The Present State of the (In)communication Media
Eduardo Galeano

The end-of-the-millennium world--which works for some and against many--is marked by two glaring paradoxes. The first paradox is this: the world economy needs a constantly expanding consumer market to prevent its profit rates from falling, but at the same time and "for the same reason" it needs hands to work at bargain-basement prices in the countries of the South and East.

The second paradox, an offshoot of the first, is this: the North sends out ever stricter orders to consume, addressed to the South and East, in order to increase the number of consumers, but it is much more successful in increasing the number of criminals. The consumer society sends out messages of death.

The magic wand of government borrowing, the external debt that enriches until the bubble bursts, permits the consuming minority to stuff themselves with new useless things, while television takes care of turning the artificial demands that the North keeps on inventing and exporting to the rest of the world into real necessities.

These days we are all obliged to buy a passage on the modernization cruise; but as it happens, there are more people shipwrecked in the waters of the market than there are passengers. For countless millions of young Latin Americans condemned to unemployment or starvation wages, advertising stimulates violence rather than demand. The ads proclaim that if you have nothing you do not exist; if you do not own a car or a pair of brand-name shoes, you are a nobody, a bit of trash; and this is the lesson the consumer culture teaches the masses of students enroled in the School of Crime. As cities grow, so does crime, except that crime grows even faster.

In taking possession of the things that lend existence to a person, each assailant wants to be like his victim. Television offers full service to its viewers: it not only teaches them to confuse the quality of life with the quantity of things; it also gives them daily audiovisual instruction in violence, which is then supplemented by video games. Crime is the most popular show on the small screen. "Hit before you are hit," players are advised by their electronic toys. "You are alone, you can rely only on yourself." Cars fly, people explode: "You too can be a killer."

Blessed be inequality The world has never been as unjust as it is now in distributing the loaves and the fishes, but the system that rules the world and now modestly calls itself "market economy" takes a daily bath of impunity. The dominant media, which present current events like a passing show, removed from reality and devoid of memory, bless and help to perpetuate the organization of the growing inequality. Poverty may deserve pity, but it no longer arouses indignation: people are poor because of the rules of the game or because fate willed it thus. Until 20 or 30 years ago, poverty was the fruit of injustice. It was denounced by the left, admitted by the centre, rarely denied by the right. Times have changed a lot in a short period: poverty is now the justly deserved punishment for inefficiency or a manifestation of the natural order of things. Poverty has been dissociated from injustice, and the very notion of injustice, which used to be a universal certainty, has become blurred to the point of disappearing altogether.

Injustice beside the point

The end-of-the-millennium moral code condemns failure rather than injustice.

Robert McNamara, one of the people responsible for the Vietnam War, recently wrote a long public apology. His book In Retrospect (Times Books, 1995) recognizes that the war was a mistake. But this war, which killed three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans, was a mistake "because it could not be won, not because it was unjust." The sin resides in the defeat, not in the injustice.

According to McNamara, as early as 1965 the U.S. government had overwhelming evidence that the invading forces could not possibly win, but it went on acting as if victory was possible. The fact that these invading forces were annihilating a people and devastating their land in order to impose a government on Vietnam that Vietnam did not want--that was beside the point.

In a system of rewards and punishments where life is conceived as a relentless race between a few winners and many losers, defeat is the only sin for which there is no redemption.

A biological if not zoological order

What happened with poverty is also happening with violence. In the South, where the losers live, violence rarely appears as a result of injustice. It almost always manifests itself as the consequence of the bad behaviour of the third-class beings who inhabit the so-called Third World and who are condemned to violence because it is in their nature. Like poverty, violence corresponds to the natural order, to the biological if not zoological order of an underworld which is as it is because it has always been and will always be so.

Ignoring a blood bath

While McNamara was publishing his book, a scandal broke out which had an impact on American and world public opinion. A Guatemalan army colonel, who was also a CIA agent, was accused of assassinating a U.S. citizen and of torturing and killing the husband of a U.S. citizen. The media provided a wealth of information about the affair, but gave little or no importance to the fact that the CIA had been funding assassins and setting up and overthrowing governments in Guatemala since 1954, when it organized a coup d'État, with President Eisenhower's approval, to overthrow the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz. President Clinton ordered an official investigation into the CIA's responsibility in the two reported cases, but not into the responsibility of the CIA or any other government body in the long and systematic carnage that cost the lives of at least 100,000 Guatemalans, most of them aboriginal.

The blood bath in Guatemala, which has always been considered "natural" and has never attracted the attention of the media that manufacture public opinion, thus acquired a sudden relevance. This served the cause of human rights in Guatemala, which was heard loud and clear for once, but it also confirmed the racial discrimination prevalent in world disinformation.

Along the same lines, it is no accident that the Oswaldo Letelier case, an exception to the rule of impunity in Chile, should have led to a prison term for two highly placed figures in General Pinochet's dictatorship. Letelier was assassinated in Washington, the centre of the world, as it were, together with his American secretary. The case stirred the interest of U.S. political and journalistic media, which gave it an international dimension and contributed to the effectiveness of the work of the militants in the cause of justice, who were not cheated, at least for once.

We might well ask what would have happened if Letelier had been killed in some Latin American city, as happened to Chilean general Carlos Prats, who was assassinated with impunity in 1974 in Buenos Aires, together with his wife, also a Chilean.

A distorting mirror

What the owners of information in the computer age call information is really the monologue of power. The universal freedom of expression exists in the fact that the peripheral zones of the world have the right to obey the orders issued from the centre, as well as the right to adopt the values imposed on them by it. In this world-wide supermarket, where social control is exercised on the planetary scale, the clientele of the cultural industries is not divided by nationality.

This is the distorting mirror which teaches Latin American children to see themselves through the eyes of those who despise them and which trains them to accept the reality that humiliates them as their destiny. According to data from UNESCO, Latin American children spend twice as many hours watching television as they do in the classroom. That is the average.

But in how many cases "are" the hours of television the child's classroom hours? Public education has suffered most severely from the disintegration of the state in Latin America. Like public health, education has been dismantled by the hurricane of neoliberalism. Education is now more than ever the privilege of those who can pay for it, while television takes care of the rest.

The overwhelming onslaught of this incommunication only serves to bring out the magnitude of the challenge we are facing in an unequal but more than ever necessary struggle, now that end-of-the-millennium fashion dictates that we give up hope as if it were a tired horse.

From the talk given by the author at the Second World Congress of the World Association for Christian Communication in October 1995.