76 Books & arts The EconomistMarch 14th 2020
2 during the dictatorship, when public criti-
cisms were repressed.
Since democracy returned in 1990, cace-
rolazoshave spilled out from the safety of
homes and back onto the streets, says Jav-
ier Osorio, a historian of contemporary
music at Alberto Hurtado University in
Santiago. “The sound of the cacerolazohas
no borders,” he says; “it’s an all-encom-
passing form of protest.” Amid the current
unrest, some Chileans have thrashed their
saucepans furiously while others have kept
to a rhythm. Pans have been strapped to the
handlebars of bicycles to be banged with a
spoon while the rider is on the move.Ears and eyes
Old musical traditions have been revived;
once-silenced voices echo between the
concrete apartment blocks in the centre of
Santiago. At the same time, modern artists
have added new protest songs to the canon,
drawing on the past but incorporating the
mood and themes of today.
A new single by Ana Tijoux, a Franco-
Chilean rapper, is called “Cacerolazo”. The
rhythm of the cacerolazoalso resounds in a
song by Mon Laferte, who scrawled “In
Chile they torture, rape and kill” on her
bare chest for the Latin Grammy awards in
November. (More than 5,000 complaints of
alleged abuse by the police and armed
forces have been lodged; by the end of Janu-
ary prosecutors were investigating 31
deaths.) Nano Stern’s “Regalé mis ojos”—“I
gave my eyes”—refers to the hundreds of
eye injuries inflicted after rubber bullets
and shotgun pellets were fired towards
protesters’ faces (tactics that have now
been revised).
In tribute to those injuries, “El violador
eres tu” (“The rapist is you”), a feminist an-
them created by a group of women in Val-
paraiso, is typically performed wearing
blindfolds. Linking police violence with
abuses of women more generally, the song
has struck a chord around the world. “La
Caravana” by Kuervos del Sur, a rock band
from the central city of Curicó, alludes to
the steady flow of marchers along the Ala-
meda, Santiago’s main drag. The marches,
and the tumult, abated in the summer heat,
but despite some government concessions
(see Americas section), they are now re-
doubling in the run-up to a referendum on
constitutional reform on April 26th.
Allende harnessed the power of music
as he became Latin America’s first elected
socialist leader; it fortified Pinochet’s long-
suffering opponents. Now, in very differ-
ent circumstances, it has again become the
heartbeat of Chilean politics. “Music is
what creates a sense of belonging at times
like these,” comments Mr Osorio. “Every-
one who plays these songs, who hears
them, who picks up a spoon and taps out
that same rhythm on a saucepan—these
people are all feeling the same thing.” 7D
uncan green, an in-house thinker at
Oxfam, a charity, and an academic at
the London School of Economics, makes an
intriguing observation. Often, he notes, a
person’s views about poverty and develop-
ment are shaped by the first region of the
developing world that he or she gets to
know. Those who begin by studying Africa
tend to have strong views on foreign aid
(whether for or against) and are obsessed
with the quality of government. Those who
learned first about east Asia tend to focus
on economic growth. And those whose
first experience is in Latin America are pre-
occupied with justice and power.
Martín Caparrós is an Argentinian jour-
nalist and novelist whose book, “Hunger”,
has already appeared in French, German
and Spanish. It has now been updated and
translated into English. The book intro-
duces English-speaking readers to a Latin
American perspective on poverty. But
“Hunger” is also highly idiosyncratic—a
peculiar, often perplexing tour through
some of the world’s most desperate places,
interspersed with muddled ranting. It is an
off-putting, infuriating book that nonethe-
less gets one big thing right.
The best parts of the book are the sec-
tions in which Mr Caparrós interviewshungry people. He hangs out with a woman
who scavenges a rubbish tip in Argentina,
with an Indian widow who has been left to
die in a holy city and with a peasant farmer
in Niger who keeps glancing at his chunky
digital watch. He asks stupid questions, as
good journalists do, and gets answers that
reveal much about how extremely poor
people think.
Why, the author asks, is an Indian
mother taking her malnourished daughter
out of the hospital before she has recov-
ered? Because, the mother explains, her
sister-in-law has fallen ill, and she must
look after the household. What would a
poor woman in South Sudan eat, if she
could eat anything? Walwal, she replies—a
kind of sorghum porridge. But suppose you
could have meat or fish, Mr Caparrós press-
es. No: she would eat walwal.
“Hunger” is also a political book. Mr Ca-
parrós believes that people go hungry
chiefly because the powerful behave in un-
just ways. He is against multinational agri-
business firms such as Cargill (though not
against crop science), and implies that
trade is a major cause of high food prices.
He thinks little of humanitarian or devel-
opment aid, and describes welfare as “a
way of maintaining poverty” because it
keeps the poor from rebelling. Much of this
is nonsense, and it is not even clear that the
author believes it. He has travelled too
widely and interviewed too many people to
hold fast to simple explanations.
Strangest of all are the chapters in
which Mr Caparrós steps back to address
the reader and his own conscience. More
than once he poses the question: “How the
hell do we manage to live knowing these
things?” Sometimes he seems to be fight-
ing an internal battle, in which his desire
for justice pushes against his feelings of
despair and horror about the lives of the
poorest: “I’ve got enough problems with-
out going around thinking about those
poor bastards in Africa or Kolkata or those
places I don’t even...” At such moments the
book seems not just Latin American but
distinctively Argentinian. Few countries
are so thick with psychoanalysts.
The great thing about “Hunger” is its re-
lentlessness. Most books about poverty
(indeed, most articles in The Economist
about poverty) introduce the reader to the
poor, then pull back into dispassionate
consideration of agricultural productivity,
social safety-nets, credit constraints and
the like. All that policy talk is fine, but it is
not how extremely poor people think about
their lives. Deep poverty and hunger often
make no sense to those who suffer those
things, except perhaps as evidence of God’s
will. Misfortune simply hit them, when the
rains failed, when a husband vanished or a
child fell ill. Mr Caparrós holds you there,
in the unsettling presence of the desperate,
and forces you to listen to them. 7Global scourgesThe famished
Hunger: The Oldest Problem. By Martín
Caparrós. Melville House; 544 pages; $32
and £26.99Spectres at the feast