Bolívar on the Afro-Arab Origins of Spanish Despotism
While it may be surprising to some, ideas about North Africa and the Middle East have played a salient role in Latin American political thought since the early nineteenth century. For Simón Bolívar the description, explanation, and critique of Spanish colonial rule required an understanding of the influence of North Africa on the political and social structures of the Spanish empire. In the famous Jamaica Letter (1815) Bolívar describes the Spanish colonial system as being an instantiation of Oriental despotism. Bolívar turns to the examples of the Ottoman empire and Iran under Safavid and Qajar rule in order to illustrate the concept of Oriental despotism: “in absolute governments there are no limits to the authority of public functionaries. The will of the Grand Sultan, the Khan, the Bey, and other despotic sovereigns, is the supreme law, and is arbitrarily executed by the pashas and inferior governors in Turkey and Persia, where the system of oppression is completely organized, and is submitted to by the people because of the authority from which it emanates” (Bolívar 2009 [1815], 48). We can observe that in referring to “the Bey,” Bolívar might have been aware of the Beys of Tunisia, who were nominally under Ottoman rule. Bolívar might also have been aware of Muhammad Ali Pasha’s activities in Egypt, since by 1815 Muhammad Ali Pasha’s modernizing project was being covered in the European press (Al- Sayyid Marsot 1984), which Bolívar regularly read. Moreover, Bolívar was an avid reader of Montesquieu (Gallegos-Ordorica 2018; Lynch 2006). Montesquieu, drawing on Jean Bodin (1530 – 1596) and François Bernier (1620 – 1688), had developed a full-fledged theory of Oriental despotism (Anderson 2013, 463 – 465). Interestingly, Montesquieu had also drawn parallels between Spanish institutions and the institutions of Oriental despotism. For example, in the Persian letters, Montesquieu’s imaginary Persian travelers describe Catholic priests in Spain as fanatical “dervishes” (Montesquieu 2008 [1721], 39). Montesquieu had also described Spanish conduct in the Americas as “barbaric” and despotic (Montesquieu 2008 [1721], 164).
According to Bolívar, the Spanish colonial system is even more despotic than classical Oriental despotism. This is so because the classical Oriental despotisms did not depend on foreign functionaries, “the key difference is this: the governors of Isfahan are Persians, the viziers of the Great Lord in Turkey are Turks, and the Sultans of Tartary are Tartars” (Bolívar 2009 [1815], 49). Bolívar’s comparison is apt in the sense that the Ottomans had co-opted local Arab elites in their system of governance by the mid-18th century, e.g., the ‘Azm family who served as governors of Damascus from 1724 to 1783 (Rogan 2009, 40). However, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Ottoman drive for defensive modernization in the form of centralization took on the mantle of Turkification, which eventually drove local Arab elites to revolt (Hourani 1991, 309)
For Bolívar, the Spanish empire is worse than the Ottoman empire because it does not allow Creoles (Spaniards born in the Americas) to acquire experience in administration by serving as functionaries of the Spanish monarchy: “it is for this reason that I say that we are deprived even of active tyranny because we are prohibited from serving as its functionaries” (Bolívar 2009 [1815], 49). The Creole elite in fact had access to administrative positions from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century (Lynch 2006, 93). Over the course of the seventeenth century, the influx of silver from the Americas had encouraged the neglect of productive enterprises in agriculture and manufacture in Spain (Anderson 2013, 72 - 75). By 1700, “Spain was the sick man of Europe” (Stein and Stein 1970, 21). The exclusion of Creoles from administrative positions was the product of the centralizing reforms that were pursued by the Bourbon dynasty in the mid-eighteenth century (Elliott 2006, 323). This centralizing project was, in turn, driven by the realization that the Spanish state had become weaker vis-a-vis its French and British competitors. However, this centralizing drive excluded the Creole elite who had hitherto been co-opted into the Spanish imperial system. This exclusion created a deeply unstable situation since the native-born Creoles still dominated ownership of the means of production while the peninsulares (Spaniards born in the Iberian Peninsula) came to dominant administrative positions (Bushnell and Macaulay 1988, 5). If we hold that political power is ultimately grounded in economic power, we can say that the Spanish empire had sealed its fate with its own hands.
