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.

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.

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.

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

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