Book Review: Derrick Hindery, From Enron to Evo: Pipeline Politics, Global Environmentalism, and Indigenous Rights in Bolivia (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2013)

Book Reviews

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. (). doi:./SX

Marina Zuloaga Rada, La conquista negociada: guarangas, autoridades locales eimperio en Huaylas, Perú (–) (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos/Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, ), pp. , pb.

This innovative research by Marina Zuloaga achieves two important goals. Firstly, itpresents an impressive and detailed history of Huaylas during the decades followingthe Spanish Conquest of Peru. It thus falls into the distinguished tradition of historiesof the Peruvian regions during the Conquest era: Karen Spalding’sHuarochirí for thatprovince, Steve Stern’s Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest forHuamanga, Susan Ramírez’s The World Turned Upside Down for northern Peru, andso on. Successive chapters discuss the implications for Huaylas of the key stages withinthis history: the Conquest itself in the s, the ‘Spanish Civil Wars’ that followedthrough to the early s, and the package of major reforms that reached their cul-mination in the s during the administration of viceroy Francisco de Toledo; thesereforms included the introduction of corregidor provincial magistracies, and above allthe sweeping programme of resettlement of the native population into new, Spanish-style towns or reducciones. The subtitle of the book points to an emphasis on localauthorities and the imperial state in Huaylas, and indeed, the primary focus is uponthe three major actors among these local authorities: native chiefs or caciques; the cor-regidores themselves, as the main representatives of the state at the provincial level; andthe clergy, whether the priests who lived among native communities in Huaylas, or theChurch hierarchy, presided over at this time by such formidable figures as Archbishop(afterwards Saint) Toribio de Mogrovejo.For this history of early colonial Huaylas alone, La conquista negociada would merit

a place in Americanist libraries – but it is for its second and most original purpose thatthe book will surely have lasting influence. Its originality lies in its focus on the guar-anga, a socio-political institution I cannot be alone in having come across in archivaldocuments without any full understanding or grasp of its significance. Zuloaga empha-sises that guarangas were the key unit of self-organisation of the native populationacross the north and centre of the Peruvian Andes. They were intermediatebetween the higher provincial level and the lower level of the ayllus, or pachacas;thus, ‘guaranga’ stands for one thousand (tributaries), ‘pachaca’ for one hundred.But they were intermediate between these levels only in the formal sense: the key argu-ment of the book is that in reality, these were the most important units of the nativepopulation, both deep into prehistory, under Inca rule, and then throughout the firstdecades of Spanish colonisation. Thus, guarangas were ‘the most significant organis-ations when it comes to understanding the political dynamic in the north-centralAndes’ (p. ); ‘they constituted the fundamental centre of power, the hardnucleus within the local and regional complex of power’ (p. ).This argument is most persuasive in the book’s demonstration of the striking irre-

ducibility of guarangas throughout the first turbulent decades of Spanish rule in Peru.Thus, in the immediate aftermath of the Conquest, the Inca system of provinces was

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. , – © Cambridge University Press

disarticulated by the Spaniards (it would be resurrected from the s in the systemof corregimientos). But the smaller units on which the new encomienda grants of nativelabour to powerful Spaniards were based were the guarangas. Thus, the guarangas ofHuaylas were parcelled out originally into two encomiendas: Francisco Pizarro himselftook the six guarangas of the north for his own encomienda, while the six in the souththen became subdivided among a growing number of encomiendas. But these alwaysrespected the guaranga structure itself and its head, the cacique de guaranga. TheSpanish subdivision of the Inca provinces was thus a ‘natural’ one in terms of localorganisation, even representing to some extent a return to the status quo ante theIncas. Guarangas became the basic constituent unit of encomiendas, with tributeallotted by guaranga rather than across the encomienda as a whole. Indeed, as the enco-mienda itself declined along with the native population, Zuloaga demonstrates howthe control of community resources by caciques de guarangas, and their other attri-butes, meant that they enjoyed relative autonomy and considerable wealth throughoutthe period, at least until the s and the introduction of the corregimientos.The status of guarangas as the ‘hard nucleus’ of power relations at the local level was

even apparent during the profound changes brought about by Toledo’s programmeof reducciones. The resettlement programme, needless to say, had an enormous andpermanent impact on native settlement patterns and lifeways in Huaylas. The simul-taneous institutionalisation of corregimientos also brought a major disempowermentof the caciques. Even so, reducción (in which caciques themselves necessarily played acentral role) also respected the basic structure of the guarangas of the region. Thus,reducción took place almost entirely with reference to the guaranga structure: reduc-ciones took the guarangas for granted and only rarely disregarded them outright. Thepopulation of some guarangas, such as Guambo, was reduced into just one town (inthis case Yungay). In other cases, the people of two guarangas were reduced intojust a single town (thus, Carhuaz was founded from the population of the two guar-angas of Ecash and Rupa). In other cases, the concentration of population was lesssevere: the people of the guaranga of Ichochonta were reduced into seven new settle-ments, with Recuay designated the head town or cabecera. Where it did not involve thereduction of the population of two guarangas into one town, cross-cutting was limitedto the case of Pampas, which became a ‘mixed’ settlement with population from itsown guaranga of Ichopomas and from that of Allaucapomas. Even within such settle-ments (Huaraz is a documented example here), however, the guaranga populationremained strictly separate, as must necessarily be the case: both tribute assessmentsand the working of lands continued to be allotted by guaranga, and each guarangaretained its own cacique.This is an original and important monograph.

ADRIAN PEARCEEl Colegio de México


Emily Berquist Soule, The Bishop’s Utopia: Envisioning Improvement in ColonialPeru (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), pp. , $.;£., hb.

Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón was doubtless among the most striking figures oflate colonial Peru. A zealous polymath, his irrepressible interests and reformist zealduring a long decade as Bishop of Trujillo (–) are brought to light more

Book Reviews

evocatively than ever before in this highly readable and carefully researched book.Martínez Compañón’s curiosity and investigations were so wide-ranging that onthe one hand he can be described as the ‘founder of Peruvian archaeology’ (for hissurvey of the Chimú ruins at Chan Chan), and on the other he has provided linguistswith prime source material for eight native languages spoken in the bishopric of his day(all are now extinct bar a few inland pockets of Quechua). He undertook an epic visitapastoral of his jurisdiction lasting almost three years (it should be pointed out that theBishopric of Trujillo was as large as the entire United Kingdom today, includingScotland), and both during and after this tour he fizzed with plans and projects.These included, to list but a few: the establishment of two colleges for native childrenin Trujillo; the promotion of village schools throughout the region; the foundation ofnumerous new towns, and most impressively of ‘Los Dos Carlos’, to house thelabourers at the mines of Hualgayoc near Cajamarca; and the introduction of extensiverights for the Hualgayoc workers, from social welfare to inheritance rights, honorifictitles and payment in cash instead of kind.Most famously, Martínez Compañón oversaw encyclopaedic research into the

people, history, resources, fauna and flora of Trujillo. This research was to accompanya great written account that was never completed, but it nevertheless yielded wooden crates filled with animal, vegetable and mineral specimens, along with antiqui-ties. It also produced almost , watercolours, prepared by local artists and boundinto eight volumes, now held in the Royal Palace library in Madrid. These illustrations,in a vernacular style, cover the full spectrum of human activity and of animal and plantlife, and provide a major focus of Emily Berquist’s account. The book as a whole – andperhaps especially its sixth chapter, on the botanical illustrations – reads as a cry for theimportance of the watercolours, which have surely never been scrutinised with suchcare. Berquist’s research into Martínez Compañón’s huge collections, and in particu-lar the role of locals (including native people) in their preparation, aspires to make amost novel contribution to the history of botany and the natural sciences at this time.Her careful cross-referencing of the written index to the botanical specimens with thecorresponding images yields wonderful finds; these include identification of a leishma-niasis-carrying fly and its victim, a century before insect-vectored diseases were prop-erly understood by modern science (pp. –). (By contrast, the otherwise persuasiveinterpretation of a further scene as representing consumption of hallucinogenic aya-huasca is marred by an untenable reconstruction of the native-language name of thevision snake depicted: pp. –.) Berquist suggests that by surveying, sampling anddepicting the natural riches of Trujillo, and highlighting the achievements andfomenting the qualities of its native people, Martínez Compañón sought to contributeto the prosperity and civility of the empire. A major argument of the book, in fact, isthat the Bishop thus sought to counter the European tradition that denigratedAmericans and their environment as degraded or degenerate.The term ‘utopia’ looms large over this book; indeed, throughout extensive sec-

tions, it features on virtually every page. It is a complex term, and this reviewerfound it difficult to pin down the diverse activities of Martínez Compañón amongcompeting potential meanings. He was a clergyman, of course, and one is mindedto recall the utopian religious of the sixteenth century (Vasco de Quiroga andBartolomé de las Casas are discussed in the introduction). He was ‘utopian’ in themodern understanding that might be summarised as ‘displaying hopeless or impracti-cal idealism’, since very few of his plans and schemes ever came to fruition. Thus, theIndian colleges in Trujillo never opened, only a small minority of the village schools

Book Reviews

and new towns endured, and both ‘Los Dos Carlos’ and the Bishop’s broader propo-sals for the Hualgayoc mines remained dead letters. Even the contents of MartínezCompañón’s meticulously assembled crates of specimens were mostly dispersed andlost after they arrived in Spain. The Bishop’s utopia, then, remained largely withinhis own head, or in his volumes of illustrations (and there is certainly somethingutopian in the scenes of human harmony and industry portrayed there). But aboveall, Martínez Compañón emerges from this account as very much the Enlightenedreformer, an exemplary product of the late Bourbon age (Berquist hints that the writ-ings of the Spanish minister of the s, José del Campillo y Cossío, were particularlyinfluential here). His plan for ‘Los Dos Carlos’, for example, is described as ‘a classicliberal recipe for promoting individual initiative and free commerce’ (p. ). Theterms ‘reform’ and ‘improvement’ feature almost as frequently as does ‘utopia’, infact, and Martínez Compañón displays the diagnostic late Bourbon concerns forresearching, recording, rationalising and rendering useful to the crown and thepublic good the resources of Trujillo, whether human or otherwise. Indeed,Berquist’s book is distinguished from earlier scholarship on the Bishop precisely byits focus on his ‘secular reform programme’. In these contexts, it seems possiblethat a repeated emphasis on utopia actually gives a slightly misleading sense of thenature of his endeavours.The book is embellished with full-colour plates. It will be of real interest to a

wide range of scholars: of the Enlightenment and science in the Spanish Atlanticworld, of the late Bourbon viceroyalty of Peru, and of course of the northernregion of Peru, where Martínez Compañón spent what he referred to as his ‘headiestdays’.

ADR IAN PEARCEEl Colegio de México


Roberto Gargarella, Latin American Constitutionalism, –: The EngineRoom of the Constitution (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,), pp. xi + , $.; £., hb.

