NYT Opinion: Don't Be Fooled by the Silence in Latin America
NYT Opinion: Don't Be Fooled by the Silence in Latin America
"It would be a mistake to assume that the historical aversion to Uncle Sam's heavy hand has disappeared," writes AS/COA's Brian Winter in The NY Times.
You are the United States.
You are the future invader
of the naïve America that has Indigenous blood...
So read some of the opening lines of “To Roosevelt” by the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, written in 1904—another moment when American gunboats were ominously prowling the Caribbean Sea. Darío was addressing President Theodore Roosevelt, who had just used the “big stick” of military power to support the creation of a new nation, Panama, to protect U.S. control over the canal zone there.
Darío’s poem became a classic piece of literature in the anti-imperialist movement that swept Latin America in the last century, a text that went on to influence Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Nicaraguan rebel Augusto César Sandino, and the Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, among others. Today, the United States is once again throwing around its military and economic might in Latin America in ways not seen in decades. President Donald Trump has dispatched a flotilla to the southern Caribbean, destroying boats said to be carrying drugs to the United States and threatening to bomb targets inside Venezuela in an apparent bid to force out Nicolás Maduro, the country’s authoritarian leader...