The exclusion of the Creole elite from the system of governance eventually drove them to pursue the path of nationalist revolts against the Spanish crown when the opportunity arose with Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1807. Bolívar himself understood the revolt against the authority of the crown as a product of the attack on Creole elite interests by the Spanish crown (Lynch 2006, 29). The schema of defensive modernization taking the form of centralization and excluding local elites, who in turn try to mobilize local proto-nationalist grievances for the sake of defending their interests, shows the clear parallels between Latin American nationalism and Arab nationalism. It also allows us to explain the manner in which non-elites ended up experiencing disappointment with this first wave of decolonization. The key difference is that the Spanish drive for defensive modernization, starting in the 1750s, took place earlier than in the Ottoman case. This is arguably what explains the seemingly paradoxical fact that while the societies of Latin America are much “younger” than the societies of North Africa and the Middle East, Latin American nationalism, as expressed in the form of nation states, is about a century more mature than Arab nationalism. This in turn reflects the fact that nationalist forms of social and political mobilization are about a century older in Latin America when compared to nationalist forms of social and political mobilization in the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Ottoman empire.
There are, of course, complicating elements in this comparison. For Arabic speakers under Ottoman rule, the metropole, Istanbul, was increasingly coming under European domination. Moreover, in some cases, e.g., Egypt from 1882 onwards, there was direct European occupation of some of these territories. In fact, European occupation was complete with the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire after World War I. Hence, nationalism in the Arabic speaking provinces of the Ottoman empire took the form of rebellion against both Turkish rule and European rule. Latin American nationalism took a different path because, despite the fact that the wars of liberation were initially triggered by the metropole coming under Napoleonic occupation, there was no significant foreign invasion of the territories of the nascent nation states in the early nineteenth century. Moreover, direct European occupation of the Arabic-speaking territories of the Ottoman Empire created a cultural rupture for the Arabic-speaking elites (and non-elites) in a way that never occurred for the Creole elites in the Americas, who for obvious reasons identified with Spanish and European culture.
Bolívar returned to the claim that Spanish colonial rule was worse than classical Oriental despotism in the Angostura Address (1819): “in the exercise of authorized absolute power, there are no limits. The despot’s will is the supreme law, which is arbitrarily carried out by subalterns who participate in the organized oppression in proportion to the authority they hold. These inferiors are entrusted with all functions, civil, political, military and religious. America received all these from Spain and was not permitted to share in the administration of her domestic concerns and arrangements” (Bolívar 2009 [1819], 81). According to Bolívar, classical Oriental despotism at least allowed the elites of the local population to acquire some experience in ruling as functionaries operating on behalf of the despot, but the Spanish did not allow Americans this opportunity. When it comes to explaining the despotic character of the Spanish empire, Bolívar turns to the claim that Spain is not really a purely European country, but rather a partially African one: “Spain herself is not strictly European due to its African blood, institutions and character” (Bolívar 2009 [1819], 87). Here Bolívar is clearly referring to the North African influence on Spain due to the long period of Berber-Arab rule in the Spanish Peninsula. In this context North African influence appears as an explanation of the Spanish monarchy’s despotic nature. To put it simply, in Bolívar’s view, Spanish imperial despotism is really the product of the transplantation of North African blood and institutions to the Americas. Consequently, according to Bolívar, the struggle for liberty is a struggle against this Spanish-North African inheritance. Bolívar was thus anticipating the quip, attributed to Alexandre Dumas (1802 – 1870), that “Africa begins at the Pyrenees” (Bolufer 2016, 452). In the eighteenth century, British travelers such as Alexander Jardine (d. 1799) had described the Spanish monarchy as very similar in nature to the monarchy in Morocco (Bolufer 2016, 457), and the German philosopher Christoph Meiners (1747 – 1810) had emphasized the ethnic mixture (Arab, Berber, and European) that characterized Spain (Bolufer 2016, 462). Bolívar was essentially synthesizing two currents of European thinking about Spain to develop his thesis, namely that it is Spain’s prolonged contact with African Berbers and Arabs that explains its despotic political institutions. By the mid-nineteenth century English travel writers such as Richard Ford would explicitly describe Spanish customs and institutions as “African” and “Oriental” (Bolufer 2016, 462).
