Eduardo Galeano
Author
of The Book of Embraces talks with Robert Birnbaum about
the music of translation, the ghost of Stalin, and the contradictions
of being human
Of the people with whom I am acquainted that appreciate
the literary world, I am frequently reminded how lucky I am to have
regular and serious (and, I might add, also intense) intercourse
with the wonderful and wholly original creatures who inhabit that
small but mighty Universe. I have never been more fortunate in my
bountiful career, such as it is, to have, for the second time, spent
some all-too-brief moments (this time on the shores of Lake Michigan
at North Avenue beach in Chicago) with Uruguayan writer and soccer
fan Eduardo Galeano.
Eduardo Hughes Galeano was born in Montevideo to a middle-class
Catholic family. He started his career as a journalist in the early
1960s as editor of Marcha, an influential weekly journal.
When in 1973 a military coup took power in Uruguay, Galeano was
imprisoned (see Lawrence Weschler's A Miracle, A Universe:
Torture In Latin America) and later was forced to flee. He
settled in Argentina, where he founded the cultural magazine Crisis.
In 1976, when the Videla regime took power in Argentina in a bloody
military coup, his name was added to the list of those condemned
by the death squads, and he fled again--this time to Spain, where
he wrote his nonpareil trilogy: Memoria del fuego (Memory
of Fire). Galeano returned to Montevideo at the beginning of
1985.
Though he has demurred being identified as a historian, his best
known and revered works, Las
venas abiertas de América Latina (The Open Veins
of Latin America) and Memoria
del fuego combine documentary, fiction, journalism, political
analysis, and history—Galeano has declared, "I'm a writer
obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America
above all, and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned
to amnesia."
The
Book of Embraces which was praised by Jay Parini as perhaps
his most daring work and occasioned my first conversation with Galeano,
was a collection of short, often lyrical stories presenting his
views on a broad prism of emotion, art, politics, and values, as
well as his unsparing critique of modern capitalistic society. (This
was the last book Cedric Belfrage, his only translator and collaborator
to date, translated before he died in 1991.) And Galeano's new opus,
Voices of Time (translated by Mark Fried), is yet another
collation of snippets and fragments (333) from his storytelling
career. Galeano is a regular contributor to magazines around the
world including English-language periodicals such as The Progressive,
The New Internationalist, The Monthly Review and
The Nation. Eduardo Galeano continues to live and write
and follow soccer in Montevideo with his Irish Setter, Morgan.
Robert Birnbaum: This book, is it a culmination?
Eduardo Galeano: Culmination, I don't know.
RB: The end of an era.
EG: I don't believe—the best of my days is the day of tomorrow.
I mean the day I haven't already lived. So I don't believe in culmination.
The word "culmination" scares me a lot. It sounds like—
RB: —oh, I'm sorry—
EG: —like death. [both laugh] I think life is an amazing
mystery and how can we die and be born so many times—no, so
it's not a culmination, the book is just a something written on
the road while I go on walking.
RB: Okay, does it mark a phase?
EG: Mark?
RB: Is it in some way a break with a past—is it a continuity—
EG: No, it's continuing. It's a way of saying that I—I think
it's my own way of saying, writing which began many years
ago sometime after I wrote Open Veins of Latin America,
I began trying to look at the universe through the keyhole, I began
to write these short stories that are integrated, always integrated
in a huge mosaic of other stories inter-linking, sort of a conversation
between different experiences, emotions, ideas, sounds, colors—
RB: You say in your introductory note in the beginning of the book,
that these pieces were taken from writings over the years but that
putting them together in this way changes their color and valence,
so was it hard, laborious to look back at your body of work and
put this together?
EG: No, no the book itself, the books, they write me. They decide,
they decide everything. I am just their tool. And this book came
from a lot of short stories I wrote—perhaps more than 600.
And at the end, 333 decided to become a single one. And you know
writing is like the job of a weaver, textile work and you have strings
or threads of many different colors coming from different places.
