Against Intervention

In today's world, intervention evokes a fearful symmetry.

As the United States feels itself authorized to intervene in Central America to put out a fire in your front yard--I'm delighted that we have been promoted from the traditional status of back yard--then the Soviet Union also feels authorized to play the fireman in all of its front and back yards.

Intervention damages the fabric of a nation, the chance of its resurrected history, the wholeness of its cultural identity.

I have witnessed two such examples of wholesale corruption by intervention in my lifetime.

One was in Czechoslovakia in the fall of 1968. I was there then to support my friends the writers, the students and statesmen of the Prague Spring. I heard them give thanks, at least, for their few months of freedom as night fell once more upon them; the night of Kafka, where nothing is remembered but nothing is forgiven.

The other time was in Guatemala in 1964, when the democratically elected government was overthrown by a mercenary invasion openly backed with the CIA. The political process of reform and self-recognition in Guatemala was brutally interrupted to no one's benefit: Guatemala was condemned to a vicious circle of repression, that continues to this day...

Negotiations Before It Is Too Late

Before the United States has to negotiate with extreme cultural, nationalistic and internationalist pressures of both the left and the right in the remotest nations of this hemisphere--Chile and Argentina--in the largest nation--Brazil--and in the closest one--Mexico--it should rapidly, in its own interests as well as ours, negotiate in Central America and the Caribbean.

We consider in Mexico that each and every one of the points of conflict in the region can be solved diplomatically, through negotiations, before it is too late.

There is no fatality in politics that says: given a revolutionary movement in any country in the region, it will inevitably end up providing bases for the Soviet Union.

What happens between the daybreak of revolution in a marginal country and its imagined destiny as a Soviet base.

If nothing happens but harassment, blockades propaganda, pressures and invasions against the revolutionary country, then that prophecy will become self-fulfilling.

But if power with historical memory and diplomacy with historical imagination come into play, we, the United States and Latin America, might end up with something very different.

A Latin America of independent states building institutions of stability, renewing the culture of national identity, diversifying our economic interdependence and wearing down the dogmas of two musty 19th century philosophies.