In this book Roberto Gargarella provides a comparative view of the history of LatinAmerican constitutionalism from independence to the present. In line with his pre-vious work The Legal Foundations of Inequality: Constitutionalism in the Americas,– (Cambridge University Press, ), Gargarella contends that historicallythere were three models of constitutionalism in the region: liberal, conservative andradical. In this new book he continues his analysis until the last wave of constitution-alism at the end of the twentieth century. Gargarella claims that in the last part of thenineteenth century a pact existed between liberals and conservatives that enshrined‘limited political liberties and ample civic (economic) liberties’. To a great extent,that pact still holds today. There were, according to the author, two waves of signifi-cant reforms in the twentieth century: the inclusion of social rights in the first half ofthe century, and later, in the last decades, the adoption of multicultural rights. Theproblem with these expansions, Gargarella claims, is that such reforms were concen-trated in the ‘rights’ section of the constitution and left the organic part (the‘engine of the constitution’) virtually untouched. This inconsistency rendered manyof the progressive reforms ineffective. For Gargarella the main problem of theregion since independence has been social and political inequality and a presidential

Book Reviews

constitutional tradition. The book can be read, in part, as an egalitarian critique of theconstitutional tradition in Latin America.The book is an ambitious work and there is much to commend the author for. It

provides a rich and controversial account of the development of constitutionalism inseveral countries. Yet the flaws of the book are as important as its virtues, if not moreso. There are two significant problems. The first concerns the scope of the analysis:such an ambitious undertaking would have required a much deeper and sounderknowledge of the history of the different Latin American countries than Gargarellacommands. Often his facts (historical and contemporary) are wrong; this is not anew criticism, since his earlier book was not well received by many historians, particu-larly those based in Latin America. For example, Catherine Andrews asserted that‘Gargarella’s work has a number of shortcomings, which severely undermine its credi-bility. In the first place, his analysis shows little or no historical awareness … [T]hequality of Gargarella’s research is far from uniform’ (Estudios de Historia Modernay Contemporánea de México, (July–Dec. ), pp. –). It is evident fromthis book that Gargarella is not well acquainted with recent developments in the lit-erature, let alone primary sources. Another criticism is that the three ‘models’ (par-ticularly the ‘radical’ one) have a flimsy historical grounding, as several historianshave pointed out. There is a pervasive lack of proportion throughout the book, andthe impact and significance of the examples Gargarella discusses seem overblown;hence, the importance of radicalism is magnified. Some figures are exaggerated whileothers are minimised without due explanation – for instance, the book ignores thedifferent understandings of the separation of powers that existed in Mexico and else-where. ‘Currents’ of thought are created with reference to one or two authors, andauthors are used as if their ideas had not changed in the course of their lives; the writ-ings of Mora, Alamán and Rabasa, for example, are taken out of historical context.From Gargarella’s account one would not know that there were important differencesin the evolution of ideas during the first years of independence. Contrary to whatthis account suggests, there was no simultaneity between political ideas in LatinAmerica, and the way in which such ideas evolved is a story that this book does nottell. A harsh reviewer, Roberto Breña, concluded that Gargarella’s previous bookdid not help the reader to know ‘more or better about the political and intellectualhistory’ of Latin America or of the United States during the first decades after inde-pendence (Política y Gobierno, : (), pp. –). Yet Gargarella has not paidmuch attention to these critiques, and he repeats the same historical account in thisnew book. This is not a minor flaw, since half of the book is devoted to historicalanalysis.Political scientists will have similar reservations about several of Gargarella’s main

arguments. Throughout the book, the author makes weighty empirical assertions: heclaims that constitutional ‘grafts’ between different models ‘failed’, for example,yet he provides no empirical evidence to support this claim. The contention thatthroughout the region presidentialism became stronger almost everywhere ischallenged by recent and not-so-recent scholarship, such as Gabriel Negretto’sMaking Constitutions: Presidents, Parties and Institutional Choice in Latin America(Cambridge University Press, ). The shifting balance of power between executivesand legislative assemblies in the countries of the region has been a more complex affairthan the author claims, and defies a simple explanation. Gargarella is well aware of thisposition but does not offer empirical evidence to challenge it. He argues that suchstudies start from mistaken assumptions and that they do not account for the

Book Reviews

dynamic aspect of the constitutions (p. ). Yet, empirical studies cannot be rebuttedsolely on the basis of constitutional theory.The second problem of the book is its ideological bias. The book provides a rigid

and doctrinal reading of constitutionalism, and it thus obscures rather than enlightensthe phenomenon. Gargarella’s neat ideological scheme might work in the realm ofanalytical ideas but it fails in explaining the messy history of constitution making,and unmaking, in the region. The historical record is made to fit a clean-cut ideologicalscheme, and in order to do so, Gargarella magnifies and minimises authors and trends.The failures of interpretation of this understanding of constitutionalism are signifi-cant. For instance, Gargarella does not see that the problem with Venezuela duringthe Chávez era was not that it had a ‘hyperpresidential’ constitution, but that theregime had become authoritarian. It is very telling that Gargarella omits from hisaccount one of the most remarkable traits of early constitutionalism in LatinAmerica: the naive belief that constitutions by themselves would change reality,almost as an act of magic. Alas, even the ‘engine room’ of the constitution can be ima-gined as a magical box.

JOSÉ ANTONIO AGUILAR R IVERACIDE, Mexico


Gilbert M. Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution:Social Upheaval and the Challenge of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century(Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, ), pp. x + ,£., £. pb.

To tell the story of the Mexican Revolution in one volume represents quite a challenge.The revolution was sprawling and chaotic, worked differently in different places, andlacked a clear ideology. It started neatly enough in , but when it unravelled isharder to say. It also spawned one of the largest and most sophisticated historiogra-phies in Latin America. The authors of Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution are cer-tainly well placed to attempt a synthesis. Buchenau has published useful monographson Mexico’s relations with Central America and Mexico City’s German immigrants,edited a collection of new studies of provincial governors and written scholarly biogra-phies of two key Sonoran characters in the revolutionary drama: Plutarco Elías Callesand Alvaro Obregón. Joseph has published foundational works on revolutionaryYucatán, trained a generation of doctoral students in Mexican history and edited the-matic collections that populate the footnotes of countless studies and have helpeddefine the field. Drawing on this previous work and a lot more besides, the authorshave produced an accessible, wide-ranging and historiographically engaged survey ofthe revolution’s causes, process and very long aftermath.The chapters strike a good balance between generality and detail. Chapter briskly

introduces key questions and debates, and discusses how waves of regional, gender andtransnational history have contributed to the field. Chapter provides an overview ofthe Porfiriato, discussing the regime’s debt to earlier liberal (and French) projects ofmodernisation, and the long- and short-term causes of its demise. Chapters to rep-resent the core of the story, covering the period from to , and here the stylebecomes more detailed and narrative. Combining biographical sketches of key figureswith the socio-political and military context, the chapters describe the emergenceof Maderismo and its well-documented weaknesses; the struggles of different

Book Reviews

revolutionary factions against Victoriano Huerta and then among themselves;Sonoran attempts at state- and nation-building; and Cardenista social reform, oilexpropriation and party corporatism, along with the conservative resistance they eli-cited. Subsequent chapters return to broader brush strokes. Chapter covers the domi-nant party’s drift rightwards and apparent peak of control and stability from to. Chapter brings the story up to , and emphasises the lingering presence ofrevolutionary ideals – not least among the neo-Zapatistas of Chiapas – even as succes-sive administrations dismantled land reform, labour protections and economic nation-alism. A brief conclusion describes continuing struggles over the meaning of therevolution during the centennial commemorations of , and between politicalparties, social movements and migrants.The book’s main strength is the way in which it combines a narrative of the essen-

tial episodes with clear analysis and discussion of different approaches and interpret-ations. The introduction identifies the organising theme running through the book:the interplay and mutual influence between grassroots politics and the nation-state.The authors frequently pause to consider different perspectives on a range of topics.Chapters on revolutionary warfare juxtapose the ‘high politics’ of generals and fac-tions with the popular experience of death, destruction and disease; MichaelMeyer’s revisionist arguments about the revolutionary credentials of VictorianoHuerta are briefly discussed (and largely discarded); new scholarship on women andgender provides an illuminating angle on familiar themes of nation-building; andthe book also engages with recent debates about the precise blend of cultural prestige,economic growth, cooptation and coercion that underpinned the ‘democratic façade’of the postrevolutionary state (p. ). Mexico is placed in a global context throughout,and there are some useful comparisons to revolutions elsewhere. All of this will bemost welcome for students seeking to navigate the historiography, and a biblio-graphical essay points to further readings. However, as they explain in their introduc-tion, the authors leave one very big question for readers to decide: was this really arevolution? (Likewise, readers will also have to work out for themselves what anyfuture revolution may look like.) Some may find this approach unduly inconclusive,but it seems unlikely to inhibit classroom discussion.In any case, there is another central argument which gives the book coherence and

might also trigger debate. The authors argue that the most distinctive and importantthing about the Mexican Revolution was how it created a shared national discourse forthe expression of consent and dissent. Of course, this argument will be familiar toreaders of Joseph and Daniel Nugent’s landmark collection Everyday Forms ofState Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (DukeUniversity Press, ), and it finds a great deal of support in twentieth-centuryhistory and scholarship. Even the most moderate revolutionaries were forced torespond to popular demands, first in the Constitution of , and then in laterbouts of reform. After , many (though not all) opponents of the official party– from Jaramillistas to Juchitecos – invoked aspects of the revolution and condemnedits betrayal. At times this argument seems to underestimate how much of a commonnational framework already existed in ; the Zapatistas may have been parochial insome respects, but they saw themselves as patriots and the inheritors of (popular) lib-eralism. From today’s perspective, the argument occasionally seems slightly incongru-ous and incomplete. At one point, the authors suggest that the Porfiriato’s ‘relativelystrong and stable central state’makes it ‘more accessible to our present day sensibilitiesthan the chaotic age of Santa Anna’ (p. ). How did the lingering ‘state community’

Book Reviews

of the s come to be perforated with the mass graves of migrants, drug traffickers,tourists, journalists and students (p. )? The introduction briefly ponders the revo-lution’s relevance amid a ‘neoliberal moment of narco-induced political crisis’ – thesymptom (or cause) of a new ‘postnational’ condition – but the book does not discussthe issue in depth (p. ). Presentism can distort and prematurely date a book, but alittle more would have been welcome here. After all, the drug wars have inducedyet another shift in historical perspective worth knowing about, encouraging researchon neglected themes – crime, militarisation, violence, drugs, the press – and a searchfor clues to understand a bewildering if not traumatic present.Still, if big, interesting interpretive questions are raised, this is no bad thing for a

survey text. The book is an impressive act of synthesis, and an accessible blend of nar-rative and analysis. It will become a mainstay of introductory courses on Mexicanhistory, and will also attract a general readership eager to learn about Mexico’s com-plicated revolutionary upheaval, the different ways historians have tried to understandit, and its long-lasting reverberations.

THOMAS RATHUniversity College London

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. (). doi:./SXX

Charles H. Harris III and Louis R. Sadler, The Plan de San Diego: TejanoRebellion, Mexican Intrigue (Lincoln, NE, and London: University ofNebraska press, ), pp. xviii + , $., hb.

The latest instalment in Charles Harris and Louis Sadler’s investigation of turmoil onthe US–Mexican border during the Mexican Revolution (–) focuses on dis-turbances in south Texas that collectively took on the name of the Plan de SanDiego, based on a document produced in January allegedly in the small southTexas town of San Diego. The signatures of nine individuals appear at the bottom,all Hispanic and at least some of them US citizens. Calling for the liberation fromUS control of the entire northern border ranging from Texas to Upper California(to distinguish the latter from Baja California, still within Mexican national territoryaccording to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo), its first clause also announced theintention of freeing ‘individuals of the black race’ and its territory from ‘Yankeetyranny’. The document’s harsh provisions included immediate execution of all pris-oners – unless these might be held for ransom – and the murder of ‘every NorthAmerican over sixteen years of age’. Indigenous peoples, specifically the ‘Apaches ofArizona’ along with ‘INDIANS (Redskins)’, would be given ‘every guarantee’, andtheir territories returned. African-Americans joining the movement would be givena special banner after victory in the states bordering Mexico, and, apparently, aid inconquering six more states of the US to establish their own republic – strangely,those bordering the states already to have been obtained rather than the ones inwhich most of them still actually lived in the US deep South. The only ‘stranger’who might be admitted to their ranks must belong to either ‘the Latin, the Negro,or the Japanese race’ (pp. –).The Plan, a relatively small and almost completely disorganised effort, has attracted

a great deal of interest from scholars, and this book is intended, at least in part, to cleanup the messiness of the resulting interpretations. Certainly, the Mexican population ofthe region – US citizens and otherwise – had much to resent about the huge losses ofterritory almost seven decades earlier after the US–Mexican War, along with the racial

