[translation from original]
Let’s start by
saying that “the only Paradise is Paradise Lost”. That is to say,
the life of human beings, at least up to the present moment in our
two million years of evolution since our forebears descended from the
trees, has not exactly been “paradise”. And as things are going
at present, there is nothing to assure us that any such paradise lies
around the corner, either.
But without
proposing anything so unreachable as “paradise”, on the contrary,
a good part of the world’s population lives an experience closer to
something like the opposite, ie, “hell”, sheer survival under
conditions of physical violence, with all the rigors that implies,
war and its effects on societies structured around the central axis
of exercising brute force for maintaining power, with all the disasters that
that brings along with it – these are the daily bread of a large
part of humanity. Between paradise and hell, the great majority live
far closer to the latter than the former.
In addition to the
chronic poverty with which a very large part of humanity lives,
violence in its distinct forms is another of the disfigurements that
mark our lives. Violence, certainly, which assumes a wide variety of
forms: but are not the aggravating socioeconomic disparities – the
20% of the richest who dispose of eighty times more wealth than the
20% of the poorest, for example – perhaps also forms of violence
in themselves? In general, according to the (debatable) dominant
criteria, violence implies direct aggression against another,
physical attack, the transition to concrete action. In this sense, war,
and criminality, are its models par excellence.
A wide range of
factors enter in this equation: homicide, robbery, assault, rape,
every damage to private property, kidnapping, fraud, trafficking of
prohibited substances. There exists a certain tendency to equate
“violence” with crime, which hides or normalizes other forms of
violence: authoritarianism, sexism, racism, for example.
Sophisticated measures exist for crime rates, but not for racism or
vanity. Can one imagine a “vanity index”, or one to measure
“arrogance”? And why not an index of “environmental
irresponsibility”? When will the UN dare to measure injustice
calling it by its name, and not falling back on technical subterfuge?
One thing’s for
certain, criminality – understood as any crime that violates social
norms – is something embedded in the human dynamic and,
confusingly, with civic insecurity. It has always existed (the
product of psychopathic personalities that transgress established
norms without guilt), in every known society, but something has come
about in our recent history to cause it to increase.
In recent decades,
criminality has been a growing phenomenon in practically all regions
of the planet. On a global basis recent years have seen a 150%
percent increase in reports of criminal acts, which equates to a very
high yearly rate of increase. Instead of happiness increasing, crime
is. What’s happening?
In Latin America
(with the second highest homicide rate in the world, doubling its
levels from the previous decade) and in the so-called countries in
transition – that is, a euphemism for those countries of the former
Soviet Bloc – this increase coincides with the so-called “lost
decade” on account of lack of economic growth in the former, and
with the transition from a planned to a market economy in the latter,
indicating that the crime increase in question has among its causes
the deterioration in economic conditions experienced by said regions.
From class struggle
to unbridled criminality
So understood, the
problem of crime constitutes a politico-cultural one with unlimited
horizons. Among others, it’s also a public health problem, and as
such, studied by epidemiologists with alarm. For the World Health
Organization, a “normal” homicide rate ranges between 0 to 5 per
100,000 population per year. When this rate rises to between 5 and 8,
the situation is considered “delicate”. But when it rises above
8, it is classified as a criminal “epidemic”.
To a very great
extent, what really counts in these phenomena is the perception of
the affected public. Where is life better? In Beijing, China, or
Zürich, Switzerland? In Stockholm, or a little village in the state
of Totonicapán, Guatemala? In a Buddhist monastery in Tibet or
Nepal, or in Mexico City (one of the most densely populated and
polluted cities in the world)?
