[applause] Okay. Okay. Great. Thank you, Fran Sebastian. Um, thank you very much. Um, in English, uh, um, and um, I'm obviously super happy and delighted and very honored, uh, to be here. Very honored to be giving the James Robinson lecture. It's not clear to me if you're going to be able to get anybody else to present the James Robinson lecture. So just in case, I'm available next year.
Okay. And today I wanted to just do something fun and a little bit different. Um, you know, uh, seemed appropriate for the event. So I, and I want, so I'm going to present some research with, uh, my collaborator José Luis Falconi. José Luis is, um, he's a professor of art, uh, at the University of Connecticut. He's not a social scientist. Uh, and, and I put all of my, my, my, the institutions with which I'm affiliated up there, including Los Angeles, since Economía gave me a, I'm now a kind of, you know, I don't know what I am, some, I'm an honorary member of the department, so I'm very excited about that. And, and, and I won't talk about the University of Nigeria. So, so this is work with José Luis and I have been doing for the last few years, uh, about the kind of political economy, but also the culture of Latin America, trying to kind of embed the political economy in the culture of Latin America. And, and, and it's really the way I'm going to start talking about this is, and the way José Luis and I started talking about it is like things we don't understand, you know, what is it we don't understand and how could we understand them. So let me start with an example of things that we felt we didn't understand, and then I'm going to propose a way of thinking about this. Okay.
So this is, um, I guess this is Bolivia, probably. Uh, this, he calls it like, you know, the technical disqualification. So let me tell you the story. Uh, five years ago, it was the bicentenary in Peru, and the Peruvian government decided to have exhibitions and shows and different events, and they asked people to put forward proposals for what they would organize and how would they organize this and who would be involved. So they started a, a competition, and a gentleman and his team, Miguel López, was declared the winner of this competition. But it was a very strange sort of competition. There were 120 teams proposed projects of events and what was going to happen, what would celebrate the bicentennial of Peru, and every single one of those teams except for Miguel López was ruled inadmissible. Okay. So the technical disqualification was, it wasn't that their proposals were bad, they were just disqualified on technical grounds. They missed the deadline, they forgot to fill out a form, they proposed a sort of activity which it had been specifically stipulated the bicentennial would not involve. So some technical reason ruled out 119 of these proposals. Okay.
Then Miguel López says, you know, uh, I'm sorry, instead of celebrating to win this win, he says, I'm sorry to find myself in the middle of this situation. Okay, I'm part of the team that was declared fit, the only team, to our great regret and disappointment. So he'd won, but he hadn't really won because in the end he was the only person, his team was the only team involved. Okay. So how, it seems very dysfunctional to us. So how do you understand something like that? Okay. So I don't think this is a case of, of course Miguel López had a kind of vested interest in winning, but only in a trivial sense, it seems to us. You know, he didn't bribe the judge or the jury to disqualify the 119. Okay? And in fact, he was genuinely embarrassed by winning, about winning this competition. And to us, the technical disqualification seems like a fantastic example, and you're going to get many other examples in the next hour, of a clash between what the great, uh, Uruguayan intellectual Ángel Rama called the clash between the real and the ideal. There's an ideal way of making a proposal for the bicentennial, but in reality it's almost impossible to satisfy that ideal, and that leads to the disqualification of 119, uh, of these different projects. Okay.
