The High Cost of Manliness

In Argentina, one motorist insults another, and the offended party bursts from his car with knife drawn. In Peru's recent presidential elections, the three leading candidates presented themselves more as messiahs than politicians, and it was not accidental that each was the founder of his own party. In Mexico, convivial gossip about a prominent man inevitably rolls around to his casa chica --the love nest where he keeps his mistress. "We expect them to have mistresses," says one wealthy married Mexican lady. "After all, they are men."

They are more than that; they are machos. Whether involved with a mistress, a mishap or an election, the Latin American male is constantly forced to prove his aggressive masculinity by a compelling phenomenon called machismo. In its simplest form, machismo is the gaudy bravado of the bullfighter, the outdoor he-manliness of the gaucho, the straightforward heterosexuality of the playboy. "The kind of man that men follow and women chase" is how one Peruvian woman defines it. But the trait goes farther than simple male ego. It turns arguments into blood feuds, business dealings into tests of strength, and heroic revolutionaries into ruthless tyrants. Says the Mexican poet Octavio Paz: "One word sums up the aggressiveness, insensitivity, invulnerability and other attributes of the macho: power. It is force without discipline or any notion of order; arbitrary power, the will without reins and without a set course."

Spanish Father. Sociologists contend that machismo is a hangover from the days when bloodthirsty Spanish conquistadors, ruthless and brave against greater forces, overran the region in the 16th century. The social system the conquerors brought with them was rigid and shot through with the sort of caste prejudice that obsessive inferiority feeds on. As they colonized, the conquistadors fathered the first generation of mestizos, part Indian and part Spanish. The mestizo grew up insecure, second-class, and prone to imitate the manliness of the powerful Spaniard who conquered his Indian forebears and sired his class.

Because of the shadowy origins of a great-great-grandmother, Venezuela born Simon Bolivar was considered a mestizo, and resented the second-class treatment he received at the court of King Charles IV of Spain in 1803. Returning to Latin America in 1807, he led the wars of independence that cost the Spanish throne some of its richest New World possessions and established Bolivar, a lover of fine horseflesh and handsome women, as one of the foremost machos of history.

Only Whisker-Deep. Machismo is still the element that separates Latin American leaders from the also-rans. In pre-Castro Cuba, the army of Dictator Fulgencio Batista respected its leader almost as much for his manliness and his brood of illegitimate children as for the military daring that first brought him to power in 1933. Castro is another story. Though he has the whiskery look of virility, and was considered muy macho for invading Cuba with only 81 men, his he-man rating fell sharply after he let Khrushchev pull out his missiles, and his love life, in the opinion of Latin Americans, is too furtive and lacks style.

In Argentina, Juan Peron was held in awe and respect as long as he proved himself politically powerful and beloved by women; it was when he began picking on the Roman Catholic Church and chasing teen-age girls that the military became bold enough to throw him out. Brazil, with its mixed Portuguese and African origins, confines its machismo to its frontier lands and southern cattle ranges. But it, too, succumbed to the magnetism of a macho leader when Getulio Vargas raised a cavalry of southern Gauchos and rode to power in 1930. All over Latin America, the compulsion to follow a macho leader--the caudillo --helps to frustrate political organization. In most elections, nearly every party is merely a collection of its leader's personal followers; if he dies or loses, the party disintegrates.

Statistical Impossibility. In its pure state machismo is linked with valor, courage, honor and dignity, but too often it is more gun-toting brag than performance. Machos insist that the women they marry be virgins, and they will defend the honor of their sisters to the death--all of which makes their endless tales of conquest a statistical impossibility. In industry, machismo makes business a one-man show; a boss makes decisions, wrong or right, almost in spite of his advisers. Internationally it can raise a Latin negotiator to his full height with a proud rejection of proffered aid --even though his country must have it and sooner or later may have to plead for it. And it makes retreat and compromise so impossible that in Cuba, for example, men who should be natural allies through mutual hatred of Fidel Castro cannot cooperate because one would then become leader of the other.

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