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Mat Youkee is the Panama stringer for The Economist, The Guardian, America’s Quarterly and other international media. He has extensively covered Chinese investment in the country and warned, in 2019, that the Panama Canal could become the center of the US-China trade war.

Macondo is Latin America’s most famous fictional village and synonymous with “magical realism.” Sixty years prior to the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, however, Joseph Conrad introduced readers to the port city of Sulaco, in a fictional country bearing a striking resemblance to modern day Colombia and Panama. His novel, Nostromo, is one of the great analyses of the political-economy of colonialism. In a media landscape prone to view Latin America through a Macondo lens, this Substack is written in the spirit of Conrad’s understanding of the workings of power.

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