Latin Americans had terrible dictatorships in the 20th century. Horrific, brutal dictatorships. But Latin Americans aren’t doing any reckoning with what actually happened. They have attached to the idea that the United States is to blame for the dictatorships and will now pout for the rest of eternity about that. The participation of the USSR in the Cold War and in the chaos and dysfunction that called forth the dictatorships has been completely written out of history.
The obsession with the dictatorships is so profound that every Hispanic studies program in existence teaches its own course on the novel of Latin American dictatorship. I teach this course in my program. But the story is, unavoidably, “this is what the evil U.S. did to poor, innocent us for absolutely no reason whatsoever.”
That’s why there’s no moving on from it. 99.999% of Latin American intellectuals are abjectly and pathetically Putinoid because of this.
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