In the name of free enterprise, freeways,
and the freedom to buy, city air has been made unbreathable.
The car is not the only guilty party, but it is the one that
attacks city dwellers most directly.
Kidnapping of the ends by the means: the super-
market buys you, the television watches you,
the automobile drives you. The giants that
make cars and gasoline-businesses nearly as juicy as
arms and drugs-have convinced us that the motor is
the only possible prolongation of the human body.
Under the dictatorship of the automobile, the vast
majority of people in our cities have no alternative but
to pay to travel, like sardines in a can, on crumbling
and scarce public transport. Latin America’s streets
never have room for the bicycle, that scorned vehicle,
symbol of backwardness when it’s not used for recre-
ation or sports.
Consumer society-that eighth wonder of the world,
Beethoven’s tenth-imposes its own symbolism of
power and its own mythology of social advancement.
“Your car is your best friend,” the commercial pro-
claims. Vertigo on wheels will make you happy: “Live
your passion!” offers another ad. Advertising invites
you to become part of the ruling class with the magic
little key: “Get it your way!” orders the voice that
gives the orders of the market, and “Show off your
personality!” And if you put a tiger in your tank,
according to the billboards I recall from my childhood,
you’ll go faster and be more powerful than everybody,
and you’ll crush whoever gets in your way on the road
to success.
Language creates the illusory reality that advertising
needs in order to sell. But in the real reality, the instru-
ments created to increase the domain of liberty end up
helping to hold us in jail. The car, machine for saving
time, eats up human time. Born to serve us, it puts us at
its service. It obliges us to work more and more hours
in order to feed it. It robs our space and poisons our air.
In the name of free enterprise, freeways and the
freedom to buy, city air has been made unbreathable.
The car is not the only guilty party in the daily crime
of violating the world’s air, but it is the one that
attacks city dwellers most directly.
The ferocious volleys of lead that get into your
blood and attack your nerves, liver and bones, are dev-
astating, above all in the southern realms of the world
where neither catalytic converters nor unleaded gaso-
line are obligatory. But in cities throughout the planet,
cars give off most of the gases which poison the air,
infect the bronchial tubes and eyes, and are suspected
of causing cancer.
According to environmentalists, every child born in
Santiago de Chile breathes the equivalent of seven
cigarettes daily, and one out of every four children
suffers from some form of bronchitis.
Brazilian friend flies to the city of Sdo Paulo.
On the plane, he meets a tourist from Singa-
pore. Singapore is, as we all know, one of the
“Asian tigers” that the international technocracy sells
us as miracles born of the freedom of money and the
absence of the state.
My friend is left with his mouth agape: the tourist is
a public schoolteacher in Singapore and she earns 15
times as much as a Brazilian teacher, because in Sin-
gapore the state does not neglect education. In the air-
port, another surprise hits when they climb into a taxi
for the city center: the cost of an equivalent trip in
Singapore is 15 times less, because in Singapore the
state gives hefty subsidies to public transport. When
they reach downtown, the streets of Sdo Paulo are
choked with traffic, and the air is a gray curtain.
Amidst the clamor, enemy of ear and soul, my friend
manages to hear a third surprise: in Singapore, the
state limits the circulation of private cars with high
taxes and tariffs.
NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
Eduardo Galeano’s most recent book is We Say No: Chronicles 1963-1991 (Norton, 1992). Eduardo Galeano 1995; transla- tion cMark Fried 1995. Published by permission of Susan Bergholtz Literary Services, New York.
26URBAN REPORT
What is ecology? A taxi
painted green? In Mexico
City, taxis painted green are
called “ecological taxis” and
the few sickly-colored trees
that survive the stampede of
cars are called “ecological
parks.”
In an official publication
from the end of last year,
Mexico City authorities
offered a few pieces of “eco-
logical advice” that seem to
have been inspired by the
darkest prophets of the apoc-
alypse. The Metropolitan
Commission for the Preven-
tion and Control of Environ-
mental Pollution recom- Luiz Cruz Azaceta, Shoot C mends, and I quote, that on
very polluted days (and nearly all are) the residents of
this city “should go out of doors as little as possible,
keep doors, windows and vents closed, and not exer-
cise between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.”
Those who know about ancient Greece say the city
was born as a meeting place for people. Is there any
room for people in these immense garages? A little
before the “ecological advice” was published, I went
for a stroll on the streets of Mexico City. I walked for
four hours amid groaning motors. I survived. My
friends gave me an effusive welcome, then they gave
me the name of a good psychiatrist.
The automobile kills a multitude every year all over
the world. In many countries, the statistics are ques-
tionable or non-existent or out-of-date. The most
recent world-wide estimate available (from the Wash-
ington-based Worldwatch Institute) indicates that no
fewer than 250,000 people died in traffic accidents in
1985. Not even the Vietnam War killed as many peo-
ple in a single year.
In Germany, to give an example from a country of
well-kept statistics, in 1992 there were five times as
many deaths from cars as from drugs. In just that year, the car killed twice as many Germans as has AIDS in
the ten years since it appeared.
Throughout the world, transport is the primary
cause of death among young people-more than dis-
ease, drugs or crime. A massive international publicity
campaign warns young people every day about the
risks of sex in the time of AIDS. Why isn’t there a
similar campaign about the dangers of the automo-
bile? Is a driver’s license equivalent to a license to
carry a gun?
To travel by bicycle on the streets of any large Latin
American city, which have no bike lanes, is a most
)ut
practical way of committing
suicide. In the countries of
the South of the planet,
where laws exist to be bro-
ken, there are many fewer
cars than in the North, but
the cars kill many more.
Why must Latin Ameri-
cans who do not have their
own car-the immense
majority of whom cannot
and will never be able to
buy one-remain con-
demned to stand watch on
corners, with no alternative
but to wait for the occasion-
al bus? Why must they
remain obliged to buy tick-
S1978, Tempera on paper. ets that eat up a healthy part of their feeble wages, with-
out any alternative? Why don’t they open protected
lanes for bicycles on the main avenues and thorough-
fares before it is too late?
Perhaps some Latin American cities, the most Baby-
lonian, have already passed the point of no return on
the road to their own ruin. But in others it would be
perfectly feasible to create an auto-free zone.
ars don’t vote, but politicians are terrified of
causing them the slightest displeasure. No
Latin American government-civilian or mili-
tary, right, center or left-has dared to challenge
motorized power.
It is true that recently Cuba has become filled with
bicycles. But that didn’t happen during the 30-odd
years of revolution when Cuba could have chosen that
cheaper vehicle which does not dirty the air and which
requires no more fuel than human muscle. No. Bicy-
cles appeared massively in Cuba when there was no
other choice, because not a drop of oil was left: not as
an embraceable joy, but as an inevitable calamity.
Not even revolutions, which no one could deny
sought change, proposed even the most elementary
steps to diminish their dependence on the omnipotent
corporations that dominate the world’s trade in auto-
mobiles and oil.
We Latin Americans have swallowed the pill that
the hell of Los Angeles is the only possible model of
modernization: a vertiginous superhighway that scorns
public transport, practices velocity as a form of vio-
lence, and drives people out. We’ve been taught to
drink poison, and we’ll pay any price as long as it
comes in a shiny bottle.
There is no colonialism worse than one that con-
quers our heart and snuffs out our reason.
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