07/03/202406/03/2024 Still from ‘Welcome, Mr Marshall’ by Luis García Berlanga
In an old story by Augusto Monterroso, an unfortunate man named Mr. Percy Taylor leaves Boston without a penny in his pockets to enter the Amazon jungle and live with an indigenous tribe. At first the natives take him for the whistle of a night watchman and give him a reputation as a poor and unhappy gringo. Everything changes the day a stranger gives him a human head, a reduced skull with his good mustache and beard, an amulet that Mr. Taylor decides to send by mail to his uncle, Mr. Rolston. His uncle, a New York resident, is so fascinated by his gift that he asks his nephew for five, ten, twenty more heads. Mr. Taylor suspects that someone is profiting at his expense.
Mr. Rolston and Mr. Taylor, of course, join forces in the export of native heads with the approval of the local authorities. The fact is that demand is growing, heads are scarce and authorities are looking for the most expeditious way to increase mortality. The laws are toughened and the most innocent offenses are punished by hanging. Dying is an act of patriotism and there are no doctors more valued than those who never cure. The coffin industry is skyrocketing. The country’s economy is booming without apparent limit. But There comes a day when there are no more natives left than politicians and journalistsso there is no other choice but to declare war on neighboring tribes.
With this childish-looking fable and hilarious twists, Monterroso denounced the colonial expansion of the United Fruit Company and pointed out the United States and the CIA, which at that time had deployed their conspiratorial arts against the government of Guatemala. To the president Harry Truman He must not have liked Jacobo Árbenz’s electoral victory, nor his agrarian reform, so he sponsored a coup d’état and replaced the democratic president with a butcher he trusted. All in the name of anti-communism. As a consequence, the country ended up immersed in an endless war with a trail of approximately two hundred thousand corpses. The UN called it genocide.
In both literature and popular culture, there are many allegories that try to explain the mystery of wealth. Apparently, the American lawyer Silas H. Strawn already resorted to the old cow analogy in the 1930s to justify his preferences for the Republican Party. Capitalism: if you have two cows, you sell one and buy a bull. Socialism: if you have two cows, the Government takes one from you and gives it to your neighbor. Now that capitalism is running rampant and socialism seems like a remote possibility, the cow joke sounds rather ironic. If we respect the parallelism, Oxfam would say that 1% of the rich have hoarded twice as many cows and bulls as the rest of the world’s population in just two years.
The livestock metaphors have aged worse than Monterroso’s work. And whoever says Mr. Taylor, also says Mr. Marshall. Shortly before Árbenz ran in the Guatemalan elections, Harry Truman’s government had offered its reconstruction funds to all European countries except the Franco dictatorship. In the midst of the Cold War, Franco sold his American sympathies cheap and The Madrid Pacts ended up turning Spain into a military colony of Washington. In Welcome Mr. MarshallLuis García Berlanga satirizes the humiliation of a regime that had won the civil war but had lost the Second World War without fully combating it.
Mr. Taylor and Mr. Marshall would fit effortlessly into more recent episodes like the Ukrainian war. Ten years ago, the West encouraged the Euromaidan riots and blessed the violent ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych. Now, on the second anniversary of the Russian invasion, we are told that International capital is insufficient to alleviate the bankruptcy of Ukraine and guarantee the integrity of the territory. In the first months of 2022, the opportunity to seal a ceasefire was explored, but the hunger for war triumphed. According to the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, Boris Johnson arrived in kyiv to say on behalf of the West that the negotiations had to be dissolved because Putin was weakened. Johnson fell. Putin is still standing.
Now the West beats the drums of war and Macron calls for raising European arms against Russia. Mr. Taylor’s story tells us that war, better in third countries, is a buoyant business that allows other buoyant businesses to prosper: social unanimity grows, repressive laws grow, the military industry grows and the manufacturing of coffins also grows. For its part, Mr. Marshall’s film tells us that those Third countries, backyard of the imperial powers, end up abandoned to their fate, dominated, exploited and bought at a bargain price. We are their military bases, their political puppets, their morgues.
If we want the trade in shrunken heads to take off, it is not advisable to skimp on pretexts and double standards. In June 2022, under the euphoria of sanctions against Russia, Ursula von der Leyen traveled to Jerusalem to announce a gas purchase agreement with Israel. Now what Netanyahu has turned the Gaza Strip into a cemetery, Western authorities look the other way and they secretly hiss or decisively support Israel and ask for five, ten, twenty more Palestinian heads so that the business of death never stops. In the background, a section of the stands applauds and waves flags. Genocidaires, we welcome you with joy.
2024-03-07 10:27:22
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