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WHAT LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE CAN TEACH THE CURRENT LEADERS OF LATIN
AMERICA  
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Ariel Dorfman
May 6, 2024
Lit Hub
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_ Ariel Dorfman Has Some Recommendations for Culturally Illiterate
Presidents and Autocrats _

, Lit Hub

 

Daniel Noboa, the president of Ecuador, might have saved himself a lot
of trouble, if he had only read more Latin American literature.
Perhaps he would not have ordered the police to storm the Mexican
embassy to arrest former Vice President Jorge Glas, who had been
granted asylum there. That unprecedented action—breaching long
standing treaties that guarantee the inviolability of diplomatic
premises—was met by enormous international repercussions: Mexico
broke relations with Ecuador, a near unanimity of Latin American
governments of all stripes added their condemnation and Noboa is being
hauled in front of the World Court in The Hague.

All Noboa needed to do to avoid this turmoil was to have read _El
Derecho de Asilo_ (_The Right to Asylum_), a nouvelle by the great
Cuban author, Alejo Carpentier. In that story, published originally in
1972, Carpentier narrates the adventures of a Secretary of Government
of a Latin American country who seeks refuge in a friendly embassy
when the president he served is overthrown. His life drags on in utter
boredom until, little by little he begins to carry out all manner of
labors in the embassy, bureaucratic but also erotic (he becomes the
lover of the inept ambassador’s wife). Our anti-hero remains locked
up in those confining premises for so many years that he ends up
receiving the gift of citizenship from the host country and is
subsequently appointed as ambassador to the government of what was
once his native land.

Reading this playful nouvelle (which anticipates the satire of
Carpentier’s virtuoso dictator novel, _The Recourse to the Method_,
from 1974) would have offered Noboa the key to how to handle Jorge
Glas when he fled Ecuador’s justice system: let him rot in the
Mexican legation for decades. I can testify that being cramped and
isolated in a monotonous enclosure, without being able (as
Carpentier’s Asylum Seeker complains) “to make a leap, even to the
cinema that is half a block away (there are already two guards
stationed at the entrance of the Embassy),” is not a bed of roses.

It is, indeed, an ordeal that I endured when I sought refuge in the
Argentine embassy in September 1973, after Pinochet’s coup
d’état. As the claustrophobic months went by, and the dictatorship
did not grant me the safe-conduct I required to leave Chile, I felt
evermore trapped in a circular time that repeated itself like “a
calendar of dead leaves” (Carpentier’s words), often wondering if
it was not better to risk the dangers of the free streets of Santiago
rather than continue cowering tediously behind four eternal walls,
transformed into my own jailer.

How can I not indulge in imagining the revenge of literature against
men of power?

It is to this misfortune that Noboa, if he had but known Latin
American literature a little better, should have condemned his enemy.

To be fair, Noboa is not the only leader who would do well to delve a
little deeper into the masterpieces of our continent. If that other
Daniel (Ortega), who has persecuted and exiled his former comrades,
were to read _Adiós, Muchachos_
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most impressive novelist Central America has produced, perhaps the
current dictator of Nicaragua would be visited by a momentary
epiphany, thrust face to face, if only for a moment, with the vileness
of having betrayed the cause of the Sandinista revolution.

In truth, a reading list could be compiled for several of Noboa’s
fellow heads of state. I recommend _Facundo_
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classic of 19th-century Argentina—one of the great texts of Latin
American letters—Sarmiento shows the extremes to which a
caudillo’s delirium can take his country, and warns future
megalomaniacs what fate awaits those who would defy the laws of
civilization.

As for Bukele, in El Salvador, he would benefit from plunging into the
ardent poems of his distinguished fellow citizen, Roque Dalton, a
reminder of what a tender, seductive land his country could be if it
renounced authoritarianism and populist demagoguery. And as for the
Peruvian President Dina Boluarte, if she were to delve into Vargas
Llosa’s _Conversation in the Cathedral_
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corruption and duplicity at the top of a regime ends up perverting
every corner of the country.

And then there is Maduro, who would be forced to recognize that he is
just another Venezuelan autocrat who leads his people to misery if he
chanced to even glance at Uslar Pietri’s novel, _Oficio de
Difuntos_, which masterfully skewers the long reign of the dictator
Juan Vicente Gómez, who ruled Venezuela with an iron fist from 1908
to 1935.

None of these ignorant leaders, of course, will follow my advice. Not
in a continent where literature seemingly has zero influence on
politics.

Let me console myself, then, with the following visualization of a
possible future. I conjecture a day when Daniel Noboa, laid low by his
own mistakes, will himself need to seek refuge in an embassy. Would it
not be ironic if his hosts had placed by the bed of their illustrious
visitor a copy of Carpentier’s_ The Right to Asylum_, as his only
reading material?

I savor the scene. Noboa, bored to death and lonely, reads that novel
and then reads it over and over again. Until, satiated, he sighs and
says aloud (but no one hears him): “Oh, if only I had read it
sooner.”

My fantasies, understandable in a writer who contemplates with despair
the lack of culture of most of the rulers of the Latin America where I
was born. But challenged by the constant frustration of our
contemporary lands south of the border, how can I not indulge in
imagining the revenge of literature against men of power who ignore
and forget that literature and only read it when it is too late?

_ARIEL DORFMAN was born in Argentina in 1942 and spent ten years as a
child in New York, until his family was forced out of the United
States by the anti-communist frenzy stirred by Joe McCarthy. The
Dorfmans ended up in Chile, where Ariel spent his adolescence and
youth, living through the Allende revolution and the subsequent
resistance inside Chile and abroad after the dictatorship that
overthrew Allende in 1973. Accompanied by his wife Angélica, Ariel
wandered the globe as an exile, eventually settling down in the United
States, where he holds the position of Walter Hines Emeritus Professor
of Literature at Duke University. He is the internationally acclaimed
author of many plays, novels, poetry, short stories, essays, and works
of journalism and memoir, including the play and film “Death and the
Maiden” (currently slated for a revival on Broadway), and the
classic text about cultural imperialism, How to Read Donald Duck,
recently reissued by OR Books. His books have been published in over
fifty languages and his plays performed in more than a hundred
countries. His most recent books are the novels Darwin's
Ghosts, Cautivos, and The Compensation Bureau, as well as the
children’s story, The Rabbits' Rebellion, and the poetry
collection Voices From the Other Side of Death. He contributes
regularly to major newspapers and magazines around the world and is
active in the defense of human rights. His next novel, The Suicide
Museum, was published by Other Press in September 2023._

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