And for Rama in his book La ciudad letrada, he sort of says a key aspect of Latin American society is that it privileges potentiality over reality. Okay. All right. And the clash between the real and the ideal. Okay. So the potential was represented by all these rules that had to be followed to permit to submit a proposal for the bicentennial. But the, the reality was it's almost impossible to satisfy all of those rules. Okay. So the real and the ideal. I'm going to try to provide some kind of microfoundation, we like to say in economics, for that. But let me make it a bit more kind of abstract. Okay. And the abstract is, you know, typically we think there's, you know, there's A and there's not A, and, you know, one of them is, if one of them is true, the other one is false, you know, and if we discover that A is false and not A is correct, then we replace A with not A, okay? Or if A is believed to be the accepted or usual practice, and there's an alternative, even if it's contradictory, we, we have to choose one or the other. But we think that many things in Latin America can be, can be sort of explained by a different model where instead of replacing one with the other, you sort of accept both of them on top of each other or beside each other. Okay? You layer them or you put one beside each other. So let me give you an example. The religious syncretism is a wonderful example. Okay? Here's an example of two contradictory things layered on top of each other. Okay. At the bottom you have Coricancha, which was the Inca... This is in Cusco in Peru. It's the Inca temple of the sun, Coricancha, and on top of it you can see absolutely layered physically on top of it is the Convento de Santo Domingo. Okay. So they came, the Incas had a temple, they put the church on top of the temple. Okay. So, so we think religious syncretism in some sense is a kind of metaphor for what we're talking about. And actually it's a very good example of sustaining multiple kind of realities that apparently are contradictory, but at the same time, okay, there's lots of issues here, we, and I'll try to talk about some of them. Okay.
So, so think about, I'll come back to religious syncretism. But if you think about that as a metaphor of sort of like, you know, uh, Coricancha that we put the church on top, um, we think that's a sort of metaphor, okay, in the sense that if you think about the history of Latin America, the modernization hasn't really taken the form of, you know, modernity replacing something previous to it. It's, it's amounted to adding things alongside so that kind of multiple realities coexist at the same time. Okay. So, so, and the Coricancha is a sort of example of that. And what's, that might be fine, but what's it got to do with the real and the ideal? Well, oops. I think that's to do with utopianism. Okay. So to understand this layering, this kind of putting A and not A next to each other or on top of each other, I want you to think about that as the real and the ideal nestling next to each other. It sounds like they're contradictory, but think of them like Coricancha and the Convento de Santo Domingo. But where does the ideal come from? The ideal comes from this great history of utopianism in Latin America. Okay. So, you know, the best example of that, of course, would be Brasília. Okay. So Brasília was, I don't know, what is it? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? You know, it was designed, this is the plan Pilotto, you know, of Brasília, of this kind of utopian vision of Brazil, of this country of progress. And as De Gaulle said, this sounds very pejorative, but I'm going to come back and reinterpret this quote by the end of the lecture. Brazil is the country of the future and always will be, the De Gaulle said. Okay, so here's the country of the future. Utopianism. Okay. But of course, utopianism is sort of deeply embedded in Latin America. It's deeply embedded in Colombian culture and society. Uh, and that's where the ideal comes in. Utopianism is about the ideal, you know. So, Rama again talking about the invention of the Americas, you know, particularly the cities. He focuses very much, La ciudad letrada, he focuses on the cities and how the cities in Latin America became an embodiment of utopian, of ideal plans, beautifully planned grids. And he says, you know, and Latin American cities have ever been the creation of the human mind. The lands of the new continent afforded a propitious place for the dream of the ordered city to become a reality. Okay. So, so, so, so you can think of the technical disqualification of an attempt to sort of fit or impose a utopian idea of what such a process of organizing the bicentennial should look like on top of the reality. Okay. Now, there's lots of things to understand here. In particular, how can you sustain kind of in equilibrium this juxtaposition of A and not A? How can religious syncretism occur and how these things are mutually contradictory? Why doesn't one win or why doesn't the other win? Okay, so you're, these are the questions to ask yourself. Okay, but, but I want you to have two images. This image of Coricancha and like this layering and adding. We don't replace, we layer, we add. And we can add contradictory things. And why would we have the real and the ideal? Well, that's where utopianism comes in. Okay.
