The Fuss Over Fuentes : U.S. Magazine’s Swipe at Author Sets Off an Impassioned Debate in Mexico

Like other wars, this one was started in the United States and spread to Nicaragua. The combat has escalated amid cries of an inquisition and charges of foreign intervention.

But this war is being fought on a battlefield of newsprint and political reviews. The protagonists are not soldiers, but Mexico’s literary giants: Octavio Paz, the 74-year-old patriarch of Mexican letters and the intellectual right, versus Carlos Fuentes, 59, defender of revolutionary governments and leftist causes in Latin America.

In this war of words, both Paz and Fuentes have refused to speak. Instead, their allies wield the verbal artillery.

The literary battle began with a scathing attack on Fuentes solicited by the American magazine the New Republic and printed in the June 27, 1988, issue under the title, “The Guerrilla Dandy.” In it, Mexican biographer Enrique Krauze, a Paz protege, declares Fuentes “low on intellectual curiosity,” his writing “frivolous” and his leftist politics “elemental.” Worse yet, Krauze calls Fuentes “a foreigner in his own country,” unqualified to write about Mexico.

Krauze’s attack on Fuentes, one of Mexico’s most famous authors, amounted to an attack on a national institution and the reaction against it couldn’t have been greater had he desecrated the flag.

The assault, published simultaneously in Spanish by Paz’s Vuelta magazine, drew outrage and catty snipes, a fusillade of counterattacks on Krauze and a snub from Mexico City’s leading literary hostess, who made it known that Krauze was no longer welcome in her home. Some of the sparring intellectuals have ceased speaking to each other.

And then, in what may be the surest sign yet that Nicaragua’s Contra conflict is winding down, that country’s interior minister, Tomas Borge, took time out from his official duties this month to pen an impassioned defense of Fuentes, a longtime friend of the Sandinistas.

Borge, who like so many Nicaraguans considers himself a poet, charged in the Mexican newspaper Excelsior that Krauze is simply a mouthpiece for the right-wing, anti-Sandinista diatribes of Paz.

Krauze, in turn, accused Borge of “cultural intervention” in Mexico’s literary affairs. He said the self-proclaimed “sentinel of the people’s happiness”--the slogan inscribed over the entrance to Borge’s internal security ministry--should now expect Mexican police and politicians to oversee the intellectual well-being of Nicaraguans. The article, Krauze asserted, was his own and it was Borge’s police mentality that imagined a conspiracy where there was none.

Unclear Motive

The motive behind these assaults is murky: Is it, as some claim, mere rivalry between Paz and Fuentes, or legitimate intellectual debate? Is this mean-spiritedness, or Mexican glasnost , criticizing cultural icons along with political ones? Is this about politics or is it about literature?

What the controversy clearly illustrates is the elevated role intellectuals play in Mexican society and, in fact, throughout Latin America. Their literature is honored and their ideas are heard; they carry on intense political dialogue in daily newspapers and even become political players themselves. Both Paz and Fuentes have served as ambassadors of Mexico, while in Peru the country’s leading author, Mario Vargas Llosa, appears to be running for president.

The fray also demonstrates the desire of Mexican intellectuals to make their mark in the United States, where all this fuss began. Ironically, while Krauze derided Fuentes’ gringo mentality in his article, he also was willingly lending himself to an American magazine’s decision to discredit the author of “The Death of Artemio Cruz” and “The Old Gringo.”

Irritated by Fuentes’ outspokenness, New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier said he commissioned the article from Krauze about a year before it finally appeared in the June 27 issue.

“I had thought for a long time that Fuentes was overrated in his politics and his writing. He’s incredibly slick and superficial,” Wieseltier said in a telephone interview. “I think he had become everybody’s official Mexican in the United States and his political views were being passed unchallenged. . . . What bothered me was (his) kind of sentimental and intellectually sloppy Marxism.”

Mexican intellectuals charge that what bothered the once staunchly liberal New Republic was Fuentes’ stand against U.S. military aid to the Contras and U.S. intervention in Central America--a hot issue in Washington when the article was solicited. But Wieseltier said the critique originally was timed, not to a U.S. political debate but to the English-language publication of “The Old Gringo.” When that deadline passed, the piece was pegged to the publication of Fuentes’ autobiographical essays, “Myself With Others.”

Krauze denied any malice on his part. In an interview, he said that he agreed to New Republic’s request because it appealed to him as a biographer and because of what he called “moral differences” with Fuentes. He worked for six months and wrote about 9,000 words, few of them favorable.

