Good afternoon. My name is barbara and i am a bilingual educator, interpreter, organizer and work with the Madison Public LibraryCommunity Engagement with the design and implementation of spanish bilingual storytimes. Im very honored to introduce a conversation between david, great writer and historian of medicine and many other parts of the world, who works with the Washington Post and marie arana. With david and marie our colleagues at the Washington Post. Im happy to introduce author, editor, journalist, literary critic and member of the Scholars Council of the library of congress. Marie is peruvian american and her work and bodies who she is as a historian, novelist, essayist and human being in this modern world. Her books include american chica, american liberator and silver, stone and sword three crucibles in the latin american story. Silver, sword, and stone is an epic book. It is a history not of only 11 america for over a thousand years going back, but it brings all of this history into the present day through the lives of three people. Each of these presentday persons are intertwined with the three parts of the history of silver, sword, and stone refrained to the violence and religion that plagued latin america for over 500 years. Many believe we must understand the collective history in the past to understand today. She is an inspiring writer whose passion and compassion gives hope in these dark times. She brings light to the america from the north of canada. Through her writing, she compels us to become passionate and moved to change the structures that are present. [applause] thank you, barbara. I love this book festival. Thank you all for coming here and for such a great organization. It is a special pleasure for me to talk with marie arana. We were colleagues at the Washington Post. She was probably the classiest and most intelligent writer to walk through the doors. Compared to the rest of us. [laughter] this is aside from what she said, shes done so many wonderful things along with her books including being central to the National Book festival in washington, which i go to whenever i can as an author, and which is really sort of one of the premier event in the country and the wisconsin book festival is doing a great job of filling in that line of wonderful books and authors and appreciating. Welcome to medicine. Thank you, david. Its a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. What a welcome the trip. Im very glad to be here. So, wanted to start with the conception. I know that in some [inaudible] they said okay explain this, so that is the thinking but then how did you go about coming up with what you could call the trip to trinity or what you called the crucible of these three ways to explain this place . I always reach into my family somehow tfamilies on how to gets moving. And it was not only my aunt, but my godmother, my fathers sister, who we were just chatting about this biography of the liberator of six republics in latin america, and i was saying to her these revolutions, the war of independence in the United States of america and in the rest of latin america were so different. They were so extraordinarily different in a way. They were prosecuted in different ways. The people fault them in different ways. The issues were so different, and i said i think is fundamentally a difference in people coming and i, and it shoe wars of independence and the most dramatic and stark ways. She said that is an interesting concept and if you really think that the two peoples of the United States of america and the rest of latin america are that different, give us a book about it. And it was a challenge. So, there was that. My father had a game he used to have us play when we were in the airport as kids and we had nothing to do and no toys to play with, no books to read. He would sit he would sit me down. I was the youngest, so i was the most unruly. He would sit me down and give me a piece of paper and do a doodle and say make of that is a pretty picture. And i would turn it around and eventually then i would make something out of it. Then he said okay, do the same for me. So i would and he would turn it into because he was an engineer and have skills he would turn it into something gorgeous, and thats sort of the way, david, but i write my books. I have a doodle, then i construct, i try to construct something beautiful out of it, and it is almost a parlor game. I was with simon bolviar, trying to think of the one person whose life represented out of the ark of narrative, that really told the most about latin america. And here was a man who liberated countries all the way from the caribbean down to bolivia, to the andes. His family had been in latin america for 300 years, 300 years of colonial sort of struggle. And so, when i was thinking of the parlor game, a doodle, what a person would most represent the biggest geography, the biggest, the longest history, and it was simon bolviar. In this case, it was a little more complex. Because it was, you know, so if indeed there is Something Different about the latin american experience, what is that. We could talk all day about how one we are and how we are very family oriented, how much we look to the past because we carry traditions with us and how much we love music and art and culture and how many extraordinary artists and writers have come from latin america. But those things dont tell us anything about the spoofed populations, but has created strife, but has kept the country from progress, but has sort of captured people in poverty. So i began to think of things that have done those things, the little populations that kept countries behind, prevented progress and all that. And it seemed to me that there was a kind of Work Together in the way. First was the extract of nature in latin america that form, really since the conquistadors, and probably before that, certainly before that, the business of taking from the earth, or taking from the land coming into sending it away. Whether it was in the colonial times, they came and took the silver and everything they had to send it out intellectually it was spain who created the Global Economy by doing that. Eventually, taking