The answer to these
questions lies beyond any concrete indices, those cold statistics
from the social sciences to which we are accustomed. The quality of
life of a population implies certain cultural assumptions – even,
if you like, philosophical ones. One thing follows for certain from
this: it is a work in progress. Although Mexico City may be an urban
hell, perhaps for a resident of a rural village, it may be a dream for
all the bounties it offers in material terms, but not for a resident
of Zürich, accustomed to calm and order. Undoubtedly, the evaluation
of quality of life is always relative. In Stockholm (Sweden),
measures of civic insecurity are low, among the lowest in the world,
its “quality of life” among the highest… But this country,
which awards the Nobel Prize, including the Peace Prize (to Henry
Kissinger, for example, or Barack Obama – are the Swedes
imbeciles?! most recently Donald Trump was nominated, sic) and where
the country’s former prime minister, Olof Palme, was assassinated
in the streets, just as can happen in a “dangerous” Third World
city – is one of the world’s biggest arms producers. And Swedish
banks are among the biggest members of the IMF, for example, which
caused the financial collapse suffered in recent years by those
ex-socialist countries “in transition”, to use the coinage in
fashion these days – those like Ukraine, Hungary, and Lithuania.
But nobody perceives the Swedes as violent. On the contrary, that
population regards itself as among the foremost defenders of world
peace. And in a certain sense, it is, undoubtedly, as the common
Swedish citizen perceives the matter, but the violence in question
lies beyond the beautiful streets of the country’s cities and the
ban on child labor enshrined in its constitution. (In Central
America, certainly, around 2% of the region’s entire Gross Regional
Product is produced by child labor, that is, about 25% of average
urban family income. Who is to blame? Are the parents of Central
American children “violent” for sending their offspring to work?)
In some Mayan-Quiché
communities in the state of Totonicapán – where the second largest
reserve of tropical pine cloud forest is found – in the long
suffering nation of Guatemala (with 245,000 deaths in its recent
civil war), current crime rates are as low as the Scandinavian
country mentioned, even while Guatemala as a whole exhibits a
homicide rate of around 27 per 100,000, one of the highest in Latin
America. Where is life better? Who is happier, a Totonicapaneco, or a
Swede?
If in Argentina the
city of Santa María de los Buenos Aires – which, despite “Buenos
Aires” meaning "good air", does not seem to offer much “good” in
that department, seeing as how that city has some of the worst urban
air quality in the world – was, according to some measurements some
years ago, rated as enjoying the highest urban quality of life in
Latin America, it remains to be determined whether the inhabitants of
the always expanding slums (the favelas, those precarious
urban-margin neighborhoods whose residents number in the millions)
entered into that calculation. In Buenos Aires, as sophisticated as
Paris or as beautiful as Rome (?), does one live better than those
humble villages of Totonicapán? It remains to determine to whom we
should ask the question, of course. Not forgetting that, with the
economic debacle affecting the country, which proceeds apace, among
the highest rates of suicide and erectile dysfunction ever are being
recorded (everything is on the downswing these past decades, the
economy and the rest).
Of course today, in
a thoroughly globalized world, proceeding from our Eurocentric
overlords, the criteria for judging reality are already all
established: all the world “understands” things with the
triumphant logic of the established society proceeding from the free
market entrenched in the prosperous North. Peace and respect for the
environment as dominant values for a humble villager in Totonicapán
of course don’t count; the “quality” of life is more closely
associated with the number of vehicles circulating than the number of
trees per person that a place can boast of. Does one live better in
Zürich than a Tibetan monastery? Hard to say, without a doubt.
According to the dominant class, without a doubt the Swiss city has
the highest quality of life on the planet. Is it necessary to be
banker to the world for that? Well, if so...it does not appear to be
a very solid or sustainable idea of “quality of life”, because
not everyone can be “banker to the world”. How many of the
world’s countries can declare themselves “neutral” like this
Swiss financial paradise does? And day by day we are convinced that
using all the technological apparatus that the dominant capitalism
has generated makes us all happier. But there is no doubt a lot of
open debate to be entertained on these questions, which the hegemonic
discourse can and must censor.
The one certainty is
that criminality is growing, all over the planet. But as we mentioned
above, those regions most depressed economically are the ones that
have shown the most spectacular rates of growth of that scourge. And
criminality combined with poverty is agonizing! One in every four
Latin American youths is outside the education system as well as the
formal job economy. Based on that, surely, it’s easy to expect more
problems than solutions. Regarding which, an investigation by the
National University of Mexico indicates, concerning that country,
that “the base of social support for narcotrafficking includes more
than 500,000 persons. So long as there are no economic or social
policies for reducing poverty it will be difficult to mitigate the
situation [of insecurity].”
