Writing about the past twenty years of U.S.-Latin America relations presents some clear challenges. We have decided to focus on three aspects of the relationship—commerce, conflict, and culture—as a way to organize and analyze a tumultuous, continuously evolving relationship between the United States and Latin America.
In terms of commerce, the most significant trade agreement in modern times was ratified in late 1993 and went into effect on January 1, 1994. Negotiations to secure the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) were brutal, but the treaty’s passage represented a new spirit of collaboration and mutual respect among the three partner nations, Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Conflict between the United States and Central America diminished during the 1990s as Nicaraguans held free elections (in 1990) which brought Violeta Chamorro to power, ending the eleven-year rule of the Sandinista revolutionary government. Both El Salvador and Guatemala sought peace through negotiations during the 1990s, but new populist leaders emerged in resource-rich Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, challenging the United States’ historic hegemony in South America. These “neopopulists” pushed an agenda that favored state controls and socialist rhetoric.
Other leaders who have opted for a middle way between market-driven capitalism, as advocated by the United States, and state-supported development include Michelle Bachelet in Chile (2006–2010 and 2014 to present); Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva in Brazil who took office in 2003 and ruled through 2010; the Kirchners in Argentina (Néstor, 2003–2007, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, 2007–2015); and José Mujíca in Uruguay, who served as president from 2010–2015. All of these leaders reacted against the strict application of a “Washington Consensus” free trade agenda, characterized by the push for massive privatization of state-supported industry, inflows of direct foreign investment, and free market advice from U.S. and European economists.
Conflict, then, between the United States and Latin America has neither taken the form of “gunboat” diplomacy of the past nor has the United States, since 1989, directly invaded Latin America. In December of that year, U.S. Marines entered Panama to remove strongman and former CIA employee Manuel Noriega. Mr. Noriega was convicted on narcotics trafficking charges. Ironically, the two Latin American nations most associated with the trade in illegal narcotics—Colombia and Mexico—have been reliable allies of the United States. Tensions, however, have mounted in recent years between the United States and Mexico, since the epicenter of drug violence has moved from the South American Andes to the border space between Mexico and its northern neighbor.
The cultural richness and diversity of the Latin American region forms a significant segment of U.S. mainstream culture. No longer is Latin American culture viewed as “exotic,” as it was in the late 1920s and early 1930s when painter Diego Rivera opened a show of his monumental frescos at New York City’s MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in 1931; he was the first Mexican to exhibit in a one-man show there. Now, Latin American music features heavily on Billboard’s Top 100; films from Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil win awards in the United States. Hispanic television markets in the United States consume telenovelas at an astonishing rate; Latin America has infused, and dramatically improved, American cuisine and, ironically, America’s pastime—Major League Baseball. As of 2014, roughly 27 percent of all MLB players were “Latino.”
If the 1980s is “the lost decade” in Latin America, the 1990s could certainly be called the decade of free market trade. The drive for a “Washington Consensus” economic development program which stressed free market–based development and wholesale sell-offs of state-run industries (utility grids, the petroleum sector, telephone systems, and airlines) was the prevailing and accepted economic dogma during the 1980s. With strong conservative laissez-faire leadership in Washington and Great Britain during the Reagan years and Margaret Thatcher’s rule, the sanctity of the market could not be overstated.
Understanding the frenetic movement toward free, market-driven trade requires a brief review of the region’s history, starting with the early 1970s. In Latin America, democracy was hardly in vogue, with military generals ruling Chile, Argentina, and Brazil; the Chilean economy came under the direction of the “Chicago Boys”—Chilean economists who had trained at the University of Chicago and advocated deregulation, privatization, and “supply-side” policies, which included lower tax rates for corporations.
In 1973, the price of oil spiked from about $3 a barrel to over $30, plunging the world into recession; interest rates floated upwards and loans, offered to Latin America by Western banks for development projects during the 1960s, became unmanageable as interest payments galloped out of control. The so-called “debt crisis” forced governments to cut government services and social programs to service growing debt. The extremes became almost surreal: in Bolivia, the inflation rate grew to about 11,000 percent in 1985 and, by the middle of the 1980s, about half of Mexico’s working-age population was under- or unemployed. Debt rose to $400 billion in the region and, by the middle of the 1980s, GDP had fallen everywhere.1
Negotiations for NAFTA began during the George H. W. Bush administration (1989–1993), but the final agreement was signed during the first days of the Clinton administration. NAFTA promised increased prosperity for all in the Americas—at least in the three signatory nations—but a great, somewhat histrionic debate took shape in the United States over the admission of Mexico to a free trade agreement, penned and settled in 1987, between the United States and Canada. Could Mexico, a developing nation, with a lower wage structure and lower levels of education, become a viable partner in a massive trade pact where goods, services, and financial transactions (but, it’s important to note, not people) would flow relatively freely between three nations? Texas billionaire Ross Perot didn’t think so and, during a failed run for the U.S. presidency in 1992, he famously spoke of the “giant sucking sound” he heard in his future-tense imagination as well-paying, industrial, solidly “middle class” jobs migrated from what’s now known as the “rust belt” (Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan) to the Rio Grande Valley. In the Valley, Mexican workers were earning about $9 a day, without benefits or union representation.
Perot’s imagination proved portentous. NAFTA has resulted in wage stagnation and decline, especially for those in the United States without a college degree. A massive expansion in the maquiladora industry, just south of the U.S. border with Mexico, shows some of the limits of NAFTA. These foreign-owned (mostly American) assembly plants depend on a vast supply of cheap Mexican labor and help push up “export” numbers from U.S. factories as parts for automobiles and refrigerators, for example, are manufactured and shipped from the United States to the maquiladora factories. Then, a finished product is assembled in Mexico and shipped back over the border (duty free) for sale to U.S. consumers. The main winner in this scenario is clearly big business, which saves on labor costs while assuming relatively minor shipping costs. In 2012, industrial wages in Mexico were 18 percent of those paid in U.S. factories; trade, of course, has expanded dramatically across the three nations participating in the NAFTA agreement, totaling $918 billion in 2010.2 Total trade between the three countries was $109 billion in 1994 and $622 billion six years later. The recent political discussion in the United States that focuses on income inequality is, in part, related to NAFTA policies. For example, it was reported in 2015 that the median U.S. income ($52,000 per year) has been falling over the past fifteen years in 81 percent of America’s counties.3 The ratio of pay between the CFO (chief financial officer) in America and the average worker is now 354:1, and the bottom 40 percent of households in America control 0.3 percent of the wealth in America. Clearly the bottom has fallen out from under America’s middle class and Perot’s warnings from nearly a quarter-century ago seem to have predicted the current political debate in the United States; as one party rails against international trade treaties, the other side has focused on income inequality and the declining middle class in America.
