The Americas: The High Cost of Manliness

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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 Simón Bolívar 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 Bolívar, 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.