Bolívar’s thesis would find Latin American defenders in the second half of the twentieth century. For example, the Mexican philosopher Octavio Paz sought to explain the phenomenon of the strong man or caudillo in Latin American politics by appealing to a North African inheritance which was transmitted to Latin America via Spain: “fanatical respect for the person of the caudillo is of Arabic origin and can be found throughout the Hispanic world” (Paz 1972, 30). For Paz, the explanation of Mexico’s political history is to be found in the fact that the Spanish conquerors, already shaped and formed by North African Oriental despotism, admired the conquered Aztecs and sought to replicate their despotic rule. For Paz, Mexico is the product of a synthesis between Spanish despotism, which is really North African Oriental despotism wearing a Catholic religious robe, and the pre-existing despotic structures which characterized Aztec imperial rule (Paz 1972, 85). For Paz, just as it was the case for Bolívar, the pursuit of liberty required a break from the Spanish political inheritance which in the final analysis was understood to be a North African and Middle Eastern political inheritance.
The idea that the Iberian conquerors of the Americas carried with them a North African Oriental heritage was not only used to explain despotism, in the Brazilian context it was also used to explain tolerance for racial diversity and interracial mixing. In the 1930s Gilberto Freyre presented Portugal as the heir to a significant Moorish heritage and he invoked this heritage in order to explain what he took to be Brazil’s receptivity to racial and cultural diversity (Cesar Melo 2013). This was a kind of Orientalism with a positive hue. However, this positive Orientalism was not deployed towards emancipatory purposes, the myth of Lusotropicalism would go on to become the official ideology of the Portuguese empire under Salazar (Castelo 2021).
The Impact of Nasserism on Latin America
By the mid-twentieth century, there was another competing image of North Africa and the Middle East in Latin American political thought. The advent of national liberation movements had transformed the image of the region. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power captivated the attention of people across the world and, in the aftermath of the Tripartite Aggression in 1956, he became a symbol of anti-imperialism across the world.
Despite the fact that Egypt had attained nominal independence from British rule in 1922, the monarchy in Egypt was still subordinate to the British (Mansfield 1969, 27). This subordination was exemplified in the Abdeen Palace incident which took place on February 4th in 1942. British tanks surrounded King Farouk’s palace and forced him to replace a government suspected of anti-British pro-Axis sympathies with a government led by the Wafd party (Kandil 2014, 10). This incident disgraced King Farouk who was seen as a powerless puppet of the British, and it led to the undermining of the legitimacy of the Wafd party, which now appeared to be an opportunistic and collaborationist party. The army was further demoralized by the disastrous defeat of 1948 during the Palestinian Nakba. In the hearings of 1949, it was revealed that the king’s corrupt courtiers had bought obsolete and defunct weaponry for the Egyptian army (Kandil 2014, 11). The army’s trust in Egyptian politicians was completely dissipated.
At the social level, the key question which dominated Egypt before the coup of July 23rd 1952 was the agrarian question. In 1952, there were around 11 – 14 million peasants in Egypt without land (Abdel-Malek 1968, 61), and 6 % of landowners held 65% of the land under cultivation (Abdel-Malek 1968, 16). The example of the Chinese Revolution brought the question of agrarian reform to the forefront in Egyptian politics in the post-WWII period. There was American pressure for carrying out land reform as a way to pre-empt a communist takeover of Egypt (Abdel-Malek 1968, 67-68). Despite the urgency of the agrarian question, the Wafd party did not engage with it in a serious manner (Abdel-Malek 1968, 14). This can be explained by the fact that the party was dominated by big landowners who were unwilling to embark on land reform. Moreover, at the level of national industrial development, the political dominance of the big landowners was preventing the further development of industrialization in Egypt (El Nabolsy 2021).