In Mexico, NAFTA, as many predicted, hurt the agrarian sector as more efficient, better-capitalized farmers in the north dumped wheat, corn, and other staples into Mexico. Mexican agricultural workers—44 percent of all Mexican nationals who cross into the United States (despite the fact that only 25 percent of the total Mexican labor force is connected to agriculture)—have been disproportionally affected by NAFTA. Mexican poverty rates for 2013 registered at about 46 percent of the national population.
On the day NAFTA was implemented, January 1, 1994, a new armed insurgency group appeared in the rural south of the nation, calling itself the Zapatistas; they took their name from revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata to remind the world that his unwavering campaign—tierra y libertad (land and freedom for all)—had yet to materialize. With about 10 percent (or ten million) of the nation’s citizens living in extreme poverty in 2012, it is clear that the NAFTA political cheerleaders and their corporate donors were, at best, willfully naïve in setting and relying on a (mostly) unfettered market to solve most socioeconomic problems in the Americas.
Exactly one year after NAFTA began operating, MERCOSUR (Mercado Común del Sur or Common Market of the South) went into effect, linking the economies of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Negotiations for this trade bloc began about a decade before the pact’s implementation and emerged out of the capitals of Argentina and Brazil. Both nations threw off military dictatorships at about the same time (Argentina in 1983, Brazil two years later) and, in a spirit of South American collaboration not witnessed in decades, the presidents of the two powers decided to build on their size and industrial base by emphasizing regional trade while reducing tariff rates. Much to the chagrin of its neighbors, Chile decided to opt out of these negotiations and, instead, organized a bilateral trade treaty with the United States; that treaty went into effect in 2004.
MERCOSUR has been fraught with tensions: For example the nation of Paraguay was suspended for a brief time in 2012 and oil-rich Venezuela (under the contentious leadership of Hugo Chávez) became a member during that year. Political disputes between leaders of the member nations have led to questions about the future viability of a trade bloc that represents a total of $2.9 trillion in GDP, using data from 2012. MERCOSUR is the fourth largest trade bloc in the world, but alarming levels of economic inequity between the South American nations have generated the sort of suspicion and political intrigue that, in theory, trade agreements are designed to mollify.
One South American nation that sought to avoid these tensions was Chile. In 2003 Chile signed the FTA (free trade agreement) with the United States, which activated on January 1, 2004. Political intrigue surrounded the signing of this pact: When Chile refused to support the G. W. Bush administration’s war in Iraq in 2003, the nation was briefly frozen out of free trade negotiations. The tensions, however real, did not derail the agreement.
Trade treaties extend back to the 1950s in Central America. Given the relative weak position of the Central American nations, individually, to compete in the world markets, and their close proximity to the United States market, trade pacts have been popular there. For example, in the early 1960s, an economic pact developed—known as the Central American Common Market—which was based on a nascent political unification, developed in 1951, referred to as the Organization of Central American States (ODECA, Organización de Estados Centroamericanos). This common market registered real gains during the 1960s as intraregional exports grew from 7 to 26 percent. But El Salvador, the most densely populated nation in Central America and the most industrialized, derived most of the benefits from this agreement, resulting in regional tensions. In fact, a short war between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969, known to outside pundits as “The Soccer War,” left 3,000 dead and all but collapsed the Central American Common Market. National conflicts in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua during this period certainly did not facilitate regional economic or political integration.
When NAFTA went into effect, trade patterns shifted toward the American north; in July 2005, some ten years after NAFTA had been implemented, a new regional trade treaty was ready for signature between the Central American nations (plus the Dominican Republic) and the United States. In a very close vote, 217–215, CAFTA-DR passed the U.S. House of Representatives and entered into effect in 2006. The original member nations were the United States, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The Dominican Republic joined in 2007 and Costa Rica joined two years later. This trade treaty, like NAFTA before it, generated strong debate within the United States. The labor bloc cooperated with the sugar industry to oppose it, but U.S. manufacturing interests—in their continuous search for markets and cheap labor—pushed mightily for this free trade agreement. During its first ten years of implementation, CAFTA-DR has registered an 86 percent increase (to $31.3 billion) in exports from the United States to the five Central American nations and the Dominican Republic.4
A free trade agreement with Colombia became a priority of the G. W. Bush administration. Given President Bush’s strong friendship with President Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2002–2010), the agreement was negotiated in 2006 but not implemented until 2011, during the Obama administration. There was much opposition to this FTA. The Democratic Party in the United States, with strong union representation, opposed the treaty—unions traditionally oppose FTAs because they dissolve organizing capacity. Union leaders in the United States claim that about 5.2 million high-paying manufacturing jobs have been lost since the early 1990s as a consequence of FTAs. Given union strength in crucial midwestern battleground states (Ohio and Pennsylvania for example), candidate Obama clearly and compellingly campaigned against the FTA with Colombia. Quoted in the Wall Street Journal in April 2008, the Senator from Illinois said that he would oppose, as president, a FTA with Colombia, “because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements.”5
Mr. Obama was referring to a very real phenomenon in Colombia. Since the mid-1980s, union leaders there—people defending the rights of workers—have been the target of harassment, humiliation, and murder. As many as 3,000 union leaders have been killed there, and very few of the killers have been captured or prosecuted. In fact, Amnesty International reports a 95 percent impunity rate for murderers of union leaders in Colombia. Once elected to the presidency, however, Mr. Obama caved to business interests and signed a FTA with Colombia in 2011, which went into effect in 2012. The FTA has pushed up trade between the two nations. For example, in 2013, total exports to Colombia amounted to about $19 billion and imports totaled $22 billion. Those numbers represent net increases—from a decade earlier—of 395 percent and 239 percent, respectively.
