Malcolm Deas

SIR: Andrew Graham-Yooll is certainly right that Peron increased the intensity of national feeling on the ‘Malvinas issue’ (Letters, 16 September). I just meant to say that Argentine claims to the islands had a long trajectory before he came to power.

I do not agree with Gordon Guthrie (Letters, 10 May) that there is a clear correlation between levels of political violence in Colombia and the ‘success’ of ‘frank struggles for a new hegemony’, nor do I agree that I have underestimated the importance of the mechanisms by which Colombian democracy is ‘regulated’. I would like to take particular issue with several points in his letter. First,...

‘Too far from God and too close to the United States.’ Whenever I read that remark, I know that I am in for a parade of worn-out received ideas about Latin America. Anthony Pagden’s review (LRB, 13 June) is just that.Barely a sentence in it is reliable. It is not true that ‘no serious efforts to produce political destabilisation, whether from without or within, have been made in Mexico since...

Michael Byers writes (LRB, 21 February): ‘By the end of the 19th century, the US had turned its attentions abroad. Its seizure of Cuba in 1898 provoked the Spanish-American War, which gave it control of Hawaii, the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone.’ The second sentence contains three substantial historical errors. The Spanish-American War was not caused by a US seizure of Cuba, but resulted...

Michael Taussig can stop wondering about one small matter: my cleaning-lady’s operation had nothing to do with my connections with President Uribe (Letters, 16 November). As for his other – rhetorical? – questions, he well knows that Colombia suffers from guerrillas and paramilitaries, fed by the drug trade, and that the violence, corruption and threat to legitimate authority worsened in the...