David Rieff and Rafael Vilasanjuan

In the early 1990s, while the West was celebrating the fall of communism and of the Soviet empire, the security apparatus that helped to bring all this about began to collapse too. The resolve that avoided the disaster of a nuclear showdown between the two great power blocs was not sufficient to prevent other kinds of more conventional conflict, in which a great number of lives were placed at risk. The testimony of David Rieff, who has been writing about human catastrophes over all these years, reveals the hypocrisy of the interventions, the manipulation of the international organisms, and the aid trap that, on many occasions, is no more than an excuse to act as a salve for our suffering consciences when faced with the reality of the victims.