Forrest Hylton

Kidnapping, murdering or deposing the president of a sovereign country is one thing; military occupation and administration is quite another, as the US found in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the occupation did not, as Donald Rumsfeld had promised it would, pay for itself. Some people got rich, though, as untold billions went missing and unaccounted for.

The US can bomb Venezuelan military and civilian targets from the USS Gerald R. Ford but it’s difficult to imagine anyone signing off on a ground invasion. Cooler heads in the US military may be wary of a quagmire. If they did invade, US troops would probably end up fighting not only the Venezuelan military, intelligence services and civilian militias but also the Colombian guerrillas that operate along the border.

On 30 October, days after the largest police massacre in the history of a city infamous for them, which left at least 121 dead, President Lula approved a law to fight organised crime. He expressed sympathy, first, for four dead policemen, then for innocent residents and children murdered in the ‘mega-operation’ in the Complexo da Penha and the Complexo do Alemão, in the north of Rio de Janeiro. A photographer discovered the head of one young Comando Vermelho soldier, 19-year-old Yago Ravel Rodrigues Rosário, on a tree. He had no criminal record, but we know he was CV from his social media feeds. Police killed more people than the number of weapons recovered.

Part of Rodrigo Paz Pereira’s success in the Bolivian presidential election lies with his choice of running mate, Edmand Lara, a forty-year-old lawyer and former police captain in Santa Cruz, who was raised in a small town in Cochabamba. He became famous for his TikTok videos about police corruption, and knows how to speak a different language from that of either the middle-class doctores or the coca growers’ leaders.

At sunset on a clear day you can see thirty miles across the Río de la Plata from Colonia de Sacramento to the skyscrapers of Buenos Aires as the sky behind them turns orange. Julio Cortázar once wrote: ‘I speak of Uruguay and Argentina as one country because they are, despite the nationalists.’ When Argentina’s economy collapsed at the end of 2001, Uruguay’s soon followed. It happened again with the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Argentina has 45 million people, Uruguay three million; the Buenos Aires metro area is more than seven times the size of Montevideo, where two-thirds of the country lives.