Giddy with free trade expectations, capitalists from the Americas, after NAFTA’s implementation, began planning for a FTAA—Free Trade Area of the Americas—a 34-nation free trade zone. In theory, this huge trading bloc would have extended from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, easing trade restrictions and tariffs along a massive North-South corridor. Cuba, of course, was excluded from the initial negotiations. But activists, social movements in Latin America, and president Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (who ruled from 1999 until his death in 2013) mobilized to defeat what Chávez called “a system of oppression.” The FTAA did not meet its 2005 target date for implementation. The gigantic program, written to reflect the interests of the wealthy business class in the Americas with little input from workers, farmers, or the poor, collapsed under its own weight and from sustained, withering attacks from its opponents. At the Fourth Summit of the Americas, held in November 2005 at Mar del Plata, Argentina, there was a pseudo showdown between President Chávez and U.S. president George W. Bush over the FTAA. Chávez won. Massive street mobilizations against the FTAA were organized and supported by the charismatic Venezuelan populist leader; Chávez’s opening remarks, before the summit even began, set the stage for what was to come. “I believe,” he said, “we came here to bury the FTAA.”
Commercial relations between the United States and Latin America have been critical to the health of the U.S. economy and the economies of Latin America. The negotiations during the 1980s leading to NAFTA, authorized by the U.S. Senate in 1993, have generated more trade, reduced barriers, and increased tax incentives; each one of these alterations tends to privilege large entities (agricultural and manufacturing) over smaller ones. Jobs have migrated to places where wages are low, labor unions weak, and workers disposable. Since NAFTA, manufacturing jobs have moved out of the industrial heartland of the United States; wages have remained flat while productivity has grown. In simple words, the market has conquered the people—throughout the Americas. The Zapatistas in Mexico, opposed to globalization, have warned repeatedly of the dangers of the market. In their Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle, issued in July 2005, they noted how “Globalization means that they no longer control the workers in one or several countries, but the capitalists are trying to dominate everything all over the world.”6 While this might sound somewhat paranoid to the modern reader, studying the breathtaking reach of the proposed FTAA forces some critical reflection on the ambitions of “the capitalists.”
Conflict has defined the political, social, and economic relationship between the United States and Latin America. However, a focus on conflict fails to capture the concurrent search for stability and conflict resolution. The following section in this chapter, which focuses on culture, is designed to demonstrate some themes and time periods in recent U.S.-Latin American relations where collaboration has been the fundamental objective.
One specific place in the Caribbean which seems to be a clear case of nearly continuous conflict between the United States and Latin America is Haiti. In the early 1990s, at the beginning of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Haiti seemed to be spiraling out of control; however, a long historic pattern of poverty and inequality suggests the limits of and challenges to the United States’ Haiti policy. Also, the United States has been, far more often than not, rooting for the wrong team in Haitian history.
The Haiti conflict goes back to the earliest days of the nineteenth century when the nation broke free, via violent revolution, from its French masters. France was reluctant to lose its profitable Caribbean sugar operation—based on slave labor—but the Haitian fighters understood the “universalness” of the 1789 declaration: liberté, egalité, fraternité applied to all humans, everywhere, all the time.
The Haitian people, for daring and succeeding to overthrow the French, have suffered the scorn and, at times, outright hostility of Western democracies. French/Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier captures the difficulty of establishing democratic rule there in his classic 1949 novel The Kingdom of this World. Paul Farmer, the American physician and anthropologist, contextualized and problematized Haiti’s historic struggles in his important 1999 work, Infections and Inequalities.
While the nineteenth century offered more of the same for the people of Haiti—poverty, a monocrop economy, few friends in the world, and seemingly insurmountable corruption and racism—the twentieth century brought little relief. The U.S. Marines invaded in 1915 and stuck around for about twenty years, and one family named Duvalier, adopting heavy-handed, anti-democratic tactics, ruled the island from the late 1950s through the overthrow of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier in 1986. In 1990, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest steeped in the theory and practice of liberation theology, was elected president of the nation. He was the first democratically elected president in the nation’s history.
Aristide’s rule ran into trouble with the Haitian military and elite; neither party was comfortable with his “liberationist” rhetoric. The president was removed from office in a coup staged by the military, which long considered his views, his speeches, and his very being subversive. A (new) reign of terror ensued in Haiti, and an early challenge of the newly installed Clinton administration (January 1993) was the restoration of the legitimate, democratically elected leader of Haiti. Aristide successfully lobbied in the United States; church leaders, the Congressional Black Caucus, and others rallied to his cause. Clinton threatened a massive military intervention to restore Aristide to power and, as the force advanced on the Caribbean nation, the Haitian military and civilian coup-makers negotiated. Aristide returned to power and finished out his term, leaving office in 1996.
But, generations of poverty, corruption, and neglect could not be resolved, or even diminished, with one presidential election and, as in prior historic periods, the international community—focusing mostly on “democratic” elections and processes—quickly lost interest in the Haiti dilemma. Aristide, reelected in 2000, was again removed from power, this time in early 2004.
During his time in office, President Aristide made some mistakes: For example, in 2003, he demanded France pay the equivalent of $21 billion (U.S.) in restitutions—an amount he claimed was equal (in real terms) to the amount paid out by Haiti to France—in gold—at the end of the independence struggle in the early nineteenth century. Neither the French, nor the other powerful Western nations, were amused. Citing irregularities in the 2000 election, rebel groups began to move in Haiti; some of these paramilitary groups were essentially retooled Tonton Macoutes (terrorists) of the dark Duvalier days. They ravaged the countryside and the cities and forced the president’s removal. Aristide claims he was “kidnapped” by the United States. Indeed, a U.S.-supplied and -piloted Boeing 757 jet carried Mr. Aris-tide out of Haiti to the Central African Republic.
Other areas of conflict in Latin America are related to the so-called “Pink Tide” that has washed over the region. The Pink Tide is a term used to describe the emergence of a new “wave” of leftist leaders in Latin America who differ dramatically from revolutionaries of previous eras. The three leaders generally associated with this movement of the “new left” are Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez (1999–2013); Evo Morales of Bolivia, who has ruled there since 2006; and Rafael Correa of Ecuador. Dr. Correa (he holds a PhD degree in economics from the University of Illinois) was elected in 2006 and has ruled continuously since.
