragedy. Joining the families of the disappeared in their long fight for answers is Claudia Paz y Paz, a criminal law expert and human rights leader. Paz y Paz cut her teeth investigating mass atrocities as the first female non-interim attorney general in her home country of Guatemala.

Taking a Stand in Guatemala When Claudia Paz y Paz presented herself as a candidate for attorney general of Guatemala in 2010, the field of nearly 50 candidates included only six women.

The criminal law expert added her name to the running not because she believed she had a chance of winning the appointment, but because she thought her solid credentials would force a substantive debate about the merits of the other candidates.

Much to her surprise, she advanced to the final round of six candidates. Then, President Álvaro Colom selected her as the first woman to serve in a non-interim position as Guatemala’s attorney general, the highest prosecutorial position in the country.

Paz y Paz had a choice to make. She could quietly occupy her position and avoid drawing the ire of the military and elite groups that have historically dominated Guatemala’s judicial system, or she could attempt to prosecute those responsible for killing 200,000 Mayans during Guatemala’s 30-year civil war, which ended with the signing of the 1996 Peace Accords.

To choose the latter would mean risking everything: her job, her political career, even her life. For her, the choice was easy.

Paz y Paz shocked the country and the world when her prosecutorial team won an unprecedented conviction >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Paz y Paz and the Missing 43

Missing in Mexico On the night of September 26, 2014, a group of students from a rural teacher’s college in Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, traveled to the nearby city of Iguala to raise money and commandeer buses to help them travel to Mexico City, where they planned to commemorate the 1968 massacre of student protesters at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco. By early the next morning, 43 of those students were missing, 40 people were injured, and six people were dead.

The anguish of the students’ families caught fire across the nation, and tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Mexico City. The hashtag #FueElEstado (It Was the State) channeled anger towards the government. The official story pushed by representatives of the government was that Iguala’s corrupt mayor had handed the students over to a local drug trafficking gang to prevent them from causing disturbances in a political rally; then, the gang had killed them and burned their bodies in a local garbage dump. Yet, millions across Mexico refused to accept this story, demanding instead “que nos entreguen vivos a nuestros hijos” (give us back our sons alive!)

Photo by trocalre.

Creating the GIEI With domestic investigations proving fruitless in locating the students and international pressure rising, the Mexican state entered into an agreement with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and representatives A Mayan woman testifies at the trial of Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala. of the disappeared students to create the Grupo for genocide and other human rights abuses in the trial of Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes (GIEI, former General Efraín Ríos Montt, who served as president Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts) in during the bloodiest years of the civil war.

November 2014. Claudia Paz y Paz, recognized as one of The Ríos Montt trial launched Paz y Paz into the the foremost human rights lawyers in the hemisphere, international spotlight as someone willing to seek justice was invited to join the team, along with two Colombian even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds and lawyers, a Chilean lawyer, and a Spanish psychiatrist. great personal danger. As death threats poured in from The GIEI had four mandates: to contribute to the those who saw their decades-long impunity suddenly investigation carried out by Mexico’s Office of the Attorney endangered, so did the accolades, including a nomination General; to accompany the search for the disappeared for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize. students; to review plans for reparations for the families; The genocide trial created political chaos at home. and to develop general recommendations surrounding the Guatemala’s Constitutional Court overturned Ríos Montt’s problem of forced disappearances in Mexico. conviction on a technicality, then removed Paz y Paz from On October 20, 2016, six months after the GIEI office six months prior to the end of her 2014 term. published its second and final report detailing the She was not long idle. Tragedy in Mexico soon called results of its investigation, Paz y Paz spoke about her for her precise skills and expertise. experience at the invitation of UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin American Studies.

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Spring 2017

Fact Finding Paz y Paz first discussed the GIEI’s notable factual findings, many of which depart sharply from public statements offered by the Mexican government. The students did not visit Iguala to boycott a public talk given by the mayor’s wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda, whose family ties to drug trafficking organization are by now well known. In fact, the talk ended before the students arrived in the city. The students were not armed: recovered buses showed hundreds of bullet holes originating outside, but not a single shot fired from within. From the time the students were first intercepted at 9:30 p.m., they were subjected to increased violence over the course of five hours, in nine different locations, across 30 miles.

Of the 180 direct victims of the night’s attack, 40 people were injured, 43 students were disappeared and remain missing, and six students were killed, their remains recovered. Implicated in the violence are the local police forces from Iguala and nearby Cocula as well as state and federal police and members of a municipal police force from Huitzuco. In addition, evidence showed the presence of federal military forces at several of the nine crime scenes.

The GIEI’s findings cast serious doubt on the government’s assertion that the students were killed by members of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel, who allegedly burned their bodies in Cocula’s local garbage dump. That story, Paz y Paz noted, was supported only by the “confessions” of alleged members of Guerreros Unidos detained soon after the event. But medical reports reveal strong evidence that those detainees were tortured.

Furthermore, their confessions contradict one another and likewise go against the scientific evidence produced by the GIEI and Peruvian fire forensics expert Dr. José Torero, who works with the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (EAAF, Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team). According to their findings, a fire of the size necessary to completely incinerate 43 bodies could not have occurred in the dump in the early morning of September 27. A blaze of that magnitude would scorch not only the entire dump, but also the surrounding trees.

Indeed, no scorch marks were found, and the GIEI even discovered shrubbery growing inside of the dump that pre-dates the alleged fire in that location.

These details raise an important question: if the students were not abducted for political activism against >>

Photo byDaniel Cima/CIDH.

The Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes (GIEI) presents an initial report in October 2015.

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Paz y Paz and the Missing 43

the corrupt mayor’s wife, why were they greeted with such force by city, state, and federal police officers as well as the military? What threat could a group of unarmed students from a poor teacher’s college possibly pose?

Exploring Motives, Implicating the State Paz y Paz explained a possible motive for the students’ disappearance. From surveillance video, the GIEI learned of the existence of a fifth bus that the students seized at the Iguala bus station, but was not included in the government’s investigation. When the GIEI asked the government about the fifth bus, they were presented with a bus with different markings from the one in the video. The possible implications of this fifth bus became clear when the GIEI learned of a federal criminal case in Chicago, Illinois,

29, 2014. The official explanation was that members of Guerreros Unidos dumped the incinerated remains of the students in the river.

However, videos and photos collected by local journalists show the director of Mexico’s Agencia de Investigación Criminal (Criminal Investigation Agency) present at the same spot on the river on October 28, accompanied by one of the alleged members of Guerreros Unidos who had “confessed” to killing and burning the students, but whose medical report revealed signs of serious torture while detained (notably, 30 lesions that occurred after his arrest). Photos also show members of the Attorney General’s Office manipulating evidence at the river on October 28. Though the GIEI called for an independent inquiry into the events of October 28, the

Photo courtesy of the GIEI.

Security camera image of the “fifth bus.”

against members of Guerreros Unidos who moved heroin from Iguala to Chicago in commercial passenger buses not unlike those the students attempted to commandeer.

Did the students accidentally seize a bus loaded with heroin bound for the United States? In such a scenario, violence against them could have been an attempt to recover the merchandise. If the students did stumble unknowingly into a drug-running operation, the involvement of various levels of police and the military in violently attacking them implicate all levels of the government.

The GIEI further called the government and its investigation into question when it discovered interference with crime scenes. Divers from the Fuerza de la Infantaría (Mexico’s Marine Corps) claimed to find a bag of human remains in the San Juan River on October BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

investigation was kept internal, and its results have not been officially published.

Paz y Paz noted that during the last months of the GIEI’s mandate, their efforts were increasingly frustrated.

The federal government repeatedly forbade them from interviewing soldiers who were present the night of the disappearances at several crime scenes. The justification for this refusal was sovereignty: soldiers need not speak to foreign investigators. The GIEI was prohibited from re-interviewing those Guerreros Unidos detainees who were tortured. Paz y Paz added that the government lost or destroyed important evidence, and several of the GIEI’s requests were postponed until their mandate expired and they were forced to leave the country.

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Still Seeking Answers With her participation in the GIEI, Paz y Paz demonstrated, once again, that she is not afraid to ask tough questions of those in power. Nonetheless, her presentation at UC Berkeley left open as many questions as it resolved. If the government’s assertion that the students were burned in the dump is not true, and if evidence indicates that the remains found in the river may have been planted there, what really happened to the students? Where are they?

If the students did indeed accidentally stumble onto a heroin-running operation, does this hypothesis justify or explain the sudden and violent loss of 43 lives or the agony of 43 sets of parents, thousands of community members, and millions mourning in the nation and around the world?

For Paz y Paz, the answer is no.

She lauds the courage and tenacity of the parents of the 43 students and notes that the GIEI was successful in clarifying certain facts and highlighting weaknesses and contradictions in the Mexican government’s official investigation, yet the story is not over. The students are still missing, and their mothers and fathers are still

waiting for them. It is in their names that Paz y Paz urges us to keep demanding more from those in Mexico with the power to push the investigation further.

At a time when impunity and corruption highlight the failures of Mexico’s justice system, Paz y Paz and the work of the GIEI shine through as an example of extraordinary personal courage and a reminder of the importance of international collaboration in the protection and promotion of human rights. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In this case, it is Claudia Paz y Paz doing the bending.

Claudia Paz y Paz, Guatemala’s first female Attorney General (2010–2014), is currently the Secretary of Multidimensional Security at the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington, D.C. She spoke for CLAS on October 20, 2016.

Brittany Arsiniega is a Ph.D. student in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at UC Berkeley.

Photo by Peg Skorpinski.

Claudia Paz y Paz at Berkeley, October 2016.

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Mexit: The Return of Distant Neighbors

Detail of a Banksy mural about Great Britain leaving the European Union.

(Photo by Ian Clark.)

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

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MEXICO

Mexit: The Return of Distant Neighbors

By Lorenzo Meyer Exit or Expulsion?

In 2016, and following a referendum, Great Britain voted to leave the European Union in what has been called the “Brexit.” On November 8 of that same year, the United States’ presidential elections were won by the candidate of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, and at that moment, we saw the beginning of what we could call the “Mexit,” the departure of Mexico not so much from the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), but rather from the long-term political project for our country, which had decided to change its spots in 1992. Twenty-five years ago, Mexico seemed to cease being a Latin American nation and began to transform itself, obeying geographic and economic imperatives in addition to the political will of its elites and with the acceptance of Washington, D.C., and Ottawa (in the third North American country). Today, everything indicates that Mexico has begun to reclaim its identity as a Latin American country.

Brexit was a sovereign decision by the British electorate to leave the European Union and one that immediately led to the fall of David Cameron’s government. His successor, Theresa May, has yet to conclude the long and difficult negotiation of the exit process begun with the EU. Conversely, Mexit is not the willing departure of Mexico, but the country’s de facto expulsion from the political, economic, and social space of North America as the result of a decision by the Trump administration.

In contrast, the United States reaffirmed the bonds of good political relations with its neighbor to the north, during the February visit of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. And Mexit did not result in the fall of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s government, but rather an even greater weakening than what had already been experienced in 2014.

It is true that North America is not a formal institution like the EU; it’s just an idea that was consolidated with the signing of Nafta in 1992. It is also true that this treaty is still in force, although it will be renegotiated by mid-2017, and its end is a very real possibility. On the eve of his first 100 days as president, April 26, President Trump announced that he would proceed with the U.S. withdrawal from Nafta. A few hours later,

he reversed his stance and agreed to renegotiate, but warned that if the terms were unfavorable, he would indeed withdraw the United States from the treaty. But while the departure of Mexico from an economic and political North America does not have the formality of Brexit, it does have a similar weight. Trump’s repeated attacks on Nafta since 2015, his decision to create a large artificial barrier between Mexico and the United States by building a 3,142-kilometer (1,952-mile) wall, and the steps he has taken to accelerate the deportation of some 5 million undocumented Mexicans from the United States — most of whom are seasonal workers with low salaries who have been characterized by the U.S. president as a group that includes “a lot of bad hombres” — imply a stark rejection of the notion that Mexico is part of North America, which is quite welcome in the eyes of a brutal, aggressive nationalism that has recently taken hold in Washington.

The “Mexico bashing” that was part of Trump’s speech from the beginning of his presidential campaign sought to leverage an anti-Mexican sentiment deeply rooted in broad sectors of the U.S. public that had not been invoked by recent U.S. governments. Since 2015, however, Trump’s speeches have blamed Mexicans on both sides of the Río Bravo/Rio Grande for “stealing” jobs that historically belonged to the working class in the United States and for increased insecurity and crime in that country.

While the facts do not support Trump’s anti-Mexican notions, in practice they provided him with a political backing reminiscent of the support that encouraged James Polk to accuse the Mexican government of a supposed “aggression” against the undefined border with Texas in 1846. Polk’s bellicose stance and his “alt facts” — “American blood spilled on American soil” — helped boost domestic support for his government, which had begun with a mere 1.4-percent margin of victory over his rival in the 1844 election. In addition, Polk believed that the growing internal tension between the northern and southern states that threatened the unity of his country could be overcome if the political energy of the whole nation were directed against a perfect common enemy: an extremely weak Mexico, which was not yet a nation-state in the strict sense >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Mexit: T he Return of Distant Neighbors

Image by N. Currier of painting by Walker/Photo from Library of Congress.

The 1847 storming of Chapultepec during the U.S. invasion of Mexico.

of the term. Polk’s move played out to his advantage: it doubled the total territory of his country and successfully postponed the rupture between the North and South for another 13 years.

If the invasion of Mexico (1846–1848) was not a real solution to the conflict in the United States at that time, then something similar might happen now. Neither Nafta nor undocumented migration appear to be the true underlying cause of the deindustrialization of the U.S. Rust Belt nor of the growing social division in the United States, although there are those who raise economic arguments that this is indeed the case.

Two Crises in One Mexit is just one of two political crises in which Mexico is trapped today. In fact, this experience is not new, there’s a history behind it. Mexico was born as an independent state from a simultaneous internal and external crisis. At the beginning of the 19 th century, New Spain first received the shocking news of the French invasion of Spain, which led to an internal political crisis that turned into a bloody civil war that led to independence. When the United States declared war on Mexico in 1846, the internal struggle (Federalists BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

vs. Centralists, Monarchists vs. Republicans, etc.) was already of such magnitude that from mid-1833 to 1848, there were 34 changes of president. Government institutions were likewise extremely fragile: in that same period, the Secretaría de Hacienda (Ministry of Finance) changed leadership 66 times. This internal strife is one of the reasons why Mexico lost. The later “French adventure” that led to the ephemeral Second Empire (1864–1867) cannot be explained without noting the fierce division and internal struggle between liberals and conservatives. There have been other times when internal and external crises have converged, but none of such magnitude.

The origin of Mexico’s current internal political crisis is the result of the failure of a transition that began at the end of the last century, when a shift from the longstanding authoritarianism of the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party) to a democracy that was acceptable and reasonable for the majority seemed possible. And this failure is seen daily in the many elements of the old system that still hold sway, notably, corruption, impunity, and as the result of both, organized crime whose violence only grows and has even wrested control

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of certain regions and areas of the country from the state. The result is the citizenry’s clear distrust of the entire institutional structure. Other indicators of this crisis are low support for the presidency (12 percent, although some sources give an even lower figure) and high disapproval ratings (86 percent). The substantial increase in gasoline prices since January 2017, the gasolinazo, has sparked protests throughout most of Mexico, even in states and cities with no tradition of this kind of civil action. These mobilizations are the most recent example of civil unrest that has not endangered the government, but does indicate widespread and growing discontent.