What's absent is the feedback loop. Okay, so this is something I've noticed for many years in Colombian public policy. For example, you try to implement something, you don't implement it, but you never learn about why you didn't implement it or why you were unable to implement it. You just come with a new project and a new proposal. There's a feedback loop that's kind of missing there. Okay. So, how to think about that feedback loop? Okay. And in fact, you know, what you see in the small and in the large, you know, whether it's tax reform or constitutional change, is that when something doesn't work out or when there's this disequilibrium between the real and the ideal, you just come with a new ideal plan. What's the best example of that? The best example of that is constitution writing. Okay? Now, I'm English. We don't even have a constitution in England, you know, but only Latin Americans think you can solve these problems by writing constitutions. Even in Africa, nobody thinks in Africa you can solve problems by writing a constitution. And here's the history. This is from my colleague at the law, law, law school, Tom Ginsburg's kind of historical project of like, you know, he, he, he basically created a data set of all the world's constitutions going back to the French, the French constitution, and the dark, the dark lines are new constitutions, like rewriting constitutions, and the light lines are, you know, amendments to the constitution. So the, the, the Republic of Dominica like wins, it's the Latin American countries with the most constitutions since independence. But the idea here is sort of like you adjust to, you adjust to, you know, Colombia has far fewer, of course, than, uh, that, far, far fewer actual constitutions, or, you know, Argentina doesn't have many constitutions, but, um, you adjust to the disequilibrium of coming with a new utopian project. Okay. So that's, that's the response to this equilibrium. That doesn't explain the lack of a feedback loop, but I'm, I'm going to come, going to come to that. Okay.
So, you know, if you go back to syncretism and you think about the feedback loop, like the Spanish come and the indigenous people would like to maintain their culture and their religion, and the church comes, and so they pretend, they pretend to believe. So, you know, so they go through the motions and they come to church, and so you can understand why the indigenous people kind of want to have those two things. The more difficult thing to understand is why it's okay from the Spanish point of view, you know. So for the Catholic Church, it's okay if the indigenous people just go through the motions, like they don't really have to convert. It's sufficient that they go through the motions. Okay. So, so that's, you know, that's, that's trying to get into this. Why is there no feedback loop? And why is it that the Catholic Church is somehow happy to just let these two things coexist? Okay, here's an example. Uh, and I'm going to give lots of Colombian examples coming up of like this ideal and real and the two contra-, the contradictory things coming next to each other. Okay, but here's an example that everybody knows. Okay, so, so this principle, you know, I obey but I do not comply. So the usual interpretation of this is the Spanish crown issues laws. In the Americas they're like, I obey, meaning I recognize your right to pass laws, but I do not comply, meaning I, I keep my right to not enforce them. Okay. So that's a kind of, you know, you're autonomous, the criollos in Latin America, they don't want Spain to control them. And, but another way of thinking about that, a different interpretation of that from our perspective is the crown in Spain is issuing laws that are completely ideal and impractical. And the people in Latin America, they kind of understand they're impractical. So I obey... and the ideal. Okay. It's like you can issue your laws. That's the ideal. I don't comply. That's the real. Okay. So, so that, that also comes out of this disequilibrium between the real and the, I, the ideal. Okay. And it's a bit like the example on the previous page of how come it's sufficient if the indigenous people don't really convert, they just show up to church. How come from the Spanish point of view it's sufficient if the Latin Americans obey but they don't comply? That's okay. All right. It's sufficient.
Okay. And we think the answer to this is in the Counter-Reformation. If you trace back this lack of a feedback loop, if you trace back this willingness to kind of be content with mutually inconsistent things, you have to go back to the Counter-Reformation and the decisions of the Catholic Church of how to deal with the Reformation, how to deal with the Protestants. Do we make concessions? Do we make doctrinal concessions to the Protestants? Do we try to like get people? And the Council of Trent said, no, we're not going to do that. We're not going to make any concessions to the Protestants, but we have to, we have to live with the Protestants. How are we going to live with the Protestants? Well, at the same time as that debate was going on, of course, the whole artistic movement of the Baroque happened. Okay. And what is the Baroque about? The Baroque. So now you know why I'm writing a paper with a professor of art. The Baroque is about encompassing everything. Okay. So here's a very famous, uh, uh, Baroque church in Cholula in, in Mexico where, you know, as the way people usually talk about this, you know, of course the Baroque artistic movement came at a time, you know, of the Counter-Reformation, of trying to make the Catholic Church appeal to people, to look wonderful, to look rich, to look enticing, to look... but it was also in some sense a metaphor for the coexistence of Catholic, Catholicism and the Protestant religion, which was something that they decided at the Council of Trent. Okay. So everything can be fitted in and everything can be added in the Baroque like. There's no center. Okay. And so this is, this is the real and the ideal, and it's A and not A, it's the temple of the sun and it's the convent of Santo Domingo all coexisting. All right. So, so, so we would say, you know, I started with this real and ideal, and how can these things coexist? Like the way we think about that is it's deeply ingrained in this culture of the Baroque, which was transmitted from Spain and, you know, Catholic Europe to, uh, to, to Latin America. It's not just about the Baroque, but it's also about the utopian aspect of things, too, which of course is deeply connected to the discovery of the Americas. All right.
