The++Philanthropic+Orge

The Philanthropic Ogre, by Octavioi Paz in The Labrynth of Solitude

Just look How big I l am! Jove up there in the sky. . . he can't be any bigger. -OVID, Metamorphoses, 13, lines 839-42

==Mexico, 1978 Liberals used to think that the "civil society" would siruoH thanks to the development of free enterprise, and the function of the state would correspondingly be reduced until it was merely supervising humanity's spontaneous evolution. Marxists more optimistically thought the century that saw the rise of socialism would also see the withering-away of the state.== ==These hopes and prophecies have evaporated. The twentieth-century state has proved itself a force more powerful than the ancient empires and a master more terrible than the old tyrants and despots: a faceless, inhuman master who functions not like a demon but like a machine. Theologians and moralists had conceived of evil as an exception and a transgression, a blot on the universality and transparency of Being. Except for Manichaean tendencies, in the philosophic tradition of the West, evil lacked substance and could be defined only as an absence, that is to say, a lack of Being. Strictly speaking, evil did not exist, only evil men, exceptions, special cases. The twentieth-century state inverts the proposition:== ==evil ultimately conquers universality and presents itself wearing the mask of Being. Except that, as evil grows larger, evil- doers grow proportionally smaller. They are no longer exceptional beings, only mirrors of normalcy. A Hitler or a Stalin, a Himmler or a Yezhov astonish us by their mediocrity as well as by their crimes. Their intellectual insignificance confirms Hannah Arendt's verdict on "the banality of evil." The modern state is a machine-a continually self-reproducing machine. Far from being the mere political super-structure of the capitalist system in the West, it is the model for economic organizations; large enterprises and businesses imitate it and tend to turn into states and empires more pow- erful than many nations. In the last fifty years we have witnessed not the expected socialization of capitalism but its gradual, irresistible bureaucratization. The great multinational companies already hint at a bureaucratic capitalism.== ==Their counterparts are the totalitarian bureaucracies of Eastern Europe. There the process has been more rapid and more ruthless. "Civil society" has almost completely disappeared: nothing and no one exists outside the state. It is a surprising inversion of values that would have made Nietzsche himself shudder: the state is Being and exception; irregularity and even simple individualism are forms of evil, that is, of nothingness. The concentration camp, which reduces the prisoner to nonperson, is the political expression of the ontology implicit in the totalitarian ideocracies.== ==Despite the all-pervading presence and omnipotence of the twentieth-century state-and despite the example of the anarchist tradition, so rich in divinations and prophetic descriptions-criticism of power and of the state was reborn only a short while ago. I am thinking especially of France, Germany and the United States. In Latin America, there is much less interest in the state. Here our scholars are still obsessed by the themes of dependence and underdevelopment. It is true that our situation is different. Latin-American societies are highly peculiar: the Counter-Reformation and liberalism exist side by side as do the landed estates and industry, the illiterate and the cosmopolitan man of letters, the political boss and the banker. But the oddity of our societies should not prevent us from studying the Latin-American state, which is actually one of our greatest peculiarities. On the one hand, it is heir to the patrimonial regime of Spain; on the other, it is the lever to get modernization under way. Its nature is ambiguous, contradictory, and in a certain way fascinating. The following pages, dealing with the case best known to me-Mexico-are the result of such fascination. I need hardly warn readers that my opinions are a series of reflections, not a consistent theory.== ==First, the state created by the Mexican revolution is stronger than the nineteenth-century state. In this, as in so many other things, the revolutionaries have not only shown decidedly traditionalist leanings but have been unfaithful to the liberals of 1857 whom they claim as their predecessors.== ==Except during the interregnums of anarchy and civil war, we Mexicans have lived in the shadow of governments that have been despotic or paternalistic in turn, but have always been strong: the Aztec priest-king, the viceroy, the dictator, Mr. President. The exception is the brief period that Cosio Villegas calls the Restored Republic, during which the liberals tried to blunt the claws of the state we inherited from New Spain. Those claws were (and still are) called bureaucracy and army. The liberals wanted a strong society and a weak state- an exemplary attempt that soon failed: Porfirio Diaz [who was president in 1877 and again in 1884-1911] inverted the proposition and fashioned Mexico into a weak society dominated by a strong state.== ==The liberals thought that modernization would be carried out by the bourgeoisie and the middle class, as it had been in other parts of the world-in England, France and the United States. This did not happen, and with Diaz the state began to turn into the agent of modernization. It is true that his regime based its economic policies on private enterprise and foreign capital. But the founding of industrial enterprises and the construction of factories and railroads was less the expression of the dynamism of a bourgeois class than the result of a deliberate government policy of stimuli and incentives. Moreover, what decided the issue was not economic policy but the goal to strengthen the state. In order for an organism to be able to complete such historic tasks as the modernization of a country, the first prerequisite is that it be strong. Under Porfirio Diaz the Mexican state recovered the power it had lost during the conflicts and wars that followed Independence.== ==The conservative historian Carlos Pereyra points out that the political convulsions and the chaotic state of the country right up to Diaz dictatorship essentially resulted from the weakness of governments from Independence, in 1821, onward. The colonial state of New Spain had been a construction of extraordinary solidity, capable of withstanding both rebellious landowners and despotic bishops. When it collapsed, it left behind a rich class that was extremely powerful and di- vided into irreconcilable factions. The absence of a central moderating power, combined with the nonexistence of democratic traditions, explains why opposing actions quickly took to arms in order to settle their differences. And so the plague of militarism was born; the sword was a response to the weakness of the state and the power of the factions.== ==Why was the Mexican state weak? It was weak, says Per- eyra, because it was poor. I must clarify; it was not the country but the body politic that was poor. The state was poor, com- pared with a church that owned half the country and a propertied and landowning class that was immensely wealthy. How could the bishops be subjugated, and how could law be made to prevail in a society where each family head considered him- self a monarch? Under General Diaz dictatorship the Mexican state began to emerge from poverty. The governments that followed ,Diaz once the violent stage of the Revolution was over, went on getting richer, and soon, with Calles, an- other general [president 1924-28, and the power behind the presidency 1928-36], the Mexican government embarked on a career as great entrepreneur. Today it is the most powerful capitalist in the country though, as we all know, neither the most efficient nor the most honest.== ==The revolutionary state did more than grow and get rich. Like Japan during the Meiji period, it made use of appropriate legislation and a policy of privileges, stimuli, and credits to further and protect the development of the capitalist class.== ==Mexican capitalism was born long before the Revolution, but it came to maturity and grew to what it is now thanks to the actions and protection of revolutionary governments. At the same time, the state stimulated and favored industrial and rural workers' organizations. These groups lived and still live in its shadow, since they form part of the PRI. *==