Based on early 2017 data from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI, National Institute of Statistics and Geography), the Consumer Confidence Index is the lowest seen in 15 years. The outlook for Mexico’s economy is also dim. According to the Banco de México, GDP growth for 2017 will vary between 1.3 and 2.3 percent.

From the beginning of his presidential campaign in June 2015 until today, Donald Trump chose Mexico

as an enemy, characterizing it as a source of important problems for his country: crime and unemployment.

Now in power, he has decided to use his neighbor to the south as an example of the rigor with which Trump’s Washington intends to deal with “problem countries.”

For a long, long time — centuries, in fact — Mexico has been frowned upon by an important sector of U.S. society. For historical, racial, religious, and cultural reasons, this sector eagerly desires the expulsion of the more than 5 million undocumented Mexican immigrants from the United States and an end to the free trade agreement with its southern neighbor. And it is this sector that nurtures the anti-Mexicanism that partly feeds Trumpism, since “Mexico bashing” produces cheap, easy, instant political points.

For now, Mexico’s unexpected external crisis is manifested in the United States’ harsh, even brutal, discourse: its promise to complete the construction of a border wall that could cost $20 billion or more, the humiliating and absurd demand that Mexico pay directly or indirectly for this enormous work of infrastructure, >>

Photo by ProtoplasmaKid.

A protest against the gasoline price hikes of the gasolinazo in Mexico, January 2017.

CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Mexit: T he Return of Distant Neighbors

Photo by Quim Gil.

Children play through the U.S.–Mexico border wall near San Diego in 2001.

the threat of undocumented workers’ mass repatriation, and cutthroat negotiations to modify and even do away with Nafta, the pillar of Mexico’s export economy, since that treaty — “the worst trade deal maybe ever signed by the United States,” according to Trump — means an annual trade deficit of $60 billion. Finally, there’s that initial threat — one that has not been repeated — which was disguised as an offer: if the Mexican army cannot act efficiently, the United States may use direct force to eliminate those “bad hombres” from Mexico who create and lead the drug cartels that are encouraging addiction and criminal violence in the United States.

It is more than significant that the first two executive orders of the Trump presidency were to call for the wall with Mexico to be built and to add more troops to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), both orders signed with relatives of victims of criminals who were undocumented standing as witnesses of honor. So, since there is no vast ocean, huge mountain range, great valley, or immense river between the two countries, the United States is going to do what nature did not: build an enormous defensive wall, guard it conscientiously, force Mexico to pay for the construction, and send back undocumented Mexicans.

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

At this moment, it is impossible to predict the evolution of the double crisis Mexico is experiencing, except that the internal one will get worse and the external one will force Mexico to undertake a new national project that no longer depends much on its relationship with the United States, whether it wants to or not. Such a task is incredibly complicated, and the current Mexican government is in no position to lead it. In any case, it has already become clear that the neighboring country’s redefinition of its national interest in Mexico allows for no “special” relationship between the two nations.

What No Longer Works The economic disaster with which Mexico’s revolutionary nationalism ended in 1982 required a profound change in both the economic and political systems. However, the government of President Carlos Salinas (1988–1994) pushed to transform the former to preserve the later. He convinced the administration of President George H.W. Bush (1989–1993) of the desirability of revitalizing the Mexican economy by means of its incorporation as an appendage of the U.S.

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in exchange for giving the old political system a new opportunity. Even though this system was authoritarian and predictable, it had been very helpful to Washington during the Cold War. In 2000, the PRI had to leave the presidential residence of Los Pinos to take refuge at the level of the states, but the next party in power, the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN, National Action Party), did not live up to expectations and ended up playing by the PRI’s old rules.

After two exhausting six-year terms, the PRI regained the presidency with new cadres, but with its old culture intact and with a growing illegitimacy. And since “it never rains, but it pours,” the unexpected has happened: the sudden and surprising change of Mexico’s relationship with the hegemonic power of the United States.

The nature of Mexico’s current conjuncture leads us to conclude that to overcome the crisis caused by the redefinition of U.S. policy towards its southern neighbor — since U.S. national interest no longer requires a stable and prosperous Mexico — our country must also face the

growing dysfunction of its own political system. Without an in-depth restructuring of its institutions, without the recovery of defensive nationalism, Mexico will not be able to successfully confront an unpredictable United States.

Once again, a lesson from Mexico’s history is clear: the best foreign policy must be a solid domestic policy, one that legitimizes authority and allows it to overcome the legacy of tremendous corruption and violence on which the supposed democratic transition of the early 21st century was shipwrecked.

Lorenzo Meyer is a professor at El Colegio de México, A.C. He has worked as a columnist for the national newspaper Reforma as well as the host of a political television show on the nation’s largest network.

Photo by Armando Aguayo Rivera.

A demonstrator’s sign reads, “As long as money changes hands, there will be no democracy.”

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Helen Mack and a New Generation

Photo by Fabricio Alonso.

HUMAN RIGHTS

Portrait of Myrna Mack at the site of her murder on 12 Calle in Guatemala City, renamed Calle Myrna Mack. People gather to commemorate the anniversary of her death each September 11.

Helen Mack and a New Generation

By Calixtho Lopes, Kevin Figueroa, and Arlette Jacome, with Beatriz Manz

O

n March 24, 2017, the courageous human rights activist Helen Mack spoke to a new generation of enthusiastic UC Berkeley students. She was at Berkeley to discuss critical contemporary issues as well as her life’s work addressing government corruption and impunity in her home country, Guatemala. The event was organized by the recently founded group Central Americans for Empowerment (CAFE), the first Central American student organization at UC Berkeley, and supported by the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS). Next to Mack sat her close friend, UC Berkeley Professor Beatriz Manz. Many of the students in the audience were of Guatemalan descent; in some cases, their parents had migrated from Central America in fear of violent conflict, while others had come to the United States as child immigrants seeking better opportunities.

The audience had many questions. How did a business woman with close ties to Guatemala’s conservative BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

political establishment become transformed into the country’s greatest human rights defender? Did being of Chinese descent and from a well-to-do landowning family have an impact on her ability to catapult Guatemala into the international limelight? Most importantly, what are the current conditions in Guatemala, and how can students at UC Berkeley become involved with movements that seek to address the country’s most pressing sociopolitical issues?

For the past 26 years, Helen Mack has dedicated her life to exposing the government corruption and impunity that pervades Guatemala. Her work began tragically on September 11, 1990, when her sister, Guatemalan anthropologist Myrna Mack, was brutally assassinated.

Myrna was stabbed innumerable times by a member of the Guatemalan Presidential General Staff to prevent her from exposing corrupt government practices that had displaced and killed thousands of indigenous people.

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Soon after her sister’s death, Helen Mack attended a memorial service at UC Berkeley. She said that the solidarity she encountered at Berkeley gave her the strength and inspiration to pursue justice. And she has prevailed, despite the infuriating lack of accountability in Guatemala’s political culture and a deeply rooted impunity that transcends political regimes. Regardless of political repression, death threats, and judicial corruption in Guatemala, Mack relentlessly mobilized the Guatemalan and international community to lobby for action on her sister’s murder investigation.

Myrna Mack’s case is only one of countless examples of state-sanctioned methods to generate a climate of fear and silence among those who attempt to expose the government’s abuse of power and control. Beginning with the civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996, the Guatemalan military state has carried out countless horrific human rights violations, most notably against the country’s indigenous peoples. The conflict began as a response to corruption in the military and escalated with the birth of guerrilla movements that opposed the authoritarian government. Proclaimed the bloodiest civil war in Latin America and recognized by the international

community as a genocide, hundreds of villages were burned and thousands of people killed in a calculated attempt to terrorize and suppress the population who witnessed the military’s relentless brutality. The racial and political violence that originated during this period established a culture of fear still present to this day.

According to Mack, corruption and impunity persist in Guatemala through an alliance among politicians, the military, and the business sector. By maintaining complete control over the country’s laws, guns, and money, this alliance creates an exclusive concentration of power that affects government accountability. Guatemala is not governed by its people, but instead by the elite who benefit from the suppression of a democratic state. As a result, Guatemala lacks the institutions necessary to hold elected officials accountable for their war crimes, embezzlement of public funds, and refusal to respect the Guatemalan people’s civil rights. Moreover, this abuse of power inhibits economic growth, resulting in extreme poverty, dramatic inequality, and rising violence, which deprive the citizens of a dignified life. This unbearable reality has resulted in child migration crises that have made international headlines. As Mack explained, the >>

Photo courtesy of Beatriz Manz.

Myrna Mack (on horseback) with Beatriz Manz and Santa María Tzejá resident Alejandro Ortiz, on a field trip to the rainforest of Ixcán in 1987.

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Helen Mack and a New Generation

Photo by Fabricio Alonso.

Universidad de Guatemala students protest against President Otto Pérez Molina, who resigned a few days later in 2015.

current conditions of crime, corruption, and injustice are the direct consequence of the “impunity of the past.”

Using her position of privilege to fight against corruption is an intrinsic part of Mack’s story of activism. Her middle-class background allowed her to attain an education, and her relationships with academics in Guatemala and abroad were crucial in exposing the government. The activism of both Myrna and Helen Mack highlights the power of academia and scholarship in ensuring accountability for corrupt systems of power.

Rather than seeking solace in her social status, Helen Mack used her privilege to launch a movement in a country that resorted to violence to maintain and perpetuate various forms of oppression. Mack’s leadership stands out even more in a country that ranks low on gender equality and development indices.

When asked how the cycle of violence could be broken, Mack spoke about her hope in a new generation.

This new generation, she said, was born around the time of the Peace Accord negotiations; they are less fearful and more outspoken. She explained that people who lived through the 30-year conf lict are conditioned to remain silent or risk persecution. However, while the children of those who endured the conf lict witnessed the consequences of the commitment to the struggle for BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

social justice, this younger generation has been insulated from the trauma of the civil war to a certain extent. This generation is better equipped to take on corruption and impunity, Mack said. Likewise, education is now more accessible, providing new tools for analytical thought, which in turn allows younger generations to be more critical of the government. In addition, technological advances — such as the Internet and social media — provide platforms to expose and protest violence and corruption in Guatemala.

Over the last five years, political developments in Guatemala have revealed that this new generation has begun to organize an unrelenting movement to expose corrupt leaders. Recent campaigns for social change could not have been carried out if it were not for young people’s higher expectations of their government and their creative use of social media. Popular phrases such as “dile no a la corrupción” (Say No to Corruption) and the hashtag #YoNoTengoCongreso (#NotMyCongress), which went viral on social media, have asserted demands and focused attention on political issues in Guatemala.

A rallying cry that resounded through these protests declared, “nos robaron tanto que nos robaron el miedo” (they have stolen so much that they have stolen our fear), indicating the intensity and commitment that these

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young people — and Guatemalan society as a whole — feel towards resisting the corrupt government.

With social media as a tool, Guatemalans have been able pursue accountability with greater strength. Despite the deficiencies of an educational system that does not teach students about their true history, young people are now turning a watchful eye to their government with the intention of creating a Guatemala that is representative of its people. In an age of technology that allows access to educational resources and an international platform, the new generation must think of intentional and strategic ways to continue using these privileges for the greater good.

Inspired by Mack’s historical insight, dedicated activism, and hope for the new generation, members of Central Americans for Empowerment (CAFE) left the discussion excited to engage with current sociopolitical issues. By learning from history and staying aware of emerging issues, UC Berkeley students strive to voice their opinions and challenge systems of oppression. As students of a leading public university, we have an ethical obligation to support efforts to advance human rights around the world. Moreover, as Central American students, we have a personal obligation to raise awareness of these issues and to seek justice for displaced families that have endured decades of political corruption and violence.

Members of CAFE are committed to using our academic and technological resources to promote transformative change. Our organization is determined to encourage political action and solidarity across lines of class, race, and gender on campus to unite UC Berkeley students against the deprivation of basic human rights in Central America. With the guidance and support of experienced activists and scholars like Helen Mack and Professor Beatriz Manz, CAFE is prepared to lead a muchneeded movement as part of a new generation, marking a new era of courageous struggle dedicated to creating progressive change in a region that has been oppressed for far too long.

Helen Mack is the Executive Director of the Myrna Mack Foundation and the 1992 Laureate of Sweden’s Right Livelihood Award, the “alternative” Nobel Peace Prize. She spoke for CLAS on March 24, 2017.

Kevin Figueroa, Arlette Jacome, and Calixtho Lopes are founders of Central Americans for Empowerment (CAFE), the first Central American student organization at UC Berkeley.

Beatriz Manz is Professor Emerita of Geography and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley.

Photo by CLAS staff.

Berkeley undergraduate members of CAFE surround (from left): Professor Beatriz Manz, Helen Mack, and Professor Lok Siu.

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Secrets, Lies, and the Case of Victor Jara

Photo by Ibar Silva.

LAW

A makeshift memorial to Víctor Jara on the street in Santiago in 2009.

Secrets, Lies, and the Case of Víctor Jara

By Almudena Bernabeu

D

ictatorial regimes are fueled by arrogance and by the ability to deny that their power will ever end. Under such a regime, a vast array of social actors — armed forces, intelligence services, religious institutions, the business sector, and mass media — will rely on a system of secrets and lies after the real (or apparent) end of the dictatorship.

When questioned about the application of brutal state policies (fear, repression, torture, summary execution, disappearance), they deny these actions ever happened.

When challenged, they simply dispute the charges. By refusing to tell the truth, they boycott — on a daily basis — the society in which they live. To the dehumanization caused by the violence they inflicted, they now add the denial of what they did. And I wonder, what are the limits of this dehumanization? Were the pain and the suffering inflicted not enough?

BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

This article examines how systems of secrets and lies generated during conflict and in post-conflict contexts affect victims’ transitional rights — their rights to truth, justice, reparations, and non-repetition. It focuses on Chile’s transitional period and, more specifically, on the pursuit of accountability for the torture and extrajudicial execution of the popular folksinger Víctor Jara in September 1973.

A System of Secrets and Lies

On September 11, 1973, under the leadership of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, officers of the Chilean Army initiated a coup d’état to oust President Salvador Allende.

Following the army’s assault on the city of Santiago and the capture of the Palacio de La Moneda — the presidential residence where Allende would take his own life — a junta of four military commanders seized control of the country

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and appointed Pinochet as president and commander-inchief. The coup put an end to the history of constitutional democracy in Chile and subjected the country and its people to a dark period of repression, disappearances, and death that lasted nearly two decades.

For years, historians, lawyers, judges, filmmakers, politicians, and journalists have worked to reconstruct and recount the story of the coup, especially its first 72 hours.

Relevant information and documentation about the initial meetings in the Ministry of Defense (where the most important decisions related to the coup were made) and the events in the Palacio de La Moneda are even found in the archives of declassified documents in the United States.

Until recently, however, we lacked sufficient information about the detention centers and other infrastructure, such as the Estadio Nacional de Chile, where people perceived as Allende loyalists were detained and exterminated. As the enemies of the new Chile that the coup sought to create, these so-called “subversives” were targeted by a large-scale system of violent repression against opposition and dissent implemented by the military junta. The first hours of dictatorial authority were devoted to hunting down sympathizers of the

previous government, including public officials and politicians of various stripes, intellectuals, academics, students, and artists.

Víctor Jara was a popular songwriter and democratic activist who advocated for social justice and the protection of the working class and indigenous culture.

