The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret. Every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I must try and break through the cliches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone.
There is some big thing about the world that produced all these people willing to kill themselves just to hurt us. On 9/11 we learned we're part of that world, in the same completely crazy, drastic and arbitrary ways it hits other countries.
In El Salvador, when neighbors were disappeared, tortured or killed, people doubted their own knowledge of the victims, and worried there must have been some secret guilt involved to deserve such punishment! That's how political terror succeeds.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as more recent attacks in Madrid, Spain, and London, England, showed in a very tragic way just how vulnerable many areas of the world are to these sorts of actions.
Conflict with the United States is one of the overwhelming facts of Latin American history.
As far as a Latin explosion, I'm sorry, I'm the only Latino who's going to say it, but there is no Latin explosion. I'm sorry. Four or five top box office people do not make it an explosion, and it's disgusting to me that people will perceive it that way.
We might be on the brink of an apocalypse if, instead of poor people with suicide bombs killing middle class guys, middle-class people with suicide bombs started killing rich guys.
Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.
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.
By the breaking in of enraged merciless armies, flourishing countries have been laid waste, great numbers of people have perished in a short time, and many more have been pressed with poverty and grief.