Author: Adolfo Garcé

“Yankees go home.” The slogan still echoes in my ears. I was born in 1965. During my childhood, Uruguayan democracy collapsed. My adolescence unfolded under a dictatorship, and I was far more exposed to French culture—since I studied at the Lycée Français—than to the American world, which felt distant to me. Although both my parents were deeply interested in Uruguayan politics, public affairs only became a central concern in my own life around 1980, when I was fifteen, after the Uruguayan dictatorship unsuccessfully attempted a constitutional reform inspired by the doctrine of National Security. As I became increasingly involved in politics, I absorbed the dominant beliefs of Uruguay’s leftist middle class at the time. One of the most powerful ideas—nurtured especially by widely read authors such as Eduardo Galeano and Mario Benedetti—was the notion of the imperialist drive of the United States.