Latin American apartheid

Violence, racism and extreme poverty 500 years after “discovery”

by Elbio Grosso Trentini

An unprecedented explosion of violence is rocking Latin America. Of course, violence is nothing new in a continent baptized in genocide, slavery and racial exclusion. It has been endemic since the birth of the concept of “Latin” America after the conquest. Its history has been one of continuing violence, military coups, and vicious racist exploitation of the majority population by the small elites of European descent.

But now something is different: uncontrollable violence has been spilling out from poor areas and shantytowns and is now affecting the small middle class. Signs of social chaos and civil collapse are everywhere; multiple kidnappings and murders occur daily, city buses are taken commando style, locals and foreign tourists are robbed and taken hostage to shantytowns and marginal neighbourhoods until ransom is paid, mobs close down streets and bridges, and whole city areas are considered “liberated zones” by local gangs in cahoots with police.

Violence in the cities is so explosive that “military occupations” of marginal neighbourhoods are commonplace. In October of last year a massive operation in a Buenos Aires shantytown involved 1,000 police and security officers. A recent bloodbath in Rio’s largest shantytown peaked one night when 30 people, including toddlers, were murdered by off-duty police officers.

Latin American nations have long been considered amongst the most violent societies in the world. In 2004, the United Nations Secretariat for Human Rights ranked Colombia, El Salvador, Venezuela and Brazil (together with the Virgin Islands) as the countries with the highest indices of youth murders and violence. The numbers and statistics are so incredible and overwhelming that they have a numbing effect.

Almost three million displaced refugees in Colombia since 1985; 800,000 “Maras” gang members in Central America that pose, according to the US military who helped create them, the “greatest security threat” in the region; Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico are responsible for 75% of all kidnappings in the world. And the list goes on…

As a Canadian visiting Latin America I was shocked by the indifferent reaction to the brutal, almost ritual, violence. Seven prisoners decapitated in a riot, their severed heads displayed as trophies on the prison’s roof; daily assaults and murders of seniors in their homes for their savings and jewelry (60% by relatives); six beggars clubbed to death by Brazilian neo-nazis in just one night; President Fox finally ordering a federal investigation on the murders of more than 300 women in Ciudad Juarez; the brutal lynching of mayors and public officials by rioting mobs; hundreds of police officers killed by criminal and rival police gangs; an alleged slave owner, prosecuted for the murder of three anti-slavery workers with Brazil’s Labour Ministry, elected mayor of a provincial city.

But the crimes that made waves and attracted extensive media coverage were a little bit different. For example, international outrage over the murder of an American religious worker, by paramilitary gangs believed to be in the pay of Brazil’s infamous slave merchants, forced the government to involve the army and their official Mobile Anti-Slavery Unit.

Latin American military experts in torture and paramilitary guerilla warfare—against their own people, of course—are at the head of organized crime, from drug trafficking to extortion and money laundering. But they are now worried that uncontrolled crime is spilling over to the enclaves and guarded neighbourhoods of the middle class. Cities resemble the South Africa of apartheid fame: white elite areas protected by buffer poor zones of a brown working class from huge black and “coloured” shantytowns, the “cities of the negroes” as they say in Brazil.

The unspoken common bond behind all this violence is race. Latin American nations are some of the most racist and racially divided societies in the world. They are organized in a segregated totality reminiscent of South Africa’s apartheid era. “Racism festers” throughout Latin America, where discussion on racial issues is taboo, wrote an expert in the Inter-American Dialogue newsletter, “all the more virulently because governments refuse to deal with it.”

The apartheid system is insidious and pervasive all throughout the continent, with segregated neighbourhoods, schools, hospitals, public services and amenities, and more so in the private realm. It is more intractable because, unlike the Afrikaner-designed model, it is not framed by a legal code but imposed as a de facto reality. Sociologists have long commented on Latin America’s permanent “norm of illegitimacy.”

After the “discovery” and conquest by Spain and Portugal, “Latin” America was conceived from racist apartheid and the theories of racial supremacy. The Inquisition established in the Americas the concept of “purity of blood” and racial exploitation when, as Canadian scholar Erna Paris wrote, “for the first time religion and racism had fused into one.”

