The United States has been an independent nation for 229 years. Has it ever had a Native American or African American president? We all know the answer is no.
Rebecca West was notably adept at tracing the pull of the past—“the great intoxicant of nations”—upon individuals and countries, and she would have found much fertile ground in this history-obsessed place.
Four days after the Zapatista uprising on New Year’s Day 1994 in the impoverished state of Chiapas, a reporter interviewed one of its peasant soldiers, a prisoner of the Mexican army, and asked why he was fighting.
In 1968, Octavio Paz founded a culture of intellectual dissidence in Mexico. The Mexican political system had no concentration camps. It proposed no ideology of a Supreme State.
Latin American history has long been dominated by four grand and enduring paradigms: militarism, Marxism (both revolutionary and academic), demagogic populism, and the closed economy.
In the universal history of shortsightedness, the U.S.'s relations with Latin America deserve a special chapter. Cuba is now only a sinking island and Nicaragua a rising democracy.