The Bourgeoisie

Those who produce liquor
and then say it's not necessary to increase the salary
of the peasants
because they're going to spend it all on booze.

Those who speak with their families
exclusively in English
amidst Dubuffet paintings and Bohemian crystal
life-sife photographs
of mares brought back from Kentucky and Vienna
and charge us daily in sweat and blood
for their painful routine awakening
in this land of dirty Indians
so far from New York and Paris.

Those who've understood, that if one looks
deep enough, Christ
was really the Antichrist
(for all that stuff about loving one another,
without distinguishing between the penniless and the decent
and all this stuff about those primitive Christians conspiring
in the complicity of catacombs
and about the agitation against Imperial Rome
and the fish so like the hammer and sickle)
and that the true Christ was born in this century
and was named Adolf Hitler.

Those who vote in El Salvador
for the president-elect of the United States.

Those who propagate misery and malnutrition
producing tuberculosis and blindness
and then build
tuberculosis hospitals and rehabilitation centers for the blind
to be able to exploit them
in spite of tuberculosis and blindness.

Those who have neither homeland nor nation here
but only real estate
bounded in the northeast by Guatemala in the north by Honduras
in the southeast by the Gulf of Fonseca and Nicaragua
and in the south by the Pacific Ocean
to which real estate Americans have come
to build factories
and in which little by little
cities, villages, villas and hamlets have grown
full of working brutes
and brutes armed to the teeth who don't work
but keep the working brutes
in their place.

Those who tell doctors and lawyers and architects
agronomists economists and engineers
that if you hang around power it will rub off on you
and that every year there must be more drastic Penal Codes
and hotels and casinos like those in Miami
and five-year plans like those for Puerto Rico
and civilizing operations
consistent with eliminating the blue mark on the asses
of distinguished ladies and gentlemen
and irrigation canals to carry the little bit of water there is
exclusively to the land where that power resides
that's so good to be around,
above all to those not professionally disposed
to take a stand in favor of so many stinking and barefoot ones.

Those who, to have freedom of the press
and constitutional rights,
bought newspapers radios and TV stations
including journalists broadcasters and camera people
and bought the political constitution
with the Legislative Assembly and the Supreme Court of Justice
thrown in.
Those who, in order to sleep safely,
don't pay the nightwatchman of the block
but directly pay the Joint Chiefs of Staff
of the Armed Forces.
Those who
in effect
have everything to lose.