Explore "The Oligarchies" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
No, the flags had not yet dried, the soldiers had not yet slept when freedom changed clothes, and was turned into a hacienda: a caste emerged from the newly sown lands, a quadrille of nouveaux riches with coats of arms, with police and with prisons.
They drew a black line:
"Here on our side, Mexico's
Porfiristas, Chile's
"gentlemen," gentry from the Jockey Club of Buenos Aires,
Uruguay's slicked freebooters, the Ecuadorian upper crust, clerical dandies everywhere."
The poor to the mines, the desert.
Mr. Rodríguez de la Crota spoke in the Senate with a mellifluous elegant voice.
"This law, at long last, establishes the obligatory hierarchy and above all the principles of Christianity.
It was necessary as water.
Only the communists, conceived in hell, as you're well aware, could object to the Funnel code, sagacious and severe.
But this Asiatic opposition, proceeding from subman, is easy to suppress: to jail with them all, to the concentration camp, and that way the distinguished gentlemen and the obliging
Radical Party lackeys will stand alone."
There was a round of applause from the aristocratic benches: what eloquence, how spiritual, what a philosopher, what a luminary!
And everyone ran off to fill his pockets in his business, one monopolizing milk, another racketeering in wire, another stealing in sugar, and all boisterously proclaiming themselves patriots, with a monopoly of patriotism, also accounted for in the Funnel Law.