Taking Note

Armies of the Night THE STORY HAS IT THAT AT AN INTERNA- tional gathering of scientists General Jos6 Checo of the Dominican Army announced a forthcoming mission to the sun. Reporters cornered the General: How will the spacecraft withstand such high temperatures? “Oh, that part is easy,” General Checo replied. “We’re going to travel at night!” Every country of Latin America has its “General Checo,” a caricature of the military threat which hangs over the continent. Painting the brass as harmlessly stupid is one way of coping. Of course, they are hardly stupid, and anything but harmless. A window on the military mind opened recently when someone stole or leaked the minutes of the XVII Conference of American Armies (known by its Spanish acronym, CEA), held last year in Argentina, with top- level delegations from fifteen countries, including the United States. The documents are a sobering commentary on the stunningly logical illogic which all the participants seemed to share with General Checo. In “Development of a Combined Appreciation of Subversion in the Conti- nent,” the “enemy” which justifies and orients the ar- mies’ mission is called by name-the International Communist Movement, known in CEA circles by its Spanish acronym, MCI, “directed by the USSR and supported by Cuba, Nicaragua and Libya.” The docu- ment offers a country-by-country analysis of the MCI’s activities, and is duly marked SECRETO. Recognizing that armed insurgencies no longer pose a threat outside of Central America, Peru and Colombia, the officers assert that Moscow has turned to a much more dangerous and underhanded strategy: the “war of peace,” based on the premise that “peace is the continu- ation of war by other means.” Orwell would have been impressed. According to the military, the MCI’s devilish method is to defend human rights (effective in “limiting the freedom of countersubversive action”), encourage culture and education (for “spreading revolutionary ide- ology”), and propagate liberation theology (“that subtle and substantive means for the MCI to penetrate soci- ety”). An even more insidious tactic is the MCI’s sup- port for multiparty parliamentary democracy (“to re- place the dictatorship of the proletariate” on the road to socialism). “All of this is a means,” the officers warn, “not an end.” Behind Moscow’s sinister “war of peace,” the CEA affirms, is an Italian schoolteacher who spent most of his short life in Mussolini’s jails: Antonio Gramsci. (His writings were locked up even longer than he was; they were quashed for nearly 30 years by the Italian Commu- nist Party he helped found.) Of Gramsci’s many contri- butions to Marxist theory, Latin America’s brass have latched on to his affirmation of the revolutionary value of artists and intellectuals in raising mass political con- sciousness. Through “cultural action,” the CEA docu- ments say, the MCI intends “to make vulnerable the very principles which advance our conception of the world.” Like peace, democracy and human rights, one would assume. ATIN AMERICA’S MILITARY ARE NOT THE only ones who have discovered the Gramscian menace. The infamous Committee of Santa Fe-the right-wing clique of professors and ex-generals cen- tered around the Washington think-tank, Council for Inter-American Security, who in 1980 outlined what later became Reagan’s Latin America policy-is back with Santa Fe II. They identify the “Marxist Cultural Offensive” as a prime threat to the Americas. And be- hind it-none other than Antonio Gramsci. “For Gramsci…it was possible to control or shape the regime through the democratic process…through con- quest of the nation’s culture….It is in this context that liberation theology must be understood,” they maintain. “Just as Catholicism is redefined by liberation theologi- ans, so art is transformed, books are reinterpreted, cur- ricula are overhauled…” Incredibly enough, Santa Fe’s armchair generals point to “the ascendancy of the left in much of the mass media throughout Latin America,” as evidence of the success of this endeavor. Democracy will be unable to stop the Gramscians, they claim, as long as they control the “consciousness-raising industry.” WTH CHECO-LIKE ASTUTENESS, THE MILI- tary of the continent have raised the farce of the MCI to such heights that it has come to include nearly everyone but themselves. Now, in the military mind, peace is war, the defense of human rights is the viola- tion of human rights, liberation is oppression, democ- racy is dictatorship…even disarmament is warfare. The Chilean delegation proposed a moratorium on the ac- quisition of high-tech offensive weaponry, irrelevant in battling the war of peace, because it diverts resources from economic development. And without develop- ment, they insist, subversion will always find fertile ground. Who then is the MCI? Anyone who supports democ- racy, defends human rights, promotes peaceful social change, believes that Jesus fought against oppression-in short, everyone to the left of Pinochet. Perhaps this is why General Checo’s trip to the sun makes sense. After all, how can we strive for that bright shining future where the MCI finally falls into the ashbin of history, except by remaining in the darkest of nights?