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Roots of the Postmodern Rebellion in Chiapas
“The Indian uprising in Chiapas that burst upon the world scene in January is a postmodern political movement. The rebellion is an attempt to move beyond the politics of modernity, be they of the Salinas de Gortari government or of past national liberation movements. And even more fundamentally, . . .” read more
Love and Death in Brazil
“It is easy, indeed a cliché, to read Brazilian politics as a bad telenovela—a dramatic and vulgar soap opera about the new democracy in which the rich and powerful engage in intrigues and romances, corruptions and duplicities all leading to an uplifting conclusion by the last episode. The . . .” read more
Post-Populist Argentina
“Falling dictatorships and troubled transitions to democracy in Latin America have dominated the agenda of social scientists of the region. These regime changes have largely been appraised within conjunctures of suddenly shifting political balances and economic crises. Such an approach seems all the more valid in light of . . .” read more
Democracy in Mexico: Will the First Be Last?
“Against the trend of democratization that is establishing itself in Latin America, complete with the accompanying debacle of its various state-party regimes, Mexico alone continues to postpone the transition to a legitimate and representative polity. The party dictatorship described as ‘perfect’ by Mario Vargas Llosa, the former candidate . . .” read more
Brazil: The Long March to the New Republic
“At the end of 1989, Brazilians voted in direct presidential elections for the first time since the military seized power in 1964. After an inconclusive first round, victory in the second went to Fernando Collor, an independent conservative, by a small margin over Luis Inacio da Silva, universally . . .” read more
Reflections on the Nicaraguan Election
“Following the defeat of the fsln in the Nicaraguan elections of February 1990, the state of that country’s politics remains unclear and unpredictable. Although there can be no doubt that Violeta Chamorro’s victory represents a major setback not only for the Sandinistas but also for the Latin . . .” read more
Murder in Guatemala
“This is a murder story. P.D. James once commented that the satisfaction of murder stories comes not only from the intellectual exercise but from the value given to individual human life, even after death: the dead person matters, justice is seen to be done. My story is set . . .” read more
Revolutionary Unevenness in Central America
“James Dunkerley’s Power in the Isthmus ranks together with recent books by Weeks and Bulmer-Thomas as one of the best English-language works on Central America. He presents a broad, successful and systematic analysis of a huge bibliography, especially of materials published in the region, and aptly combines the . . .” read more
Corporate Reconstruction and Business Unionism: The Lessons of Caterpillar and Ford
“Technological determinism has recently emerged as the favoured theme of those who seek to challenge the centrality of class politics within the British labour movement. This somewhat uncharacteristic perspective is used to argue that new production technologies are directly creating a new political environment. Production processes, it is . . .” read more
The Panorama of Brazilian Feminism
“The women’s movement in Brazil—of which feminism is one aspect—has reflected the condition of women themselves, whose unity as a gender is cut across by other fundamental references (ethnicity, social class, etc.) and has above all been cross-class in character. Its heterogeneous composition stems directly from specific features . . .” read more
The Abortive Abertura: South Korea in the Light of Latin American Experience
“I wish in this essay to peer through the Latin American looking glass, or abertura, to see what light may be shed on the ongoing struggle to democratize the South Korean political system. In Latin America the richest literature on the problems and prospects of democratization emerged along . . .” read more
Introduction to Hecht Interview
“Over the past quarter-century huge areas of Amazonian forest have been reduced to ashes. The conquest of the Amazon resembles more a scorched earth policy than development. The rate of deforestation has been close to exponential, and it has all been for nothing.” read more
The New Class Basis of Chilean Politics
“In the plebiscite held in Chile in October 1988, the attention of the international press focused overwhelmingly on the exposed position of the ageing head of the dictatorship, Augusto Pinochet. For the new power bloc, however, comprising the armed forces, the capitalist class, bankers and technocrats, the primary . . .” read more
Cuba and Southern Africa
“After eight months of talks in Geneva between Angola, Cuba, South Africa and the United States, 1988 is drawing to a close with the distinct possibility that Pretoria may have been forced to end ten years of procrastination and redraw its regional strategy in such a way as . . .” read more
Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by Elimination
“We Brazilians and other Latin Americans constantly experience the artificial, inauthentic and imitative nature of our cultural life. An essential element in our critical thought since independence, it has been variously interpreted from romantic, naturalist, modernist, right-wing, left-wing, cosmopolitan and nationalist points of view, so we may suppose . . .” read more
The Workers' Party in Brazil