The leaders of the “new left” have held to some predictable policies and rhetorical flourishes. They have moved their nations away from the so-called “Washington Consensus” but they’ve kept their societies (unlike Mr. Fidel Castro in Cuba in the early 1960s) firmly in the fold of the capitalist market order. They have expropriated, or sought to control, certain key sectors of their nations’ industries. In Venezuela and Ecuador, petroleum is a critically important creator of revenue for the national economy. In Bolivia, natural gas, coca leaf production, and tin are key economic components.
Mr. Hugo Chávez was a gifted orator, politician, and populist. He emerged out of the Venezuelan military and took the country, during his fourteen-year rule, in a path that diverged significantly from Washington’s wishes and expectations. Chávez exerted significant control over the oil industry, after a strike by petroleum workers, and he used robust oil profits to help the poor. He waged a war of words against then sitting U.S. President, George W. Bush. In 2006 he called Mr. Bush “the Devil” from the podium of the United Nations in New York and on his television show, Aló Presidente (Hello President), he referred to Mr. Bush as “Mister Danger” and a “donkey.”
The theatrical, verbal assaults belied the degree to which Chávez commandeered the Venezuelan economy: He resisted a devastating strike of oil executives and workers in 2003. The strike ended with thousands of workers losing their jobs and furthered Chávez’s consolidation of the state run industry. The strike brought on a significant (but temporary) reversal of GDP in Venezuela during that period. Despite this, high international oil prices from 2000–2008, with recovery again after 2009, meant that tens of billions of dollars from the state-run oil company, PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A.), were directed toward the government’s social programs (the Bolivarian Missions) which supported the construction and staffing of hospitals and significant subsidies on food and housing for the poor.
Veteran journalist Jon Lee Anderson wrote a searing critique of the Chávez regime in The New Yorker. He focused on Caracas’s “Tower of David,” an unfinished ziggurat rising from the city center, named for oil tycoon David Brillembourg. A sort of squatter community emerged there, with security guards controlling entryways, and an ex-con turned evangelical minister, Alexander Daza, commanding the operation. The unfinished building (construction began before Chávez assumed power) still stands as a clear symbol of the gap between Chávez’s soaring rhetoric and the city’s current reality. In March 2014, a year after Mr. Chávez’s death, the 3,000 or so “residents” of the tower were removed by the government of Nicolás Maduro.7
With the price of oil faltering for the past twenty-two months and holding at just under $50 a barrel as of this writing (in August 2016), the future of the Venezuelan economy and the Bolivarian social mission is in jeopardy. However, according to the World Bank, overall poverty fell in the period from 1998 to 2013 and the nation’s Gini coefficient, which measures absolute inequality, moved from 49 in 1998 to 39 in 2012. Zero on the coefficient represents perfect equality.
In Ecuador, similar metrics have been measured. President Rafael Correa, an economist by training, decided to focus more on social spending and less on debt reduction; he decreed that external debt financing could not exceed 3 percent of GDP and he has increased the education budget from 3 to 6 percent of GDP. Poverty has fallen, especially during the days of high oil prices on the international market. From 2006 to 2014, poverty rates dropped by about 15 percent.
Despite these positive developments in poverty reduction and the construction of social infrastructure, the response from Washington toward the new left has been tepid at best, and outright hostile at worst. For example, in 2002, a coup in Venezuela briefly toppled President Chávez; Mr. Chávez claimed the coup was cooked up in Washington and the relative speed with which the George W. Bush administration supported the coup-makers—against his legitimate, popularly elected government—certainly seemed suspicious. Immediately after the coup commenced and when it appeared that Chávez had been toppled, the United States recognized the coup leader, Mr. Pedro Carmona. A trio of U.S. policy makers—Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich, and John Negroponte—all with strong ties to the dark days of the 1980s Central American expeditions, actually “sanctioned” the coup, and hoped that it would succeed. The people of Venezuela quickly pulled away from the coup when Carmona and his U.S.-backed allies immediately began rolling back the Chávez reforms. Rallies erupted in the streets. Chávez returned.
In Honduras, the democratically elected president removed in a 2009 coup did not return to power. Manuel Zelaya, who was elected and assumed the presidency in January 2006, was ousted from power, ostensibly by the Supreme Court and the military. He had been ordered by the Court to desist from holding a constitutional referendum, viewed by many as an attempt to extend his time in power. Zelaya ignored the Court and the military moved in, in what has been derisively referred to as a Golpe Profiláctico—a coup to prevent what follows. He was forced from the presidential palace early in the morning of June 28, 2009, placed on a plane, flown to Costa Rica, and left at an airport there wearing his pajamas.
The Obama administration quickly, but gently, denounced the coup. Zelaya, since gaining power in 2006, had gravitated toward the centrifugal pull of Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian Revolution. Zelaya’s policies meant a rise in the minimum wage for Hondurans, free education for children, and a significant (about 10 percent) reduction in poverty during his brief tenure. None of this pleased the wealthy ruling elite in Honduras or the conservative elements in the Roman Catholic Church and, rather than fight for Zelaya’s return to office—as was the Clinton strategy with Aristide and Haiti—American officials called for “new” elections. Those elections were held in late 2009 and Porfirio Lobo, a Conservative, became the new president of Honduras.
A clear, complex area of conflict between Latin America and the United States emerged in 2003 when the administration of George W. Bush took the United States and a small “coalition of the willing” to war in Iraq. That coalition did not include the powerful nations of France, Germany, Italy, Russia, or China. Nor did it include Latin America. In fact, the most influential nations—Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile—openly condemned the illegal invasion and the Bush-Fox alliance (Vicente Fox, the conservative president of Mexico) temporarily collapsed. President Chávez of Venezuela likened the war to fighting “terrorism with terrorism,” and Costa Rica withdrew support after its constitutional court determined that the war was in violation of international law.
One nation in South America, Colombia, supported the war. Colombia at the time was ruled by the conservative Álvaro Uribe, who was a close ally of President Bush. Mr. Uribe’s plan to eradicate the leftist insurgency there, the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), was predicated upon receiving billions of dollars in mostly military aid from the United States. The Colombians, essentially, were held hostage by the Bush administration and their support was limited to rhetorical, government-to-government support. The Colombian government neither sent troops nor equipment for the 2003 U.S. war in the Middle East.
