By TARSUS GENUS*
Uruguay is a small bright spot before Antarctica. with its back to the squalor of Milei and facing the Rio Grande, it shines as a counterpoint to Hitler's orange ghost towards the north of the continent
“At both entrances to the dark gallery, solid fences made of iron and almost rotten wood prevented access by the curious and even by possible ghosts.”
(In a short story by Mario Benedetti)
I am not sure if it is still possible to speak of “historical cycles” in the sense conceived by the great narratives of historical theory, in which the actions developed by the most important actors of each era were situated, politically, based on the analysis of the conflicting material interests, which are more easily visible. It seems obvious that classes and the struggle between them have not disappeared, and the same meaning of the idea of nation remains valid. But it seems certain, however, that the phenomenon of mass immigration and the brutality of the climate transition have added new complexities to understanding and situating oneself with humanity within the scope of the great emancipatory, cultural, environmental and economic struggles of the 21st century.
In moments of change, which have not yet clearly appeared on the scene, history seems more like a tunnel — with ghosts from the past and new, undefined characters from the present — than it actually seems like the horizon of a dawn or a late twilight. The fact is that the “early” and the “late” in history are not linked to our short existence, but to the period in which humanity, as a whole, is making itself for the universe.
I think of the south of the Southern Cone, at this moment where a small luminous point before Antarctica, Uruguay — with its back to the squalor of Javier Milei and facing the Rio Grande — shines as a counterpoint to the orange ghost of Hitler towards the north of the continent.
In an article published on November 04, 2024, the newspaper's columnist Folha de S. Paul Bruno Boghossian published a summary of the program that Donald Trump would implement if he were elected, as he was a day later, with a landslide victory he obtained over Kamala Harris: “authoritarian turn, disfigurement of laws, construction of a circle of absolute loyalty and asphyxiation of agents capable of resisting his ideas, distorting old laws to persecute immigrants (…) and using force to punish his rivals and, if he wins, he will probably say that he obtained the approval of the polls to govern as an autocrat.” And he obtained it, on an enormous scale, which makes it impossible to say that the poor, working-class and miserable Americans who voted for him “were deceived.”
However, Donald Trump's most violent promise to the local and global far right was missing: mass deportations, which the president-elect reiterated immediately after his victory, which means — adding these programmatic points — a complete destruction of American liberal democracy and also the demonstration of a clear Nazi-fascist political tendency of the majority of its people, demonstrated by the polls.
To carry out mass deportations — let us remember Hitler's Germany and the “militarized democracy” in Israel with its genocide in Gaza — it is necessary to install in any country a de facto authority, above internal and international laws, either with support at the polls perverted by money, or with the support of ruthless allies on the international scene.
With the elections held in Germany, fifteen years after the German defeat in the First World War, Hitler was appointed as Chancellor of the Reich, to form the new Government (January 1933) with the Leader strengthened by two elections. The polls in July and November 1932 — already fueled by Nazi terror — made it possible to legitimize attacks on Jews and all opposition from the left, center-left and center forces, following an election in which the parliamentary representation of the Nazi Party rose from 107 to 230 deputies, with National Socialism receiving only 37% of the votes.
Both Hitler and Donald Trump said what they would do before the elections. There is no deception, no dissimulation, no programmatic mystification to win over voters, because both won them over by brandishing the values of the old bourgeois-democratic humanism, in their moment of exhaustion, saying that their political promises of progress in freedom have failed completely: freedoms have become increasingly formal, the desire for equality increasingly dried up and social peace has been refuted by wars. They kill, torture, massacre and murder without mercy or pity!
In Germany, Hitler grew because of the defeat of the German Revolution, but in the United States Donald Trump grew because the “American dream” was reformed by the right-wing utopia of seeking “a place in the shadows,” an illusory place — for each person — alongside the white, rich and wicked, close to the claws of the American eagle, but far from the golf courses where the elite celebrates power, life and the glory of their businesses.
In the US, it seems that the class struggle of the poor against the rich has been co-opted by the far right, to transform it into a class struggle of the poor against the poorest (or most excluded) of the traditional class society. This alone should change much of our analysis of the contemporary period.
The situation of the thinking left, which is searching for new ways to rediscover its lost social base, due to multiple factors that cannot be analyzed here, is very similar to what happens to a character in a definitive short story by Uruguayan Mario Benedetti. In his book Insomnia and Duermevelas (Seix Barral), in a story called “Tunnel and duermevela”, a railway tunnel — mysterious and mind-blowing in the tiny town of São Jorge — is closed at both its mouths, which for many years prevented “access to the curious and possible ghosts”.
It contains characters who are remembered by a boy who dares to penetrate its interior, which resembles the brave Uruguay, where the extreme right is irrelevant. A country of tunnels and torture, of armed resistance and now of faith in the most exemplary democracy in South America.
Marquitos — son of Don Marcos — and Lucas Junior, son of Don Lucas, talked frequently about the enigma of that immense and mysterious void from which emerged — so the legend said — a white horse without a rider and, with the help of “some impulse of wind, a pale and wrinkle-free Saturday that a mouse planned like an immobile roof and collapsed on the pastures".
Both Marquitos and Lucas Junior were linked to the mystique of the Tunnel, making speculations of all kinds, when in one of these conversations Lucas Junior said: “you see that it is now open, but no one dares to enter this great hole”. That was when Marquitos announced: “I will dare!” And he became a slave to his own announcement, in the “most heroic gesture he had ever planned in his life.”
And then the encounters in the darkness of the Tunnel follow one after the other, first with a man named Servando who introduces himself as a delinquent accused of having beaten an old woman, but who in fact, the man claims, was beaten by her; then with Marisa, who says she was there because her husband, or rather, “my man”, left with a lover and their two children, so that she would commit suicide; then she meets a dog that passes by her, without barking or moving its tail, followed by its owner who tells her “don’t be afraid, because this darkness makes dogs cower”, even though he has already bitten a three-year-old child. And then Marquito follows, who now stumbles upon a girl who is afraid to sleep, but who doesn’t back down because she doesn’t want to “give up” and also tells her not to worry about her, because nothing ever happens to vocationally solitary people, like both of them.
Just as he is getting ready to exit the other side of the tunnel, a familiar face passes by, an old friend of his father, Fernandez, riding a motorcycle, who asks him: “Don Marcos, what are you doing there all alone?” Marquitos then replies, somewhat perplexed and very confused, “I’m not Don Marcos, I’m Marquitos!” The answer is not accepted by his father’s friend, Fernandez, who simply tells him: “That tunnel makes everyone crazy. They should close it forever!”
At moments in history when cycles come to an end, there is always a special place where a spark of human consciousness, shaped by decades and centuries, can usher in a new era, whether as challenging experiments or as new resistance against exploitation and infamy. Benedetti and many men and women from all classes crossed this Tunnel together and glimpsed, beyond the singularities of each encounter in the darkness of the dictatorship's underground, strong reasons to fight and win.
*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts).
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