Dear Sir,
I was disappointed to read former professor Michael Hogan’s so-called book review of Todd Miller’s meritorious “Empire of Borders” – it was just an anti-U.S. diatribe of Hogan’s inflammatory and unreferenced opinions dealing with other author’s works.
Yes, the United States has a long history of exploiting its southern neighbors at the behest of rapacious corporations. In that regard it has been little different in morality from its global predecessor, the British Raj.
And Mexicans have every reason to fear that under Trump the United States could invade again, as it has numerous times in the past.
But well-meaning people on both sides of the border have been working hard in recent decades, and with good success, to build a mutually beneficial relationship between the two countries – something ignored by Hogan’s caustic review.
He dismisses the good that has been done by likening U.S. efforts to a “Trojan horse” whose real name is an “an oligarchy [whose] guise is security and economic growth, and its goal is global economic dominance.”
Neither the global British Raj nor U.S. corporate global capitalism – nor, for that matter, Genghis Khan or the Roman legions of Julius Caesar’s time – had the best interests of dominated foreign peoples at heart (as Hogan seems to expect).
Trump has done enough to worsen this fact of life already, without Hogan and the Guadalajara Reporter adding to hard feelings against Americans in general and their badly behaving current government in particular.
Jim Dickinson,Tlachichilco