Our Hand in Latin America
“You have some of the most full-hearted people anywhere working in the Latin American church,” author Lawrence Weschler was telling us. “The tragedy is that John Paul cannot see the similarities. When Arns was trying to do things the Vatican felt were too radical he’d say, ‘I’m not at all committing apostasy. I’m doing in Brazil what the Holy Father does in his native Poland.’”
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Weschler knows firsthand the effects of the pope’s moral authority in Poland, where Weschler (yearning for “somewhere where politics mattered”) first visited shortly after Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inauguration. Over the years Weschler has chronicled the Polish drama in several New Yorker articles and a 1982 book.
“In Eastern Europe there’s no doubt the liberation from the yoke of Communism is enormously exhilarating, but those countries have huge problems. To some extent they’ve been sold a bill of goods,” Weschler told us. “It might be that Communism at root is fatally flawed and is more horrible than the thing it’s trying to address. But the thing it tries to address is pretty horrible, as the people in Eastern Europe are going to find out. . . . Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish writer, said, ‘We’ll become like Latin America. There will be a polarization of wealth. Intellectuals will loosen themselves from society. There will be a hovering intellectual cloud and we will enter cycles of democracy and populism and demagogic totalitarianism.’”
And he told us that the authors of Brasil: Nunca Mais interpreted the Brazilian generals’ “doctrine of national security” as an American export given a native spin. Weschler writes that 80 percent of the senior officers in the “core group” of Brazil’s first military government had been trained in the U.S. Notions of an enemy within, which did damage enough to American society in the 50s, did much worse abroad.
“To some extent, the doctrine of national security is the concoction benefiting all these ‘Americans.’ It preserves that 6.3 percent no matter where it happens to be. To the extent it’s based on torture we should be aware of it and try to decide if we want to live lives based on that.”
Just a coincidence. . .
