Word: dictatorship
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...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...
...been accused of human rights violations. Reform would have a very practical military and diplomatic effect on a lot of Nicaraguans who left the country. These are middle- and working-class people who have expressed a desire to fight but who are afraid that the F.D.N. would create another dictatorship. Beyond Nicaragua, if the contras were acceptable to Latin Americans, then the Latin Americans would stop using Central America as their way to express anger...
...Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota. A young reporter named Gabriel Garcia Marquez spent some 120 hours interviewing the survivor and shaping his recollections into a first-person narrative. When this appeared in print, serialized in 14 installments, the paper's circulation nearly doubled, and Colombia's military dictatorship grew embarrassed by some of the details, and then angry. Soon the sailor was forced to leave the navy, the offending paper was shut down, and the reporter embarked on an exile that would lead him one day to the Nobel Prize...
...deeper question at issue is how long and how easily democracy and dictatorship can live together. In some respects, Chun has eased his country steadily closer to freedom. The man in the Korean street no longer observes a midnight curfew, fears no sudden police raids and is able to travel abroad much more easily than before. Nonetheless, South Korea remains a virtual police state. The former general had hardly seized power when he pushed through martial law and placed many of his enemies under house arrest. To this day, the press is muzzled and the spreading of "black rumors" against...