Povery and Power in Latin America
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Two books to be considered here address issues of poverty and power in Latin American countries where the lives of the poor are made more onerous by government action and where the military often views life as cheap and the life of the poor as expendable. One of the books was written by a member of the poor and downtrodden class in Brazil, while the other was written by a primary school teacher who witnessed the events he recounts concerning an Army attack on a Guatemalan village. The two books come under the heading of personal narratives and stand as eyewitness accounts of life in a certain class in Latin America. Victor Montejo's Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village is told by an observer, a man from outside the community who was present when the attack on the village occurred, while Child of the Dark is the diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, a woman who lived on the streets of Sao Paulo and who wrote her diary on scraps of paper from that same street environment. The two books together offer a devastating portrait of the lives of the poor in Latin America, as well as the degree to which the authorities in this part of the world are enemies of the poor and are waging a direct war on them. The two narratives gain power by being in the words of people who experienced the world described and who were shaped by that experience. Child of the Dark could have been written about the slums of any number of countries, for the horrors of such a slum are repeated around the
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e. Carolina herself has an anger about her position and about the horrors she witnesses around her, and that anger is one of the main reasons why she seeks to express herself in a different way, in the pages of her book. She notes several times that she believes the people who live around her would be attacking her if they knew what she had written and that they probably would hate her if the book was published, which is precisely what did happen. She uses her book as a way of accomplishing what she cannot accomplish in any other way--she escapes from the favela. Yet there is more to her diary than a desire to escape, for she is an apt observer of the world in which she lives and offers a telling analysis of the underside of society. The book holds a special place on the shelf of books on Latin America because it comes from someone who lives among the lower classes and knows firsthand the troubles found there and who can tell of the daily search to assuage hunger because she had to fight that fight herself.
The book was important when it was written for just that reason, and it has a clear political dimension in that it cannot help but be critical of a society that allows people to live in such squalid conditions, so near s
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1736
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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