silver from latin america and the sending and not only to europe, but asia, manila, beijing taking at the time. So, that extracted nature. The business of let them come in here and let them take what they have. I was onthat was one thing. The other thing was this culture of violence that we have lived with, all the way back to indigenous times. Its very, its very much a part of who they are. Its very much a part of not that we are violent, but that is imposed on us. Violence in latin america is very different from north america, from the United States. In that here, we have random violence, right. People go to a church and shoot people were going to a school and shoot people. Its a random sort of thing. And its uncontrollable in a way. In latin america, it is organized violence. So, you have rebellions, you have military crackdowns, you have drug wars. Its a bunch more organized sort of violence. So, that seemed to work handinhand with the exploitation can be extracted nature, the exploitation and violence, and it then what else was there . What marched with the conquistadors into the conquest were the priests and th the faih that was imposed with the culture and the government. So, to make a very long answer to the question, that was how i got to those three things. I suppose one could argue that this is based on organized violence, the genocide of the native americans of course. But, you know, i think its a little different because it was almost as if the native americans here were like part of the landscape you could push back, and as opposed to in latin america where you married them and have children with them, and it was a different sort of there were so many evocative and clear places in the book just one after another. The first one that struck me was in the United States perspective, the stereotypes and lack of knowledge about south america particularly is pretty bleak. You tend to know about immigration and to understand that it was the dissenter of everything at one point is really stunning. Tell the audience about that. The city that was this tremendous mother lode of silver that they came across. They camped out on the mountain and he because of course. It was for decades, hundreds of years actually because there is still mining and it went from being the engraving in the 15 hundreds like this, and now you go and its like this because they literally have taken all of this over. At the time that it was at its highest, which was in the 16 hundreds and early 17 hundreds, it was the center of the universe. It was bigger than london, bigger than paris. It had musicians, it had who came from abroad to perform. It had a very fancy houses, beautiful cathedrals, and then of course, as the silver waned, the people began to leave. Now you go and it is a shell of itself. But it was an extraordinary place and its time. The other trinity that goes along with silver, sword, and stone are the three characters. How did you find them . They seem to fit basically, but it mustve been a process defined the three characters and then develop them into the larger story. It is a good question because it is a lifetime of collecting. You know as someone that has worked in journalism, you know that you meet people along the way. I had met, lets start with the mining. I had meant leonor gonzales, who is my character in the silver part of the book. I admit her when i had gone up to a place which is a very small mining town. Its the highest human habitation in the world, on the planet. It sits at 18,000 feet. And it has about 40, 50,000 people in it. They are all mining in the rock just underneath the glacier. And they mining gold. I met leonor because id gone up for another purpose completely. Ive been asked to write a film, part of the film on the education and poverty of girls and how educated girls could actually change communities. And in the process of doing this film, i went up to see a little girl chosen out of the 40 videos sent to me, i chose this little girl for the film and i was fascinated by her mother, so even though i was waiting about the little girl for the film, i followed another for years, for six or seven years. She was an extraordinary figure to me. At the age of 45, she looked 80. Her skin was completely damaged by the sun. She had no teeth. She was extraordinarily spirited, strong spiritually, and she had lost her husband in a mining accident. His mind had collapsed, and she had to raise these children on her own. It didnt occur to her to go down the mountain somewhere safer. Probably one of the lawless places in all of peru. There iproof. There is no government. There are no police. Murder is rampant, aides are rampant, prostitution is rampant, slavery is rampant. There is no water or no way to get food really unless you bring it up yourself. It is the most primitive standards, and it just occurred to me that this woman when i was thinking of the three things i wanted to write about this woman represented a life that was almost exactly the life of her ancestors have lived 500 years ago. And so that was leonor. Carlos, ive been following for years because i had written a piece for the Washington Post more than 20 years ago. It was for the anniversary of the release of the people who left out of the country really in 1980. These people came without shoes, just with what the they had on. This particular person came from jail because castro opened all the jails and said go into your mischief elsewhere. So, i met carlos in washington. Hed come all the way up and landed in key west. Shed been sent out for indoctrination, not indoctrination, what do you call it [inaudible] [laughter] thank you. And he then eventually came to washington, d. C. I was able to write about him as one of the people who, what had become of their lives. A lot of the people became very successful in the United States. People eventually owned restaurants or became bankers or lawyers, but carlos went on to become a criminal. And i followed his wife until he actually was caught in a drug raid and send to prison. So, it was from the Washington Post piece i followed him and followed him for years. And he seemed to me because of that trajectory of life he