The United States Naval Base at Guantánamo, Cuba, has been a century-long source of tension but that tension intensified in 2002 when the base became a prison camp for detainees in the United States’ seemingly interminable War on Terror. The Bush administration dumped “enemy combatants” from the Middle East at Guantánamo, claiming these individuals had no rights under international law. The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed: In a landmark 2006 decision, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the court declared that article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (which prohibits torture, indefinite detention, and insists on access to fair trials) applies to all people, everywhere, at all times. As of this writing in late August 2016, nine detainees have died in captivity and sixty-one remain at Guantánamo in a surreal legal limbo: The U.S. Congress will not authorize any funds for the transfer of these people to the U.S. mainland and, since evidence against some of the detainees was derived from torture, rulings from civilian courtroom procedures could never hold up.
Some Latin American governments have supplied relief for the nightmare scenario at Guantánamo, a prison that has cost U.S. taxpayers about $5 billion since 2002 and has seriously jeopardized U.S. leadership and authority in the world and region. José Mujica, sitting president of Uruguay from 2010–2014 offered to take in six prisoners from Guantánamo, and those individuals were transferred from Cuba to Uruguay on Sunday December 7, 2014. Mr. Mujica had a clear understanding of the plight of prisoners: he was detained for fourteen years—much of this time spent in solitary confinement—as a political prisoner for participating in Uruguay’s Tupamaros guerrilla organization during the early 1970s.
Conflict has defined the relationship between the United States and Mexico; the collaboration and enthusiasm during the go-go days of NAFTA negotiation ended in 1995 with a major devaluation of the peso, and a Washington-arranged bailout.
The year 1994, sardonically referred to as “the year of living dangerously” by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, was marked by the implementation of NAFTA on January 1; the emergence (on the same day) of the Zapatista revolutionary movement in the south; the March murder of the hand-picked presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio; and the collapse of the Mexican peso in December. The devaluation in late 2004 triggered a $50-billion bailout. President Clinton pushed the international community to help Mexico and the funds flowed through the IMF (International Monetary Fund). The United States offered—essentially—a $20-billion credit line, of which $12.5 billion was used. Mexico paid back these funds to the United States within two years, two years ahead of schedule and with $500 million in interest payments. Though the relationship between the United States and Mexico has always been tense, this period was especially strange. Reflecting on the crises of 1994 and 1995 in his native Mexico, Mr. Fuentes wrote that “the only strange thing is that it didn’t happen earlier.”8
Drug smuggling through Mexico has become a serious source of tension between the United States and Mexico. With the collapse of cartels in Colombia in the early 1990s—first the Medellín cartel with the death of Pablo Escobar in 1993 and, shortly thereafter, the collapse of the Cali cartel—drug smuggling “ballooned” north and west, away from Colombia toward Central America and the west coast of Mexico. Though Mexico is not a producer of cocaine—that still happens in Colombia, Peru, and other places in the Andes and South American jungles—it is estimated that, by 2007, about 90 percent of all cocaine entering the U.S. market moved in through Mexico, with Central America serving as an important transshipment point.
Mexican cartels, not unlike the Colombian cartels of a decade earlier, moved the product and outmaneuvered, outgunned, and outspent the national government. When Mexican president Felipe Calderón (2006–2012) decided to fight the cartels, the cartels fought back, and blood flowed. The United States, during the waning days of the George W. Bush administration (2001–2009) announced the Mérida Initiative, a $1.3-billion security assistance package for Mexico. Mérida, in addition to providing weaponry to fight the cartels, was designed to help build the Mexican judicial system. The efficaciousness of that system has been repeatedly called into question, most recently in September 2014, when forty-three college students studying at a severely underfunded teachers college were kidnapped, murdered, and burned beyond identification. Mr. José Luis Abarca, the mayor of the town of Iguala, in the state of Guererro, is widely believed to have orchestrated the crime. He is accused of ordering the local police to capture the students, who were then turned over to a criminal gang; gang leaders—it has been reported—apparently mistook the students for a rival gang and executed them. The case produced widespread protest and dismay from Mexicans who have historically held a deep skepticism for their nation’s leaders and institutions. The prison escapes of Mr. Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, only reinforced such skepticism. The billionaire leader of the Sinaloa cartel, “El Chapo,” twice escaped from Mexican prisons, embarrassing Mexican and U.S. authorities. He was recaptured on January 8, 2016, and, the next day, Rolling Stone magazine published an “in-depth” interview between the cartel leader and the American actor Sean Penn. The piece, titled “El Chapo Speaks,” was written after a clandestine meeting in Mexico between the actor and the narcotraficante somewhere in Mexico in October 2015. Mexican telenovela actress Kate del Castillo facilitated the meeting.
Prior to Mexico’s emergence as a major transport route and supplier of cocaine to the U.S. market, most narco discussion focused on one South American nation: Colombia. In fact, at the end of his administration, president Bill Clinton pushed through Congress a “Plan Colombia” designed to save the Colombian nation. Colombia had seen increased criminal activity during the 1990s as the cartels dispersed and new actors, including paramilitary organizations, wreaked havoc. The leftist insurgency contributed to the chaos and, by the year 2000 when the plan was announced, as many as 25,000 men, women, and children were thought to form the Marxist-inspired insurgency known by its Spanish acronym, FARC. At that time, the FARC was generating between $300 and $500 million annually, through extortion, protection of the narcotics industry, and kidnapping. It was the largest and wealthiest insurgency group in the Americas. Plan Colombia, a $1.3-billion aid package to Colombia, breezed through the U.S. Congress, and was designed to fortify the Colombian army and judiciary.
As of this writing, about $10 billion (2000–2015) has flowed from the United States to Colombia in mostly military aid. The Colombian government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC leadership have agreed to a broad outline which became formalized in “Peace Accords.” The signing of a peace agreement—which occurred on September 26, 2016—represents a critical turning point for Colombian society after a long, nearly four-year “Peace Process” in Havana that captivated the world and was energetically endorsed by—among others—Pope Francis I and Miss Universe (2015), Colombia’s Paulina Vega. The peace process has been relatively concise, when compared to the conflict which has endured for decades in Colombia and has left—according to some estimates—over five million victims.9 On March 30, 2016, the Colombian government announced that peace talks would begin with the ELN—the National Army of Liberation (Ejército de Liberación Nacional), a leftist insurgency inspired by the Cuban Revolution. The ELN probably counts on 1,500 armed combatants but even with such limited numbers, they have been effective at attacking the nation’s infrastructure, especially oil pipelines. This round of peace talks is scheduled to begin in Ecuador and then move to Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, and Cuba.
