by Susanne Jonas*

Image from www.anticapitalistes.net.

When legendary Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano died on April 13, 2015 at age 74, radio and television stations in many Latin American countries interrupted their regular programming to pay tribute. Argentina’s daily newspaper Página 12 published 33 tributes on April 15.  The headline in Mexico’s La Jornada read, “The invisible [people] lose their chronicler.”

Galeano’s message was a Latin American cry for social justice. He laid bare the workings and the effects of US imperial invasions of various types and their collaborators among local elites. Argentine writer and journalist Stella Calloni tells us that he considered the fundamentalisms of IMF and World Bank technocrats to be more powerful than Islamic fundamentalisms. He shone a laser-beam exposing the crimes of the military dictatorships in nearly every Latin American nation during the 1970s.^[1] He wrote sometimes in prose, as in his early book, The Open Veins of Latin America (1971), but primarily in collections/collages of stories and vignettes.^[2]

In the words of Chilean author Ariel Dorfman, Galeano’s passion was to tell the stories that would have been unknown or forgotten, and were ignored by other writers. In a Democracy Now interview, Galeano answered a question about how he chose his stories for Children of the Days (2011): “They chose me. You know, they touched my shoulder or my back, saying ‘Tell me. I am a wonderful story and deserve to be… written by you’… After the process [of selection], the only surviving texts or stories are the ones I feel that are better than silence.”

Galeano wrote and spoke often in lyrical tones, punctuated by humor, irony, and tenderness—even about very dark subjects, and even in searing, razor-sharp analyses of injustice. He had a unique ability to inspire, to comfort, or to enrage us against the power elites—or, alternatively, to make us smile, sometimes to laugh out loud, or to shake our heads in disbelief. And he delighted the entire continent with his ode to Football (Soccer) in Sun and Shadow.

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As noted in recent tributes, Galeano wrote and spoke with a Latin American voice. But at the same time, in many countries, readers and listeners felt him to be “theirs.” As one friend wrote, “When he was in Uruguay, he was Uruguayan; when he was in Cuba, he was Cuban; when he was in Guatemala, he was Guatemalan.” He was Zapatista when he was in Chiapas. In El Salvador, he was considered “one of ours.” All the more so in Argentina, where he lived in exile for several years.

Beyond nation-states, Galeano also inhabited other worlds of social justice: the worlds of indigenous and Afro-Latino peoples throughout Latin America, and the world of women’s rights. Salvadoran feminist Silvia Ethel Matus wrote about “the feminine in Galeano”; and when he died, felt that “We women have lost an ally.” He once wrote, “Human rights begin in the home.” His political hero was Rosa Luxemburg. His last book, published days after his death, is the anthology Mujeres, stories about real and mythical women, from Marilyn Monroe to Scheherazade.

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Guatemala was the thread that linked me to Galeano and gave me the privilege of knowing him personally. His very early book, Guatemala: Clave de Latinoamérica (Key to Latin America; 1967), was the first I read on Guatemala, and it drew me into the country’s endlessly byzantine, convoluted dramas.^[3] That was the Guatemala of the first-wave 1960s leftist guerrilla insurgency. Guatemala was the “key” to Latin America, Galeano wrote, “not as a mirror” of all other countries, but as the first laboratory of dirty wars (counterinsurgency) and “as a source of great lessons, painfully learned.”

Even as he became the chronicler of all Latin America, Galeano remained engaged with Guatemala and referenced its painful lessons. In Days and Nights of Love and War, he wrote about the 1971 daytime assassination of a wheelchair-bound Congressman who had criticized exploitative foreign nickel company investments. Galeano served on the jury of the 1983 Permanent People’s Tribunal (Madrid), which focused on the army’s scorched-earth, genocidal response to the second-wave insurgency in the Mayan highlands. From the Maya he also learned hope: “‘What is a man on the road?’ asks a sacred Maya book. And answers, ‘Time.’ [In]…Guatemala, the tormented present remembers a different possible future.”

In July 1996, Galeano revisited Guatemala, this time as an honored speaker in a large auditorium at the national university’s historic cultural complex. His reading gave that overflow crowd a great gift, a balm for the war-torn country’s dark secrets and its ideological, class, and racial fissures. He magically lifted our spirits to another plane: “The right to dream should be part of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.”

