Latin America's message to the Arab world
Latin Americans should share their experiences with democratisation with other countries in the global South.
Pepe Escobar Last Modified: 09 Dec 2011 10:10
Take a good look at this 1970 photo.
The 22-year-old woman in the photo is about to be examined by a bunch of subtropical inquisitors.
She has just been tortured, electrocuted and waterboarded - what Dick Cheney dismisses as "enhanced interrogation" - for 22 days.
Yet she didn't break down.
Today this woman, Dilma Rousseff, is the President of Brazil - the perennial "country of the future", the world's seventh-largest economy by purchasing power parity (ahead of the UK, France and Italy), a member of the BRICS, and exercising a soft power way beyond music, football and joy of living.
This photo has just been published, as part of a Rousseff-biography, exactly when Brazil finally launches a Truth Commission to establish what really happened during the military dictatorship (1964-1985). Argentina, way ahead, already did it - judging and punishing its own surviving inquisitors in uniform.
remainder in full: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/201112694026340182.html