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# Gradual Change or Violent Revolution in Latin America? 

Violence belongs to the world of feeling just as the experience of peace does. Gradualness indicates the speed at which structures change. A mood and a speed are not commensurate, nor can they be substituted and interchanged. But gradual change of structure can go hand in hand with a violent expression of the experience of newness. Both creation and destruction are explosive when they are rooted deeply in life and must overcome a barrier. Spring, too, can "break out"’!

Can gradual change be an alternative to violent revolution? Those who ask this question are convinced that change is necessary, unavoidable. They want to understand violence so that they may propose alternatives to it. My task here is to highlight how difficult this understanding is. The other man’s violence always threatens. My violence soothes me. This ambiguity makes it difficult to understand the other man’s anger in the other man’s terms. I know no more peaceful men than Dom Helder Camara (Archbishop of Recife, Brazil) or Francisco Juliao (exiled Brazilian labor leader), but since they speak with strong feelings, they are both called violent men.

When interests are involved, objectivity is actually more difficult for the doctor than it is for the priest. So let us act, for the time being, neither as patient nor as doctor in international affairs, but as students. We know that a patient’s primary feelings might contain a far better diagnosis than a doctor’s reasoned conclusion. We want to prepare ourselves to register the signals on which such feelings are transmitted.

## Which Way Violence?

On the one hand, the disciplined and purposeful planning of a counter-insurgency school in Panama might be an initial symptom of a mortal disease: of a Vietnam to the South, an incubating demon of a "Viet Lat" in the seventies. On the other hand, outbreaks by undisciplined guerrillas in the Peruvian Andes might be an advanced symptom of incipient health, an outcry of budding awareness. Which way lies violence?

It is obviously far more pleasant to consider and advocate "gradual change" and its sister notion, "constructive alternatives to violence"’, than it is to develop discriminating empathy with a foreign, changing texture of life. Let us make this "academic" effort. This empathy with social process beyond the barrier of culture should be a major goal for education, especially in the political sciences.

As students of change, it is important and significant for us to feel what urbanization means — deep down — to the man who arrives in industrial Sao Paulo after a month’s trip from Belem at the mouth of the Amazon. We must consider how urbanization affects his character, his self-image. Our co-living with him seems more important than the development of new instruments to plot the directions of his surface responses or economic behavior. We are committed to share in our guts the anxiety and bewilderment of a man from the fields suddenly taken into a factory. Only slowly, and with tenderness, may we sense the pain of another when his old world dims, when new stars bewilder him; when words lose their traditional meaning, and new words that he does not grasp sparkle, seduce, and betray. I believe that only the man who knows himself as being constantly subject to this experience can share in this experience of others.

Everyone knows that some words upset and others soothe. But not everyone remembers that there are some words which may have either effect, depending on the social context, the semantic ghetto in which they rally a group. "Violence" is one of these, and on this I guess we agree. I also believe that, since 1965, in the United States and Latin America, "gradual methods" has been another such expression. I want to call your attention to this especially.

I remember well a night with a group of students at the central university in a Latin American country. Their commitment to the word "violencia" was so strong that those who did not feel swept away by it were considered unreal, outsiders. Earlier that same day, I had spent an hour with a key man in the country’s industrial renewal, one of the great men in the Council for Latin America. As I listened to him, I sensed his fear of violence, his reasoned and intelligent commitment to gradual methods of societal change. More than that: I had heard him detail the need for arming private goon squads, composed preferably of reliable Catholics, who would insure the time needed for this gradual change. Again, which way lies violence?

On the same day, then, I had shared in both poles of the same social mood. It is obvious that violence and gradual change meant very different things for the patient and the doctor on the same day in the same city.

## Semantic Ghettoes Coexist

Within one semantic ghetto — one conception universe — reasonable discourse is possible. Supposed agreement can be questioned, and one’s opponents can make their points. But what happens between two semantic ghettoes? Between distinct semantic ghettoes, only diplomatic notes can be exchanged, or shouts can clash. Finally, narcissistic coexistence of two sick units can be imagined. Let us study how men can be trained so that in their hearts the words from two ghettoes can meet.

