There are extremely interesting things happening at the moment in Latin America, this vast territory that the United States still considers its backyard, with a few dozen military bases ready to intervene in case the “security” of the The empire would be threatened.
It is especially on the women’s side that things are moving. There was, of course, the election of Michelle Bachelet in Chile. A member of the Socialist Party, she served two terms, from 2006 to 2010, then from 2014 to 2018. Then, there was in Argentina, on the other side of the Andes, the election of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. She was president of her nation from 2007 to 2015, then vice-president from 2019 to 2023. From 2011 to 2016, the Brazilian giant was led by a woman, Dilma Rousseff. In Honduras, a small country in Central America, Xiomara Castro was elected president of the country in 2021. Then, very recently, it was Mexico’s turn to join this feminine wave with the election of Claudia Sheinbaum as president. of this country which shares at least one characteristic with Quebec: its long border with the United States.
All these women are united by a common denominator: they are left-wing, progressive, determined and, in general, disinclined to bow to the dictates of the US empire. They have no personal wealth and all have at heart the fate of the less fortunate.
The recent election of Claudia Sheinbaum, who belongs to the Movimiento de Regeneración nacional (Morena), the party founded by Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), is a warning shot that undoubtedly heralds a new era in relations between Mexico and its American neighbor. Claudia, as she is already familiarly known, succeeds AMLO, who promised to undertake the “Fourth Transformation” of the country during his mandate.
But what is this “Fourth Transformation”? you will tell me. I would answer: a sort of Quiet Revolution. The first transformation took place during the War of Independence, between 1810 and 1821, to end the three-hundred-year colonial bond and slavery. The second transformation took place between 1858 and 1861, with the government of Benito Juárez who laid the foundations of a true national state, with the separation of the powers of Church and State. The third was the revolution against thirty years of dictatorship, led among others by the famous Emiliano Zapata. It ended with the constitution of 1917. In the meantime, the United States had seized half of Mexican territory: California, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Mexico. ‘Arizona.
What about the “Fourth Transformation”? It began with the coming to power of AMLO who promised to carry out a whole range of social measures to reduce poverty, improve employment and wages, and combat drug trafficking and serious crime. AMLO leaves the presidency with a popular approval rating of 60%. Quite a success in a country that seems ungovernable.
Claudia promised to continue the work initiated by her predecessor six years earlier. Tequila, spicy tacos and mariachis to celebrate Long live Mexico! Hey!
Excerpts from my personal diary
This morning, Thursday, I read in the daily newspaper Rebel Youth very sad news: Israel bombed the “American neighborhood” of Beirut, a neighborhood which has nothing American, but where one of the bombed houses sheltered two Cuban correspondents from the Latin American agency Prensa Latina. Fortunately, they were not on site at the time of the bombing. The house belonged to a Lebanese journalist who lived in Cuba for eleven years and it had become a haven of peace in the middle of the turmoil, where people came to meet, to get together, to celebrate, to have a bite to eat, to drink and sing, in a very Cuban atmosphere. Today, it is nothing more than debris. A poem by Pablo Neruda comes to mind, written in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, in 1937:
“I lived in a neighborhood of Madrid / with bell towers / clocks and trees / My house was called / the house of flowers because geraniums burst out everywhere: it was / a beautiful house / with dogs and children / And one morning it was all on fire / and one morning braziers / came out of the earth / devouring human beings / and from then on it was fire / it was powder and blood / Look at my dead house / Look at it broken Spain […].»
People often ask me how I live in Cuba and I think of all these dead houses. I’m doing well.
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