With the promulgation of the Agrarian Reform Law in 1952, the Free Officers’ coup took on the dimensions of a social revolution and undercut the legitimacy of established parties like the Wafd (al-Shelq 2010, 66). Moreover, by distinguishing between “flag independence” or juridical independence on the one hand and substantive independence on the other hand, the July Revolution created a discourse that resonated with some Latin Americans. After all, most Latin American countries had attained “flag independence” in the early nineteenth century, but they still suffered from imperialism. Colonialism, involving direct political control and the denial of juridical sovereignty, is only one way in which imperialism takes form. Depending on historical conditions, imperialism can also take the form of neocolonialism, whereby the juridical sovereignty of a specific territory is internationally recognized but mechanisms are implemented that allow for the exploitation of its raw materials and its cheap labor reserves. A state may have juridical sovereignty that is the product of recognition by the international community, while at the same time lacking the hallmarks of statehood as understood from an empirical sociological standpoint, e.g., it may lack the capacity to exercise a monopoly of force over its territory (Jackson and Rosberg 1982, 3). From a Weberian standpoint the key empirical sociological criterion for statehood is monopoly over the exercise of force. However, we may also think of other empirical sociological criteria for statehood, e.g., the capacity to undertake development projects in the interest of the majority of the population. A state under neo-colonial domination may be said to have juridical sovereignty without empirical sovereignty (or sovereignty as defined by empirical sociological criteria). As Mehdi Ben Barka put it, “[juridical] independence by itself is nothing more than a form in need of content” (Ben Baraka 1967, 166). Imperialism is a genus, of which colonialism, of the kind that was manifested in the “Scramble for Africa” for example, is a species (El Nabolsy 2022). Nasserist discourse resonated globally precisely because it articulated this distinction clearly and acted upon it. Nasser and the Free Officers had discovered upon attaining power that, in the words of Mohammed Hassanein Heikal, “the Egyptians do not own anything in Egypt [!]” (al-Qa ʿid 2013, 385). The drive for nationalization was thus an attempt to attain some measure of real self-determination.
The Nasserist government fixated on social issues that were of importance in Latin America. For example, the agrarian question was a pressing issue in Cuba which passed its own land reform law in 1959 in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. Before the agrarian reform there were 200,000 peasant families without land in Cuba (Castro 2007 [1960],148). The agrarian reform law set an upper limit of 402 hectares for each individual (Guerra Vialboy and Loyola Vega 2010, 80). The agrarian reform law also targeted the American companies which owned massive latifundios in Cuba (Castro 2007, 245), which set the revolution on a collision course with the U.S. The leadership of the Cuban Revolution admired Nasser, whose nationalization of the Suez Canal served as a model, and sought to establish contact with him. Che Guevara went to visit Cairo in June 1959. However, he did not, as Federico Vélez notes, make a positive impression on Nasser, who thought that he was too rash (Vélez 2016, 29). Nasser only came to trust the Cubans after Raul Castro’s visit in July of the same year (Morsi 2019, 152). However, Che’s visit highlights another important Cuban-North African connection. Mohammed ben Abdelkrim El Khattabi, the Moroccan leader of the Rif War (1921 – 1926) against Spanish and French forces, was in exile in Cairo at the time and Che met with him (Aïdi 2017). In fact, Che and Castro were both influenced by the guerilla tactics deployed by Abdelkrim El Khattabi against the Spanish. Alberto Bayo, a Spanish veteran of the Rif War, provided military instruction in guerilla tactics to the Cuban revolutionaries (Aïdi 2017).
The Cubans had a much more radical political orientation than Nasser. Nonetheless, Nasser was an important figure for both Castro and Che who took him to be a trailblazer in the struggle against imperialism in its colonial and neo-colonial form. Che had told Nasser that “when things were going badly for Castro fighting his war up in the Cuban hills [sic], he used to be encouraged by the way Egypt had overcome the attack by Britain, France, and Israel” (quoted from Vélez 2016, 29). In fact, the 1956 nationalization of the Suez Canal and the Tripartite Aggression were a pivotal moment in the transformation of the image of North Africa and the Middle East in Latin American political thought. For Bolívar, the struggle for liberty was a struggle to move away from anything having to do with North Africa and the Middle East. For Castro and Che, the struggle for liberty meant emulating, in some important respects, a political figure from North Africa and the Middle East.
