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Latin America: The Next Transition

After neoliberalism and structural adjustment, followed by the long decade of the commodity boom and ‘pink tide’ governments: where now for Latin America? Impacts of the shifting fortunes of the Chinese economy and a US bent on ‘near-shoring’ for a region still trapped in the extractive logic of export dependency.

Mexico in Flux

Against the rightward trend of the Old World, countries in Latin America continue to favour governments of the left. The resounding mandate for Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico’s presidential election confirms Morena’s hegemony within the new party system. Where exactly on the political map should its project be placed?

Lula’s Return

An analysis of the class forces aligned on each side of Brazil’s 2022 electoral divide by one of the country’s leading social theorists. With Lula restored to the Planalto Palace—and pulling some surprises—André Singer delineates the hyper-trasformismo operating at the summits of state power and registers the darker overtones of January 8’s pastiche-riot in Brasília.

Colombia at the Crossroads

The victory of Gustavo Petro is a historic breakthrough in a country where independent popular forces have been systematically excluded from formal political representation for two centuries. What lies ahead?

A Brazilian Comi-Tragedy

A vivid account of Roberto Schwarz’s new play, Rainha Lira, staging the political turmoil of contemporary Brazil. Intricacies of class conflict and Caesarist reaction, bourgeois rejoicing and favela discontents, in a polyphonic epic that foretells the troubled conditions of Lula’s return.

The Battle for Chile’s Constitution

Following Chile’s resounding vote to reject the Pinochet-era constitution, the struggle to draft a replacement has split along popular and official lines. Legal theorist Camila Vergara describes how the autonomous energies of the neighbourhood cabildos have been pitted against the conservatism of the ruling bloc.

A New Intuition

Plots that stylize class conduct, literary structures imitating historical ones, formal fractures indexing historical impasses, literature as the discoverer of new knowledge: Roberto Schwarz’s studies of Machado de Assis as models for a distinctive Marxist criticism.

Struggles of the Roofless

Amid the debacle of Bolsonaro’s rule, Guilherme Boulos—coordinator of Brazil’s Sem Teto and PSOL presidential candidate—speaks to Mario Sergio Conti about the political crisis, barrio psychoanalysis, the balance sheet of the Lula–Dilma governments, the politics of impeachment and the militancy of practical experience.

Retrocession in Ecuador

Tony Wood on Thea Riofrancos, Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. Indigenous resistance to statist development as background to an electoral defeat of the left in the Andes.

Neo-Backwardness In Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Brazil's foremost cultural theorist considers parallels between the rise of Bolsonaro and the 1964 military coup. Is capital once again advancing its modernization programme with the support of the country’s most backward-looking elements? Paradoxes of politics and culture, from Machado to the present, via tropicalismo and Glauber Rocha.

Pandemonium in Brazil

Unravelling of the Bolsonaro presidency in the face of mounting opposition and a contagion threatening to wreak havoc on the favelas.

Snipers in the Kitchen

Amid ongoing political turbulence in Latin America, Juan Carlos Monedero mobilizes the resources of state theory, from Gramsci to Poulantzas, to provide a comparative critical analysis of the cycle of left governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Brazil.

Mesoamerican Pathways

Tony Wood on John Tutino, The Mexican Heartland. Historic struggles of central Mexico’s campesinos postulated as relay-switch for capitalism’s expansion in Latin America and beyond.

Marielle Franco: 1979–2018

Life and death of the Rio de Janeiro city councillor who battled the military lockdown of the favelas, in the context of the restoration to office of Brazil’s traditional ruling caste.

Thinking for Ourselves

Leading Cuban intellectual and militant of the revolutionary generation discusses his path through the 26 July Movement to Batista’s overthrow and founding Pensamiento Crítico, a beacon of critical Marxist thought throughout Latin America.

After the Take-Over

In the wake of Temer’s take-over, Brazil’s crisis viewed from the perspective of the favelas. Analysis of the gendered conditions in the peripheries—now under redoubled assault—and their potential for mobilization against the conservative wave.

