Based on the reading from last week, it is no surprise that Latin America encountered problems. Whenever issues are ignored they tend to grow; and when people are ignored they tend to get agitated and demand attention. This is more or else what happened in latin america.

I enjoyed reading about the Zapatista movement that followed Diaz’s time in power. It goes to show how those with “less power” can actually cause big disturbances. Something interesting that I found was that the Mexican revolution was fought by many but for different causes. Most of the times that I have learned of a revolution it has been a group of people fighting for a joint cause. However, considering all of the issues they faces, it makes sense for them to be fighting for different causes. I believe this may have been one of the reasons that the revolution was not successful for the Zapatistas (in terms of them not being able to coordinate and constitutionalists ending up in power). I think that for a revolution to work, everyone must be fighting for the same cause.

In a way this embodies the problems in Latin America–people not being able to compromise on different opinions and views. In theory, this should be simple to do, but considering the history and state of Latin America it was not. So in the end, we are left with the ongoing problem of “It’s complicated.”

The readings this week were also very interesting because they showed different view points surrounding similar issues. Once again, this illustrates the discrepancies between people’s ways of thinking. That being said, there does seem to be an overall feeling of anger or desperation or maybe just a need for change. What type of change? I don’t know and maybe they did not either; and maybe that is what was the real problem. It seems that they all knew something was wrong and wanted to fix it but no one approached it in a completely functional way.

My questions for this week are: Do you think these revolutions were successful? and do you think there would have been a better way to approach them?