Colors and voices and they want to become a single chorus or a single
carpet or something like this—
RB: Tapestry?
EG: Tapestry, a single tapestry. Then there are some of them that
have no place there and it's terrible to renounce and I love all
of them, all of the stories—
RB: I was going to ask if you would read a favorite but then that's
a hard choice. Would you read the 1st and the last, which I would
guess you chose with great deliberation?
EG: Let me see, the first one is—
RB: I read them to my son the other day and showed him the illustrations.
We love them.
EG: The drawings come from ancient times. Some of them are ten
thousand years old. They look like they were done last week. Art
that was created by Indians in Cahmarca in Peru a long time ago.
And true art has no age. It's the oldest of the old but it
sounds like something just recently done. So the first, the opening
text, is this one I suppose, "Time Tells":
We are made of time we are its feet and its voice, the feet
of time walk in our shoes sooner or later we all know the winds
of time will erase the tracks, passage of nothing, steps of no one,
the voices of time tell of the voyage.
And the last one, I don't remember now, which one is the last one—"Days
Gone":
He is always first when the end night approaches; silence is
broken by the one out of tune . . .
I don't know if my English pronunciation is okay. If it's not you
should cut it and we then begin again, is this is okay?
RB: It's fine.
EG: He's always first when the end …The one out of tune,
the bird who never tires, awakens the master-singers and before
first light all the birds in the world begin their serenade at the
window, sailing over the flowers and over the reflections. A few
sing for love of the arts, other broadcast news or report gossip
or tell jokes, or give speeches or proclaim the light. But all of
them, but all of them, artists reporters, gossips, cranks, and crazies,
join in single orchestral overture. Do birds announce the morning?
Or by singing do they create it?
It was okay, my English? I do it again.
RB: It was fine. You haven't always worked with this book's translator,
Mark Fried.
EG: At the beginning my translator was Cedric Belfrage. He was
old and he is dead now—he died while he was translating the
Book of Embraces. He did Open Veins, the trilogy
Memories of Fire, which was quite a task, a difficult,
a hard job. One thousand stories divided in three volumes and he
was great. And Mark is perfect, I mean, I'm his twin brother.
I think he is my other voice. And I am his and [I have] exactly
the same feeling of certitude I had with Cedric. You know Cedric
was a noble Englishman, the black sheep of his family.
RB: [laughs] I won't ask why.
EG: Expelled by Joseph McCarthy during that period. He was obliged
to live in Mexico in Cuernevaca.
RB: That's not a bad place to live.
EG: He was one of the founders of Hollywood; at the beginning of
Hollywood, Cedric was there. And he identified with me so much and
I felt so identified with him that I received at that time when
he was translating Memories of Fire, sometimes I received
angry letters, from him. Angry letters sent by the mail—at
that time we had no faxes, no emails or these sort of recent inventions.
RB: Better.
EG: So it was the postman riding his donkey bringing letters, and
some of his letters were terrible. I mean he got angry each time
he found something that he would not say. If there was something
in the book, anything, could be an idea or an adjective or an opinion
or a description of something or an evaluation of anything, person
or experience that he would not share, that he was unable to think
or feel or believe that this was his own, then he got very angry.
Like he had been betrayed by me. And then the letters would say,
"How could you say that?!"
 RB:
That's very tricky. You want the person that you are working with
who is translating to be your mirror, but the text is not of their
creation.
EG: No, it's a perfect synthesis of life, life is this, we
are always looking at others as possible mirrors and we feel betrayed
when it doesn't work.
RB: [laughs]
EG: But that's it. He was much, much older than I was, but we were
like brothers, much more than brothers—twin brothers. And
then he was very angry each time he realized that I was not him.
RB: Slowly, slowly, translators are getting their due. At least
getting more recognition for the immensity of the task.
