Adapted from a speech given by Carlos Fuentes in May 1988 at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Fuentes’s latest novel, VLAD, will be published in English by Dalkey Archive Press in July. He died on May 15, 2012.
As the United States inaugurates a new president, this is a good time to look back on mistakes and lost opportunities in Latin America, so as not to repeat the former and so as to recapture the latter.
The primary reason for these recent failures is the United States’ unique obsession with events in Central America, particularly in Nicaragua. The…