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Remaking Medellín
Transformed from murder capital to corporate boom town, Medellín has been hailed as a rare urban success story for neo-conservatism in South America. The singular progression of Escobar and Uribe’s hometown—cattle-trading post, industrial centre, drug-trafficking hub, neoliberal Latin Mecca.
A Brazilian Breakthrough
What made the greatest Brazilian novel of the nineteenth century, Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, a masterpiece of world literature? The strange fate of realism in an ex-colonial society, in which liberalism was a ruling ideology, modernity a universal ideal, and slavery still an everyday fact of life.
The Chequered Rainbow
As tensions mount on the eve of national elections in Bolivia, a study of the longest insurrectionary cycle of any Latin American country, stretching from the late eighteenth century to the present day. The explosive fusion of ethnic and class aspirations in the newest round of risings, overthrowing two presidents in as many years.
Taking Lula’s Measure
Contested by popular movements from Buenos Aires to La Paz, the neoliberal model’s fate in South America’s most populous country. Emir Sader presents a balance sheet of the Lula government as it approaches the final year of its mandate amid continuing social iniquities, corruption allegations and comfort for finance.
Nothingland—or Venezuela?
Reviled by Venezuela’s TV channels, survivor of a US-backed coup attempt and a two-month employers’ strike, Hugo Chávez has been given yet another popular mandate—to the ill-concealed dismay of the financial press. Eduardo Galeano’s miniature snapshot of a flourishing Latin American democracy.
The Duckbilled Platypus
What animal species does contemporary Brazil most resemble? The strange forms of a society that no longer enjoys the options of under-development, without acquiring the dynamics of globalized development, in the liveliest exploration to date of the possible meaning of Lula’s government.
Colombia: An Evil Hour
The longue durée of Uribe’s Colombia, from its origins in the mid-19th century, through the Violencia of the postwar years, to the coming of today’s guerrillas, narco-traffickers and paramilitaries. Conditions and prospects of the latest campaign to wipe out armed insurgency against Latin America’s oldest ruling order.
Collision in Venezuela
What has lain behind the massive social conflicts that have unfurled round the Chávez regime? The spurious and real reasons for the rampage of Venezuelan managers, media and middle class against the country’s elected President. Oil, land and urban rights as the stakes in a social war of colour and class.
'Considering Coldly ...'
Does Spanish American literature illustrate or overturn the idea that in the ‘world republic of letters’ economic and cultural relations between centre and periphery run parallel? A Peruvian assesses Franco Moretti’s conjectures (NLR 1), and springs some surprises about Beckett.
Chile, A Quarter of a Century on
“A quarter of a century has passed since the Chilean President Salvador Allende was overthrown and died a violent death, while still remaining loyal to his people and his country to the end. A us-supported military coup put an end to the revolutionary period that crowned a . . .” read more
Play It Again, or, Old-Time Cuban Music on the Screen
“A friend of mine, a Cuban film director, writes to me about visiting the Salzburg Festival. After enjoying operas by Berlioz and Mozart, he says, the big surprise was the Festival’s closing event, a concert by the Cuban old-timers La Vieja Trova Santiaguera, chosen by the Festival’s special . . .” read more
Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City
“Sometime during 1996, at the very latest, Latinos surpassed Blacks as the second largest ethno-racial group in New York City. (They long have been the largest census group in the Bronx.) There were no street celebrations in El Barrio or Washington Heights, nor did the mayor hold a . . .” read more
The Chilean Pension Fund Associations
“Chile’s system of privately managed pension funds, which has now grown to quite impressive global proportions, appears to be a technically astute—if not, of course, socially neutral—solution to the far-reaching crisis of state pensions. The man who originally devised it, José ‘Pepe’ Piñera, is the foremost of the . . .” read more
Siren/Hyphen; Or, the Maid Beguiled
“‘This female savage’, noted the missionary Jean-Baptiste Labat, in his Nouveau voyage aux îles de l’Amérique, ‘was, I believe, one of the oldest creatures in the world. It is said she was very beautiful at one time. . .’ He was describing a Carib known as Madame Ouvernard, . . .” read more
Sebastiao Salgado and Fine Art Photojournalism
“Black-and-white photographs of a vast pit, its sides cut into a giant’s stairway and scaled by crude ladders, its surface covered with figures, most bearing large sacks; scanning the space between foreground and distant background, the effect is dizzying—there must be thousands of these figures. The pictures are . . .” read more
Really Existing Democracy: Learning from Latin America in the Late 1990s
“The resurgence of democracy in Latin America in the last decade or so came as a surprise to many who saw the continent, if not the whole of the Third World, as producing conditions which favoured only the exercise of tyranny. Latin American democracy will indeed remain surprising . . .” read more
Latin America: The Resurgence of the Left
“The Left in Latin America is staging a major comeback. While most publicists, journalists, academics, government and World Bank officials either celebrate or bemoan the triumph of ‘neoliberalism’, opposition is growing which in time could challenge the dominance of the whole free-market power structure. As yet only loosely . . .” read more
Che Guevera and the Congo
“It’s Che Guevara time again in the pleasure gardens of the West, as publishers and television companies gear themselves up for the thirtieth anniversary of the guerrilla leader’s death in 1997. We’ve already had the early motorcycle diaries, published all over Europe in 1995, and no less than . . .” read more
Reflections on the Non-Revolution in Uruguay
“Even by the standards applied to Latin America, Uruguay is under-reported in the English-speaking world. If it is mentioned at all, it is in terms of the battle of the River Plate (the war movie, more often than the actual event), or the Tupamaros, an alliance of agrarian . . .” read more
Negotiating Caribbean Identities
“In this lecture I will address questions of Caribbean culture and identity. I want to suggest that such questions are not in any sense separate or removed from the problems of political mobilization, of cultural development, of economic development and so on. The more we know and see . . .” read more