Um, now you're thinking, okay, he's sort of proposing, and I'm going to give lots of examples of clientelism and things like that in a minute, but, you know, it looks like, you know, when you see a title like the fundamental disequilibrium in Latin America, you think like, okay, he's proposing yet another explanation for why everything is a mess in Latin America. And I am, but there's more to it than that. And there's always what we call a plus one. What do I mean by that? Think about this metaphor of like adding things. You add, you add, you add things, something comes, you add it, you add it, you add it, and something emerges out of that. Something new comes out of that. You know what in physics they, in theoretical physics they call it emergent phenomena. What do I mean by that? A Brazilian buffet. Okay. What's a Brazilian buffet? If you go to this Fogo de Chão restaurant, I don't know if they have that in Bogotá. I'm sure, you know, like it's like, it's everything. A Brazilian buffet is everything. It's like Japanese, you know, you know, it's everything. Man, man, you know, like, um, Italian, Spanish, you know, like you name it. It's all there. It is like it's, and you know, but it's not just the sum, is not ju-, the whole is not just the sum of the parts, okay? It's a Brazilian buffet. You know, maybe ceviche would be an even better example. Okay, what is ceviche? It's like potatoes, Andean food. It's like raw fish from Japan. It's like Italian. But that what comes out is ceviche. A ceviche is not any one of those individual parts. It's an emergent, ceviche is an emergent phenomenon. Okay. So, so we think in some sense, you know, this adding, it's like a Latin American model of innovation or creativity or so. Yeah, there's lots of problems with, with this model of society, this cultural model, but I, we're also going to argue that actually there's lots of very interesting and creative things about that. And it's, that's partly what's distinct about Latin America and good about Latin America. So, so it's more than, you know, maybe this looks like a trivial example, but, but may-, I'll give you some more later. Okay. So, so, so, so just it's more than the sum of the parts. It's not just an explanation for dysfunction. It's also a model of creativity. All right.
Okay. So roadmap. Okay. Like what am I going to do for the rest of the talk? Well, let me give you some examples of this disequilibrium in action. And I'm going to give neoliberal policy reform in Argentina. And then I'm going to start with my Colombian examples, which is Colombian land restitution in Meta. Okay, which I think we think is a great example of this dysfunctionality. Okay. Um, then I'm going to talk a little bit about why Latin America is different from North America. Of course, North America had utopianism like William Penn, the Puritan, Puritans. There were lots of utopians. But of course, what the North America didn't have was the Counter-Reformation. So the United States developed a much more, our argument is a much more empirical way. There's more of a feedback loop, uh, in the United States. So it's not clear that utopianism, utopianism is the difference, but this feedback loop is the difference. So I'll talk a little bit about that, and then I'll try to convince you. You know, I gave you this, talked about this famous adage of Rama. I'm going to give you some other examples from Latin America which we think this way of thinking helps think about in a new way. One is going to be, uh, inequality. Another is the pervasiveness of clientelism in Latin America. And another is, you know, uh, the magical state, you know, the, the magic of the state. This is something mostly about Venezuela, but, um, okay. Um, and, and then let's see, let's see, let's see where I get in magical realism. Okay.