He personified the ideological enemy of the new rightwing military command. Jara was brutally tortured in the Estadio Nacional and died on September 15. His lifeless body was found in a pile of corpses, his hands and wrists broken, and his body riddled with 44 bullet wounds. He was 40 years old at the time of his execution.

Jara was just one of the thousands of victims of the post-coup repression at the Estadio Nacional and of the massive systematic policy of violence and torture in Pinochet’s Chile. The Rettig Report, drafted in 1990 by the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, estimated that 2,279 persons had been killed or disappeared under the Chilean regime. By 2004, the Valech Report from the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture had documented 27,255 cases of arbitrary detention and torture. More than 5,000 of these victims were detained between September 11 and 13, 1973. >>

Photo by Federico Valido.

A statue of Salvador Allende outside Chile’s Ministry of Justice in Santiago in 2014.

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Secrets, Lies, and the Case of Victor Jara

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

The four leaders of the September 1973 coup in Chile.

Widely studied and analyzed, the Chilean coup has become pivotal for understanding 20th-century Latin America. Yet, most readers are unfamiliar with the failed attempt to overthrow Chile’s democratically elected government three months earlier in June 1973. The men responsible for organizing this first coup came from various branches of the army. Upon discovery of their plot, they were arrested and imprisoned.

The fate of these men opens a chink in Chile’s carefully crafted system of lies. It has recently come to light that one of General Pinochet’s first orders as leader of the coup was to pardon the men who had been arrested during the June 1973 coup attempt and to assign them to guard the Estadio Nacional. The level of cruelty and violence described by numerous surviving prisoners of the stadium — both men and women — can be explained in part by the anger these officers felt after their recent punishment under the Allende government.

Likewise, it is no coincidence that, of all the regiments in all the regions of the country, Pinochet ordered the Tejas Verdes regiment to move to the Estadio Nacional, where they would assist the Blindados No. 2, Esmeralda, and Maipo BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

regiments in overseeing the imprisonment and torture of detainees. Just a few days after the coup, the head of the Tejas Verdes regiment, Colonel Manuel Contreras, became the cruel and creative director of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA, National Intelligence Directorate).

No one ever heard about these and other covert actions: they were hidden, then denied, and finally, passed off as lies. Yet, the Chilean military didn’t lie until after Pinochet was arrested in London in 1998 because they had no need. No one questioned them, there were no international demands, and the victims — the thousands of Chileans affected by the dictatorship — were irrelevant.

Chilean military officers only started lying and hiding after the first lawsuits were filed, and then, they followed the same systematic patterns they had used when torturing and executing detainees. Today, despite some progress, the Chilean Armed Forces insist on maintaining a conspiracy of silence, a sort of prolonged repression that continues to subjugate the citizens they claim to protect and serve.

In the midst of so many secrets and lies, only one group finally decided speak out and end the complicitous silence: a relatively small troop of conscripted soldiers

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who were completing their compulsory military service in September 1973 and had the misfortune of belonging to the detail that was moved to Santiago to support the coup.

Today, these soldiers are fishermen, accountants, security guards, concierges, and taxi drivers, who live in different parts of Chile. They decided, both individually and collectively, to tear down the web of lies. Thanks to the testimonies of these men, whose names were unknown until recently, we have been able to identify clandestine torture centers (now transformed into fancy apartment buildings in the middle of Santiago). We have likewise learned some of the rationale behind the harrowing nights following the coup d’état, because the conscripts were also involved in the crimes.

Torture and Execution One of the conscripts who stepped forward to bear witness was José Paredes. In his testimony, Paredes identified Lieutenant Pedro Pablo Barrientos Núñez as a participant in the torture of Víctor Jara and the man responsible for the shot that killed him. In 1973, Barrientos was a section commander in the Second Combat Company of the Tejas Verdes regiment of the Chilean Army stationed in the Estadio Nacional. In 1989, after the end of Pinochet’s rule, Barrientos moved to the

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Photo from El Sol (Argentina).

Inside the Estadio Nacional during the coup in 1973.

United States. He was a naturalized American citizen, residing and operating businesses in Florida, when he went to trial for the torture and execution of Jara.

Hugely famous throughout Latin America for his moving protest songs and stalwart defense of indigenous rights, Víctor Jara was working as a theater professor for the Universidad Técnica del Estado (UTE) when the coup took place. At the time, he was preparing a music festival on the UTE campus, where Salvador Allende planned to call for a plebiscite in response to demands aired in recent demonstrations throughout Chile.

On September 12, 1973, after hearing about the coup, Jara went to the university, where he was detained. He was transferred to the Estadio Nacional, along with hundreds of university students, administrators, and professors.

A gloomy structure in a central Santiago neighborhood, the Estadio Nacional is a classic example of the cold, impersonal architecture of the 1960s. For a stadium, it’s rather small — very small when one considers that during the first two days of the coup, it was transformed into a detention center where more than 5,000 people were held.

A military intelligence officer, Captain Fernando Polanco Gallardo, identified Víctor Jara when he was being transferred from the UTE to the Estadio Nacional.

Polanco separated Jara from the rest of group and beat

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him severely. During the next three days, Jara was held in the stadium, and on September 15, he was taken to an underground locker room, where he was interrogated and tortured as a punishment for his political beliefs and, finally, executed.

Seeking Justice In May 2012, just few hours after my son Diego was born, I received a surprising message. My colleague Francisco Ugas was working with a group of Chilean prosecutors specializing in human rights, and they wanted my help with one of the many criminal cases filed during Chile’s transition process after Augusto Pinochet’s arrest in London. This case addressed the execution of the folksinger Víctor Jara.

In our first meeting, the Chilean prosecutors and I explored our options; we soon decided to form a legal team that would use U.S. law to help Víctor Jara’s family — his widow, Joan Jara, and her daughters, Amanda and Manuela — file a civil lawsuit against Barrientos for Jara’s brutal torture and summary execution in the Estadio Nacional. Our final goal was Barrientos’s extradition to Chile, where he would have to face criminal trial.

The U.S. lawsuit against Barrientos was originally filed in September 2013 on behalf of Víctor Jara’s family.

Our complaint maintained that the former Lieutenant Pedro Pablo Barrientos Núñez had participated in the arbitrary detention and torture of Víctor Jara. Our complaint also alleged that Barrientos was responsible for cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment and extrajudicial killing, as well as crimes against humanity, since the death of Víctor Jara was part of a widespread and systematic attack against intellectuals, political leaders, and Allende supporters that took place in mid-September 1973. We defined this violence as “systematic” because members of the army who were deployed in the stadium operationalized their actions against the subversives, with each soldier being assigned a task. For example, Barrientos was in command of the mass detentions at the Estadio Nacional, and he also took command of and exercised direct control over soldiers in the stadium. Barrientos’s liability thus derives from the principles of direct responsibility, conspiracy, and aiding and abetting, as well as command responsibility, since he and members of the Chilean Army under his command committed the acts that led to Jara’s torture and death.

In December 2012, while we were still preparing to go to court in the U.S., a Chilean court indicted Barrientos and nine other members of the Chilean security forces BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Photo by John Raoux/Associated Press.

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Pedro Pablo Barrientos Nuñez at the U.S. District Court, June 2016.

for their alleged responsibility in the torture and assassination of Víctor Jara, yet U.S. authorities failed to extradite Barrientos to Chile for criminal prosecution.

Therefore, a complaint under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) and the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA) before a U.S. court was the only option that would let Jara’s family learn the truth of what had happened in the Estadio Nacional and help them pursue even a portion of the justice that they had been denied for decades. In the U.S., this sort of lawsuit doesn’t lead to the imposition of a criminal sentence, but the court must examine the evidence and determine the defendant’s responsibility for the crimes committed and award compensatory and punitive damages.

After two years of investigation, the trial against Barrientos started in a U.S. district court in Orlando, Florida, on June 13, 2016. Witnesses brought to trial,

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even greater fear, the detainees were shown piles of corpses that were later removed in refrigerated trucks.

Witnesses also narrated the brutality of Jara’s torture, recounting how officers at the Estadio Nacional broke Jara’s wrists and hands to make sure he would never play his guitar again.

After nine intense court sessions, on June 27, 2016, the jury found the defendant, Pedro Pablo Barrientos Núñez, liable for both the torture and extrajudicial killing of Víctor Jara. Two days later, on June 29, 2016, the district judge ordered Barrientos to pay $8 million in compensatory damages and $20 million in punitive damages (plus court costs) to the Jara family.

particularly the key conscripts from the Chilean Army, testified that Pedro Pablo Barrientos Núñez was at the Estadio Nacional between September 12 and 15, 1973; that he gave orders to the Second Company of the Tejas Verdes regiment as its second-highest-ranking officer; and that he bragged about having shot Víctor Jara in the head. At the stadium, he was in command of the guards, oversaw interrogations, and met with the heads of the detention center.

The testimonies of these conscripts also provided a better understanding of the horrors endured throughout the Estadio Nacional. The trial exposed the systematic practices of torture in this mass detention center. The conscripts described the professors’ naked bodies, the suicides provoked by the torture victims’ screams of pain; the summary executions — even of children — and the massacres of those who tried to f lee. To inspire

More Secrets and Lies In post-conflict and post-dictatorship processes, the right to know the truth about what happened is one of the most basic rights of the victims. Indeed, truth has become a salient issue in these periods of transition, as seen in the creation of the iconic South African and Latin American truth commissions.

The concept of truth is so relevant in current transitional processes that it is addressed explicitly in the recent peace accord between the Government of Colombia and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia).

Point five of the accord defines the rights of the victims of the Colombian conflict and creates an institutional system to guarantee the process of transitional justice in the country. Likewise, this transitional system — the Comprehensive System of Truth, Justice, Reparations, and Non-Repetition — includes two extra-judicial institutions directly related to the search for truth: the Truth Commission and the Special Unit for Disappeared Persons. The judicial system, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, also provides for reduced criminal sanctions if perpetrators recognize the truth of what happened and their responsibility for the crimes.

These truth mechanisms seek to discover what happened to the victims, to create narratives about the roots of conflict, and to help societies understand the causes of structural violence. Designed in response to victims’ and families’ demands to know the fate and whereabouts of their loved ones, they strive to put an end to their search for answers and provide a kind of closure to their suffering. These efforts to know the truth endeavor to counterbalance the systems of secrets and lies that usually arise in post-conflict situations, the conspiracies of silence among members of the elite and other social sectors involved in the commission of abuses. >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Photo by Antonio Larrea.

meaningless today,” yet it guaranteed that “all human rights violations committed prior to the date of that decree would remain in impunity,” noting that the law applied to all persons who had committed criminal offences during the state of siege between September 11, 1973, and March 10, 1978, which was the period of “the worst and most systematic human rights violations perpetrated by the military government.”

The justification used to pass the Amnesty Law is a common narrative of denial in (post-)autocratic contexts that portrays silence and oblivion as necessary to achieve peace and stability.

The Chilean dictatorship’s opacity even transcended the end of Pinochet’s tenure. On October 5, 1988, after 15 years of authoritarian military rule, a majority of Chilean citizens voted “No” in the national plebiscite to determine whether Augusto Pinochet should Víctor Jara sings with his family. remain in power for another eight years.

The case of Víctor Jara is representative of such a Yet even as the plebiscite put an end to Pinochet’s regime, the 1978 Amnesty Law was still applied, protected by the system of secrets and lies in Chile. In the search for overwhelming power of the Chilean military. This broad and justice, Jara’s family had to overcome various forms of illegal amnesty impeded any form of accountability for the denial — institutional, legal, social, individual — as I crimes committed, including the torture and assassination discuss in the following paragraphs. of Víctor Jara.

After her husband’s death, Joan Jara began looking This impunity reigned until 1998, when Augusto for the truth. She wanted — and deserved — to know Pinochet was detained in London following an arrest what had happened to Víctor, why he was tortured and warrant issued by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, killed in such a brutal manner, and who was responsible who was applying the principle of universal jurisdiction for his death. In 1978, Joan Jara asked the Chilean to investigate international crimes committed during authorities to open a criminal investigation into her the Chilean dictatorship. While UK authorities rejected husband’s death. The Criminal Court of First Instance Pinochet’s extradition, thus allowing him to avoid started to investigate the events, but after four years, it criminal trial in the Spanish National Court, his arrest concluded that there was insufficient evidence to initiate had a significant impact on the Chilean judiciary and prosecution, so it closed the investigation. Despite threatened the sacrosanct system of secrets and lies. exhausting every legal process available in this search Only after Pinochet’s arrest and his subsequent return for justice, the institutionalized lack of transparency to Chile did the Chilean Supreme Court limit the scope and repression of the Pinochet regime hid the truth and and application of the Amnesty Law. Prosecutions finally impeded the pursuit of accountability. began, even though the Amnesty Law remained in force This institutionalized system of secrets became a until September 2014, another 16 years. legal form of denial in 1978, when the Chilean regime In this context, Joan Jara filed another complaint passed the Amnesty Law. According to the Rettig Report, the law allegedly aimed to strengthen “the bonds uniting on the death of her husband with the Chilean Court the Chilean nation, leaving behind hatreds that are of Appeals, and in 1999, this court initiated its BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

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Photo courtesy of the Fundación Víctor Jara.

investigations. But after 20 years of blatant institutional impunity and after having overcome the insurmountable effect of the Amnesty Law, the case of Víctor Jara found yet another challenge: the social pact of silence maintained by those who had personally witnessed or had knowledge of his torture and execution.

Regardless of the specific reasons for their silence and denial, the resistance of witnesses and participants to provide testimonies to the press, the courts, and society at large resulted in Víctor Jara’s case being closed once again in 2008.

Leads dwindled to rumors, and lies shored up alibies. Then, just when the family’s desperation was reaching unprecedented levels — and the web of silence and lies was more intricate than ever — the small group of conscripts came forward to provide critical evidence that was Víctor Jara singing. previously unavailable.

Although José Paredes had identified Pedro Pablo Barrientos Núñez as the person responsible for Jara’s death in 2009, Barrientos’s whereabouts remained unknown until 2012, when an investigative report by the Chilean television station Chilevision revealed that Barrientos was in Florida. At that moment, Joan Jara decided to file the civil complaint before the District Court of Orlando, just as the Santiago Court of Appeals charged Barrientos as a direct perpetrator in the killing of Víctor Jara, pending extradition that was never implemented.

Over the course of these investigations, José Paredes, the soldier who identified Barrientos, changed his testimony on several occasions. I am not sure whether he was afraid or intimidated — or perhaps he had lied in his original testimony. What I know for certain is that he is alone, as are the other former soldiers who decided to speak out. They are the only ones who have revealed some of the truth, without any support, recognition, or help, and today, they feel demoralized.

The final form of denial the Jara family had to confront was individual in nature and took place in court.

During the trial in Florida, despite extensive evidence proving his responsibility, Barrientos continually denied the allegations against him. Defense witnesses provided

contradictory and inconsistent explanations about the former army officer’s activities, their communications with him, and his whereabouts in the days after the coup.

Defendants are not expected to confess their responsibility in court, but Barrientos’s profound and irrational prevarication, his bizarre and grotesque fabrications, are symptomatic of Chile’s decades-long system of secrets and lies. Barrientos denied being present at the Estadio Nacional, even though witnesses saw him at the stadium more than 20 times in the four days following the coup and described him giving orders and participating in the abuses. This strategy of denial was at its most outrageous when Barrientos declared that he hadn’t heard about what had happened to Víctor Jara until 2009.

