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The Latin Americans Their Love-Hate Relationship with the United States by Carlos Rangel Transaction Publishers (1977) 1987, English, Softcover, 322 pages
REVIEWED BY LEÓKRAUZE
The Return of Latin America's Noble Savage
On May 27, 2007, in the middle of a telenovela, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez pulled the plug on Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), the oldest television station in the country. Days before the channel went off the air Chávez had warned, "We will not tolerate any news media that is in the service of those who make coups against the people, against the nation, against national independence, against the dignity of the republic."
Chavistas around the world identified with the Venezuelan President in his self-described fight against the "cultural domination of imperialism." In Mexico, Camilo Valenzuela-a top official from the PRD, Mexico's leftist party-declared that Mexico had "a lot to learn" from Hugo Chávez's peculiar brand of democracy.
This was not the first time that Latin America played host to a movement that in the name of a perverse revolutionary ideal assumed the role of nemesis of U.S. imperialism and protector of regional "dignity." Chávez's move against RCTV was a symptom of a larger sickness-perhaps a chronic one-in the history of Latin America: the tendency to mythologize the American subcontinent as the cradle of the noble savage, threatened constantly by the great corruptor north of the Rio Bravo.
Nobody has explained this collective neurosis better than the Venezuelan author Carlos Rangel. In 1977, Rangel set himself the task of explaining two worrisome traits in modern Latin American history: the unhealthy resentment towards the United States and the fascination with revolutionary processes as social panaceas. To re-read Carlos Rangel in 2007, 31 years after the historic appearance of The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship with the United States, the English version of his original book, Del buen salvaje al buen revolucionario (1976), is to contemplate a sadly prophetic exercise.
As the recent Venezuelan episode illustrates with tragic precision, an important element of Latin America continues to have a complex relationship with the United States in particular and with the...