A continuous area of contention between the United States and Latin America involves immigration. In 2014, 11.7 million undocumented persons lived in the United States (down from 12.8 million in 2007); and the majority (5.6 million) originate from one country, Mexico. However, the United States is hardly “drowning” in immigrants from the South: In November 2015, the Pew Research Center, a widely respected authority on immigration issues, reported that from 2009 to 2014 there was an aggregate 130,000-person outflow from the United States to Mexico; that is, about a million persons returned to Mexico during that period while “only” 870,000 arrived.10 But much recent attention has focused on the plight of Central American arrivals to the United States—especially unaccompanied minors. This reality turned into a “crisis” in the summer of 2014 when, during a seven-month period, approximately 30,000 unaccompanied minors were detained at the U.S. border. Many factors contributed to this humanitarian crisis: First, the Central American civil wars of the 1970s–1990s helped destabilize the region. Recent trade policies/liberalization have not generated prosperity for the Central American people; in fact, some 60 percent of Hondurans live in poverty, according to 2014 statistics. Criminal gangs and drug smuggling networks have prospered throughout the region. The situation became so acute by 2014 that mothers in Honduras chose to send their children—alone, on a harrowing voyage through Central America and Mexico—to seek refugee status and relative safety in U.S. detention centers over the potential peril of gang and other violence in the towns and cities of Central America.
While violence and conflict capture the attention of the U.S. and Latin American media outlets, more subtle, stable, and ultimately more important forms of exchange between the United States and Latin America involve cultural contact and integration. Music, art, architecture, literature, film, sport, and cuisine all move from Latin America to the United States and vice versa. When American rapper and actor Tupac Amaru Shakur (né Lesane Parish Crooks) was killed in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1996, most people had no idea that he was renamed as a three-year-old in honor of an eighteenth-century rebellion leader in the south of Peru. Tupac Amaru II, né José Gabriel Condorcanqui (1742–1781), led a major, widespread rebellion in Peru (and what is today Bolivia) to assert the rights of poor, indigenous peoples. He died a martyr and his message of struggle and revolution—and violence—traveled across place and time.
Now, with the Internet, culture throughout the Americas remains vital while access and diffusion has spread, allowing people in the United States to learn about music, film, and literature from Latin America without ever entering a concert hall, theater, or library. American cuisine has been enhanced and enriched through the incorporation of Latin food traditions. Americans are now consuming locally produced tacos in all major cities. Taco Bell—the fast food, corporate cliché of Mexico—is no longer the only source for “Mexican food”; in fact, a significant percent of Taco Bell’s sales take place between the hours of 1:00 and 4:00 a.m. Many of these consumers have been working and need quick, easy-to-handle food that is eaten, generally, behind the wheel of a car.
Ceviche—which can’t be consumed in a car—has become popular in the United States in recent years. This traditional coastal dish from Peru (and Ecuador) is made from raw seafood, aji (a burning spice made from the rocoto pepper found in Peru), cilantro, onions, salt, and lime. The seafood is essentially “cooked” in the lime juice, and Peruvians of all socioeconomic classes eat ceviche, normally at lunch time. But even in middle America, in the city of Louisville, a restaurant named “Seviche” (to help with pronunciation) opened ten years ago, which suggests that ceviche and other Latin staples are no longer confined to Miami, Los Angeles, or New York City. The chef in Louisville, Anthony Lamas, is himself a product of Latino fusion: His father is Puerto Rican and his mother hails from Mexico.
American cuisine has made its way to Latin America; an upscale hamburger franchise in Colombia called “La Hamburguesería” is popular with the upwardly mobile in Bogotá and the menu features hamburgers and French fries. TGI Friday’s, McDonald’s, and P. F. Chang’s are frequented by middle-class patrons in Bogotá. In Mexico City, in the elite neighborhoods of Condesa and the Zona Rosa, “Burgers by Buba” recently opened and sells a cheeseburger for 78 pesos—about $5 U.S. at current exchange rates. While there is no authentic “American cuisine,” many Latin Americans associate American cuisine with the hotdog and hamburger. Expanding on this idea, Carlos Fuentes wrote the chapter “Spoils” in his novel The Crystal Frontier. The chapter is a devastating critique of U.S. consumption patterns, the unimaginative nature of American fast food, and the resultant obesity epidemic in America. That book, published in Spanish in 1995 and released in an English language edition in 1997, is a fictitious, artistic interpretation of American cuisine, but the critique contains some uncomfortable kernels of truth.
As America becomes more Latin—it is estimated that by 2050, 30 percent of the U.S. population will be of Latin American origin—food offerings from Latin America will continue to emerge into the mainstream. We know that long ago “salsa” began outselling ketchup in American supermarkets and, today, youngsters on the West Coast eat more fresh fish tacos than Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks—an American, frozen food staple from the generation of their grandparents.
Sports in the Americas has long been an area of academic interest; the journal Studies in Latin American Popular Culture has been disseminating research on cultural questions in Latin America, and the American historian Joseph L. Arbena focused on sport in Latin America during his long career at Clemson University.11 Two sports—baseball and soccer—will constitute the focus of this section; one made in the USA and the other drifting north from Latin America but originating with British sailors during their extended stays in Latin America, especially Argentina, in the late nineteenth century.
Baseball, with its desegregation in the United States in 1947, has changed in terms of demographics. No longer an “all white” sport, Major League Baseball is now about 27 percent Hispanic; about 24 percent of players were born in Latin American counties. Major League Baseball now caters to Latin audiences in the United States by broadcasting games in Spanish, hosting exhibition matches abroad, and commercializing their players’ roots. Much baseball talent originates in the pan-Caribbean region—Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Venezuela. Some of these places, especially Mexico and Colombia, are “soccer-centric” societies, but soccer tends to dominate in the highland, capital areas (Mexico City and Bogotá are both interior, high altitude cities) and baseball is more popular in the coastal regions.
