Beyond ideologies: how to talk about Ukraine in Latin America

History, says Paul Valéry somewhere, is the science of things that do not repeat themselves.

I think I know what he means, but at the same time it seems clear to me that, although the story does not exactly repeat its things, with the same actors and the same settings, it has an undeniable tendency to plagiarize itself: changing details, that yes, so that plagiarism is not too noticeable.

That is what I was thinking about these days, trying to understand the different positions that Latin America has taken in the face of the war in Ukraine.

The continent, which in 2001 almost unwaveringly condemned the US intervention in Afghanistan, which in its majority opposed the Iraq war in 2003, is fatally divided over the criminal action of Putin's Russia.

A long diplomatic tradition has always been opposed, in Latin America, to the unilateral use of force by the strong countries against the weaker ones: a position, as anyone will see, that is also one of prevention or self-defense, since imperialist interventions do not they have been strangers to us in the two centuries of our independence.

The problem is that these interventions have been perpetrated above all by the United States,

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That may be happening now;

and if so, it is easy to remember that it had happened before.

In the 1930s, for example, several Latin American leaders, who still carried on their shoulders the memory of the war in Cuba and the intervention of the United States Navy in Panama, turned their anti-Americanism into a support for everything that was anti-American.

But they did it blindly, and through fanaticism they ended up sympathizing with Nazi Germany: because the enemies of my enemies are my friends.

In one of the strangest passages of his book

, Carlos Granés tells how it happened to José Vasconcelos: one of the luminaries of post-revolutionary Mexico, rector of universities and Minister of Education.

In 1929 he had had a good chance of being president, but an American ambassador sabotaged his candidacy;

that personal resentment was added to the collective grievances, and thus Vasconcelos got up one day having become the editor of a pro-Nazi magazine financed by Germany.

The crime of aggression committed by Russia has divided our republics into two camps: on the one hand, the countries that follow a tradition that we could call republican, that support sanctions, have diplomatically sided with Ukraine and with the international order created since the Second War, and defend the self-determination of the peoples and the principle of non-intervention;

on the other hand, those who have accepted Putin's propaganda for whatever reason, and consider that the invasion is not an invasion, but a defense, and that aggressive expansionism is not that of Russia, but that of NATO, the arm armed with US imperialism.

In the middle were until a few months ago countries like Mexico and Brazil,

whose diplomats condemned the aggression and whose presidents —López Obrador and the well done Bolsonaro— showed a reluctance when it came to condemning Russia that seemed too much like collusion.

The Colombian Petro has assumed a stance of isolationist neutrality.

Asked about the matter when he was a candidate, he replied: "What Ukraine or what eight rooms."

Which, in free translation, means:

.

Those who have faithfully followed the Russian version of the war —even ridiculously repeating the most absurd propaganda falsehoods— are Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela: all authoritarian governments where democracy is a failure and human rights violations are routine sad;

all governments that for geopolitical reasons or economic support depend more or less on Putin's handouts, and that feel they gain political miles when the Kremlin issues veiled threats against the United States.

This was the case in January 2022, when, a month before the most heralded invasion in recent history, in the midst of negotiations to avoid the catastrophe that has finally occurred, Putin's people suggested the possibility of placing missiles near the North American coast.

There is no greater surprise in any of this: there is no surprise in the divisions between factions, nor in the ideological use of a human crisis that seems remote, nor in the uncomfortable whiff of the Cold War that too many of our political conversations have in this Latin America. disoriented.

But now we should look beyond all this.

Now, when one year has passed since this invasion, when we have already seen enough —because everything is seen and known in our hyperconnected world— the images of suffering that war leaves behind every day, we could use the Occam's razor and return to the simple observations: beyond the alliances or alignments that are made from governments and the powerful, it is possible that we, ordinary citizens,

Sergio Jaramillo said this or with similar words a few days ago, when he summoned a handful of writers and activists to launch a kind of appeal to civil society in Latin America.

Jaramillo was one of the architects of the peace agreements at the Teatro Colón, with which the Government of Juan Manuel Santos managed to demobilize the FARC guerrillas, but he has mounted this campaign, #AguantaUcrania, without any political zeal or representing any institution, neither to any party, nor to any government: he recently visited the city of kyiv and took note of the ravages of the war, and listened to the accounts of the Ukrainians about their recent pains and also heard them speak of their future anguish: because winter was coming and life in the war, which had been very hard for months, would be even more so.

It is, truly, a citizen movement, and it is moved by fuels as simple as solidarity and the admiration that many of us have for the resistance of the Ukrainians.

Of course, one does not have to be a complete cynic to doubt the usefulness of these initiatives, or to wonder about it.

Happily, that was what happened the day of the public presentation of #AguantaUcrania: the Colombian journalist Catalina Gómez asked Oleksandra Matviichuk, director of the Center for Civil Liberties of Ukraine and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize last year, if the Declarations of support from the citizens of this remote continent were of some use to their attacked country.

Matviichuk, with enormous gratitude and more words, said yes.

Not only because she allows the Ukrainians,

who have resisted Putin's aggression with something that can only be called heroism, feeling less alone in the world, but also because it opens the possibility of resisting in the other war: the information war.

And in that field, I think, many things will be at stake.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

is a writer.

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