So, so let me talk about, um, uh, neoliberal policy reform. Like how would you think about these ideas in the context of neoliberal policy reform in Argentina? Well, here it is, libertaria, like so President Milei is imposing, you know, as we speak, a completely utopian model of like how an economy and society should function, and, you know, clashing with the reality of Argentina. But of course this is not the first time this has happened in Argentina. Okay. If you go back to, you know, the 1990s when President Menem, 1989 President Carlos Menem came to power, uh, the traditional narrative of this would be, okay, this was the era of the Washington Consensus. You know, President Menem, he was a traditional Peronist. He came from the provinces, from La Rioja. But he was convinced by the World Bank or whoever it was that he should abandon the bad old days of the Peronists and adopt neoliberal reform. And in a sense he did. But how would you think about this from my perspective? Well, there's the old Peronist clientelistic way of doing things, and then there's neoliberal reform. Would you expect neoliberal reform to replace the old Peronist way? No. You'd expect it to be put on top of it or put beside it. You'd be, you'd expect people to incorporate both. And in fact, if you look now at the academic literature on neoliberal reform in Argentina in the 1990s, that's exactly what happened. Okay? That neoliberal reform did come, but it was made compatible. It was put alongside the traditional way of doing politics in, uh, Argentina. Okay. So, so, so, you know, so, so, so, and how did that happen? You know, uh, as, uh, Steve Levitsky, you know, uh, uh, political scientist Steve Levitsky says in his book, you know, about transforming Argentina, the PJ, the Peronist party, underwent a stunning about-face. The stunning about-face happens when Carlos Menem embraces the Washington Consensus. Okay. But then what Levitsky also points out is that, well, you know, what was the secret? President Menem realized that many aspects of Washington Consensus could be just adapted to the usual way of doing politics. Privatization. For example, Carlos Slim in Mexico acquired his fortune through neoliberal privatization in Mexico. In, uh, Argentina, privatization, privatizing assets was compatible with rewarding the supporters of the Peronist party. So then it turned out neoliberal reform was compatible with the traditional way of, uh, doing politics. Though despite the stunning about-face talking about embracing the Washington Consensus, there's little evidence that the Peronist party suffered a substantial erosion in its activist base. And this was because President Menem was able to make these two things work together. Okay, making the buffet. All right, so let me not go into the details. You got the idea.
Okay, let me talk about Colombia, the Colombian frontier. So this is, um, the municipality of Cabuyaro in, uh, Meta. It's in Meta, Buenos Tiempos, Paros, you reckon? Okay, here's the story. Uh, here's the story. Uh, in 1997, now of course I think this example is interesting also because I want to say this is not just a kind of cynical political economy. There's a real sort of dysfunctionality going on here. Okay. So in 1997, the Colombian Land Reform Institute, INCORA, decides, you know, to bring 85 people, you know, to this one, uh, vereda El Capinero in Cabuyaro. They're mostly from the north of Colombia. They give them land titles. They settle them on this land. Okay. It comes with an agricultural project. But the agricultural project said, well, we can only give you the agricultural project if all of the families come. All of the families didn't come. So, here's one of the campesinos. They were going to give us an agricultural project. They never gave it to us. We couldn't work how we wanted because some people hadn't arrived. And if they didn't come, they couldn't give us the project. Okay? So, already there's like a technical disqualification. Then what happens? These families get displaced by the paramilitaries. What does INCORA do? Oh, look, that land is vacant. There's no one there. They grant it. They grant the same land to another 35 different families. Okay. So, so then what happens? Well, those families leave too because of paramilitaries. They also get displaced. Okay. This is somebody else from the second family being interviewed. They left because there was nothing there. Not a single project. There was nothing to do. Okay? So all the complementary inputs never arose. Okay? So then what happens? Well, President Santos has his land restitution. Great. Except now there's two sets of people with title to exactly the same pieces of land. And what happens? They start fighting over restitution. Okay? Now, you could probably tell a political economy story of that, but most political economy stories I hear about INCORA are people bribing INCORA not to redistribute land rather than redistributing land twice. Like for us, this just seems an example of like dysfunctionality. INCORA has these rules. It has these principles. It says, oh, if the land is vacant, you can grant it to... They try to implement these principles, you know, and the reality with the paramilitaries displacing people, with of course some people don't show up, so you can't give the project because some families didn't... Like the ideal is messed up by the reality. Okay. So, all right, quick, let me not go into this too much. You sort of got the idea.
