Authors: Robert A. Heinlein
The nuances of Peruvian politics are too complex for me and I doubt if any outsider could gain a real understanding of them without a long, hard apprenticeship. All of the nations south of us are constitutional republics with liberal constitutional safeguards similar or usually equivalent to those found in our own constitution, yet with the shining exceptions of Chile and Uruguay, their political records seem to us to be an endless list of coup d'état, bloody revolution, unelected provisional presidents, political admirals and generals, states of siege, states of public emergency, exiles and refugees, outlawing of opposition parties, liquidation of opposition leaders, suppression of free speech, free assembly, and free press.
Here is a place to walk softly, to be not hasty in passing judgment; we may not understand all that we see. I found in traveling around the world that a great many people believed the most arrant nonsense about the United States. In particular, a great many people, apparently well educated and sophisticated, were convinced that the people of the United States were in the grip of terror and that free speech and free press no longer existed here. They believed that the United States was fomenting a third world war and would presently start it, with Armageddon consequences for everyone else, and that the government of the United States smashed without mercy anyone who dared to oppose even by oral protest this headlong rush toward disaster.
These people could "prove" their opinions by quoting any number of Americans and American newspapers and magazines. That they were able to quote such American sources proved just the opposite, namely that we
do
continue to enjoy free speech even to express arrant nonsense and unpopular opinion, escaped them completely.
The extremely wide scope of free speech and free press in the United States, much wider than that enjoyed anywhere else in the world including all of the British Commonwealth, is not understood elsewhere.
(More free speech and press than in the British Commonwealth? Surely not! Ah, but we
do
have: our radio is not government owned, we do not place severe restrictions on the importation of printed matter from outside our borders, our libel laws and our limitations on reporting of court procedures are as nothing compared with theirs, our news reporting is the most aggressive in the world.)
The real restrictions against what we can say or print are very nearly limited to only the most blatant of pornography and to classified military secrets. But citizens of other countries neither understand nor believe this; it is too foreign to their own experience. I said to a man in South Africa: "You insist that anyone in the United States who expresses an opinion favorable to Russia or to communism is immediately thrown in jail. How do you reconcile that with the fact that the communist
Daily Worker
is still published in New York?" He simply called me a liar.
I thought of sending him a copy on my return, but I refrained; such a publication in
his
country was likely to cause him trouble if he was caught with it.
In most cases all around the world these discussions that revealed the extent of misconception about the United States and its institutions started at the same point: why didn't the United States government or the United States people or
somebody
suppress Senator McCarthy and put a stop to the "reign of terror" in our country?
The interest in Senator McCarthy was enormous; the total lack of understanding of what was really going on was even more enormous. Now I am neither a constituent nor an admirer of the Senator, but I found myself repeatedly in the odd position of trying to explain what he was doing, why it was legal in a free country for him to do it, and how it was impossible for a congressional investigation to cause a "reign of terror" in 160,000,000 people.
My task was made more difficult by the fact that many Americans with other attributes of a horse than horse sense were asserting loudly that McCarthy had indeed created a "reign of terror." Are
you
terrified? I am not, yet I have in my background much political activity well to the left of Senator McCarthy's position. The worst that Senator McCarthy can do to me is to ask me a lot of questions and demand answers under oath. I may resent some of the questions but I can answer them without taking refuge in the Fifth Amendment; there is no treason in my record.
To call such investigation a "reign of terror" is to stretch language out of all shape. My notion of a "reign of terror" consists of bandits in the bush who murder and loot in the dark of the night (Indonesia, Malaya, Kenya, elsewhere), jailing the opposition political leaders (Argentina, Spain, etc.), or killing them (anywhere behind the iron-and-bamboo curtain); it does
not
mean questioning people under the safeguards of the most thorough system for the protection of individual rights this world has ever known. It does
not
mean a few dozen traitors and/or custard heads taking refuge behind the Fifth Amendment on the sole grounds that to tell the truth would be to incriminate themselves.
I am not defending McCarthy's thumb-fingered approach nor his sweeping public statements. It has been argued that McCarthy's personality and methods have played into the hands of our enemies and enabled Communism International to make effective propaganda against us. There is some truth in this thesis but, in my opinion, not much. I think that a Senate investigation of communism in the United States would have been fought by propaganda just as angry, just as vicious, had the investigation been chairmanned by Thomas Jefferson with Daniel Webster as his chief counsel. The thing that the communists hate is not McCarthy's unloveable personality but the fact that he is daring to attack communism at all.
The other half is that the thing so many foreigners relish about this investigation is not the issue of communism, not the personality of McCarthy, but the fact that it gives an excuse to take a slap at the Fat Boy . . . Uncle Sam-
Us.
It is easy to hate the rich and the powerful; those who sneer at us for "McCarthyism" are just as ready to sneer at us for our inside plumbing-I have heard both sneers combined in one sentence.
The point of this aside while our party drives through beautiful new Lima is that the political institutions of another country are hard to understand. Outside the United States very few people comprehend the nature of a congressional investigation and it is almost impossible to explain it to them. They have it mixed up with the Inquisition, with Senator McCarthy having all the functions and powers of Torquemada. The idea that a private citizen can answer or refuse to answer a series of questions put to him by a senator, such that the record shows clearly that the citizen being questioned is now or has in the past been actively engaged in treason against the United States-and then get up and walk out a free man-is so foreign to most other people that they simply cannot believe it.
Furthermore, if they did believe it, they would be even more contemptuous of us for being so soft than they now are for "McCarthyism" as they comprehend it, i.e., which they conceive to be a policy of take-him-away-and-lock-him-up-I-don't-like-his-politics. Our extreme leniency, if they understood it, would strike them as preposterous, asinine.
