Reading and writing fill in the blanks
In the southern cone especially, from Venezuela to Argentina, the region is rising to overthrow the legacy of external domination of the past centuries and the cruel and destructive social forms that they have helped to establish.
The of imperial control — violence and economic warfare, hardly a distant memory in Latin America — are losing their effectiveness, a sign of the shift towards independence. Washington is now compelled to tolerate governments that in the past would have drawn down intervention or reprisal.
Throughout the region a vibrant of popular movements provide the basis for a meaningful democracy. The indigenous populations, as if in a rediscovery of their pre-Columbian legacy, are much more active and influential, particularly in Bolivia and Ecuador.
These developments are in part the result of a phenomenon that has been observed for some years by specialists and polling organisations in Latin America: As the elected governments became more formally democratic, citizens an increasing disillusionment with the way democracy functions and “lack of faith” in the democratic institutions. They have sought to construct democratic systems based on popular participation rather than elite and foreign .