had led, he taught in the war in angola and have been brutalized by the experience, and that globalization has made him very comfortable with violence. So, he became very much the sort of representation of violence. The third one was harder, and i actually have to hunt for xavier albo because i was looking for a priest or nun or somebody that could represent the faith for me in latin america who would be large enough that this person could actually take in all of the aspects. It was recommended to me by a friend of mine who was a professor you should go down to bolivia and because man, so i did. And i didnt look any further than that, because this was an extraordinary man. He was a priest who came from spain, and he arrived in bolivia at the age of 17 very, very young and innocent in the sense that he thought he was coming to evangelize the indigenous of bolivia, and he ended up being evangelized himself in the sense that he fell in love with the bolivian people. They learned their language and he decided that what he was going to do to promote their culture, not promote his own. Which not all priests did. Which not all did. Absolutely. But his wife, because he is now almost 90, went through all the periods of liberation. Theology and all that sort of thing that timmy represented a he said that really captured my attention was he said i am paying back for the conquest. I am paying back for all the priests that supported the conquistadors and kept the power hold. Getting back to carlos, the phrase that i found fascinating was the generational heritage. [laughter] i tripped over it several times. I would say that its a little tricky of the social science concept. I could see you applying it to carlocarlos in this sense. Tell the audience about that. Transgenerational epigenetic heritage is a very new science. Its not even quite yet a science. I guess since it is being followed by some very Important Research and scientists to see if it is indeed true. Its based on the fact and a way to describe it best i think is to be example to say if a person has lived through the holocaust, say, and has suffered enormously and has been broken psychologically by the experience of the holocaust, that experience will have biological implications on the next generation. And so, by the sort of logic you think okay, if it goes from generation to generation, it would go down and down, are we still in a way the inheritors of other experiences. Our way of living as this would be an example of epigenetic experience. If you lived through the unrest of the whole generation that lived through, does that do something to your children and in real ways come in psychology is as real as biology as we all know. So, these things can be inherited. And that poses the question that if you had lived this extraordinarily difficult and fraught history Latin Americans lived through, are we carrying the burden in a way. I asked the question, but i have no answers. Having lived in texas for eight years, i tend to believe part of it. Watching the gun toting up today and after generation after generation with guns in the backs of trucks. At the end of your book i would like to read this. We cannot turn back time. We cannot undo the world we have made, but until we understand the ghosts and the machinery, the victims of the collective amnesia, we cannot hope to understand the region as it is now. To look at it squarely along with its inequities lies the heart of the latin american narrative. Thank you. That really captures what you are trying to do there. You come to that at the end of the book in a sort of explain how you got to the point of understanding. I feel very strongly that history makes us who we are and we are the product of the history of our families and our people, of our ancestors, of our countries. But our faith and in many cases we are the product of that history. I believe that strongly. It is amazing to me sometimes that they dont pay enough attention to history. We dont pay enough attention to the things that have really shaped the culture is that we live in. And i that sort of amnesia worries me because i think particularly when you look at National Characters, there are some deep things you need to understand about what history does. Let me give you an example. In the United States of america, we believe that they are exceptional people. We believe that we have a great nation and great people that we have created a great country and that we can export of greatness and we do. We think we are pretty special. And we are. And we have that whole attitude. In latin america, nobody thinks they are exceptional. Nobody thinks they are special. Nobodys ever thought they would export. I think the only example i can think of of someone who thought they could explore anything of latin america is when castro actually said for years to angola and was trying to say i can do this the way the great countries send warriors to other places. I would argue the dominican anbaseball players. [laughter] you are right. You are right. Absolutely. So, but anyway, at any rate, its that business about history shaping us in here in the United States of america we know enough about latin america and the history of those that live among us and now we are 22 of the population, very soon to be a third, which is sort of justify mass i think we need to know a little bit of the history so that mission has been to focus on that. Held that your history shape your writing of the book . My father is peruvian and my mother is american. My father was born in lima peru. And during the Second World War when all of the classrooms and universities were emptied out because they went to war, the state department started to bring Latin Americans up to fill the classrooms. She was actually offered this twice the first time that he turned it down because he had a girlfriend he was interested in and didnt want to leave her side. The second time he thought mit is a pretty smart place. Maybe i will go. So he went to boston and did his University Graduate work. I have the two sides of my culture, my mind, my family life we took my mother down to peru and she was the only one that was raised with a very loving