“This Is a Shitty Government, but It Is My Government”

In the midst of the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) debacle, a humble worker showed a sign that read, “This is a shitty government, but I defend it because it is my government,” that President Allende referred to in a humorous way… “I wake up once in a time, every hundred years, when my people awake,” says Bolivar in Neruda’s “Canto General.” It is not an excessive quote but a question of the Latin American drama and awakening of these days. It is not very common for an article to begin with the statement that life’s truth consists of “love, power and war,” ¹ recurrent themes according to Rene Zavaleta Mercado in Bolivian History ² (Latin America), that now lives its constitutive moment in the 21st Century.