OF CRITICS AND CRITICISM How others did it too

Both in Chile and abroad, I am often asked how people take the style of my papers, a matter which seems to be of more concern than the substance. I can only answer with the fact that my mailing list, to which I add people parsimoniously, and only at their own request (and take them out at my own will, something I am about to do soon to some people whose recent behaviour has been unacceptable), has been growing all the time. The "secondary circulation", which are the remailings to friends and colleagues of the recipient, cannot even be counted.

"DON'T BE PERSONAL" One hang-up Chileans have (and they have many), well

apart from their aversion to calling things by their name, is calling

people by their name. Using "descalificación personal" is a great crime.

Well, folks, institutions are staffed and run by people, and it is they who

do things badly. From the head of a company to the lowly person who serves

you (generally badly), and from the minister to his or her subordinates and

further down the line, they are the ones who make the bad decisions, say

the silly things and have the wrong attitudes. There is no point in

criticising their desks, their briefcases or computers. Their actions have

a name and surname (in the case of Chile, two of each).

Even the most liberal-minded venue cannot escape from this curse. In the

daily debate programme El Termometro on Chilevision, there is one frigid

tart (I know it may be a contradictory expression but I wished to insult

her twice) whose task is to read messages from viewers commenting from

home. She often criticises the comment (though she is not a member of the

panel) as "a personal attack", a definition which she uses generously. On

the debate about the morning-after pill, one spectator rightly commented

that the conservative religious organisations like Opus Dei were behind

much of the opposition to its availability. "Do not use disqualify", he was

told. There was more debate in Beijing's Great Hall of the People in the

1960's, than in Chile.

ONE DAY STANDS At the end, the locals cannot take it. As mentioned on a

previous occasion, I am very rarely invited to public speaking engagements

in Chile, and normally I am only invited once. More often, never at all. If

all the universities, business organisations and military or civilian think

tanks who at one or other stage promised that they would ask me to give a

lecture/course/seminar had delivered on their promise, my diary would be

busier than Placido Domingo's.

Outside the more technical aspects of the defence sector, and the lengthy

no-holds-barred interview of mine in the business magazine CAPITAL in late

September, when was the last time you saw my name in print in the local

media? The foreign opinion formers aren't that enthusiastic either. Despite

being the only resident foreign analyst covering most of the spectrum of

Chilean sectors, my last appearance in the Financial Times was over six

years ago, and not once in 16 years have I made even the letter pages of

The Economist. The latter's correspondent in Santiago, Ruth Bradley, had

the cheek to complain to me that I had cut her off my mailing list. "Why

would you like to read my views, Ruthie, if you never considered them

worthy of reproducing"?.

IF YOU THINK I'M BAD A recent article in the Bulletin of Latin America

Research, the journal of Britain's Society of Latin American Studies (of

which I am a long- standing member), enlightened me about historical

foreign commentators on the region. Compared to them, I am full of

compliments. Here are some quotations.

Richard Spruce, a botanist who spent 15 years in the Amazon collecting

plant species in the mid 1800's wrote: " thank god that we Englishmen are

not as other men are, especially as those Brazilians".

William Banks, a British surgeon, was on his way in 1864 to take up a post

of assistant surgeon with the Paraguayan army. On his way, he visited Bahia

and Rio de Janeiro, recording in his journal "The Portuguese and the

Brazilians I thoroughly detest as a nationŠ..a most unmoral race who

perpetrate excess of a nature and an extent that would horrify an

Englishman. They are worse even than the French, who are only a trifle

removed from the monkeys."

Montevideo, which he visited next, "presented a melancholy and stagnant

aspect" (still does, Ed.). When he finally got to Paraguay, he described

the Paraguayans as "monkeys on barrel-organsŠ.such a pack of demons I never

beheld: yelling, screaming, laughing, chattering like huge gorillas let

loose for a morning's fun in a timber merchant's yard". He soon resigned

his new post , declaring "if only this country belonged to Britain, what

strikes in civilisation it would make ("yeah, like the former colonies in

Africa, I presume, Ed.).

Such attitudes persisted until modern times. The head of the Foreign

Office's South American Department wrote the following in an internal memo

dated 1945, referring to the people of Latin America as "inconvenient and

rather ridiculous dagoes living at the world's end". I have to admit I had

to look up the word "dago" myself. Apparently it refers to any Latin

American descendant from Spanish, Portuguese or Italian ancestors. So relax

Foxleys, Covacevichs and Abumohors, you are not dagoes.

Some criticism was less sanguine, more to the point and still very

relevant. Sir Clements Markham, a geographer travelling in the Andes during

the 1950's, repeatedly criticised the Lima elite for travelling to London,

Paris or Berlin rather than Cuzco.

This is a short paper dictated by the fact that I have been away playing

soldier with the Chilean army most of this week (about which more later in

my December defence review), not to mention the fact that I have not been

feeling very generous towards my readers recently.