==Yet it would be wrong and simplistic to reduce our image of their relationship with public power to that of subject and ruler. This relationship is considerably more complex: for one thing, in a one-party regime like Mexico's, the popular organizations are the almost exclusive source of legitimization of the state's power; for another, the popular unions, especially the workers union, have a certain freedom of movement. The government needs the unions as much as the unions need the government. In practice, the only two forces capable of negotiating with the government are the capitalists and the lead- ers of the workforce. Finally, not content with stimulating and, to a certain extent, creating both the capitalist and the working-class sectors in its own image, the post revolutionary state ended its evolution by creating two parallel bureaucracies. The first is made up of administrators and technocrats; these people are government personnel and the legitimate successors of the bureaucracies of the colony and thePorfirist" period. They are the mind and arm of modernization. The. second is composed of political professionals who run the var-ous levels and divisions of the PRI. These two bureaucracies live in a continuous osmosis, everlastingly moving from the party to the government and vice versa.== ==The description is hasty and schematic but not inexact. It shows that the central power in Mexico lies not in private cap- italism nor in the syndicated unions nor in political parties, but in the state. The state is Capital, Work and Party-a secular Trinity. However, it is not a totalitarian state nor a dictatorship. In the Soviet Union the state owns things and human beings; I mean, it owns the means of production, products and producers. In its turn the state is owned by the Commu- nist party and the party is owned by the Central Committee. In Mexico, the state belongs to the double bureaucracy: the administrative technocracy and the political caste. And yet, these bureaucracies are not autonomous, and they live in a constant relationship-rivalry, complicity, alliances and ruptures-with the other two groups who dominate the country along with them: private capitalism and the working-class bureaucracies. Furthermore, these latter are not homogeneous either; they are divided by conflicts of interests, ideas and personalities.== ==Now, indeed, another sector is becoming more and more influential and independent: the middle class and its spokesmen, students and intellectuals. The function of the friars and clerics of New Spain now is fulfilled by university communities and writers. Ideology today occupies the place that once belonged to theology and religion. Luckily, Mexico is an increasingly diverse society, and the practice of criticism-the only antidote for ideological orthodoxies-is growing in pro- portion to the diversification of the country.==