Antonio Candido 1918–2017

Pioneer analyst of a Brazilian literary space, Candido surveyed Western cultural centres and their contending theories, not simply to measure up local experience, but to test them against it. Portrait of a gifted teacher and literary critic, subtle master of his country’s complex ex-colonial condition.

Social Theory from the South

Jeffery Webber on Maristella Svampa, Debates Latinoamericanos. Cartography of the continent’s social thought.

Sarmiento’s Masterpiece

Fiction, history or sociology, documentary or fabrication, the explosive rhetoric of Sarmiento’s classic was formative in Spanish American literary culture. Kristal examines the composition and reception of a unique work from Argentina.

Filtering Dissent

Hailed as organizational tools of the oppressed, social media have also emerged as powerful surveillance apparatuses, but could existing power structures be reinforced even by the very algorithms they use to order data? A history of algorithmic filtering and a case study of its role in the land struggles of Brazil’s Guarani and Kaiowá peoples.

Venezuela After Chávez

As Nicolás Maduro clings on to the presidency, a leading analyst discusses the crumbling of Chavista hegemony and a revival of the right amid collapsing oil revenues, a malfunctioning economy, street protests, and the long-term corruption of state structures.

Green Development?

Jeffery Webber on Thomas Miller Klubock, La Frontera. Social and environmental history of enclosure and resistance in southern Chile.

Feminism and Neoliberalism in Latin America

Verónica Schild tests Nancy Fraser’s hypothesis of an elective affinity between feminism and neoliberalism against the material and cultural realities of Latin America. Shifting meanings of liberationist strategies for women’s autonomy and popular pedagogy in an epoch of free-market economics and NGOization.

The Battle of Bogotá

In a high-stakes election, South America’s most ruthless recent embodiment of reaction, Álvaro Uribe, lost his bid to install a minion in the presidential palace and pursue the extermination of guerrilla forces in Colombia. Mauricio Velásquez analyses the electoral victory of Uribe’s one-time confederate Santos, and the prospects for civil peace in its wake.

Unexpected Cuba

Alone among the ex-Comecon countries, Cuba has forged a distinctive path since 1991—not transition to capitalism but careful adjustment to external change, safeguarding its gains in social provision and national sovereignty. Emily Morris challenges the view that Havana will have to embrace the market and submit to foreign capital if it is to survive.

Rebellion in Brazil

A sociological portrait of the protests that gripped the country in June 2013. Crossovers of class, ideology and generation on the major cities’ streets, as portents of deeper shifts under way.

The Quinoa Hack

Staple of Andean diets long before the Spanish conquest, quinoa has lately become a global health-food commodity—with dubious results for Bolivia’s campesinos. Josh Berson maps out the limits of food justice pursued through consumerist techno-fixes.

21st Century Welfare

Latin America as laboratory for conditional cash transfers, fast becoming the hegemonic social-protection paradigm for the Global South. In a comparative survey, Lena Lavinas reveals the CCT model as a strategy for the financialization—not abolition—of poverty.

The Reckoning

Unlike its neighbours, Brazil has yet to confront the crimes of its military dictatorship. As a Truth Commission sifts evidence of torture, killings and disappearances—many of whose survivors are now in high office—what will be the upshot of a belated accounting with the past?

Rise of the Image-Makers

A leading journalist considers the transformations in Brazil’s media sphere in the post-dictatorship period. Reporters turned marketeers, policies become products, money and power ever more tightly interwoven, within a landscape reformatted by new technologies.

Ecuador’s Path

The Andean republic’s president discusses his formation and his government’s record in office, across a range of spheres: economy, environment, education, freedom of the press. How would he respond to critics, and what are the main challenges the country faces?

Political Iridescence

Brazil’s foremost literary critic engages with the autobiography of Caetano Veloso, its best-known musician. The dense weave of relations between 60s counter-culture and left movements, and its rending by years of dictatorship and capitalist triumph.

