Jorge Capelán
On Friday there was a scandal that is still reverberating around the world. In a interview with the right-wing and anti-popular media par excellence, Infobae, sworn enemy of everything that smells of Patria Grande, Mr. Jorge Bergoglio, that for about 10 years has held the religious name of Francis, delivered an outburst of, if not biblical, at least moral, geopolitical and historical proportions.
Questioned in this way by the sly journalist Daniel Hadad, about his opinion of the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, Bergoglio said:
“With much respect, I have no choice but to think of an imbalance in the person who leads [Comandante Daniel Ortega]. There we have a bishop in prison, a very serious, very capable man [terrorist Rolando Alvarez]. He wanted to give his testimony and did not accept exile. It is something that is out of what we are living, it is as if it were bringing the communist dictatorship of 1917 or the Hitlerian dictatorship of 1935, bringing here the same ones… They are a type of gross dictatorships. Or, to use a nice distinction from Argentina, guarangas. Guarangas”.
Adolf Adolf Hitler meeting representatives of the Vatican:
The Catholic Church is not in the best position to talk about Nazism or dictatorships.
There is a lot of cane to grind in those unfortunate statements. First of all, it should be explained that the interview lasted about an hour and covered all kinds of topics regarding the Pope’s personal life, the Catholic Church and Vatican affairs. He only spoke about Nicaragua for about 30 seconds. However, Infobae titled the interview “Pope Francis opined on Nicaragua: “It is like communist or Hitler dictatorships, rude”.
Another thing to clarify is the meaning of the adjective “guarango” in the Southern Cone, which Bergoglio seems to like so much. It means “fool”, “stupid” and “immature”.
It is surprising how, in order to qualify the government led by Comandante Daniel Ortega, Bergoglio thinks of bringing to light “the communist dictatorship of 1917 or the Hitlerian dictatorship of 1935”, having at hand much closer examples in which he himself played an important role.
However, his recent declarations on Nicaragua cast doubt on what place in history he put himself when, as Provincial Superior of the Jesuits in Argentina, the Argentine dictatorship murdered 30,000 of his compatriots and even sent soldiers to distant Central America to advise the Contras on the best way to assassinate Nicaraguans.
If Bergoglio blithely ignores real dictatorships like the one in his own country and prefers to take examples from History Channel about Germany and the Soviet Union (by the way, many things can be said about Hitler, except that he was a dictator) and calls them “guarangas”, perhaps there is some truth in the very well documented journalistic versions that indicate that in the 70s he collaborated with the dictatorship and that his indiscretions caused the arrest of the Jesuit priests Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics at the hands of the military regime.
Since his election in 2013 by a group of prospective cardinals and behind the backs of the faithful, Bergoglio has taken on the task of selling himself as a progressive pope, concerned about the environment (everyone remembers his encyclical Laudato Si), concerned about indigenous people and inclusion in the church, although the latter has not yet taken hold.
There are still those who, from an anti-imperialist perspective, claim him as “the apostle of the unity of the Patria Grande”. How deluded they are, bent on seeing progress in “progressive” governments that since returning to power have done nothing but administer the decrepit neoliberal model!
And that is what Bergoglio is at the global level as pope of the Catholic Church: the simple administrator of a church that struggles to maintain its share of privileges within the Western order of neocolonial exploitation. Let no one expect pears from the elm tree, because he will never give them.
It is said that Bergoglio was a close friend of Methol Ferré, a very important Uruguayan geopolitician, with leftist nationalist ideas, and close to the intellectual current of another very important geopolitician, the Argentine Jorge Abelardo Ramos.
For Bergoglio, who has identified himself with Peronism, it should always have been very clear what is meant in Latin America when one speaks of “dictatorship” and “democracy”. When the powerful chant “dictatorship”, in reality they are seeking to attack political projects with a genuine popular base and which question the neocolonial status quo in our region.
This is clearly demonstrated by Ramos in his book Historia de la Nación Latinoamericana (see chapter X and following). The accusations of “dictatorships” on the part of the port-cities built in the heat of the Spanish colony and later of the English and French neo-colonization of the continent, were directed against any political alternative that sought to unite the Patria Grande under an endogenous project of material and cultural development. “Dictators” were Belgrano, San Martin, Bolivar, Artigas up to our days with Sandino, Fidel, Chavez or Comandante Daniel.
Jorge Abelardo Ramos, who was truly lucid in these matters, wrote about Argentina: “We are a country because we were unable to integrate a Nation and we were Argentines because we failed to be Latin Americans. Here lies our whole drama and the key to the revolution to come”. Bergoglio’s “guarango” seems to be unaware of this. His was a typical Argentine “guarangada”, from a country that unfortunately is incapable of entering the Patria Grande nuestroamericana that many of us prefer to call Abya Yala.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 