EG: Yes, this is improving. It's true, but they are still very
badly paid everywhere, not only here. And therefore they don't have
time enough to do it in the best way because it's very difficult,
it's the translation of another music. Each language contains its
own music and therefore when you are translating you are coming
from one music and inventing another one. Which music would be the
best in order to get these ideas, emotions, feeling, memories, possibly
to be shared by other people from other cultures, from other languages.
I don't believe really in God, nowadays.
RB: Did you ever?
EG: In my childhood, yes, I was very Catholic. And in my childhood
I was a fervent reader of the Bible, then there were some stories
that I didn't like too much but I didn't know why. And as time had
gone by, years had passed, I am now able now to understand why for
instance the Tower of Babel story was a story I didn't like at all.
This God acting like a universal chief of police, punishing and
hating and being—how could he find that giving us the diversity
of languages was a punishment? The diversity of languages is one
of the best treasures of the human condition, of the fact of being
human in this earth. Because diverse is the best thing, I mean,
the best of the world is the fact that the world contains so many
worlds inside. And so many languages. We have different languages
because we have different musics and we are walking musics. As we
are walking time.
RB: When I was an undergraduate, I used to think that all the languages
were like colors of a prism—and that all of them together
were like a perfect white/light and in some sense the universal
language. You had the sum total of all describable reality. Or another
in the way all the language groups combined equal all human experience—all
that was capable of being talked about. But barring that, we would
always be looking at life piecemeal.
EG: Yeah, you are allowed to know just a little apart of the whole,
no? And especially because there is another language. Which is perhaps
more powerful, which is the language of silence.
RB: Hmm.
EG: I am working and trying to deserve the privilege
of speaking, writing, and knowing perfectly well that the only words
which really deserve to exist are words better than silence, but
it's not easy to find these words. Because language is such a word.
The language of silence seems to be much more powerful. It's a great
challenge. That's why I go on working and working, looking for words,
chasing words.
RB: There is a writer, Alan Furst, who wrote so-called literary
thrillers of WWII years in Europe and what I like about his writing
is what his characters in their conversations, what they leave unsaid—
EG: Umm, yes, the unsaid.
RB: About translation, it appears to me it is really another work,
as a movie is not of the book.
EG: No, it's a recreation. A recreation, I wouldn't say entirely
new but new in the sense that if it's too tied to the original
version of a book or story or an essay or article, anything, it
would be, in the name of loyalty, it would be betraying its own
purpose—because it should be free to fly with its own wings.
Otherwise it is too orthopedic, too artificial.
RB: I find it puzzling how it's said that some book or other can't
be made into a movie. Every year there is a movie made from something
that supposedly couldn't be done. Ondaatjes' The English Patient
comes to mind.
EG: If it's opening new spaces of freedom in the
art of creation with no borders, with no fears, no limits, then
it may go on, it may walk the best way. Sometimes it doesn't finally
work and a translator cannot do it. Cannot do it and then it's just
a sad shadow of the original work, but in most cases when you have
the time and the energy, to work in freedom, it's a beautiful work,
it's a nice job, unfortunately also it pays very badly, as I told
you.
RB: [chuckles] In this country we have few who are getting recognized—Edith
Grossman and Esther Allen.
EG: No, in this country and some European countries they are not
so very well paid but at least paid in a decent way, but in Latin
American countries it is really something—a despised job.
You can translate perfectly well 10 pages per day or 15—I
wouldn't be able to translate 15 words in a day, not to say 15 pages—
|
The richest people
are suffering fear in such a proportion they cannot imagine
life without this panic of being kidnapped and feeling that
people hate them or I don't know—it must be terrible. |
RB: [laughs]
EG: It implies a certain respect for words. Words may be sacred,
why not—if silence is sacred also?
RB: When you come to the United States are you doing missionary
work?
EG: No.
RB: No?
EG: No—I hate missionaries. [both laugh] No, all these messianic
peoples thinking that they should save other people, no, no, I don't
want to save anybody—except myself. Which is quite a task.
I mean, what a hard job to do.
