So much has been written about the Spanish conquest of Latin America that it has become difficult to find new approaches to the topic. Hugh Thomas’s definitive history of the invasion of Mexico, now called simply Conquest, is 20 years old, but his monumental history of the Spanish monarchy is much more recent, and volume…
The village primary school in El Corralito in the province of Pinar del Rio has 30 students and 15 teachers. We were invited to their celebration of the ‘Day of the Teacher’ (December 22), along with all the students and parents (almost all those attending were mothers). The day began as it always does, with…
This letter was in response to the The Guardian’s obituary of Denis Healey. David McKie says that Denis Healey was “formidably equipped” for the job of foreign secretary, despite never getting it. I had an experience in the 1980s that made me draw the same conclusion but which also gave an insight as to why…
La Curva is an unremarkable small Nicaraguan town, a few kilometres south of Masaya. I’ve known it for twenty years, and to me its only outstanding feature is a pair of huge ‘guanacaste’ trees, bedecked with epiphytic plants, that stand on the south side of the main road (or stood, I’ve been told that one…
Ten days in Honduras: a TV reporter and a cameraman, a radio reporter, a trade union leader, the head of an indigenous community fighting forest destruction, two transsexual activists, two bodyguards of the director of the agrarian reform institute and a lawyer were all murdered. The daily political killings are rarely investigated. Even if they…
Over 120 organisations have signed a letter to President Obama instigated by the Alliance for Global Justice, calling on him to rescind his executive order which imposes sanctions on officials in Venezuela and describes the government of Nicolas Maduro as an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States’. …
Those who would protest that only regime change and full recognition of human rights in Cuba should precede any deal have surely had their arguments demolished. This month marks the 112th anniversary of the signing of the lease for the Guantánamo base between the Cuban and US governments. For at least half this period the…
The ‘Agrosolar’ project, funded by the British embassy, has begun to pump water to irrigate crops right at the start of Nicaragua’s dry season. El Timal is in the almost forgotten area between Nicaragua’s two large lakes, only about 20km from the international airport but with practically no transport connections to the nearest town. Into…
In January 1983, police in Los Angeles arrested frogmen bringing 400 pounds of cocaine ashore from a Colombian freighter. But they missed their main target, the drug importer Norwin Meneses, who may have been tipped off by officials. In August 1986, a US Customs informant, Joseph Kelso, told his handlers that Drug Enforcement Administration officials…
There are many histories of the Americas that begin with Columbus’s landing in what were to become known as the West Indies, but this is perhaps one of the few accessible accounts which focus on the Caribbean itself, and which follow through right to the present day. Carrie Gibson’s thesis is that the Caribbean was…