Peru, for example, is an infinite distance from the ghetto of meaning which is a U.S. university. The latter is a strange ghetto and utterly removed from that of Peru. It is a ghetto where the problem of "unbalanced diet" and "death from over-nutrition" has been substituted for the world problem of hunger. But in the Andes of Peru, thousands still die of plain hunger.

The United States is a land so rich that it can consider with some comfort the proposal to tax the rich so as to guarantee an annual $4,000 income to all those who do not produce. Off there, is the rest of the world: the world of those destined, at best, merely to survive.

With a guaranteed income, we could push Watts beyond our borders and surround the North Atlantic with a "World Harlem". Would this cure the basic sickness of our society? At this moment we are becoming aware of the common roots of slums and underdevelopment. The events of 1966 made public opinion aware that, for reasons much deeper than had been assumed, Harlem and Fifth Avenue cannot mingle. First of all, words in the two ghettoes _cannot_ mean the same things. Now we learn to see further implications: _gradualness_ of change just cannot be experienced the same way in the first year of settlement in a neo-colony as it can in the twentieth year of a bull market in megapolis. And yet we must relate them. We cannot afford to coexist, we must live together. The bridge of words is not sufficient if it is not paralleled by a bridge of feeling.

It takes time to acquire empathy with the growing pains of a foreign society, to train oneself to academic contemplation as opposed to operation research, to commit oneself to real observation which does not exclude the heart. Such growth is difficult because it takes much time and peace for the student, and because it is frowned upon as innocent dreaming by most people. The high concentration on operation-oriented research in foreign relations is certainly not a result of the CIA, but it is a sad indicator of the decline of institutional commitment to deep insight in our universities. Our task should be assistance to men preparing themselves for disinterested awareness across cultural lines, service to men seeking to become capable of non-condescending respect for the alternatives actually open to growing societies.

## Contrasting Views of Violence

Violence, or the social expression of nonrational aggression, has a different meaning for the holdup man, the cashier in the bank, and the bystander. What does gradualness or violence mean for different men in Bogota? For Camilo Torres, violence is one thing. For the clergy of Bogota, it is another. And finally, violence means something else again for a planner in the Colombian Ministry of Education. Camilo believes himself an educator and tries to teach that gradual improvement, even if it were possible under the present structure, could not bring any meaningful change. The Cardinal of Bogota believes that he is charged with, and is a guardian of, peace. Of course, the Cardinal believes in change — as long as it fits into the established order. (For the man in power, violent protest cannot mean "education".) The third man, the bureaucrat who is trying to multiply little red schoolhouses, feels threatened by the clash of the first two men, because it calls his attention to something which does not fit into his professional schemes. He thinks to himself: "Could it be that Camilo’s type of adult education — adult education through testimony — must come first? Must it come before our kind of schooling in little red schoolhouses can be of any value at all?" Must perhaps Camilo precede the bureaucrat and the multiplication of little red schoolhouses?

It makes little sense to build schools in Latin America before we have really begun to engage in adult education. And this, I believe, we cannot do without uncorking violence.

Let me illustrate what I mean. It was in a shed in Aracaju, in Northeast Brazil, December 1964. Twenty men were assembled around a slide projector. A picture of a man with a pick and a pile of stones was projected onto a sheet of brown paper. With it were four syllables: _"ter-ra"_, _"ho-mem"_. Then, another word was added: _"nossa"_. "Land", "man", and finally, "ours". The men around the projector had the skin of hunger, the ashen quality almost unknown in the United States. They were undernourished by custom and heredity, unable to know what a healthy appetite means. You could sense their lacks which had not yet developed into needs. You could see how unaware they were of crying injustice. These laborers were learning to recognize some written words — words which they themselves had picked as the most meaningful to them that year in that village: terra, homem. Suddenly one man got up. Trembling, he stammered: "Last night I could not sleep, because yesterday I wrote my name. I saw my name written on paper. _Entendi que eu sou eu_ — I understood that I am I." Surely, this is anguish — the anguish of birth. There is nothing gradual about that awakening. He said, _"Eu sou eu, e por isso somos responsdveis"_ (I am I, and therefore, we are responsible).