“The birth of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—pt) has been a singular event of the eighties, not just in Brazil or even in Latin America as a whole. For it is a striking fact that very few new working-class parties have been founded anywhere in the . . .” read more
Introduction to Borge
“The interview was conducted at the Comandante’s residence, over breakfast, with the help of an old friend, Ileana Rodriguez, and a new friend, Daniel Alegría, whose stories—instructively different from the life trajectories of North American intellectuals—I hope to tell in another place. It was not a particularly propitious . . .” read more
Tomas Borge on the Nicaraguan Revolution
“The questions I want to ask basically concern the originality of the Nicaraguan revolution, which is very different from the Cuban revolution but in ways that are not altogether clear. We know that you don’t use the word socialism but the word Sandinism, but we don’t know . . .” read more
Uruguay after the Dictatorship
“At 9.00pm on the evening of 22 December, the noise of a caceroleo swept once more over the city of Montevideo. This is one of a number of ritual protests employed by Uruguayans during the savage military dictatorship which lasted between 1973 and 1985. In houses, on balconies . . .” read more
Mario Vargas Llosa: Parables and Deceits
“Some time ago I urged a friend from Lima to read Vargas Llosa’s Historia de Mayta—clumsily entitled The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta in the English edition—so that he might give me an insider’s opinion of the book’s treatment of the Peruvian revolutionary left over the last thirty . . .” read more
Resurgent Democracy: Threat and Promise
“In ‘ “Resurgent Democracy”: Rhetoric and Reality’, nlr 154, Edward Herman and James Petras condemn us support for new democracies in South and Central America as hypocritical and opportunist. They also point out the wilful confusion involved in deliberately associating genuine democratization in South America with a . . .” read more
The Crisis in Bolivia
“On the morning of Thursday, 29 August 1985 the government of Bolivia presented Supreme Decree no. 21060 to the nation. The 166 articles of this charter for a ‘New Economic Policy’ constituted the most radical shift in planning and policy in the country for over thirty years. Wages . . .” read more
'Resurgent Democracy': Rhetoric and Reality
“During the past year Reagan administration officials and the us press have pointed with frequency and enthusiasm to a resurgence of democracy in Latin America. Secretary of State George Schultz, for example, has spoken of ‘more people voting in more elections in more countries than ever before . . .” read more
Art and Dialectic in the Work of Wilson Harris
“In his first major work, Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss made the point that the anthropologist had become the ‘hero’, shaman and priest of the secular world, his expeditions into the savage hinterland a modern-day substitute for the primitive rite of passage into manhood, power and prestige within the . . .” read more
Peru: Capitalist Democracy in Transition
“The writing of this article greatly benefited from discussions with numerous friends and colleagues in Peru: An¢al Quijano, Rodrigo Montoya, Orlando Plaza, Otto Flores, Helan Jaworski, José Matos Mar, Ricardo Letts, Carlos Urrut¡, Victor Villanueva, Edmundo Murragara, Alberto Grana, Jaime Giannella, Hugo Blanco, Armando Pillado, Baltazar Caravedo, Carlos . . .” read more
Cold War in the Caribbean
“Amidst the general worsening of East-West relations, and the sharply antagonistic policy of the usa towards the Third World, a new political situation has emerged in the Caribbean. The region itself has a population of around twenty-nine millions, and comprises thirteen independent island states, numerous European and . . .” read more
Central America: Crisis in the Backyard
“The five republics south of Mexico seemed until the late 1970s the most secure region of domination for a us imperial system in retreat after the trauma of South East Asia. Many saw Nicaragua’s 1979 Sandinista victory over the Somoza dynasty as merely vindication of theories of . . .” read more
Latin America: Between Hobbes and Friedman
“In recent years a major preoccupation of everyone interested in Latin America has been the extreme fragility of its democratic institutions. This incurable weakness has even made itself felt in Chile and Uruguay—countries once celebrated as living proof of bourgeois democracy’s viability in peripheral capitalist societies. From a . . .” read more
Class Struggles in El Salvador
“The military coup in El Salvador of October 15th 1979 provoked a new and remarkable twist in the bloody social conflicts which have wracked this Central American republic. The former dictator, General Humberto Romero, was replaced by a junta which proclaimed the need for sweeping reforms and which . . .” read more
The Fall of Somoza
“The first decades of the 20th century saw the transformation of Nicaragua into one of the so-called banana republics of Central America; though it was not so much banana companies who took charge of the country’s political and economic destiny, as United States wood and mining interests. As . . .” read more
The Travail of Latin American Democracy
“The shifting complexity of Latin American politics baffles the observer, frustrates the theoretician and challenges both the committed endurance and the tactical subtlety of the revolutionary. Continent of military coups and dictators—but also of (male) bourgeois democracies as old or even older than some West European or North . . .” read more
Sandinistas Seize the National Palace!