Thanks to Chile’s system of secrets and lies, the perpetrators of such crimes have enjoyed long-lasting impunity, while the victims have been deprived of their rights to truth and justice for decades. It took Jara’s family more than 42 years to discover the truth and achieve a limited form of justice in a civil trial. Nonetheless, Chile continues its path to expose the truth of what happened.

Democracy strives to overcome institutional silence; international pressure has ended legal impunity under the Amnesty Law; a handful of brave citizens have opened >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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a window of hope against the social pact of silence; and now, the legal system has been able to prove the falsehood of individual accounts.

Towards a Conclusion Like so many others in Chile, Spain, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, and Guatemala, Joan Jara and her daughters spent decades attempting to untangle a web of lies, not only for themselves, but also for their extended families and for their countries. They have put the objectivity of their suffering at the service of the fight for truth and justice, the only way — I believe — to truly rebuild a country and provide the best for its people.

The trial against Barrientos exposed the truth about the execution of Víctor Jara and the atrocities in the Estadio Nacional. If justice prevails, Pedro Pablo Barrientos Núñez will be extradited to Chile, where he will face the Chilean people and his very presence will trouble those who attempt to preserve their power through lies.

In July 2015, while attempting to reconstruct what had occurred in the Estadio Nacional, and specifically to

Víctor Jara, I interviewed 21 of the conscripted soldiers in locations throughout Chile. Being with them reminded me of carefully listening to my grandparents’ stories about the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. Once again, I felt the weight and the excessive price of building a society on the pillars of exclusion and lies. The challenge for all societies, including that of Chile, is to not desire or perpetuate a power that is based on lies, but to dare to build an inclusive society that can overcome them.

Almudena Bernabeu is the Co-founder and Director of Guernica 37 International Justice Chambers and has worked in human rights and international law for more than 20 years.

She spoke for CLAS on September 19, 2016.

Joan Jara (left) opening the renamed Calle Víctor Jara in Antofagasta, Chile, in 2012.

Phoot courtesy of Municipalidad Antofagasta.

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Photo by Eduardo Verdugo/Associated Press.

ART

Migrants in Ixtepec, Mexico, board “La Bestia” in 2014.

MONTARlaBestia: Riding the Beast The train known as “La Bestia” has carried as many as half a million Central American migrants a year on a dangerous journey across Mexico towards the United States. Through art and poetry, the Colectivo de Artistas Contra la Discriminación explores the meaning of “riding the beast.”

(Photos by Jim Block.)

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MONTARlaBestia

Esta vez, no me tirarás, / no soltaré las riendas, / This time, you won’t buck me, / I’ll hold on to the reins,

A group of 100 artists came together to create this exhibition as the collective Artistas Contra la Discriminación. They organized around the principle that discrimination is a cancer, and we are all responsible for identifying and eradicating this sickness Through their work as a collective, Artistas Contra la Discriminación designs projects to raise awareness about migration and how it marginalizes an already vulnerable population. “The Beast” is a nickname for the train that carries Central American migrants on its back. Men, women, and children travel toward the American Dream, riding the rails through Mexico’s underdeveloped landscape.

Héctor Larios Lozano, American Blue Dream, Oil on wood.

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Delia Vega, Untitled, Mixed media on wood.

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te asiré con más fuerza, / y el estribe no escapará a mi pie.

I’ll hold onto you tightly, / and I won’t lose my foothold.

Gustavo Monroy, Untitled, Oil, resin on wood. Poem: Rodolfo González Martínez, “This Time.”

On this journey in search of a better life, migrants face many dangers, including mutilated bodies, kidnapping at the hands of organized crime, and systematic rape. This exhibition not only describes the horrors of this journey, but also highlights the struggle of those fighting for human rights, reminding us that migration is a complex phenomenon.

Each work of art joins the exhibition by forming part of the train; each car is accompanied by an excerpt from a poem, which serves as the tracks.

– Adapted from the statement of the Colectivo de Artistas Contra la Discriminación

Lucía Vidales, The Kingdom of Wandering, Oil on wood.

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Muchas lunas han girado / desde que arranqué los pies de las tierras del sur / No aceleró el tren sus pasos de hierro / y nos dejó tiempo para la memoria …

Many moons have rolled by / since I pulled my feet from southern lands / The train never sped up its iron pace / but left behind time to recall …

Ernesto Hume Santacoloma, Untitled, Assembly. Poem: Irma Pineda, “Many Moons Have Circled.”

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Ya murió la Bestia / Ya nadie la puede usar / Es un fantasma / Con cien calaveras encima.

The Beast is dead already / No one can ride it no more / It is a ghost / With a hundred skulls above.

Jorge Wolff, Untitled, Mixed media on wood. Poem: Dominique Legrand, “Beast.”

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De Guatemala a Nicaragua, / de Honduras, México o Salvador, / La Bestia a diario lleva que lleva / From Guatemala to Nicaragua, / from Honduras, Mexico or El Salvador, / daily the Beast takes, it takes /

Eduardo “Guayo” Valenzuela, Children of Their Time, Oil on canvas.

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Carlos Zamora, Untitled, Permanent marker on wood.

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pura carne de cañón, son, son, / pura carne de cañón, son, son, … nothing but fodder for the cannon, son, son, / nothing but flesh for the cannon, son, son, …

Mauricio Gómez Morín, The Last Station, Collage, group of objects, and ceramic. Poem: Francisco Hernández, “I Am the Beast.”

Amilcar Rivera, Untitled, Oil on wood.

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MONTARlaBestia

Photo by Jim Block.

Visitors view the exhibit at CLAS.

On display at CLAS, 2334 Bowditch Street, Berkeley, through September 29, 2017.

Presented by the Center for Latin American Studies.

Underwritten by Richard A. Levy, MD, and Andrew Kluger, in conjunction with

The Consul General of Mexico, San Francisco

Artistas Contra la Discriminaciรณn

Nauyaka Productions

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Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation

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Dresser on Mexico

Photo by Dr. Carlos Lomeli.

(continued from page 11)

Andrés Manuel López Obrador campaigns in Guadalajara in 2016.

To achieve this goal, López Obrador would have to understand that the national project he has offered has been too narrow, too monochromatic, and that if he wants to govern, he cannot do so only for the poor. He will need to address the needs of the middle class and explain how he will promote its expansion. He will have to state how he will alleviate poverty and create wealth. And that would entail the transformation of historic grievances into practical proposals, the reinvention of resentment into policy, and views on how to combat inequality while assuring prosperity. Up to now, López Obrador has not been able or has not wanted to think in this fashion. He has insisted on making history instead of playing politics.

And engaging in politics would mean listening and building bridges and modernizing his views and accepting pluralism in his own party. It would entail devising a cabinet that included the best people and not those who are unconditionally loyal. It would entail moving beyond the close-knit circle that surrounds him, where many questionable allies remain. It would entail offering convincing policy proposals and not just impulsive

occurrences. He would have to leave behind the rhetoric of constant confrontation and incessant division. If he doesn’t domesticate himself, the Establishment will either support a PRI candidate or will close ranks behind Margarita Zavala to stop him, as it did with her husband in 2006.

Therefore, if “AMLO” wants to reinvent himself, he will have to go beyond his conventional position, wherein more than offering something, he blocks everything. He will need to develop a constructive agenda that transcends mere hatred of the established system. An agenda that heeds grievances and doesn’t just capitalize on them. An agenda that is based on policy analysis and policy prescriptions.

An agenda capable of establishing him and his team as political actors that want to reconcile and modernize the country, not the opposite.

The internal challenges are great; the external dangers are omnipresent. Because now we know that Donald Trump is not a “normal” politician who will moderate himself, but rather an autocrat who will empower himself.

We have witnessed the arrival into the Oval Office of a man without any sort of experience in public office, with >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Photo by Torbak Hopper.

A sales display of Donald Trump piñatas in 2016.

a half-visceral, half-vengeful temperament. Incapable of controlling his impulses on Twitter, incapable of addressing the xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism that runs rampant among many of his followers. The first presidential candidate to win despite being a chronic liar, sexual predator, tax evader, and racist whose triumph was celebrated by the Ku Klux Klan, a “negotiator” whose only international experience has been inaugurating hotels and golf clubs. As David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker, “The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic.”

Now Trump will misgovern as we have seen in the past month, with weakened checks and balances, with a Republican majority in control of Congress and willing to go along in certain areas as long as it gets tax cuts.

Lambasting the media and the courts. Picking fights with allies that are unnecessarily turning into enemies. Using dominant party rule to unleash the Mexicanization of American politics. Using unrestrained presidential power to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, endanger trade agreements, defund culture and the arts, reject global warming, deregulate Wall Street, and do whatever else pops into his or Steve Bannon’s head. All that and more. Because there is no reason to believe that BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

the delirious Trump of the campaign trail will eventually become the reasonable politician of the Oval Office. On the contrary.

What to Do? Many in Mexico are bewildered, anxious, afraid. They are overwhelmed by the feeling that — in the current context — the country has no remedy or solution or path or horizon or salvation. Yet, the real answer is there. It lies in using this internal and external jolt to clean our house and strengthen its walls. It lies in understanding the foundational problems of corruption and impunity.

Corruption has led to growing, harmful, paralyzing costs. It is the main obstacle for the competitiveness of the country. It has created incentives for those in power — the most opaque and prone to cheating — to spend more resources on construction projects. It leads to the discrediting of institutions allegedly in charge of combatting it, including prosecutor’s offices and the courts. It leads to investment decisions that don’t produce social benefits, but rather rent-seeking. Corruption distorts the economy by inhibiting innovation, competition, and risk-taking, because who you know matters more than how talented you are. Corruption has turned Mexico

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into a country of sewers. Cheating, lying, and stealing have become Mexico’s number one enemies, the biggest impediment to the economic evolution of the country.

The World Justice Project recently published its comparative Rule of Law Index, and the results for Mexico are disheartening. We fell nine places in the last year, to the 88th spot among 113 countries. Below Burkina Faso, Zambia, Tanzania, and Iran. And the worst indicators are related to corruption and the justice system. We all know the reasons.

A political class regardless of ideological stripe that does not want to lose accumulated privileges and assured impunity.

A National Anticorruption System that has started off very slowly and will require autonomous prosecutors. A rotten judicial system that hasn’t been able to adapt to the demands and requirements of oral trials. A police force that was created to be an instrument at the service of the powerful and not a mechanism for the protection of citizens. Prosecutors who don’t investigate, judges who close their eyes in the face of torture, a military that is gradually taking over tasks of public security when it shouldn’t.

But worse still, an anesthetized society for whom these wounds don’t hurt as much as they should, and therefore, intermittent demands from below don’t create the necessary pressure. Because too many Mexicans believe that the root cause of Mexico’s stasis is cultural.

Even the president insists this is the case. However, this way of thinking and justifying the unjustifiable is profoundly damaging to the country and its citizens because it suggests that Mexico is corrupt due to tradition, habits of the heart, DNA, history.

But if all Mexicans are corrupt by nature, it means that the country has no way out. The problem has no solution. The problem doesn’t have identifiable culprits or an institutional root. When the president and the political class argue that in Mexico, corruption is everybody’s fault, they are ascribing moral equivalence between the Casa Blanca scandal and the woman who steals fruit in the market to feed her family. Given that “everybody is bad,” what is bad cannot be identified or combatted, beyond appealing to social decency and a return to moral values.

But as James Madison famously wrote, “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The root of corruption in Mexico — in government and society — isn’t cultural but institutional. It’s not a question of habits, but of incentives. It is not about what society allows, but what government doesn’t sanction. Citizens are corrupt because politicians have created laws to allow corruption, to make it a necessary condition to assure the survival of the current political and economic system based on cronyism.

A predatory state creates a predatory society. A state that >>

Mexico ranks 88th of 113 countries in the World Justice Project’s 2016 Rule of Law index.

(Data and graphics from the World Justice Project. On the right, each icon notes Mexico’s ranking for that indicator.)

79. Burkina Faso

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80. China

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81. Zambia

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82. Belize

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83. Kyrgyzstan

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84. Tanzania

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85. Dominican Republic

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86. Iran

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87. Tanzania

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88. Mexico

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89. Lebanon

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90. Madagascar

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91. Ecuador

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92. Russia

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93. Uzbekistan

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94. Liberia

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95. Sierra Leone

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96.Nigeria

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97. Guatemala

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Restraint on Government Powers Mexico: 83rd

Absence of Corruption Mexico: 99th

Open Government Mexico: 34th

Fundamental Rights Mexico: 75th

Order and Security Mexico: 94th

Regulatory Enforcement Mexico: 85th

Civil Justice Mexico: 101st

Criminal Justice Mexico: 108th

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Why Mexico Fell Apart

breaks laws produces citizens who disobey them, not the other way around.

Because what would happen if the contractor who used influence peddling to obtain contracts (as was the case of Casa Blanca) ended up in jail along with his partner in crime in the government? If Casa Blanca had led to the removal of Peña Nieto from office? If the corrupt person — under the law — lost everything? That is where we need to go as a country, and therefore, the fight against corruption does not take place only through the government’s exhortation for citizens to behave like angels, it necessarily entails a process of institutional renovation that includes investigation, sanctions, and jail time for little and big fish alike.

The new anti-corruption system is a small first step to de-normalize what so many do and so few pay for. It will require an autonomous attorney general, an autonomous anti-corruption prosecutor, sufficient budget, specialized tribunals, and public pressure that does not melt away.

Otherwise Peña Nieto and all of those who benefit from corruption will have triumphed, by making Mexicans believe that they are as corrupt as the people who govern them.

Time for Militant Disobedience Given these cloudy times — these “tiempos nublados,” as Octavio Paz would have called them — many in Mexico are calling for unity, for patriotism. Calling to close ranks and use lovely words and emblems and national hymns to confront harsh realities: the reality of free trade, endangered; the bilateral relationship, threatened; a neighbor gone wild.

The dream that was North America, coming to an end. The forced “Mexit” that is happening at our expense.

And all of this happening — allegedly — because of Trump, someone we should all confront and criticize daily, not only because of his policies, but because of his temperament. Our point of departure should be the argument that “normalization” and appeasement will not stop a pathological narcissist who has put his country and the world at risk. There will be no possible domestication, no conceivable negotiation. Every bad decision since Day One underscores this fact. The U.S. is currently governed by a cruel, divisive man and his dark cabal. And therein the probable results: a constitutional crisis; a confronted, polarized society; a breakdown of international alliances; a possible impeachment, or if not, a great deal of damage.

The only ones capable of containing this damage are those who remain angry. Those who remain indignant.

Those who do not accept as “normal” the abnormality that Trump has invoked. Those who should not remain calm, because as Simon Schama has written, “accepting the verdict of the polls does not entail the suspension BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

of dissent.” For all of us, this is a clarion call to defend and give weight to words that are being lost: liberal democracy, due process, pluralism. We simply cannot allow the return of barbarism, the end of so much that was fought for and won — including equality for women and the LGBT community — the end of an era that was not a mess, but that did ignore deep inequality and profound resentment from those left behind. We will have to be militantly disobedient, with civil actions that articulate the dignity of the citizen, of women, of Muslims, of African Americans, of Jews, of Latinos, of immigrants from all walks of life. A united front against 21st-century Ku Klux Klanism.

