ABSTRACT
Latin America is a continent of both hope and fear. Before 1998, from the time of its liberation from Spanish and Portuguese rule, Latin America had been ruled by dictators. In Latin America, genuinely left-leaning and democratically elected presidents, such as Gustavo Arbenz of Guatemala, Salvador Allende of Chile and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua were removed by CIA machinations, killing thousands of innocent people in the process. More than 60,000 Latin American soldiers have been trained at the School of the Americas–among them, some of the region's most notorious human rights abusers, such as Salvadoran death-squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson. If the left-wing regimes seek to establish themselves as an effective buffer against imperialism, they will have to try and become real knowledge economies like Cuba and seek to become less dependent on non-renewable resources. Latin America is known to have income inequality among the highest in the world.
