Eduardo Galeano

in Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos n. 9 (April 1987)

Lelio Basso conceived of peoples on the move, and not locked up in the showcases of the Museum of Man: in a situation of change, in the act of reason: living history is the only place where the beautiful and dangerous adventure of transforming the world can only be realised in solidarity between peoples in the face of common challenges. The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples, born in Algiers ten years ago, speaks of peoples as the protagonists of history. Unlike traditional legal norms, the Declaration does not reflect the bad conscience of a power that never says what it thinks and never does what it says, but announces a new, truly democratic world and proposes to help build it. Today’s world, a world in agony, is organised to deny in deeds what pompous words proclaim. Formally we are all equal, we all have equal rights; in reality, Orwell’s famous formula, some are more equal than others.
More equal in life, and even in death. If Lech Walesa had been born in Guatemala, he would have been gutted in the first strike and his assassination would not have merited a line, not a single line, in the international press. In the so-called Third World, inhabited by third-class people, by under-people, violence is “natural”. Violence corresponds, like poverty, like underdevelopment, to the zoological order, to the biological order, to the cosmic order, to the divine order, and so it will be.
The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, which has reduced infant mortality by half, causes a scandal in the bien-pensant circuits, which consider themselves entitled to test it on democracy; it was never a cause for scandal, however, that Nicaraguans live twenty years less than North Americans by the chance of having been born a little further south on the map of America.
Imperialism has gone out of fashion among intellectuals in the rich countries. It seems stupid or tasteless to denounce the imperialist system of power. Thus, silence and lies offer impunity to an order which has turned terror into a habit and which kills thousands of human beings every day, by hunger or by bullets.
The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples has an unmasking function, it brings us back to reality and puts us into history: it claims the right of peoples to be, and that implies denouncing what prevents them from being. Violence, poverty and underdevelopment in the so-called Third World were not born out of a goat’s ear.
The imperialist order produces violence, as steel mills produce steel: the normal functioning of its gears forces the systematic violation of human rights. Repulsive are the professional killers, the torturers, the jailers, the inquisitors; but more repulsive is the system that makes them necessary. The conscience that orders bears more responsibility than the hand that executes.
Such violence, visible or invisible, proves that the new relations of domination can be even more atrocious and effective than the colonial status of times past. Financial usury, commercial plunder, political extortion and cultural alienation are mainly responsible, indirectly but mainly, for the fact that forty thousand children die every day from hunger or curable disease, and they are mainly responsible, indirectly but mainly, for the countless crimes committed every day by state terrorism through the dictatorships, democracies and dicttacracies that rule most poor countries.
The so-called Third World consumes more weapons than food; the process of militarisation does not require military governments to go along with its maddening development. Many civilian governments start out wanting change and end up working to prevent it. In the name of realism, they become impotent. Prisoners of military power structures, they survive by paying the price of immobility: they can mention land reform, but cannot do it; they can talk about justice, but cannot practice it. In the case of my country, Uruguay, for example, we may well be said to be on probation. The president, elected by popular vote, has committed himself to blocking any judicial process against the criminals in uniform who practised state terrorism, and has left the repressive apparatus intact. The national budget continues to allocate to repression, in democracy, the same proportion of resources that the dictatorship attributed to it. The national budget looks like the budget of a barracks: out of every ten pesos spent by the state, four go to the military and the police. Some of the newly born or reborn democracies in Latin America are thin, anaemic, sick with weakness. No wonder: they feed on fear. They eat fear for breakfast, fear for lunch, fear for dinner.
Between fear and dignity, between the cage and freedom, between property and work, the right of peoples takes sides. There is nothing neutral about the right of peoples, there is nothing neutral about those of us who identify with it and work to spread it: we are independent, yes, but not neutral. After all, the established international order, which is founded on the growing inequality of its parties, does not believe in the neutrality that its own legal rules invoke and praise. The formal ceremonies of the system proclaim peace, freedom and democracy, but they do so out of pure exorcism. The deeds of the system practise the law of the strongest, use the world as a hunting ground and a source of profit, and turn it into a slaughterhouse and a madhouse.
Peoples’ law goes beyond the legal tradition that dissolves peoples into states or reduces them to archipelagos of disconnected individual islands. The law of peoples, a law of solidarity, breaks through authoritarian law and selfish law, and thus pays homage to the popular protagonism that has left its indelible mark on contemporary times. The people become subjects of law to the extent that they refuse to remain objects and recognise themselves as the source of history: tired of suffering history, they have decided to make it, this is the sound and the fury of the wind of our time.
Utopia comes to the call of a dying world: it announces another world, a possible home for all, a vast meeting place for free peoples, equal in their rights, different in their profiles, diverse in their voices. Rather than utopia, we should call it hope, because it comes from experience as much as from imagination. It is reality that shows us that hunger is not inevitable, nor humiliation a destiny; that the sterility of the oppressors does not imply the creative impotence of the oppressed, and that the responsibility for history is no longer in the hands of the gods, nor of their tricky inventors: that history can and must be made from within and from below, and not from without and from above.
Where traditional law says “he” or says “I”, the law of peoples says “they” or says “we”. Therein lie the forces of life, the energies of unceasing birth: this “we”, this certainty of collective existence, makes us feel, and even know, that we are more than fleeting moments of time and tiny dots of space.
The black slaves that capitalism tore from the west coast of Africa brought to America not only their arms. They also brought their cultures, their cultural keys to identity and communication. We know little or nothing about these cultural keys, which defended the slaves against a system that wanted to turn them into things. Little or nothing we know, but we know, at least, that many of those slaves believed, and their grandchildren still believe, in the two memories. They believed, they believe, that each person has two memories: one memory, the individual memory, condemned to death, condemned to be devoured by time and passions; and another memory, the collective memory, victorious over death, continuous, immortal. I believe it too. I also believe in such high joy. I believe that Lelio, Ruth, Marianella, will live as long as the will for justice or the will for beauty lives in the world, and as long as human dignity, a thousand times assassinated, is miraculously able to get up and walk.

Galeano, Eduardo
in: Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos n. 9 (April 1987)