As for Mexico, the country will have to prepare itself for the uncertainty to come with an even keel, with patience, with vision. We will have to bring together the best minds and sit them down at the table, because the situation today is as critical as 1994, if not more so. That was the year we lived dangerously, the year in which the presidential candidate was assassinated, the Chiapas rebellion took place, and devaluation wrought havoc on the country’s economy. In 1994, instability gave way to unity, polarization led to negotiation, and partisan squabbles were replaced by path-breaking electoral reforms. Saving Mexico mattered more than the struggle to rule over it. The country stepped back from the edge of the cliff via foundational pacts that led to the democratic transition. Today, circumstances are more urgent, more threatening. The danger is larger, and the political class is worse.

There are proposals regarding what to do vis-à-vis Trump, many of them intelligent and valuable. Buy time and give him enough rope so that he ends up hanging himself, while Mexico seeks other partners, other markets.

Prepare to renegotiate Nafta and play hardball while doing so. Allow the U.S. to unilaterally withdraw from the free trade agreement and be governed by the rules of the WTO. Refuse collaboration on security and drug trafficking in exchange for what we really do want to preserve in our trade relationship with the U.S. But, fundamentally, what to do depends on what type of country we want to be. A Mexico united around a model of economic and social development geared towards growing, competing, educating, democratizing, becoming more equal, becoming more transparent. Or a country “united” behind a historic pattern that places us in an unfavorable situation, time and again. The Mexican model based on extraction over inclusion, rent-seeking over innovation, cronyism that splits the pie instead of making it bigger. Those are the true walls Mexico has built, created

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by Slim and his monopolies, by the PRI and its corruption, by political parties and their lack of representativeness.

So, unity by all means, but around a Mexico that internal and external blows will force us to recreate.

Unity to demand transparency of government spending in light of the gasolinazo. Unity to reduce party financing by 50 percent. Unity to fight corruption, even if it is in Los Pinos. Unity to create a rule of law that actually works for ordinary citizens. Unity around a political class willing to reform itself and not just protect itself. Because Trump may kick and humiliate us, but we can and will resist if we act like true patriots. Those who defend their country from foreign enemies, but also from bad governments.

The true patriots as Mark Twain described them: those who are loyal their country all the time and to their government when it deserves it.

Finally, a word of warning for my fellow Mexicans.

These are not times for providential saviors or conservative nationalists or proto-populists or amiable wives of former presidents. As a wise friend told me: these are times for citizens, for rebels, for women, for students, for movements against the status quo. Let us all contribute to the honest, energetic, pungent debate that we need and deserve as a country, motivated by a

phrase from Václav Havel that resonated with me since I first read it: an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

The opportunity to carry and defend and expand what we have achieved from below. Marching.

Mobilizing. Resisting. Lobbying. Drafting legislation.

So that more Mexicans can stand tall, having achieved what we had never thought possible before: the National Institute for Transparency (INAI); the right to freedom of choice in Mexico City; constitutional protections for same-sex marriage; the “Ley 3de3”; the National AntiCorruption System; oral trials; independent journalism; the movement to create an independent judiciary. The modest, indirect, long-term changes that are changing how power is exercised in Mexico, these are the achievements of our time. This where I am inviting you to stand, defending them as we continue the fight.

Denise Dresser is a political analyst, academic, and columnist who writes for Reforma and Proceso and teaches at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). She spoke for CLAS on February 24, 2017.

Photo courtesy of Gobierno Cholula.

Mexicans sign a petition supporting the Ley 3de3 anti-corruption measure in Cholula.

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Democracy at Stake

BRAZIL

Democracy at Stake

By Carlos Milani

A

t the turn of the 21st century, Brazil was acclaimed as a “rising economic power” and a dynamic democracy where government implemented progressive public policies in one of the world’s most unequal societies. Brazilian “best practices” were high on the international agenda. Developing countries sent envoys to Brasília to analyze the gradual results of social policies being implemented. But what went wrong? What are the origins of Brazil’s current profound institutional, political, and economic crisis?

In broader terms, the transition from the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002), to Lula da Silva (2003–2010), then to Dilma Rousseff (2011–2014) represented the continuity of the 1988 Constitution political pact, consensus on macroeconomic stability, and respect for the rule of law, as well as the implementation of creative and inclusive social policies, particularly in the field of poverty reduction. It goes without saying that each president had his/her own idiosyncrasies in terms of building coalitions, dealing with business and social movements, or relating to the mass media. Moreover, they were noticeably quite distinct from one another in the way they projected Brazil’s political ambitions and roles in the international scene.

In a nutshell, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso built alliances with center-right and right-wing parties in the legislative branch and cherished financial corporations as his main economic support in the private sector. During his mandate, Brazil was known for macroeconomic stability and some important advancements in the health sector, particularly as far as HIV-AIDS treatment access was concerned. Under the label of “prestige diplomacy,” Brazil’s foreign policy ratified important human rights agreements, championed environmental multilateralism, and endorsed “Third Way” programs. To this end, Cardoso met with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, aiming at the establishment of a more just global order and “globalization with a human face.”

Coming from a political party that once raised radical and left-wing banners, President Lula da Silva needed to build a larger coalition to ensure governability, including center-left, center, and center-right parties represented in the National Congress. This explains why neoliberal >> BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

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The Brazilian Chamber of Deputies during the impeachment vote, April 2016.

(Photo by Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil Fotografias.)

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Photo by José Cruz/Agência Brasil Fotografias.

Presidents of the BRIC countries in 2010 (from left): Dmitri Medvedev (Russia); Lula da Silva (Brazil); Hu Jintao (China); Manmohan Singh (India.)

economic policies coexisted with progressive social policies during Lula’s mandate. His government fostered a regular annual increase of the minimum wage, supported the fight against hunger, strengthened social housing and public infrastructure for the poor, and promoted a rural development model based on hegemonic agribusiness and a credit program for family agriculture, but also gave considerable support to higher education and research.

Socially speaking the large coalition built by the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers’ Party) also included rural and urban social movements, as well as the industrial and civil construction sectors interested in a development model based on extensive public investment, nationally and abroad. Benefiting from the commodities boom cycle and impressive Chinese economic growth rates, Brazil increased its accumulation of gross international reserves from approximately $37.8 billion in 2002 to $288.5 billion in 2010.

Nevertheless, the distinction between the two historical periods becomes clearer when we look at the changes in Brazil’s foreign policy agenda. With Ambassador Celso Amorim as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lula da Silva’s government sketched a “grand strategy” based on a multipolar international order and a development model emphatically aimed at national autonomy.

Lula–Amorim’s strategy focused on regional integration BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

in South America and South–South cooperation; the formation of the IBSA Dialogue Forum (India, Brazil, and South Africa); the creation of the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and since 2010, South Africa); and an increased dialogue between foreign policy and defense, explicitly demonstrating an ambition for international prominence. These were important features of Brazil’s international projection of power between 2003 and 2010, which together with the pre-salt oil discovery announced in 2007, boosted the country’s diplomacy to question asymmetric global governance structures, thus urging for political reforms in global institutions.

In addition, under Lula–Amorim, Brazil revealed its ambition for graduation also in terms of its international role. Both in the World Trade Organization’s meeting in Cancún in 2003 and through the Turkish-Brazilian mediation proposal for the Iranian nuclear program in 2010, Brazil’s government demonstrated that it also wanted to “act globally” and to be a rule-maker in the international order. Brazil not only refused to sign the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas in 2005, but also became China’s trade and investment partner, including in the exploitation of oil from the pre-salt layer resources.

When Lula was preparing to step down in December 2010, opinion polls showed that his personal approval rating had reached a dizzying high of approximately 87 percent.

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Being the successor of such a popular president was no easy task for President Dilma Rousseff. She did not enjoy the same charismatic leadership profile, nor did she benefit from a favorable global economic context for Brazil’s development. The effects of the 2008 global economic crisis on the Brazilian economy were clear during her first mandate, and her government failed in its attempts to reduce the banking system’s interest rates and excessive gains, stimulate growth through public and private investments, diversify the industrial infrastructure, and thereby, reorient the Brazilian macroeconomic development model.

Moreover, Rousseff ’s political coalition was ideologically too broad, and party leaders did not agree on all the policies she was trying to implement. Once the commodity boom was over, growth rates declined significantly, and it was impossible to maintain Lula’s previous development pact of “gains for the poor and for the wealthy” at the same time.

Despite this change in the political game, Rousseff still insisted on increasing the minimum wage, expanding social policies to fight against poverty, promoting research and scientific development (for instance, through the “Science Without Frontiers” program), as well as fostering nationwide technical and professional capacity-building programs. In 2014, according to the World Bank, Brazil

presented the lowest Gini coefficient of its history (0.514), and the Ministry of Social Development published that “only” 12.8 percent of the population was living under the poverty line. These were impressive figures when compared to previous years: Gini was 0.595 in 1995, 0.586 in 2002, and 0.538 in 2009; whereas the poverty line included 33.2 percent of Brazil’s population in 1995, 33.6 percent in 2003, and 17.6 percent in 2009. In other words, Rousseff maintained her commitments to social policies in a national and global economic scenario that was straightforwardly less benign than that of her processors.

The economic and social policies as well as the development model that she was trying to implement required a strong social coalition in the legislative branch, in civil society, and within social movements to support the implementation of her decisions. Her developmentalist state likewise required a national entrepreneurship capacity and a productive sector associated with the nation’s future. However, as political scientist André Singer and economist Ricardo Carneiro have both affirmed, the failure of Rousseff’s developmentalist experience suggests that the Brazilian productive sector’s configuration and interests were increasingly linked to the financial sector, more oriented towards global markets, and much less prone to accepting the implementation of a national developmentalist socioeconomic model.

Brazilian poverty declined dramatically beginning in 2003 with expanded social programs under the Lula and Rousseff governments.

34.6%

33.2%

>>

Brazilian Percentage of Total Population in Poverty, 2001–2013

33.6%

(Data from MDS Plano Brasil sem Miséria; 2010 data not reported)

29.9%

Poverty Extreme Poverty

28.0%

22.6%

21.8% 18.9%

17.6% 15.4% 12.5%

12.8%

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Having briefly described the trajectory of Brazilian policies and politics since 1995, I must stress that despite their respective differences and relevant distinctive traits, the three presidents did not deviate from the 1988 Constitution and political pact that has supported Brazil’s re-democratization. Nevertheless, in 2015–2016 the sense of progressive advancement was disrupted; something happened in Brazil over the last two years, and the country now faces one of the greatest institutional, political, and economic crises of its Republican period.

What are the facts that we need to recall? Who are the main actors involved in Brazil’s current deadlock?

First, corporate funding of electoral campaigns has supported the election of 594 members of Congress, both in the Chamber of Deputies (Brazil’s lower house) and the Senate. Among them, 318 are or have been under investigation for corruption or illegal electoral campaign practices but played a key role in the impeachment procedure, particularly Eduardo Cunha (former president of the Chamber of Deputies, now in prison).

Second, institutions of political control (the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Attorney General’s Office, the Federal Police) have gained autonomy and capacity as

well as increased funding (and salaries) in recent years.

Yet, however relevant their investigations and judicial operations may be, they have been very selective in terms of their initial fight against corruption. It was only in late 2016 and early 2017, when the controversial coup against Rousseff had been concluded, that other major political parties such as the center-right Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (PMDB, Brazilian Democratic Movement Party) and the center-right Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB, Brazilian Social Democracy Party) were also touched by the judicial process related to the Lava Jato investigation. They have also been closely linked to the media through leaks of judicial operations to gain popular support, publicly condemning politicians before due process of law.

Between 1995 and 2002, the federal police implemented 48 operations; from 2003 to the time of this writing, 2,226 operations have been carried out.

Third, the judiciary has adopted different criteria in the analysis of judicial processes and strikingly different time frames, being very slow in some cases (against center-right and right-wing politicians) and extremely quick in others (against PT political leaders). It may

President Dilma Rousseff argues her case during the impeachment proceedings, August 2016.

Photo courtesy of Senado Federal.

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Photo by Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil Fotografias.

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Brazilian senator Aécio Neves (left), a leader of the impeachment process, was suspended from office for corruption in May 2017.

be mere coincidence, but this difference has drawn the attention of the citizenry. It took the Supreme Court more than four months to decide on Eduardo Cunha’s ousting from the presidency of the lower house, but less than 24 hours to prevent Lula from being nominated minister.

Fourth, former Vice President Michel Temer, who was elected with Rousseff and is now serving as the nation’s president, behaved like a political traitor. His party, the PMDB, had been an ally of the PT for 13 years and bore partial responsibility for the good and bad results of their policies. It is true that alliances may change in politics — the question is how and why. After Rousseff ’s ousting from power, Temer built an alliance with the PSDB and other smaller parties and has since implemented a series of measures with seriously negative effects on social policies (education, health, family agriculture) and strategic national development (such as energy, naval, and regional aircraft industries). After approximately one year with Temer in power, “the emperor has no clothes,” and corruption scandals have touched not only the president and his close ministers and assistants, but also PSDB senator Aécio Neves, thus shaking the country’s fragile democracy to the core. What and who comes next

is one of the major questions put forward for Brazil’s democratic future.

Fifth, the media is not a neutral agent in this process, and on behalf of an apparent freedom of expression, newspapers, magazines, and television channels (mainly Globo, Folha de São Paulo, and Estado de São Paulo) have ended up “manufacturing dissent.”

Sixth, there is also an international dimension that must not be neglected. Indeed, several international organizations and leaders, as well as foreign media, have expressed their concern about the undemocratic political process leveled against Rousseff. These include the Organization of American States (OAS), the InterAmerican Court of Human Rights (Iachr), the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Eclac/ Cepal), and several United Nations agencies (UN Women and Unhcr for instance), to cite just a few. The global media has also criticized the conservative and putschist Brazilian media for its coverage of the political facts since the crisis began. The political crisis in Brazil has been covered not only by leftist media such as the Mexican newspaper La Jornada and Argentina’s Página/12, but also >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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by mainstream newspapers and weekly magazines like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Independent, The Guardian, Die Zeit, L’Obs, Süddeutsche Zeitung, El País, and Público.

In fact, Brazil’s current crisis is not just a set of domestic effects stemming from a global economic emergency — i.e., it is not merely about geopolitics and foreign interference in national affairs. Neither is it just a crusade against corruption that, in fact, touches all state branches (executive, legislative, and judicial), sectors (public and private), and levels (macro/social and micro/individual).

It is not only the ruin of one of the most important left/ center-left mass political parties in the world. And finally, it is not another “normal” transition within the democratic regime. The “coup by impeachment” in 2016 was profoundly controversial, and each of the above-mentioned partial accounts of the Brazilian crisis must be put together for us to understand the facts and their deep-seated implications.

As a leitmotif of this crisis, there is the common belief that corruption is the country’s worst problem (rather than inequality) and that the PT is the agent primarily (if not solely) responsible for the dissemination of corrupt practices in Brazil’s contemporary politics and business.

Fighting against corruption could include a series of “innovative” instruments and “exceptional and selective” measures within the police, the judiciary, the media, and the lower house. “Cleaning Brazil” could mean the criminalization of the PT and the social condemnation of all individuals (even well-known Brazilian composer and writer Chico Buarque), social actors, and other political parties connected with any sort of progressive banner.