Indians, not considered full human beings by the conquistadores, were brutally exploited and massacred in an unprecedented genocidal frenzy: Native American populations fell by almost 95 percent within years following the Europeans arrival. To continue the economic exploitation of the continent millions of African slaves were imported. Here is when and where the racist pyramid of white, brown and black (European, mestizo, Indian and African) started in Latin America.

The pervasive high levels of corruption in all sectors of society (last year, Ecuador and Argentina held the dubious honour of being the two most politically corrupt societies in the world, according to Transparency International) make a mockery of any well-intentioned anti-discrimination legislation. Governments routinely falsify and doctor statistics and official reports on health, education, public spending, employment, and all social and legal issues. Gabriel Garcia Marquez called them “countries that only exist in paper.”

Governments in Argentina, for example, are being sued at federal and provincial levels by Greenpeace and other human rights organizations, uncovering new scandals every day. A few recent headlines reveal deliberate and routine falsification of health and environmental records of the Riachuelo basin, one of the most polluted and toxic areas in the world, home to more than five million people, and nuclear contamination reports in neighbourhoods close to an atomic research centre in Buenos Aires, as well as doctors forced to alter death certificates in order to “lower” infant mortality rates.

Overt racism, racial violence and racist language appear everywhere. The June 1 cover of Pagina/12, one of Argentina’s most progressive newspapers, screamed in bold letters: “We must kill all the negroes!” Those were the words of a police commander recorded during a massacre of workers protesting against extreme poverty and hunger. During the same period a respected radio journalist in Buenos Aires declared on air that “cholas” (Indian women) “give birth on trees like animals and drop their babies on the rivers down below,” and a history professor told his class of his embarrassment at the majority of “shitty niggers” in the Argentine army.

Just shrug your shoulders; racist words are casually tossed up in conversation in every Latin American city, from tired “work-like-a-nigger” cliches, to blackface shows and crude anti-semitic puns on TV, to president Fox’s public comments that Mexicans will take jobs in the US that “not even blacks want.”

The system of racial apartheid is most obvious in the media. Walking the streets of major Latin American cities you cannot escape the billboards, the ads, newspapers and magazines, portraying a surreal continent that is strangely white, middle class, North American and European. As Drew Hayden Taylor recently wrote in Toronto’s NOW magazine, “all the people on air (in Mexico) look very European. That is to say, very pale and very white.”

Blacks, Indians and people of colour—the overwhelming majority of the Latin American population—are almost invisible and do not exist in that world, except for the soccer player and sports figure, the odd musician and token political star and, of course, the criminal and the terrorist. They are a servant class, marginal and invisible, that provides almost slave labour as a subsidy for the middle class and elites of European descent.

A recent commentator, writing on the low ranking of Rio and other Latin American cities in international quality-of-life reports (at the bottom of the lists with African capitals) sadly complained that the cities “were not truly human.” That’s what human rights activists call the continent’s horror of “social violence”: not just the massacres and murders, but the extreme poverty of hundreds of millions—getting poorer every day—the racial and social exclusion, slave trafficking, the exploitation of millions of minors working as sex slaves, and the world’s highest levels of corruption and income inequality.

But in the midst of all the violence, extreme poverty and corruption, there are signs of hope and small but significant victories. New democratically elected governments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay—together with the first non-white president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez—are being forced to try to organize together in a common front against poverty and social exclusion and, at least tangentially, racism.

Most importantly, the persistent and ridiculous propaganda myth of colour blind “racial democracies,” so ingrained in Latin America and advantageous to the local elites, is being denounced and challenged effectively by Indigenistas organizations in Bolivia, Central America, Ecuador and Peru, Mexican Zapatistas and African rights coalitions in Colombia and Brazil. They know their struggle is over 500 years old. Their hope is that the inevitable zero hour is at hand, in solidarity and peace.

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Look for Elbio Grosso Trentini's forthcoming book Latin American Apartheid