Certainly, this is what we want to happen in development, and I hope that we want it to happen at all cost. The cost of such awakening is high. Awakening of this kind does not fit men into the slots available. Education of this kind is more than instruction. It is silly to propose some training for gradual change to people who have seen such dramatic instances of awakening awareness.

The above case occurred in 1964. The first thing the Brazilian military government did in 1965 was to suppress this type of education, or at least to control it. No government at present can afford indiscriminate and free _concientizagao para a politizacao_ (mobilization of consciousness for political purposes). Not Cuba. Not Accién Popular in Peru.

Even in the United States, discussions about the nonpermissible forms of slum education within the poverty program during the past year have made us humbler. The poverty program has opened the eyes of politicians to the ambiguities that Latin American politicos face in grass-roots movements. It is easier now to speak about this delicate subject in the United States.

## Social Structures or Creativity?

No government wants to educate, unless it is moderately certain that its system will be accepted by those educated. We all prefer to trust our social structures rather than bubbling creativity.

In Latin America, relatively small capital investment would be needed to create widespread expansion of truly adult education: education which transforms unconscious lack into conscious needs; education which mobilizes creative imagination, At present we may advocate such education but we cannot obtain the funds for it. We are faced with a continental political commitment to gradual change. We are faced with paternal governments who want to prepare the structures before people become aware that they need them. Within the context of gradual change, the type of education I described cannot but be called "subversion". Within the political context to which our nations are subject, you may not awaken creative needs you cannot satisfy.

If gradualness in change, at all cost, is the main criterion for development, then the very first thing a government must do is this: impose strict controls on adult education. You may put any amount into little red schoolhouses, into trade schools and universities. _Socialization_ through schooling will be called a most significant and productive investment. But beware of truly adult education! Beware of the power you unleash! Commitment to gradualness, at least in education, means a lack of confidence in our generation of living men. Gradualness, at least in education, means the decision of those in power today to make their children feel as our system requires them to.

Perhaps this provides a first reason why today it is difficult in Latin America to understand U.S. public concern for "gradualness" in change. The inhabitants of U.S. slums, perhaps, find gradualness just as hard to swallow.

## Uncle Sam and Social Change

Another peculiar phenomenon makes it difficult to discuss change in Latin America without emotion: namely, continued implication of the United States when change is discussed. At the Center of Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, we have under study some twenty public controversies which took place in Latin America in the last few years. They were chosen at random. On each controversy we collected hundreds of editorials and analyzed their "ideological" content. We set out to understand what arguments are used, what symbols manipulated, what feelings triggered, when people take sides on public issues. We wanted to see how people explain their options, how they justify their preferences, and how they extrapolate the consequences of decisions they hope, or they fear, will be taken. Now we have found that whenever structural change is the issue of a controversy, "Tio Sam" is always dragged in. It matters not whether the subject is Petrobras, a new university, educational reform, a new press law, or a violent death. This is a fact. I do not intend to explain it. I simply indicate this insistent reference to the United States as one factor which complicates any study of change in Latin America. All reference to change, to its speed or its meaning today in Latin America, implies a statement on foreign policy. This reference to the United States is, of course, ever present when one discusses Latin American events in English. Recently, it has assumed a new dimension, because the U.S. intellectual community is discovering the parallels between hurdles the poverty program meets and those implicit in foreign assistance. Both are upsetting.

## Underdevelopment and the Poverty Program

In December 1966 we at Cuernavaca had a striking example of the deep meaning this parallel has for North Americans today. Some sixty people involved in poverty programs in U.S. slums met for consultation at our Center. The theme was an analysis of poverty as alienation and experience. We asked the participants to formulate the true aims of their programs. Our staff studied the sixty responses. They compared the attitudes the poverty workers held toward the poor, with the clichés well known from foreign assistance programs of AID, CARE, mission societies. They found many coincidences. and Poverty workers, just like missioners, seemed obsessed with the desire to "share" their blessings. The desire to incorporate the slum poor into an "achieving society" parallels the U.S. manifest destiny to extend the benefits of the "great society" beyond its borders.