peruvian family, and i was proved again and i completely was convinced my mother was a sort of strange burden in the landscape, and then of course when i was ten, we moved to the United States. And i tried to convince myself that i was american, and i pretty much had. My father was the author of the landscape. So, i had seen it from both sides. They were two people who adored each other. They couldnt agree on anything. [laughter] the way that you create a person, the way you carry a person, the way you eat at the dinner table, the way that you receive friends, the way that you practice your faith they were very different. There would be these arguments, and i would be the one to negotiate them. My mother would say what you please tell your father [laughter] we are in this country now and this is the way you do things. My father would say would you please tell your mother you cant run barefoot through the grass. [laughter] theres one question that i actually hate when someone asks me but im going to ask you a different way. What surprised you about the book . Where did the Research Take you that they were not expecting to go . Will, i guess i didnt expect these three things to be so united. When i stepped forth, it was like im going to have three parts of explain three important things, and the more that i told the story, and starting with indigenous times and Going Forward each time it was wow, now im bringing along that coming and now im bringing along that. And by the end of it, by the end of the book, i hope you realize that these three things, exploitation, violence and the church marched together in the history of latin america. And very much so. The extent of that, the way it was braided surprised me. I think any study of religion and violence would see that these connections are all over the world unfortunately. And it is likely more connected exaggeration of what the world is dealing with. On the other side of the question is you have a very specific mission of how you wanted to bring these together. Youre not trying to write about all the wonderful things in latin america which you feel deeply, but there must have been points in the book were delighted about what youre finding. Absolutely. Yes. I was delighted by finding actually that there were some quite wonderful priests and nuns doing wonderful work, absolutely. And in a sense, sort of getting back, in a way history had taught them to do. It delighted me, too, the way that i think the resilience of people who are in places of poverty who had nothing, who all they have is the life of their spirit, life of their family, and the resilience is so extraordinary, and that really delighted me. And i met so many people in the course of writing this book that because i went everywhere and sat with everybody. I sat on the cold rock and drink and there was the sense that even in such difficult circumstances, there is this human spirit is extraordinary. Just extraordinary. In your life as a book editor at simon schuster, which is both of our publishers, and the book world, which is a fabulous standalone section in the Washington Post late lamented, you dont literature all the time. And in the opening, you said several aspects of the wonders of latin america that you are not quite dealing with, including the great writers. But when you look at isabella and marquez, that seems to connect with the three other aspects of the trilogy, doesnt it in some ways . Absolutely. Its an interesting term, because in spanish, its actually a very different concept. Things are so large and incomprehensible that they seem magical in a sense. There has been, in fact, so much bloodshed in latin america. In the war of independence alone in venezuela there were more deaths during the wars of independence van in the civil war and the American Revolution combined, and that is just in venezuela. So you can imagine the sort of ravages of the war. When the blood trickled down the street and turned the corner until it reached the house, and latin america you say our heads rolled out from under the bush anbushand you think yes, and de. And its very close to real that it is almost you cant imagine, when people say you cant imagine what i just saw an him o that is with magical realism is really. But there were lots of other traditions. In the Latin American Literature it is interesting. Did you know him and talk with them . He is a friend. Extraordinary. This is mario vargas who was a nobel prize winner, the only prize winner from peru. It was the next ordinary story, if i may just tell it because it says something about who he is and what it became. He was raised as a child speaking or told that his father had died, he had a heart attack and died and was gone. He was raised in the house of his mother and his grandparents from her side. He eventually, his mother said now we are going to lima. This was at the age of eight or nine. And as the time went on, there was a knock on the door and the door opened and the man said on your father he was quite alive and now having a love affair with his mother. His father was a very authoritative man and sent him to military school. That experience really made mario who he is because i think that everything that he writes it is about loathing dictatorship, loathing that sort of militaris of life, the authoritarianism. You can see it in his writing, the sort of reaction to that shock of suddenly having a patriarch who not only as a patriarch that is sending him out of the house to get rough when all he wanted to do is write and read poetry. The other aspect that you deal with or many aspects is the violence of the shining path and how that was created and how it affected the country that you love. It was terrible to watch into something that i watched in my own lifetime. You could see the terrorists had such a hold on the country that they came in to lima and they set up storefronts where they operated out of coming and it was a terrible time with bombs going off all the time. You couldnt send your children to school, you could go down the street for the fear of a bomb being there. People were plastering things on windows, so you couldnt they listened rattle and fall. And tanks in the streets all the time because eventually when the president came into power and wiped out terrorism there was the other side, then the military side came. So, i saw this sort of rebellion and repression cycle in my own lifetime several times, and it was a pretty terrifying thing to be living in the middle of a city that was held by the terrorists. So, it was a very happy day when they were driven out. Of course, the president turned out to be not as good as we thought he was and was in fact very corrupt and had blood on his hands us while. So, long story. One of the things that struck me about it was the unwitting consequences of some of good intentions. In other words some of the setting up of the university of bringing people who couldnt go to college before to this place and then radicalize their indifference. And there is one professor. 