Word: conquistadore
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...wildest country and among the wildest people we have ever seen," wrote one of Conquistador Hernan Cortes' commanders about Guatemala in 1524. It was only the first of many unflattering stereotypes of Central America. In the U.S. in the 1850s, the heyday of Manifest Destiny, the region was regarded chiefly as an inviting target for territorial expansion. By the turn of the century, the United Fruit Co. was cheered on as it went buccaneering through the region, buying governmental favors for the sake of more and cheaper bananas. Bananas, in fact, were the raison...
...answer rates 9.5 on the bromide scale. The most spectacular product of Spain, in fact, is and always has been the manic-romantic, the legion of brillants who have ranged from the old salt who convinced the Spanish that he had discovered a passage to India to the faded "conquistador" who tilted at windmills. Not quite in their league, but certainly in the milieu, is Luis Cabrillo, a young disenchanted adventurer who has been kicked out of 23 schools and almost as many jobs. But the semifictional Luis owns one of the best brains in Spain. In The Eldorado Network...
...oratory: he often salts his speeches with fire-and-brimstone references to the Aztec past. During his state of the union address, for example, in speaking of the oil spill in the Bay of Campeche, he made references to an ancient god and the Aztec mistress of the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes. "In the depths of this flaming well," he intoned, "we Mexicans have seen ourselves reflected in Tezcatlipoca's black mirror. Malinche emerged from those depths howling for human sacrifice to satisfy the god of fire." A physical fitness buff, he keeps in shape with a vigorous regimen that...
...Rome because Hannibal had never set foot in the city. In fact, Freud's ideas about himself were heavily tinged with mythic and military overtones. "I am actually not a man of science," he once told his friend Wilhelm Fliess, "not an experimenter, not a thinker... but a conquistador...
Cuban Premier Fidel Castro may talk like an explorer, but he acts more like, well, a messianic leftist conquistador. Since he began a major airlift of troops to Angola three years ago, the bearded Communist dictator has expanded his country's military presence in Africa to ominous dimensions. Some 43,000 Cuban troops, roughly one-third of his country's regular armed forces, are now stationed on the continent. In addition to the army-size units in Angola (20,000 troops) and Ethiopia (17,000 troops), there are contingents in Mozambique, the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Libya...