Latin America: Silver, Sword, Stone, by Marie Arana - Book Review

SILVER, SWORD, AND STONE
Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story
By Marie Arana

Latin America, Marie Arana writes, is defined by a common set of stories and an interconnected system of beliefs.CreditCreditVictor Ch. Vargas

SILVER, SWORD, AND STONE
Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story
By Marie Arana
477 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30.

Review by: Álvaro Enrigue, a Mexican novelist, author of “Sudden Death.”

Toward the end of “Silver, Sword, and Stone,” Marie Arana remarks on the difficulties of arriving at general conclusions about the history of the vast and diverse Latin American continent. It’s a complicated task, and not only because of the size of the land, the age of many of the cultures and the magnitude of the human migrations it has received. The oldest grievances of Latin America — economic inequality, lack of access to justice, pervasive violence — feel as urgent now as they were in the 19th or the 16th centuries, and it’s hard to conclude anything about a story that keeps repeating itself. The problem with never-ending narratives, of course, is that they don’t have a conclusion.

As Arana, a Peruvian-born journalist and the author of a prizewinning biography of Simón Bolívar, meditates on the fragility of recent, still insufficient, progress in improving living conditions in the region, she includes a melancholy line that resounded deeply with my own sense of what it means to be Latin American: “We have learned to witness history with a certain helplessness.” It’s a small confession but an important one — a yielding to personal observation in a book that is otherwise carefully factual, a window onto a soul contemplating the continent’s troubled experience of the world.

Aren’t all histories brutal? Don’t others feel the divergence between what their countries should be and what they are the way we Latin Americans do? Why are we so prone to point out what we do wrong? Hasn’t our peculiar creative genius been resilient enough? Are our gifts to the world irrelevant? What about chocolate, corn, potatoes and tomatoes? The coronary bypass, oral contraceptives, a leprosy vaccine? Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jorge Luis Borges and Frida Kahlo? Arana is proud of her Latin American heritage, but she has a point when she writes that until there is a full reckoning with the legacy of racism and other forms of injustice the region’s citizens must remain self-critical.

In her book, she treats Latin America as a “commonality” with a “concrete character” rooted in the unusual circumstances of the encounter between its indigenous cultures on the one hand and European and African populations on the other. The region, she argues, is defined by a common set of stories and interconnected system of beliefs as well as the use of a lingua franca — Spanish — that is not the mother tongue of all but which the majority understands and can speak.

To encompass these particularities, Arana has divided her book into three parts, each named after a trait that has played an essential role in history: “silver,” evoking the dependence on extractive economies focused on precious metals; “sword,” referring to the tendency to embrace political power predicated on military might and the threat of violence — la mano dura, or the iron fist; and “stone,” a multifaceted religious fervor that is only superficially similar to Catholic orthodoxy. In each section Arana reprises the same stories from the time of the Aztecs and the Incas up through our day but in ways that complement and don’t repeat. She has a noteworthy sense of narrative form, and her intuition about the importance of repetition in Latin American history is reflected in the book’s structure; problems recur like a difficult dream that instead of finishing merely begins again and again. It’s this frustration with repetition that explains her — our — melancholic helplessness before history.

“Silver, Sword, and Stone,” as Arana points out, is not a straightforward history of Latin America. Neither is it journalism. Rather, it’s a hybrid, combining learned historical analysis with in-depth reporting and political commentary. Each section considers the region’s historical burdens through the prism of actual citizens: Leonor González, the widow of a Peruvian miner who ekes out a living pounding bags of stone into gravel in search of flecks of gold; Carlos Buergos, a Cuban migrant to the United States who, beaten down by the Castro regime, is imprisoned for theft in Havana and serves as a “hardened killer” for the Cuban Army in Angola before escaping to Miami; and, finally, Xavier Albó, a Spanish Jesuit who, preaching in Bolivia during the liberation theology movement of the 1970s and ’80s, is awakened to the region’s misery and corruption. These individuals and their stories are effective embodiments of Arana’s themes and, by extension, their impact on the region’s more than 600 million inhabitants.