“The plan seemed too simple to be sane: take the National Palace in Managua in broad daylight with a force of only twenty-six, and hold the members of the House of Deputies hostage in exchange for the release of all political prisoners. The National Palace, a tasteless old . . .” read more
Operation Carlota
“The United States first made known the presence of Cuban troops in Angola in an official statement of 24 November 1975. Three months later, during a short visit to Venezuela, Henry Kissinger remarked in private to President Carlos Andrés Pérez: ‘Our intelligence services have grown so bad that . . .” read more
Two Years of Popular Unity in Chile: A Balance Sheet
“The Allende government, representing the Unidad Popular coalition in Chile, has now been in office for over two years. It is time enough to make an assessment of it. The stated goals of the up were to end the monopoly structure of the Chilean economy, break Chilean . . .” read more
Dependent Capitalist Development in Latin America
“The theory of imperialist capitalism, as is well known, has so far attained its most significant treatment in Lenin’s works. This is not only because Lenin attempts to explain transformations of the capitalist economies that occurred during the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade . . .” read more
Introduction to Zavaleta
“The following article is an analysis of the political forces and strategies at work in Bolivia in the period prior to the overthrow of the nationalist General Torres by the rightist General Banzer in August of last year. A remarkable feature of the Torres period was the emergence . . .” read more
Bolivia: Military Nationalism and the Popular Assembly
“On 7 October 1970 President Ovando was overthrown by a triumvirate representing the three branches of the armed forces, headed by General Miranda. Then, in a remarkable political action, General Torres proclaimed resistance to this junta, called on the workers, and made himself President. The triumvirate managed to . . .” read more
Building a Popular Army in Argentina
“In June 1966 General Juan Carlos Onganía seized supreme power in Argentina. During the inaugural ceremony Cardinal Caggiano gave his blessing to the military dictator. In the subsequent months General Onganía proceeded to send the troops into the universities purging all leftist, progressive and/or reformist professors. Though Onganía . . .” read more
Presentation of Mariategui
“The admiration expressed for Mariátegui in Latin America and beyond is not matched by a real study of his writings. Since his death in 1930, many have invoked his authority though in most cases illegitimately. He has been claimed as the source of various brands of sui generis . . .” read more
The Anti-Imperialist Perspective
“To what extent can the situation of the Latin American republics be likened to that of other semi-colonial nations? Their economic position is undoubtedly semi-colonial; and as native capitalism expands and imperialist penetration grows as a consequence, the semi-colonial characteristics of their economies will be clearly emphasized. The . . .” read more
Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America
“Debate on the Left in the last decade over the origins and present nature of Latin American societies has focused on the problem of whether they should be seen as feudal or capitalist in character. A complex and lengthy discussion has taken place whose importance is not diminished . . .” read more
Uruguay’s Urban Guerrillas
“Among the many protests staged by Latin Americans to demonstrate their opposition to us policies during Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s 1969 visit was the destruction of the General Motors offices in Montevideo, Uruguay, by a commando of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (mln), also known as the . . .” read more
Argentina--Imperialist Strategy and the May Crisis
“Argentina is probably the most industrialized major country in the so-called Third World. Well over 60 per cent of its population live in towns, a proportion higher than that in many European countries. The urban and rural proletariat, organized in solidly developed trade unions, comprises two-thirds of its . . .” read more