Trindad and Tobago celebrated its 61st anniversary of independence just two weeks ago.
It sounds like a long period of self-determination, but it is very short compared with our Latin American cousins.
Ten days ago, Brazil marked 201 years since shrugging off Portuguese colonial rule. Outgoing ambassador Rodrigo Do Amaral Souza bid farewell to TT by conferring the Grand Cross of the Order of Rio Branco on Minister of Foreign Affairs Dr Amery Browne, TT's former ambassador to Brazil.
On Tuesday, Mexico's ambassador Víctor Hugo Morales Meléndez celebrated 213 years of ending Spanish rule with a splendid display of Mexican heraldry at the National Academy for the Performing Arts.
Venezuela, to whom we are especially close, is celebrating 211 years. On Thursday, Ambassador Alvaro Sanchez Cordero hosted our National Philharmonic Orchestra in concert to commemorate 61 years of diplomatic relations between Venezuela and TT.
Peru's Ambassador to TT David Malaga marked 202 years of Independence and 55 years of friendship with TT with a food festival that ended yesterday.
What made international news, however, was the 50th anniversary last Tuesday of the historic coup against a democratically elected government in Chile that became a milestone in our shared history, a day people around the world still remember, and the subject of this column before.
The name Dr Salvador Allende became almost as legendary as that ofJuan Perón in Argentina and Ché Guevara or Fidel Castro in Cuba, not because he was a larger-than-life charismatic character or a defiant communist, but because as a socialist president of Chile he tried to restructure Chilean society along socialist lines within a democratic model of government, at a time when it was considered deviant to do so.
In those Cold War days, one had to be firmly planted in one camp or the other. Extreme politics - capitalism on the right, communism on the left - was the order of the day. Current confusing situations such as Russia's right-wing dictatorship pretending to be a democratically elected government of the left would have been unimaginable.
Salvador Allende's brutal sacking is as legendary as what followed was shocking. His Popular Unity Party was a coalition comprising parties on the left, and he himself was a member of the Socialist Party. Many considered him a touchstone as the first democratically elected Marxist in the days of US vs USSR political polarisation.
It hardly mattered that he had always functioned within the democratic process as a member of the senate and as the minister of health who introduced legislation that created the Chilean national health service, the first in the Americas to guarantee universal health care. His nationalisation of foreign assets, redistribution of wealth and foreign policy that embraced Cuba and China terrified the US, and the CIA stoked civil unrest as the economy stagnated and foreign investment disappeared.
The country was on its knees financially and socially, and although Allende retained the suppor
