The issue of sovereignty has historically figured prominently in Latin American political discourse. From Simón Bolívar to Benito Juárez in the nineteenth century, to Juan Domingo Perón and Salvador Allende in the twentieth, to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez today, sovereignty and its corollary, the non-intervention principle, have been prominent among the region's watchwords. In the late 1950s a Mexican diplomat declared that ‘intransigent non-intervention’ was the ‘cornerstone of the Inter-American system’. Sometimes imbued with racialist elements, as in José E. Rodó's claim that Latin America had ‘an inheritance of race, a great ethnic tradition to maintain’, or in the recent claim by a Venezuelan general that the Latin American defence of sovereignty is ‘part of the legacy which our aboriginal ancestors have passed on to us through chromosomes’, the discourse on sovereignty and non-intervention has become a Latin American trademark.