The nationalization of the Suez Canal also sparked demands in Panama for the nationalization of the Panama Canal. Panamanian university students launched protests in 1956 demanding that their government nationalize the Panama Canal following the Egyptian example and that their government publicly support Egypt’s right to the Suez Canal (Vélez 2016, 14 - 15). The Eisenhower administration was increasingly worried about Nasser’s influence on Panamanian demands for nationalization and it sent stern warnings to Panama about drawing any analogies between the Egyptian case and the Panamanian case (Vélez 2016, 10 - 11). The Tripartite Aggression also galvanized support for Nasser in Latin America among sectors of the left and the center-left. In Brazil, senator Kerginaldo Cavalcanti held that the British, French, and Israeli invasion of Egypt set a dangerous precedent of direct imperialist military intervention that could one day jeopardize Brazil: “as they intervene today in Egypt, in order to take the Suez Canal, tomorrow either England or the United States could intervene in Brazil in order to fulfill their interests. They might want us to subordinate our interests in our national oil industry ‘Petrobras’ to their whims” (quoted from Vélez 2016, 18). Cavalcanti held that the British, French, and Israeli invasion of Egypt, if left unopposed, would provide support for the Monroe Doctrine, insofar as it would set a precedent for military intervention. Fundamentally, the transformation of the image of North Africa and the Middle East in some strands of Latin American political thought was the product of internal political transformations in North Africa and the Middle East, associated with the advent of Nasserism, the Algerian Revolution, and other nationalist mobilizations, coupled with a disillusionment in some sectors of Latin American societies with the limitations of formal independence. This transformation would in turn shape the reception of North African and Middle Eastern intellectual production amongst progressive circles in Latin America, e.g., the reception of Samir Amin’s work in Latin America and his visits to the Centro de Estudios Socio-Económicos (CESO) of the Universidad de Chile, which operated from 1965 until its closure after the Pinochet coup in 1973 (Ellner 2024, 746).
Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, OPEC, and the rise of Global South Solidarity
By the time of the rise of Nasserism, most Latin American states were already a playground of neocolonialism. As pointed out by Samir Amin (2017), this resulted in Latin American states’ general lack of engagement with the NAM (Non-Aligned Movement), with the exception of Cuba. According to Amin, there are three main factors that explain how neocolonialism undermined Global South solidarity in the context of the NAM: “(1) Latin American countries were formally independent since the beginning of the nineteenth century and did not share the recent struggles of Asian and African nations to reconquer their sovereignty; (2) U.S. domination of the continent through the Monroe Doctrine was not challenged by any of the state powers in office (except Cuba)—the Organization of American States included the master (the United States) and was qualified for that reason by Cuba as ‘the Ministry of Colonies of the U.S.’; (3) the ruling classes, of ‘European extraction,’ looked to Europe and the United States as models to be copied. For those reasons, the attempt to build a ‘Tricontinental’ did not succeed: it was joined only by movements in struggle (often armed struggle), but rejected by all state powers on the continent at that time” (Amin 2017, 613).
Latin American foreign policy, at the state level, was dominated by a false sense of political independence and economic parity with the empire, reflecting the aspirational character of the governing elites rather than the dire need for social and economic development in Latin American countries. However, a notable exception to this line of thought was the Venezuelan lawyer, diplomat, and political leader Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo (1903–1979), best known today as the founder of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). Pérez Alfonzo was also one of the founding members of Acción Democrática, the political party that won the first democratic elections in Venezuela with the candidacy of Rómulo Gallegos in 1947.
As Minister of Development in Gallegos’ government, Pérez Alfonzo was the main promoter and author of the legal reforms that limited foreign oil concessions and established what came to be known as the “fifty-fifty” rule. This tax scheme raised the state’s share of oil revenues from 43% to 50%, and it was later implemented by other oil-producing countries through OPEC. Just a year after being elected, Gallegos’ government was overthrown by a military coup orchestrated by the U.S. (Kovalik 2019), forcing Pérez Alfonzo to flee the country and live in exile for the next decade (Porras 1979; Mayorbe 2005).
In 1959, during the presidency of Rómulo Betancourt, Pérez Alfonzo returned to Venezuela as Minister of Mines and Hydrocarbons. In April of that same year, he led the Venezuelan delegation to the First Congress of Oil Exporting Countries in Cairo, where Pérez Alfonzo proposed the formation of OPEC as an important strategy for regulating oil prices. In his book El Pentágono Petrolero [The Oil Pentagon] (1967), Pérez Alfonzo describes the foundation of OPEC as a “historical necessity” to counteract the pressures of imperialism (Pérez Alfonzo 1967, 129).[2] This was of particular relevance in a context in which international oil companies were actively trying to pit Venezuela against Middle Eastern countries to achieve lower oil prices. However, instead of engaging in this competition, Pérez Alfonzo began holding conversations and building alliances with Arab countries as early as 1947 (Dugarte Rangel 2021).