Book Reviews

and ethnic discrimination that they had suffered there since that event. It did not takelong for the original manifesto to attract the attention of the authorities, and one ofthe principal signatories, Basilio Ramos, was quickly arrested in McAllen, Texas, wherehe was attempting to enlist support from well-to-do Hispanics. Certainly, the Plan’sannounced genocidal intentions immediately got the attention of persons in theborder area, who were already jittery because of the violence of the MexicanRevolution just across the border. Disturbances continued in what were certainlyalarming but not monumental numbers of incidents, carefully documented in thecurrent study, until close to the end of , and then resurfaced for a time inmid-. The authors’ thesis is that while the movement originated out of southTexan, not Mexican, grievances, it was taken advantage of by Mexican revolutionaryVenustiano Carranza to try to force US recognition of his government, and thenlater re-emerged briefly in mid- as he and his commanders just south of theborder tried to force US president Woodrow Wilson’s Pershing PunitiveExpedition to pull out of northern Mexico. The writers of the Plan itself, theyassert, were magonistas, ideological followers of radical Ricardo Flores Magón, whohad been operating along the border and in and out of US prisons for a number ofyears, starting well prior to the revolution itself. The authors carefully examine archiveson both sides of the border, giving us a plausible, empirically based defence of theirthesis.Throughout, the authors give close attention to other historians’ interpretations of

the Plan. A particularly convincing clarification involves the numbers of Mexicans andMexican-Americans killed or fled during the disturbances. Certainly, these people werein a difficult situation, caught between Texas Rangers and US soldiers eager to elim-inate anyone who might harbour the revolutionaries and thus fall into the category of‘Bad Mexican’, and those they regarded as bandits who might at any time demandhelp, animals and cash. Yet census records show clearly that the populations of twoof the Texas counties most affected rose substantially, with only Starr County’snumbers decreasing slightly. Further, they question interpretations that conclude,without a great deal of evidence, that thousands of suspected revoltosos and/or inno-cent Hispanics had been hung or shot by rangers or soldiers during the period;these estimates soar in the historical literature after the assertion by Walter PrescottWebb in his book The Texas Rangers, again without evidence, that to ,died. I strongly agree with Harris and Sadler that the documentation only supportsapproximately deaths of this nature. South Texas was not heavily populated atthis time, and it seems unlikely that a large number of violent deaths would haveescaped the historical record.As for their thesis that Carranza took advantage of the disturbances to put pressure

on the US government to do what he wanted them to do – that is, recognise him andlater withdraw US troops from Mexican national territory – I find this notion at leastpossible, though I think it unlikely that Wilson would have responded in the way theauthors believe that Carranza hoped. Wilson generally operated with very little inter-est in what was actually happening along the southern border of his country. He onlyacted in the region when border issues helped him look strong by sending Pershinginto northern Mexico, helping him to get re-elected and improving the politicalcontext for increasing arms purchases and beefing up the US military. Meanwhile,Wilson used the opportunity to train Pershing’s troops in northern Mexico andNational Guard soldiers along the US side of the border in preparation for entranceinto the First World War, should that prove necessary.

Book Reviews

While this book will no doubt not completely resolve the controversy over this rela-tively ineffectual conspiracy or series of conspiracies, it is a fine attempt to do so basedcarefully on what we can actually see in the documentation. It is an important remin-der that when dealing with topics that intersect with current racial and binational con-cerns, it is best to stick closely to the evidence.

L INDA B . HALLUniversity of New Mexico


Javier Salcedo, Los Montoneros del barrio (Buenos Aires: Editorial de laUniversidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, ), pp. , pb.

The history of the armed groups that flourished in Argentina in the s and s isreceiving increasing attention. In the early s, former participants in guerrilla groupspublished their memoirs, journalists produced factual – and sometimes anecdotal –reconstructions of key events and figures, and academics published studies on an arrayof specific topics, including the political socialisation of a generation of activists and mili-tants who came of age in the late s, the imaginaries and ideas that nurtured thatpoliticisation and radicalisation, and the ways in which the logics of war subsumedthe logics of politics. Historian Javier Salcedo’s Los Montoneros del barrio adds an orig-inal approach to that burgeoning literature. Unlike most studies in this area, it focuses onone case: the development of the Peronist Montoneros in Moreno, a working-classneighbourhood in the Greater Buenos Aires area. Based primarily upon oral interviews,the book sheds new light on the social and generational ‘origins’ of theMontoneros and,more importantly, on the allure that the group initially had for some segments of thepopular classes; on the ways in which class and cultural differences were negotiated atthe local level; and on the contradictory meanings that Peronism – and the veryfigure of Juan Perón – acquired for the different Montonero constituencies inMoreno (and likely beyond).The book is organised chronologically. The narrative starts in , with the foun-

dation of the Asociación Obrera Textil (Textile Workers’ Union, AOT), the localchapter of the Textile Workers Federation, and ends in , when the most promi-nent members of the AOT broke with the Montoneros to create the JuventudPeronista Lealtad (Loyal Peronist Youth, JP Lealtad). By looking closely at thislocal history, Salcedo discovered that the textile workers engaged with theMontoneros in early – that is, shortly after the group kidnapped and executedformer president Pedro Eugenio Aramburu (in May of ) and when it wasalmost dismantled amidst increasing state repression. Hence, the workers fromMoreno engaged with the Peronist guerrilla well before it grew among middle-classeducated youth. Based on this finding, Salcedo’s work is organised around tworesearch questions: first, how and why Moreno’s workers committed to participatingin the Montoneros; and second, how class differences were codified and negotiatedwithin the Montoneros. He shows that the relationships between the Montoneros’largely middle-class, educated leadership and Moreno’s workers went from an earlymoment of companionship and empathy to a second moment of distrust and misun-derstanding, centred on disputes about the exercise of the local leadership and on theways in which the Montoneros’ leadership confronted Perón.After a first chapter in which he briefly synthetises the history of armed struggle in

Latin America and discusses the extent to which the Peronist guerrillas of the late

Book Reviews

s were connected to the history of Peronism, Salcedo’s work focuses on Moreno.Chapters to , the core of the book, deal with the particularities of the Montoneros’development at the local level. Chapter introduces the reader to the main charactersin this history by identifying four different groups that coalesced, locally, in theMontoneros: the workers within the AOT; the neighbourhood youth that joinedin the Juventud Peronista de Combate (Fighting Peronist Youth, JPC); formerPeronist militants from the Comandos de Organización Revolucionaria(Revolutionary Organization Commandos, COR, with origins in the late s);and, finally, groups of ‘outsiders’, middle-class university youth who went toMoreno to do political work. Salcedo adopts an intensely fleshed-out approach tothe dynamics of politicisation and radicalisation that unfolded in early sArgentina, as is apparent in chapter , which studies the coalescence of the fourgroups. Not surprisingly, the young ‘outsiders’ acquire a stellar role. As other youngpeople enrolled in other political groups, those who in and adhered tothe Montoneros coveted the ‘experience’ of fighting alongside the Peronist workers.Salcedo shows that the ‘outsiders’ already engaged with the Montoneros initiatedtheir politico-military work in Moreno through contacts with both the workers andthe former members of the COR. The interesting question, at this point, is whyMoreno’s Peronist militants opted to engage with the Montoneros.In chapters and (which explore the enlargement of the Montonero constituency

in Moreno in ), Salcedo offers a twofold answer to the question. On the onehand, he successfully shows that the workers and the local youth were already capti-vated by the Montoneros’ allure after the Aramburazo, a ‘fact’ that attested totheir Peronist identity and commitment to Perón’s return. Some local groups, forexample, painted graffiti displaying their identification with the Peronist guerrillaswell before they were in touch with actual Montoneros, as if they were waiting tobe contacted. In the same vein, Salcedo studies how the first Montonero cadreswent to work together with the COR members to create, locally, events of ‘armed pro-paganda’. In Moreno, they planted a bomb in the headquarters of a natural gas pro-vider who failed to comply in a timely fashion with the provision of gas; an ‘armed act’that generated solidarity and enthusiasm among workers and neighbours alike. On theother hand, Salcedo effectively demonstrates how, in contrast to other vanguardparties, the Montoneros did not focus on ideological discussions and formation.The incorporation of new members followed a well-established methodology but,ideologically, it merely required the vague acceptance of the three Montonero pre-mises: the construction of socialism as an objective, the adoption of Peronism as a pol-itical identity, and the agreement on armed struggle as a methodology. Alreadyidentified with Peronism and apparently captivated by the possibilities of armedstruggle, the local militants ‘delegated’ – in Salcedo’s terms – their political represen-tation to the Montonero leadership, a delegation that was also based upon bonds ofpersonal trust and empathy. At the end of , however, tensions between theMontonero leaders and the local militants emerged, revolving around the local proble-matisation of some acts of ‘armed propaganda’; the system of promotions and sanc-tions used by the organisation; and, most fundamentally, the Montoneros’ refusal toaccept a local leadership. As chapter shows, those tensions escalated even at the pin-nacle of political mobilisation in , when Perón’s delegate Héctor Cámpora wonthe presidential elections that opened up a short ‘democratic spring’ and then pavedthe way for Perón’s definitive return to the country. The members of the AOTand the JPC had been active in affiliating new members to the Peronist Party even

Book Reviews

before the Montonero leaders decided to do so, thus expressing a level of agency thatthe leadership conceived of as ‘indiscipline’. The same concept was applied in June of when, right after Cámpora was sworn in, the local militants carried out the ‘sei-zures’ of one meat-packing plant and one hospital. Unfortunately, at this pointSalcedo explores more the tensions between the rank-and-file members and theleaders than the experiences of the ‘seizures’ per se, which could have constituted avantage point from which to reconstruct the possible meanings that the Moreno mili-tants constructed about democracy, participation and eventually popular power.In the last three chapters, the book looks at more familiar terrain: the disputes

between the Montonero leadership and Juan Perón, which ended with the militantsof Moreno abandoning the Montoneros. Unlike other scholars who emphasise someparticular moments that, in their view, marked the fracture between the Montonerosand Perón, Salcedo explains that the potential break was already a possibility fromthe very inception of the Montoneros and their three banners – a possibility thatcrystallised throughout , when the Montoneros and Perón not only haddifferent political agendas (rather than merely different time frames to pursue thesame agenda) but also used a mutually conditioning logic of apriete (applyingpressure). Salcedo severely questions the common belief that the convergencebetween the Montoneros and the Marxist Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias(Revolutionary Armed Forces, FAR), negotiated throughout and madepublic in September of that year, had produced substantial shifts in theMontoneros’ strategy. However, while that convergence might not have been as sig-nificant theoretically and strategically speaking, the ways in which it was interpretedand enforced at the time did have profound effects, at least in Moreno. There, themonths-long tensions about who had the right to exercise the local leadership esca-lated when the Montoneros assigned a new political representative to the districtwho was a FAR militant. The local militancy reacted promptly, organising massassemblies to protest against what they viewed as an ‘intrusion’. Moreover, appro-priating a belief that circulated among other Peronist circles at the time – notablythose belonging to the right-wing sectors, and Perón himself – the AOP and JPCmilitants accused the FAR of being ‘not Peronist enough’. The discontent greweven more when the local militants realised that the Montonero leadership was ques-tioning Perón’s power. As Salcedo shows through close analysis of the foundingdocument of the JP Lealtad, this group reacted against the way in which theMontonero leaders positioned themselves vis-à-vis Perón. Salcedo reconstructs aseries of meetings that Perón held with youth groups in February : at thesame time that he overtly expelled the Montonero-oriented groups from his move-ment, he welcomed the AOP and JCP militants, now part of the JP Lealtad,whose loyalty to Perón was their only banner.There are some unfortunate decisions in Salcedo’s book, such as devoting two long

chapters to the discussion of two (admittedly important) documents. However, thebook is generally well written and argued. It will become required reading foranyone interested in the links between working-class history, Peronism and theMontoneros.

VALER IA MANZANOInstituto de Altos Estudios Sociales/CONICET

Book Reviews


Sebastián Carassai, The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes, Politics,Violence, and Memory in the Seventies (Durham, NC, and London: DukeUniversity Press, ), pp. xii + , £., £. pb.

