Saturday, December 17, 2011

Latin America’s message to the Arab world

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.

This Saturday, Rousseff will be in Buenos Aires for the swearing-in ceremony of Cristina Kirchner, re-elected as President of Argentina. The presidents of these two key South American countries are women. Tell that to the Tantawi junta in Egypt - or those democratic paragons at the House of Saud.

These things take time.

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