Latin America Politics General Thread

  • Thread starter Thread starter CRHeel94
  • Start date Start date
  • Replies: 184
  • Views: 5K
  • Politics 
Panama forced the Chinese company to sell because of pressure from the US.

Don't know if it was a fair price or not. Still extortion.

Takes the leg out of one of his excuses. Maybe he'll come up with another excuse.
 
Panama forced the Chinese company to sell because of pressure from the US.

Don't know if it was a fair price or not. Still extortion.

Takes the leg out of one of his excuses. Maybe he'll come up with another excuse.
Eh, that sort of thing happens all the time. Heck, the US was trying it with TikTok. As long as the Chinese company got fair value, it doesn't bother me. You're not wrong that it's extortion, but there are thousands of worse problems.

Hopefully Panama understands that they are bullshit excuses and that Trump wants conquest, not canal management. I suspect they do.
 
Hey @CRHeel94 -- do you know if the road to Monteverde is still a rough ride or if they have improved it. When I was there some years ago the big discussion among locals that I talked with and (overheard) were the pros and cons of making it easier to get there. I'm curious and literally asking for a friend.
 
Hey @CRHeel94 -- do you know if the road to Monteverde is still a rough ride or if they have improved it. When I was there some years ago the big discussion among locals that I talked with and (overheard) were the pros and cons of making it easier to get there. I'm curious and literally asking for a friend.
Shoot I didn't see this when you first posted. Haven't been up there for a while. Think they have extended the paved portion but not completely. Great place to visit for a weekend.
 
Shoot I didn't see this when you first posted. Haven't been up there for a while. Think they have extended the paved portion but not completely. Great place to visit for a weekend.


My wife and I must go back...we were looking places over with an eye to moving to CR when we visited a decade ago. We pretty much decided that if we did move that Heredia looked like a great spot.
 
Saw that @donbosco posted on FB.

Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the best Latin American writers of our lifetime passed away this weekend. Though 90% of my reading is in English, the one author in Spanish I have read regularly has been Vargas Llosa (my favorite is La Fiesta Del Chico which uses the assassination of Dominican strongman Rafael Trujillo as its backdrop).
 
My wife and I must go back...we were looking places over with an eye to moving to CR when we visited a decade ago. We pretty much decided that if we did move that Heredia looked like a great spot.

Atenas is the place I would look at. Town up in the mountains but a manageable drive to SJ. Have noticed some European-owned restaurants popping up in that area.

Heredia is nice, but the traffic going up can be a pain. That area had the prettiest girls back in the day (I'm sure that's a real winning data point with the wife).
 
Though 90% of my reading is in English
I would not have guessed this. I can see it now; it's just not my mental image of you. Actually, I don't know what my mental image was in terms of your diet of books, but it wasn't that, lol.

Anyway, I would have liked to read Garcia Marquez in Spanish. And I'd bet Borges is a better read in the original. I know of Vargas of course but have never read his works.
 
I read some Mario Vargas Llosa. And I enjoyed what I did. I hope to read more someday when I don’t read so many drafts of student essays and annotated bibliographies and tests and theses. My favorite thing that he wrote came in 1984 when he had already begun his rightish leaning. It was ‘The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.’ It is never touted as his best but I liked it for the history. I should (and will) read ‘Harsh Times’ (2019) because it is about Guatemala. While he left The Left, spent time as a Liberal, then moved Center-Right, he was always anti-authoritarian and thus also anti-fascist - which in these times is something hopeful to bind some of us together in solidarity I guess.

Quote from ‘El País’ of Spain following the death of Vargas Llosa: "...when it seemed that he would no longer write anything worthy of his great novels, he published the superb ‘Harsh Times,’ (Tiempos Recios) based on the CIA's intervention to overthrow—in 1954 and with false accusations of radical communism—the moderately social democratic government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala. The work closes with a paragraph in which Vargas Llosa, a staunch anti-Castroist, demonstrated that rather than being an enemy of Fidel Castro, he was a friend of the truth. The Guatemalan lesson, he acknowledged, led revolutionary Cuba to ally itself with the Soviet Union to ‘shield itself against pressure, boycotts and possible aggression from the United States.’ In his opinion, ‘the history of Cuba could have been different’ if the United States had earlier accepted the ‘modernization and democratization" of the Guatemala attempted by Árbenz.’”~ ‘El Pais,’ — Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025)

 
Atenas is the place I would look at. Town up in the mountains but a manageable drive to SJ. Have noticed some European-owned restaurants popping up in that area.

Heredia is nice, but the traffic going up can be a pain. That area had the prettiest girls back in the day (I'm sure that's a real winning data point with the wife).

Thanks for the tip...am I wrong in remembering a light rail set-up from SJ to Heredia?
 
I read some Mario Vargas Llosa. And I enjoyed what I did. I hope to read more someday when I don’t read so many drafts of student essays and annotated bibliographies and tests and theses. My favorite thing that he wrote came in 1984 when he had already begun his rightish leaning. It was ‘The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.’ It is never touted as his best but I liked it for the history. I should (and will) read ‘Harsh Times’ (2019) because it is about Guatemala. While he left The Left, spent time as a Liberal, then moved Center-Right, he was always anti-authoritarian and thus also anti-fascist - which in these times is something hopeful to bind some of us together in solidarity I guess.