‘Member of a violent society – without being violent himself’, wrote Panorama maga-zine when declaring the ‘average Argentine’ person of the year in (p. ). Thereference is indicative of contemporaneous perceptions of the Argentine middle classesas mere observers to the escalating violence of the late s and early s, a silentmajority caught between noisy – or, more appropriately, violent – minorities. Whilstprevious studies on memory and the dictatorship have tended to focus on the middle-class activists, there is a paucity of scholarly work on the broader role of the middleclasses as a social group during this period. Sebastián Carassai’s work is undoubtedlya welcome contribution to the scholarly literature due to the author’s exhaustiveexamination of the complex and shifting relationship between the ‘average’Argentine and violence. The study abounds with neglected and new empirical data,ranging from opinion polls to newspaper articles and adverts. Particularly valuableare the interviews with middle-class Argentines, for which the author compiled a docu-mentary of historic images and clips that was shown to participants as a sort of visualaide-memoire, with a view to fostering spontaneous discussion and remembering. Themeticulous methodological approach and detailed analysis of a range of data thus con-tributes to a nuanced understanding of the ‘non-activist’ majority of the middle class,who constitute heterogeneous protagonists rather than monolithic spectators.Carassai’s work should also be commended for its ambitious geographical and

chronological scope. As well as the Argentine capital Buenos Aires, the authorexpands his analysis of the middle classes to encompass two contrasting places: SanMiguel de Tucumán, the capital of the north-western province of Tucumán, andthe small town of Correa in the province of Santa Fe. These two case studies, theformer characterised by political violence and the latter less so, are a welcomeinclusion. Moreover, Carassai does not limit his discussion to the dictatorshipperiod, nor to the s, as the title suggests; rather, he explores the evolution ofthe middle classes in relation to political upheaval and violence from the mid-twenti-eth century onwards, setting the scene for analysis of the s and, to a lesser extent,beyond.The book begins by elucidating middle-class political culture from the s and

dispelling a number of common misconceptions about the middle classes vis-à-visPeronism. Carassai characterises middle-class political identity as embodying ‘non-Peronism’, a stance neither staunchly opposed nor outwardly supportive of Perónand the movement he founded. Far from actively endorsing military rule, themiddle classes supported the overthrow of Peronist rule in and again in ,precisely because of the plotters’ anti-Peronist nature. Although Carassai acknowl-edges that the majority of the revolutionary Left was of middle-class origin, he urgescaution in overstating this fact, since it tends to obscure the beliefs and opinions ofthe majority, non-activist members of the middle class. Carassai thus critiques the per-ceived ‘Peronisation’ of the Argentine middle class during the late s and the firsthalf of the s.The three subsequent chapters, somewhat overlapping in chronology, scrutinise

different aspects of the violence of the late s and s, revealing a myriad ofresponses from the middle classes to escalating violence. Focusing on social violence,particularly student radicalisation, chapter argues that although the ‘average

Book Reviews

Argentine’ grew increasingly weary of the various military regimes that ruledArgentina from to , the middle classes stopped short of forging any sortof solidarity with students and activists. In spite of this, Carassai does identify a per-ceptible sympathy towards the protagonists of this era, particularly from youngermembers of the middle classes and those linked to the universities. In places likeTucumán where student uprisings were more frequent than in smaller towns likeCorrea, student mobilisation appears to have remained in collective memory andhad a stronger and long-lasting impact. In chapter Carassai turns to middle-class per-spectives of armed violence, finding that the revolutionary Left enjoyed even lesssupport than the student activists from a social class which tended to view itself as dis-associated from violence undertaken by a minority. The middle classes’ lack ofapproval for the revolutionary project helps to account for their predispositiontowards a radical solution from the armed forces to end the violence. State violenceis the topic of chapter , which examines the installation of the terrorist state from onwards and the dictatorship that followed. Although the middle classes’ accep-tance of the coup has been widely documented, this chapter revisits, in originalfashion, the commonplace justification of state violence by examining its initial emer-gence. Carassai uses this analysis to dissect an important paradox: the endurance ofsuch narratives in the current context in which dictatorship-era state violence ismore commonly viewed with disapproval. Drawing on interviews with members ofthe middle classes, Carassai shows that rather than actively supporting militaryaction, the middle classes tended to place their faith in the state’s ability to protectthem and restore order.The final chapter marks a change in approach and pace from the previous ones, as

the author turns to representations of violent cultural products consumed by themiddle classes. Incorporating cartoons, adverts, magazine features and, to a lesserextent, film and literature, Carassai argues that violence became an integral andbanal feature of marketing discourse and can be viewed as a social bond that unitedthe middle classes, who became increasingly accepting of violence in the s ands.The level of detail and close analysis of interviews, cultural products and opinion-

polls undertaken by the author assumes a certain amount of prior knowledge ofArgentine history from the reader, as there is limited space dedicated tohistorical con-textualisation. However, given the growing body of texts in both English and Spanishdealing with twentieth-century Argentina and, in particular,the dictatorship period,this is not a weakness of Carassai’s study, but ratherpermits the author to adopt abroader scope and deeper discussion than issuggested by the book’s title. As well asoffering a nuanced and complexunderstanding of the middle classes, Carassai avoidsevaluating the middleclasses in terms of what they ‘should’ be or what they ‘failed’to do, apersistent issue in analysis of this social sector; instead, he examines whattheyactually were and how they evolved. In doing so, the book helps readers tounderstandhow middle-class disapproval of armed violence perpetrated by therevolutionary Leftwas not mirrored in the middle-class response to theterrorist state and in the ways inwhich collective memories of Peronism andviolence continue to shape Argentina eventoday.

CARA LEVEYUniversity College Cork

Book Reviews

J. Lat. Amer. Stud. (). doi:./SXX

Jessica Stites Mor (ed.),Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold WarLatin America (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, ), pp. x + ,$. pb, $. e-book.

The histories of human rights and solidarity have become burgeoning fields of scho-larly enquiry in recent years. Rooted in the global/transnational historiographical turn,they provide windows through which to examine networks that existed betweenpeoples around the world and the ideas – such as human rights – that they helpedto instil at a global level. It is no surprise that much of the new scholarship onhuman rights and solidarity has focused on the Cold War era either. If not exclusivelyproducts of the Cold War, both phenomena were intricately linked to the way inwhich that conflict unfolded, and in turn, both fed into the way it played outduring the latter half of the twentieth century. As civil wars, revolutionary insurgenciesand state-led violence engulfed societies, the cause of human rights grew more urgentand visible. Ideological affinities and shared ideals (whether real or imagined) also ledpeople to join in the cause of solidarity either with those fighting for revolutionarychange or those suffering the effects of hostility and repression.Latin America stood at the heart of many new solidarity networks and human rights

campaigns during the ColdWar period. As Jessica Stites Mor’s edited volume,HumanRights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America, so ably demonstrates,solidarity and human rights tied people in the region not only to other parts of theworld and vice versa, but also to others within the region itself. Comprised of ninechapters and an introductory essay by Stites Mor, the book takes us from LatinAmerican solidarity with Puerto Rican nationalists to transnational student protestsin and the solidarity campaign with Chile, from Salvadorean refugees and inter-national aid in Honduras to Brazil’s gay liberation movement. There is also a chapteron the way in which Latin Americans viewed US involvement in Latin America in thecontext of Nelson Rockefeller’s visit to the region (not exclusively negatively, asit turns out), and a chapter on the Latin American literary boom in the s. Theoverall purpose of the book is to offer a history of solidarity and human rights frombelow: to examine grassroots perspectives and showcase examples of South–Southcooperation. It therefore focuses on what Stites Mor calls the ‘key contributions’that ‘community organizers, party members, intellectuals, novelists, priests, students,artists, urban pobladores, refugees, migrants, and common people’ made to the ‘thegrowth of new visions of political community and human rights in participatorydemocracy’ (p. ).In exploring these different perspectives, the book’s contributors believe that soli-

darity and collective activism during the Cold War had an inherent value. Theyalso draw connections and explore the practicalities of collaboration in new and sig-nificant ways. Margaret Power’s examination of how Puerto Rican nationalism wasperceived across Latin America is particularly valuable. As well as persuasively integrat-ing Puerto Rico into histories of the Cold War in the Americas, she demonstrateswhat solidarity with Puerto Rico concretely achieved when it came to saving lives,freeing prisoners and challenging US hegemony. Brenda Elsey’s chapter on the cam-paign for solidarity with Chile also does a very good job in examining how ‘popularculture became a subject of struggle between Pinochet and solidarity activists’. Asshe ably illustrates, activists used popular culture to fight ‘against the inculcation ofvalues promoted by the regime through inventions of culture’ and as ‘a creativespace for activists to promote new political agendas, such as women’s rights’

Book Reviews

(p. ). Molly Todd’s study of the ‘Politics of Refuge’ is another highlight of thevolume. In examining the way in which Salvadorean exiles in Honduras during thes imagined and constructed an identity for themselves through organisationand collective action, she sheds light on how local groups perceived their positionin global politics.Admittedly, some of the book’s contributors romanticise the role of non-state

actors. Despite the volume’s title, the story of human rights does not receive asmuch attention as solidarity and remains an amorphous concept by associationrather than a subject of detailed analysis. There is also a lack of engagement inmany of the chapters with the political and ideological dimensions of solidarity inLatin America, as well as the power structures within which solidarity campaigns oper-ated. This is problematic for grasping the ultimate aims and impact of the solidaritycampaigns, especially in the case of Chile. Indeed, overall, enthusiasm for describingdifferent forms of collaboration also overshadows the intended story of how this col-laboration changed notions of political community, human rights or democracy.Even so, some of the chapters do an excellent job at challenging assumptions and

looking at the complexities that lay beneath grassroots activism. By exploring therelationship between those offering solidarity and those receiving it, for example,James Green’s and Christine Hatzky’s chapters illustrate the tensions that arosebetween people of very different backgrounds, cultures and political contexts. Greenthrows a spotlight on the homophobia of the Chilean far Left, while Hatzky’s exam-ination of Cuban volunteers in Angola reveals that Cubans and Angolans ‘remainedstrangers to each other during the sixteen years of transatlantic cooperation’ (p. ).In the context of a fashionable rush to chart transnational and cultural encountersduring the Cold War, these findings encourage us to approach the story of transna-tional networks, solidarity and human rights activism with critical awareness and akeener sense of their heterogeneity.In many respects, in fact, this is an edited volume that signals the take-off of a his-

torical field and a starting point for further research. It shows what can be done andwhat has been done so far. But it also demonstrates how much there is still to under-stand and explore. It is a must-read for anyone considering research on solidarityduring the Cold War and will serve as a springboard for future work. As Stites Mornotes, the volume ‘pleads for … a sustained conversation about the nature and chal-lenge of the transnational in Latin American Cold War history’ (p. ). With thisvolume, that conversation has begun, and I for one look forward to seeing how itdevelops.

TANYA HARMERLondon School of Economics and Political Science


Cath Collins, Katherine Hite, and Alfredo Joignant (eds.), The Politics ofMemory in Chile: From Pinochet to Bachelet (Boulder, CO, and London: FirstForum Press, ), pp. xix + , $.; £., hb.

The th anniversary of Chile’s September coup prompted a flood of studies,memoirs, commemorations and reflective essays on the significance of events in acountry whose politics have had a greater impact on the comparative study of democ-racy than one would expect for a nation of its size. It is precisely the drama of the endof one of Latin America’s most enduring democracies and its emblematic transition to

Book Reviews

democracy that has elicited such interest, not to mention how the country dealt withand processed the painful and violent legacy left by the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.This is a contested history – while some suggest that Pinochet’s crimes have beenswept under the rug, others argue that human rights violations have been dealt withas well as can feasibly be considered possible, walking a pragmatic line betweenjustice and the maintenance of what was a precarious democracy at the outset ofthe transition. Among this flood of reflections, this carefully constructed and skilfullyexecuted volume, edited by Cath Collins, Katherine Hite and Alfredo Joignant, standsout for its insightful analysis and path-breaking contribution to understanding thepolitics of memory in Chile and beyond.The aforementioned plethora of studies tends to fall into two camps, one more pol-

itical and the other anthropological and sociological. Political scientists have tended tofocus on juridical interpretations of rights abuses and have analysed the impact ofdealing with the past on the politics of democratisation. On the other hand, anthro-pological and sociological approaches analyse the impact of human rights abuses on thefabric of society and in the public and private spheres of individuals and groups. Nostudy before this one has woven these strands together for a comprehensive treatmentof the politics of memory. The book gets to the hard-core politics of human rightsabuses and their aftermath but at the same time takes account of the lived experiencesof people in a way that no other volume does.The editors begin by noting that most political scientists have tended to steer clear

of the study of the politics of memory, either because it was seen as too subjective,because it was deemed more the purview of history or sociology, or because politicalscientists saw collective memory embedded in the very institutions that theydeemed as more appropriate objects of study. The editors dismiss this notion, and anumber of the political chapters follow their call to take a political scientist’stoolbox to the politics of memory with fruitful results. Each of the chapters showsthat memories are deployed by actors as powerful political tools. The works in thevolume also share the idea that different generations interpret the same events differ-ently, that political ideology continues to weigh on how current and past events areinterpreted politically, and that despite the desire of most actors to reach some sortof shared sense of national consensus, memories of the past continue to have animpact on the conduct of democratic politics many years later.The universally high-quality chapters present different takes on the relationships

discussed here. After a tightly constructed introduction, accessible to new readers ofChilean politics and still instructive for experts, the volume’s first chapter dealswith more traditionally political issues. Alexander Wilde’s chapter demonstrateshow the courts, the media and events (which he terms ‘irruptions of memory’) inter-acted to provide two different ‘seasons’ of attitudes regarding human rights abuses andled to distinct policies wherein the state could act more aggressively to deal with thepast. Similarly, Cath Collins’ meticulously researched chapter shows the sourcesbehind the shift from relative impunity early in the democratic transition to a moreaggressive stance by the courts, though she also underscores how the closed natureof these processes provided less than satisfactory outcomes for protagonists and thepublic. Elizabeth Lira and Brian Loveman’s wide-ranging analysis of ‘torture aspublic policy’ steps out of the frame of reference of most of the chapters in thebook to recognise that rather than torture being an isolated tool employed bythe Pinochet government, it has a long trajectory in Chile from colonial times tothe present and has been consistently condoned or ignored by government authorities.

