Julio Cortázar
in Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos n. 3 (February 1984)
On 14 February last, a great friend of the League, Julio Cortázar, passed away. We would like to remember him here by reproducing the speech he gave in 1979 for the constitutive meeting of the Tribunal of the Peoples. A speech that is a song of love for Latin America and a strong call to fulfil our duty as militants.
This meeting, like all meetings that have been held throughout history with the intention of taking peoples a step forward in their evolution and destiny, is taking place under the sign of paradox. A cruel and obvious paradox: that the peoples, as such, will not know about the meeting or its conclusions. I am speaking specifically of the peoples of Latin America, for whom the vast majority of declarations and work on human rights, and more recently the Declaration on the Rights of Peoples adopted in Algiers three years ago, are practically a dead letter, and dead for the worst of reasons, that of ignorance.
I can affirm this to the extent that after having participated for several years in the deliberations and judgements of the Bertrand Russell II Tribunal, I was given to personally verify the wall of silence erected in almost all our countries and the ignorance of their peoples about the action of the Tribunal. And if I begin by making this statement, which may seem pessimistic, I do so precisely because I believe in the need to continue and perfect all kinds of international assemblies until the day comes when this wall of silence falls under the weight of truth, reason and love.
It is obvious that our meeting is not intended directly for the knowledge of each of the individuals who constitute a people: once again, the inevitable structure of the social pyramid must gradually operate the slow work of osmosis, of transmission, of conviction which ends up bringing to the majority the ideas and actions emanating from spirits and groups in a more favourable position from the point of view of thought and even of action. But I have enough experience not to be fooled by the immediate resonance that reigns within the four walls of any assembly, and which leads many people to naively imagine that this resonance, favoured by the media and the urgent needs of the people, will have repercussions beyond national borders. In most Latin American nations, these borders are hermetically sealed or, even worse, they have the diabolical possibility of transforming the echoes into their opposite and showing our action as the product of an attempt at deception and subversion.
Thus, every judgement of the Russell Tribunal and every article of the Algiers Declaration has been and will be presented in these countries through an odiously biased interpretation or, even worse, will be carefully silenced to avoid any attempt at analysis and reflection. I am well aware that the same will happen with the work and conclusions of this first meeting of the Peoples’ Tribunal, and I have no illusions about the immediate repercussions they will have in Latin America. In the face of all this, if our efforts are to have a positive outcome in the not too distant future, I am convinced that they must be carried out in a twofold perspective. On the one hand, it is essential to carry them out in spite of this bleakly negative panorama, but at the same time, it is not possible to limit ourselves to merely stating them on the last day of our debates, but it is necessary to continue our action not only as a Peoples’ Tribunal but from the most varied possibilities and angles in order to place it in an orbit that will eventually surpass the walls of silence, the borders of oppression and alienation, and finally reach the ears and the conscience of the peoples who are its natural addressees. Only in this way will our defence of these peoples against the violation of their rights be effective, for only in this way will the defended peoples know why they are being defended, why this Tribunal exists, why it must be supported when they receive its support.
I repeat my assertion: what I am saying now, what any of us will say here, will not be heard in countries like Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the list does not stop there. In each of these countries there is a people subjected daily to brainwashing based on the most modern technique of imperialism, which seeks and often achieves a systematic deformation of the most essential moral and historical values. At this very moment many of these peoples are being subjected to propaganda and indoctrination aimed at convincing them that they are not only sovereign peoples but that they can and must disregard any point of view coming from outside; for enormous multitudes thus deceived and thus conditioned, instruments such as the Declaration proclaimed in Algiers (assuming they know it) automatically mean an inadmissible intrusion of foreign elements into national interests, and the same can be said of the constitution of this Peoples’ Tribunal here in Bologna. It is precisely for this reason that I insist on the imperative need to work within the double perspective to which I alluded earlier; If the jurists capable of elaborating instruments of denunciation and defence against the violations of the rights of the peoples must work without any concern for the echoes that these works may or may not arouse in the peoples concerned, we, the non-jurist participants, have the obligation to gather the fruit of these works and to commit ourselves, each within our specialities and possibilities, to project them by all means so that their content reaches an ever greater and clearer awareness among the peoples for whom it is destined. It is not a frivolity if I say that on many occasions a poem or the words of a song, a film or a novel, a painting or a story, a play or a sculpture have carried and carry to the people the notion and the feeling of many of the rights that the specialists express and articulate in their legal form; it is not a frivolity that someone like me, a mere inventor of fictions, is still determined to participate in this kind of meeting and say what I am saying. Because the awareness of the rights of peoples can and must enter them by many routes that are not necessarily the legal routes that escape people’s immediate comprehension, when they are not silenced or deformed by the regimes that exploit and alienate peoples; that awareness can come through routes that have nothing to do with logic or with the text of the fundamental declarations; It can come by the ways of beauty, poetry, humour, irony, satire, caricature, image, sound, joke, dramatic cry, drawing, gesture, everything that directly touches the popular sensibility and admirably opens the way to the logical, moral and historical content of formal statements.