In such a sense, the
wave of civic insecurity which continues to expand on all sides,
constitutes a sign of our times, the end of the 20th
century and the beginning of the new millennium. But the perception
that accompanies this phenomenon is what counts: the European country
with the highest reported rates of automobile robbery, bicycle
theft, home robberies, and theft of personal property in general, is
Switzerland, which does not necessarily mean that it’s the place
where the most such crimes are committed but [maybe] that: 1) it’s
the country where the most confidence is placed in the security
services for reporting such illicit activities and on the
corresponding justice system entrusted with rectifying them; and 2)
where the idea of private property has penetrated the deepest
(Switzerland, banker to the world, could not be otherwise. Regarding
which, as Bertold Brecht once said: “if it’s a crime to rob a
bank, how much worse is it to own one?”). Meanwhile the Mexican
capital is the urban center with the most security cameras in Latin
America, with about 15,000, and at the same time 95,000 (badly paid)
police agents, making it the largest urban police force in Latin
America, despite all of which, the Aztec capital does not exactly
enjoy an image of security (it’s the city with the dubious
distinction of suffering the highest rate of kidnapping per capita).
But if we speak of quality of life, Mexico is the city with the
highest number of bookstores in Latin America. How to
understand/measure the question “where is life best?”
Which is to say that
insecurity, in great measure, depends on how one perceives it, on the
collective imaginary of it. Which, in our day, and to an increasing
degree, means: civic insecurity depends on how major mass media
outlets construct it, being as they are the indispensable
constructors of today’s “social reality”.
Is the
democratically elected president of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro a
bloody narco-dictator? Dictators don’t typically win democratic
election after election, of course, with a public that supports them.
Nor are Moslems a bunch of “bloodthirsty fundamentalist fanatics”
(and by chance both Venezuela and a large part of the Moslem Middle
East by definition hold the largest petroleum reserves in the world),
nor are narcotrafficking nor urban violence the true principal
problems of Latin America. But this is nonetheless what the
commercial media tirelessly repeat, day by day, minute by minute.
“Narcotrafficking and other forms of association that generate
social violence offer the perfect pretext to the United States for
maintaining a constant presence in the region, a presence that is
ever more militarized, in tune with its prevailing ‘iron fist’
and repressive policies”, as Rafael Cuevas incisively observed.
The last thing we
need in the long-suffering countries of Latin America is the “iron
fist”; but that is often what prevails as public policy for
“combatting” criminality. (For the Ministry of Governance in
Guatemala, Central American migrants – poor people fleeing their
countries and headed towards the United States – are all
“criminals”. But why always press such a punitive military-police
policy?) This notion supports a basically repressive treatment of all
social problems, emphasizing measures like providing ever more
resources to the police or security forces, and in some cases the
military itself – for assignments maintaining internal order (the
“itchy trigger finger”), permitting incarceration even for minor
infractions to set an example (“zero tolerance”), considering any
signs of belonging to a gang as tantamount to a crime, lowering the
age of incarceration, accelerating trials for these offenses – but
not for prosecuting a businessman for evading taxes or a corrupt
public official – imposing harsher sentences, asking for the death
penalty, criminalizing “poor youth”, and by extension all
impoverished urban areas. Concerning which, serious studies of Central
American isthmus countries that have applied these “iron fist”
policies in recent years demonstrate that statistics associated with
insecurity have grown, along with gang membership and activity.
Similar to what transpired in Colombia with the sadly celebrated
“Plan Colombia” (later the “Patriot Plan”): with extreme
militarization of the country, the production and trafficking of
cocaine did not diminish but rather, to the contrary, grew, and
Colombian society as a whole was not pacified, but rather became one
of the most violent on Earth. (And US geopolitical strategy can now
boast 7 bases in the region, controlling a large part of the Amazon
basin.)
Treating these
complex social problems is not easy work, undoubtedly; but a
military-police solution does not exist. That much has been amply
demonstrated.