"Expand and protect the great society" seems to be the almost religious banner which gives respectability to any decision made in the United States affecting investments, services (many of them gratuitous and social), establishments (not a few, paramilitary), and sales in Latin America. A decision-making process affecting Latin America which is dispersed through thousands of centers in the United States is given some kind of rationale by means of this consenting rationalization. For many observers in Latin America, the U.S. desire to share the "great society" lingers behind any discussion of change. Expansion and/or defense of the "great society" lies behind any discussion on the proper speed of social change in Latin America. The almost compulsive repetition that change in Latin America must happen "gradually though rapidly" is interpreted in Latin America as a fear of any form of development that might lead the southern continent out of U.S. hands and outside the U.S. market.

There cannot be any doubt that the gradual, orderly, and controlled increase of the gross national product is a major criterion for policy. How primary this criterion is, I do not want to say. Many critics, from Francois Peroux to Eduardo Frei, insist that this particular measuring stick is given too much importance.

Making the growth rate of per capita income the most signifcant indicator for growth can lead to a planned division of our societies into two sectors. In one sector you find the growing minority whose income increases at a rate superior to the gross national product. But the majority are aggregated in the other sector. And they are on the way to relative impoverishment, even though their purchasing power — in absolute terms — might increase.

Politicians argue that this arrangement insures stability. Indeed it does insure the established system. All those who "fit" and grow into the new society are also favored by it and are, therefore, purchased for its maintenance: they can only lose by revolution.

Perhaps this argument puts the cart before the horse: it measures social goals in terms of a method chosen a priori. The argument is also indicative of an emotional attitude which must be taken seriously. And today, this is our task: to elicit respect for emotions — even if they do not fit our scheme.

## Gradualism Reinterpreted

All over Latin America one can now hear a new type of interpretation of U.S. concern for gradualism. It is an attitude more difficult to put into a few words without repeating expressions which smack of demagoguery. This interpretation focuses on the increase of U.S. federal agencies — especially dependencies of the Department of Defense — in Latin America. The question raised by this increasing apparatus is whether, consciously or unconsciously, the United States is preparing the groundwork for a "Viet Lat". The impression given is that a continent-wide system of counter-insurgency is growing. The inter-American police force to control guerrillas is seen in the same perspective as that in which the increase of state police is seen by the southern Negro. Those people in South America who use this argument see orderly and gradual change as a strategic attempt designed to gain time to establish an airtight network of repression.

In this war-focused context, resistance to U.S.-induced development is advocated as an improved alternative to the preparation for war in the seventies. The argument runs along the following lines: it would be a better thing to prevent lethal establishments of U.S. para-military agencies than to have to abort them later; but given that it is too late now for that kind of contraception, it is better that violence abort any further development of them than to collaborate in the incubation of the "demons of Viet Lat".

These feelings might shock, they might stem from bad dreams, but they are real. And they are now beginning to be understood in the United States. I attended a recent meeting of a group of graduate students and professors at an Ivy League college — serious men who have organized to systematically document U.S. activities in Latin America. It is their particular aim to ferret out blatant abuses of confidence, to unmask the establishments which pretend to serve development but in reality are instruments to draw Latin America into a global military strategy corresponding to somebody’s view of the U.S. national interest. I was deeply touched when I saw that these men seemed willing to organize a USS. citizens’ group for nonviolent protest to U.S. exploitation in Latin America. The ghost of "Viet Lat" is uglier, but nowhere less real, than the equally ghostly Alliance for Progress.