I think like if we were going, if I was going to talk more about the difference between North America and Latin America, uh, and I'm going to resist commenting on that. Uh, you know, we'd go back to the different incidents of the Counter-Reformation and how the same Baroque kind of culture never impacted North America. And there's a feedback loop. A more pragmatic and empiricist culture kind of emerged. You know, I think, you know, if you read like, I'm talking about like this is, you know, this is, here's the ideal and the real, you know, the ideal, the beautiful city. That's why Rama's book is called La ciudad letrada. So he's very focused on urban, the urban aspect, the urban manifestation of this ideal. You can see the beautifully planned city, you know, with the roads and the squares, and then outside, you know, it's like La Violencia, you know, to use a Colombian example. Okay. Uh, and you know, he points out if you look at the history of city construction in North America and Latin America, it's sort of strikingly different. In Latin America, the conquistadors like ran around the continent incredibly rapidly, founding these cities. If you think of all the cities in Colombia, all of the big cities were founded, most of them were founded very soon after the conquest. Okay, in the United States, something totally different. You know, Chicago, uh, was founded in 1830, which was 223 years after the Jamestown colony. You know that it's a completely different way of like occupying space and kind of consolidating territory, you know, where, you know, he calls it like, what does he call it, a mad gallop, you know, um, you know, the conquest triumphantly imposes cities on a vast and unknown hinterland, you know, and this is just, it's the, it's because it's this utopian ideal of like, we've conquered, we've, you know, we've, we've, you, but outside we haven't controlled, okay. All right.
So, so, so here's some implications. So I talked about this obedezco pero no cumplo. So let me give you some, some more implications, and, and I'll start with clientelism. So, so, um, one of the best kind of ethnographic studies of clientelism is by Javier Auyero. Javier is a, is a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and he's been studying for 30 years, uh, one kind of peri-urban area in Buenos Aires, like looking at different aspects of the society. And one thing he looked at is he did an ethnography of the Peronist political machine. So they have a political machine. So he studies in great detail clientelism. So how would we think about clientelism? Well, think about this disequilibrium. Think about this A and not A, or the real and the ideal. There's going to be problems. Okay, the Argentinian state promises services that actually it just can't possibly provide. You know, in the same way that INCORA promises well-defined and secure property rights and doesn't deliver. So the disequilibrium creates dysfunction. So what does a clientelist machine do? It solves problems. And in fact, Auyero's preferred definition of clientelism is problem-solving through personalized political mediation. And what he shows is that what the Peronist operatives do is arbitrage this disequilibrium. They intermediate between the people who think, oh, I have a right to that service, and then they go to the office and the office is closed, or there's nobody there, or they tell them to come back on Monday. They come back on Monday and it's a holiday and there's nobody there. Well, they go in and they say, well, yes, you're eligible for that service, but there's no money, so we, we, we can't give it to you. So this disequilibrium, what do the Peronists? They, they take up that space for you. Okay? So, so you know, like, what are Peronist brokers? They're not seen as unscrupulous, corrupt politicians, but are good, helpful, self-sacrificing people with whom they have a personal relationship. It's not the government who gets them their jobs, grants them their pensions, buys medicine, finds them food. It's Matilda or Juanita or Andrea. Okay? And they're seen as doing so not because they're under any obligation, but because they care. So clientelism emerges as a sort of arbitraging this disequilibrium. Okay. So what's striking about Auyero's book is the lack of kind of, you know, it doesn't appear as a sort of, of course, they're getting votes in exchange for this, but there's a trade, there's an exchange. The Peronists get votes, but what creates the demand in Auyero's book for these services that the Peronists provide is this disequilibrium.