“Mexico is a country whose complexity has exhausted several generations of intellectuals, but Fuentes seems unaware of that complexity,” Krauze wrote. “His work simplifies the country; his view is frivolous, unrealistic and, all too often, false.”

Born in Panama

Fuentes is the son of a diplomat, born in Panama and raised partly in the United States. He has written about Mexico’s blinding obsession with its northern neighbor.

“Quite the opposite,” Krauze retorted, “Mexico has always been a country maniacally obsessed with itself.”

Of Fuentes’ use of language, often praised as his greatest gift, Krauze wrote that he was “tone-deaf to certain nuances, expressions, themes.”

Krauze wrote that he is irked by the contradictions that he sees in Fuentes, what he calls Pierre Cardin tastes with Che Guevarra politics. Fuentes served in the 1970s as ambassador to France for President Luis Echeverria, whom Krauze considers one of the country’s most corrupt and destructively Populist presidents. Fuentes signed on to the Cuban revolution to alleviate his own love-hate with the United States and never learned to criticize the Castro regime even after other leftists did, Krauze charged.

And Fuentes’ politics regarding Nicaragua are petrified, according to Krauze: “Fuentes reproduces Reagan-like illusions when he believes that the Sandinistas are the real ‘freedom fighters.’ ”

While the article apparently had little impact in the United States, it detonated in the Mexican literary world.

“Immoral,” wrote Fernando Benitez, editor of the newspaper La Jornada’s weekly literary supplement.

“Vicious,” cried Excelsior columnist Gaston Garcia Cantu.

“A strategic offensive” to smear Fuentes in the United States, added commentator Adolfo Aguilar Zinzer in Excelsior, offering as proof that Krauze used more subtle language in the Spanish version of his article.

Nexos magazine literary editor Rafael Perez Gay wrote that Krauze tried to pass off a personal attack as literary criticism. Aiming for the machismo jugular, Perez Gay likened Krauze to a rejected lover who publicly insults his ex, and said the critique really is a compliment: “Krauze is an admirer, a lover, a rejected reader of Carlos Fuentes.”

“Hypocrisy,” shot back playwright Pablo Hiriart, one of the few to defend Krauze in print. “It is evident that Krauze’s article crystallizes the opinions that many people hold in private about Carlos Fuentes and his work.”

Indeed, some of Fuentes’ loudest defenders today have been his accusers in the past. And some of those who now cry jealousy appear guilty of the same.

“This is a minor-leaguer taking a shot at an institution,” said leftist intellectual Jorge Castaneda, a contemporary of the 40-year-old Krauze. “Krauze wanted to make a splash in the United States. He does not have the standing of a Fuentes or even of someone like Jorge Castaneda. He wanted to make it big without the hard work it takes.”

‘Jealous of Everyone’

Like Borge, Castaneda said he believes that the attack was at least partly inspired by Paz, author of “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” who in general sits opposite Fuentes on most political issues in Latin America. Paz is envious of the younger Fuentes’, his success in the United States and, more importantly, in Spain, the Spanish language motherland, said Castaneda. “In his old age he has become jealous of everyone and he became jealous of Fuentes,” he said.

Last year, Fuentes won Spain’s Cervantes prize, the highest literary honor in the Spanish language and one that Paz had won several years before. In January, Fuentes was awarded Nicaragua’s Ruben Dario Order of Cultural Independence, a prize that Paz most likely does not aspire to, but perhaps found irritating, nonetheless.

Paz and Fuentes are frequently mentioned as contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and both have been accused of campaigning for it.

“Fuentes’ possibilities are no longer that much smaller that Paz’s,” Castaneda said.

Both Paz and Fuentes have tried to remain above the scuffle. Fuentes declined to comment, saying that if he answered his many critics he’d never get his work done. Paz said this controversy belongs to Krauze.

But he added, “I don’t want to answer the police,” refering to Nicaraguan Interior Minister Borge, whose article appeared under the title “Paz (Spanish for ‘peace’) Declares War.” Clearly the shot that hit home was Borge’s.

Krauze insists that the criticism of his article has been “poor,” focusing on his intentions rather than the contents. He accuses his adversaries of an “Inquisition” mentality.

“I violated a taboo and I must be punished. . . . Just as our political life has been monolithic and obsessed with unity, so has been our culture,” he said.

“Krauze has every right to do this article,” replied author Carlos Monsivais. “But he also must get a response. The intensity of the response shows that everyone read this as a political act.”