## Qualitative Changes in Life Experience

We have had to go into some detail to establish how touchy it is, given the screens of a semantic ghetto, to discuss the desirable speed of change. I repeat: If we were interested only in plotting and planning economic rates, abstracting from human experience, all this effort could be foregone. But we believe that qualitative changes in life experience are much more important for development than economic indicators and cement. Let me illustrate one scheme which we can follow to analyze this experience. It is a scheme which the members of our continuing faculty seminar in Cuernavaca have adopted, and we are indebted for its development to men like Fromm, Maccoby, Erikson, Helio la Suaribe, and many others. We have set out to understand social change as an interrelated transformation of (1) institutional structure, (2) formulated values or ideologies, and (3) social character. Our principal concern is that of understanding how the human heart reacts to this three-pronged change.

We try to focus on institutional structure and ask: By what law or assumptions or persuasions are these held in place? By what appeals to abstract value systems can the Mexican revolution promote private schools for the rich or the Brazilian revolution its new press laws?

But we will not be content to analyze this relationship between structure and rationale, we will not just seek to understand what persuasion a given functional mechanism exudes. We will try to understand what personality characteristics it favors. With concern we will watch the survival and renewal of that authentic mass outbreak of joy which is the carnival in Rio. Finally, we want to know something about the relationship between character and ideology. What kind of personality finds most strength and support and consolation in a given type of faith? Who are those drawn to the Macumba, to the sects, to the guerrillas, or to achievement in well-organized business? Who are those people in Chile who can — and want to — recognize themselves in the ads in LIFE _en Español_? Who can be motivated by the picture of a portly middle-aged executive from Minnesota to change his way of life by foregoing immediate gratification to save for later, more conspicuous consumption?

## Violence, A Response to Experience

This is an ambitious program, we admit. We want to try the impossible in order to come closer to grasping the mysterious workings of drastic social change. Of course, if we engage in this type of analysis, gradualness and violence assume a new meaning. Violence is not the measure of the speed with which one of these three variables changes. Violence is not a measure of structural reorganization. It is not a measure of change in persuasion. And it is not the measure of a new social type. Violence is rather a response of experience, of feeling, to the tensions created among these three.

It would be fascinating for me to heap example upon example. But for the time being, we want only to understand the impact which the U.S. presence in Latin America has on the quality of change there. I only want to indicate a model for analysis which may make the mode of U.S. impact on Latin American change a bit more amenable to discussion. Let me exemplify, separately, the impact of U.S. technical assistance on each of the three factors mentioned: institution, persuasion, personality. In other words: structure, ideology, and character; mechanisms, conceptual systems, and the character of those who fit them. Allow me to play with oversimplification and caricature to make my point and elicit needed discussion.

## U.S. College Board Exams for Latin America

First, an example: an attempt is now being made to persuade Latin American universities to adopt the U.S. College Board Entrance Examinations. Considerable amounts of U.S. money have been spent on their development, particularly in Puerto Rico, and they are now available in Spanish. These tests are generally, though perhaps grudgingly, accepted in Puerto Rico. At first sight, their export — free of charge, since a foundation picks up the tab — may be seen as the simple concession of a benefit of our college machinery to others who are in need of it. Looking more carefully, we see that their adoption in other countries will ultimately have an important impact on those universities which do accept this testing tool. The acceptance of an admission test alters the social function of a university system. To be more explicit: This test is a filter designed to eliminate from further study those whose character or ability does not favor their academic achievement in a U.S. university. Those screened out are not considered proper material for U.S. higher education, because achievement at a university is interpreted as a forecast of achievement or leadership in later life. But leadership or achievement _where_? Success as it is defined and made necessary by an achievement-oriented society as we now know it in the United States. The adoption of this test, therefore, represents a decisive, profound, and covert long-range manipulation of the quality of life in a whole country. The adoption of the U.S. College Board examinations by a Latin American university contributes to making that university a far more important tool for the expansion of the basic mood of the "great society" than any direct changes in curriculum schedule, teaching method, or faculty training. The transfer of a small device from one culture to another can ultimately affect the face of a whole society: with the adoption of this device one type of character is preferred over others, and what is perhaps more significant, a certain type of self-image, copied from that of the United States, is subtly made into the standard of success in Sao Paulo.