Quote from ‘El País’ of Spain following the death of Vargas Llosa: "...when it seemed that he would no longer write anything worthy of his great novels, he published the superb ‘Harsh Times,’ (Tiempos Recios) based on the CIA's intervention to overthrow—in 1954 and with false accusations of radical communism—the moderately social democratic government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala. The work closes with a paragraph in which Vargas Llosa, a staunch anti-Castroist, demonstrated that rather than being an enemy of Fidel Castro, he was a friend of the truth. The Guatemalan lesson, he acknowledged, led revolutionary Cuba to ally itself with the Soviet Union to ‘shield itself against pressure, boycotts and possible aggression from the United States.’ In his opinion, ‘the history of Cuba could have been different’ if the United States had earlier accepted the ‘modernization and democratization" of the Guatemala attempted by Árbenz.’”~ ‘El Pais,’ — Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025)


I enjoyed Tiempos Recios... I find the Arbenz coup a fascinating time in Central American history. I asked my parents what was their favorite and they went back to Conversation en La Catedral (one of his first novels). Added that to my reading queue.
 
I would not have guessed this. I can see it now; it's just not my mental image of you. Actually, I don't know what my mental image was in terms of your diet of books, but it wasn't that, lol.

Anyway, I would have liked to read Garcia Marquez in Spanish. And I'd bet Borges is a better read in the original. I know of Vargas of course but have never read his works.

Its probably higher than that if I'm honest with myself. I read 20-24 books a year and maybe one or two are in Spanish. I read so much faster in English than in Spanish, so it feels like Im getting bogged down.

There are some authors that translate well, but most of them have such a powerful way with the verve that there is definitely an impact. Garcia Marquez in Spanish is amazing. I have not really read much Borges. I bet Vargas Llosa is decent in English, but there are times when he can use very particular slang words (wonder how they translate those words or phrases).
 
I regularly assign a book, a barely fictional account of the Mexican Revolution called The Underdogs or Los de Abajo. I’ve used two different translations over the years and the slang translations in them differs wildly. I appreciate it when the translator oro ides their own “Foreword” and does some explaining of their decision-making.
 
State Department upgrades travel advisory for El Salvador


Lost in all this, I actually like El Salvador. People are very warm and inviting. Love myself some pupusas (the local dish, tortilla dough filled with beans, cheese or chicharron among other things...now found in many US cities). I've been traveling there for the last 30 years; one of my jobs took me to the most dangerous neighborhoods...the rough places in the US are child's play compared to those. Safety was a disaster for decades with one of the highest homicide rates around. Truth be told, Bukele has really cleaned it up and it feels very different. Last couple of years I felt normal walking around in San Salvador.

That safety has come with rather draconian measures (its estimated that about 5% of persons imprisoned under their martial law are innocent) and there is little due process. Bukele wiped his ass with their constitution, which prevented consecutive terms for presidents. He has a singular hold on power that is more similar to Venezuela and Nicaragua than to the democracies of the region.
 
Been a while since I've been to El Salvador. I drove there back during the civil wars -- it was a roundly stupid thing to do but welp...there you go. Spent some time on the side of the road with my car being searched by soldiers (the only thing they confiscated was a box of Tijuana Fats' matches and a copy of Steppenwolf). Spent a couple of wild days in San Salvador which at the time was only barely functioning -- street signs were largely missing and stop lights were sometimes working, sometimes not. But there was beer.

August is big time holiday month there and in the old days Salvadorans would vacation in Guatemala during those weeks. Just get rowdy and tear shit up pretty often. A couple of times I was hired by Guatemalan friends that owned bars just to be a white guy behind the bar in hopes that would help keep the insanity down (they believed that would make a difference -- maybe it did).
 
"Guatemala City (EFE).- Guatemala’s Public Prosecutor’s Office arrested on Wednesday the Deputy Minister for Sustainable Development Luis Pacheco on charges of “terrorism.”

Pacheco was a leader of the Indigenous organization of the 48 cantons of Totonicapán, and back in 2023, led protests against the Attorney General, María Consuelo Porras, for her attempts to overturn the results of the general elections that gave a victory to President Bernardo Arévalo de León.

The deputy minister was arrested early on Wednesday’s in a raid on his home in Guatemala City by the Prosecutor’s Office against Organized Crime and handed over to the judicial authorities, according to the National Civil Police (PNC)."

Prosecutors arrest deputy minister who defended President's election in Guatemala - EFE

Guatemala's Attorney General María Consuelo Porras is behind this move...she is a throwback to the time of corruption that preceded the upset election in 2024 of Bernardo Arévalo, himself an outsider to the kleptocracy that typically rules the country. This Wikipedia Entry on Porras is short but gives a good sense of who she is: María Consuelo Porras - Wikipedia (The Links In The References Check Out). In short, the office of Public Prosecutor is an appointed office that can only be vacated by resignation prior to the conclusion of a term of four years. In the case of Porras the previous president (Alejandro Giammattei) appointed her in his last days in office meaning that she can hold the position until 2026. She is a major anti-democracy force in the nation and a thorn in the side of President Arévalo.

Porras was the Organized Crime and Reporting Project's 2023 Person of The year: María Consuelo Porras
 
IMG_8705.jpeg

𝙟𝙤𝙨𝙚 𝙯𝙖𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙖
@jczamora
>> On World Press Freedom Day, we stand in solidarity with journalists who risk everything to tell the truth. My father, #JoseRubénZamora, who has been held hostage in Guatemala for over 1,000 days by the criminal network entrenched in the
@MPguatemala under #ConsueloPorras and her complicit judges within
@OJGuatemala is one of them. Journalism is not a crime. Today would be a good day to free him. #WPFD #PressFreedom #FreeZamora c.
@BArevalodeLeon
 
Back
Top