Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [219]
The history of Latin America is full of substitutes for the genuinely popular social revolutionary left that has so rarely been strong enough to determine the shape of its countries’ histories. The history of the Latin American left is, with rare exceptions … one of having to choose between an ineffective sectarian purity and making the best of various kinds of bad jobs, civilian or military populists, national bourgeoisies or whatever else. It is also, quite often, the history of the left regretting its failure to come to terms with such governments and movements before they were replaced by something worse.
I was thinking of the junta of reformist militarists under General Velasco Alvarado in Peru (1969–76) who proclaimed the ‘Peruvian Revolution’ on which I reported sympathetically but sceptically.7 It nationalized the country’s great haciendas and was also the first Peruvian regime to recognize the mass of Peruvians, the Quechua-speaking Indians from the high Andes now flooding into coast, city and modernity, as potential citizens. Everyone else in that pitifully poor and helpless country had failed, not least the peasants themselves, whose massive land occupation in 1958–63 had dug the grave of the oligarchy of landowners. They had not known how to bury them. The Peruvian generals acted because nobody else wanted to or could. (I am bound to add, they also failed, though their successors have been worse.)
It was not a popular note to strike, inside or outside Latin America, at a time when the suicidal Guevara dream of bringing about the revolution by the action of small groups in tropical frontier areas was still very much alive. It may help to explain why my appearance before the students of San Marcos University in Lima – ‘Horrible Lima’ as the poet rightly calls it – did not go down at all well. For Maoism in one or other of its numerous subvarieties was the ideology of the sons and daughters of the new cholo (hispanized Indian) middle class of highland immigrants, at least until they graduated. Their Maoism, like military service for the peasants, and the ‘gap year’ of European students, was a social rite of passage.
But was there not hope in Chile, the country with the strongest Communist Party and with which I had both personal and political connections? Indeed, my father’s brother Berk (Ike or Don Isidro), a mining expert based in Chile since the First World War, and founder with his wife, a Miss Bridget George from Llanwrthwl in Powys, of the largest extant branch of the family bearing the name Hobsbawn, had had a connection with the ephemeral Chilean Socialist Republic of 1932, led by the splendidly named Colonel Marmaduke Grove. More recently, through Claudio Veliz, then at Chatham House in London, who gave me most of my original introductions for the continent, I had met a patently very intelligent as well as good-looking lady, wife of a prominent Chilean socialist, whom I took round Cambridge, England: Hortensia Allende. On my first visit to Santiago I had lunch at the Allende house, coming to the conclusion that her unsparkling husband Salvador was the less impressive partner of the couple. That, as it turned out, was to underestimate the stature and the sense of democracy of a brave and honourable man who died defending his office. Others remember where they were when President Kennedy died. I remember where I was when I was rung up by some radio programme with the news that President Allende was dead – at an international conference on labour history, looking down on Linz and the Danube. I had last been in Chile in 1971, on a side trip from Peru to report on the first year of the first socialist government democratically elected to everyone’s surprise, including Allende’s.8 Nevertheless, in spite of my passionate wish that it might succeed, I had not been able to conceal