RB: This occurs to me because your view of the world is, your view
of politics is so very, very much different from the conventional
nordamericano wisdom. And popular perception, yet there
are people in the U.S. who avidly appreciate your point of view—what
is the reality of conversation about your point of view in the States?
EG: It's really diverse. This is a very diverse country.
And with so many United States inside the United States. It's
amazing for me I am always discovering new and new—realities
inside reality here. And, of course, I am not trying to save anybody.
There is a very important difference between charity, it's called
charity in English? Caridad, charity and solidarity. I
don't know if you know this old African proverb saying that "the
giving hand is always above the receiving hand." So charity
is humiliating. But solidarity is not because it's a relationship
between equals. A respectful relationship. And my relationship with
readers or people going to hear when I am doing, a reading is a
relationship founded on solidarity, not charity. I don't think I
am above anybody. The mission, it was the conception that some intellectuals
had and still have about their own importance. I am the owner of
the light. Then, I am going to walk in darkness—
RB: [laughs]
EG: —and give this marvelous gift to the poor blind people—nah.
This is horrible.
RB: You're right, bad choice of words.
EG: No, but it's very good to say it, to tell it. It's something
that—it's an unusual question.
RB: Given all the ugly facts in the world—one thing I believe
you try to remind readers of is that over two billion dollars a
day is spent every day in which we kill each other.
EG: In fact it's more—
RB: 2.6 billion.
EG: 2.6 billion dollars every day—it's a scandal! Can
you imagine this! In the art of killing other people.
RB: In view of that and much more, how is it that you even want
to continue speaking out and discovering more and more of these
ugly facts?
EG: Ah, because I believe in contradictions. I believe that the
real source of all energies of life is contradiction. So if you
have dark, you have light. If you have day, you have night. If you
have evil, you have good and everything is quite mixed. If I'm speaking
about horrors, I am always also speaking about the hidden marvels
that horrors hide inside. And that's why. I am a really—I
fall down several times each day. And I get up. I don't know how.
I don't know why. But I get up. But I mistrust full-time optimistics.
RB: Probably they are on medication.
EG: They are not very human. We humans are weak.
We are contradictory, and human faith is as contradictory as we
are. I am optimistic for instance in the morning, up to 11 o'clock,
then I begin being pessimistic—
RB: [laughs]
EG: Uh, at one or two in the afternoon, some voice, a secret voice
inside me would say, "Well okay, so you believe in so and so
and so and humankind and the human condition, and you, yesterday,
you said that we are very badly done, wrongly done but we are unmade,
so you are optimistic. Well, Eduardo you are drunk."
RB: [laughs heartily]
EG: "You are denying evidence, like drunk people do."
"Let me see," this secret voice is saying inside me,
"2:30 pm, you begin drinking six, why do you say the things
you are saying?" Well, this is what happens until 2, 5, 6,
7 and then I'm optimistic again and at night I have strange feelings—crossing,
interlinking, denying each other and so I am the result of all this
contradictory synergies, inside.
RB: A result of—you are able to balance or accept, uh, process
these contradictions because you have lived long enough to see that
that's the way it goes. When you are younger you don't see
that when you are confronted with obstacles, you think that's it,
you don't think you can get past it. Whereas the longer you live
there are bad and good things happening and you manage to keep going—a
hard lesson to learn. Many people get stuck at one pole or the other—
EG: Yes—but what you really learn going on and on the road
walking day by day, year by year is that reality is amazing. That
she is a beautiful, horrible, mad woman full of poetry and that
she is able to give you so many surprises. The best thing about
life is the fact that we receive so many surprises. Unexpected news,
who knows what's waiting for me in the next corner perhaps a car,
a criminal car that will crash into me, perhaps? But perhaps I may
find a beautiful person, a brother, a lover, someone with whom I
may share my insides. And the problem is that we are all doomed
to suffer an international system, a world system which daily teaches
us to mistrust the others. You see—no, no, no, the other is
not a promise, the other one is never a promise. It's a menace,
it's a threat. He may kill you, rob you, rape you, cheat you,
I don't know what. [chuckles] And so if you really believe that
life is surprising and there are bad surprises and good surprises,
we should begin to fight against this system that is training us
to fear, to fear everything because as you said at the beginning
they need alibis to justify this scandal. Why are they spending,
the owners of the planet, $2.6 billion in the military industry?
