José Aragón*
In Nicaragua we know a lot about imperialism, colonialism, invasions and foreign impositions. The most diverse and sophisticated hegemonic methods deployed by Washington throughout the length and breadth of the continent, in its eagerness to manage politics, destroy culture and take over the resources of Latin American nations, have been experienced in the heart of its territory and sovereignty.
Nicaragua, a small country with enormous geostrategic importance, has suffered the onslaught of this arrogant and systematic policy, like no other nation in the world. Practically from its beginnings as a sovereign country, Nicaragua has been engaged in struggles to defend with blood, heart and life the freedom, independence, dignity and sovereignty of its country against the endemic harassment by the United States of America.
So no one better than a Nicaraguan to explain in a thorough, objective and precise way the long history of encounters and misunderstandings that have marked the relations between Washington and the America that extends from the southern shore of the Rio Bravo to the confines of Tierra del Fuego.
The book, The Complex Relations between the United States and Latin America, a work of the solid Nicaraguan intellectual, Carlos Midence, exposes and analyzes in depth and with profuse and clear data the imperialist practices of subjugation in all its forms, mechanisms and devices. It also addresses and analyzes the vast culture of resistance that this aggressive U.S. policy has generated in the peoples who defend their legitimate interests of freedom, culture and progress from their own worldview and history.
Each page of the book is an interesting and profound contribution to the analysis or debate with foundation, it is a ray of light on “the infinite blindness” that they have tried to impose on the peoples of Latin America through a rhetoric that justifies barbarism by dressing it up as a bucolic experience of civilization and exchange, when what has really been sought is to permeate and re-orient their cultures, their ancestral ways of life and their self-determination in order to impose on them a new order of “freedoms and democracies” that obeys the plundering interests of the dominant power.
Carlos Midence also looks at the evolution that the old methods of subjugation are undergoing today. What used to be solved by means of blatant coups d’état and direct occupation by the US Army, is nowadays attempted to be imposed by means of subtle soft coups that destabilize from the shadows those governments that do not bow to the designs of the empire. These new methods combine media lynching, economic piracy, manipulation of human rights, criminal blockades, among many others, which the author discusses and analyzes in detail.
He also points out the pretexts that throughout history have served to justify an attack, a war or a direct intervention, and reviews the role of Trojan horses played by local elites, accustomed to serving as pieces of a strategy that has served to guarantee and consolidate quotas of power and privileges to the detriment of the rights of the majority of the intervened peoples.
The complex relations between the United States and Latin America is an essential book for anyone interested in accurately understanding these times of new and intense imperial onslaughts in the southern countries of the continent and throughout the planet. Its pages are a nourishing and pleasant intellectual contribution with a clear and deep language that makes it very easy to understand the content.
*Nicaraguan painter living in Barcelona. Escriduende Award, to the best Spanish-American book of poetry for the book Palabra de Pintor-Poeta (Word of a Painter-Poet).
