He is called 'The Tank Man': a man in a white shirt standing alone in the middle of the road blocking four tanks moving on Tiananmen Square, Beijing.

It was June 5, 1989.

Who was he? No one knows. He might have been an ordinary person suddenly unable to restrain his anger at seeing the army return after killing dozens of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square just 40 hours before. Perhaps he wanted to yell: "You're coming back! Aren't there enough victims?"

There is something interesting when power begins with a story about words and coconut juice.

In 1961, the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a poem about the people murdered on the edge of a bleak ravine to the northeast of the Dneiper river:

I am
each old man
here shot dead
I am
Every child
Here shot dead.

Twenty years before this, at that ravine in Ukraine, at Babi Yar, around 34,000 Jewsincluding women, children and elderlywere murdered by German soldiers in just two days, September 29-30, 1941.

It was like a candle going out," the nun who witnessed Vclav Havel's death at 9:50 in the morning said. "So silent."

A president who rejects the state palace and chooses to live in his farmhouse off a dirt road, his only security two guards at the corner and a faithful three-legged dog, and who gets around driving his nondescript 1987 Volkswagen beetle: this is not some Latin American tale. He really exists in this 21st century: Jos Mujica, the President of Uruguay.