“The colonies were dead,” Arana writes, but “the spirit of colonialism remained very much alive.” Her indictment of the conquistadors is brutal, and she is unapologetic in condemning the operations of the United States government in support of Latin America’s right-wing authoritarian regimes during the Cold War. But she makes clear that the Inca and Aztec empires were ruthless too, and that if the United States offered weapons and training to the conservative owners of land and capital, the use of extreme violence to crush the opposition was well established by the time the Americans arrived to finance it.

“Silver, Sword, and Stone” is just as illuminating about the current political moment, in which the cultural and linguistic line dividing the United States from its hemispheric neighbors for more than 200 years could become a fortress wall. She reads recent episodes in Latin American history in the contentious but essential key of race relations, which are at the core of the ideological confrontations in this era of national populism.

Access to education, justice and a reasonable income has always been linked to skin tone in the continent, as Arana notes, but race has mostly been ignored as a category of analysis by Latin American intellectuals. The issue is particularly excruciating because the overwhelming majority of the population is nonwhite. Yet no matter how many revolutions have been fought and won, that majority remains the object of discrimination and economic corruption.

The reluctance of Latin American elites to share their wealth — often but not always in association with foreign powers — has produced a sophisticated discourse to justify the status quo. One influential theory that Arana cites in passing, developed by the 20th-century Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos, is that of the Cosmic Race — according to which everybody in the region is of mixed origin and, because of this, colorblind. New generations of Latin American writers and thinkers, frequently from middle-class families that migrated from Europe in the past century, have sustained the Cosmic Race theory, pointing out, with Marxist flair, that the problem is capital distribution, not skin shade, and that class struggle will eventually take us to a better place.

“Silver, Sword, and Stone” denies these ideas with an informed and authoritative voice, one that deserves a wide audience. Like Arana, I believe that the main problem in Latin America for the past 500 years has been racism, in its varied, nefarious guises and names. As long as the region continues to fail to address this head-on, the enormous promise of its diversity and creativity will never be fully realized, and the stories, and melancholy, Arana invokes will keep repeating instead.

Bolivar, o verdadeiro: uma biografia de Marie Arana

RYAN L. COLE Our South American Cousin A stylish introduction to the extraordinary life of Simón Bolívar The City Journal, 4 October 2013

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Bolívar: American Liberator, by Marie Arana (Simon & Schuster, 624 pp., $23.49)