Okay, let me, let me come, come back to the Colombian, you know, frontier and talk about the Antioquia for a bit. So this is a, what went on in the Antioquia, you probably all know about this scandal, is a perfect example of like the real and the ideal. And in Colombia, you know, thanks to the liberal politician Darío Echandía, you have a beautiful expression for this, you know, which is the orangutan in the tuxedo. You know this expression. So Darío Echandía in the 1940s said Colombian democracy is like an orangutan in a tuxedo. Okay. So how can an orangutan in a tux, wouldn't the orangutan like rip the tuxedo off? Or wouldn't the tuxedo civilize the orangutan? No, they coexist. Okay, that's Colombian, that's Colombian democracy. And it's a perfect example of the coexistence of two apparently completely contradictory things. Okay, the orangutan and, you know, the tuxedo. Okay, so here's the tuxedo. You know, I won't go into all the details of this, the exploitation of, uh, of, you know, of the Antioquia, uh, and the, the exploitation of, in some sense, the ideal by, you know, beard and creating all of these shell companies so that, you know, uh, Colombian elites and international elites could basically illegally or legally acquire enormous amounts of land in the Antioquia by creating all these shell companies that didn't exist basically. Okay, so here's the, you know, here's the, here's the tuxedo and, you know, and following the laws, uh, at some level. Uh, but you have to ask yourself, and here's Cargill getting in on the action too. The interesting thing is how they acquired the land, and that's where the orangutan comes in, because if you look into the details of how they acquired the land, how Cargill acquired the land, or how, you know, uh, even Bogotá elites acquired the land, the land had to come from somewhere. What you see is enormous appreciation in the price of land. Okay. So, for example, here's some, here's some examples. You know, a one and a half thousand hectare parcel of land via Rosenda in the Antioquia was acquired for, um, two million. Sorry, it was sold for two million dollars in this exchange. So the shell company owned by Cargill paid a serious amount of money for the land, two million dollars. But earlier that year, it had been acquired for ten thousand dollars. Okay? So let's say the land was worth two million dollars and it was acquired for ten thousand dollars. Okay? So in between the shell companies and the campesinos were intermediaries. Intermediaries, well, like who? I don't know exactly. Uh, but here's a, here's a guess at who, the kind of thing that went on. And this is El Leman Freddy Rendón Herrera, a paramilitary comandante, making, talking about, you know, this similar process today. The campesinos are trying to reclaim the land they sold very cheap. Yeah, but they sold it, and the businessmen, they bought it cheap. Yeah, but they bought it. So ten thousand dollars, it's cheap. Okay. So, so this is, this is, this is the, the inter-, this is the interface between the orangutan and the tuxedo, between two apparently completely inconsistent things. But here they're working in synergy. You know, they're working in synergy. If you, there's a very old literature on the latifundia and the minifundia, for example. Another thing I could talk about would be the, this example of the latifundia and the minifundia, of how the latifundia and minifundia existed historically. So the orangutan and the tuxedo.
Okay, here's the, you know, the magical, uh, Venezuelan, uh, state. Okay, so this is José Ignacio Cabrujas, who was a Venezuelan, um, playwright who wrote about this, and, you know, this is just really an example of utopianism, you know. So his explanation for the kind of collapse of Venezuela and the rise of Chavismo was that in Venezuela you expect magic, and the oil economy had basically fueled this sense of utopia, that utopia was feasible and utopia was possible, and what, you know, what he called the demand for magic. And he sort of says, you know, it would be suicide for a presidential candidate in Venezuela not to promise us paradise, you know, because the state has nothing to do with reality. The state is a magnanimous, uh, magnanimous sorcerer. Okay. So how do you explain such a crazy thing? Well, from our perspective, this is, this is utopianism, that the utopianism was fueled in Venezuela by this wealth. The oil abundance created this sense that anything was possible and the state could deliver it. You know, uh, we call this the demand for magic. Okay. So again, you know, if you think about clientelism, you could think about, you know, Chavismo or whatever as a sort of political strategy or whatever. But here there's really a demand for magic. You know, the people demand magic. This is what Cabrujas says. You know, it's like it would be suicide for a presidential candidate not to promise everything, paradise. Okay. So the politicians have to respond to the demand. People demand utopia. Okay. So maybe that's a way of thinking about populism also. And, you know, this is, um, you know, uh, he was pretty into, you know, anything about Chávez, he was pretty into magic. Okay. And, you know, this is, uh, this is the ex-president, I think we can safely say, of Venezuela, but I couldn't resist this because it's such a great example, you know, uh, Nicolás Maduro announces early start to Christmas, you know, he moved Christmas, the start of Christmas to, why not? Why not? Anything is possible in Venezuela, as we saw. Okay, I'm, I'm, I could talk about, I'm not sure I want to talk about magical realism too much. Okay. So, so, so, so, you know, we want to think of, I won't talk about magical realism. I'm not sure I feel confident in talking about literature, but, but if José Luis was here, he'd talk about magical realism as an example of layering things that are in mutually inconsistent somehow on top, you know. And if you think about that as a, that's a very, that's a fantastic example of this plus one, of, of the sort of creativity and, you know, uh, but let me talk about the informal sector as another example. So think about the informal sector. What's the informal sector? There's the formal, you know, and, but the informal sector has rules, it has regulations, you have to comply, it's very complicated. So what do you do? Just go informal. Okay. So the formal and the informal, that's a bit like the latifundia and the minifundia, that's working on different principles next to each other, kind of maybe in synergy, maybe not, uh, but we think of that also as, how would you think about that? That's, that's also a kind of layering, that's a bit like Coricancha, you know, like the formal sector and the informal sector, that the two of those things coexisting is coming from the same, uh, mechanism. Okay, I won't talk about that. Okay, and, you know, I won't talk about Alcántara, but, you know, if you read his work also, he traces this very much to, to the Baroque. Okay.
