Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

ultra left. Utterly critical of the hopeless Cuban-inspired guerrilla dreams of 1960–67,⁶ I found myself defending the second-best against the criticisms of campus insurrectionaries. As I wrote at the time:

The history of Latin America is full of substitutes for the genuinely popular social revolutionary left that has so rarely been strong enough to determine the shape of its countries’ histories. The history of the Latin American left is, with rare exceptions … one of having to choose between an ineffective sectarian purity and making the best of various kinds of bad jobs, civilian or military populists, national bourgeoisies or whatever else. It is also, quite often, the history of the left regretting its failure to come to terms with such governments and movements before they were replaced by something worse.

I was thinking of the junta of reformist militarists under General Velasco Alvarado in Peru (1969–76) who proclaimed the ‘Peruvian Revolution’ on which I reported sympathetically but sceptically.⁷ It nationalized the country’s great haciendas and was also the first Peruvian regime to recognize the mass of Peruvians, the Quechua-speaking Indians from the high Andes now flooding into coast, city and modernity, as potential citizens. Everyone else in that pitifully poor and helpless country had failed, not least the peasants themselves, whose massive land occupation in 1958–63 had dug the grave of the oligarchy of landowners. They had not known how to bury them. The Peruvian generals acted because nobody else wanted to or could. (I am bound to add, they also failed, though their successors have been worse.)

It was not a popular note to strike, inside or outside Latin America, at a time when the suicidal Guevara dream of bringing about the revolution by the action of small groups in tropical frontier areas was still very much alive. It may help to explain why my appearance before the students of San Marcos University in Lima – ‘Horrible Lima’ as the poet rightly calls it – did not go down at all well. For Maoism in one or other of its numerous subvarieties was the ideology of the sons and daughters of the new cholo (hispanized Indian) middle class of highland immigrants, at least until they graduated. Their Maoism, like military service for the peasants, and the ‘gap year’ of European students, was a social rite of passage.

But was there not hope in Chile, the country with the strongest Communist Party and with which I had both personal and political connections? Indeed, my father’s brother Berk (Ike or Don Isidro), a mining expert based in Chile since the First World War, and founder with his wife, a Miss Bridget George from Llanwrthwl in Powys, of the largest extant branch of the family bearing the name Hobsbawn, had had a connection with the ephemeral Chilean Socialist Republic of 1932, led by the splendidly named Colonel Marmaduke Grove. More recently, through Claudio Veliz, then at Chatham House in London, who gave me most of my original introductions for the continent, I had met a patently very intelligent as well as good-looking lady, wife of a prominent Chilean socialist, whom I took round Cambridge, England: Hortensia Allende. On my first visit to Santiago I had lunch at the Allende house, coming to the conclusion that her unsparkling husband Salvador was the less impressive partner of the couple. That, as it turned out, was to underestimate the stature and the sense of democracy of a brave and honourable man who died defending his office. Others remember where they were when President Kennedy died. I remember where I was when I was rung up by some radio programme with the news that President Allende was dead – at an international conference on labour history, looking down on Linz and the Danube. I had last been in Chile in 1971, on a side trip from Peru to report on the first year of the first socialist government democratically elected to everyone’s surprise, including Allende’s.⁸ Nevertheless, in spite of my passionate wish that it might succeed, I had not been able to conceal from myself that the odds were against it. Keeping my ‘sympathies entirely out of the transaction’ I had put them at two to one against. I did not visit Chile again until 1998 when I shared with Tencha Allende and other friends and comrades watching Santiago television the wonderful moment when the British Law Lords announced their epoch-making judgment against the former Chilean dictator General Pinochet on Santiago television. I did not share this joy with my Chilean relatives, who – at least those continuing to live in Santiago – had been supporters of his regime.

Debates about the Latin American left became academic in the 1970s with the triumph of the torturers, even more academic in the 1980s with the era of US-backed civil war in Central America and the retreat of army rule in South America and entirely unrealistic with the decline of the Communist Parties and the end of the USSR. Probably the only significant attempt at old-style armed guerrilla revolution was the ‘Shining Path’, brainchild of a fringe Maoist lecturer at the University of Ayacucho, who had not yet taken to arms when I visited that city in the late 1970s. It demonstrated what the Cuban dreamers of the 1960s had spectacularly failed to show, namely that serious armed politics were possible in the Peruvian countryside, but also – at least to some of us – that this was a cause that ought not to succeed. In fact, it was suppressed by the army in the usual brutal fashion, with the help of those parts of the peasantry whom the Senderistas had antagonized.

However, the most formidable and indestructible of the rural guerrillas, the Colombian FARC, flourished and grew, though in that blood-soaked country it had to deal not only with the official forces of the state but with the well-armed gunmen of the drugs industry and the landlords’ savage ‘paramilitaries’. President Belisario Betancur (1982–6), a socially minded and civilized Conservative intellectual not in the pockets of the USA – at least in conversation he gave me that impression – initiated the policy of negotiating peace with the guerrillas, which has continued at intervals ever since. His intentions were good, and he succeeded in pacifying at least one of the guerrilla movements, the so-called M19, favourite of the intellectuals. (There was a time when every party in Bogota swas likely to contain one or two young professionals who had spent a season in the hills with them.) Indeed, the FARC itself was prepared to play the constitutional game by creating a ‘Patriotic Union’ intended to function as that electoral party of the left which had never quite managed to emerge in the space between the Liberals and the Conservatives. It had little success in the big cities, and after about 2,500 of its local mayors, councillors and activists, having laid aside their arms, had been murdered in the countryside, the FARC developed an understandable reluctance to exchange the gun for the ballot-box. I was host to one of the militants, en route to or from an international gathering, in the cafeteria of Birkbeck College, far from the wild frontier of banana plantations, battles between FARC and Maoist guerrillas and the local paramilitaries in Uraba, near the isthmus of Panama, where he practised his legal politics. When I next asked friends for news of him, he was already dead.

IV

What has happened to Latin America in the forty or so years since I first landed on its airfields? The expected and in so many countries necessary revolution has not happened, strangled by the indigenous military and the USA, but not least by domestic weakness, division and incapacity. It will not happen now. None of the political experiments I have watched from near or far since the Cuban Revolution has made much lasting difference.

Only two have looked as though they might, but both are too recent for judgement. The first, which must warm the cockles of all old red hearts, is the national rise, since its foundation in 1980, of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores or PT) in Brazil, whose leader and presidential candidate ‘Lula’ (Luis Inacio da Silva) is probably the only industrial worker at the head of any Labour Party anywhere. It is a late example of a classic mass socialist Labour Party and movement, such as emerged in Europe before 1914. I carry its plaque on my key-ring to remind me of ancient and contemporary sympathies, and memories of my times with the PT and with Lula, often touching, sometimes moving, like the stories of the party’s grassroots activists from the Sao Paulo car factories and the remote inland townships. And as tribute to the democratic and educational zeal of the PT’s prize city, Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul), honest, prosperous and anti-globalist, which moved its council to organize and its mayor to preside over an open-air question-and-answer session for the citizenry with a visiting British historian on the main square, amid the noise of the municipality’s efficient trams.

The other, more dramatic, landmark was the end in 2000 of Mexico’s seventy years of unshakeable one-party rule by the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party). Alas, one doubts whether this will produce a better political alternative, any more than the revolt of the Italian and Japanese voters in the early 1990s against the frozen Cold War regimes of their countries.