Book Reviews

The next two chapters shift the focus to symbolic representations of the politics ofmemory, departing from the more formalistic format of the previous chapters butmaintaining their quality and sharpness. Cath Collins and Katherine Hite present acogent and fascinating analysis of the memorialisation of sites and spaces associatedwith the dictatorship. They reconstruct not just the process of memorialisation, butalso how these spaces have become key public arenas for activism and reflection onthe past and future. In a similarly symbolic vein, Alfredo Joignant’s insightfulchapter on Pinochet’s funeral details how a single event could again set off apainful and soul-searching debate on the significance of the regime for Chile’s politicaland social fabric. The funeral prompted declarations of the definitive end of the tran-sition, with some suggesting the fallacious notion that the ‘Pinochet effect’ wouldcease to be significant to Chilean politics.The final substantive chapter, by Carlos Huneeus and Sebastián Ibarra, examines

the notion of a ‘divided Chile’ along the cleavage line established by the dictatorship,as well as associated issues that divide or unite the Chilean public. Relying on extensivepolitical opinion survey data, the authors not only examine contemporary attitudesregarding the past but also explore how political opinions in the country have beentransformed since the turbulent s.Collins, Hite and Joignant have produced what amounts to the definitive

collection on the politics of memory in Chile. The list of contributors alone makesit essential reading on the subject, but the quality and depth of reflections on the lega-cies of the Pinochet dictatorship for Chile’s collective memory, combined withthe sensitivity of the volume to the multi-dimensional elements of memory andpolitics, make it an enjoyable one as well, with potential contributions for understand-ing the complex relationship between politics and memory in cross-nationalperspective.

PETER M. S IAVEL I SWake Forest University


Cynthia E. Milton (ed.), Art from a Fractured Past: Memory and Truth-Tellingin Post-Shining Path Peru (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press,), pp. xi + , £., £. pb.

Art from a Fractured Past brings to light the wide-ranging possibilities of artisticlanguage and the images to which people who lived through political violence inPeru have turned. While the realms of politics and culture have long intersected inAndean societies, the excruciating events and traumatic pain experienced in thes and early s have given the production of art new relevance. By promotingmultiple memories and meanings and by breaking silences, works of art can challengeold frameworks and destabilise dominant narratives that marginalise the experiences ofthose who have suffered most. In her introduction, historian Cynthia Milton sketchesout the book’s central argument: that artistic forms of expression carry the potentialfor opening up communication and drawing a broader swath of society toward theunknown and into accepting different representations of Peru’s violent past.Compiled on the eve of the -year anniversary of the publication of Peru’s Truthand Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report (), the book endeavours,through images and text examples of visual representation, storytelling and perform-ance, ‘to trace some of the ways Peruvians utilize artistic means to describe their

Book Reviews

past, to understand, and, in some sense, to bring about alternative justice, social repair,and a historical account’ (p. ).The first section, on visual representation, focuses on testimonial art. Milton begins

by discussing the imagery of paintings submitted to art contests sponsored by NGOs asa lead-up to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. These works, she finds, drawon a pool of common referents to rescue experiences, and bear witness, in the sense oftestimonio, to denounce injustices. Depicted as victims of state repression, communitymembers are presented as worthy of sympathy, recognition – and reparations. In asecond chapter, drawings and testimonies from the community of Chungui,Ayacucho, are reproduced from a book published in by anthropologist/artistEdilberto Jiménez. This collaborative grassroots testimonial dates back to the s,but sadly no later reflections by Jiménez are included, even though he continues towork on memory in Ayacucho. The third chapter by anthropologist María EugeniaUlfe focuses on retablos, a fluid art form developed by Ayacuchano artists who haveused painted figures and emblematic scenes to record how violence was experiencedand provide social commentary.The second section, on telling stories, begins with an analysis by literary critic Víctor

Vich of a prize-winning novel, La hora azul, by Alonso Cueto (Editorial Peisa/Anagrama, ). Going beyond criticism of the armed forces, the novel exploreshow the effects of political violence are imagined by Limeño society and tackles theintensely tricky theme of guilt. This is followed by an extract from a graphic novel(by Rossell, Villar and Cossio) that mixes cartoons and images from many sourcesto recount key events from the early years of the armed conflict. Finally, there is a tran-scription/translation of a lengthy interview in which historian Ponciano del Pinoprompts film-maker Palito Ortega Matute, both Ayacuchanos, to reflect on localcinema in the context of political violence. This chapter is central to the book. It pro-vides insights into the vibrancy of local cinema during the war years as well as the con-troversies over the Truth Commission’s process voiced in Ayacucho. Its key message isthat film-making in the locality had been immensely popular, not least because it gavethose acting in and watching local films a chance to see themselves as protagonists whomade up part of the story and who, at critical moments, could through their actionstriumph over fear.In the third section, the politicisation of representation comes to the fore in three

insightful studies of performance. Sociologist Ricardo Caro documents the continuallyshifting interpretations of the past found in a small town in Ayacucho department.There, commemorative re-enactments of a particular violent encounter havebecome a new battleground, with some memories censured while others are promoted,and where local actors previously hailed as heroes are re-labelled victims. The followingstudy by anthropologist Cynthia Garza examines the representational universe of awell-known theatre group, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani. Through performance,Yuyachkani has attempted to call on collective social memory and in recent yearshas made the search for the absent, disappeared body, both individual and collective,a central theme. Finally, ethnomusicologist Jonathan Ritter traces in detail the way aparticular musical genre, pumpín, popular throughout rural Ayacucho, has adapted topolitical contexts. Performance can foreground a well-established tradition of testimo-nial song, but these songs in the past have also been a vehicle for critique and protest,including the celebration of revolutionary Maoism. Rounding off the collection is aneloquent afterword by Steve Stern in which he places the case studies within a broaderdiscussion of ‘the artist’s truth’.

Book Reviews

This book addresses a timely and pertinent theme. Through the order of presen-tation, we get a sense of unfolding. The book starts with earlier art forms whereemphasis was given to creating the ‘acceptable’ victim, at the cost of brushing asideinternal community disputes, previous protest and all connections with the ShiningPath. In the following sections, we move on to the potentials offered by storytellingand performance to reflect on the dilemmas provoked by the politicised representationand dualistic categorisation that continue to entrap post-conflict societies: victim/pro-tagonist, insider/outsider, repair/reconciliation, testimonial/protest. The overallimpression given is that Andean populations remain under suspicion and scrutinyand that artistic expression remains vital in struggles for citizenship and memory incontemporary Peru. The diversity of the art forms and backgrounds of the contribu-tors is the book’s clear strength, although this also leads to unevenness which some-times distracts. Overall, the book complements the brilliant in-depth study ofSarhua by Olga González (Unveiling Secrets of War in the Peruvian Andes,University of Chicago Press, ), in which painted boards play a central part.

F IONA WILSONRoskilde University


William Stanley, Enabling Peace in Guatemala: The Story of MINUGUA(Boulder, CO, and London: Lynne Rienner, ), pp. x + , £., pb.

In a well-researched book that often reads like a thriller, William Stanley tells the storyof MINUGUA, the United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala (–).MINUGUA was mandated to help Guatemala build conditions that would sustain ‘alasting peace’ after a long and bitter internal war. The UN Department of PoliticalAffairs (DPA) commissioned Enabling Peace in Guatemala and Stanley was providedwith enviable access to MINUGUA’s extensive documentation. As a result the book isslightly biased in its perspective, which is broadly favourable to the UN, but it is none-theless a detailed and critical chronological account of the mission’s work.Guatemala’s daily homicide rate is today higher than at any point in the war, and

almost all spheres of life in the country are affected by swiftly mutating crime net-works. What Stanley describes as ‘the descent into mass criminality and near statefailure’ was evident by the late s. In hindsight, the most pressing question is:what if anything could MINUGUA have done to prevent what has ensued – ‘akind of purgatory that is neither war nor peace’ (p. )?On the positive side, the Peace Accords, which MINUGUA helped to

mediate, brought about the cessation of armed conflict. Stanley argues that this wasby no means a ‘done deal’ and that it might not have happened, or would have hap-pened only much later, without MINUGUA. Certainly, the rural poor that formedthe bulk of the war’s victims had reasons to want peace. Economic elites alsowanted it: by the late s Guatemala’s pariah status was harming investment andtourism. But the guerrilla might have continued, as did the FARC in Colombia, bystriking deals with emerging cartels. However, the greatest danger lay in sections ofthe military which saw no need to negotiate with a defeated guerrilla; the retentionof repressive institutions and practices associated with counter-insurgency could bejustified. The UN had to work with sections of the army and of the elite that werewilling at least to cease armed confrontation. Stanley argues that the MINUGUA’sfocus on human rights verification in the first two years may have helped to

Book Reviews

provide the ‘transparency needed for the URNG to take a leap of faith and disarm’.The relatively smooth demobilisation of combatants was perhaps MINUGUA’s mostsignificant achievement.Stanley identifies other successes: the mission produced good and impartial human

rights reports, its presence probably led to the investigation of the murder of BishopGerardi, and some institutional reform projects were successful. The unsung Programade Asistencia Institucional a la Reforma Legal (Institutional Support Programme forLegislative Reform, PROLEY) helped Congress learn to draft new forms of legislation.MINUGUA helped some marginalised sectors to advocate more effectively. The UNmandated what initially appeared to be a defanged truth and justice commission, theComisión de Esclarecimiento Histórico (Commission on Historical Clarification,CEH), to investigate human rights abuses committed during the war. The CEHcould not attribute individual responsibility or initiate prosecutions of perpetrators,but its report was much stronger than anticipated: it laid the groundwork for potentialprosecutions and limited the mobility of former military officers, who became liablefor arrest and prosecution by other countries under universal jurisdictions of inter-national law.As Cousens and Kumar have argued in Peacebuilding as Politics: Cultivating Peace

in Fragile Societies (Lynne Rienner, ), peace-building involves both the ‘negative’task of preventing a relapse into renewed armed confrontation and the ‘positive’ taskof overcoming the underlying causes of war. The prevention of relapse into wardepends on political processes and institutions that can resolve conflict without resort-ing to violence and the existence of effective public institutions, particularly a strongjudiciary and legal framework. These depend on each other. Unlike neighbouring ElSalvador, in which the much stronger Left focused its greater bargaining power oneliminating most of the political and domestic security power of the army,Guatemala’s Peace Accords included detailed plans for the reduction of the armedforces and the strengthening of civilian power; respect for human rights, judicialreview and research into violations committed during the armed conflict; and pro-motion of indigenous rights and economic and agrarian reform. This aspect of theaccords, an ambitious wish list developed by the much weaker UnidadRevolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity,URNG), soon began to unravel. One gets the impression, from the book, of thehead of mission’s increasing frustration with the smoke and mirrors of the elitesand the army, which may have wanted a ceasefire but had no interest in socio-econ-omic reform. Sadly, both Stanley and the Guatemalan press that he often cites areright: peace, democracy, governance, equity and justice mattered more to outsidersand friendly states than to many Guatemalans. Latent crime networks segued out ofthe military and intelligence apparatus: these required a compliant police and afragile judiciary. The final chapters of the book document the dark farce of theFrente Republicano Guatemalteco (Guatemalan Republican Front, FRG) years, whenthe Peace Accords began to collapse.Stanley correctly concludes that MINUGUA lacked a clear strategy after . In

hindsight, the mission should have focused on security and the rule of law, as didONUSAL, the United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador. This gravemistake is striking because it represents an ‘unlearning’ of the Salvadorean process,where intense effort was made to introduce a new civilian police force purged ofthe unaccountable militarised police of the past. Instead, MINUGUA gave thehighest priority to pressuring successive governments to raise taxes. These increases

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were of course necessary to enable other reforms, but politically they were unwinnable.MINUGUA might have done more with backing from the Security Council, an ade-quate budget and better guidance, better leadership (at times) and, above all, clearerdirection. Successive MINUGUA heads of mission must have become increasinglyaware of this. But such problems are obviously more apparent in hindsight – fromthe vantage point of , it is easier to see the then hidden, but entrenched, opposi-tion that the mission faced at all times. Its partial and sometimes modest achievementsare remarkable under the circumstances, but tragically, Guatemala really is now in acondition that corresponds to Stanley’s assessment: a kind of purgatory which isneither war nor peace.