Indeed, the crisis can be analyzed as a classic case study of social polarization and elite division, which is nothing new in Brazilian history (e.g., Vargas in 1954, Goulart in 1964). It opposes demands of economic orthodoxy from “the market” that impinge upon and frequently override social priorities, including modest welfare and rights-based social development programs directed towards historically marginalized people. It can also be understood as a social crisis, since Brazilian society has not been able to construct a sense of public good and common belonging and still faces dilemmas related to identity (is the Brazilian Everyman also black and indigenous?), acceptance (what are the tolerable limits of exclusion and inequality in our society?), and coexistence (how can we continue living together with respect for one another, regardless of our differences?).

No less meaningful is the debate on Brazil’s international role: should the country follow a neocolonial trajectory and converge with the United States and the West in all BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

matters? Or could Brazil have agency to implement a more autonomous foreign policy? These issues are indeed associated with a break within Brazil’s strategic elites, from both public and private sectors. What is at stake in Brazil today is the “political pact” of its transition from dictatorship to democracy and the 1988 Constitution.

Indeed, the crisis encompasses more than domestic politics — it also has an international and geopolitical agenda. In 2003, Brazil’s foreign policy moved away from its previous trajectory aligned with the Western world (especially the U.S.). Although Lula and Rousseff had differences, their approaches to foreign policy were based on a shared interpretation of the world order (less hegemonic and more multipolar) and the defense of Brazil’s self-esteem, political autonomy, and development.

Currently, these foreign policy principles and decisions are being set aside. In March 2017, Brazil and the U.S. signed a military agreement that paves the way for the joint development and sale of defense products. Bloomberg reported the agreement as “the latest sign of a foreign policy change in Latin America’s largest economy after more than a decade of left-wing rule ended with the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff last year.” Two other military deals are being discussed and could pave the way for U.S. use of Brazil’s rocket launch site, the Alcantara base.

Yet, President Barack Obama made not one reference to the political turmoil in Brazil in 2015 or 2016 as a threat to the building of democracy and the rule of the law in the region. On the contrary, Obama paid Argentina’s President Mauricio Macri an official visit during the same week of the April 17, 2016 vote in the Brazilian National Assembly and expressed his confidence in Brazil’s political institutions. Weeks later, a White House spokesman reaffirmed “our confidence in the durability of Brazil’s democratic institutions.” On April 23, 2016, the very same day Rousseff was in New York at the United Nations telling international journalists that there was a coup underway in Brazil, members of the U.S. Congress from both Democratic and Republican parties sent a letter to the Brazilian Congress saying that they were praying for the best possible solution for Brazil.

This letter was sent after PSDB Senator Aloysio Nunes, president of the Foreign Relations Commission within the Brazilian Senate, had made a trip to Washington, D.C. During this visit, Senator Nunes, Temer’s current Foreign Minister, held a meeting with Assistant Secretary of State and former U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, Thomas Shannon.

At the time, Ambassador Shannon was one of the most influential decision-makers in the Department of State as far as Latin America was concerned. Senator Nunes also

Photo by Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil Fotografias.

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Mounted police at an anti-government demonstration during votes overturning progressive policies on worker rights and pensions, May 2017.

held meetings with the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Bob Corker (R) and Ben Cardin (D), respectively. He then attended a luncheon organized by Albright Stonebridge Group. How should one interpret all these meetings being held a day or two after the April 17 vote in the Brazilian National Assembly? Does this reveal the bias of U.S. decisionmakers toward one side of the dispute?

Obama did not hesitate to publicly address the British people to convey a message of support for the United Kingdom’s strategic links with the European Union, nor did he fail to defend democracy in Ukraine when U.S. interests were at stake in the region. Obama’s silence on Brazil’s coup was astoundingly revealing. The State Department took the very same stance during the coups in Honduras (2009) and Paraguay (2012). History matters, and one should never forget another Democratic president’s role in domestic politics in Brazil. Prior to his assassination in November 1963, President John F. Kennedy held several conversations with the U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, Lincoln Gordon, and his top aides to consider policy options and strategies to support Goulart’s deposition and the installation of an allied military government. This strategy was then followed by Lyndon Johnson.

The Cold War is over, it’s true, but have U.S. interests and attitudes changed in the region or do officials in Washington still consider Latin America to be the United States’ backyard? It is often said that left-wing political parties and social movements in Brazil show too much anti-Americanism; however, one must recall that the U.S. has not just tacitly supported military coups.

Temer’s government is not delivering more transparency, more effective institutions; it is promising market-oriented reforms as well as policy changes that are not only economic in their nature, but are social and cultural, too. Democracy-building in Brazil is, like in the myth of Sisyphus, laborious but not futile; it may produce despair, but also revolt. One of the questions for the future of Brazilian democracy is how revolt may be channeled to avoid yet another roll down the hill on the country’s path to build a more just and progressive society.

Carlos R.S. Milani is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). A visiting scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies from January to December 2017, he spoke for CLAS on February 9, 2017.

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Negotiating Nuclear Safety

By Celso Amorim While the Cold War has slipped into the past, nuclear threats remain a terrifying contemporary reality. North Korean long-range missile tests, tensions between nuclear-armed states elsewhere in the world, and the danger of terrorists acquiring nuclear materials all underscore continuing existential dangers.

Latin America offers some important lessons on nuclear containment forged in the crucible of the Cold War. “The Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean may be the most important treaty you’ve never heard of,” William Perry, the Secretary of Defense during the Clinton administration and a keen observer of nuclear issues, remarked at CLAS in February 2017. He had just returned from a 50 th -anniversary commemoration of the signing of that agreement in BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Mexico City in 1967. The agreement, created in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, founded a nuclear-weapons-free zone in Latin America that eventually included 18 countries, among them Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Cuba. This treaty was the first “to prohibit nuclear weapons in a populated area,” according to the U.S. State Department, and “led to similar zones that now cover 114 countries.”

Celso Amorim, a former Foreign Minister and Defense Minister in Brazil, writes below about another important effort from South America in “the defense of peace, understanding, and integrated development” when it comes to nuclear materials. He commemorates the 25 th anniversary of the Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials.

— Harley Shaiken

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Operation Crossroads Baker nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in 1946.

(Photo from U.S. Department of Defense/Wikimedia.)

I

n a world where nuclear risk is once again high on the agenda, a South American agreement from the 1990s is worth looking at. The 25th anniversary of the Agência Brasileiro-Argentina de Contabilidade e Controle de Materiais Nucleares (Abacc, Brazilian-Argentine Agency for Accounting and Control of Nuclear Materials) is a fitting occasion to celebrate an innovative initiative and to defend its continued development as a key contribution to peace and the integration of South America.

Throughout my career, the issue of nuclear cooperation has come up on several occasions — at a multilateral level, primarily when I participated in panels on the Iraqi disarmament or the creation of the famous 13 steps toward nuclear disarmament at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty conference in 2010, and at a regional level, when dealing with the nuclear issue with our Argentine neighbors.

The negotiations between Brazil and Argentina that led to the signing of the Agreement for the Exclusively Peaceful Use of Nuclear Energy (which would eventually create Abacc) and the Quadripartite Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) constitute decisive moments in the relationship between the two countries. I tend to define this partnership as “the most strategic of our relationships,” since it requires a mutual effort in the defense of peace, understanding, and integrated development, with positive repercussions for the stability of the South American continent. One cannot understand Mercosul or Unasul, which have been so critical to peace and progress in our region, without understanding the history of cooperation between Brazil and Argentina. Furthermore, one cannot adequately evaluate the meaning and the depth of this cooperation without analyzing its nuclear dimension. >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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The important sentiment of trust-building had been Brazil had a positive reaction. Negotiations began shortly expressed in multiple settings — in the famous Declaration thereafter, and concrete results were achieved with great of Iguaçu, which followed the re-democratization of the speed, given the technical complexity and political two countries (undersigned by Presidents José Sarney and sensitivity of the issue.

Between 1990 and 1991, I was in charge of the economic Raúl Alfonsín), and in different mechanisms of cooperation department of Itamaraty, where I replaced my friend and between both countries.

During the beginning of the “New Republic” (in 1985), partner in many battles, Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães, a I worked in the Ministry of Science and Technology under great champion of Brazil–Argentina integration. During Minister Renato Archer, who led the Ministry from 1985 to this time, nuclear cooperation issues were overseen by 1987. My work mainly concerned international matters, and one of the divisions of the department I directed. In my the nuclear issue was not one of my direct responsibilities. numerous trips to Buenos Aires, whether for commercial At that time, the Comissão Nacional de Energia Nuclear negotiations that led to Mercosur or to discuss the nuclear (CNEN, National Nuclear Energy Commission, under the issue, I almost always stayed at the residence of the Brazilian executive branch) and Itamaraty (the Ministry of Foreign Embassy. Ambassador Franklin Thompson Flores, who Affairs) were in charge of nuclear matters. But my interest was the Brazilian Ambassador to Argentina during the late in the subject was definitely inspired by my work with 1980s, was deeply involved in economic and commercial Minister Archer, who negotiations. He used to as a young deputy had say, with his characteristic been involved in the early air of tranquility and development of Brazil’s wisdom, “this nuclear nuclear program thanks deal is the most important to the encouragement issue; it will define our of Admiral Álvaro bilateral relations more Alberto, the first Chief than economic issues.”

In the early 1990s, of the National Research the main concern was Council (CNPq).

I have a particular that the accountability memory from this period and control agreement that relates to [the topic might restrict our ability of international nuclear to produce nuclear energy cooperation]. On the for peaceful purposes eve of the Declaration of and jeopardize industrial Iguaçu, I led the Brazilian technological advances delegation in a meeting Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim at the United Nations in 2010. made by both countries.

(Photo courtesy of UN Photo). on biotechnology with There was a great the representatives from interest in strengthening Argentina. Ambassador Junovski, who was then director cooperation, not only in relation to safeguards, but also of international cooperation for San Martín, held a private in creating joint projects. However, these projects were meeting with me and spoke at length about the importance dependent upon other developments and came to fruition, of nuclear cooperation in consolidating democracy in in a limited way, much later.

The negotiating process that led to Abacc was both countries. Ambassador Junovski’s view that peace, indicative of both countries’ capacity for creativity and prosperity, and democracy went hand in hand served as an cooperation. We have achieved an exceptional level inspiration for future actions.

Many important declarations and symbolic gestures of cooperation, unprecedented in fact, as deep as or of trust under the presidencies of Sarney and Alfonsín deeper than some European countries have attained opened the door for future initiatives. In the early 1990s, with Euratom. In our case, Abacc is a unique system nuclear cooperation began to take a more concrete form. that mirrored the great trust that exists between Brazil Argentina presented a proposal for a common system and Argentina and offered the possibility of both of accountability and control of nuclear material, a countries negotiating with the IAEA, based on a jointly suggestion that had previously been ignored. This time, constructed agreement.

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During the celebration of the 20 th anniversary of the Declaration of Iguaçu, I was the Minister of Foreign Relations under President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva.

For both Argentina and Brazil, there was a perception that bilateral cooperation on strategic issues (such as defense, space, and nuclear projects for peaceful purposes) was necessary. In this context — as a result of the discussions between Itamaraty and CNEN and, undoubtedly, parallel conversations on the Argentine side — the idea of close collaboration between both countries for the construction of a multipurpose reactor arose. Beyond the technical aspects, the joint design of a reactor is a result of the maturation and degree of trust in the relationship between Brazil and Argentina.

Our countries were able to overcome rivalries, surpass practical difficulties, and engage in cooperation on a complex and delicate issue. We have taken a great step, one of inestimable symbolic value, by developing a joint project in such a sensitive area.

This engagement between the two largest economies of South America reveals, among other things, the steadfast will of Brazil and Argentina to follow their own exemplary path of integration. From

an institutional point of view, Abacc is an innovation in cooperation among developing countries that also testifies to the political imagination of both nations.

In a world marked by conf lict and war, Abacc can serve as a model of how to overcome suspicions and rivalries, which are often based on false perceptions of reality, but still hinder cooperation and progress.

In South America, Abacc is proof that the road to constructive cooperation is not only desirable, it is fully possible.

Celso Amorim has served as Brazil’s Minister of Foreign Relations and Minister of Defense. This article was translated by Isabel Nogueira from the preface to O Modelo ABACC - Um marco no desenvolvimento entre Brasil e Argentina (Editora UFSM, 2016), published in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the agency. Ambassador Amorim spoke for CLAS on April 19, 2017.

Photo courtesy of IADB.

Presidents José Sarney of Brazil and Raúl Alfonsín of Argentina issue the “Declaration of Iguaçu” in 1985.

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Development on the Peripheries

Photo by Alberto Ballena/Associated Press.

RESEARCH

The Gallito Ciego dam inspired water system development in rural Peru.

Development on the Peripheries

By Karen Chapple and Sergio Montero

W

hen Peruvian engineer Teodoro Rojas returned home to Tupicocha from a 1983 visit to the Gallito Ciego dam in Cajamarca, he gathered together his fellow comuneros to tell them about the valve technology he had seen. His vision was to use it to build artificial reservoirs to solve the community’s irrigation problems. But some of the people remained skeptical, according to Rojas: “They couldn’t imagine it, because they had never seen it before.”

Just a few families bought into the concept, providing Rojas with materials and in-kind labor to help build the reservoir. To coordinate commitments, which spanned an eight-year period, the families organized a comité de regantes (irrigation committee). The new reservoir boosted the community’s economy, and families that had previously been skeptical now wanted to participate. Two more committees were formed, and two more reservoirs were built. The whole Cullpe community in Tupicocha was now involved. By 2010, 70 percent of Cullpe’s rural BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

inhabitants had “moved from a subsistence economy with food insecurity to a surplus economy with food security” (Alfaro Moreno and Claverías, 2010: 40).

The community’s success sparked a new, positive attitude in the region towards change and innovation.

Seeing these improvements in the region, neighboring communities wanted to improve their own agricultural production. It “gave hope to the farmers,” according to Rojas. This local interest then drew the attention of funders: non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and different government agencies became very interested in promoting these irrigation innovations and began funding numerous grants to try to replicate them in other rural communities in Peru and beyond.

Not long after, Rojas was elected as Tupicocha’s mayor, and the Peruvian government began encouraging municipalities to enter into a voluntary agreement to become a collective association called a “Mancomunidad” to provide services and promote local development jointly.

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Tupicocha joined with six other villages and the provincial municipality of Huarochiri to form the Mancomunidad Municipal de la Cuenca Valle de Lurín. Leveraging the government connections of Huarochiri mayor Dr. Rosa Vásquez, the Mancomunidad then won funding for two technical studies for reservoirs that will provide 15 million cubic meters of water for the region. Compared to the 1 million cubic meters of water in the eight reservoirs built in the region in recent decades, this project will represent a significant improvement for the rural inhabitants. After initial success in infrastructure development, particularly waste and sanitation, the Mancomunidad drew attention from two NGOs in the region — the Centro Global para el Desarrollo y la Democracia (CGDD, Global Center for Development and Democracy) and the Centro de Investigación, Educación y Desarrollo (CIED, Center for Research, Education, and Development) — and a new conversation about collaborative governance around economic development began.

In our forthcoming book, Fragile Governance and Local Economic Development: Theory and Evidence from Peripheral Regions in Latin America (Routledge, 2018), we argue that this case illustrates three key themes that are leading to a new, albeit fragile, governance for local economic development in small cities and peripheral regions in Latin

>>

Photo by Sergio Montero.

A reservoir that forms part of the water system of Tupicocha, Peru.

America: learning processes; networks and associations; and leadership and conflict management. Diverse forms of learning are generating new forms of collaboration and economic development. By leveraging networks and creating new associations, communities can connect the horizontal and vertical dimensions of governance needed to promote economic development. Finally, governance grows out of nurturing individual leadership, facilitating the transition to shared leadership processes, and managing conflicts in emerging collaborative schemes.

