opinion

Galeano's mirrors
by Raúl Leis --- raulleisr@hotmail.com

A few weeks ago I received Eduardo Galeano's most recent book and its dedication evoked years or friendship and paths we have walked together. The book is entitled "Espejos: Una historia casi universal" (Mirrors: A nearly universal history), and combined hundreds of vignettes in which the author confesses to have succumbed to the temptation to tell some of the stories of the human adventure in this world from the point of view of those who didn't show in the photo.

Galeano is Uruguayan and published his first book in Montevideo. In 1973 he lived in exile in Argentina, then on the Catalan coast. At the beginning of 1985 he returned to Montevideo, where he currently lives, walks and writes. As an example, let me share certain texts from this latest book, which should be required reading.

1. He tells the official story that Vasco Núñez de Balboa was the first man who saw, from a peak in Panama, the two oceans. The people who lived there --- were they blind? Who first named corn and potatoes and tomatoes and chocolate and the mountains and rivers of the Americas? Hernán Cortés? Francisco Pizarro? Those who lived here --- were they mute? The Mayflower pilgrims heard that God said that America was The Promised Land. Those who lived here --- were they deaf? Later, the grandchildren of those pilgrims in the north took the name and everything else. Now, they're the Americans. Those of us who live in the rest of the Americas --- what are we?

2. Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, was on the water. Hernán Cortés demolished the city, stone by stone, and with the rubble filled the canals that had been navigated by 200,000 canoes. This was the first water war of the Americas. Now they call Tenochtitlan Mexico DF. Where water ran, now autos run.

3. In the name of liberty, equality and fraternity, the French Revolution proclaimed in 1793 the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Then the militant revolutionary Olympia de Gouges proposed the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen. The guillotine cut off her head. A half-century later another revolutionary government, during the first Paris Commune, proclaimed universal suffrage. At the same time, it denied women the right to vote, unanimously but for one: 899 votes against, one for.

4. Thousands of unburied dead stalk the Argentine pampas. They are the disappeared of the last military dictatorship. General Videla's dictatorship applied disappearance as a weapon of war on a scale not seen before. It applied it, but it didn't invent it. A century earlier, General Roca had used it against the Indians in his masterpiece of cruelty, which obliged every dead person to die several times and condemned their loved ones to go crazy in pursuit of their fugitive shadows.

In Argentina, as in all of America, the Indians were the first disappeared. They disappeared before they appeared. General Roca called his invasion of indigenous lands The Conquest of the Desert. Patagonia was an empty space, a kingdom of nothing, inhabited by nobody. And the Indians kept on disappearing. Those who submitted and gave up their land and everything were called "Reduced Indians" --- reduced until they disappeared. And those who didn't submit and were beaten with gunshots and sword strokes disappeared, turned into numbers, deaths without names in the military annals. And their children disappeared as well: divided up as spoils of war, called by other names, shorn of their collective memories, little slaves of their parents' murderers.