Beyond his public readings, Galeano said he was also back to continue learning. He met with the Archbishop’s Recovery of Historical Memory commission investigating war crimes; some of those horrific war stories later appeared in Children of the Days. He also visited the Mayan highlands with Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchú. And from the Mayas he took the title of Children of the Days: as he later told Democracy Now, it came “from something I heard years ago in a Mayan community of Guatemala. Somebody said, ‘We are children of the days. We are sons and daughters of time.’”

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In recent years, several debates have arisen in the United States over Galeano’s legacy. The most prominent materialized when a New York Times article (5/24/2014) proclaimed in Manichaean terms Galeano’s own “disavowal” of Open Veins of Latin America, his 1971 critique of the foreign pillage and raging capitalism that created the hemisphere’s inequalities and injustices. As evidence of his disavowal, the NYT article cited Galeano’s humorous comment at a 2014 Brazilian Book Fair, “I wouldn’t be capable of reading this book again; I’d keel over… my physique can’t tolerate it.” Upon his death, numerous U.S. mainstream media repeated the disavowal tale – but they missed the point: Galeano was poking fun at the writing style of his younger self. He told Democracy Now—and other interviewers, in a similar vein—“My style has changed a lot… but I’m not repentant [of Open Veins]… not a single comma, not a single period.”

Eduardo Galeano’s passing leaves a painful human and cultural void, but his spirit remains embedded in our minds and hearts. As Roberto Fernández Retamar, head of Cuba’s Casa de las Américas, has said, “What is left is his extraordinary presence.” As if to affirm his presence, Galeano has left us one more forthcoming book—as yet untitled.

by David Edgar*

Ending with Thursday’s vote, the British general election campaign has been exceptional in many ways. Its result will almost certainly be indecisive and it’s possible that the shape of the new government will remain unknown for days or even weeks. But underneath the battle between two middle-aged white males for the office of prime minister, new forces are engaged. The most emblematic visual moment of the campaign was a group hug by three women party leaders after a television debate. But the outcome will be decided by two groups of angry, white, poor men.

The roots of this exceptional election lie in the last one. After 13 years in power, with an unpopular leader (Gordon Brown) and having been through the financial crisis of 2008, the Labour Party expected to lose the 2010 election. In Britain, the party that gains an overall majority in the House of Commons forms a government, with the majority party leader as prime minister and the cabinet drawn from that party’s members of parliament (and a few from the House of Lords).

Two strong parties in a winner-takes-all electoral system meant that one party or the other was able to govern alone for almost all the postwar years. However, the proportion of seats won by other parties had been gradually increasing since the 1980s. In the 2010 election David Cameron’s Conservatives won the largest number of seats, but not an absolute majority, so they had to negotiate an agreement with the third party, Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats, to govern in coalition. Both parties accused Labour of running up a massive fiscal deficit in its last years in office, and were committed to a policy of fiscal austerity to bring that deficit down. However, under its new leader Ed Miliband, Labour could argue that—like Barack Obama’s—its 2009 and 2010 spending stopped the post-crash recession turning into a slump. Meanwhile, outraged by their usually left-leaning, protest-vote party going into coalition with the Conservatives, around a third of the Liberal Democrats told pollsters that they would vote Labour next time.

Commentators thought that this spelled a return to traditional two-party politics: a right-wing government (albeit formed of two parties) cutting spending and causing unemployment, up against a left-wing opposition calling for greater spending, particularly for the poor.  However, the deep disillusionment with all politicians—the British parliament had been rocked by an expenses scandal in the dying years of the Labour government—merely shifted the protest vote elsewhere. And, as across Europe, that protest vote was concerned not just with economic but also social issues, particularly those of identity.

In 2010 the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a right-wing populist party that argues for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, gained a paltry 3.1% of the votes. However, under its effective leader Nigel Farage, UKIP persuaded right-wing voters that the only way to reduce immigration was to withdraw from the EU, which allows free movement of labour across the continent.

Over the last five years, UKIP has seen its polling increase to well into the 20s, and, in 2014, it won both the local and European elections (on low turn-outs). UKIP was seen as taking votes from the Conservatives, which indeed it did, provoking Cameron’s party to chase it to the right on immigration (slashing benefits to migrants and their families) and Europe (promising a referendum on Britain’s continuing membership). Under the winner-takes-all system, UKIP was unlikely to take a huge number of seats at the general election, but by splitting the right-wing vote it could let Labour win in many marginals. The rise of a successful right-wing populist party was of course alarming to the left, but—secretly—Labour strategists viewed it as an asset.