Why? Well, because we live in a dangerous place. Earth is a dangerous
place. So we are trained to feel fear of everything. To live in
panic and I am against fear. I feel fear like everybody else, but
I don't think fear should be my guiding star, that I am obliged
to adore fear.
RB: The connections I make are that I see people my age or even
younger who are frozen and no longer seem to enjoy life because
they don't feel or see that there are going to be any surprises.
And they are already disappointed at what life has given them and
they don't think it can get better.
 EG:
They think or they feel that least that tomorrow is another day.
Just another name for today.
RB: [laughs]
EG: You are doomed to repeat life, to repeat history but you can't
change.
RB: And also not that many people when you compare their standard
of living against the rest of the world's are probably in top 1
percent. All the toys, forget about sufficient necessities, they
could probably feed Central American provinces with their waste,
you know.
EG: Yes.
RB: So they have all this and, incredibly they have no happiness.
This is of course endemic to the U.S. And it looks like a big trap.
EG: Yes, they are prisoners. We are all prisoners. Prisoners of
fear in the world but the richest people are suffering fear in such
a proportion they cannot imagine life without this panic of being
kidnapped and feeling that people hate them or I don't know—it
must be terrible. That's why we are not rich. [laughs] I am rich
enough to have my great friend, Morgan [an Irish setter] who is
my dog and you have your Rosalie who is now hearing us. She is inside
our talk—in silence, in silence.
RB: So things are changing in Latin America, in Brazil, in Ecuador,
Venezuela, Bolivia, even Chile. You have been quoted as saying that
were there not a war in Iraq, those governments might be in danger—but
given there is a war in Iraq there are—[EG's a body language
is obvious] You didn't say that?
EG: No, I didn't say so, no. Ahem, because there are different
ways of playing this dirty game of war. Sometimes experts, technocrats,
bankers are more dangerous than armed soldiers. And we have terrible
difficulties in Latin America to build a real democracy. And I think
this because leaving aside the fact that the world is organized
like an immense war machine—but there are also super governments,
governing the governments. And it's also part of this terrible
landscape, a world that has become a madhouse and a slaughterhouse
and is in the hands of a handful of a few people, a few countries—the
International Monetary Fund is a super government, for instance.
And it's managed by five countries—especially by one that
has the right to veto—which is the one that we are now in,
talking.
RB: [laughs] We are in the country of Chicago right now.
EG: —the World Bank, how many countries? It's called World
Bank. How many countries manage the World Bank? Eight countries.
And the WTO has a right to vote but it has never voted, never. All
the resolutions are taken like in Stalinist old times.
RB: [laughs]
EG: By acclamation.
RB: Today when one says Stalinist it's laughable, it's
a cartoon, but when you think about it—
EG: That's the way they work. Like guided by Stalin or his ghost,
because they never vote. And they're doing terrible things against
poor countries in the name of the few rich. And the same thing in
the United Nations, for instance. It's supposed to be—a
beautiful way for realizing that we are diverse but one. That we
all countries have something in common—which is the need to
respect each other, to be peaceful and so on. Well, the General
Assembly where we are all represented is just symbolic. It never
makes decisions, it makes recommendations and who really decides
everything is the—
RB: Security Council.
EG: Yes. Inside the Security Council the five counties with the
right to veto—five countries, are the owners of the world,
they decide everything. To decide if a country will or will not
be annihilated. What will happen with this planet? In the hands
of five countries—they are taking care of peace and they are
at once the main producers of weapons.
RB: The five leading arms dealers.