70,000 lives. This professor was part of the boom at the university, and he had gone to china and studied dollars maoism and for the grassroots and to do what he d did, to wipe out the intellectual class, kill anybody that had anything and start from scratch. And so that is what he set out to do. So, im going to ask a couple of personal questions. For those of you that dont know, shes married to one of the great book critics of modern times. How does that work . [laughter] does he read your stuff and critique it . Does he intimidate or encourage . Our house is full of books. We pull our hair out because theres too many books, then theres always the, of getting rid of any. So there is this thing we have, and its it is a wonderful wife actually, the ability to talk about books with my husband. We have very different tastes. He likes country music, i dont get it. [laughter] i love mambo and he doesnt get it. [laughter] we argue about books all the time which is delightful. I will read something and say youve got to read this and then he will read it and say what was so good about that . Then we will have a heated conversation, and this is our life. [laughter] so, just personally, how do you go about how do you organize the writing process . Does the room look like . You have a room of your own im sure coming and how do you put together all of the material and go about writing . What is your day or week or month like . Im a strong believer you can put off the writing for too long. And i guess this comes from journalism. You can research something in other words, i give myself a year, a solid year of reading and research when im starting about. And i do nothing about that. And then i make myself sit down and start writing because even though im going to research for all those years im writing, i need to be writing at that point because it helps organize the thinking process. So, i am somebody researching all the time as im writing and filling in things. They once di said i created whei write this not as a, which is like slop. And hes as im not a writer, im an editor. I feel the same way. You create this slop, put it down and it doesnt make sense. Then you go back and fix it into shape and work on it and polish it and it becomes something. But you basically i think there are people that are afraid to write or have writers block, because they want is to be perfect from the getgo. It never is. And i think we know that from journalism. There is no time to put something off. You just have to sit down and do it, and then it becomes what it is. The room where i write i write in my pajamas. You can imagine what my room is like. Its very comfortable. I have lots of places i can sit, and then i actually have been known to write a book on a very hard chair with no upholstery. Because . Because it makes it makes you sit there and do it. One more question and then there will be time for a couple of questions from the audience. And this is the only political question im asking. You dont have to answer it politically, but the question is if latin america became more like the United States, or the United States became more like latin america. That is a good question. You know, i have, having grownup in latin america and immersed myself really since i left the book world, when i listen to criticism, the world was my oyster. There was a very large landscaped to cover. And then i left it to focus on latin america. And you see this but i try to describe in the book are these cycles latin america goes through, and they are a kind of rebellion as ive said. And it happens again and again and its because the revolution never really actually was one. What happens is when colonial structure took over, which is the white elites took over the role. And i look at the United States, and i think we have in this country cycles of course of rebellion, then we have the war and there is a kind of rhythm here as well. But i find it remarkable how the present day where you have almost a fear of leaving your party or being more candid or able to reach across the table and talk to somebody in candid and constructive ways, which is the way things are in latin america, i find that surprising in this country. And i live in washington, d. C. , so i see it all the time about senators are really afraid to be seen with each other if they are from different parties, because they feel like they are selling each others message. And this is disturbing. Ive never seen it quite this way. I had to read joanne freemans book to be reminded back into civil war days, back during abraham lincolns time, there was greater partisanship and people were slaughtering each other up. We havent seen that in the present times and its disturbing to see that inability to communicate and have more tolerance of one another. So, there is a microphone over here. We will take a few questions. This is a related question. Going forward, but are a couple significant events that are happening now easy things evil thing now that come out of the three that youve identified from the past or the forces in latin america that are shaping and perhaps a different way . Personalities or exploitation by different economies, i guess what you see Going Forward for the next 25 to 50 heres . Thereve been many attempts to win the heart of latin america starting from, as you say, there