Ways of Listening in a Visual Medium

Within a mediasphere dominated by telenovelas and spectacularized news, what role for documentary film? Recent examples of a critical, anthropologically inflected cinema from Brazil.

Potemkin Republics

In his final essay, the late Bolívar Echeverría considers the bicentennial history of Latin America’s oligarchic states. While elites stage empty rituals of affirmation, might the continent’s marginalized majorities be reimagining national identity?

Silver and Lead

Tony Wood on Anabel Hernández, Los señores del narco. The structures of political complicity and corruption that have fuelled Mexico’s drug wars.

Scars and Faultlines

The art of Doris Salcedo as test-case for the complex interaction of aesthetics and commerce. For works aiming to commemorate lives lost in Colombia’s civil wars, what are the consequences—economic, ethical, critical—of integration into the circuits of both memory and market?

Continental Laboratory

Michael Löwy on Emir Sader, A Nova Toupeira. Cycles of revolution in Latin America—laboratory both of neoliberalism and its challengers.

The Old Mole’s Path

Gregory Elliott on Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World. Britain’s foremost Communist historian surveys the Marxist tradition. Implementation, legacies and prospects of the Moor’s ideas.

'What exists cannot be true'

The Argentinian historian of the Mexican Revolution recalls his life as a roving agitator. Worlds of rebel workers, from the barrios of Buenos Aires to the Bolivian altiplano and Guatemalan jungle, Lecumberri Prison to the streets of Paris and Rome.

The Philosopher’s Island

Anders Stephanson on Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. Did the Weltgeist drop anchor in revolutionary Saint-Domingue?

Latin America Tamed?

Tony Wood on Michael Reid, Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul. A revised neoliberal gospel for the region, courtesy of the Economist.

Brecht’s Relevance: Highs and Lows

In what ways does Brecht’s drama—and the world-transforming impulse behind his strategies of defamiliarization—speak to times and places other than his own? Ups and downs of his resonance in Brazil and beyond, shadowing the movements of history’s leading edge.

Asset-Stripping the State

Within the global wave of privatizations, those enacted in Latin America stand out for their breathtaking speed and scale. Medeiros contends that the principal motivation was not economic but political, driven by new capitalist coalitions emerging from the 1980s debt crisis.

The End of Kirchnerism

The turbulent beginning of the Fernández presidency marks the end of Kirchnerism in Argentina. Maristella Svampa surveys its record, noting ruptures and continuities—both rhetorical and substantial—with its predecessors in economic policy, social indicators and modes of rule.

The Weakest Link? Neoliberalism in Latin America

The continent that once served as laboratory for the Washington Consensus now represents the most substantial challenge to its prescriptions. A survey of left strategies, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City, and prospects for counter-hegemonic regional integration.

A Symptom Called Managua

Nicaragua’s capital as microcosm for the country’s transformation since the 1970s: shattered by earthquake and the depredations of the Somoza dictatorship, briefly lifted by Sandinista urban reconstruction, remade in the 1990s by narco-traffickers and the returning Miami emigration.

Competing Readings

Roberto Schwarz discusses the cultural-political import of rival interpretations of Machado de Assis, within the critical space of world literature. Local versus international, specific versus universal, entangled within the ironies and dizzying narrative disjunctures of a Brazilian master.

Undocumented in America

Has the mass immigrants’ rights campaign of 2006 been asphyxiated by the Democrats’ embrace? Two Los Angeles activists recount the movement’s progress since the Chicano struggles of the 60s, and current defence of America’s sans-papiers from state and vigilante attacks.

Is Pinochet Dead?

Central planks of the Chilean dictator’s state have been left untouched by successive elected governments. Tracking recent student and labour protests, Manuel Riesco asks whether the ‘Transition’ will now finally follow Pinochet into the grave.

In the Atlantic Mirror

Alistair Hennessy on J H Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 1492–1830. Conquistadors and indigenous peoples, colonists and slaves populate a continental canvas, in a magisterial comparison of British and Spanish imperialism in the Americas.