Photo of the Day: José de San Martín Monument, Central Park, NYC

Longtime New York Times columnist James Reston wrote that Americans would do anything for Latin America except read about it. Let’s see how many of my readers disprove his contention.

I came across the equestrian statue in this photo a couple of weeks ago, when I was walking near the entrance to Central Park at 59^th Street and Avenue of the Americas. It pays tribute to José de San Martín (1778–1850), a general who led Argentina, Chile, and Peru to independence from Spanish rule—then remarkably, instead of seizing power, as so many post-independence soldiers did over the last two centuries, resigned his post.

The San Martin statue, dedicated in 1951, is a smaller-scale replica of one in Buenos Aires created in 1862 by the French sculptor Louis-Joseph Daumas.

Whether intentional or coincidental, the Central Park version faces another equestrian statue of a second Latin American liberator, Simon Bolivar, as if in commemoration of their historic July 1822 encounter in Guayaquil, Peru.

Nobody is quite sure what the two commanders said in this closed-door meeting, but two months later San Martin resigned his title as “Protector of Peru,” in an attempt to ensure South American unity.

That hope was frustrated. Two years later, dismayed over the continued fracturing of the nations he’d just helped free as well as the death of his wife from tuberculosis, San Martin set sail with his daughter for Europe, and never returned. Following his death in France in 1850, his remains were transferred to the Cathedral of Buenos Aires in Plaza de Mayo.

North Americans should know more about San Martin’s military campaigns. His 1817 crossing of the Andes particularly displayed his cunning, audacity, and precise planning. Before marching, he used Mapuche natives to spread misinformation about his next moves among the opposing Spanish forces.

A New York parade on the day I walked by prevented me from coming close to the statue, so it is a bit hard to see to its top, more than 34 feet off the ground.

But you can see from the photo that San Martin’s right arm is raised. I would guess that it’s not merely commanding his men in battle, but directing the 5,000 troops he had trained in Argentina into rugged passes in the Andes more than 10,000 feet high.

By the time he left the mountains and entered Chile, the Spanish royalist forces opposing him, confused by the false intelligence passed along through the Mapuches, did not know where to concentrate their forces. San Martin defeated them soundly at the Battle of Chacabuco.

Quote of the Day (Mario Vargas Llosa, on ‘The Enthronement…of a Monstrous Lie’)

“He couldn’t remember how it began, the first doubts, conjectures, discrepancies that led him to wonder if everything really was going so well, or if, behind the facade of a country that under the severe but inspired leadership of an extraordinary statesman was moving ahead at a quickstep, lay a grim spectacle of people destroyed, mistreated, and deceived, the enthronement, through propaganda and violence, of a monstrous lie.”—Peruvian novelist, Nobel Literature laureate, and politician Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-2025), The Feast of the Goat, translated by Edith Grossman (2000)

Over the course of his long career, Mario Vargas Llosa disappointed a number of his readers with his gradual drift from leftist politics to something more like free-market conservatism. But unlike so many in the MAGA movement in the United States, he drew the line at Donald Trump.

In 2016, he denounced the then-candidate as a “clown” and a “racist.” In an interview two years later with the Argentine daily Clarin (reprinted online following his death two weeks ago, in Worldcrunch), he was even more emphatic:

“Nobody had managed before to vote in a populist, a philistine and a demagogue like Trump. What does that show us? That no society, not even the most advanced ones in terms of legality and democracy, is immune to populism and nationalism. Trump’s legacy for the United States will end up being very negative.”

Over 1,100 anti-Trump protests are expected today. That’s a paltry number compared to the size of the challenge he poses now to the American republic, but it’s a start. Otherwise, we risk seeing the “grim spectacle of people destroyed, mistreated, and deceived” that Llosa warned about in the rise of Latin American authoritarian regimes.

This Day in Latin American History (Narco-Dictator Noriega Surrenders to U.S. Forces)

Jan. 3, 1990—Panamanian strongman General Manuel Noriega surrendered to the U.S. troops who invaded his country in the most significant military action since the Vietnam War, ending 10 days when he was holed up in the Vatican embassy—and 22 years of corruption and violence by himself and his predecessor.

New York Times columnist James Reston once wrote, “The U.S. will do anything for Latin America, except read about it.” It has certainly been the case that, until—well, just the last week or so—this country had largely forgotten about Panama for the last 34 years, not paying much attention when Noriega died, still in captivity, in 2017.

The event that brought that nation back into our consciousness was a tweet by—well, You Know Who—about how Chinese soldiers were operating the Panama Canal, and that we were being overcharged for passage through it.

It’s hard to figure out what brought on this outburst, except that: 1) You Know Who likes to pick fights who allies with leaders who have been democratically elected, and 2) he might be, as former Congressman David Jolley suggests, jealous that Baby Jesus was receiving more attention on Christmas than he was.

Noriega seems like just the type of person he would have enjoyed. Actually, there is precedent for Republican Presidents keeping on good terms while he was in power—except that they did so while keeping as far away from him as possible, so as to avoid his ineradicable moral stench.

