Real Life in Latin America
Looking
for History:
The news from Latin America doesn't attract the attention that it used to in the United States. And the truth is that even when it did, the coverage often treated the nations of Central and South America and the Caribbean like interchangeable stage sets for Cold War intrigues. Substitute narco-traffic for communism and again Latin America seems more like a setting than a real place — let alone a collection of real places.
So the journalist Alma Guillermoprieto is saying something important when
she writes, in the introduction to Looking for History: Dispatches
From Latin America, that while the articles and essays that follow
concentrate on countries with which the United States has a particularly
important relationship, that relationship is not her subject. These stories,
from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, "are
about the countries themselves, written in the conviction that Latin America
has its own independent life."
Guillermoprieto was born in Mexico City, where she is based today, although
she has also lived in Colombia, Brazil and various other points in Central
America and the United States. She covered Latin America for The Washington
Post, then joined the staff of The New Yorker, and her previous
collection, The Heart That Bleeds, is made up of articles that
appeared in that magazine between 1989 and 1993, filed from all over the
region. This time around, her primary subjects are Mexico, Colombia and
Cuba. There are also short essays (extended book reviews, really) on Eva
Perón, Mario Vargas Llosa and Che Guevara.
The three linked pieces on Cuba serve as an introduction to Guillermoprieto's
style. When reportage is modified by the adjective "literary,"
it often suggests either a high degree of confession or an elaborateness
with language and elasticity with the truth: long passages guessing what
this or that character must have been thinking at some key moment in the
narrative. Guillermoprieto is a quieter writer than that. And while she
is often a presence in her stories, she is never the center of attention.
Her visit to Havana in 1998, occasioned by the presence there of Pope
John Paul II, is her first in some 15 years. She spends her time in the
company of friends of friends who are faithful to the revolutionary idea;
walking the city; conversing; watching; stitching together the impact
on Cuba of the Soviet Union's collapse, which she observes must have been
as "inconceivable and shattering as the arrival of the Spaniard on
Mexico's shores was for the Aztecs." She is as likely to find her
most revealing details in a televised speech or in a hotel lobby, where
the prostitutes in their blaring outfits pair off with dollar-wielding
tourists.
A similar series of articles about Colombia is the least satisfying section
of the book, perhaps because it lacks the charismatic protagonists at
the center of (for instance) Cuba’s narrative, and perhaps because
in Colombia it's impossible to keep U.S. policy, driven entirely by drug-
traffic concerns, from dominating the story.
The Vargas Llosa essay is interesting and the Perón piece is tremendous, but both feel slightly out of place. The book's most dazzling material comes in its final half, which is almost entirely given over to a series of meditations and articles on Mexico.
Admittedly, the nature of the material works in her favor: During the
period covered, public life in Mexico was wrenched by a series of truly
astonishing plot twists, involving not just sex, drugs, money, murder,
armed rebellion and political intrigue, but dizzying tales of betrayal
and shame, disinterred skeletons and witches employed by the government,
alleged body doubles and secret identities, endless disappearances, and
at least one lonely suicide. It is hard to make this dull.
But Guillermoprieto also has substance to convey. My favorite of her observations
is that Mexicans not only entertain but profess to believe an endless
series of conspiracy theories. After all, she notes, they are "a
populace raised on a near-total absence of truthful information about
its governors and persuaded that wisdom lies in believing the worst."
Here again she finds plenty of larger-than-life characters at the center
of the action. She manages to come face to mask with Subcomandante Marcos,
leader of the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas, at the height of his notoriety,
and to speak with most of the major political candidates from recent campaigns.
If anything, the book could have used a more drawn-out epilogue on Mexico
in particular, for some better sense of whether Guillermoprieto believes
that the relative calm following last year's elections marks a new era,
or whether, like past interludes of "normalcy," this one will
soon be upset by the ferocious ghosts of a history that always seem to
linger just off stage.
The recent movie "Traffic" alludes to events in contemporary
Mexico, but the truth (even as far as it is known) is far more baroque
than that elaborately plotted movie could ever hope to have captured.
Sorting out the details, as Guillermoprieto has done, is worth it, because
the news from Mexico, and the rest of Latin America, is much more interesting
than any movie.
A similar version of this review appeared in the April 15, 2001, issue of Newsday.