However, Labour (and almost everyone else) had misunderstood the new force. UKIP was presumed to consist of red-faced military types and stern blue-rinsed matrons. However, research showed that its voters were actually poorer, older, and whiter (and more male) than the general population. Despite leader Nigel Farage’s instinctive right libertarianism, the party shifted to the left on some economic issues (in the manner of the French National Front). Suddenly, they were a threat to Labour as well, and so the party joined the anti-immigration arms-race, ratcheting up its own rhetoric.

Nonetheless, Labour seemed set fair at least to be the largest party at the election. Two years ago, the economy started turning around, with unemployment falling. Still claiming that austerity policies had delayed the recovery, Labour shifted its ground from the recession to the cost of living. It pointed to a drop in living standards—working people are earning on average £1,600 less a year (after inflation), compared with 2010. The jobs that have been created include many that are low-paid, part-time, and on zero-hours contracts. Nearly a million people use voluntary food banks. Echoing Ronald Reagan, Labour was able to ask the electorate if it felt better off than four years ago, and get the same answer. In this, Labour was positing an alternative narrative to the Conservatives’: a narrative in which, for years if not decades, the super-rich had got super-richer, working- and middle-class wages had flatlined, and the people’s aspirations had been met either by tax credits topping up their wages, or by personal debt.

However, with the country still borrowing over £75b a year, Labour didn’t feel that it could offer an end to austerity, only a fairer distribution of pain. With this offer, and with UKIP still likely to bite more substantially into the Conservatives’ vote than theirs, Labour felt confident of winning around 35% of the vote, on the basis of which it could be the largest party, and maybe even win an absolute majority. There was after all nowhere else for its core vote to go.

That all changed in the most unexpected way on September 18 last year. Almost unnoticed, traditionally Labour Scotland had been shifting to the Scottish National Party (SNP), whose main plank is independence, for many years. Following devolution of many powers to a Scottish assembly in 1999, the SNP served two terms as an opposition to a Labour-led government, then as a minority government from 2007, and finally as a majority in 2011. As such, the SNP insisted that a referendum on Scottish independence be held last fall, which ended up with a substantial, but not victorious, vote for the Scots to leave the union (45% to 55%). However, the energy of the Yes to independence campaign led to a massive increase in SNP membership and—now—the serious prospect that the SNP will win all of Scotland’s 59 seats, including the 41 Labour won in 2010. This haemorrhage would and will stop Labour gaining an absolute majority: at the moment, according to the polls, it looks like stopping them being the largest party, and thus having the first chance to form a government.

In the heady afterglow of the referendum campaign, there is another reason for the SNP’s prospective success. After the vote, the SNP’s leader Alex Salmond handed on power to his deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, who has shifted the party significantly to the left. Now, in Scotland at least, there is a party vowing to end austerity and to increase public spending. At the end of the second televised debate (boycotted by Prime Minister Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg) Labour’s Ed Miliband looked on as three anti-austerity party leaders—the SNP’s Sturgeon, the Welsh Nationalists’ Leanne Wood and the Green Party’s Natalie Bennett—engaged in a group hug. Suddenly, the politics of gender, national identity, and the environment melded with traditional left politics of public spending and defending the poor.

This kind of rainbow alliance has been posited before. There are proper doubts about how left the SNP has actually been in power in Edinburgh. But this time there are over 60 constituencies likely to vote for a left agenda (on top of many constituencies with Labour MPs who oppose austerity). And, what was the bedrock of support for the Yes vote in the Scottish independence referendum? The traditionally Labour-supporting working-class of Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city. In fact, angry, poor, white Scottish men. The only demographic difference with the UKIP vote is that the Glasgow Yes vote was younger.

The lesson of this election may turn out to be that when there is an oppositional, left-wing alternative to the prevailing austerity consensus, then a surprising number of people vote for it. But it’s also true that—in the absence of such a repository—the angry and disconnected can go another way. And the result of Thursday’s vote? It looks like there will be an anti-Conservative majority, but it may well be that the Conservatives win the largest number of seats, and seek to cling on to power. In which case, there may well be another election soon.

* David Edgar is a playwright who has written for Britain’s National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and many other theatres. His RSC adaptation of Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby won major awards in London and New York, and is frequently revived. His two plays about a fictional West Coast gubernatorial election—Continental Divide—were presented by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Berkeley Rep in 2003. He was Professor of Playwriting at the University of Birmingham and is currently Humanitas Visiting Professor of Drama at Oxford. He is a frequent commentator and reviewer for The Guardian and the London Review of Books.

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David Edgar, “Not Over Yet: The British General Election of 2015.” Social Justice blog, 5/5/2015. © Social Justice 2015.