Columbus'
Legacy to the Pope and Castro
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- A circle is closed
next week when the long awaited trip of the Pope to Castro's
Cuba finally takes place. 507 years after catholic Spain
started the rape of the continent with an historic voyage
that began from here, the Church in a new guise leads the
charge to usurp the last outpost of Latin dictatorship and
render it a member of the continent-wide family of
democracies.
Five hundred and seven years from
Columbus to Castro is a long time to wait for democracy to
arrive, especially when measured against the much earlier
rapid progress of its northern cousins in the United States
and Canada. And for that we have no one to thank but
catholic Spain and catholic Portugal.
North America was settled by pilgrims,
idealists, political and religious refugees. They wanted to
create a New World and democracy became the chosen
instrument. It was flawed, of course. It did not protect the
Indians and it did not involve the slaves, but it laid the
basis for economic advance first and social and political
reform later.
The Spanish and Portuguese
conquistadors were not fleeing persecution. They were
adventurers and mercenaries. They lived under the
Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation. They really did not
question it, and authoritarianism and feudalism were second
nature. They were not interested in development or society.
They were only there to conquer and pillage, to extract the
mineral and agricultural wealth as fast as they could and
ship it home. "The bloody trail of the conquest", as its
earliest reporter, the friar Bartolome de las Casas, put it.
The high Indian civilizations, the
Incas and the Aztecs (the Mayans were already in decline for
other, still disputed, reasons) were destroyed mercilessly.
To re-read Prescott's great accounts is to understand brutal
ignorance at its worst. No wonder that modern day Peru is so
race-ridden, corrupt and feudal, with the Indians of the
Andes treated worse than the blacks in South Africa ever
were. If Mexico is somewhat better--since the Indians were
part and parcel of the western world's first twentieth
century revolution in the early years of the century--the
recent massacre in its southern province of Chiapas show how
skin deep respect for Indian life and culture can still be.
Not only was political evolution
suffocated at birth for the best part of four-and-a-half
centuries, so was economic development. The
Counter-Reformation state banned and restricted enterprise
in the private sector. It licensed certain entrepreneurs to
develop state monopolies. It favoured state mercantilism.
Individual inventiveness and endeavour were stifled.
Here were two side-by-side continents,
equally endowed by nature. One prospered, the other crawled
on its belly. Only after the upheavals of the Second World
War, step by difficult step, did Latin America start to shed
its alliance of church and state and engage the engine of
economic growth; and not too far behind followed democracy.
Three countries, which lacked mineral
wealth and a large Indian population, managed to escape the
worst ravages of the conquistadors. Chile was one, protected
by desert in the north, the high ridge of the Andes to the
east, and Antarctica to the south. Farms were settled and,
bereft of Indian workers, run on their own by individual
families. Trade was mainly with England, not Spain.
Democracy arrived 170 years ago, before even France and
Italy.
Only American influence much later, at
the time of Nixon and Kissiner who were obsessed by supposed
communist influence, stymied this telling record of
achievement. Fearful of the leftist Salvador Allende winning
the election, discrete but telling support was offered to a
military coup. But the notions of law, fair play and decency
were too deeply embedded for the Pinochet dictatorship's
writ to run forever. Nine years ago Chile returned to its
democratic roots.
Costa Rica, too, was poor and had a
small Indian population and was far from Guatemala, the
Spanish Central American capital. Farmers could not grow
rich on the backs of the Indians. There was no powerful
elite. Today, Costa Rica claims its place as one of the most
stable and long-lasting, least militaristic, democracies in
the world. Third, there was Uruguay which has long pioneered
a benign distribution of income.
Venezuela, in contrast, is mainstream
Latin America with a highly skewed distribution of income,
albeit more advanced than the average. It has been
democratic since 1958 and, until recently, has maintained a
good record of avoiding political violence. Nevertheless,
recent events have shown how much deeper the roots of
democratic life have to penetrate to give real stability.
Venezuela's near neighbours, Brazil,
Ecuador and Colombia, are in a much worse state. The feudal
system, with the might of the landowners central to it,
still maintains, even in the democratic age, a
disproportionate influence on decision making. Class
differences appear unbridgeable. Even if the army is
off-stage in Brazil and Ecuador, in Colombia its role is
ever more political with an undiminished capacity for savage
acts of violence.
Could Columbus, the tenacious, but
cold-blooded, sailor ever have guessed at what a difficult
course he had set for his new "discovery". Can the Pope,
re-kindling the religious flame in Castro's marxist Cuba and
emphasizing the virtues of democracy, ensure for the future
a more selfless catholicism that convinces these still
archaic societies that the Indians, the poor, the
underpriviledged are owed a debt with half a millennium's
worth of accumulated interest?
January 14,
1998, LONDON
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172; fax
+44 374 590493;
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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