Latin America With Passion and Lucidity

LOOKING FOR HISTORY: Dispatches from Latin America, by Alma Guillermoprieto. Pantheon Books: 308 pp., $25.

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There’s a reason why magical realism flourished in Latin America. The place--or places, rather--can be chimeric, mirage-like, extraordinarily difficult for the average rational western mind to wrap itself around. At the same time, this far-flung geography is a mundane realm ruled by political and economic realities so hard-edged as to seem obvious, and therein lies another trap.

Most journalists from this country who grapple with Latin America stumble. They scratch just beneath the stereotypes and are so dazzled by their discoveries that they think they’ve found nuance and depth. Or they remain so befuddled that they turn repeatedly to comparisons with familiar touchstones in the United States.

But to be a Latin American journalist in Latin America isn’t easy. From the Rio Grande to Patagonia, local journalists are harassed, censored, intimidated, bought or killed. Dinosauric political bosses from the left and old-style caciques from the right, ruthless drug traffickers, obsolete laws and corrupt employers can make the life of a journalist miserable. Yet the predicament of the Latin American journalist does not end there.

As a general rule, journalists and media organizations in Latin America lack the basic protections and resources that journalists and the media in the United States take for granted. In spite of all these limitations, some of them excel at their craft, yet few will ever get the international recognition they deserve.

Every once in a while, though, an Alma Guillermoprieto appears on the American horizon to write sensibly about a wildly diverse region united by powerful commonalities. A Mexican who writes in Spanish and English, Guillermoprieto needs no translator, not of the nuanced Spanish that predominates nor of the even more subtle body language with which the region’s people communicate. Whether she’s reporting from the jungles of Colombia, the streets of Mexico City, the beaches of Cuba or public libraries in New York or Buenos Aires, Guillermoprieto captures the human side of her subjects at their historical moment in lucid prose and with passion and depth. She is a writer who knows the names of the trees, the plants and the peculiar characteristics of a kitchen in Puebla, Mexico. Unencumbered by cultural filters or preconceptions, she never needlessly reaches for an American analogy to demystify the subject at hand.”Looking for History” is a compilation of 17 essays, focusing on Argentina, Colombia Cuba, Mexico and Peru, published in the New Yorker or in the New York Review of Books.

Standing out like a small jewel among the fine pieces is an unnervingly lucid account of the 1990 presidential campaign of world-renowned Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. Latin American intellectuals have played a very important political role in their countries since independence from Spain in the early 19th century. Some, like Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in Argentina and Romulo Gallegos in Venezuela, have even won the presidency, and their novels, “Facundo” and “Dona Barbara” respectively served as political blueprints for their governments. But Vargas Llosa the politician, writes Guillermoprieto, “failed to see what his novels know.”

Indeed, as Guillermoprieto sees it, Vargas Llosa stood no chance of joining the select presidential group. He was too honest about his feelings for his country and naive enough to put those feelings into print. “Perhaps saying that I love my country is not true,” Vargas Llosa wrote, “I often loathe it. Although I was born in Peru, my vocation is that of a cosmopolitan and an expatriate who has always detested nationalism.”

“This,” marvels Guillermoprieto, “in the course of explaining how he happened to decide to run for president. Can such a man triumph in politics? Should he?”

Smart enough to find the telling quote to portray the man, Guillermoprieto is also familiar enough with the harsh realities of the region to expose a flaw. “One hardly knows,” she writes, “whether to wince or laugh at [Vargas Llosa’s] description of some of his rallies.” During one political debate, his opponent, the now infamous Alberto Fujimori, chided: “It seems that you would like to make Peru a Switzerland, Dr. Vargas.”

“Typically for Fujimori,” writes Guillermoprieto, “his gibe was a few degrees off the mark: the point was, Vargas Llosa had campaigned as if Peru already were Switzerland.”

But her real talent in this essay is her ability to reveal the paradox of Vargas Llosa’s political failure. “The ruling classes’ xenophobia, racism and conservative prejudices found expression in Mario Vargas Llosa’s campaign, even as the candidate haplessly defended his own agnosticism, decried racism and took refuge in his daily readings of Karl Popper and the Spanish Golden Age poet Luis de Gongora.”

Nor is Guillermoprieto shy about venturing into more familiar territory, scrutinizing the lives and the eerily parallel ambitions of Eva Duarte-Peron and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Her fresh approach is to explore the ways in which each icon aspired to saintliness. The piece begins with the writer striking an intimate tone, looking at early photographs, old film footage and an image of Eva Peron reproduced in an old promotional piece and not shying from the obvious. “Eva Duarte’s destiny is so strong by now that it is almost impossible to believe that at the time the picture was taken she did not know, as we do, that this bland and to all appearances untalented girl, born illegitimate and on a ranch, was soon to become Evita.” One Guillermoprieto line in particular perfectly synthesizes the tango-like life of Eva Duarte-Peron. “eforeMi vida por Peron!’ she cried a thousand times before the roaring crowds, and then she died.”

In Evita’s life, however, there’s much more than melodrama. Guillermoprieto reconstructs the embedded ambiguities that characterized her subject, who in one paragraph is a powerful, demagogic, grasping and calculating corrupt politician and in the next is a devoted feminist pushing for a women’s voting rights act. To understand her following among the poor and the disenfranchised, consider this insightful paragraph:

“Peron had a horror of physical contact. Evita kissed lepers. She also took lice-infested urchins to the official residence for a rest cure and bathed them herself; started a union for domestic workers; and set up hospitals, children’s homes and a home for girls who traveled to the big city and found themselves penniless, as she once had.”

No wonder the poor in Argentina saw her as a saintly figure.

Likewise, Guillermoprieto captures perfectly the environment in which Guevara lived and died, a hemisphere in which the corruption of leaders cries out as loudly as the injustice of its political, economic and judiciary systems. “Guevara,” she writes, “stood out against the inflamed horizon of his time, alone and unique.” Dead, we are told, he satisfies the fervor of some people in Latin America. Alive, “he demanded that others follow his impossible example, and never understood how to combine what he wanted with what was achievable.”

Ultimately, though, the journalist’s portrait of Guevara is far from hagiographic. “He was,” writes Guillermoprieto, “a fanatic, consumed by restlessness and a frighteningly abstract hatred, who in the end recognized only one moral value as supreme: the willingness to be slaughtered for a cause.”

In other pieces in the collection, Guillermoprieto’s skills as a reporter shine; her stories of life in Cuba are particularly strong. One, for instance, chronicles the visit of John Paul II to the Caribbean island in January 1998 and the political tug of war between the pope and Fidel Castro. In another piece, “Love and Misery in Cuba,” she skillfully dissects the ironies that connect and divide the Miami Cuban community and their friends and family back home. If it weren’t for the money the exiled Cuban community sends to the island, she points out, their relatives in Cuba would not be able to survive. But if it weren’t for these same generous souls in Miami so stubborn in pressing the United States to maintain and tighten its embargo on the island, life would be better for the people and Castro would run out of excuses to justify the failure of his regime

What makes “Looking for History” valuable is not so much the timeliness of its stories, which continue to be relevant, or the scope of the reporting. What separates this book from the common reporting on Latin America are the author’s insight and her determination to tell the story in its own terms, from a Latin American perspective.

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Sergio Munoz is an editorial writer for The Times.