FROM the Monroe Doctrine to its ‘Donroe’ variant, the US has regarded Latin America as its backyard, a vast protectorate whose resources — natural and human — must always remain available for exploitation to the regional hegemon that replaced European colonial powers more than a century ago. The Cuban revolution of 1959 posed the first insurmountable challenge to this trend. Five years earlier, the US had successfully deposed a reformist government in Guatemala (among the witnesses to this catastrophe was a young Argentinian doctor, Ernesto Guevara), just a year after thwarting democracy in Iran. The bearded rebels who had overthrown the Batista dictatorship in Cuba proved harder to dislodge — and, 67 years later, the US is still on the job.

The advent of Latin America’s ‘pink tide’ at the turn of the century, with the election of Hugo Chávez as Venezuela’s president took Washington by surprise, focused as it was at the time on Iraq and Afghanistan. Since then, a number of hopeful trends have been witnessed in the region, represented by figureheads such as Manuel Zelaya and Xiomara Castro in Honduras, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Michelle Bachelet and Gabriel Boric in Chile, arguably Néstor and Cristina Kirchner in........

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