Virgin Appears in Sky; Woman Gives Birth to Chicken “THE OLD IS DYING, AND THE NEW CAN- not be born,” Antonio Gramsci once reflected in his Prison Notebooks. “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” In Latin America, there is no better place to find these symptoms than in the conservative press. Combine an editor’s awareness of the power of media and the depth of many readers’ religious beliefs and superstitions, and the result can be crude politi- cal manipulation. Here are two recent illustrations. First Chile. In the town of Villa Alemana, just east of the seaport of Valparaiso, stands the house of a retired Navy officer. In November of last year, strange things began happening in the sky over his back yard. A teen-age boy, who had spent most of his life in state institutions, began to tell locals that the Virgin Mary had appeared to him in the clouds. She had delivered two messages to the overawed teen-ager; first, that the Chilean people should “pray for Russia,” and second, that “the priests have taken the wrong road. ” Within no time, the place had become a veritable tourist attraction for the faithful or the gullible. The Virgin duti- fully appeared to the crowds on several occasions. Though she hovered in the clouds, in living color and 3-D, she declined to speak again, much to the disappointment of the multitude. By now the local bishops were disturbed and suspicious. Reports circulated that strange-looking young men with trucks full of equipment had been seen close to the naval officer’s house. Who were they? Plainclothes secret police of the CNI? A team of investigators set up by the Bishop of Valparaiso declared that the Virgin in the clouds was “a false image.” But how was she manufactured? Hologram? Slide projection? Or was it all done with mirrors? The right-wing press took up the case of the suspended Virgin with alacrity. After all, she provided a useful distrac- tion from more troublesome contemporary issues such as the Sixth National Day of Protest against the Pinochet regime, or the public call for the CNI to be dissolved. Her swipe at local church activism was also neatly timed, for in November the Catholic Church was giving important back- ing to the swelling protest movement. The message was clear and topical and the right-wing press lapped it up. Next, went the joke in Chile, she will tell us that it is un-Christian for housewives to bang their saucepans in protest against the dictatorship. I N NICARAGUA TOO, “FALSE IMAGES” OF THE Virgin have long been a staple feature of the daily La Prensa, which alternates between conservative polemics and National Enquirer-style sensationalism. There was one, for example, whose statue sweated (tears, supposedly, for Sandinista Godlessness). La Prensa has also regaled its readers with two-headed calves, UFOs and earthquakes– all the proof you could wish that the universe cannot be subjected to the diabolical forces of dialectical materialism. Even so, La Prensa outdid itself in February. “Mother, gives birth to chicken!” proclaimed the headline. All the ingredients were there; even the slum where the dire omen was witnessed seemed well chosen: it was the Barrio Jorge Dimitrov, named for the famous Bulgarian Communist leader. Not surprisingly, Sefiora Amanda Carballo, the unfortu- nate woman in question, could find no explanation for the event. Nor could the neighbors, who had watched for a month in mystification as “a small protuberance” grew in the stomach of the mother-to-be. Nor, most importantly of all for La Prensa’s readership, could “a little nun from the College of Christ the King,” who was conveniently on hand to answer the bewildered reporter’s questions. “I can say nothing,” said the Sister ominously. “This is something abnormal.” Meanwhile, the two pound black and white chicken (born dead, unfortunately, so unable to tell its side of the story) was placed on public display in a glass jar. There, according to La Prensa’s final paragraph, it became “the principal topic of conversation among neighbors of the Barrio Dimi- trov, who offered their conjectures about this event that violates the laws of nature.” Like the Virgin of Villa Alemana, the chicken’s message was clear. T HE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION, MEANWHILE, has designated a new special envoy to Central Ameri- ca, to replace the unlamented Richard Stone. The new- comer is Harry W. Shlaudeman, admittedly a stranger to Central America, but by no means unfamiliar to the tricky ways of Latin American politics. The name may already be familiar to our readers. Shlaudeman acquired his field ex- perience first as assistant to Special Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in the wake of the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic. Later, he served from 1969-1973 as deputy chief of mission in the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, Chile. During that tour of duty, he was responsible for drafting the “Shlaudeman Paper,” an influential contingency plan for dealing with the new socialist government of Salvador Allende. The rest is history. From Chile, Shlaudeman was given onward postings as Ambassador to Venezuela, then Peru and Argentina. The transplanting of his Chilean experience to Central America could be intriguing to watch, especially if La Prensa begins to replace its folksy bottled chickens with high tech Virgins in the skies over Managua.
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