(We recommend: Petro government joins coalition against fentanyl: this is its fight strategy)
Granés, assistant director of the Vargas Llosa Chair and author of La revancha de la imaginación, El puño invisible (for which he received the Isabel Polanco Sy International Essay Award) and Salvajes de una nueva epoch. Culture, Capitalism and Politics, proposes in his new essay that there is a close link between art and politics in Latin America, with delirium as the common thread.
“The artistic avant-garde mixes, on the one hand, a delusional, overflowing imagination, but also, on the other, a component of very strong political delirium, the reconstruction of society, the creation of a new man,” Granés points out.
Alexis de Tocqueville said that excessive imagination, delusion in an artist, something that could be a virtue, in a politician could be very dangerous. He was inadvertently making a diagnosis of Latin America, a place where we have had enormous fantasists who, when limited to the field of poetry, plastic arts, and fiction, make marvelous, portentous works. However, that same mentality applied in the political field is disastrous, because it does not take into account the raw material with which it works, which is the human being, contradictory, diverse, plural, and that does not adapt to prefabricated models.
(It may interest you: A collective transport strike paralyzes Buenos Aires and six Argentine provinces)
In Latin America, he points out, there has been a glimpse of that utopian space that is conducive to revolution that some US and European intellectuals consider fascinating. Why choose this region?
Columbus thought that paradise was in America. This was the first utopia that was projected. Then came Vasco de Quiroga and then the Jesuit missions, utopian projects of a pure and perfect society where the indigenous did not mix, indoctrinated to be the perfect Christians. Then came the utopia of progress, driven by positivism. And in the 20th century came the idea of the socialist revolution. Many intellectuals, when they begin to realize that all the promises of the Soviet Union have failed, discover that suddenly a revolution has prospered in Cuba. They insist on defending it with the illusion that this dream that has failed in Europe can succeed in Latin America. They refuse to see all the flaws and all the rot in that system. Gianni Vattimo, a very interesting philosopher, is glad that these ideas are still alive in Latin America. Of course, he does not have to pay the consequences of totalitarianism, of repression, of censorship. We are still looked down on, as if we were not ready for liberal democracy. We are the toys of the first world, the place where the revolutions that they are not capable of giving in their own territory are carried out.
Does the ‘Latin American identity’ really exist or is it a construction?
That is a Latin American obsession and it has taken us a lot of effort trying to determine what we are or what characterizes us. José Enrique Rodó, for example, said that Latinos had a propensity to see ourselves seduced by the “disinterested ideal of the spirit”, that is, that we were prone to art, religion, eroticism, the politics of ideas, and that it separated us from the Yankees, who were pragmatic, utilitarian, interested in material things, money and whiskey. All of this is an artificial construction that does not take into account an objective truth, which is that we are fatally plural. We are the product of multiple migrations, mixtures, races and temporalities. Perhaps our classification or stamp is that we are unclassifiable. Latin America is too varied a place for us all to identify with the same discourse.
It is the pride of those who believe themselves to be victims. In the 1960s something very interesting happened in Latin America, especially with the Cuban revolution, and that is that Latin American nationalism, which had no real links with Marxism or the left, but rather with Arielismo (the ideological current promoted by Rodó), is once again confronted with the North American empire. The attempted invasion at the Bay of Pigs puts this in evidence. That Latin American nationalism turns and gets a different face: “Now what we are going to do is free ourselves from the Yankees. We have not been able to be what we are because we have been oppressed”. The idea of oppression arises with great virulence and philosophies of liberation, theater of the oppressed, pedagogy of the oppressed, liberation theology appear. This is how violence is legitimized to end oppression.
He says in his essay that it is at this moment, from the 1960s, when the revolution also begins to eat its own children.
It is something that had happened with fascism, which had legitimized the use of political violence. These anti-Yankee and anti-imperialist youth believe they have the right to kill and liberate the continent. This is the danger of pride. They feel so absolutely legitimized in their moral cause that they believe that if they take up arms to blow off the heads of their neighbors or if they blow up oil pipelines in the Colombian jungle, they are doing damage to the United States. That is the greatest delusion that has ever happened. for the heads of Latin Americans.
He explains that in Latin America there was never any confidence in democracy. Because?
In the 20th century, the Latin American obsession with curbing the Yankee cultural influence went hand in hand with a rejection of liberal democracy. From then on, we are already at odds with the idea that citizens can participate in politics, that they can organize themselves into parties and that they can gain power. The arielists said that this should not be replicated in Latin America because what characterizes us is rather spiritual elitism. The Latin peoples must be guided by hierarchies of thought, intellectual aristocracies. From there to caudillismo there is little distance. Francisco García Calderón said that freedom in Latin America could not be a natural right, but an evolutionary conquest; that is to say, that one does not know how to exercise that right and therefore it is necessary to go through an autocratic stage so that the race is homogenized and the spirit is tamed. That is an absolute lie. All one dictatorship does is attract another.
Yes, Perón was a military man who believed he was an intellectual; Martí was the opposite: an intellectual who believed he was a soldier.
Why does Peronism remain valid?
It’s a great question. Don’t know. It is the only Latin American project that is still alive. The PRI, in Mexico, died; Castroism died; Aprismo died with the suicide of Alan García; Acción Democrática is buried by Chavismo… They are all mummies, historical relics, except Peronism, which has an impressive capacity to mutate and be reborn. Perhaps that explains its survival. Deep down it is a nationalism that knows how to play two or three cards as it suits it. The original Peronism was a vehement nationalism, to aggrandize the country, to give Argentina its place in the world. Then it becomes a montonero, liberationist nationalism, which seeks the end of oppression. Perón’s political genius consisted in giving right-wing nationalism an image of Argentina as a great nation; and to left nationalism, an Argentina in the process of emancipation. Perón played both cards, addressing different audiences: the first, who wants to feel powerful, and the other, who wants to feel like a victim. If you play both cards at the same time, you drive society crazy. You have the same young people killing each other because they defend two incompatible versions of Peronism: the montoneros and the Triple A.
This phenomenon has clearly occurred in Spain, for example, since 2014, with the landing of the populist strategy for outsiders to gain access to positions of power in record time. Those who produced this process learned in Latin America from the Bolivarian government, from the Kirchnerista and from the correísta. I am referring to Íñigo Errejón and Pablo Iglesias, who learned how to use the means of capitalism and put them at their service. Once they manage to infiltrate these media in this way, radical ideas are circulated which, added to the discontent, have been very successful.
How can civil society collaborate to be less delusional?
It is not easy, because our caudillismo, our delirious characters, are seductive, they bewitch the masses. The democratic system has no antibodies against this. There should be awareness of the importance of the division of powers. In Latin America we do not give importance to the Judiciary, it is attacked or caricatured, when it is a fundamental pillar of democracy. All the illiberals, the demagogues, attack this power because, once in their hands, they can do whatever they want. Judges have to be well paid and have social prestige.
Populism attacks those who think differently, it seeks to impose a single reading of the facts. Are we in the era of cancellation because we are in an era of populism, or vice versa?
There is something that unites them and it is an exacerbated moralism. Populism divides between friends and enemies and in the latter appears the egoist, the anti-patria, who has some moral flaw and, therefore, deserves to be excluded. The cancellation also has something of that: it sees the vices in certain characters and works of art that threaten my identity. The cancellation is an exacerbated punitive moralism and morality is becoming the pretext to justify everything that I am, an idealized image of myself. In that it is similar to populism, because in it no one disagrees, everyone thinks like the leader. Populism is nothing more than a desire for unanimity.