EG: They are making the business of war and they are supposed to
be peacekeepers. So it's absolutely undemocratic, it's not democratic.
When I come here, for instance, to the United States—this
my fifth day here, a lot of journalists have asked me about democracy
in Latin America, will we be able to build it? It's very difficult.
Why? Because the entire world is not democratic. Yeah. It's
not a problem, of course we are coming now in Latin America finally
to the exit door, I hope so, from long years of military oppression,
dictatorships, and it was terrible. But this was also part of the
world order. It's not something that came from—
| The
technology of manipulation was unknown in past times. The
capacity for lying and establishing your lies as universal
truth was never acquired by other civilizations. |
RB: One needs to look at the U.S. Military's School
for the Americas.
EG: And the Plan Condor—it was like a common market of death
with foreign advisors and so on. But we still believe that democracy
is possible and I believe it's possible but it's a challenge,
not yet a reality. Something to be done, to be conquered by people
and in this sense it's very meaningful, the fact that Evo
Morales was nationalizing the oil and—
RB: —gas—
EG: —gas, and he's perceived as a scandal. Why, because he
committed a cardinal sin in Latin America and in the world. He did
what he has promised to do. This identification between facts and
words is forbidden. Facts and words ought to be divorced, otherwise
you perhaps are a populist or demagogic president or perhaps a terrorist
even, if you think that if you say "yes," you should act
in the same way. Being as they are divorced, facts and words never,
never greet each other when they by accident cross paths. They never
say, "Hello, how are you?" Because they don't recognize
themselves. When words say, yes, the facts make no. When words say
yes, then facts make no. And so on. And this is one of our worst
colonial heritages in Latin America. It's not our sad privilege.
RB: In Latin America, is Chavez considered a demon? Has he been
demonized in the south as he has been here?
EG: For some people yes. The big media, of course, is against him.
Of course, it's an homage paid to a true democracy that he is building
now in Venezuela. He won eight elections. This tyrant, this dictator,
this horrible person won eight elections—eight clean elections
RB: You were an electoral observer.
EG: Yes, in the plebiscite.
RB: He won by an astounding margin.
EG: He was giving back power to people. Not frequent
in human history, isn't it? A president organizing a plebiscite
to ask people, "Do you want me to stay or go?" I was
the delegate of all the independent international observers, and
I spent the last night with James Carter and Gaviria, from the Carter
Foundation and the OAS, watching what was happening and finally
it was clear that it was a fair election. A fair popular consult,
a fair popular referendum and anyway they went on, the owners of
the big media went on saying he is suppressing people—
RB: If he had been suppressing people, he would have shut them
down—yes?
EG: Yeah, that's it. The fact is that this upside-down world needs
demons, needs satyrs to go on killing and to go on living to kill.
And spending these absolutely absurd sums in exterminating each
other. And they need an alibi. What, so why? It's like the
Iraq war—they needed something, a reason, of course the reason
was a lie. But this war born from a lie, is still there, going on
and killing people.
RB: You quoted your mother, "Lies have short legs."
EG: When I was a child my mother would say that.
RB: Mark Twain said, and it is often attributed to Winston Churchill,
"A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is
putting on its shoes." [This quote has been attributed to Mark
Twain, but it has never been verified as originating with Twain.
This quote may have originated with Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-92)
who attributed it to an old proverb in a sermon delivered on Sunday
morning, April 1, 1855. Spurgeon was a celebrated English fundamentalist
Baptist preacher. His words were: "A lie will go round the
world while truth is pulling its boots on."]
EG: Lies' legs are very long and they run very
fast. When liars say it was not true, I'm sorry, like Bush or Blair,
people rewarded them, reelecting them as it happened in those countries.
RB: It's beyond surreal.
EG: Yes, that's the way it is. I mean, nowadays the technology
of manipulation was unknown in past times. The capacity for lying
and establishing your lies as universal truth was never acquired
by other civilizations.