This unbridled civic
insecurity (in Latin America in particular, with the highest crime
rates on the planet) has costs for the whole of society, in terms of
health systems, security, and justice. It’s estimated that 14% of
the gross regional product of Latin America is lost to violence,
almost three times higher than countries of the North where these
losses are less than 5%. In many countries of the region, these
losses far exceed the total invested in all social areas. Aside from
this there are many other costs more difficult to measure, yet still
concrete: intangible costs, invisible costs despite having severe
effects, like the sensation of fear, terror, and deterioration of the
quality of daily life. One can definitely ask the question whether
this entire epidemic of violence in which we are embroiled is not
part of a political project, one with a directionality to it.
To quickly sidestep
accusations of “conspiracy theorizing” that could attend such an
assertion, it’s important not to lose sight of two considerations:
1) It’s dificult
to support the notion that there could be some Macchiavellian plan
that somehow gives marching orders to every “Mara” or football
hooligan, every massacre of rival gangs of narcotraffickers, or every
stolen cellphone that occurs in every corner of these afflicted
societies. But there is a level at which a more macro-intentionality
reveals itself behind all these phenomena. Something along the lines
of, “the churning river rewards the fisherman” (“a río
revuelto ganancia de pescadores”). Certainly the gains do not go to
the popular masses. Can we really believe that the heart of the
problem with the most impoverished societies of the region consists
of bands of criminals, or do they only constitute the visible tip of
a vastly larger iceberg? In any case, this surge in crime has various
factors at its base: poverty and social exclusion above all. And
politically, in the aftermath of the dirty wars that they lived
through in the decade of the 80s of the past century and the
neoliberal austerity plans imposed on their national governments,
this climate of perpetual insecurity serves the great powers for
purposes of controlling the masses. The notable surge in growth of
new evangelical churches that now saturate the region also harmonizes
with the same objective. Put in other terms – and although this is
supposed to be out of fashion in the sphere of social sciences
nowadays – for understanding this explosion of criminality and
violence it is necessary to revert to the concept of class struggle.
The latter has not disappeared, although its theoretical formulation
has today been obscured. How else can one understand these complex
phenomena if not in the light of these deadly struggles around
maintaining power? Or are we really supposed to believe that there
are just more and more “bad hearted people” out and about
nowadays who, for sport, dedicate themselves to gang mayhem?
2. There’s a
society just as Latin American as any of the region (drinking their
rum and dancing their Caribbean “Sabrosona”, and differing as far as possible
from the physiognomy of a Nordic country – which afterall is what
we all take as an obligatory model of “security”) which nevertheless does not
present the slightest signs of these high levels of criminality:
Cuba.
Cuba: Dictatorship
or paradise?
Nobody said that
there are never any expressions of civic violence in the island, even
having increased somewhat in recent times, as even official media
acknowledge. But although in the press that systematically attacks their
revolution there is no mention of it, it’s indisputable that the
level of criminality in Cuba is lower than even those countries
considered safest on the planet, which is to say, those of
Scandinavia.
Taking up again what
was said above: politico-cultural reality is, more and more, that
which is constructed by the mass media. Cuba has a homicide rate less
than 5 per 100,000, but commercial media never say anything about it.
In Cuba there are
endless problems, no doubt (as there are everywhere else, certainly.
Does Sweden not also have them?) Again, then, the question presents
itself: Where is life better? It’s worth a reminder that in the
prosperous and developed North one speaks of “quality of life”;
in the poor and oppressed South, in any case, one speaks of its mere
possibility. Cuba, with enormous structural problems, blockaded,
continuously attacked, has a number of quality of life measures
similar to the most developed countries (those that manage the
biggest banks, decide the wars, and impose the fashions we are
obliged to follow). Civic security is one of those.
Just to graphically
illustrate with a comparative example: the commercial press all over
the world relentlessly repeats that people keep fleeing Cuba, escaping
this “dictatorship”. On average, eleven Cubans leave daily, out
of a population of twelve million. Whereas Guatemala, with 16
million, sees 300 persons leave per day, fleeing poverty, headed
towards the United States, and risking an ever more perilous journey.