To elaborate further — not on a fact, but on a certain danger. The U.S. college entrance exam is one small but effective contribution to the development of an overseas "white America" (to use the U.S. jargon of 1966). _Gradually_ and _without violence_ those who fit and aspire to a new societal pattern proposed to them from the outside are selected to manage it. The protests from Harlem are now getting a hearing. It is time to attune our ears to the same protest reaching us in foreign idioms.

## Implications of Exporting Ideas

Discussion in depth is needed on this question: May we export the _motivational structure_ which corresponds to our _cherished_ persuasions (in other words, to the American way of life) if this implies also the reverse — the export of Watts and Harlem and Selma on a gigantic scale? This question, if properly understood, is so disturbing and discouraging to me that I formulate it with fear — particularly the fear that it be understood as an expression of despair, while in truth it is meant as an enormous challenge. We must not be lazy. Thomas Aquinas says that laziness is the worst of sins: the deadly inactivity of a man who has given up living because he has become aware of how hard it is to live.

The highly ambiguous assistance of the United States in Latin America represents an inevitable involvement. The involvement is inevitable because it meets the objective demands of international political and economic fact, and because it satisfies deeprooted needs which stem from the prevalent U.S. self-image: the US. tenet of "secular religion" (to speak with Bellah) that every American at any moment can, must, and may share the blessings of his country with those less fortunate than he. The radical’s demand that the United States "drop out of international relations because it cannot but do damage" is on the opposite pole from the new isolationist’s aggressiveness; but both attitudes are marginal and but a frame which highlights the commitment of the majority here to the utopia of a worldwide "great society".

Concern with the world beyond national borders is a deeprooted part of U.S. ethics. There is no other country in which the ethos of international help has marked with equal depth the basic creed of a nation. There is no other people which could produce as a trademark — alongside Uncle Sam and the big stick — the image of the Quaker missioner. There has never been another government which has set up the like of its worldspanning institutional network for assistance: social, economic, military, and religious.

The U.S. enveloping involvement in Latin America, therefore, is both socio-politically and psychologically inevitable. Discussion of this involvement has afforded me the opportunity to demonstrate the difficulties which threaten misunderstanding of the relationship, as well as to point to the challenge that these same difficulties present — the striving toward an understanding that will lead us to greater human depths.

The obstacle on which I have focused is operational and concerns those in the United States who want to deal with Latin America. This obstacle is the tendency to underestimate how difficult it is even for the highly educated North American to reach a deep, a realistic, a humble awareness of the ambiguity implicit in his participation in the development process outside the "great society". This difficulty will increase for every North American in Latin America. The ability to let himself be adopted into the feeling of authentically rooted Latin American groups or crowds is not acquired in libraries. Neither is it achieved simply by participating in action programs. This ability is rather a measure of the personal maturity and the personal commitment of the individual North American to utter simplicity and openness of heart — two phrases not too current in our academic circles. Therefore, this ability is restricted to exceptional men and women, and will remain so. It should be our stated task to seek them out and to encourage them to commit themselves generously and without reserve to voluntary immigration into Latin America.

After the obstacle, I focused on a value — a value which I consider the critical element in development, the element which will decide if economic growth and technological abundance will meet real needs or only create new awareness of deficiencies. This element, this value — if present — will condition human freedom. Its absence will result in deadly coexistence of men and groups without a future. Drastic change, as we have seen, can leave in its wake either violently bewildered wrecks or men who experience new dimensions of personal freedom and creativity bursting open. Will drastic change rest in men who experience their awareness and feelings, or will it make men less poets, make men into just more effective and productive manpower?

The ability to experience change seems to be the decisive indicator of the value of change. Change which cannot be lived is deadly. Change which diminishes the ability of a man to feel related and a participant cannot be going in the right direction. 

At a recent course in our Center in Cuernavaca, a participant (a cattle breeder bent for the altiplano) told me: "I get it! You don’t grow people. If they are men, they each grow. And each better know that he himself is responsible for this growth. You don’t develop people and societies. They do."

The ultimate criterion for the planner of social change cannot be the mode of its production or the technical structure to which it leads, but rather the quality of leisure, of creativity, of celebration it makes possible.