RB: That's progress.
EG: Yeah, technological progress in which I don't really believe
too much. I always have the suspicion that machines dream at night.
RB: [laughs] Right. Your country, Uruguay, seems to be doing better
these days.
EG: Yeah, we hope so.
RB: Too early to tell?
EG: We are living also some contradictions between hope and reality.
We'll see. I am now fighting in my own country against the identification
of Uruguay with giant corporations in planting their paper paste
factories and this is very welcome by everybody including the progressive
government. "They are creating jobs, we have so many jobless
people" and people perhaps prefer to die from contamination
and pollution rather than die from hunger. And so ecology is not
a popular cause in Latin America and I suspect in other regions
also. It's very difficult to say—"Well, it's a
single struggle, the same struggle, social justice and environment."
And we should stop divorcing human kind from nature.
RB: We presume our superiority to everything—humans own everything
else. We are more important and superior to dogs and birds and spiders.
EG: [chuckles] We are part of the same. This is
a beautiful heritage coming from Indian culture in all the Americas—this
communion with nature, this certitude that everybody is our relative,
that we are all members of the same family, all who have legs or
paws or fins or wings or roots, that we are part of everything.
RB: I recall in the late '70s when the environmental movement was
vocal and real trouble spots were being identified and there was
an admirable bit of muckraking on it and in New Jersey when workers
at chemical plants which had high incidents of cancer, were asked,
they would make a conscious choice, "My family has to eat."
So what do you do?
EG: Well, this one of our problems and the other is we have an
inside-out government, I feel, my own government that I have fought
for during years and years, for a left-wing government, and we have
it now, but part of it is now saying we should be realists and pay
homage to this cynicism as the only possible form of realism. That
reality is at it is. In this reality the market is god. So we shouldn't
irritate him, he may be very angry against us.
RB: It's an insult to dogs that the word "cynicism" comes
from the Greek word for dog—when it is such a misguided pathology.
And it appears that the distinction between cynicism and skepticism
has been blurred.
EG: When it becomes political behavior, it is very dangerous. Because
they are working against democracy. Against the prestige of democracy
and against the prestige of words. If you conquer the government,
if you win the government promising people that you will keep the
country aside from any form of free trade agreement because it's
a big lie, because it's a prop, because free trade doesn't exist,
then how can you afterwards do it? A part of our government, not
all of it, some people that would welcome a free trade agreement
with the U.S. and so, the same with Lula in Brazil, the whole campaign
of Lula speaking against tragenics, trangenicos, genetically
modified seeds, then when he was in the government, he approved
them. I mean, he spoke against it and later he said, "Well,
okay, it's a reality, I cannot do anything against it."
RB: Bill Clinton is the poster child of talking progressive and
acting centrist and right.
EG: The problem is the prestige of democracy and the prestige of
words. Especially, especially Robert, this is very important for
me—in the eyes, seen through the eyes of the new generation.
Of the young people. In these recent Chilean elections, which had
a very good result—I think it's good that a woman becomes
president in countries in which women are half of the population.
[laughs] It's funny, some people are speaking about women
as an exploited minority. Minority of what? They are 50%. Well,
so I really think the elections had a good result but there is a
detail about it and it's that 2,200,000 people didn't vote
and they are all young people who don't register to vote. 75% of
young people in Chile, 3 of each 4 didn't vote. And this should
sound an alarm for all of us. Be careful what are we doing. Perhaps
they don't believe in us. It's not just that they are lazy. "So
it's too complicated to go and register and I prefer to stay home."
No, perhaps it's something much deeper than this, than laziness.
Much deeper and so we should be careful. Careful in the use of words.
Indians believe that words are sacred. They were not wrong. And
they go on believing in it and it's true. Words are sacred.
That's all. [pause] I don't want to go on speaking.
RB: [laughs]
EG: I'm tired of speaking, let's have a coffee.
Want a coffee, Rosie?
____
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Posted:
July 18, 2006