The interaction of all these classes, groups and individuals takes place within a framework-the international arena.
==Some countries indirectly influence public opinion by means of different groups-especially students, journalists and other professional sectors. As in the case of Cuba, this influence sometimes has little relation to the country's actual power and progress on the economic, social or cultural fronts. Naturally, the most substantial reality is the multiple power of the United States: a power that is economic, social, technical, scientific and military, all at one and the same time. The might of the United States becomes a fascination-that is, it inspires a contradictory feeling of attraction and revulsion. Its influence is especially profound, and frequently ominous, in the economic sphere; it also penetrates the realms of technology, science, culture, popular sensibility and, of course, politics.== ==The presence of the United States in Mexican life is a historical fact that needs no demonstration; it has a physical, material reality. My earlier observation about the ambiguous relationship between the unions and the Mexican state can be applied to a certain extent to the one that unites us with Washington. I mean, it is a relationship of domination that cannot be reduced purely and simply to the concept of dependence;it is a relationship that allows a certain freedom of negotiation and movement. There is a margin for action. Narrow though this margin may seem to us, it is at any rate considerably wider than that which separates Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia or Cuba from the Soviet Union. Of course, in moments of political crisis the influence of the American ambassador to Mexico can be-and indeed has been-as important and decisive as that of the satrap of the Great King during the Peloponnesian war.== ==The radical authors-Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky-who at the turn of the century concerned themselves with the social history of prerevolutionary Russia were at one in pointing out the weakness of the bourgeoisie when faced with the authoritarian state. One of the characteristics of Russian capitalism, was its dependence on the Czarist state. The bourgeoisie never succeeded in freeing itself totally from the tutelage of the autocracy. This failing ultimately prevented it from completing the task that, according to the Marxists, was its historical mission: the modernization of Russia. All the polemics between Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks stem from the different positions that these groups adopted to deal with this situation.== ==Beside the weakness of the bourgeoisie, another often neglected factor must be mentioned: the Czarist state could not be an efficient agent of modernization because, in its structure, its leaders, and its animating spirit, it was still to a large extent a patrimonoialist state, to use the term coined by Max Weber. In short, there is no doubt that the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie, when confronted with the patrimonialist state, was the determining cause of the Revolution's final out- come. The Soviet bureaucracy, which succeeded the autocracy, took upon itself the task of modernization that, historically, according to Marxist opinion, belonged to the bourgeoisie; but the results were as contrary to the forecasts of the Mensheviks as to those of the Bolsheviks. The conjunction of political power and economic power-both of them absolute-produced neither the bourgeois democratic revo- lution nor socialism, but the implantation of a totalitarian ideocracy.== ==I have used the example of Russia, although it seems far- fetched, because this sheds light, indirectly, on the peculiar ties of the Mexican situation. In Mexico as in Russia at the turn of the century, the historic goals of the intellectuals and also those of many prominent groups and the enlightened bourgeoisie can be epitomized in the word "modernization" (industrial development, democracy, technology, laicity, etc.). In Mexico as in Russia, when faced with the relative weakness of its own bourgeoisie, the central agent of modernization has been the state. Finally, as in Russia, our state inherited a pa- trimonial regime-that of the viceroys of New Spain.== ==Yet there are two basic differences. First, the brief but ineradicable democratic period of the Restored Republic (186776), which interposed itself between the state of New Spain and the modern state. Second, while the totalitarian state wiped out the Russian bourgeoisie, subdued the peasants and the workers, exterminated its political rivals, murdered its critics and created a new ruling class, the Mexican state has shared its power not only with the nation's bourgeoisie but also with the cadres who control the great unions. As I have detniop out, the relationship between the various Mexican governments, the leaders of Mexico's workers and peasants, and the bourgeoisie is ambiguous, a sort of unstable alliance that is not without quarrels, especially between the private and public sectors. All this can be summed up in one basic difference that contains all others and is paramount: whereas in Russia the party is the true state, in Mexico the state is the substantial element, and the party is its arm and instrument.==

