On its surface, a poem seems incapable of stopping a bullet. Yet Chile’s transition to democracy was facilitated by the poet’s survival in people’s minds, his lines repeated time and again, as a form of subversion. Life cannot be repressed, he whispered in everyone’s ears. It was a message for which he may have died, but that lives on in his verse.
"We need to mentally define what kind of integration we want. Is it to copy the model of the European Union? Is it to build something new? What does every leader have in mind?"
The late Venezuelan president's Bolívarian revolution has been crucial to a wider Latin American philosophy - "History will affirm, justifiably, the role Hugo Chávez played in the integration of Latin America, and the significance of his 14-year presidency to the poor people of Venezuela" former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
Not only have leaders from Ecuador to Venezuela delivered huge social gains - they keep winning elections too
How a Washington Global Torture Gulag Was Turned Into the Only Gulag-Free Zone on Earth
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