As recognized by Pérez Alfonzo and other Venezuelan intellectuals (e.g., Pérez Alfonso and Rangel 1976; Sánchez 2000), the key factor that boosted the Venezuelan–Arab alliance, materialized in the founding of OPEC in 1960, was the rise of Arab nationalism. In the words of the economist Domingo Alberto Rangel, “this nationalism had as its prophet in Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser, and in Iraq Kassim, whose coup took place precisely in mid-1958. In those same years, the Algerian insurrection was underway, winning victorious campaigns and exerting a strong influence on the political sensibility of the Arab peoples. I recall that in Cairo, when Dr. Pérez Alfonzo and others were there as representatives of Venezuela at the Congress of the Arab League, we noticed the tremendous influence that the Algerian insurrection was exerting in the Arab world […] Thus, the spark of Arab nationalism was something decisive in the formation of OPEC, and Pérez Alfonzo, along with those in Venezuela who supported the idea of an international regulation of the oil trade, took advantage of it” (Pérez Alfonzo and Rangel 1976, 132).
Likewise, Pérez Alfonzo clearly stated the role of Arab nationalism, and in particular the role of the nationalization of the Suez Canal, in the creation of OPEC: “I mentioned as a decisive factor in the creation of OPEC the rise of the Arab peoples and the opportunities that the nationalization of the Suez Canal created for those aspirations. Arab nationalism can also be considered a contributing factor that helped facilitate the creation of OPEC […] The situation of the Suez Canal demonstrated the possibility that the Arabs could efficiently manage something as complex as canal traffic” (Pérez Alfonzo and Rangel 1976, 134).
Besides the mutual need to regulate the oil market, there was a further awareness of the underlying problems that both Latin American and Arab countries were facing: “The other point I wish to note is that this resurgence of Arab aspirations for self-determination was also of decisive importance. The purpose of the Congress was already being fulfilled even before the drop in prices. Thus, they had been inviting Venezuela to the oil congress since 1956. The Arab League had been planning the oil congress since that year, as stated in one of the most recent books they published on the subject. And this was true” (Pérez Alfonzo and Rangel 1976, 134).
Historical developments in North Africa and the Middle East, such as the nationalization of the Suez Canal, the Iraqi coup of 1958, and the Algerian Revolution, brought to the forefront the “historical necessity” to which Pérez Alfonzo was referring in his presentation of the first oil-regulating laws for Venezuela. Despite the apparent historical misalignment between Latin American countries, formally independent since the early-nineteenth century, and Arab and North African countries that were just attaining independence in the mid-twentieth century, these historical events helped establish the need to develop a common agenda for the Global South based on the necessity of protecting natural resources, establishing full sovereignty, and the creation of a more just international order.
Furthermore, the development of a consciousness of a common anti-imperialist struggle in Pérez Alfonzo’s thought is also evident in the fact that he was among the first intellectuals in Latin America to openly oppose Zionism: “One cannot side with the Third World only at times, and at other times detach ourselves in order to flirt with international capitalism, which uses extremist Zionism as its spearhead, encouraged by that very capitalism. It is not because of our position in OPEC, nor out of unwavering solidarity with the Third World, that we must be firmer against that far-reaching and dangerous Zionism. It is simply for the sake of justice, which is something of greater importance for world peace and the future of humankind” (Pérez Alfonzo 2011, 357–358).
Conclusion
We can see how the image of North Africa and the Middle East in Latin American political thought was transformed from an image dominated by the concept of Oriental despotism in the early nineteenth century to an image dominated by the idea that North Africa and the Middle East were the focal points of the struggle against imperialism. This transformation was a function of internal developments in North Africa and the Middle East, i.e., the rise of a nationalist movement which directly challenged the dominance of European and U.S. imperialism in the mid-twentieth century, as well as internal transformations in Latin American societies themselves, especially the realization that “flag independence” is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for pursuing the developmental goals which would meet the aspirations of the majority of Latin Americans. This transformation of the image of North Africa and the Middle East in Latin American political thought is what provided the context for the emergence of a pro-Palestinian discourse in Cuba (after the Revolution), Venezuela (with the Bolivarian Revolution), Nicaragua (with the Sandinistas), and Colombia (with Gustavo Petro).
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