“There is no doubt that we live in a fractured and divided country. Every day the contrast between those who directly or indirectly enjoy the benefits of belonging to a dominant class and the great majority who fight a daily struggle just to survive…becomes more and more obvious.”

“Anecdotes, narratives modeled to the measure of oblivion; confused memories for the confusion of history, which is oblivion; altering the scene of the crime according to the needs of the criminal….thirty years later, the bonfire of pardon still burns bright…an entire nation, a society, watches as memory is consumed by the flames….a society, its history.”

“The word history refers to an investigation of what has taken place. For that reason, history, said the ancients, is life’s teacher….it teaches those who write it and those who read it.”

One of the thousands of problems afflicting Mexico is the reduction of democracy to little more than a representative process fueled by votes. With few exceptions, neither the right nor the left can conceive of it in any other way.

“The reelection of political representatives…in theory seems like a good idea because…their experience with public affairs [makes them qualified] to seek the public good in the face of particular interests or factious powers, whether they be economic, military, spiritual, or now criminal.”

Large swathes of the left in Brazil claim that the only way President Dilma Rousseff’s mandate will survive intact in coming months is if she makes significant changes to her economic policy. Such an approach is doomed from the start because it implies that her economic policy is indefensible.

It has become a cliché to note that the left is in retreat throughout Latin America. If the prosperity of the first decade of the century propelled it forward, the economic crises of the second have stopped it in its tracks.

According to Chile’s Servicio Electoral, there are currently ten new political parties being formed in the country and six more that are being officially registered. Given the fact that thirteen parties already exist, if all the new initiatives meet with success Chile will be home to nearly thirty political parties.

“Transfuguismo,” or the act of changing one’s party affiliation, has become endemic in the Dominican Republic. In a country plagued by corruption and irresponsibility, the phenomenon has become an expression of the times, an alarming symptom of an era in which “consciences are bought and votes are sold.”

A number of vociferous critics are holding the left responsible for all of Colombia’s current ills and evoking the Peñalosa era as a golden age to which the country should return.