At the tip of West Virginia’s eastern panhandle sits the town of Bolivar, population 1,045. Originally named Mudfort, Bolivar changed its name in 1825 as a salute to a Venezuelan rebel whose words and actions echoed those of America’s own founders.
Simón Bolívar’s life, a story unfamiliar to many Americans, is the subject of Marie Arana’s hefty new biography, Bolívar: American Liberator. The book’s two-word subtitle only hints as its subject’s accomplishments: Bolívar was a revolutionary jack-of-all-trades, equal parts Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, with dashes of Hannibal and Napoleon as well. He laid the groundwork for revolt with his eloquent rhetoric, led ragtag armies across thousands of miles, freed six nations, wrote their founding documents, and attempted, with mixed success, to lift their fledgling governments off the ground.
Deeply researched, and a clear labor of love, Bolívar offers a stylish introduction to this great historical figure. Arana’s biography reads like a novel. It seems ready-made to be turned into a movie. Bolívar was undoubtedly a swashbuckling warrior and visionary intellectual, but Arana’s romantic portrait of El Libertador, while thrilling, is at times overly florid. Bolívar strides across the pages, galloping shirtless through triumphant arches into liberated towns where virginal girls await to place crowns of laurels on his head.
Bolívar has been compared in many quarters with George Washington. Both were figureheads and heroes to their respective revolutions, both rid the Americas of empire, and both took on the task of founding new republics. But, as the author explains, the men, the wars they fought, and the Americas they fought for, were by no means identical. Great Britain’s colonies, largely white and Protestant, were attached to an industrializing and benevolent empire. Spain’s, in contrast, were an ungainly meld of races, ethnicities, and classes, purposely cut off from each other and the outside world, and kept uneducated and impoverished by the cruel design of the economically primeval mother country. Bolívar sought to, and for a time did, unite disparate pieces of the continent into a centralized state. To get there he led one of the longest, most expansive, and arguably most difficult wars in history.
The scion of an aristocratic Venezuelan family, Bolívar was orphaned at an early age and raised by his nurse. He inherited his forefathers’ hostility toward the Spanish, wandered Europe as a young man, reading Rousseau, Locke, and Voltaire, making love to noblewomen, contemplating ancient Rome and Greece, and, ultimately, vowing to liberate his homeland. His voyage home in 1807, which detoured in the United States, firmed his resolve. There, as Bolívar recalled, he “saw rational liberty at first hand” and found inspiration for the struggle ahead.
The revolution that followed came in fit and starts. Venezuela declared its independence in 1811; Spain snatched it away two years later. In 1813, leading what was known as the “Admirable Campaign,” Bolívar reestablished the country’s sovereignty, only to see it collapse the following year. After exile in Jamaica and Haiti, Bolívar regrouped, lit through and liberated New Grenada (Colombia) before moving on to free Venezuela once again. The territory encompassing much of modern day Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Bolivia followed.
Arana persuasively makes the case for Bolívar’s greatness as a military leader. He was flexible and savvy, equally adept at managing squabbling warlords and inspiring his men, who affectionately referred to him as “Iron Ass” due to his stamina in the saddle. He led astonishing marches through dangerous swamps, across flooded plains, and over ice-capped mountains. Rounding out the romantic picture was Bolívar’s way with the fairer sex. After the death of his young bride Maria Teresa Rodríguez del Toro y Alayza in 1803, he developed an alternating aloofness toward and need for female companionship. As Arana explains, “he was irresistibly attracted to them, but would find them surprisingly easy to win and discard.” Of the lovers who came and went, none meant more to Bolívar or is more central to this biography than Manuela Saenz. Vividly brought to life here, the colorful Saenz, often called “the Liberatrix,” shared her paramour’s passion for freedom, and thwarted an attempt on his life in 1828.
Unlike Washington, Bolívar’s battlefield successes were not matched by his political accomplishments. His fondest hope—putting the newly freed nations united under the flag of one republic—was realized in 1821 when the Congress of Cucuta created the Republic of Gran Colombia, and elected Bolívar, their liberator, president. But the union was torn apart by provincial resentments, which Bolívar sought to manage through increased power, culminating in a decree of dictatorship in 1828, which led to his resignation from the presidency two years later. Racked by infirmities, Bolívar, 47, died before he could even begin his exile.
Bolívar’s political legacy may not sit well with American readers, but as Arana stresses, his ideology was calibrated to the political sensibilities of the Spanish colonies. In his “Letter from Jamaica,” a note to a sympathetic Englishman, written during his exile in the Caribbean, Bolívar articulated with great clarity the reality facing a freed South America. Latin Americans were neither “Indian, nor pardos [people of mixed descent] nor Europeans, but an entirely new race,” writes Arana. Bolívar saw that neither monarchies nor “Philadelphia style” democracies could govern “a population cowed and infantilized by three hundred years of slavery.”
Bolívar is a fascinating figure of vast importance; Arana’s work is worthy of her subject. But Bolívar, like so many historical biographies, is overly embroidered. While her descriptions of the South American landscape are elegant and lyrical, passages such as “suffering the pain of inflamed hemorrhoids, he couldn’t help but burn, too, with a consuming fury” stretch the graceful limits of metaphor. And the occasionally drifting and repetitive narrative gives the biography, at times, a soft focus. Bolívar is a fine book, but it could stand some pruning.
Regardless, there are some powerful passages here, in particular Arana’s thoughtful coda, which explains the evolution of Bolívar’s reputation. Disgraced at the time of his death, history has been kind to El Libertador, and cunning politicians (most notably the late Hugo Chavez, who exhumed Bolívar’s corpse in a bizarre political stunt) have rushed to embrace the man and shamelessly suggest themselves as his reincarnation.
The admiration, though self-serving, is well-founded. Despite the ultimate failure of Gran Colombia, and the political and social turmoil of the continent since his time, Bolívar freed not one but six nations and guaranteed that, as Arana reminds us, “the Spaniards never returned.” No wonder the people of South America revere him and the citizens of Mudfort chose him as their namesake.

Ryan L. Cole, a former advisor to Governor Mitch Daniels, writes from Indiana.

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