On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey

by Paul Theroux

Rich people, arrivistes, and new-money snobs emphasize their enhanced status by chucking the homespun traditions that the poor cling to—they have little else to cling to. The English writer V. S. Pritchett noticed this in his travels in Spain and elsewhere: “The past of a place survives in its poor.”

The African masks at the Trocadero Museum of Ethnology in Paris caught the eye of young Pablo Picasso: “A smell of mold and neglect caught me by the throat. I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately,” he said. “But I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them color and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. It’s not an esthetic process; it’s a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I had found my path.”

“The staff had long surpassed their smiling hours”—the

travel is less about landscapes than about people—not power brokers but pedestrians, in the long march of Everyman.

All my adult life, beginning with my teaching in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer, I have tried to understand how to reconcile the nature of poverty, the role of charity, the intervention of aid organizations, and the maneuverings of governments, especially those in the third world. After repeated visits to Africa over fifty years, I concluded that foreign aid as it is conventionally practiced is essentially a failure, futile in relieving poverty, and often harmful, relieving the ills of a few at the expense of the many.

Most charities are diabolically self-interested, proselytizing evangelists, tax-avoidance scammers with schemes to buff up the image of the founder—often someone in disgrace or mired in scandal or obscenely rich. Claiming to be apolitical, such charities allow authoritarian governments and kleptocracies to go on existing, because the charities do the governments’ work, and in doing so, prevent oppressed people from understanding how they are being exploited.