There’s nothing new about children travelling alone through Central America and Mexico to get to the United States. The journey and its dangers were portrayed five years ago in the film Sin Nombre. One character, Sayra, a teenage girl from Honduras, ends up crossing the Rio Grande alone. She is looking out for Casper, a…
Over ten days in June 1954, a decade after the D-Day landings, the CIA sent twelve planes to drop bombs and propaganda on towns in Guatemala in support of a coup against the elected government of Jácobo Arbenz. They did only minor damage at first: one plane bombed the wrong radio station, another ran out…
Some years ago, in an article about unwritten books that people would like to read, someone selected the yet-to-be-written “Prison Memoirs of Henry Kissinger”. Now aged 90, the chances of Kissinger being tried for his war crimes, much less sent to prison, are rapidly diminishing. However, he has outlived Christopher Hitchens, one of his accusers,…
Creating the USSA was the driving ambition of Latin America’s ‘Liberator’, Simón Bolívar. According to his biographer Marie Arana, it may well have been in London in 1810, in conversations with Francisco de Miranda, that he first conceived of a federal power in the southern continent to match that in the north. He spent the…
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…