The walls of an architecture in ruins, scored, scarified, discoloured by saltpetre, in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Cuba and Mexico, bear the wounds of time and the traces of political struggle. The stones of the ancient civilisations were torn up and stripped of their colouring to build the modernist utopia, but neither urban ghosts nor the spectre of revolution have saved the continent from the abyss of violence, from the Mexican revolution, the first of the twentieth century, down to the dictatorships that followed.