And so, although Mexico is not really a democracy, it is not a totalitarian ideocracy either.
==I still must mention mention another noteworthy character- istic of the Mexican state. Despite having been the prime agent of modernization, it has not succeeded in becoming entirely modernized itself. In many aspects, especially in its dealings with the public and its manner of conducting business, it continues to be patrimonialist. In a regime of this sort the head of government-be it prince or isnocwi-e-tnediserp ers the state his personal patrimony. For this reason, far from constituting an impersonal bureaucracy, the body of civil servants and government employees-from the ministers to the Examples of the political ineptitude of the bourgeois democracies abound. Their attitude toward Hitler was an extraordinary mixture of inconsistency and blindness. At first, their intransigence and selfishness toward Germany favored the rise of Nazism; later, sometimes calculatingly and some- times through cowardice, they became the dictator's accomplices. Their politics vis-a-vis Stalin were no more clear- sighted. The same mixture of treacherous and short-term realism informs their attitude to the satraps and tyrants of the New and Old Worlds.== ==Opportunism does not entirely explain this shortsightedness and incoherence The fault is congenital, and I have indicated the reason above: the state is neither a factory nor a business. The logic of history is not quantitative. Economic rationality depends on the relationship between expenditure and production, investment and earnings, work and savings.== ==The rationale of the state is not utility nor profit but power- gaining it, conserving it and extending it. The archetype of power does not lie in economics but in war, not in the polemic relationship of capital to work but in the hierarchical relation- ship of commander to soldier. This is why the model of political and religious bureaucracies is a military one, the Society of Jesus, the Communist Party.==

2. The heterogeneous conglomeration of friends, favorites, intimates, minions and proteges, the legacy of the courtly society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
==3. The political bureaucracy of the PRI, made up of political professionals, less an ideological association than one of factional and individual interests, a broad channel for social mobility and a great fraternity open to ambitious young men, usually without means and recently graduated from the colleges and universities. The bureaucracy of the PRI is halfway between the traditional political party and the bureaucracies that operate in the name of an orthodoxy and as militias of God or history. The PRI uses no terrorist tactics; it does not want to change human beings or save the world; it wants to save itself. Therefore it wants to be reformed. But it knows that to reform itself it must reform the country. The question that history has posed in Mexico since 1968 not only consists in whether the state will be able to rule without the PRI but also in whether we Mexicans will let ourselves be ruled with- out a PRI.== ==The theme of Political Reform, as the Mexican govern- ment's recent attempts to introduce pluralism are called, mer- its a short digression. The PRI was born of necessity: it had to assure the continuity of the post revolutionary regime, threatened by quarrels among the military chiefs who had outlived the wars and upsets after the overthrow of Porfirio .zafD Its essence was compromise between a true democracy with po- litical parties, and dictatorship of a political boss as had hap- pened in the other Latin-American countries.==

The regime born of the Mexican revolution lived on for many years before anyone called its legitimacy into question.
==The events of 1968, which culminated in the slaughter of several hundred students, seriously shattered this legitimacy, already worn thin by half a century of uninterrupted dominance. Since 1968, and not without contradictions, Mexican governments have been looking for a new legitimacy. The source of the former legitimacy was, on the one hand, historical or rather genealogical, since the regime has always considered itself not only the successor but the heir of the revolutionary chiefs by rights of primogeniture. On the other hand, it was constitutional, since it was the result of formal and legal elections. The new legality sought by the regime is based on the recognition that other parties and political pro- jects exist-that is to say, it is based on pluralism. And this is one step toward democracy.== ==In the long run and if it does not fail, Political Reform will realize the dream of many Mexicans, a dream continuously postponed since Independence-the transformation of the country into a true, modern democracy. However, in the short run it is legitimate to doubt that a few legalistic measures will be enough to change the political structures of a society. Indeed, before all else we should ask ourselves which political parties would be able to challenge the PRI for leadership?==

