Start with the cover, cunningly designed to provoke a double take. What at first glance appears to be a cigar-chomping Mexican bandido in an oversized sombrero proves, on closer examination, to be a grinning British soldier celebrating victory in the Falklands. All he needs to go Latin is a big hat, a bullet-studded bandolier and a cigar. Three props conjure a chuck wagon full of clichés. The sombrero speaks of braggadocio and machismo, Hugo Chavez, Manuel Noriega, Juan Peron, generalissimos and juntas. But also of laziness – a hat to pull down over your face when, slumped against the adobe on a dusty side street, you sleep off the tequila. Poverty born of sloth, whose only remedy is to slip north across the Rio Grande: wetbacks, drug runners, illegals.

The bandolier manages simultaneously to evoke the guerrilla, the revolutionary and the outlaw: Pancho Villa, Che Guevara, Pablo Escobar – holed up somewhere in the sierra beyond the reach of the hapless, hopeless government forces. Awaiting their chance. Then there’s the cigar, the Western hemisphere’s gift to bloated bankers and oncologists, the combustible quintessence of conspicuous consumption. We think not of wealth earned but flaunted – also of extravagant displays by poor people who, in thrifty Protestant countries, would be saving for a house: fiestas, Carnaval in Rio, the Mexican Day of the Dead – and, of course, Fidel, blowing smoke in Yankee faces.