REPORTAGE: FIONA McCANNreviews Viva South America. A Journey Through a Restless Continentby Oliver Balch
FOLLOWING IN THE footsteps of Simón Bolívar is no mean feat, given that by his fortieth birthday, South America's legendary liberator had covered more than 20,000 miles on horseback – yet this is the terrain Englishman Oliver Balch sets out to cover in his first book, Viva South America! A Journey Through A Restless Continent. With Bolívar as his nominal guide, Balch traces his way through nine of the continent's countries, looking for the Liberator's legacy in its teeming slums, disappearing jungles, underground mines and elevated plains, and among those who now populate the vast land mass that Bolívar, together with Argentine general José de San Martín, prised from its European colonisers almost 200 years ago.
Now resident in Argentina, Balch, with whom I crossed paths during my own time in Buenos Aires, kicks off his quest in Mar del Plata, at the 2005 Cumbre de las Américas summit when a visit by then US president George W Bush appeared to unite a divided continent in anti-US sentiment. While the power brokers sat down to discuss policy, the masses gathered for a rabble-rousing public spectacle led by Bolívar’s self-appointed successor, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Invoking the great liberator, Chávez reminded the assembled thousands that Bolívar had set out “to eliminate slavery, to eliminate misery, to eliminate poverty exploitation”. Asserting that such objectives had yet to be achieved, Chavez stirred up the crowd with talk of a new revolution and the need for a “Bolivarian alternative” to what he saw as a continent still in chains.
Buoyed up by Bolívar and cheered on by Chávez, Balch sets off to look behind the rhetoric and find out what life is like for the inheritors of the Liberator’s legacy. His investigation takes him on a trail already blazed by countless backpackers, a fact which at times threatens Balch’s balancing act between travel writing and social journalism. This is well-travelled territory for the most part, yet Balch comes into his own when he leaves off accounts of bus toilets and bowel movements, and brings to his journey the social focus and journalistic rigour that set his book apart from so many eloquent group e-mails.
In each country, he finds a focal point: in Chile, it’s women’s rights as he highlights the grim reality of socially sanctioned domestic abuse; in Peru, he concentrates on religion and the rise of evangelical missionaries; in Brazil, he takes on the reality of racism.
Yet in grappling with the generality of such subject matter, Balch’s eye for detail is impressive, personalising the book beyond the academic and painting vivid, affecting pictures of the poverty that blights the continent.
Though he owes more than a little to Bruce Chatwin in his first-person voyages into the homes of struggling South Americans, he manages to up the journalistic ante with relevant facts and figures in a patiently researched attempt to stitch together an unravelling continent. Peppered with chance encounters, Balch’s journey also includes some careful manoeuvring which lands him at a dinner with Chile’s president Michelle Bachelet, at the presidential palace in La Paz to witness president Evo Morales dancing, and face to face with Fernando Lugo en route to his presidency of Paraguay.
Though Balch exhibits an occasional, almost bemused detachment, there is an honesty to his account which makes no attempt to disguise his own flaws and cultural grapplings with a continent he can only ever view as an outsider. In fluid, at times poetic prose, his descriptions of South America in this historical moment are vivid and telling, and if he allows himself the occasional Latin flourish, poetic licence is easily granted given the accuracy of so many of his observations.
If there is no conclusion as such, it is because a continent in permanent revolution, if not always evolution, will not allow it. What Balch offers instead is a snapshot, a clear, colourful account of people whose liberation from their colonisers has yet to provide them with the kind of freedom that Bolívar envisioned.
Fiona McCann is a freelance journalist