First, it was the successful combination of three forms of learning that created collective action and new governance capabilities in the village of Tupicocha. Mayor Rojas drew from his technical knowledge about reservoirs and anecdotes from other areas where community members constructed a reservoir, which then provided the experiential knowledge that built the trust necessary for more collaboration in building other reservoirs. This onthe-ground learning aligned the goals of network actors in the region and convinced them of the urgent need for coordination and joint action around water issues, leading to the formation of formal associations. Finally, the transition to shared leadership in the Mancomunidad made it possible to support and scale up a fragile public– private collaboration.

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Photo by Kristian Golding.

Chapple and Montero’s research also examined the isolated town of Lurín, Peru.

In many ways, the story of the reservoirs is reminiscent of the idea of commons governance (Ostrom, 1990). As Ostrom (2002:16) concludes, in the effort to increase benefits and decrease costs, “it is essential to draw on cultural endowments and their knowledge of local resources to find innovative institutions that fit local conditions.” The Cullpe farmers adhere to several key project-design principles to pool common resources: equitable costs and benefits; broad participation; and recognition of management rights by higher authorities.

Institutional innovation and new meaning emerge from local assets, particularly cultural endowments and knowledge (Bebbington, 1999). In contrast to the networked governance of NGOs, the private sector, and public sector that increasingly dominates Anglo countries, this more fragile governance in Latin America minimizes private-sector involvement and engages communities directly in decision-making from the bottom up.

Latin American regions did not settle on this form of governance from the outset. Peripheral regions and secondary cities saw decades of experimentation with different models of economic development. Partnering with national government, NGOs built brick-and-mortar factories and business incubators, which were gradually deserted after an initial burst of interest due to the lack of local capacity to develop viable businesses. Similar top-down partnerships next attempted to attract business BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

clusters and insert local companies into global value chains, yet apart from notable successes like fair trade coffee, they failed to scale up these efforts. In this context, locals have decided to take matters into their own hands.

Our book explores the relationship between governance processes and local economic development in six Latin American regions: three sparsely populated rural regions (Arauco, Chile; Lurín, Peru; and Isla de Mompox, Colombia) and three intermediate cities (Córdoba, Argentina; Linhares, Brazil; and Quetzaltenango, Guatemala). These cases illustrate not only the challenges of governance in small and intermediate cities in Latin America, but also the variety of governance approaches that these cities and regions are innovating and implementing to achieve a territorial vision of local economic development. Lurín, Arauco, Mompox, Linhares, and Quetzaltenango are all stories of bottomup governance networks that strive in different ways to connect with higher levels of government and with rural inhabitants, artisans and associations of small businesses struggling to reach national and international markets.

With political obstacles impeding relations between the regional and national government, Córdoba turns instead to an international epistemic community to learn and justify local and regional economic development strategies.

Each case illustrates emergent innovations on the ground in communities of practice that then transform

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our theories about how successful local economic development occurs. Learning as a social and interactive process is not only demonstrated in the case of Lurín, Peru, chronicled above, but also the Chilean region of Arauco, where a localized learning process built community confidence while educating outside experts, and in Córdoba, Argentina, which underwent a mutual learning process with the Inter-American Development Bank about how to shift from a cluster to a territorial development approach that actually changed the IDB’s policies and strategies in Latin America. Learning processes interact with the dynamics of associations and leadership in these contexts: for instance, the case of Mompox, Colombia, shows the difficulties of moving from individual leadership towards shared leadership in small and intermediate cities, while in Linhares, Brazil, businesses embraced collaborative production and developed a policy network that has resulted in spillovers and economic development in the region. The question remains how to “scale up” this fragile governance. The case of Grupos Gestores in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, highlights both the challenges and possibilities of replicating policies between regions and scaling up successful local approaches to the national level.

For most of these regions, inclusive economic development means a more endogenous approach, or “development from within” (Teitz, 1993). Whether in rural areas or small cities, governance networks are identifying untapped economic resources and supporting the entrepreneurial capacity needed to take advantage of these economic opportunities. Endogenous development is not new, of course, in either developing or advanced industrial countries, but the experience of these regions suggests that not only is it a viable alternative, these particular forms of fragile governance can enable it.

Karen Chapple is Professor of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley and a founding member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Building Resilient Regions. She spoke for CLAS on March 9, 2017.

Sergio Montero is Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Development at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá.

References available in the online version of this article.

Photo by Karen Chapple.

A Grupos Gestures member selling her wares at a local fair in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.

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The Impact of Wildland Fires

CONICYT

Chile & California: The Impact of Wildland Fires

By María del Carmen Thomsen, Pedro Reszka, Andrés Fuentes, and Carlos Fernandez-Pello

It is often said that the country of Chile is “at the end of the world.” In early 2017, parts of Chile indeed felt they were experiencing the end of the world as wildfires devastated hundreds of thousands of acres. These fires, the worst in Chilean history, destroyed 8 percent of the country’s total forest area – more than a million acres – that may take 30 years to recover. Classified as a sixth-generation wildfire, the conflagration had the potential to impact the atmosphere at a continental level.

Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman wrote that “countless acres have been burned to cinders, killing people and livestock, leveling a whole town, destroying centenarian trees as well as newer woodlands meant for export.” The damage went far beyond the raging flames. The Santiago air,

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“befouled with smoke and ash, became unbreathable for weeks.”

This catastrophe gave an immediate relevance to a pilot research project involving UC Berkeley faculty, students, and researchers and their Chilean counterparts. They were among eight collaborative research groups that received UC Berkeley–Chile Seed Grants in 2014. The grant competition, organized by the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) at Berkeley, was funded by Chile’s National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (Conicyt).

These researchers, as well as many of the other groups benefitting from the UC Berkeley–Chile Seed Grants, point to the establishment of a continuing longterm effort of collaboration between Chile and California.

— Harley Shaiken

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The Happy Camp Fire in northern California, 2014.

(Photo courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service.)

Convergent Environments, Convergent Research Extreme weather, with high winds and very low humidity, along with human activities enhanced by the wildland–urban interface (WUI) clearly have increased the risk and the role of fires in forest ecosystems, both in Chile and the United States. Increased concern about the wildland fire problem has led to a veritable boom of related research activities in recent years, with notable efforts being made by research groups at Chile’s Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (USM) and the University of California at Berkeley.

The interest of both institutions in wildland fire research is no coincidence. On one hand, the vegetation of Mediterranean climatic areas of California and

central Chile has long been cited as a classic example of convergence. In fact, the species native to both countries offer similar conditions for the initiation, spread, and control of wildland fires. And on the other hand, the bonds between the researchers are remarkably strong, and long-standing collaboration addresses different topics related to combustion and fires. Furthermore, joint efforts on wildland fire research have been facilitated by a grant from an agreement between Chile’s Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (Conicyt, National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research) and UC Berkeley. >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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The Impact of Wildland Fires

Photo by Jeff Schmaltz/NASA.

Vegetation in California and Chile is also surprisingly similar.

Shrubland covers the dryer areas of southern California and central Chile.

Agriculture is concentrated in the fertile Central Valleys of both California and Chile. And as in southern Chile, temperate rainforests spread over the U.S. Pacific Northwest, including the northern reaches of California.

The landscapes and vegetation of California and Chile likewise present unique challenges in terms of wildland fires. Fires in shrublands tend to propagate rapidly. Under certain conditions related to topography, wind, and the state of the vegetation, these fires display sudden, very fast, “eruptive” behavior. Eruptive fires are particularly hazardous for fire crews because of their unexpected intensity, and as a result, they have claimed many casualties. Dry vegetation, due to the combination of a long drought and a severe heat wave, encourages the phenomenon. Severe fires in wildland cover large areas, posing logistical, firefighting, and population evacuation challenges.

The wildfire problem in Chile is mostly limited to the central and southern parts of the country, where Smoke in this satellite photo of Chile shows the extent of the January 2017 wildfires. a sizeable forestry industry relies on Weather, Land, and Vegetation plantations of non-native species to produce cellulose, California and Chile share very similar weather wood chips, timber, and engineered timber products. patterns, geological features, and types of vegetation.

The greatest industrial capacity of related production The Golden State enjoys a type of Mediterranean weather is located around the cities of Talca, Concepción, and similar to what we encounter in north-central Chile, Temuco. Most of the tree plantations are Monterey specifically between the cities of La Serena and Valdivia. pine (Pinus radiata), covering 60 percent of the planted Likewise, Santiago presents characteristics reminiscent of surface, and eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus and E. Los Angeles, with warmer temperatures in the summer nitens), accounting for 35 percent. and short winters. Weather in northern California is quite like that of southern Chile.

The presence of noticeable mountain chains in both Chile and California — the Andes and the Sierra Nevada, respectively — adds further parallels to the general landscape of both regions and influence temperature changes and wind patterns. Experience has shown that the incidence of wildland fires is directly related to weather conditions and variations in atmospheric air patterns that affect temperature and precipitation.

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Ignition and Fire Spread Sources of wildland fire ignition vary. Major sources are human activities, such as campfires, waste burning, industrial work, etc. There are, however, important natural sources, including lightening, sun radiation concentration by natural rock formation or glassy surfaces, and bird interaction with power lines. These sources result in what is called “spot wildfire ignition” because they usually

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occur as a localized ignition area. There have also been cases where a “prescribed burn” — used to decrease the vegetation load and, in turn, reduce the risk of a fire — has gotten out of control and started large wildfires.

Spot wildfire ignition by hot metal fragments/sparks and firebrands (flaming or glowing embers) is an important fire ignition pathway by which wildfires and WUI fires are started and may propagate. Hot metal fragments and sparks can be generated by power line interactions, hot work (friction, grinding, welding), and overheated incandescent particles. The particles generated by these events can fly from the source of origin by initial momentum or be carried by wind. Depending on the energetic characteristics of these particles and the target fuel bed on which they land, the particles are potentially an ignition source.

According to published data, hot metal particles and sparks from power lines, equipment, and railroads cause about 28,000 natural fuel fires of the approximately 80,000 wildfires that occur annually in the United States.

Although most fires are put out shortly after they start, some spread with disastrous consequences. An example of a catastrophic spot-ignited fire is the 2007 southern California firestorm known as the Witch Creek and Guejito Fires, which eventually burned almost 200,000 acres and destroyed more than 1,100 homes. The California

Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) report for these fires alleges they were ignited by hot particles generated by clashing power lines.

Once ignited, a wildland fire can spread through two different mechanisms. One is related to the heat transfer from the fire front by convection and/or radiation towards the unburned vegetation bed located ahead of the flame.

Vegetation materials are then raised to a sufficiently high temperature to release combustible gases that combine with air to form a flammable mixture eventually ignited to attain fire propagation. The second mechanism is related to fire propagation by mass transfer and occurs mainly when bushes and trees are involved. Flaming or glowing vegetation particles, called firebrands, are commonly lofted by the fire plume and transported by the prevailing wind ahead of the fire front. If these firebrands reach the ground with sufficient energy, they can lead to the smoldering and/ or flaming ignition of the receptive fuel bed. Firebrand spotting leads to more rapid fire spread than flame-front propagation because firebrands generated by burning vegetation or structures are transported downwind to ignite secondary fires or structures remote from the flame front.

The modeling of trajectories and combustion of flying firebrands has received a considerable amount of attention, but fewer experimental and theoretical works have studied >>

Photo courtesy of Gobierno de Chile/Wikimedia.

Firefighters with Chile’s National Forestry Corporation battle the 2017 blazes near Valparaiso.

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firebrand ignition of the receptive vegetation bed. To address this need, the research groups in Chile and California have worked on spot ignition by firebrands using an original, simplified version of a “fully physical model” to predict the minimum-size firebrand capable of igniting a typical sample of Mediterranean vegetation litter.

Forest and Wildland Management To minimize the risk of ignition and consequently of fire propagation, the management of wildland becomes fundamental. In this regard, California boasts vast experience and abundant technical resources, and the Chilean researchers who visited California acquired an interesting knowledge base that could eventually be applied in Chile. Indeed, forest management can truly alter the state and conditions of the wildland. Multiple techniques, ranging in effectiveness, can be used to prevent wildland fires or make the environment less prone to and more prepared for them.

For example, ecosystem restoration can prevent wildland fires. Healthy, thriving ecosystems are less vulnerable to extreme fires that can destroy wildlife habitat, damage private property, and risk lives. Restoration of natural ecosystems can be achieved through mechanical treatments (such as thinning crowded forests) or controlled burns, which can prevent the buildup of flammable vegetation that promotes extreme fires.

In Chile, the Corporación Nacional Forestal (Conaf, National Forestry Corporation) manages the country’s forest resources, and one of the institution’s main objectives is the prevention of wildland fires. Conaf collaborates with California permanently through the Cal Fire agency, mostly for professional exchange focused on community-based fire prevention. Because almost all forest fires originate in human activities, whether through carelessness, intention, or accident, most of Conaf ’s efforts are focused on educating people and eradicating common behavior that can end up generating a wildland fire. As part of its strategies to prevent wildland fires, the institution devotes resources to keeping roads near the forest in good condition for better access in case of emergencies, building fire breaks, clearing the areas under power lines and other constructions, etc. These fire mitigation methods are discussed with Cal Fire to compare the practices used to protect homes and other private property, especially in WUI zones, and to study how these techniques might apply to areas such as Valparaíso in Chile.

Shared Challenges, Shared Opportunities Different climate change projections agree that in the next century, central and southern Chile will face scarcer BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Photo by Vladimir Rodas/EU/ECHO.

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rainfall, with increased drought events and increased extreme weather events, like high temperature and high wind, similar to the conditions during the 2016–2017 fire season. At the same time, the growth of the Chilean population will be concentrated in urban areas, which means that WUI areas will be increasingly populated.

Similar concerns can be observed in California. As a result, wildfire problems will become more severe, both in the occurrence of extreme fire events and an increased number of people exposed to wildfires. This prognosis presents many challenges related to Chile’s management of its forests, wildlands, and wildland–urban interfaces, the country’s efforts to combat forest fires, and the design and construction of a built environment that is more resilient to future wildfires.

Wildland management requires a better fundamental understanding of the burning behavior of different forest fuels and how external conditions (e.g., weather patterns,

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The 2017 fires in Chile killed 11 people and burned nearly 1.5 million acres.

water availability, interaction with other species) affect that fire behavior. This information impacts decisions regarding which species should be favored in both native and agricultural forest environments. Clearly, the response to wildland fires requires risk-informed decisions, which in turn require sound predictive capabilities. Therefore, the current computer fire models often used in the U.S. will need to be adapted to Chilean fuels, or new models will have to be developed.

The strong similarities between the western U.S. and Chile present great opportunities for technical, operational, and scientific collaboration between Californian and Chilean universities and government institutions. Chile can learn much from the California experience, particularly in wildland management, community fire safety, and building code improvements.

Operationally, Chile offers different firefighting tactics, including experience in the use of computer modeling in

major fires and management of private forests. Finally, the recent project on spontaneous ignition by firebrands funded by the UC Berkeley–Chile Seed Grants program is an example of successful scientific collaboration that offers opportunities for both fundamental and applied research, another high-water mark in the long tradition of joint efforts between California and Chile.