On this path full of paradoxes, we must not be afraid to go off the beaten track, because it is precisely in this break with traditional forms that our only chance of effectively fulfilling what the Peoples’ Tribunal has set out to do lies. We must start from the premise that the action of the Tribunal is aimed at the defence of peoples who not only lack many of the rights enunciated in the Algiers Declaration, but who are composed in their vast majority by individuals who ignore the simplest formulation of these rights, and therefore cannot fulfil the first and most elementary operation of protest and vindication which is always a mental operation, a coherent affirmation or denial in the face of injustice, plunder and subjugation. Huge masses of Latin American men in a state of total or partial illiteracy populate our plains and our mountains throughout the continent, and for the moment there is not the slightest possibility of giving them even the rudiments of what we would like to do for them. It is obvious that this does not prevent, as it has never prevented throughout the history of the progressive ideas of mankind, specialists in the field from laying the moral and legal foundations for the defence of the rights of any people in the world; But it is also clear that the paternalistic attitude of past thinkers, legislators, jurists and politicians must be overcome in the present time and that the action of this Peoples’ Tribunal will only be effective if its pronouncements emanate from the top of the social pyramid as an echo, a response and a justification to the latent and perceptible desires and hopes of the peoples; but this dialectic between the babble and the word, between the desire for law and law as a norm, demands an incessant and ever-increasing contact between the peoples and their interpreters, the convulsions of popular roots that the twentieth century has witnessed and continues to witness amply demonstrate that it is no longer possible to continue thinking and proceeding from a supposed delegation of intellectual and moral powers, and that along with the guiding thought and the tribunes from which it is made known, as is our case at present, it is necessary to seek by all means a more direct, broader and, I would say, more visceral communication with the object of our concerns, with the peoples in their entirety and in each of their individual components. Let us accept the inevitable fact that a continent such as Latin America imposes on us, and let us persist in fulfilling our task in the face of closed borders and misrepresentations of all kinds; but at the same time, hic et nunc, let us explore all the possibilities that are opening up in the field of communication, of the mental and psychological bridges that can help us to bring this work to the consciousness of the oppressed peoples. The science, knowledge and talent of jurists is here at the service of a noble cause; all that is lacking is a detonator that projects this thought and turns it into a seed falling in faraway lands, germinating at last in fruits of freedom, of democratic conscience, of rebellion against injustice and subjugation. That detonator is also here, among us, but it must be torn away from academic routines and prejudices, it must be turned into something living and dynamic; that detonator is the imagination of each one of us, the possibility we have to use the most varied and even the most unexpected means to turn each legal text into a piece of life, each formal declaration into a dynamic feeling, into an uncontainable experience. We need to push the possibilities of imagination in all fields to their furthest limits, because if we remain in the sphere of theoretical conclusions and unilateral practice, if we limit ourselves to relying on their mere usual dissemination through the press and other media, the moral effectiveness of the Peoples’ Tribunal will be circumscribed and impoverished by the lack of resonance of its principles and its purposes, as has happened in Latin America with respect to other tribunals and other assemblies; Once again, the internal and external enemies of the peoples will be better aware of those principles and those purposes than the peoples themselves, and will find ways to neutralise and negativise whatever this Tribunal can accomplish.
That is why, as a writer in solidarity with the aims of this meeting, I appeal to the imagination of all those who fight for the rights of peoples in order to convert theoretical thought into organic impulses, in order to show at the level of breathing, of life and of everyday feelings all that is enunciated in principles and texts. Never has the capacity for invention on every conceivable level been more necessary to arouse in the Latin American and other oppressed peoples of the Earth a greater awareness of their dignity and a greater will to affirm and defend it. The second article of the Algiers Declaration states that every people has the right to respect for its national and cultural identity. Yes, but this respect must begin to exist within the peoples themselves, and for this it is necessary for these peoples to have a clear awareness of their national identity, which has nothing to do with the cheap nationalisms injected into them daily by the regimes that oppress them; and in the same way, these peoples must also have an equally clear awareness of their cultural identity, against which the machinations of imperialism are being used with all the weapons of unbridled publicity and elitist and distorting education. In the face of this, the task of all those of us who are not jurists is to transmit and above all to transmute the theoretical and normative notions of the law of peoples, so that they reach them not only as notions but as intuitions, as palpable, immediate and everyday certainties in the lives of millions of women and men still lost in a mental desert, in an enormous prison of mountains and plains.
This work is difficult and slow; that is precisely why we must intensify it every day, and this Peoples’ Tribunal that is being constituted today in Bologna gives us a new reason and a new breath to carry it out. Let us build bridges, let us build roads to those who, from far away, will hear our voice and will one day turn it into the clamour that will tear down the barriers that today separate them from justice, sovereignty and dignity.
in: Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos n. 3 (February 1984)