"Things will be very bad for Latin America. You only have to consider the ambitions and the doctrines of the empire, which regards this region as its backyard"
About this Quote
Saramago doesn’t predict disaster so much as indict the machinery that makes disaster feel inevitable. “Very bad” is blunt on purpose: it refuses the soothing language of policy briefs and development rhetoric. The real sting is in how he frames causality. Latin America’s future isn’t being shaped by fate or internal deficiency, he implies, but by “ambitions” and “doctrines” emanating from “the empire” - a word that drags U.S. power out of its preferred disguise as benevolent leadership.
The phrase “you only have to consider” is a sly provocation. It positions the evidence as obvious, almost embarrassingly available, as if willful ignorance is the only barrier to understanding. And “doctrines” is doing heavy lifting: it gestures toward a long lineage of justification - from the Monroe Doctrine to Cold War anti-communism to neoliberal “reforms” - in which ideology sanitizes intervention, coups, sanctions, and economic dependency as rational necessity.
“Backyard” is the master metaphor: domestic, casual, proprietary. It captures the psychological violence of being treated as someone else’s annex, a space where rules can be bent because it’s assumed to be private property. The subtext isn’t just anti-American; it’s anti-imperial realism. Saramago, a leftist novelist shaped by Iberian dictatorship and global unevenness, is warning that the center’s self-image (“security,” “stability,” “freedom”) often masks a simpler aim: control. His intent is to make that mask harder to wear.
The phrase “you only have to consider” is a sly provocation. It positions the evidence as obvious, almost embarrassingly available, as if willful ignorance is the only barrier to understanding. And “doctrines” is doing heavy lifting: it gestures toward a long lineage of justification - from the Monroe Doctrine to Cold War anti-communism to neoliberal “reforms” - in which ideology sanitizes intervention, coups, sanctions, and economic dependency as rational necessity.
“Backyard” is the master metaphor: domestic, casual, proprietary. It captures the psychological violence of being treated as someone else’s annex, a space where rules can be bent because it’s assumed to be private property. The subtext isn’t just anti-American; it’s anti-imperial realism. Saramago, a leftist novelist shaped by Iberian dictatorship and global unevenness, is warning that the center’s self-image (“security,” “stability,” “freedom”) often masks a simpler aim: control. His intent is to make that mask harder to wear.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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