So, so, you know, if I back up a bit and sort of think about what I'm saying here, it's a different, it's a bit of a different way of thinking about political economy, you know, and in interpreting these examples, I'm sort of resisting a more Machiavellian interpretation. Okay. So you could tell stories about, you know, Peronism or, you know, what went on in Meta in a very Machiavellian way. It's all about power and it's about interests. But what I've, you know, the point of the bicentennial example is to say you can't explain that by interests. Like, so what's going on, you know, I don't think you can explain that example in Meta through interest. People have interests involved, but that's not what's driving it. It's more dysfunctional than that. Okay. So we're trying to propose a way of sort of thinking about that, uh, that, that, that dysfunction. Okay. So, so I think that's interesting, you know, because it gives you much more room for maneuver than the traditional equilibrium of power and politics. Okay? It's not just about power and interest. There's a kind of disequilibrium. So that means there's actually much more scope for changing things. If you can, I'm not proposing, I don't have a solution for how to do that, but it gives you much more scope for changing things because, you know, in some sense there's this clash between the real and the ideal, okay, and that's not just a matter of interest, it's a kind of disequilibrium. But I'm also trying to say, you know, the ideal is not necessarily bad. There's the plus one. Let me go back to De Gaulle making fun of the Brazilians, okay, that Brazil is the country of the future and always will be. That comes from utopianism. But if you think like utopianism is not such a bad thing, maybe it's not such a bad thing to think you're the country of the future. Because maybe if you think you're the country of the future, you achieve lots of things on the way to becoming, you don't ever become the country of the future, but on the way you achieve many things that you wouldn't have achieved had you not thought you were the country of the future. Okay.
And, and, and, and, so, so, so, you know, so, so let me end with one example, you know, which should appeal to talking about what Latin Americans are good at, which is football. Okay. So if you go back about the history of Brazilian football, you know, and go back to the 1958 World Cup when the Brazilians, there's a beautiful, if you've never watched it, biography of Pelé. And so the manager of the Brazilian team tells the Brazilians, stop playing, stop trying to play like Germans. You're not Germans. You're Brazilians. Play like Brazilians. Okay. And what does that mean? You know, and it means this, you know, here's Pelé. It means you add, you add capoeira, you know. So, and the famous ginga, which is, you know, the, the, the way, the Brazilian way of playing football. Yes. Madam. Yes. So here's, you know, Pelé doing the, you know, uh, ginga, and, you know, this is an example of like syncretism or something, or it's a matter of making football Latin American by like adding Latin American characteristics. So we think this is an example of a plus one, and this is also clearly, you know, a positive, uh, aspect of this equilibrium. Okay. So, so I think, you know, we need to do a lot more work on the plus one. I think when José Luis and I first started, we started with these examples of like things are very dysfunctional. So how do we explain that? Okay. But then you realize, ah, actually it's not just about dysfunctional, that this is also a model of creativity and cultural innovation, and, you know, that's, I think that's an important side of this that we haven't thought enough about, that I hope to do, we will do in the future. So, so I think that's, that's all I have to say. Um, and, and hopefully you got the idea. Uh, and I'll shut up and people can ask questions. [applause]