ANITA SCHRADER MCMILLANUniversity of Warwick


Michael Edward Stanfield, Of Beasts and Beauty: Gender, Race, and Identity inColombia (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, ), pp. x + , $., hb.

Of Beasts and Beauty is an absorbing and attractive book: it either pulls you towards itsfascinating angle into Colombian history or pushes you to think about how a certainmainstream understanding of beauty can be weaved through a historical formation in aspecific context. Although I am writing this review from the disadvantaged point ofbeing neither a historian nor a Colombian specialist, I was captivated by the opportu-nity to learn about the intricate relationship between beauty, gender and race thatStanfield lays out, and particularly the ways in which beauty standards, gendered nor-mativities and racialised appearance expectations can be correlated to politics, violence,inequality and exclusion. Stanfield reveals how beauty appears at the centre of powerstruggles to ‘sedate’ a nation in terms of its gendered organisation and its conflictiveand unsettling present at different moments in Colombian history from until.The book provides a detailed analysis of beauty pageants, fashion development and

elite versus popular concerns with physical appearance throughout this period inColombia: from the Carnival and costume balls in mid-eighteenth-centuryCartagena (p. ) and the large number of periodicals written by or for womenbetween the s and s celebrating different versions of women’s beauty andsupported by the free-press advocacy of the Radical Liberals at the time (likeBiblioteca de Señoritas – what an amazing name!); to the bicycle craze of the s,which defied elite society, striving to liberate ‘women from stifling dress and socialrestriction as it gave more freedom astride a modern and snappy conveyance. Itfilled their lungs with the clean air of the countryside as it developed their musclesand added color to anemic cheeks’ (p. ); the emergence of Cromos (equivalent toLIFE magazine) in as a key modernising thermometer and ‘photo album ofthe nation’ (p. ), still alive and kicking to this date; the first Miss Colombiacontest in ; the horrors of La Violencia from to , alongside the emer-gence of mass spectator sports and the popularity of beauty pageants at the regional,national and international levels, with its accompanying commercialisation; thenational happiness over the crowning of Luz Marina Zuluaga as Miss Universe in; the tensions around keeping Señorita Chocó as the incarnation of the excludedblack Colombia amongst growing worldwide openness to breaking the ‘colour barrier’(it was only in that the country crowned its first black Miss Colombia); the drug

Book Reviews

production and trafficking from the s onwards and the ‘new money’ that beganto mark politics and beauty pageants alike; and the unfortunate events surrounding theNovember Reina Popular competition, when the M- guerrillas took control ofthe Palace of Justice, unleashing a terrible massacre, and the Nevado del Ruiz volcanoexploded, killing around , people in the worst natural disaster in Colombia’shistory (p. ). The book ends with an epilogue to in which Stanfield notessome further developments, some within the media, that keep Colombia in theworld’s eye with specific reference to beauty concerns. These developments includethe soap opera Yo soy Betty, la fea and its US version Ugly Betty, and Shakira’s make-over from dark to blonde, and Sofia Vergara’s from blonde to dark, to appeal to globalmarkets.In terms of analytical contributions to concepts of beauty, the book struggles to

move away from mainstream understandings, but what is more interesting, at leastfor me, is what beauty does: what kinds of power struggles are bestowed under itsname, what social arrangements, hierarchies and fashions are arbitrarily set up andreproduced to maintain such mainstream understandings? Overall, for Stanfield,beauty is memorable, seductive, feminine, moral, virtuous, civil, uplifting, peacefuland hopeful. More importantly for his argument, beauty is the constant opposite ofthe beast, which is institutional, elitist, dysfunctional, violent and chaotic. Indeed,this is the key conceptual line that runs through the book: that beauty serves asboth an antidote and a sedative to the violent and demoralising Colombianpolitical, social and economic life, which is both male and bestial. For Stanfield,female beauty is there to save the country from the ravages of the male beast and tomake those ravages more bearable. His overall conclusion is that one of the uses ofbeauty in Colombia is in its capacity to give a ‘shared positive national identityespecially in periods of [the country’s] history when systems and institutions failedso spectacularly to become more inclusive and democratic and as alternatives wentdown in flames’ (p. ).While this line of thought is compelling, it also raises several questions. The contra-

position of beauty and power, of beauty and the beast, and assertions such as the aboveor that ‘women have dressed for seduction while men have dressed for status’ (p. )could be at times problematic. There is a strong assumption that what supports theneed for beauty, lived through endless beauty pageants, as a national obsession andas an alternative and positive expression, is the lack of Colombia’s clarity in developinga ‘modern political agenda’, a reliable government or a corruption-free political andeconomic sphere. This presupposes that concerns about beauty have no merit in them-selves. The main issue is that the author opposes beauty to modernity and appears toreduce beauty to an uncivilised, unimportant, unserious realm. It is as if beauty isalready known and defined ‘in advance’ of its empirical experience and its explorationin this historical survey of Colombian life. Maybe this was all that was methodologi-cally possible from this historical exploration, which draws on newspapers, journals,magazines such as Cromos, travel accounts and a variety of visual sources such as photo-graphs, prints and cartoons. It is hard to hear the voices of the Afro-Colombians or ofthe indigenous peoples, or of the rural poor or lower-class mestizos, as if these peopleare just affected by, but not really active producers of, other experiences of beauty.While there are some accounts of the popular uprisings supporting the few blackbeauty queens, we hear more of the standpoint of the white elites, the keepers ofthe archives, the writers of the travel accounts, the subjects photographed forCromos. We do not quite know who the ‘Colombians’ are with precision throughout

Book Reviews

the text as there is a conflation of the multiplicity of experiences and positions thatexist in this diverse country.One of the most interesting contributions to debates on beauty is Stanfield’s pro-

posal to think of beauty as ‘relational, comparative and dynamic’ (p. ), and I wantedto hear more about this. Can the world of beauty that Stanfield describes also be seenas a beast? Can we think of beauty as both dynamic and contradictory? Could theopposition be inside its own logic? Are any of the workings of beauty present in pol-itical dealings, in resistance, and in social struggle? It would also have been interestingto follow through with Stanfield’s proposition that beauty definitions in the specificcontext of Colombia are plural. In the period from to , Colombia’s lateengagement with modernising processes meant that it ‘followed the logic of amulti-ethnic and regional reality, one formed in the colonial era and maintained inthe nineteenth century, where rural ideals competed with urban ones, wherecaste, color and nationality informed a plural but still hierarchical sense of beautyalternatives’ (p. ). Unfortunately this line of thought slowly dissipates. At times itseems that Stanfield blurs the distinction between analysing beauty as a social con-struct, as a category and as a concept to grapple with, and beauty as a fact, a verifiabletruth of bodies that can be memorable – as a fact that can be found walking onthe street.Having said this, the compilation and weaving of materials in the book contains a

wealth of rich detail that offers a novel history of Colombia while proposing a modelto investigate the circulation of beauty concerns within broader historical processesand specific social and political contexts. It is a text that will be of interest to historians,gender specialists and scholars looking for ways to take beauty seriously. This bookoffers us a great example of how we might think about how spectacles, wider culturalindustries, individual bodies and idealised body images are used politically not only todistract from social tensions but also to recreate national goals and ideals. Each of thechapters traces a chronological exploration of specific moments of Colombian historyand how a certain version of the beauty complex was developing alongside these in atightly knit co-stimulating relationship.

MÓNICA G . MORENO F IGUEROAUniversity of Cambridge


Samantha Nogueira Joyce, Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of RacialDemocracy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, ), pp. v + , £., hb.

Given the paucity of up-to-date academic works that specifically interrogate the subjectof ethnic representation within the all-pervasive phenomenon of the telenovela inBrazil, the publication of Samantha Nogueira Joyce’s book Brazilian Telenovelasand the Myth of Racial Democracy is to be welcomed. This study sets out to explorea particular example of this television genre, Duas Caras (TV Globo, –),which openly tackled matters of race and racism in contemporary Brazil in its storylineand dialogue. This was the first prime-time novela in Brazil to have an Afro-Brazilianlead protagonist (Evilásio, played by well-known TV and film actor Lázaro Ramos),and its author, Aguinaldo Silva, wrote a blog during the run of the programme inwhich he directly engaged with its fans and critics, particularly with regard to the reac-tions provoked by its treatment of racial questions. Joyce’s book sets out to illustratehow race and race relations were negotiated in the novela, and in Brazilian society

Book Reviews

more broadly, during the programme’s typical eight-month duration, via Silva’s blogand public engagement with it as well as media criticism and commentary in general.Joyce claims that her study ‘tracks the dynamic process through which Duas Carasworked to debunk the ideology of racial democracy in Brazil once and for all’(p. ). This is a very ambitious claim, and overall the book fails to live up to the expec-tations that such statements raise. It does, however, make a useful contribution to theexisting bibliography, in spite of a problematic writing style and unwieldy presentationat times, as outlined below.The crux of Joyce’s argument is that inDuas Caras Silva uses ethnic stereotypes in a

productive way, namely to provoke a reaction among the audience and promote widersocial discourse about race. She gives several useful examples of how the author has atrack record of courting controversy, and she makes it clear that ‘the main focus here isnot to judge whether or not blacks were correctly represented on the program orwhether or not TV Globo telenovelas are racist, but in fact to show how a televisionprogram can contribute to a metadiscourse about race and racism in contemporaryBrazil’ (p. ). Joyce amply illustrates the peculiar mechanics of the creative processthat gives rise to this genre, using the idea of ‘open texts’ that are ‘constructedthrough a social dialogue between producers, consumers, and a broad range of socialactors’ (p. ). She shows how audience responses to characters, storylines and issuesraised inform the very content of the novela, as the author, writing future episodesas others are being aired, tailors his product accordingly. Joyce’s exploration of theconcept and practice of ‘social merchandising’, whereby topical issues and socialthemes are deliberately woven into the storylines and dialogue to serve a didactic func-tion, is equally illuminating. By examining excerpts from Silva’s blog and public andmedia reactions to Duas Caras, she shows how so-called ‘entertainment-education’can trigger debate and potentially prompt changes in social discourse and behaviour.She quite rightly also alludes to the more cynical motives behind such content,although more could be said about TV Globo’s wider quest to combine commercialsuccess with a perceived social responsibility, particularly as regards the issue of ethnicrepresentation.In addition, Joyce helpfully contextualises this novela and its deliberately provoca-

tive treatment of cross-racial romance – which involves the rehashing of hackneyedethnic stereotypes and racist dialogue – within the history of the representation ofAfro-Brazilians in novelas. She provides a historical overview of the ideologies of bran-queamento (whitening) and racial democracy, tracing their shifting trajectories andbringing the issues right up to date by exploring recent developments regardingaffirmative action policies, particularly racial quotas in public universities. The latterform an important backdrop to the reactions sparked by Duas Caras in terms ofthe issues surrounding race in Brazil; as Joyce argues, ‘the fictional story contributedto the current discussions of race, racism, and affirmative action policies, such as quotasin Brazilian media, law, politics, and society at large. As exemplified by the viewers’responses to the author’s blog (over seven hundred comments for each post) as wellas the many discussions in various media – talk shows, newspapers, and so on – a tele-novela, as well as literature, has the capacity to intervene in history, to help constructit’ (p. ). Whilst I think it may be overstating the case to say that Duas Caras helpedconstruct history, Joyce illustrates, by bringing together various print and electronicmedia sources, how it undoubtedly placed the question of race at the centre of theeveryday discussions among ordinary people that the omnipresent novelas generatein Brazilian society at all levels.

