Trouble with true
Carlos Alberto Montaner
Jesus felt a keen distaste for
Pharisees and scribes. According to Matthew, he called them ``hypocrites,''
a behavior he found repugnant. The Ibero-American Summit, which just ended
in Estoril, Portugal, was full of hypocrites.
A hypocrite is a person who simulates feelings he doesn't feel and
indignation he doesn't experience. He says one thing and does another, in
pursuit of his own benefit. He is not a schizophrenic and he's not confused.
He's a moral scoundrel.
Take, for instance, Cristina Kirchner, the Argentine president. The lady
pronounced herself wounded in her democratic feelings by the events in
Honduras. But she comes from a party (the Peronist Party) that in the past two
decades has irresponsibly provoked the untimely end of the only two
non-Peronist governments the Argentines have managed to elect.
Hounded by the Peronists, Raúl Alfonsín had to throw in the towel in 1989,
seven months before ending his mandate. Fernando de la Rúa had an even worse
fate; he left power in 2001, fleeing in a helicopter two years before his
term's scheduled end, crushed by the steamroller the Kirchners helped drive.
The Ecuadorean Rafael Correa is no different. He censures the Hondurans for
dumping Zelaya, but he made his public debut as a minister in a government
(Alfredo Palacio's) that in April 2005 overthrew the legitimate president,
Lucio Gutiérrez, after a conflict between the legislative and the judiciary
that is more similar to than different from the events in Honduras.
And what can we say about Evo Morales? His specialty is to generate
ungovernability in Bolivia. With his coca-growing bullies, he used to block
traffic, besiege cities and generate violent conflicts that had two
fundamental purposes: to destabilize the country and create victims. The
strategy worked. Bolivia was destabilized, several dozen people died in street
riots and Congress, cowed to the point of panic, forced the resignation of
Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada in October 2003. The president had to go into exile
in the company of Carlos Sánchez Berzain, his most outstanding minister.
And Daniel Ortega? This man hasn't the slightest democratic conviction. He
was a dictator during his first Sandinista term -- which culminated in the
plunder of half the nation, a notorious event known as the piñata. He
left office with hundreds of deaths on his conscience (that's just a figure of
speech) and then came back in for a second term. To perpetute himself in
office, he has resorted to electoral fraud, blackmail, bribery and
intimidation. Yet this man dares to tear his garments because Zelaya was
deposed by the Honduran Congress.
As for Raúl and Fidel Castro, who can fathom the depths of their hypocrisy?
A couple of dictators who have clung to power for no less than half a century
in a country where there's only one political party, where the separation of
powers is a macabre joke, cannot accept the affront to democracy represented
by Zelaya's ouster by a ruling from the Honduran Supreme Court (later endorsed
by Congress) because Zelaya severely violated the nation's Constitution.
But the one who gets the grand prize for hypocrisy is Hugo Chávez. The
colonel who in 1992 attempted to kill the legitimate president, Carlos Andrés
Pérez when he led a failed military coup in Venezuela -- an attack that left
hundreds of bodies on the streets of Caracas -- who today persecutes and
imprisons his ideological adversaries, dares to describe as ``vile'' the
American policy of respecting the will of the Honduran people, as expressed in
the elections of Nov. 29 and the ensuing vote in Congress.
Fortunately, not all Latin American rulers have been hypocrites. Alvaro
Uribe, Ricardo Martinelli and Alan García were brave enough to stand under the
authority of the truth and common sense.
Oscar Arias of Costa Rica went even further. In the same manner in which
some months ago in Trinidad he was honorable enough to declare that we Latin
Americans are the main creators of our own ills, at this gathering in Estoril,
Arias reminded Brazil's Lula da Silva -- another dyed-in-the-wool hypocrite --
that it is not coherent to embrace Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or approve of
the elections in Iraq and Afghanistan while denying Hondurans an opportunity
to emerge peacefully from their political crisis.
Blessed be the sincere and those who abhor hypocrisy, for theirs is the
kingdom of heaven. Matthew didn't say that. I did.
December 9, 2009
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