Latin America’s Long Fight Against The US For Sovereignty
“An American team will win the next soccer World Cup,” a Nicaraguan boy once told me. It took me a second to realize he meant Brazil or Argentina, not the United States.
Greg Grandin’s new book shows that “America” (or, in Spanish, América) was the name used for the whole hemisphere by the late 17th century. In the 18th, the great liberator Simón Bolívar set out his vision of “our America”: a New World free of colonies, made up of distinct republics living in mutual respect.
He even cautiously welcomed the newly declared Monroe Doctrine as a rejection of European imperialism. Bolívar died without realizing his dream of a Pan-American international order but, Grandin argues, his ideals live on in Latin America today.