Landscape of the Americas

Now, we the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago must open up to the best ideas, and the best leaders who will be attending the Summit in Port-of-Spain in April this year. We must look to the Americas.

The Americas is a land of just over 920 million persons. It contains just about 14 percent of the planet’s population. It includes the English speaking countries of the North, Canada and the US; Honduras and Belize in Central America; Guyana in South America and the Caribbean states. It includes the Spanish-speaking nations of Central America: Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, and among others the Southern continental states of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Then there is Brazil, which speaks predominantly Portuguese. Haiti, French Antilles and parts of Canada speak French. Within these states there are scores of peoples, the descendants of Africans, Mayans, Incas, Aztecs, Yanomani, Xincas, East Indians who speak distinct non-European languages. Each linguistic world opens up a value, a philosophy, distinct ways of being and doing.

The terrain of this vast continent and her islands is unimaginably diverse. Canada is icy, vast, exposed to giant winds from the North; she has vast supplies of oil under the earth and has a deeply rationalistic planning philosophy. The US too is vast, has ice, but it also has mangroves and swamps, dry deserts and rocky canyons, deep fertile valleys to plant fruit, river deltas and huge floodplains and rolling prairies to grow billions of tons of corn, oats, soya; she is capitalistic, heavily industrialist. Canada is vast with a relatively small population, 33 million. The USA has the largest population in the Americas, 300 million.

Central America, from Mexico to Panama, is a relatively narrow waist of land, on one side the hurricane-intensive Caribbean, on the other the choppy Pacific. It is a crowded, almost jumbled landscape, long ledges of beach, mangrove and swamp, dank forests, small plains, hillsides which have been farmed for hundreds of thousands of years by Aztecs, Mayans, Olmecs and their ancestors. Mexico has 112 million persons; Guatemala 13 million, El Salvador seven million; Nicaragua six million; Panama three million, Costa Rica four million, Honduras seven million and Belize just over 300,000 persons. These nations are still recovering for 500 years of shell-shocking imperialism, first from Europe, then from their Anglo-Saxons neighbours in the North. Five million Mayans of “pure” stock in Guatemala are only just now beginning to enter the trajectory of world history.

South America is a land of long brown snaky rivers, their origins hidden by Amazonian forest, staunch outcrops of mountains, high plains, cloud-high lakes and ultimately ice.

The extreme south, Patagonia, part of Southern Argentina and Chile, is desolate countryside. Venezuela has 27 million persons; Colombia 46 million; Ecuador 14 million; Peru 29 million; Chile 16 million; Bolivia nine million, Paraguay seven million; Uruguay 3.5 million; Argentina 41 million; and Brazil, the second largest population on the continent, 200 million.

“Progress” in this part of the Americas is measured by distance from the epicenter of the European cultural cosmos.

On the one hand there are the Buenas Aires, Bogotas, Rio de Janieros, Santiagos, Limas, Sao Paulos and Quitos, as big and bustling as New York or Ottawa, with their own large commercial, banking, administrative centres conjoined to vast suburbs and humongous shanties; on the other there are thousands of small towns, hundreds of thousands of isolated farmsteads and rural villages, on riverbanks, in jungles or on rocky ledges and crevices of ice.

These nations, politically, are all slipping “leftwards” with Brazil emerging as the continent’s alternative superpower.

The Caribbean Basin stretches from the Bahamas in the North, through Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Jamaica and the other English-speaking islands, to Guyana, Suriname and the French and Netherland Antilles. Cuba has 12 million persons, the Dominican Republic ten million, Haiti nine million and Jamaica, the largest of the others, just about 2.5 million.

Guyana, with a vast expanse of hinterland, has just about three-quarters of one million persons. These nations have been plantation islands; most are still struggling to achieve real, genuine, authentic, ital development.

These then are the Americas. In April, the leaders of these nations, except Cuba, will descend on Port-of-Spain for three days to read a draft declaration comprising 66 affirmations.

They will discuss, edit and announce this declaration to the global media. As citizens we will witness some hubbub and spectacle. But the leaders of many of these nations are real persons too; they will go back to real lands, real peoples, real communities, real anguishing problems. It is an opportunity to open our minds to their words and ideas. Most of their societies are “older” and larger than ours. Many of their ideas are more noble and ital.

This series of twelve articles leading up the Summit will examine the key ideas outlined in the Draft Declaration, and their significance for Trinidad and Tobago.