Word: dictatorship
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some critics blame the U.S. for the existence of just about all the world's non-Communist dictatorships. While it is true that many of these receive U.S. support, the forces that lead to dictatorship are usually beyond American control. Take Haiti. It may be possible to bring about a lessening of corruption and brutality. But no amount of American intervention will soon turn that country into a democracy, since politically it is starting from scratch, with a literacy rate of 30% and an annual per capita income...
...should be. But her intentions are not the issue; her skill and strength are. The Philippines is such a faction-ridden, contentious country that the return to, or advance toward, democracy is likely to be slow and halting at best. At worst, the end could be another dictatorship...
...decision about just when and how to withdraw support from a dictatorship is excruciatingly difficult. There are no rules, no laws; choices must be made case by case with subtlety, sophistication and patience. Differences of degree as well as kind must be recognized. It is not enough to put governments into two files, democratic and undemocratic. There are regimes that are improving and regimes that are deteriorating. There are sound and unsound democracies, tolerable and intolerable dictatorships, more or less repression. Even "corruption," so offensive to most Americans, comes in different degrees and must be judged--and fought...
...young men, an American and a Latin American, have been jailed by the police of an unnamed country's rightist dictatorship. The crime: distribution of subversive leaflets. In their cell, they converse clumsily, united less by ideology than by a rapturous and surprisingly sophisticated passion for literature. Yet at every turn they misunderstand each other, responding to received images from each other's popular culture rather than to the actual person across the room. The American is a wandering would-be writer. He cheerily acknowledges that he knows no Spanish and thus has not even read the flyers they handed...
That encounter, which leads to brutal police beatings for both, takes place in 1970. Fifteen years later, the men meet again, this time at a diplomatic session between the same country's newly installed left-wing dictatorship and an international human rights group. The visitors are pleading for the release of an imprisoned poet who had served the former right-wing regime as its Ambassador to Spain. The air is abuzz with debate about the competing political and aesthetic duties of the writer, the distinction between artistic merit and moral virtue and the uneasy relations between the industrial nations...