Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World. Galeano

Tr. Spa-Eng. from Shvoong

 Eduardo Galeano (extract from pags. 237-252, from Upside down. A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, Spain XXIst Century Publishers, 2002).
 Human rights humble themselves before machines rights. They are more and more cities, and especially the cities of the South, where people are prohibited. With impunity, cars usurp human space, poison air and often kill the intruders that invade their conquered territory. What is the difference between the violence that kills by engine and the one that kills by knife or bullet? This century's end despises public transport. When the twentieth century was half of its life, Europeans used trains, buses, tubes and tramways for three-quarters of their comings and goings. Currently, the average has fallen, in Europe, a quarter. And that is too much, when compared with the United States of America, where public transport, virtually exterminated in most of the cities, only covers five percent of the total transport. ( …) The largest number of cars in the world concentrates in the United States and also the biggest quantity of weapons. Six, six, six: one of every six dollars spent by the average citizen, is devoted to the car; of every six hours of life, one is dedicated to travel by car or work to pay for it; of every six jobs, one is directly or indirectly related to the car, and another is related to violence and its industries. The more people cars and weapons murder, and the more nature they raze, the more the Gross National Product grows. ( …) The automobile promises freedom to people, that is why motorways are called freeways, free roads, and yet it acts as a mobile cage. Human labor time increases despite technological progress, and the time needed to go and come from work also increases year after year, due to the transit jams, which force to move barely and crush the nerves: you live inside the car, and it does not loose you. ( …) Never so many have suffered so much by so few. Only twenty percent of humanity has eighty percent of the cars, even if 100% of humanity must suffer the poisoning of air. Disastrous public transport and the absence of lanes for bicycles make little more than compulsory private car use, but how many can afford it? Latin Americans that do not have own car or may purchase ever, live cornered by traffic and drowned by the smog.
 Sidewalks are reduced or disappear, distances grow, there are more and more cars that cross and increasingly less people who meet. ( …) ( …) In cities around the world, the car generates most of the cocktail of gases that sick bronchi and eyes and everything else, and also generates most of the noise and the tensions which stun the ears and give the willies. ( …) The amount of cars grows and grows in the Latin American Babylonias, but that amount is still low in relation to centres of global prosperity. In 1995, the United States and Canada had more motor vehicles than the sum of all the rest of the world, excluding Europe. Germany had this same year so many cars, trucks, vans, mobile homes and motorcycles as the sum of all the countries of Latin America and Africa. However, in the cities of the South of the world, three of every four deads die by car across the globe. And of the three killed, two are pedestrians. Brazil has three times fewer cars than Germany, but has also three times more victims. Each year in Colombia, six thousand homicides occur, called traffic accidents. ( …) Cars kill in the world, each year, as many people as were killed, added, by the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: in 1990, they caused many more deaths or physical disabilities that war or AIDS.  ( …) Modernization, motorization: the noise of the engines does not allow to hear the voices who complain about the artifice of a civilization that robs your freedom to then sell it back to you, and which cuts your legs and then force you to buy cars and exercise equipment. It is imposed in the world, as the only possible life model, the nightmare of cities where cars rule ,