bones. We knew that it was a land with a long and old history of sorrow, and that the sorrows of its men were strong and deep because their lives had been shattered by hordes of conquistadors and priests, speculators and gangsters, dictators and companywallas who came upon them time after time like the dogs of hell searching for what they could rape and devour. Las Casas has told us in his generous and brave book. Very Brio/Account of the Destruction of the Indes (1552), that the Spaniards who had gone to the new world were savage men and a curse; that they had made their god, who w^as once a god of love, whose touch gave men back the miracle of belonging to a human community, into a contorted creature riveted to his silver cross and demanding from a poor humanity an awful sacrifice of their faith, gold and their blood. We knew that Latin America had since been raided by new and more efficiently ruthless corsairs who had more greed and less shame. Their betrayals and their (errors, their corruptions, embezzlements, blackmails, murders and every other crime that the imagination can ever conceive of had made Latin America into a grotesque place. They had money and guns. they had barbed wires and electric prods, they had the rhetoric of democracy and gas chambers, and they believed with an untroubled conscience that 'It is those who devote themselves to killing who have power' (Elias Cannetti. Crowds and Power). When we recalled their names (Francia, Rojas, Diaz. Gomez. Batista, Martinez. Trujillo, Estrada, Cabrera, Duvalier, Somoza, Pinochet and more—many more) we did so with a shudder, for their very names, like an evil spell, threatened to abolish our memory of another ordinary and moral world which did continue to exist. Fortunately, there was always someone who would break the story of horrors by reminding us of men who refused to be humiliated, to live without grieving for the tortured or protesting against the wretchedness of history or searching for ways out of a society in which there is so much fatigue and pain. We could share, at least momentarily, in the hopes of men like Toussaint, Bolivar, Zapata, Sandino, Orozco, Siqueiros, Riviera. Dario. Neruda. Romero and others: iheir names and their dreams would then promise that it w^as still possible to emerge from the brutalities of power and to live in a world of deeds and work and companionship. We, therefore, organised our seminar in the hope that Latin America would no longer be for us only a place of myths or of dark despair and struggle. Our hope was to invite scholars, poets, art critics and journalists who could provide us with more information about the South American continent, give to our sketches and glimpses more historical substance and help us to arrive at some clarities about ourselves and the world in which we live. Besides, we felt that a seminar full of talking, exchanging ideas, telling tales about a society haunted by dictators and the solitude they impose upon people could in itself be a way of renewing societies. Seminars are not about power or about being right; they are, instead, processes of discovery and invitations to create new ideas—ones that were not even in our heads when we began. 6 January-June 198 5