Egypt As a Latin American Country
One point I found interesting about the Egyptian Revolution was
the
pattern of military participation. This seemed to fall
within the
range of what Edward Luttwak, in his Coup D'Etat: A
Practical
Handbook.(1968) called the "pronunciamento." As
the name suggests,
it more typically happens in Iberia and Latin America.
There are certain "social substrates" which underly and define the
Latin American
military. In Latin America, there is no tribalism to speak of,
nothing
like the Zulu/Xosa distinction in South Africa, for
example, or the
corresponding distinctions in large sections of the Middle
East. To
the extent that a Latin American is aware of being a Venezuelan or
a
Peruvian, he is hispanicized. In the colonial era, the big
distinction
was between people who were permanently settled in the colony
("creoles"), and
people who were only there for a limited period, having been
sent to
rule on behalf of the king in Madrid-- or Lisbon. Later, the
distinction was one between "ladinos" and "indios," not so much a
matter of race as of acculturation. In Latin America,
the officer corps tends to have a class basis, rather than a
tribal or
ethnic basis. At the risk of some oversimplification, I would say
that
the
officer corps is traditionally lower-middle-class in a
lumpenproletariet society. The
officer corps is formed of farm boys who got selected for free
education in officer colleges at a time when the national
elites were
sending their children to America or Europe. Sometimes the officer
corps produces someone very much like Napoleon Bonaparte, or
someone
like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, or someone like the
Portuguese officer
Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, organizer of Portugal's "Carnation
Revolution" in 1974, something not basically dissimilar to
what
has happened in Egypt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otelo_Saraiva_de_Carvalho
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnation_Revolution
The Carnation Revolution derived its name from the troops
passing
through a flower market, en route to occupy public buildings,
etc., and
seizing the opportunity to adorn themselves with the flower
in season,
as a demonstration of their benevolent intentions. Similarly,
their
watchword was the song _Grândola, Vila Morena_, which if I
understand
correctly, would be roughly the Portuguese equivalent of
Country/Western music. Jane Kramer has an immensely
sympathetic essay
on Carvalho in her book of
collected essays, _Europeans_ (1988). She concluded that "I think
Otelo
is a
fool of revolution, the way people in Mother Russia were fools of
God.
He never got over the fact that the revolution stopped, and that
when
it did stop 'o povo' [the common people] were not much
richer or
happier or more in control of their lives than they were before."
(p.
102).
It may be that Egypt is different enough from other
countries in the
region that the regional curses do not apply. There was a time
when
people asserted that Spanish democracy was a lost cause, and spoke
of
the Opus Dei in very much the same terms that
they now speak of the
Muslim Brotherhood.