was the communist way of and that was rejected. There was the wave of democracy, and that is now being sort of rejected. We have president s that are elected, and we have bolivia, elected by the people and did some very good work in his first tenure. The way that hugo chavez was elected democratically and did some very good social work in the beginning. Then there was this sense of ie own disposition and i will never leave this position. We will convert the constitution and expand congress so i can keep this position. That is something that is a wound in the side of latin america, and we need to sort out watch that and overcome it. On the other hand, mexico for instance is for such a long period of time they have had regular elections in mexico, which was unheard of in the past. And people in a very organized fashions go to the polls and elect president s before them leave town and democratic process goes on. The democratic process goes on. There are lots of other problems. That thats a huge advance. I see costa rica doing very well. So, there are these glimmers of hope that you see people actually changing the gears and changing the way things go. But then you see argentina, that has just fallen back into this disarray, and you see venezuela in this chaos. There is an exodus in venezuela and throughout latin america creeping above problems in the ways that our being created here in the checks and border because they are taking jobs. You know, some of them are breaking the law. And these things infect us. On the other hand, there are some signs of progress. The economy in peru is booming even though we are having a constitutional crisis there at the moment. The economy in colombia was booming at the biggest time of violence. So how do you explain that . Its quite an extraordinary irony everywhere. I would like you to expand on what you said about the venezuelan influence. It sounds because negative in terms of immigration. When you think of latin immigration to the United States, its largely positive, wouldnt you say . Yes. I dont mean to say that the venezuelan immigration to the rest of south america has been totally negative. In fact, people have really sacrificed a lot. Venezuelans have walked all the way to ecuador or walked all the way to peru. They may be professors, musicians, and they are taking jobs as construction workers or wall Street Market workers, and they are making do. They are sending money back to those who havent left venezue venezuela. But they are also taking culture, and they are educated people. A lot of the people that have left are the most educated people. As i said, teachers and musicians and the like. So, it is as immigration can be is an infusion of good along with all the problems that arise from it into the indignation that comes from it. A few more questions off their. Yes maam. I have the sense that after the nazis were defeated, that there was a significant migration of lowlevel germans and others in europe. My father was born in norway, and there was a significant fifth column in norway of nazis. They found homes in south america. So, was that because there was already white elites bear because of the strongman kind of tradition, had they had significant intellectual and political and cultural influence, or is the notion simply wrong in the scope that theres not that much influence of this particular migration of ideas and people . During this time. They were given homes. They were given jobs. And to welcome them and to actually make their lives comfortable it wasnt the usual migration it was actually very easy migration and the top jobs of argentina. And if you vote argentina it is largely italian or german. You go to chile it is pretty much the same. A country that is largely indigenous like peru is like going to madrid or paris its a completely different world. Host you have written two novels . My husband wants me to go back to fiction. I have dedicated a few books to him. [laughter] and he actually is one of the characters. [laughter] but i thank you would like to go back to fiction. There have been periods of colonialism really, and after the spanish came, then of course there was the european colonization. And to put into effect the Monroe Doctrine and it says very clearly if anything happens in this hemisphere that looks like a Foreign Invasion of any kind, or foreign ideology, we have the right as United States of america to step in to clean it up anywhere. So there is a fence and we have felt it when the United States has come in commercially or politically or militarily. And as you see that this is a colonialism of sorts. And it is something very difficult to shake. Because it starts commerce and creates jobs. My own father worked for the American Company in peru. But what is happening is the country itself is not developing and they are not coming to the full realization because they are not governed by the outside force. I have a followup. My husband and i with the violence america has perpetrated and for what existed those countries. I think america gets off pretty easily without any retribution personally. So it is a colonial relationship and the whole suffered very little violence. So talking about National Character do you have any thoughts about that . I think we have been ignorant of it. My whole mission and my whole mandate with latin American History and what has occurred down there and that does have repercussions eventually for those who are in school or coming across the border or tremendous human rights situation. We dont know the history of the United States than the other countries of latin america with the history of the United States and cuba that created filled elk ostrow. And the United States and nicaragua that was the problematic nature of nicaragua today or guatemala. Or honduras. Or chile. When nixon and kissinger decided that they dont want the American Copper Company and the corporations to be nationalized because that is what the president wanted to do. And then to create a force to the extent the military was inspired to bomb the president ial palace. So this all was the impetus from coming from washington dc. Thank you for coming today. [applause] thank you