A review of Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder and the Cold War in the Caribbean by Alex von Tunzelmann The words quoted above come from Cuba’s Fidel Castro. This was how, looking back at the incident, he described the abortive invasion at the Bay of Pigs in March 1961, planned and funded by Jack Kennedy and…
One of the parties contesting Sunday’s election in Honduras has seen 18 of its activists murdered in the last 18 months. The LIBRE party’s presidential candidate is Xiomara Castro, the wife of the former president Manuel Zelaya, who was deposed in the military coup of July 2009. Despite the intimidation, LIBRE shows signs of breaking…
Today is the fortieth anniversary of the coup that toppled Salvador Allende. There are still many unresolved crimes from his period in power. Twenty years ago, I spent a week working on a housing project in one of Santiago’s poorest barrios. It was only three years since Pinochet had left office; people guardedly expressed a…
If Ecuador grants asylum to Edward Snowden, no doubt we’ll hear Rafael Correa being described once more as a ‘tinpot president’, ready to welcome dissidents to Ecuador’s ‘jungly bosom’. If instead Snowden ends up in Venezuela or Cuba, his would-be jailers will move even further onto their moral high ground.
In 1954, the elected, mildly progressive president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, was deposed in a coup orchestrated by the CIA. Arbenz planned modest land reforms that threatened the interests of the United Fruit Company. His successor reversed the reforms and put to the firing squad an estimated 8000 opponents. The coup launched 42 years of dictatorship…
According to official records, there were 54 murders in Honduras on Christmas Eve. With a violent death every 74 minutes, a rate that more than doubled over Christmas, the country is four times more dangerous than Mexico. In 2012, 7172 murders were recorded. That’s nearly one per thousand inhabitants, by far the highest murder rate in the…
From Guardian Weekly letters, 22 March Your editorial and Tariq Ali’s piece on Hugo Chávez (15 March) had a fairness and balance. To understand Chávez’s significance, it is vital to be aware of the role the US has played in Latin America for well over a century, deposing or assassinating elected leaders and carrying out…
You would expect the New York Post to say Glad to see Hugo (get it?). Or Britain’s Daily Mail to label him a brutal despot (ignoring the fact that he won four elections). Toby Young in the Daily Telegraph, looking for the most obnoxious comparison possible, said he was the Latin American Kim Jong-il. More…