Latin American Politics Quotes

Unless we make revolutionary reforms, some day — in some unknown serra — some unknown Fidel Castro will rise up in Brazil.

Politically, [Latin] America is the same as it is physically: the land of the earthquakes.

An overall trend of political moderation in Latin America makes for far less interesting headlines, but it also makes for far better lives for our people.

The greatest promotion I ever had on a newspaper was when 'The Washington Post' suddenly promoted me from city-side general assignment reporter to Latin American correspondent and sent me off to Cuba. Fidel Castro had just come to power. It was a very exciting assignment, but also very serious.

Che came in 1963, shortly after I had come to power.

After Victor Paz's government, I was still in politics, but I personally spent a lot of time consulting and working with Argentina, with Peru, and in Brazil.

Latin America is now exploring new and often promising paths in rejecting the doctrinal notions of "globalization," and also in the remarkable growth of popular movements and authentic participation in the political systems. How successful this will be is more a matter for action than for speculation.

I have been to Cuba many times. I have spoken many times with Fidel Castro and got to know Commander Ernesto Guevara well enough. I know Cuba's leaders and their struggle. It has been difficult to overcome the blockade. But the reality in Cuba is very different from that in Chile. Cuba came from a dictatorship, and I arrived at the presidency after being senator for 25 years.

Honduras is strongly anti-Communist, maintains no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and has provided vital support for United States-backed rebels fighting to overthrow the Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua.

It was not until I got down to Latin America that I began to get a political education. Whatever my ideas when I went down there, I saw things around me every day that influenced me. I saw the terrible economic and social conditions, and the injustices that could not be ignored.

I think for the U.S. government the Sandinistas represented a threat to their dominance of Latin America.

The left is being funded primarily by the drug traffickers who provide this tax money and that's why the guerrillas in Colombia, unlike the guerrillas anywhere else in Latin America, have been able to survive for 40 years because they have a hard, solid source of income.

Comandante Fidel Castro loves Cuba! But his love for humanity, if you'll pardon the expression, trumped his love for Cuba: He was universal; he was an internationalist, and he put that spirit in the hearts and minds of the Cuban people through the Cuban Revolution.

There's no question in my mind that it was C.I.A. sanctioned, and most - many Latin American investigators have come to the same conclusion. Of course, we never heard about that in our country.

Latin America is very fond of the word "hope." We like to be called the "continent of hope." Candidates for deputy, senator, president, call themselves "candidates of hope." This hope is really something like a promise of heaven, an IOU whose payment is always being put off. It is put off until the next legislative campaign, until next year, until the next century.

When you talk to a Latin American president, they make you feel so tiny right from the beginning, right from the moment when they shake your hands.

Raul Reyes was a good revolutionary. I knew him personally.

I was the first person to come into New York with a Latin American point of view which was also very much influenced by political happenings in Latin America.

It was Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez who benefited most from the World Social Forum's enthusiasms.

One of my biggest inspirations is President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Yea, President Hugo.

Fidel is a Marxist-Leninist. I am not. Fidel is an atheist. I am not. One day, we discussed God and Christ. I told Castro, I am a Christian. I believe in the Social Gospels of Christ. He doesn't. Just doesn't. More than once, Castro told me that Venezuela is not Cuba, and we are not in the 1960s.

The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America.

In Latin America, specialists and polling organisations have, for some time, observed that the extension of formal democracy was accompanied by an increasing disillusionment about democracy and a lack of faith in democratic institutions.

After some reflection I have decided that while I am the president of Ecuador, I will not attend any Summit of the Americas until it begins to make the decisions required.

In the past decade, nearly a dozen elected Latin American presidents have been forced from office.