The world had been changing before 11 September 2001, but the moment that planes brought down the towers in lower Manhattan, history began to accelerate in the wrong direction. An image of the fall of the American empire was fixed, sharply, in the retina of humanity.
Morning newscasts throughout Latin America could not believe what the gringo networks were broadcasting live, while the region’s population, half way between stupor and schadenfreude, realised that their northern neighbour was vulnerable.
Geopolitics were now, definitively, being moved by other forces. Latin America had gone from being the backyard of the Cold War to China’s bottomless pit – the pasture for the limitless extractivism brought about by globalisation.
