Once again, I am astonished by the amount of major world events, such as the Terror in Latin America, that my education has thus far neglected to educate me about.  Imagine only just learning about the existence of World War Two – well that’s precisely how I feel right now, only it’s the Terror I am learning about.  Even if I hadn’t been formally taught about the subject, I’m still surprised that I never heard about it through other means (such as through family members who grew up during this tme, albeit in Canada).  I suppose I’m just shocked that the news and information I have received my whole life has such huge gaps in it – how North American for me not to know a thing about the rest of the world.  I need to start filling in these gaps!

The atrocities of the Terror disgust and disturb me – I never realized concentration camps and such huge political genocides occurred so recently.  I always thought of the late twentieth century as a time of social progress in much of the world, though I see now that it was anything but this in Latin America.  It’s hard to think that the time period of these dark ages paralleled the joyful and laid back times my (Canadian) parents grew up in.  Sure, this Cold War era wasn’t a stroll in the park in many places, with oppression and communism ruling much of Europe, which became riddled with violent revolutions; at the same time, Europe’s revolutions still seem far more advanced and ‘ahead of the times’ compared to Latin America’s series of revolutions and coups, which involved concentration camps and the arbitrary killing of thousands of people who supposedly posed a threat.  To me, these differences seem to cleave the world in two, with part of it ahead of the times, and part way behind.

Another intersting aspect of the Terror is the idea of terrorism.  Terrorism and ‘the war on terror’ only became a huge and well-known issue after 9/11 in the US; and despite knowing of some prior terrorist acts (such as the kidnappings in Quebec), I never realized the extent to which terror was used before 9/11.  Latin America had dozens of terror organizations, all acting quite explicitly and boldly.  If these organizations were operating the same way in Canada, the media would explode with news about it, and globally, it’d be impossible not to know of their existence and actions.  Yet, since these organizations operated in Latin America, far fewer people worldwide know anything about them (myself included).  This perhaps goes to show how much the US influences world interests, and how North American media can guide global media to report about and raise awareness of topics of interest in the US.