We now return to our regularly scheduled program

Three short pieces below,  trying to update recent news-type items, this morning. There is only so much time to write for this site and I have other commitments.

I’m buried in tracking down information on the 18th century explorer and writer Pedro Alonso O’Crouley y O’Donnell and the Mexican military hero John Riley (gee, you’d never guess these are for an Irish organization, would you?),  so I haven’t had the time to comment on a few items that have appeared in the last week or so related to more recent Latin American history.

Adrianne Pine (Quotha) on the background and on-going dissolution of Honduras (and Haiti) in “Foosball with the Devil”.

Inca Kola, Abiding in Bolivia and others have all talked about the recently declassified documents that prove the United States played a major role in the 1971 coup in Bolivia that brought right-wing dictator Hugo Banzar to power.

Rita Pomade (Mexconnect) writes of Leonora Carrington and the swinging (as in police-baton swinging) sixties in Mexico City.

Marisa Treviño (LatinaLista) on how the historical Latin concepts of “race” affect the U.S. census today.

Alan Cowell (New York Times) on Dame Margot Fonteyn’s pas-de-folie when she fell flat on her face in 1959, clumsily dragging herself, Fidel Castro and John Wayne (yup, that John Wayne) into an attempted coup in Panama.  Dame Margot’s later picked herself up, and was a bit quicker on her feet in her next foray into the world of international intrigue, involving a Soviet defector: