Published at: 17/05/2024 08:00 PM

Around the same time, forty years ago, two enormous, distant, antagonistic countries were defining their course. Like a theatrical move in history, a fast-paced story that allowed us to see how to step on the ground and how to step on the wrong foot.

I was a girl fresh out of high school when an overacted Ronald Reagan from Hollywood, together with Margaret Thatcher, dry, bathed in lacquer, sold us a new vision of the world, a very dry scabbard, happiness in boxes: neoliberalism.

That, they said, was the solution to all of humanity's problems, because it turns out that all the problems of humanity were only one: the State and those laws that intended to stand between the insatiable thirst for profit of corporations and the cake of wealth.

That waste of social spending to cover people's basic needs such as health, education, housing, more or less decent salaries... That was what the world was in jeopardy, they told us. The solution was to “liberate the economy”, to let the market regulate itself, with its invisible hand. That the rich would become disgustingly rich and, when that happened, their wealth would trickle down to the poor, who would then be able to afford our basic needs and other little things, so that we would all be happy forever.

While they were telling us that, they told us that the opposite of these fascinating and novel ideas was what was happening in China, an evil and ruined communist country that only knew how to make piñateria, special rice and lumpias. And don't ask any more because I'll assemble a Tiananmen for you.

And so the years went by, and we experienced firsthand the deceptive offer of the trickle. We saw how that market was regulated just to accumulate wealth, without letting a goth slip away.

What would fall was captured by criminal greed, which is the very basis of capitalism. The absence of the State brought us crazy things like the privatization of rainwater, the privatization of sunlight, pensions... Private property turned out to be private only for the rich. For the old mortgaged poor, the property belongs to the banks.

Banks became more perverse monsters than they already were. The laws gave corporations the character of a person and we immediately discovered that they were all psychopaths. Psychopathic piranhas that began to devour each other, the biggest to the smallest, the most medium-sized, to the not so big; becoming, the most voracious, into giant, perverse conglomerates that took over all financial and business activities under the same smiling corporate logo.

Those beautiful and grandiloquent phrases of “a government of the people, by the people, for the people”, that wonder of the “Welfare State”, that development with which the gringos and Europeans trapped the countries they plundered in order to sustain it, were dismantled drop by drop, with a reverse trickle system, which in 2008 became a tsunami, when the lie collapsed, when the looting was exposed and the looting banks were “rescued” with public money, painfully amputating what was left of protection social.

We in Latin America, we in the Global South, were never in those fabulous plans, in those dreams of development. It was up to us, as always, to be the squeezed guinea pigs, the plundered land, the mine. For us there were never pretty promises, but rather the traditional threats and bloody punishments with cynical Colgate smiles and the classic “we do it for your good”. There were no surprises for us.

There were, yes, for the Greek and European peoples who, poor people, thought they were different from us, that they were more, better, in short, civilized.

They trickled down in reverse, slowly, and they dried up without realizing it because the exhaustion of overwork, from an impossible career to success. Either that or you're a loser, the anguish of not being one, the guilt, didn't let them see that they were being robbed, that their dreams didn't exist, that everything was a publicity stunt. Let them be quiet, don't complain, that, here is a strong state to suppress them, so yes, with a “security” apparatus to protect the interests of the capital accumulated by the 1% of super billionaires who elected us as rulers, long live the lobby and freedom!

That they shut up, that they be stunned, that they don't think, that we are the best country in the world. That you can't afford college? That you can't afford your insulin? Join the Army and go kill innocents in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, Sudan... We have an extensive catalog of death for you. That you're stressed out because you did horrible things in the war? Take your heroin, take your fentanyl.

San Francisco, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Detroit, splendid cities, showcases of the American dream, converted into real settings for The Walking Dead. New York, an art deco rat farm, a meter of tin where crazy people push their ropes to the rails, and the desperate want it to be their turn to push. And once a year, the enthusiasm and mockery of the Met Gala, the rich and their charitable works that don't trickle down either.

Europe is the same: melting in its arrogance, converted, not in the backyard of the United States, but in its garbage dump. Crowned garbage pretending to shine with the (dubious) glories of yesteryear. The cradle of Western civilization turned into its own grave

To all of these, quiet China. During these years when Western powers succumbed to the neoliberal dismantling, China did the opposite. A strong state directed the development of a country that had almost everything to do and did it.

Without fuss or fuss, China was rising up along lines of high-speed trains, highways, and impossible bridges. Sprinkled with industries, futuristic and livable cities, fields that are no longer remote and forgotten, schools, universities... China at the forefront of science and technology at the service of humanity. Extremely modern China without leaving behind its essence, its culture. A country for life.

One day, not long ago, we inevitably had to see her, it was impossible not to notice her enormous presence. China turned into a superpower but with a different approach. Not that of a thug from the neighborhood that the United States and its henchmen in Europe have been, but of a partner, of a brother, even of a teacher, because China has some things it can teach us.

In these forty years, the destruction caused by neoliberalism in the West is inversely proportional to the spectacular development achieved by the Chinese model. While the United States and Europe dedicated themselves to the destruction, war and plunder of resources, even of their own peoples, China focused on planning, building, developing a system of social justice that reveals the lie of the invisible hand and the (impossible) trickle that they told us from these sides, back in the 80s, when I was a little girl.

And so, time always gives reason to the truth and the truth is that the American Dream is an illusion, it's the carrot in front of your nose that you'll never reach for, the rare exception, the lie of the millionaire who started in the garage, is a state of suspension that allows a few to destroy our lives... Anyway, the American Dream is a nightmare.

On the other hand, the truth is that China, which does not sell dreams, shows itself and shows us that another different, just world of cooperation, of shared destiny, that many of us imagine. That world for which so many of us fight, those ideas that we defend and that China shows us today as a living, thriving, possible reality for all. We are not flower eaters, nor were we wrong: China is not a dream. China is the certainty and towards that certainty we are going.

CAROLA CHAVEZ

@tongorocho