[rburhum]

You dont think it is presumptious of you to think you can somehow dissect a situation in an entire region (South America) without clearly any historical knowledge that can give you meaningful context? I say this because your question "Why didnt free speech and democracy stop such instability in the first place?" show a clear misunderstanding/lack of knowledge and tremendous oversimplification of Cold War era politics, neo-colonialism, caudillism, Spanish feudalism and decentralisation of power. Breaking it down to a simple explanation of "is free speech and democracy good and if such why didnt it help here?" is clearly silly at best.

[josai]

Your comment was also a ridiculous over-simplification. My reply was a bit facetious, which was probably silly of me. But whatever. We both fail at arguing; I have not influenced you nor have you influenced me.

Anyway, it appears that I'm now treading on people's toes so that's enough from me.

[rburhum]

I succeeded at pointing out how haughty, supercilious and disconnected your comments about democratic experiments... Even though you were quick to downvote my replies.

Enough for me, too.

[josai]

This account doesn't have enough karma to downvote anyone :-P

[rburhum]

Then you did succeed at convincing somebody out there! :)