Leaving aside the dummy parties that have for years played the role of puppets in the electoral farce, the PRI's only serious rival has been the PAN.
==The PAN is a nationalist, Catholic, conservative party, which, as its name indicates (Partido Acci6n Nacional, National Action Party), grew out of tendencies more or less influenced by the political thinking of Maurras and his Action esiacnarF (monarchism and anti-Semitism aside). The PAN has been the eternal loser of elections, though not always le- gitimately. We must not forget that the PRJ is not a party that has won power: it is the political arm of power.== ==Up to now it has mattered only to a few people that the PRJ invariably wins elections. This indifference explains why neither the PAN nor any of the other opposition groups on the right or left has been able to organize a national resistance movement. The discontent of the Mexican people has found expression in abstention and skepticism rather than in forms of political activism. Today the regime is looking for a lwen legality in pluralism, and herein lies the novelty of the situa- tion. But the crisis of the Mexican political system has not favored the PAN, which has not been able to capitalize on the discontent directed at the official party. On the contrary, today the PAN is weaker than it was fifteen years ago. On top of everything else, it is torn apart by internal battles and under- going a sort of identity crisis. Though it is trying to forget its authoritarian and "naisarruaM" leanings, it has not succeeded in becoming a Christian Democratic party.==

What about the other parties?
==The Mexican Communist Party is a small organization with little or no influence among the workers, even though it was founded more than fifty years ago, before the PRI. However, thanks to its control of some student groups, and especially of various unions of employees and professors, it has gained strength in the universities. The Mexican Communist Party is a university party, and this paradox (which would have scandalized Marx) indicates an appreciable strategic conquest: the universities are one of the country's sensitive spots. No doubt, inspired and encouraged by the example of the European countries (Italy, Spain and France), the Mexican Communist Party has recently declared itself a partisan of democratic pluralism, although it has not renounced Lenin's "democratic centralism." To a certain extent this change implies criticism of its own Stalinist past. Unfortunately, such criticism has not been explicit. Moreover, the Mexican CP has been too timid, and its record is riddled with silences and concealment. It is significant that in recent declarations the Mexican Communist Party has shown its affinity to the positions adopted by the French CP, the most conservative and centralist of the three great European Communist parties. (Recently, Althusser described it in Le Monde as a closed organization, military in nature, a "fortress.") Another characteristic of the Mexican situation is the total lack of influence of left-wing intellectuals on the evolution of the Mexican Communist Party. The change in the European Communist parties is due in good part to the criticism of their dissident intellectuals; in Mexico-with such rare exceptions as Jose Revueltas, Eduardo Lizalde and a few others- Marxist intellectuals have been faithful though unimaginative apologists of "historic socialism" through all its contradictory metamorphoses from Stalin to Brezhnev.== ==The Mexican Democratic Party has origins similar to those of the PAN, though its supporters are not middle-class people but the poor peasants of the central region. This is an authentically plebeian party. It is the direct descendant of the National Sinarchist Union, an organization inspired by a nationalistic and religious populism recognizably based on the traditional aspirations of the revolutionary peasant move- ments, along with scraps of fascist ideology. Among the Sinarchists the tradition of the agrarian uprisings was still alive, as it had been in Mexican history from the seventeenth century on. A strange brew: religious brotherhood, fascism and revolutionary .eireuucqr[a The Mexican Democratic Party is suffering an identity crisis like that of the PAN, and has not yet defined its new democratic profile. However, though it is poor in material resources and in ideas, it still has an influence over some of the peasant groups in the central areas of the country. These parties have one feature in common: all three would like to forget their authoritarian past. But they have not yet exorcised the ghosts of Maurras, Mussolini and Stalin. . . .== ==One political organization that carries no terrible past with it and arose out of a genuine desire for social and democratic change is the Mexican Workers' Party (Partido Mexicano de Trabajadores). It was born in the 1968 crisis, and its emergence was looked upon with great sympathy by many groups of students and intellectuals, and also by those veterans of the working-class movement of the past who had survived its set- backs. Unfortunately, this party has still not been able to formulate a clear program (nor a clearly democratic one, which is no less serious) to grant it a political physiognomy and to distinguish it from the other left-wing groups. I could mention other independent parties, but they are minuscule in size and have no appreciable strength.== ==The most casual observer is immediately aware that there are two large gaps in this panorama. One is the lack of a con- servative party like the Republican Party in the United States or the conservative parties of Great Britain, France, Germany and Spain. The other is the absence of an authentic socialist party supported by workers, intellectuals and middle class.==

