In Latin America, Nostalgia Can Be “One Hell of a Drug”
By
Andrea Moncada
A new book by a veteran journalist tracks the political uses and abuses of the region’s history.
This article is adapted from AQ's special report on food security in Latin America The novelist William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In other words, the past haunts the present in ways that are sometimes deliberate, and sometimes not. In Patria, a retelling of the history of Latin America since its pre-Columbian period, Laurence Blair gives this phrase a different spin. Nostalgia for the past can be “one hell of a drug,” he writes. Blair is referring to how the memory of Francisco Solano López, Paraguay’s president during the...
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