La plata, la espada y la piedra

Marie Arana, in an exercise to understand the origin of the still open wounds of Latin America, masterfully interweaves the biographies of three contemporary Latin Americans with a thousand years of vivid history. Their lives represent the three driving forces that have shaped, for centuries, the character of a region: exploitation, violence and religion.Thus, we meet Leonor Gonzáles, a miner who lives in a small community located five thousand meters above sea level in the Andean mountain range of Peru and who, like her ancestors since time immemorial, works digging the bowels of the earth to extract nuggets of gold. Around her, illiteracy, malnutrition and disease reign as they did five hundred years ago. And now, as then, the survival of her people depends on a vast world market whose fluctuations are controlled in remote places.To Carlos Buergos, a Cuban who fought in the Angolan civil war and now lives in a quiet community on the outskirts of New Orleans. Carlos was one of the hundreds of criminals that Cuba expelled to the United States in 1980. His story is an echo of the violence that has traversed Latin America from pre-Columbian times to the current fight against drug trafficking. Finally, to Xavier Albó, a Jesuit priest from Barcelona who emigrated to Bolivia. Xavier considers himself an Indian through and through and is therefore well known in his adopted country. And although his objective is the antithesis of proselytism, he is heir to a checkered past in which the priests marched alongside the conquerors with the mission of evangelizing the New World. Since then, the Catholic Church has played a central role in the political life of Latin America. The result, in a perfect combination between the historical essay, the report and the political analysis, is the vibrant portrait of a continent whose identity has always been complex.