Soccer has spread in the USA and American youth are playing more soccer than baseball, a trend that continues to advance. With the recent emphasis on dangers from concussions, it seems logical that parents will steer their kids away from “American” football and toward fútbol.12 Many “American” soccer players play in Latin American leagues, such as Mexico’s “Liga MX,” which provides lucrative contracts to players who—for financial reasons—forgo America’s MLS—Major League Soccer. Statistics from 2014 show the MLS average salary of $213,000 U.S. is significantly lower than the Mexican Liga MX salary of $265,625.
Los Angeles, California, with its close geographic proximity to Mexico and Central America, is a soccer mecca in the United States and the soccer played there, along with youth development programs in Los Angeles, has impacted the USA writ large. For example, whereas American-born soccer coaches—up until recently—attempted to apply “football” logic to the game of soccer (that is, through emphasis on strength, power, and set plays at the expense of intuition, finesse, and technical ability), many contemporary coaches, with roots and training in Latin America, have revolutionized the game here in America. Latin players have transformed the game in Europe: both the Spanish and German soccer leagues are dominated by Latin American players and one team, Barcelona, fields the three best players in the world: Lionel Messi from Argentina, Luis Alberto Suárez from Uruguay, and Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior from Brazil. The focus on international stars, the outrageous sums paid to professional players,13 belies a more sober reality in America: in any American city, there is most likely an adult soccer league populated by both Hispanic and non-Hispanic players. Soccer will continue to spread in America, probably at the expense of American football, and America’s rich immigrant tradition is reflected, each day, on soccer pitches across the nation.
Film is a significant source of cross-cultural contact, and many Americans and Latin Americans learn by watching the movies, both fictional and reality-based. In fact, an entire generation of Americans viewed the Mexican Revolution not through Carlos Fuentes’s dense, stream-of-consciousness novel The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), but through an American-made film—Viva Zapata!—directed by Elia Kazan in 1952. The film starred Marlon Brando, with screenplay by John Steinbeck; Brando played Emiliano Zapata, the film’s hero and martyr. Viva Zapata! attempts to explain the mayhem, intrigue, and outside agitation that defined the 1910 revolution—a revolution that churned for more than a decade.
Ten years prior to Viva Zapata! Orson Welles was sent to Brazil on a goodwill tour through the “Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs,” a federal agency set up by president Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. Tensions quickly developed between Welles and his American backers (RKO Radio Pictures) and the film was never completed; however, one segment of the film was discovered in UCLA’s archives, cleaned up, and released in 1993 as the documentary It’s All True. The final part of the documentary shows a section of Welles’s work in Brazil, called “Four Men on a Raft,” filmed in Brazil in 1942. Welles told the story of the jangadeiros—the four fishermen who traveled more than 1,600 miles, in 1941, from the northeast city of Fortaleza to Rio de Janeiro on a creaky raft to dramatize their daily struggles and seemingly inescapable poverty. During the filming in Rio, that is, during the reenactment of the actual voyage, the leader of the group, Manoel Olimpio Meira (nicknamed Jacaré—Alligator), drowned when the raft capsized. Welles was devastated by this accident, but remained determined to finish the film. Sadly, the studio executives in New York worried more about Jacaré’s politics (he was a communist) than the sacrifice he made for the film. RKO pulled the plug on the project.
In the seventy years or so since the Welles/RKO dustup in Rio, much has changed in terms of cinematic integration in the Americas. Alfonso Cuarón was the first Mexican to win an Academy Award as best director for his film Gravity. The film took a total of seven awards in 2014. But the “Mexican invasion” began earlier with director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who shocked audiences with his powerful, realistic film depicting chaos, violence, urban poverty, and the search for redemption in Mexico City. That film, Amores Perros (2000), translated as Love’s a Bitch, garnered immediate worldwide recognition for the young Mexican director. His 2003 film, 21 Grams, starred Sean Penn and was shot in Memphis, Tennessee; the director—before making the film—described the broad outline of the movie to Lynn Hirschberg, a writer for the New York Times Magazine: “it’s a movie about guilt and forgiveness,” said the director. “In America, that would be considered an art film. Here, it’s the way we live.”14 Mr. González Iñárritu won back-to-back Oscars in the category of “Best Director” for Birdman (2015) and The Revenant (2016).
American directors and artists have made significant contributions to understanding and cross-cultural collaboration between the United States and Latin America. In 1997, American John Sayles wrote and directed the astonishing film, Men with Guns, based on the 1992 book The Long Night of the White Chickens by Guatemalan American writer Francisco Goldman. The film is a stark, seemingly surreal look at the endemic violence that has plagued Latin America—especially Central America—though the film never identifies a specific location. Sayles, clearly, was commenting on the brutality of the 36-year Guatemalan civil war, 1960–1996, but suggested that the root causes of the violence were universal to the region: endemic poverty, gross economic inequality, historic racism, societal indifference, and men with guns. American folk musician Ry Cooder traveled to Cuba in 1997 to work on an album with traditional Cuban musicians. He “discovered” a tremendously talented but nearly unknown group of musicians who once played at the Buena Vista Social Club—a private social club shuttered once the revolution, with its discourse of popular, plural, and public, took hold in 1959. Cooder convinced the German director Wim Wenders to film the studio sessions, and the documentary film Buena Vista Social Club was released in 1999. The once-ignored, nearly anonymous Cuban musicians became instant international celebrities.
In 2006, American director Tommy Lee Jones weighed in on a politically sensitive topic in the United States: Immigration as it pertains to the U.S. border with Mexico. Mr. Jones made a powerful film in 2006 titled The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Filmed in west Texas, the beauty and extension of the physical landscape becomes an actual character; the film deals with friendship, loyalty, and sacrifice and portrays the U.S. Border Patrol in a light that could be characterized as dim.
During the past twenty-five years, some films from Latin America have had a major impact on United States culture. In 1992, Like Water for Chocolate was released, based on the same-titled novel (1989) by Mexican writer Laura Esquivel. The film was widely seen in the United States and blended the intrigue of Mexican cooking and traditional recipes with the violence of the Mexican revolution. The “narration” of the revolution, from the perspective of a female protagonist and an American border physician, Dr. Brown, is presented in an optimistic, positive light. Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) was made in Cuba in 1993 by veteran filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. The film proved controversial because it dealt openly with censorship and treatment of gay people in Cuba. Cuban watchers saw the film as a watershed moment, an abertura—a slight opening up of the repressive, controlling Castro regime.
