Under the 1961 Vienna Convention, foreign embassies are ‘inviolable’: the host country’s officials have a ‘special duty’ to protect them and can’t enter without permission. When the Venezuelan embassy in Washington DC was besieged last summer, the National Lawyers Guild said that the US government had flouted the convention by condoning the attacks and protecting…
A review of ‘November’ by Jorge Galán El Salvador is the smallest country in mainland Latin America – only the size of Wales. But in the 1980s El Salvador and its neighbours, Honduras and Guatemala, had an unlooked-for strategic significance. After the success of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in 1979, the United States was…
A reflection on Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the rise of the new imperialism, by Greg Grandin, published in 2006 and updated in 2010. So many books have been written about US intervention in Latin America that, when this one was published a decade ago, it might easily have been overlooked. Grandin’s…
A review of a book by George Lambie. Those who love Cuba live in fear that what seems an inevitable future change towards a more market-oriented economy will sweep away all that is good about the country – its excellent health system, the absence of extreme poverty, its schools, its largely crime-free streets and the…
When Spanish ships first reached the Americas in 1492, they had no idea of the size of the lands on which they’d set foot, nor did they realise that they were twin continents in their own right. Columbus died believing he’d found an alternative route to the ‘Indies’, because although the early explorers new the…
On 9 April 1948, the Colombian politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán stepped out of his office with a group of friends to walk to Bogotá’s Hotel Continental for lunch. An assassin confronted him in the street and shot him three times in the face and chest. He died shortly afterwards. His supporters caught the 20-year-old culprit,…
A review of Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement by Graham Greene. For anyone interested in the politics of Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, which of course also requires an interest in the US intervention in the isthmus that intensified during the later stages of the Cold War, this…
A review of Fidel & Gabo: A portrait of a legendary friendship, by Angel Esteban and Stephanie Panichelli Two of the best-known Latin American figures of the twentieth century, Fidel Castro and Gabriel Garcia Márquez (Gabo) were close friends. This book claims to be the story of their relationship, but does it do it justice?…