Columbus' legacy to Pope and Castro

By Jonathan Power

CANARY ISLANDS, Spain (JP): A circle is closed this week when the long awaited trip of the Pope to Castro's Cuba finally takes place. 507 years after Catholic Spain started the rape of the continent with an historic voyage that began from here, the Church in a new guise leads the charge to usurp the last outpost of Latin dictatorship and render it a member of the continent- wide family of democracies.

Five hundred and seven years from Columbus to Castro is a long time to wait for democracy to arrive, especially when measured against the much earlier rapid progress of its northern cousins in the United States and Canada. And for that we have no one to thank but Catholic Spain and Catholic Portugal.

North America was settled by pilgrims, idealists, political and religious refugees. They wanted to create a New World and democracy became the chosen instrument. It was flawed, of course. It did not protect the Indians and it did not involve the slaves, but it laid the basis for economic advance first and social and political reform later.

The Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors were not fleeing persecution. They were adventurers and mercenaries. They lived under the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation. They really did not question it, and authoritarianism and feudalism were second nature. They were not interested in development or society. They were only there to conquer and pillage, to extract the mineral and agricultural wealth as fast as they could and ship it home. "The bloody trail of the conquest", as its earliest reporter, the friar Bartolome de las Casas, put it.

The high Indian civilizations, the Incas and the Aztecs (the Mayans were already in decline for other, still disputed, reasons) were destroyed mercilessly. To re-read Prescott's great accounts is to understand brutal ignorance at its worst. No wonder that modern day Peru is so race-ridden, corrupt and feudal, with the Indians of the Andes being treated worse than the blacks in South Africa ever were. If Mexico is somewhat better -- since the Indians were part and parcel of the western world's first twentieth century revolution in the early years of the century -- the recent massacre in its southern province of Chiapas show how skin deep respect for Indian life and culture can still be.

Not only was political evolution suffocated at birth for the best part of four-and-a-half centuries, so was economic development. The Counter-Reformation state banned and restricted enterprise in the private sector. It licensed certain entrepreneurs to develop state monopolies. It favored state mercantilism. Individual inventiveness and endeavor were stifled.

Here were two side-by-side continents, equally endowed by nature. One prospered, the other crawled on its belly. Only after the upheavals of World War II, step by difficult step, did Latin America start to shed its alliance of church and state and engage the engine of economic growth; and not too far behind followed democracy.

Three countries, which lacked mineral wealth and a large Indian population, managed to escape the worst ravages of the conquistadors. Chile was one, protected by desert in the north, the high ridge of the Andes to the east, and Antarctica to the south. Farms were settled and, bereft of Indian workers, run on their own by individual families. Trade was mainly with England, not Spain. Democracy arrived 170 years ago, before even France and Italy.

Only American influence much later, at the time of Nixon and Kissinger who were obsessed by supposed communist influence, stymied this telling record of achievement. Fearful of the leftist Salvador Allende winning the election, discrete but telling support was offered to a military coup. But the notions of law, fair play and decency were too deeply embedded for the Pinochet dictatorship's writ to run forever. Nine years ago Chile returned to its democratic roots.

Costa Rica, too, was poor and had a small Indian population and was far from Guatemala, the Spanish Central American capital. Farmers could not grow rich on the backs of the Indians. There was no powerful elite. Today, Costa Rica claims its place as one of the most stable and long-lasting, least militaristic, democracies in the world. Third, there was Uruguay which has long pioneered a benign distribution of income.

Venezuela, in contrast, is mainstream Latin America with a highly skewed distribution of income, albeit more advanced than the average. It has been democratic since 1958 and, until recently, has maintained a good record of avoiding political violence. Nevertheless, recent events have shown how much deeper the roots of democratic life have to penetrate to give real stability.

Venezuela's near neighbors, Brazil, Ecuador and Colombia, are in a much worse state. The feudal system, with the might of the landowners central to it, still maintains, even in the democratic age, a disproportionate influence on decision making. Class differences appear unbridgeable. Even if the army is off-stage in Brazil and Ecuador, in Colombia its role is ever more political with an undiminished capacity for savage acts of violence.

Could Columbus, the tenacious, but cold-blooded, sailor ever have guessed at what a difficult course he had set for his new "discovery". Can the Pope, re-kindling the religious flame in Castro's Marxist Cuba and emphasizing the virtues of democracy, ensure for the future a more selfless Catholicism that convinces these still archaic societies that the Indians, the poor, the underprivileged are owed a debt with half a millennium's worth of accumulated interest?