María del Carmen Thomsen is a researcher at UC Berkeley and Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (USM) in Valparaíso, Chile. Pedro Reszka is a professor at Universidad Adolfo Ibañez (UAI) in Santiago, Chile. Andrés Fuentes is a professor at USM. Carlos Fernandez-Pello is a professor at UC Berkeley. The authors are part of a collaborative research group that received a UC Berkeley–Chile Seed Grant through a 2014 competition organized by CLAS and funded by Conicyt.

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Rediscovering Clarice Through Translation

Photo by Alair Gomes.

LITERATURE

Clarice Lispector, Rio de Janeiro, 1969.

Rediscovering Clarice Through Translation

By Katrina Dodson

T

ranslation is a way of deep reading, another point of entry after you’ve read a text more times that you can count. The first time I tried to translate the work of the beloved Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector was as a new graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Comparative Literature. I wanted to understand one of her most puzzling stories, “O ovo e a galinha” (The Egg and the Chicken). The opening is simple enough — a woman looks at an egg on the kitchen table: “In the morning in the kitchen upon the table I see the egg. I look at the egg with a single gaze.” Yet as with most of Lispector’s writing, what begins as a concrete, objective thing slips from your grasp: Immediately I perceive that one cannot be seeing an egg. Seeing an egg never remains in the present: BERKELEY REVIEW OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

as soon as I see an egg it already becomes having seen an egg three millennia ago. —At the very instant of seeing the egg it is the memory of an egg. —The egg can only be seen by one who has already seen it. —When one sees the egg it is too late: an egg seen is an egg lost.

My head is already swimming, and we haven’t even arrived at the chicken yet. The earliest version of this translation is written in pencil in a notebook somewhere, boxed up with the rest of my papers from the decade it took to complete my Ph.D. I had no way of foreseeing that by the time I earned my degree, in fall 2015, I’d have made a two-year detour to translate the Complete Stories of the writer who was supposed to be the subject of my final dissertation chapter.

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Even now, after inhabiting “The Egg and the Chicken” to the point of claustrophobia, I can’t stop revisiting it, both in English and in Portuguese. I don’t think I’ll ever stop retracing the egg and the chicken in my mind.

Clarice, as she’s known in Brazil, has that effect on people. To echo a warning that her friend, the writer Otto Lara Resende, once gave to scholar Claire Varin: “Be careful with Clarice. It’s not literature. It’s witchcraft.”

Clarice Lispector is a household name in Brazil, so famous that people use just her first name, like the soccer star Pelé, the singer Caetano, or former Presidents Lula and Dilma. You can discuss Clarice with taxi drivers and fruit vendors, particularly in Rio de Janeiro, the city where she spent most of her adult life and where they’ve recently installed a life-size statue of her by the beach in her neighborhood of Leme, just off Copacabana.

Nearly 40 years after her death, the work of Clarice Lispector is not only required reading in Brazil, but she has also attained the status of mystic, sage, and glamorous literary icon all rolled into one. Her famously gorgeous face turns up on posters, graffiti murals, and lampshades, and a stunning variety of inspirational quotes are spuriously attributed to her on social media.

Like Mark Twain, J.D. Salinger, or Toni Morrison for Americans, Clarice Lispector is a writer who Brazilians often encounter as teenagers in school. Passages from Lispector stories regularly appear on the vestibular exam, the Brazilian version of the SATs. For every educated Brazilian, reading Clarice is a necessary rite of passage, with all that comes with it — a mix of intimidation and the potential oppressiveness of something compulsory, but also the ecstasy and wonder of discovering a voice that speaks to you like no other. Clarice’s writing is simple and complex in ways that defy explanation, even from the socalled experts: literary scholars.

In the writer’s only televised interview, conducted in the last year of her life, Clarice mentions one of her most notoriously difficult novels, The Passion According to G.H., difficult for being an abstract, meandering, mystical >>

Screenshot of Google search for Lispector quotes

Lispector quotes, real and imagined, populate social media streams.

“Be careful with Clarice. It’s not literature. It’s witchcraft.”

— Otto Lara Resende

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meditation on the nature of existence, among other things.

She says, “a Portuguese teacher at Pedro II [an elite high school in Rio] came to my house and told me that he’d read the book four times and still didn’t know what it was about. The next day, a 17-year-old girl, a college student, told me it was her favorite book.” Clarice then elaborates, “Either it touches you or it doesn’t. That is, I suppose that understanding isn’t a question of intelligence but rather of feeling and of entering into contact.”

When the interviewer asks if she thinks future generations will better understand her, she replies, “I have no idea. I know that before, no one understood me, and now they understand me.... I think that everything changed, because I haven’t changed at all. As far as I know I haven’t made any concessions.” As for “The Egg and the Chicken,” she admits that it’s “one story of mine that I don’t understand very well,” and singles it out as among her favorites, “a mystery to me.”

What this exchange shows is that there are no ready solutions for how to read Clarice and even less for how to explain her. As I have found through translating her work and accompanying the range of new readings and responses to it, there are a variety of ways to rediscover The Brazilian cover of The Passion According to G.H.

Photo from Wikimedia.

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her at different moments of one’s life. Clarice’s writing is playful and forbidding, deeply philosophical and slapstick, intensely psychological and sensual, dramatic but also plotless. One can read her as a late modernist, a Brazilian, a woman, a mother and the worldly wife of a diplomat, one of the first Brazilian women to earn a law degree, the child of poor Jewish refugees who fled the pogroms in what is now Ukraine, a Jewish writer with a strong Catholic influence, a spiritualist with a syncretic streak and interest in the occult, a mystic, a foreigner and outsider.

Clarice Lispector became a literary sensation at the age of 23 in 1943 with her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, about the coming of age of a young woman named Joana who eventually leaves her husband. It drew comparisons to the stream of consciousness styles of Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce, from whose novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Lispector plucked the title for her book. The next year, Lispector married one of her law school colleagues, Maury Gurgel Valente, who became a diplomat and with whom she would have two sons and live in Rome, Bern, and Washington, D.C., before divorcing him and moving back to Rio de Janeiro with their children in 1959.

From 1940 to 1977, Lispector wrote nine novels, more than 85 short stories, numerous newspaper columns and literary sketches known as crônicas, and four children’s books. She also translated from English and French, writers ranging from Agatha Christie, Jonathan Swift, and Edgar Allan Poe to Jules Verne and Bella Chagall.

There were moments when Lispector fell out of favor and then was applauded again, yet by the time she died from ovarian cancer, on the eve of her 57th birthday in 1977, she had already achieved renown as one of her country’s most esteemed writers.

Translation plays a unique role in giving life to an author’s work beyond its original context, and Clarice Lispector has had many lives in English. Her writing is odd and challenging, and it has taken over 50 years for a more mainstream literary audience to appreciate her work in translation. It’s hard enough to convince the gatekeepers of publishing capitals — New York, London, Paris — to embrace writers with unfamiliar styles, even when backed by the cultural weight of canonical literary traditions, such as literature in French and German. It becomes harder still to convince them to invest their energies in a writer like Clarice Lispector, whose work comes out of a literary tradition considered minor and little known beyond its national context. Even within this tradition, Lispector’s style is less readily engaging than a writer’s like Jorge Amado, whose novels depict more

Photo courtesy of the Instituto Moreira Salles.

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The first wave of “Lispectormania” – Clarice signing books in Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s.

vibrant characters and locales that better fit a foreigner’s idea of Brazilian “local color.”

Given the challenges to publishing unusual work by unknown writers, it is unsurprising that most of the earlier English translations of Lispector’s work were undertaken by university and small presses. In 1961, the University of Texas published the first translation of a Lispector novel into English, The Apple in the Dark. At the time, the translator, Gregory Rabassa, was more famous than the author, already associated with translating Latin American Boom writers, including Julio Cortázar and eventually Gabriel García Márquez.

The 1980s saw another wave of Lispector interest through feminist critique, after the influential French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous wrote the first of several books rapturously elevating Lispector as the muse for Cixous’s theory of l’écriture féminine, feminine writing. Cixous’s attention led to a series of Lispector translations into French in the 1970s and ’80s by the feminist press Des Femmes. Cixous’s writing also prompted Lispector’s inclusion on the syllabi of Women’s Studies courses in the United States.

In the multicultural context leading into the 1990s, with interest in world literature on the rise, New

Directions in the U.S. and Carcanet in England put out further translations of Lispector’s work, the majority translated by the Scots-Italian professor Giovanni Pontiero, whose employer, the University of Manchester, originally housed Carcanet. Another university press, Minnesota, put out The Passion According to G.H. in 1988 and Àgua Viva in 1989, which Professors Earl Fitz and Elizabeth Lowe translated as Stream of Life. By that time, Lispector was well-known among those familiar with Latin American literature and feminist theory.

She also became a cult favorite in creative writing MFA programs, since along with literary scholars, it’s the poets and writers who make it their business to sniff out undiscovered literary gems.

The previous generations of Lispector scholars and translators laid the groundwork for her ready entry into the international literary canon. Yet the level of “Lispectormania” that the latest series has inspired is unprecedented. This renewed interest began in 2009, when Benjamin Moser published the first Englishlanguage Lispector biography, Why This World. Its success led New Directions to launch a series of new Lispector translations, starting with her final novel, The Hour of the Star, in 2011. Momentum picked up with the >> CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY

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Rediscovering Clarice Through Translation

Photo by Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil Fotografias.

A statue of Clarice with her notebook and her dog overlooks Rio’s beaches.

simultaneous release of four novels in 2012. It culminated in the publication of the Complete Stories in August 2015, which made the cover of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the first time a Brazilian author has gained that distinction.

The attention reverberating from New York induced Lispector’s Brazilian publisher, Rocco, finally to print her complete stories in the original, Todos os contos, with the same cover and design as the U.S. edition. New Directions plans to release new translations of the remaining four novels over the next few years and eventually volumes of the crônicas, letters, and children’s books, assembling a Complete Works of Clarice Lispector.

What we might call the fourth wave of Lispector in English has granted the writer an unprecedented level of prominence on the world literary stage in a way that has brought her reputation much closer to what it is in Brazil.

Recent critics have grasped for ways to comprehend the shock of a talent they were previously blind to. They have sought to locate Clarice in the international canon by comparing her to a dizzying range of writers, including Kafka, Borges, Nabokov, Chekhov, Woolf, Joyce, Sartre, Wittgenstein, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Ovid, Rabelais, and even Groucho Marx.

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After a certain point, these comparisons form an absurd composite, yet they’re also a sign of how farreaching Clarice’s writing is. One reviewer wrote, “This welcome, overdue publication of the Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector fills a hole in our literary history that many of us didn’t even know existed.” Another referred to Lispector’s sudden popularity as “the Bolaño treatment,” referring to the explosive popularity of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño after The Savage Detectives came out (though I’d say that Lispector’s books don’t quite have Bolaño’s bestseller appeal). In general, it’s a great time for literature in translation, with Karl Ove Knausgaard becoming a literary rock star, Ferrante Fever still running high, and new independent translation presses sprouting up every year.

In the past two years, I’ve paid close attention to how this rediscovery of Clarice Lispector has been filtering into the Anglophone literary world. She is gradually moving away from qualifiers like “the great Brazilian writer,” “the greatest Jewish writer since Kafka,” “a female Chekhov,” and “the Brazilian Virginia Woolf,” and into a new space where writers in English drop casual references to just “Clarice Lispector,” “Lispector,” or “Clarice,” with the assumption that readers should already know who she is.

Spring 2017

Translation as performance: Lispector makes a pun on “prova,” which means proof but also refers to a dress fitting.

Original: “Então tive a prova, a duas provas; de Deus e do vestido.”

Literal translation: “So I had proof, the two proofs; of God and the dress.”

Dodson: “So I had fitting proof, the fitting and the proof; of the dress and of God.” — from Clarice Lispector, “The Dead Man in the Sea at Urca” multiplied, through additional translations into English, as well as into Hebrew, Greek, Ukrainian, Dutch, and Korean, among others. On and on those ovos and galinhas roll, the egg and the chicken in constant evolution as we keep rediscovering Clarice.

Katrina Dodson holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley and is the translator of the Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector (New Directions, 2015), for which she was awarded the PEN Translation Prize in 2016.

Dodson spoke for CLAS on March 8, 2017.

Katrina Dodson with the Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector.

Photo courtesy of Katrina Dodson.

She is increasingly read beyond strictly Latin American and feminist frameworks, now integrated into English classes at American universities and high schools.

Clarice keeps invading contemporary North American poetry, fiction, and theater, with talk of film adaptations in the air. I think about the day when postcards of the glamorous Clarice Lispector appear next to those of Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, and Simone de Beauvoir in bookstores and wonder whether it will be a sign of literary triumph or cultural decadence.

While countless factors have contributed to the growing influence of Clarice Lispector’s work in English, I believe that the definitive element has been the approach of these new translations, which hew closer to her unique style and way of distorting standard Portuguese. Of course, I’m slightly biased, as the sixth translator in this series, all of us working closely with the same editor. We each have our idiosyncrasies and different inflections of English — from different U.S. regions, England, and Australia — yet Lispector’s voice maintains coherence throughout.

Translations are often praised for their seamlessness, for making the work seem originally written in the target language. If attributes like fluidity and harmony belong to ideals of beauty in a major mode, then what these new translations are more attuned to in Lispector’s work is an embrace of an aesthetic counterpart in a minor key, marked by a more deviant logic of interruptions, erratic movements, and jarring juxtapositions. I view the effect as similar to the way Emily Dickinson’s poetry gained a greater force of individual genius after being restored to her more daring punctuation, word choices, irregular meter, and slant rhyme, after being initially rendered more conventionally by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd when they edited her work posthumously.

While translating the Complete Stories, I focused especially on capturing Lispector’s cadences that carry the reader through the obstacles of her odd grammar and diction. I also found a way to enter her work less as a scholar chasing an ideal of precision in literary interpretation and rather as a performer aiming for another sort of interpretive accuracy. As a translator, instead of explaining what you think the writer means, you need to perceive what she’s doing in order to recreate its effect.

In my Translator’s Note, I compared the process of translating a lifetime of work in two years’ time to “a one-woman vaudeville act.” While Lispector’s voice is incredibly distinct, she takes on a dizzying range of personas and voices, which I breathlessly accompanied in these stories. And her voice continues to be refracted and

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Article Title

À beira da família estou eu. À beira de eu estou mim. É para mim que eu vou. E de mim saio para ver.

— Clarice Lispector, “É para lá que eu vou”

Clarice Lispector, “É para lá que eu vou”, Onde estivestes de noite © 1974, Clarice Lispector and Heir of Clarice Lispector.

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Spring 2017

Atbeira the edge of theestou familyeu. amÀI.beira At the of I ismim. me. À da família deedge eu estou To me is where am going. nd from out to see. É para Imim que eu Avou.

E deme mimI go saio para ver.

—— Clarice Lispector, “That’s Where I’m Going” Clarice Lispector, “É para lá que eu vou”

Clarice Lispector in 1961.

(Photo by Claudia Andujar.)

‘’That’s Where I’m Going’’ By Clarice Lispector, translation by Katrina Dodson, from COMPLETE STORIES, copyright ©1951, 1955, 1960, 1965, 1978, 2010, 2015 by the Heirs of Clarice Lispector, translation copyright © 2015 by Katrina Dodson. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

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The Río Bravo/Rio Grande forms the Mexico–U.S. border in Parque Nacional Cañón de Santa Elena, Chihuahua, and the Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend National Park, Texas.

(Photo by Jasperdo.)

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