Quotes About Latin America

Buenos Aires, sophisticated and fascinating, is the Paris of Latin America; with a vibrant cultural scene, the best theater and live music, it is the birthplace of many world-famous writers.

One of the characteristics of Chileans in general, and of the descendants of Spaniards and Basques in particular, is their seriousness, which contrasts with the exuberant temperament so common in the rest of Latin America.

El senador Trueba, que por principio detestaba esas cosas, comprendió lo que habían querido decir sus amigos del Club, cuando aseguraban que el marxismo no tenía ni la menor oportunidad en América Latina, porque no contemplaba el lado mágico de las cosas. «Pan, circo y algo que venerar, es todo lo que necesitan», concluyó el senador, lamentando en su fuero interno que faltara el pan.

El tema de la noche fue la intervención de la CIA en Latinoamérica, que contribuyó a derrocar democracias y reemplazarlas por el tipo de gobierno totalitario que ningún norteamericano toleraría.

we turn our backs on Latin America, always comparing ourselves instead to Europe.

We Chileans like the Germans for their sausage, their beer, and their Prussian helmets, as well as the goose step our military adopted for parades, but in practice we try to emulate the English. We admire them so much that we think we're the English of Latin America, just as we believe that the English are the Chileans of Europe.

The technique of "disappearing" ideological enemies, which several Latin American dictatorships were so strongly committed to during the seventies and eighties, had been practiced in Chile nearly a century earlier. None of which takes away from the fact that our democracy was the most solid, and the oldest, on the continent.

Like all of Latin America, Mexico after independence in 1821 turned its back on a triple heritage: on the Spanish heritage, because we were newly liberated colonies, and on our Indian and black heritages, because we considered them backward and barbaric. We looked towards France, England and the U.S., to become progressive democratic republics.

The United States is using its war on drugs as an excuse to expand its control over Latin America.

I would say that the U.S. has overlooked Latin America. Their priorities have always been somewhere else. And that is a problem and that is a mistake.

I've not been anywhere in Central or South America before. The closest I've been is Cancun and Cabo in Mexico. But I think I'd love the culture, the sprit, and the energy of Brazil.

The liberal order led by the United States favored an open world connected by the free flow of people, goods, ideas and capital, a world grounded in the principles of self-determination and sovereignty for nations and basic rights for their citizens. It did fall short of its ideals, often in Latin America and Southeast Asia.

The revolutions of my century, the 20th century - the Soviet revolution, or the Chinese, or the revolutions that were fomented in Latin America, such as in Cuba - failed for the most part, a failure which was completely clear by the end of the century.

I'd been to Mosul and back and forth to Iraq and Latin America, and it was all quite harrowing... and I felt like I wanted a month or two of total escapism.

One sees in Latin America, and also elsewhere, among many Catholics a certain schizophrenia between individual and public morality.

I think the best thing I can say about it - and I think the best thing you can say about anything, really - is that 'The Motorcycle Diaries' made me feel like my home was bigger; it made me feel at home anywhere in Latin America.

Latin Americans hold on tight even to pain and suffering, preferring a certain present to an uncertain future. Some of this is only natural, entirely human. But for us, the fear is paralyzing; it generates not only anxiety but also paralysis.

The Left, however, resists anglicizing Spanish terms because its political agenda relies on encouraging illegal immigration from Latin America and discouraging the assimilation of Hispanics into American society.

In Latin America, specialists and polling organisations have, for some time, observed that the extension of formal democracy was accompanied by an increasing disillusionment about democracy and a lack of faith in democratic institutions.

en Latinoamérica las constituciones se utilizan como instrumentos para subvertir el propio imperio de la ley

During his brief tenure, President Kennedy may have authorized more covert interventions in Latin America than any other postwar president—including Ronald Reagan, who fomented wars in Central America.6

Much of the Snowden archive revealed what can only be called economic espionage: eavesdropping and email interception aimed at the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, economic conferences in Latin America, energy companies in Venezuela and Mexico, and spying by the NSA's allies—including Canada, Norway, and Sweden—on the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy and energy companies in several other countries.

The Internet breaks a 500-year Latin American pattern of monopoly, monopoly of information, economics, social, religious power. It fundamentally gives power to the individual, which is a new development in Latin America. —FERNANDO ESPUELAS

All through Latin America, there's sharp condemnation of the criminal atrocities of Sept. 11. But it's qualified by the observation that although these are horrible atrocities, they are not unfamiliar.