Printed Balloons, performance by Andrew Harding.
Latin American dictators have been as much ours as earthquakes, the Andes, or bananas. They are wedges of the same suit. Indeed, the United States has always played a decisive role in its establishment, but the acts of violence and genocide of some of them (the most terrible being that of Maximiliano Hernández Martínez when he murdered 30,000 indigenous people in El Salvador in 1932) far exceeded what was “stipulated” by their bosses in Washington.
This is how many times we from our countries reproach the United States for its interference and the excesses it causes with these interventions. But no less true is that our dictators are a distinctly Latin American product studied at places like West Point or the School of the Americas, and supported by the local ruling class. The average North American citizen does not understand these “subtleties”, and in this piece, I am ironic about his honest (and naive) request: please, stop blaming US.
