How much do people in Latin America hate the U.S.?
The question is hardly new, but the war in Ukraine brings it up again: How can Latin American countries loudly committed to the principle of non-intervention shrug off the decision by an autocratic oligarch to send in the tanks to take over a smaller neighbor whose land and resources his country has coveted for centuries? The answer has little to do with what’s going on in the Donbas or Kyiv.
Who cares what Zelenskyy is saying about Russian war crimes? As Andrés Velasco, a former minister of finance and presidential candidate in Chile who is now at the London School of Economics, suggested: “One possible explanation is Pavlovian anti-Americanism: if the U.S. is backing Zelenskyy, that is not a family photograph in which they wish to appear.”