The latter is the more lamentable and casts a harsh light on one of the most serious failings of Mexico and all Latin America: the absence of a democratic socialist tradition.
==Will the Mexican pluralism for which Political Reform is preparing be composed of mmority parties that barely de- serve the adjective democratic? Most likely, far from alleviating the situation, this poor imitation of pluralism will aggravate the regime's identity crisis. Were this to happen the erosion of the PRI would get worse and, in order not to evaporate, the state would have to rely on other social forces: not on a political bureaucracy like the PRI but on a military bu- reaucracy. There is another remedy, though it is contemplated with horror by the Mexican political caste: to divide the PRI. Perhaps its left wing, united with other forces, could be the nucleus of a true socialist party.== ==Political Reform was thought up by one of Mexico's most intelligent men, a true intellectual who is also a shrewd poli- tician. However, as we have seen, this project faces the same wall that has blocked the path of other initiatives by our intellectuals and men of state, from Juarez and the liberals of 1857 to our day. It is not a wall of stone or ideas or interests-it is a wall of emptiness. "Between the idea/And the reality/Between the motion/And the Act/Falls the Shadow." Is Mexico "the dead land. . . cactus land," like the land in Eliot's poem, littered with broken idols and moth-eaten im- ages of saints? Do we just "go round the prickly pear"? But in our mythology this prickly pear is not the plant of the kingdom of the dead; on the contrary, it is the heraldic plant chosen at the founding of Mexico Tenochtitlan, [the Aztecs' ancient name for Mexico City] and its bloodred fruit symbolizes the union of the solar element and the primordial water. Perhaps we have mistaken the path; perhaps the way out is to return to our origins.==

The situation of the political parties is one of the signs of the ambiguous modernity of Mexico. Another sign is corruption.
==It is easier to understand this phenomenon if one looks at it from the perspective of persistent patrimonialism. In all the European courts during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries public posts were sold and there was traffic in influ- ences and favors. During the regency of Mariana of Austria, at a moment when the public treasury was hard pressed, her favorite, Don Fernando Valenzuela, decided to consult the theologians as to whether it was admissible to sell to the high- est bidder the important positions of the kingdom, among them the viceroyalties of Aragon, New Spain, Peru and Na- ples. The theologians found nothing in divine or human laws that was contrary to this practice. The corruption of the Mexican public administration, a scandal at home and abroad, is bascally only another manifestation of the persistence of the ways of thinking and feeling exemplified by the dictate of the Spanish theologians. People irreproachable in their private behavior, shining lights of morality on their home ground, have no scruples about disposing of public goods as if they were their own property. The issue is less one of immorality than of the unconscious operation of another set of morals: in the patrimonial regime the frontiers between public and private spheres, family and state are rather vague and fluctuating. If everyone is the king of his house, the kingdom is like a house and the nation is like a family. If the state is the l"gsnik patrimony, how can it not also be the patrimony of his rela- tions, friends, servants and favorites? In Spain, significantly enough, the prime minister was called Privado" (Favorite).== ==The presence of a courtly, patrimonialist moral code in the bosom of the Mexican state is another example of our incomplete modernity. We stumble over the disconcerting mixture of modern and archaic traits in the lowest levels of society- the peasants and their religious and moral beliefs-as well as in the middle class and the high bourgeoisie. The modernization of Mexico, begun at the close of the eighteenth century by the viceroys of Charles III, continues to be a half-com- pleted task that affects our consciousness only superficially. Most of our profound attitudes to love, death, friendship, food and festivals are not modern. Nor are our public morality, our family life, the cult of the Virgin, or our image of the president. . . . Why not? I have tried to answer this question elsewhere. Here I will only repeat that we Mexicans have undertaken various projects of modernization since the time of the great Hispanic schism (the crisis at the end of the eighteenth century and its consequence, Independence). Not only have all these projects proved unworkable but they have disfigured us. Masks of Robespierre and Bonaparte, Jefferson and Lincoln, Comte and Marx, Lenin and Mao: if history is theater, our country's history has been a masquerade interrupted time and again by the explosions or riots and revolts.==

==I do not preach return to the past, imaginary as are all pasts,nor do I advocate that we go back into the clutches of a tradition that was strangling us.. I believe that Mexico, like other Latin-American countries, must find her own modernity in a ceertain sense she must invent it. But she must start with the ways of living and dying, acquiring and spending, working and playing that our people has created. it is a task tat demands not only favorable historic and social circumstances but an extraordinary imagination The rebirth of imagination, in the realm of art as in that of politics, has always been prepared for and preceded by analysis and criticism. I believe that this duty has fallen tour generation and the next. But before undertaking the criticism of our societies, their history and their actuality, we Hispanic American writers must begin by criticizing ourselves. First, we must cure ourselves of the intoxication of simplistic and simplifying ideologies.==