So where is life better, then?
Of course there are
violent acts on the island, aggressive youth, criminal offenses.
There is disguised production of pornography also, undoubtedly. In
fact, official media acknowledge that the economic crisis in which
the country was submerged from the start of the 90s of the 20th
century with the “Special Period” following the Soviet collapse
and the measures that were implemented to exit this ordeal, opened
the way to manifestations of “individualism, egoism, incivility,
marginalization, and everyday violence”. But the measures of civic
insecurity continue to be low, very low, equal to or lower than the
countries of Scandinavia. Cuba is a safe place.
It’s very
important to emphasize this, because day by day, as a result of media
manipulation from which nobody can escape, the dominant “reality”
of the world, not even to speak of Latin America, is unbridled
violence, suffocating criminality, organized crime that appears to be
more powerful than states themselves. In the face of this it’s
indispensable to point out that there are many fallacies, since a
country like Cuba, without any “zero tolerance” nor "iron
fist” against crime, presents a climate of security light years
distant from any neighboring country (some with homicide rates above
50 per 100,000 in more than one case, and even exceeding 100 per
100,000 at times, in Tijuana or Acapulco, or Natal in Brazil).
On the island there
are no signs of youth gangs, the terrible “Maras” that have
reached the point of paralyzing an entire country, as occur in
Honduras, or that have obliged authorities to militarize the favelas
of Rio de Janeiro in 2007, practically paralyzing the entire city,
nor bloodbath horror stories offering a media spectacle – and
profitable business – for sensationalist yellow journalism, with
tales of gore, since if a crime does reach the newspapers [in Cuba],
the report is redacted with didactic prose as part of a policy of
harm minimization. The consumption of illegal drugs is very low (it
is truly regarded there as a problem of public health, as determined by
national policy, to be attacked with intelligence, and not by falling
upon every peasant in the producing countries in order to burn their
fields). If one really desires to attack the entire supply chain of
distribution and trafficking of prohibited substances, all the
military paraphernalia with which the powers-that-be “pursue”
mafia interests in the region does not appear to be yielding results
(surprisingly?). At least, it does not shut the business down.
Assuming that that really is the result sought after, as opposed to
controlling societies.
Cuba, it must be
said, is not “in the hands of narcotraffickers”, as happens with
so many other states that have been “decertified” by the White
House (since when did the World Health Organization ever “decertify”
the United States from the list of “healthy countries” on account
of being the principal drug-addicted country in the world?)
Confronted once by a notorious instance of narcotrafficking activity
on the island, Havana did act immediately by stopping it, and
executing the criminal responsible, General Arnaldo Ochoa in 1989. In
fact there is no illegal drug trafficking on the island, at least
insofar as it pertains to gangs dedicated to the business. Neither
are there – was that really what was hoped for, at the end of the
day? – military plans like those of Colombia or Mérida to confront
this “apocalypse”.
Cuba is full of
problems, of contradictions; if we want to be even harsher: of
meanness and moral weaknesses. But if the impossibility of peacefully
walking (without risking sexual assault) is the great deficit of
current societies (in Latin America, in particular, but not
exclusively, since this phenomenon is expanding worldwide), if
walking around at night has reached the point of being a gigantic
drama given the reigning insecurity, if at every corner we run the
risk of being assaulted or we know we must not enter “red zones”
(red not on account of being socialist, it’s worth clarifying),
because a Mara will not leave us be, if we spend so many resources on
security (barbwire, private security, alarm systems, maximum security
prisons, armored vehicles, closed circuit cameras, guard dogs, etc,
etc), if all this is the principal problem of our times, the Cuban
“dictatorship” does not present it. A dictatorship that cares for
its people… Long live dictatorship! No? And to say that the people
wish to flee the dictatorship does not offer a good argument, because
the impoverished populations of all the countries of Latin America
continue fleeing daily towards the (paradise?) of the North, despite
a veritable Calvary along the way to the “American Dream”.
Cuba assuredly may
not be a paradise, but at least it’s further from hell than all the
rest of its sister countries of the region. It’s crime indices tell
the story.