The institution of political refuge as practiced in South America is almost as hard for us to understand. It is as if Adlai Stevenson had found it healthy to hole up in the French Embassy immediately after election day in 1952, for this is approximately what Señor Haya did. He ducked into the Colombian Embassy and stayed there for five years. The Peruvian government never gave up its contention that Haya was a common criminal charged with a capital crime; Colombia, which itself passed through three changes of government by revolution during the five years, never swerved from its determination to give asylum even though the various Colombian governments were not in sympathy with Haya's politics. But, bitter as the issue was, Peru never attempted to remove the refugee by force from the utterly undefended embassy; the principle of asylum was too precious even though Peru declared that Haya was not entitled to it.
Asylum is a necessary part of politics as practiced in South America. When bullets are used as commonly as ballots it is comforting to know that, if you find yourself out of power tomorrow, there are a couple of dozen safe spots right in your own capital where your successor's soldiers cannot arrest you, or possibly shoot you while "attempting to escape." This is as ameliorating an influence as our own Fifth Amendment.
(By the way, I have never heard of one of Senator McCarthy's so-called "victims" choosing to take refuge in the Russian Embassy.)
But why should politics in South America be such a rough and sometimes deadly game? I will spare you a 10,000-word essay on historical background, racial types, traditional institutions, and so forth, and admit that I do not know. But I do know that our northern political attitudes cannot readily be exported to South America. Our Latin neighbors are unanimously agreed on one point: they do
not
want Uncle to tell them how they must behave. Most South Americans are both intensely patriotic and fiercely individualistic. Most of them do not dislike us-we are probably better liked and for less reason in South America than anywhere else in the world. But while they will accept United States capital, products, and engineering, if offered with decent respect for their dignity, they will not accept any "do-gooding" from us in internal politics. They hate Yankee intervention much more than they hate their political opponents.
I suggest that in this they may be right. It took us a long time to achieve political stability; there are those alive today who remember the fratricide of 1861-'65. Political philosophy is still a long way from being a science, revolution is still the refuge and the natural right of the oppressed, and I contend that it is very hard to be sure who are the "baddies" and who are the "goodies" in any overturning of a government south of us . . . at least at the time it takes place. Chile and Uruguay are proof that they are not incapable of achieving stability without our busybody help. In the meantime, a policy of hands-off combined with a warm willingness to help when and how they want help seems to me to be the best we can do.
As we passed the Colombian Embassy we saw two armed soldiers on guard outside. Señor Haya was not in sight, but he was there; his long wait for safe conduct to exile had still four months to run.
The country club at Lima would have been a credit to any city of comparable size in the States and its kitchen would almost certainly have surpassed the comparable ones; we had a wonderful lunch at the ridiculous prices made possible by the exchange. A wedding reception party was gathering as we left; the señoras and señoritas were elegantly dressed and most of them were remarkably attractive, some were very beautiful. For my taste the señoritas south of here live up to the propaganda about them. True, they do have a slight tendency to be broad-shouldered across the hips, but, as the chief mate of the
Gulf Shipper
pointed out, in these parts two axe-handles across the hips is considered about right. The gringo liking for narrow hips is probably a passing fad if history is any guide. Besides that, girdles are terribly difficult things to manage in hot climates, so I have been told.
All of the women wore hats, just as they do in the British Commonwealth. But the hats of these ladies were brilliantly imaginative and frivolous whereas most British hats for women look like something built by birds in a tree and then abandoned.
Ticky was not wearing a hat and received a few surprised glances, but she carried it off with cold dignity. She had a hat with her on the trip (the one she uses for weddings and funerals at home, her only hat), but she declined to be intimidated into wearing it once she found out about a dispensation which permitted her to enter churches without one.
After lunch we visited the art institute and Jirón de Unión, the shopping center. Lima has gone all out for modern architecture but the modern trends in painting have not made a dent. Nowhere did we find a painting looking like two fried eggs, one addled, or perhaps jackstraws in a high wind. The instructors actually required the students to learn anatomy, perspective, and draftsmanship-very reactionary, of course. I liked it.
Jirón de Unión is the collective term for a narrow shopping street each block of which has its own separate name. This must be confusing to the postman; the tourist does well to ignore the street signs and simply keep an eye out for landmarks. The shops are quite well stocked but not equal to those of cities of the same size in the States, except for silver articles of all sorts, much of it of great grace and imaginative beauty and made remarkably cheap by the ridiculous rate of exchange. Ticky showed remarkable restraint, for it would be easy indeed to go wild and spend oneself broke there. Shortly we had to hurry back to the ship in order not to miss it.
As soon as we left Callao we started running across the furrows and the ship bounced for a couple of days down to Arica, northernmost point in Chile. A roll can be unsettling but a pitch really shakes up the stomach; the
Gulf Shipper
was moving around like a cayuse trying to get rid of a rider. I can now testify that Dramamine actually does stop seasickness, at least for this deponent. I am subject to seasickness and certainly would have been disgracefully and miserably ill without the drug; as it was I missed no meals and ate heartily. But I will never grow fond of excessive motion in a ship. It is annoying to have your soup in your lap, irritating to have to hop madly for balance when caught with trousers half on, not restful to fight the motion of the ship in your sleep.
But
anything
is better than seasickness. I include drilling for gum-line cavities without Novocain.
Arica has no harbor, only an open roadstead; the
Gulf Shipper
anchored and tied to a buoy, thus mooring her against swinging but leaving her still subject to the swells that bounced her around on the way down. Cargo was loaded and discharged by lighters which tied up around the ship like pigs around a sow. Ticky and I watched the first boat load of stevedores come aboard and were struck by their extremely colorful and piratical appearance; we kept expecting them to break into the
habanera.
But it was appearance only; so far as our own experience serves, Chilenos, all of them, are the gentlest and most kindly people in the world.