Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [213]
Its main countries were also in one of the continent’s occasional phases of constitutional civilian government which was soon to end. However, the caudillo or personal chieftain of the old type was already on the way out – at least outside the Caribbean. The regimes of the torturers were to be collectives of faceless and mostly colourless officers. In South America the only country under military dictatorship at that time was the unusually old-fashioned Paraguay under the eternal General Stroessner, a nasty regime, kind to expatriate Nazis, in a disarmingly attractive and charming country, which lived largely by smuggling. Graham Greene’s touching The Honorary Consul is an excellent introduction to it. I am, perhaps, inclined to excessive kindness, for it was the only Latin state officially recognizing an Indian language, Guaraní, and, when I visited it some years later, I discovered that my name was familiar to the editor of the somewhat unexpected Revista Paraguaya de Sociologia published there, as the author of Rebeldes Primitivos. What scholar can resist fame in Paraguay?
Nobody who discovers South America can resist the region, least of all if one’s first contact is with the Brazilians. Nevertheless, what was most immediately obvious about its countries was not so much its spectacular economic inequality, which has not ceased to increase since, as the enormous gap between its ruling and intellectual classes with which visiting academics had contact, and the common people. The intellectuals, mostly from comfortable or ‘good’ – overwhelmingly white – families, were sophisticated, widely travelled, and spoke English and (still) French. As so often in the Third World (to which the Argentines vociferously refused to belong), they formed the thinnest continent-wide social layer, for in their minds, unlike the artificial concept of ‘Europe’ in the minds of the old continent, Latin America was a constant reality. If they were in politics, they almost certainly had a spell as exiles in another Latin American country or a common trip to Castro’s Cuba; if academics, a spell as members of some multinational establishment in Santiago, Rio or Mexico City. Since they were thin on the ground, they knew each other or knew about each other. That is how in 1962, from the start, being passed from one contact to another, a visitor like myself could quickly find his bearings from people whose names meant nothing in Europe, but who turned out to be key intellectual or public figures. But the very fact that such people moved in a world equally familiar with Paris, New York and five or six Latin capitals separated them from the world in which most darker-skinned and less well-connected Latin Americans lived.
Outside the already urbanized ‘southern cone’ (Argentina, Uruguay and Chile) these people were flooding from the countryside into the shanty-towns of the exploding cities, bringing their rural ways with them. Sao Paulo had doubled in size in the ten years before I got there. They squatted on city hillsides as in the country they had dug up unoccupied corners of the big estates and built shelters and shacks, eventually to become proper houses, the way it was done in the village, by mutual help of neighbours and kin, rewarded with a party. On the street markets of São Paulo, overshadowed by the new high-rise buildings, the masses from the parched hinterlands of the northeast bought shirts and jeans on instalment payments and the cheap illustrated booklets of verse ballads about the great bandits of their region. I still have the copies I bought then. In Lima, Peru, there were already radio stations broadcasting in Quechua – in the early morning hours when the whites were still in bed – to the Indian immigrants from the mountains, now numerous enough to constitute a market, in spite of their poverty. The great writer, folklorist and Indianist José śMaria Arguedas took me to one of the music halls where, on Sunday mornings, the highland people came to listen to songs and jokes