The path to power for Noriega ran through his hard-drinking, corrupt predecessor, Omar Torrijos, who seized power in a coup d’etat in 1968. From humble origins, Noriega became so indispensable to the dictator—first as an army colonel, then as his intelligence chief—that Torrijos called him “my gangster.”

Upon taking over Panama after Torrijos died in a 1981 plane crash, Noriega leveraged a comparatively small arms-and-drug trade into what journalists R.M. Koster and Guillermo Sanchez Borbon called, in their account In the Time of the Tyrants: Panama, 1968-1990, called a "narcomilitary state."

Many of his countrymen would have privately agreed with the nickname bestowed on Noriega by his future American jailers to signify his pockmarked skin: “Pineapple Face.”

But they also would have been terrified that any one-liner—even a slight hint of a smirk—would have been noticed by the ruthless leader who, New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson commented in a 2017 podcast interview, possessed the frightening ability to observe the slightest thing out of the corner of his eyes even while seemingly focusing on someone else.

Though denying to Anderson that he was involved in drug trafficking with the Medellin drag cartel, Noriega did admit that he allowed money laundering for this crime in his country’s banks at the behest of the CIA, which wanted a means of monitoring this activity. Anderson judged this a half-truth.

Both Democratic and Republican Presidents chose to look the other way through two decades of the Torrijos-Noriega regime: Jimmy Carter needed Torrijos to take the Shah of Iran off his hands when the latter’s admission to a U.S. hospital sparked the hostage crisis, and Ronald Reagan and George Bush wanted to counter Communist influence in Cuba and Nicaragua.

As in the Philippines, a dictator’s heinous murder of a prominent dissident (in this case, Dr. Hugo Spadafora) caused such international revulsion that his American handlers felt compelled to act. When a call for him to step down went unheeded and Noriega voided the 1989 Presidential election, plans went into motion on how to remove him.

Noriega’s rash declaration of war on the U.S. and a subsequent killing of a U.S. Marine provided the Bush administration with the pretext needed to remove him in its “Operation Just Cause” December 1989 invasion.

The American casualties— 23 troops killed in action and over 300 wounded—may have seemed minimal compared to the Vietnam War, the largest previous U.S. military action. But, considering American complicity in the regime it ended up overthrowing, it was all so unnecessary.

Quote of the Day (Richard Rodriguez, on ‘The Paradox of the Border’ and Internal Despair)

“The paradox of the border right now is that you see young people coming to the American border for the opportunity of America, at exactly the time when Americans are importing drugs from Latin America because of the despair of our unhappiness. The paradox of that movement in both directions is so interesting to me and so little noted.” —Public intellectual Richard Rodriguez quoted in Kelsey Husnick, “Tippett, Rodriguez: ‘Brown is the New Color of American Identity,’” The Chautauquan Daily, August 8, 2014

Quote of the Day (Jorge Luis Borges, on Dictatorships and Writers)

"Dictatorships foment subservience, dictatorships foment cruelty; even more abominable is the fact that they foment stupidity. To fight against those sad monotonies is one of the many duties of writers."—Attributed to Latin-American author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

This Day in Diplomatic History (Nixon’s Disastrous Latin American “Goodwill” Tour)

May 8, 1958—Sent by President Dwight Eisenhower on a seven-nation “goodwill” tour of Latin America, Richard Nixon encountered his first real sense that all would not be well in Lima, Peru. Five days later, things would become so bad for the Vice-President that he would later include the incident in his memoir Six Crises.

Nixon would have preferred to stay home, where he could talk the administration into cutting taxes—then, as now, an electoral vote-getter, and something particularly important for the Vice-President as he looked to succeed Eisenhower as President by winning the GOP nomination and subsequent election in 1960. But Eisenhower had picked up on Franklin Roosevelt’s use of his second VP, Henry Wallace, in sending his subordinates abroad. Nixon had already journeyed to Argentina, Africa, and, in 1953, a 38,000-mile trip through Asia. The swing through Latin America was expected to be similarly uneventful.

Nobody at home expected the wave of anti-American protests that began when Nixon, on a platform at San Marcos University in Lima, was pelted by rocks and eggs and shouts of “Go Home, Nixon!” Calling the protestors “cowards,” he cut short his address, moving on to Catholic University, where the atmosphere was not much warmer but he at least didn’t have to contend with farm produce and projectiles.

Five days later, in Caracas, Venezuela, the tour turned positively violent. A hostile mob surrounded his car, pelting it with rocks and shouting “Death to Nixon!” Later, he and wife Pat would be spit upon by the crowds.

A worried Eisenhower dispatched a naval squadron in case his VP needed to be taken out of Venezuela for his own safety, but Nixon managed to leave quietly. The rest of the tour was ended.

Whatever its impact in Latin America, the demonstrations against Nixon only produced a wave of sympathy for him in the U.S.—something not easy to do, given the numerous enemies he had already created in this country. (Adlai Stevenson, for instance, referred to the red-baiting VP as “McCarthy with a white collar.”) Viewed as a representative of his country, the Vice-President was hailed for his courage. He came out of the encounter with his political prestige enhanced.