In 2002, the Brazilian film Cidade de Deus or City of God was released, based on the 1997 book of the same name by Paulo Lins. The film was unusual for its unsentimental look at life and violence in the Brazilian favela—specifically, a marginalized segment of Rio de Janeiro named Cidade de Deus. The actors who starred in the movie were people who lived in this neighborhood and the film’s dire conclusion suggested that the quest for power, money, guns, drugs, and authority is both endemic and patrilineal. Two years later, Motorcycle Diaries was released, based on the 1952 transcontinental voyage of Ernesto “Che” Guevara who traveled with his friend Alberto Granado. This film represented a truly trans-American collaboration: American filmmaker Robert Redford was one of the backers (as co-producer), Mexican actor Gael García Bernal played the Argentine folk hero/revolutionary (Che Guevara), and the movie was directed by Brazilian film-maker Walter Salles.
Literary currents and traditions have moved along the same pathways as film. The conclusion of the First World War had a profound effect on literary production and dissemination. In Latin America, a new indigenismo emerged; this was a post-war focus on pre-Columbian peoples, traditions, and languages. No longer would culture be defined solely by the Parisian avant-garde. Writers and painters presented themes drawn from their own Latin American experiences and realities. Some would write in indigenous languages, as was the case with Peru’s José María Arguedas, who published in Spanish and Quechua. In the United States, the 1920s represented one of the richest periods in modern American literary history. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, and Gertrude Stein were all prominent during this period and they wrote some of the most significant, enduring works of the twentieth century. One writer, though, William Faulkner, would reverberate in the American south and South America like no other writer in American history. Faulkner, who created a county called Yoknapatawpha, situated most of his novels in this place somewhere in Mississippi. Likewise, Gabriel García Márquez created “Macondo,” a fictitious place on the Colombian Caribbean coast, to set his 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Colombian writer has acknowledged the southerner’s influence: In his 1982 acceptance speech before the Nobel Committee, Mr. García Márquez referred to William Faulkner as mi maestro—my teacher, my master.
Many other Latin American writers of the so-called “boom”—the explosive power of Latin American literature as it emerged into the world (read English language) market during the 1960s—were influenced by Faulkner. But the clearest expression of Faulknerian magic and madness is found in the work of Mexicans Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes, Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, Chilean José Donoso and Mr. García Márquez of Colombia. In 2007, three years before winning the Nobel prize in literature, Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa reflected on his debt to Faulkner: “Faulkner, for me, was a revelation: he taught me things—lessons really—about the handling of space and time that I’ve never abandoned.”15
During the past twenty years or so, a number of important writers have explored, in their work, their Latin heritage. Many of these writers were born in the United States and their success suggests the strength of Latin American themes in writing and culture. New York–born, Dominican American Julia Alvarez published a searing historical novel about the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic titled In the Time of the Butterflies. American-born writers, both of Mexican descent, Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros have introduced Latin American themes into the American literary mainstream: Castillo, a poet and essayist, published, in 1996, an important collection on the Virgin of Guadalupe titled Goddess of the Americas/La Diosa de las Américas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. Colombian American Sergio de la Pava, who works as a public defense attorney in New York City, stunned the literary establishment with his massive novel A Naked Singularity, which is a scathing fictitious study of the inequities in our contemporary criminal justice system. Junot Díaz and Horacio Castellanos Moya are also both influential writers living in the United States; Mr. Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel—The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao— about the Dominican immigrant experience in the United States. He teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Castellanos Moya, who lives in exile from Central America (he was born in Honduras and grew up in El Salvador), teaches at the University of Iowa and has addressed the violence of his native region with a novella appropriately titled Senselessness.
Trade agreements of the past quarter century—negotiated by business executives and politicians—suggest a high degree of consensus between the Latin American region and the United States. Trade policy has been the subject of much recent scrutiny and criticism, generating a sociopolitical backlash known euphemistically as the “Pink Tide”—politicians elected in Latin America seeking to gradually disengage from the Washington Consensus with its sanctimonious, self-serving prescriptions. Conflict has taken the form of trade disagreements, characterized by an inability to see the strength and durability of Latin American nationalism in historical context. Also, Washington’s facile definition of democracy as “elections only” has tended to occlude rather than promote hemispheric integration. What ultimately has integrated north and south in recent years has been the persistent, creative march of cultural patterns and traditions; culture has deeply influenced both hemispheres and will continue to flourish and encourage integration in the immediate and distant future.
1. See Michael J. LaRosa and Germán R. Mejía, An Atlas and Survey of Latin American History (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), p. 138.
2. See Julián Aguilar, “Twenty Years Later, NAFTA Remains a Source of Tension,” The New York Times, December 7, 2012. See also, Mark Stevenson, “At 20 Years, NAFTA Didn’t Close Mexico Wage Gap,” Associated Press, December 31, 2013.
3. Larry Schwartz, “35 Soul-Crushing Facts about American Income Inequality,” Salon, July 15, 2015.
4. See Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). Online. Available: http://2016.export.gov/FTA/cafta-dr/.
5. Susan Davis, “Obama Vows Opposition to Colombia Trade Deal,” Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2008.
6. This, and the majority of the Zapatista Declarations, are written by “Subcomandante Marcos,” né Rafael Sebastian Guillen Vincente (July 2005).
7. See two articles by Jon Lee Anderson in The New Yorker: “Slumlord: What has Hugo Chávez Wrought in Venezuela?” (January 28, 2013), and “Emptying Out the Tower of David” (July 24, 2014).
8. Carlos Fuentes, A New Time for Mexico (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996), p. 81.
9. “5.5 millones de víctimas y contando,” Semana, Junio 3–10, 2013, Edición Especial, no. 1622.
10. Julia Preston, “More Mexican Immigrants Leaving U.S. Than Entering, Report Finds,” New York Times, November 19, 2015.
11. Professor Arbena died in 2013.
12. Concussions can present in soccer; generally this occurs when two players try to “head” the ball and unintentionally crash into one another.
13. In 2014, Mr. Messi signed a contract for 50 million dollars in salary, per year, with Barcelona FC.
14. Lynn Hirschberg, “A New Mexican: Alejandro González Iñárritu,” New York Times Magazine (March 18, 2001).
15. Robert Boyers and Gene Bell-Villada, “Exhilaration and Completeness: An Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa,” Salmagundi 155–156 (2007).