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.