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It is a pity that poor proofreading and inadequate polishing of ‘thesis speak’ let thisstudy down. Its subject matter is important, and its approach is original. For themost part Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy reads like athinly veiled postgraduate dissertation, overly explaining and defending its chosenmethodologies, as well as its academic contribution to various disciplines. The proseis consequently rather laboured and the book’s structure somewhat repetitive,making for difficult reading at times. There are also inconsistent or inelegantPortuguese translations. I will nevertheless include this book in the bibliography onthe Brazilian telenovela that I provide for my undergraduate students, as it makessome useful contributions to our knowledge and thus complements the existingsources on the subject.

L I SA SHAWUniversity of Liverpool


Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann and Javier Auyero (eds.), Cities from Scratch:Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America (Durham, NC, and London:Duke University Press, ), pp. , £., £. pb.

In recent years, a gulf appears to have developed between academic writing and the‘developmental’ literature. World Bank staff members usually cite only their owninstitution’s publications, although the occasional exception is made for the workof academic economists. In turn, academic writing too often ignores policy debatesto pursue its own issues – the term ‘ivory tower’, it seems, is an increasingly appropri-ate description of much of the social science work conducted in universities. One ofthe causes of this mutual neglect is that so much is written, not just by academicsand the multilateral development banks, but increasingly by journalists, NGOs andbloggers. The flood of writing means that absolutely no one can keep up, and inresponse we tend to read too narrowly.This problem has clearly infected this book, for while there is an extensive bibli-

ography, huge areas of academic work on poverty, slums, informality and urbanupgrading are omitted and there is an almost total absence of references to ‘develop-mental work’. For example, there is only one reference to any work done by the WorldBank or the Inter-American Development Bank despite their ubiquitous presence inthe region’s cities.The authors state that ‘[t]he volume’s central questions are about the nature of

Latin America’s poor informal cities themselves: their relationships to the largerurban form, their political roles, their transformations over time, and their natureas sites for the reproduction or transcendence of poverty and subcitizenship’ (p. ).The formulation of these questions perhaps explains the absence of any reference tothe development literature, but it also constitutes what to my mind is the mainflaw of this book: its failure to come up with any kind of policy recommendation.In that sense, this is a modern academic study par excellence; it reviews the path ofacademic enquiry, sets up new areas of supposed neglect, and then proceeds toassume that the designated issue is important. But for a book subtitled Poverty andInformality in Urban Latin America, is that sufficient?The blurb claims that ‘this collection of essays challenges long-entrenched ideas

about the history, nature and significance of the informal neighborhoods that housethe vast majority of Latin America’s urban poor’. This claim only makes sense if, as

Book Reviews

it does, it omits so much of the work that has already been carried out in the study ofthese phenomena.This criticism is not to say that the book does not have merit. Bryan McCann’s

chapter about the relationships over time between a favela and its middle-class neigh-bours is interesting in revealing the pronounced social divide that exists between them.Even the famous Favela-Bairro Program failed ‘to integrate the favela with the sur-rounding formal neighbourhood’ (p. ). McCann’s description of the effects ofthe urban pacification programme is also interesting, although I am somewhatpuzzled by his claim that the programme has ‘triggered rampant real-estate speculationwithin Zona Sul favelas’ (p. ). How can that be, when legal titles are still absent andmiddle-class alienation from the neighbouring favela is so marked (p. )? MarianaCavalcanti’s chapter deals with a closely related theme and argues that the proximityof a favela to the asfalto of the middle class sometimes creates a threshold area whereproperty values become more equal. However, the cause of this is troubling insofar as itarises as much through the falling values of formal property ‘as a function of its proxi-mity to favelas’ (p. ) as through the ‘unrelenting valuation of properties in conso-lidated favelas’. Again, I am not wholly convinced that the value of favela property canhave risen so much, and neither Cavalcanti nor McCann present any real evidence tosupport this assertion. In addition, Cavalcanti’s interesting description of how formalestate agents attempting to sell property to middle-class households do not just ‘avoidtalking about it [the proximity of favelas]; they avoid dealing with it altogether’(p. ) casts doubt on how much the price of favela housing can rise – for if themiddle classes are so scared of the favelas and try to move away, what is fuelling therising property boom in the favelas?As with any edited collection, this volume has limitations in terms of its coverage.

Four of the nine chapters are about Rio de Janeiro, which prompts the question ofwhether Rio was the most studied city of the South even before it won the rightsto host the Olympics and the final of the World Cup. The other five chapters dealwith some aspect of informality in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Managua, Mexico Cityand Santiago. Some of these are original contributions and point to ethnographicapproaches that could be useful to other social scientists.In sum, this book is clearly a useful contribution to the urban literature in Latin

America, but one that falls short of the rather ambitious claims of its editors;neither does it provide much help to policy-makers.

ALAN GILBERTUniversity College London


Derrick Hindery, From Enron to Evo: Pipeline Politics, Global Environmentalism,and Indigenous Rights in Bolivia (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press,), pp. xxiii + , $., hb.

The election of indigenous president Evo Morales in , following a wave of socialprotests, placed Bolivia at the forefront of debates over indigenous rights, extractivismand the quest for ‘post-neoliberal’ development. Derrick Hindery’s new book, FromEnron to Evo, makes an important new contribution to these debates. Focusing on oilgiants Enron and Shell’s Cuiabá gas pipeline in Bolivia’s Chaco region, Hindery tracesone indigenous group’s struggle for self-determination in the context of an expand-ing extractives frontier. Through a combination of dogged detective work at the

Book Reviews

international level and deep ethnographic work in Bolivia with both indigenousgroups and state officials, the book illuminates the inner workings of transnationalresource exploitation and financing, as well as the extractive industry’s local effectson indigenous populations. Crucially, by focusing on the evolution of a single resourceconflict that has spanned from the neoliberal s to the present, Hindery provides acompelling ethnographic account of the continuities and tensions arising fromBolivia’s current ‘post-neoliberal’ development model, at a moment when these arebecoming increasingly visible and contested at a national level.Hindery’s central argument – that neoliberal governance subordinated indigenous

rights to transnational capitalist interests – is hardly a novel one. Yet, whereas manyprevious critiques of neoliberalism have rested on vague accusations of complicitybetween transnational corporations and the state, this book offers us a rare ‘nutsand bolts’ account of the concrete processes through which such collusions playedout. Based on extensive documentary analysis, Hindery reveals how projects createdby international financial institutions like the World Bank and InternationalMonetary Fund to manage the social and environmental impacts of extraction weredoomed to failure from the outset owing to conflicts of interest that made it imposs-ible for the state to regulate transnational corporations. Furthermore, he demonstratesthat – contrary to the ‘free market’ discourse of the era – without multilateral fundingthe Cuiabá project would have been financially unviable. Thus, despite a rhetoric ofsustainable development, multilateral donors were key actors in backing extractiveindustry projects in Bolivia – projects that paid only minimal lip service to socialand environmental concerns.A key argument of the book is that it is necessary to look beyond individual projects

or case studies to evaluate the overall effects of extractive development. By demonstrat-ing the ‘synergistic effects’ of particular projects – which often depend on and pave theway for others – Hindery sheds light on the emergence of an entire ‘extractivecomplex’, which produces chain reactions at multiple scales. In doing so, he enablesus to conceive of extractive industry development as a reterritorialising process witha vast spatial reach. Again, this flies in the face of the rhetoric accompanying this devel-opment. As Hindery details, when advocating such projects, transnational corpor-ations and the state (both in the neoliberal period and in the current Moralesperiod) paint each project as self-contained, safe, and with limited effects on thelocal environment and the livelihoods of the communities nearby. In revealing thefallacy of this discourse, the book has important implications for wider debates onthe governance of extraction.Yet, this book is not only about the tenacity of neoliberal governance; it is also

about the creative ways in which indigenous peoples respond to such processes indefence of their historically grounded claims to territorial sovereignty and self-deter-mination. While making clear the costs of extractivist development for theChiquitanos, Hindery avoids depicting them as mere victims. Instead, he provides adetailed account of their multi-scalar strategies, their shifting coalitions, their politicaldebates – and the pragmatic choices they make in light of the enormously powerfulforces facing them. He characterises their approach as ‘flexible pragmatism’. A keyexample is a compensation plan agreed to on the basis that the oil companieswould provide financial, legal and technical support to secure legal land titles for com-munities (a pattern echoed in numerous other indigenous territories). Throughdetailed examples such as this, Hindery reveals how indigenous peoples manage to

Book Reviews

exercise agency within the double-edged spaces of an extractivist development model –something we have both sought to illuminate in our work.Perhaps this book will be most cited for its challenge to the MAS government’s self-

image as a pro-indigenous, post-neoliberal and decolonising state. Much recent scho-larship on Bolivia has taken as a starting point the idea that the election of EvoMorales represents a fundamental rupture in the country’s development trajectory.More than any other recent academic book, Hindery’s account calls this assumptioninto question. Following the Cuiabá case (along with several other important cases likethe Desaguadero oil spill, the Madidi Park project, and the scandal about the TIPNIShighway), Hindery demonstrates in ethnographic detail how the current ‘indigenous-led’ state replicates a centuries-long relation with extractivism that spans from thecolonial period, through the neoliberal period, to the present. While these dynamicsare being widely debated in Bolivia and in Bolivianist scholarship, Hindery’s bookoffers specific evidence of how they play out in practice in territories of extraction.The message that emerges is an important, albeit depressing, one: even in Bolivia,the place lauded across the world for its empowerment of indigenous rights, theforces and practices of global capitalism continue to demand the sacrifice of indigenouspeople’s lands and resources. In revealing these sacrifices, this book demonstrates theimportance of ethnographic work in Bolivia’s under-researched indigenous frontierregions for understanding the dynamics of the current ‘process of change’.From Enron to Evo will be widely read in the Latin American indigenous studies

world, as well as by political ecologists and scholars of the Latin American Left.Hindery’s clear and accessible writing style makes the book a valuable resource for stu-dents of geography, anthropology, Latin American studies and related disciplines. Thebook will also be widely read in Latin America, where a Spanish-language version hasalready been published to critical acclaim. In short, by bringing Hindery’s committedempirical work to bear on debates on neoliberalism, extractivism and indigenous devel-opment, this book illuminates the complex challenges faced by Latin Americansocieties struggling for more just, equitable and decolonising forms of development.

PENELOPE ANTHIAS (BERKELEY)AND NANCY POSTERO (SAN DIEGO)

University of California


Linda C. Farthing and Benjamin H. Kohl, Evo’s Bolivia: Continuity and Change(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, ), pp. xix + , $., $. pb.

Evo Morales and the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement towards Socialism, MAS)party captured the Bolivian presidency with a majority of the popular vote in , afeat that was repeated in the presidential and legislative elections. The election ofthe MAS represented a sea change in the Bolivian polity. Not only did it express thepopular classes’ will for political and economic change, but the election of Morales (anindigenous Aymara) was also symbolic, marking a radical break with mestizo elitecontrol of the state apparatus. On coming to power, Morales called for a democraticand cultural revolution; this included fashioning a new economy geared towardshelping people to ‘live well’ (vivir bien) in harmony with nature, and the reinventionof the state through the rewriting of the Constitution by a popularly elected assembly.In Evo’s Bolivia, Farthing and Kohl draw on over years of experience living andworking in Bolivia to provide a highly personalised insiders’ account of the firsttwo MAS administrations. The main questions they pose are: what has changed

Book Reviews

since Morales entered government? What has this historic turn accomplished? And,more broadly, is another world possible?Most of the recent literature on Bolivia, particularly the mainstream press, is

polarised. Conservatives have portrayed Morales and the MAS as a dangerous anti-democratic force determined to institute a socialist regime. Meanwhile, some on theLeft believe that Morales can do no wrong. The authors aim to counter suchdouble bias through a well-balanced analysis of the MAS in power. For Farthingand Kohl, the MAS represents neither the ‘revolt of the masses’ nor autonomous‘constituent power’; rather, they argue that the MAS works within the pre-existingliberal framework but is nevertheless committed to instituting a substantive newstate model. It is this conflict-ridden middle ground that forms the core of the book.The authors acknowledge that Morales is a ‘front man’ for diverse movements and

interests that have had an impact on fomenting the ‘process of change’. Thus, they tellthe story from the bottom up. They speak to a broad range of informants – theseinclude President Morales and his ministers, but also social movement leaders, activistsand poor farmers and workers. The book has a distinctly anthropological feel. Ratherthan using traditional yardsticks to measure success, the authors assess how well theMorales administration has done with reference to the categories and values ofBolivia’s social movements. While the book is thick with local detail, the authorsare nevertheless careful to situate the discussion within the broader transformationssweeping the region.The book starts by describing the country that the MAS inherited in , includ-

ing the legacy of colonialism, dictatorship and the neoliberal turn, which wreakedhavoc on the region from the mid-s onwards. It then shifts gear to considerthe radical changes enacted by the MAS and how these efforts have been constrainedby structural factors including history, geography, population, economy and inter-national relations. For example, chapter , ‘Reinventing the State’, examines howthe MAS has attempted to reshape government itself. The central paradox here isthat the MAS, which was originally composed of political outsiders who had littlefaith in the governing institutions, had no choice but to operate within the establishedpolitical system. Not only did this impede the governments’ ability to incorporategrassroots decision-making processes, but well-established patterns of corruption,patronage and authoritarianism soon raised their heads. More worryingly still, onoccasion Morales has walked roughshod over the grassroots movements that puthim in power. Meanwhile, Morales’ ability to redesign the economy along more ega-litarian and sustainable lines has been hampered by the nation’s reliance on natural gasrevenue and the dependence on foreign capital that this implies. Finally, the farmingoligarchs in Bolivia’s eastern lowlands have posed a serious threat to the Moralesadministration. These land-owning elites have set up paramilitary groups who haveattacked MAS supporters, mounted obstacles to meaningful land reform and intermit-tently declared de facto regional autonomy.The picture that emerges of Bolivia today is one of enormous challenges and con-

siderable shortcomings. The government seems to lurch from one crisis to the next,with little capacity to enact its own agenda. The authors note that the government’score principles, including the ‘decolonisation’ of the state and ‘vivir bien’, remainfuzzy, ill-defined concepts that do not inform practice. Given the unrealisticallyhigh expectations that accompanied the MAS’s accession to power, it is unsurprisingthat some grassroots activists feel disillusioned. This is evidenced by the proliferationof local-level road blockades and protests in recent years – the most forceful of which

Book Reviews

was a mass movement against the government’s decision to cut fuel subsidies (adecision Morales quickly rescinded). The authors note complaints by many grassrootsactivists that the ‘October Agenda’ (the demands of the campesino and indigenousmovements that brought Morales to power, including the adoption of a newConstitution, land reform and the nationalisation of gas) has yet to be fullyimplemented.While the ‘new’ Bolivia might not look that different to the old one, the authors

are at pains to point out the modest gains that have been achieved. Since Morales cameto power the middle class has grown to encompass per cent of the population, econ-omic growth is greater than it has been in decades and there have been big advances interms of civil and social rights. For example, cash transfers and investment in healthand education have contributed to improving the lives of the poorest and most vulner-able sectors of society. There have been significant advances in terms of expanding theparticipation of women and indigenous peoples in government, and since Moralesbroke with the US-financed drug war, human rights abuses committed by the securityforces have decreased dramatically. Thus, in answer to the book’s core question, ‘isanother world possible?’, Farthing and Kohl argue that it is, but it takes time. Theynote that Morales and the MAS cannot really be expected to decolonise the state,create jobs, industrialise the country and improve health and education overnight.Over the past five years several books have been published charting the rise of the

MAS, including contributions by Sven Harten, Jeffery Webber and James Dunkerley.What is unique about Evo’s Bolivia is its breadth and accessibility. The text is inter-spersed with anecdotes and direct extracts from interviews; these combined voicesprovide a vivid and engaging window onto the process of change as it unfolds inBolivia. The book makes Bolivia legible to the uninformed reader and would be excel-lent material for undergraduate teaching. Packed with critical insights into regionaland global processes, Evo’s Bolivia is also essential reading for anyone who is com-mitted to progressive social change anywhere in the world. This book is a testimonyto the achievement of Kohl and Farthing as scholars, but also to their commitmentto promoting social and economic justice.

THOMAS GRI SAFF IInstitute of the Americas, University College London


Diana Villiers Negroponte (ed.), The End of Nostalgia: Mexico Confronts theChallenges of Global Competition (Washington, DC: Brookings InstitutionPress, ), pp. vii + , $.; £., pb.

This competently edited book covers a range of mainly policy issues currently facingMexico. Like many Brookings publications, it concentrates to a significant extent onquestions involving the United States; there are four chapters out of nine that coverbroadly international issues. Unfortunately, this topic selection has done nothing tomake the work especially interesting. There are a whole series of topics whose inclusionmight have added more to the volume than any one of the four discussions of US–Mexican relations. Those that might have been considered include the governanceof Mexico City and its importance for the Left in Mexico.This reviewer also would have liked more discussion of the reasons for the survival

and recovery of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional RevolutionaryParty, PRI). After all, many observers predicted the PRI’s demise following its defeat

Book Reviews

in successive presidential elections. Another absent discussion has to do with change inhigher education. This can be understood as an aspect of globalisation, and it haschanged the whole character of public life in Mexico. Moving from politics topolicy, also missing was any discussion of the role of agriculture or its connectionwith indigenous Mexico and the latter’s poverty and slow economic growth.Moving from policy to culture, there is also an absence of discussion of issues to dowith the role of Catholicism and the Church. The fact that abortion is now legalin Mexico City and that it may soon be followed by the legalisation of drugs tellsus a lot about how Mexico is changing.These issues interact. For example, for as long as the Left governs Mexico City, it

will have possibilities for winning the presidency. Fear of this outcome has driventhe PRI and the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN) closertogether, and this has in turn facilitated Peña Nieto’s ability to carry through an ambi-tious reform programme of market economics and institutional change. Peña Nieto’sreforms, for better or worse, are likely to prove decisive in the next set of presidentialelections.What the book does cover, however, is covered capably. A chapter by Arturo Franco

that seeks to explain why Mexico has grown so slowly over the past generation isuncharacteristically interesting. Mexico, after all, is one of the poster children of econ-omic orthodoxy in Latin America, but the consequences of such policies in terms ofliving standards have been disappointing. Franco’s other chapter, which deals withpolitical questions, was written at an unfortunate time because the author did nothave the opportunity to do more than touch on the dramatic reform programmeunder the Peña Nieto presidency. The question today is not whether radical reformcan take place but rather what its consequences will be.Much the same observation could be made about Chacón’s chapter on Mexican

public education, although it does bring up some general points about some of theissues that public education raises. Similarly, Duncan Wood’s chapter on energypolicy is factually interesting but again came to press before the most recent energyreform was enacted.Obviously one cannot prevent discussions of policy from eventually becoming obso-

lete, but one nevertheless has the impression that this work has tended to fall betweentwo stools. A richer historical account focused on issues of long-term continuity andchange might have enhanced the volume’s relevance more than a discussion of short-term policy. However, the discussion that we do get, while contemporary enough, isonly sporadically interesting, and one fears that it will soon be overtaken by events.

GEORGE PHIL IPLondon School of Economics and Political Science


Catherine Krull (ed.), Cuba in a Global Context: International Relations,Internationalism, and Transnationalism (Gainesville, FL: University Press ofFlorida, ), pp. xiii + , $., hb.

This eclectic collection of essays by scholars based in the United States, Canada, Cubaand the United Kingdom has its origins in a conference held at Queen’s University inKingston, Ontario, on the th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution in . As itstitle suggests, the book divides neatly into three sections on international relations,internationalism, and transnationalism, with six essays in each. The collection is

Book Reviews

edited and introduced by Catherine Krull, with a short foreword by renownedCubanist Louis A. Pérez Jr.Krull’s comprehensive introduction deals with the overarching themes of the

volume’s chapters in turn. It gives, for example, an overview of some counterproduc-tive and harmful US policies toward Cuba over the years. But there is always a difficultbalance to achieve between summarising an edited volume’s contents and stealingsome of the thunder from the contributing authors’ arguments.The section on international relations begins with two authoritative chapters, the

first on the history of and continued possibilities for US–Cuban cooperation, andthe second on Cuba’s armed forces as an adjunct of the island’s foreign policy.Karen Dubinsky’s chapter then gives us a fascinating but sobering analysis of theway that children have been pawns and victims of the long-standing tensionsbetween Havana and Washington. The spectre of Operation Peter Pan and the depar-ture of , Cuban children from the island starting in early casts a longshadow over a problem symbolised more recently by the drawn-out saga of theElián González case that began in . Dubinsky analyses some of the Cold Warrhetoric that led to such paranoiac and harmful migration and the separation offamily members over generations.Asa McKercher’s chapter on Canadian policy toward Cuba studies Ottawa’s deter-

mination not to let weightier interests in its relations with Washington affect itsforeign policy toward Cuba. But there should be no pretence that Ottawa’s ‘quick’recognition (p. ) of the new revolutionary government just over a week afterFulgencio Batista’s hasty escape from Havana was not related to the timing ofWashington’s recognition a day earlier. Ditto the recognition by nearly all Westerngovernments that maintained vitally important political and economic relationswith the United States, which had acted as the de facto doyen of foreign governmentsin Cuba ever since the island’s nominal independence in . The British ambassa-dor in Havana, for example, conveyed London’s official recognition of the new provi-sional government within an hour of Washington doing so on January. Thestatement that ‘Cuba was just another state’ (p. ) for Canadian policy-makersmight appear disingenuous despite the outward appearance of normality thatOttawa was at pains to display. This chapter, based naturally on predominantlyCanadian sources, forcefully argues that Ottawa’s policy vis-à-vis Havana has been‘remarkably consistent’ (p. ). The topic reminds us that there is a rich vein ofmaterial to be researched outside the well-mined Havana–Washington axis.The late Max Azicri begins the section on internationalism with a chapter analysing

the Cuba–Venezuela alliance. He highlights Washington’s limited ability to impactnegatively on the alliance, and underlines the long way that it has to run. KevinM. Delgado recognises that he is altering the term ‘internationalism’ from itscommon usage in his very personal chapter on santería. He questions the authenticityof some practitioners of the syncretic Cuban religion and the dubious wares theypeddle to foreign tourists. The subject matter here sits slightly at odds with otheressays in the section.A contribution by Robert Huish on Cuba’s medical internationalism asks some

pointed questions about what for some realists in international relations is a hard-to-fathom policy. Like Cuba’s earlier internationalist military interventions inAfrica, the policy seems to run against the norms practised by states in pursuingonly unenlightened self-interest. What, might one ask, is in it for Cuba? There is evi-dently some political objective in all of this, and Huish helps us discern it. In tandem

Book Reviews

with the frequency of humanitarian emergencies is the astonishing speed with whichCuba’s medical authorities can act in deploying their health practitioners to almostany point on the globe. This compares most favourably with the pedestrian reactionof governments with highly developed economies and far greater financial resources.One particular highlight in the volume is the perceptive chapter by Ana Serra on

foreign views of the Special Period in Cuba, wherein she makes a very interestinganalysis of the fictional take on those years by Spanish writers, particularly two left-leaning authors. The context here is Spain’s own experience of lengthy dictatorshipunder Generalissimo Franco and the idealised Spanish Second Republic that precededit. In this light it would be interesting one day to read an analysis of positions taken onCuba by foreign academics and resident foreign correspondents to see how their ownpolitical backgrounds and allegiances inform their views of the island’s reality.The volume ends with a flurry of excellent chapters. Susan Eckstein expertly dissects

transnational ties between Cubans on either side of the Florida Straits, concludingwith plenty of evidence that full transnational engagement between the communitieshas only been possible since the collapse of the Soviet bloc. In a chapter by JohnD. Holst on social justice, it is heartening to note that harsh and prolonged politicaldogmatism has not extinguished the altruism of educators and health practitioners.While sentimentalism might enter into views of Che Guevara, where hard-nosedappraisal of his contribution might have been preferred, it is good to see that idealismstill prevails after years (and counting) of realist foreign relations and their conti-nuing negative effects.It is useful to have so many thoughts under one cover on such a variety of Cuba-

related topics. A volume on economic reforms would be out of date before its publi-cation – such is the current speed of change on the island – but this is not the case withthis collection of essays, from which Washington and the first wave of Cuban emi-grants to the United States do not emerge well.

CHRISTOPHER HULLUniversity of Chester


Roger Burbach, Michael Fox and Federico Fuentes, Latin America’s TurbulentTransitions: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Socialism (New York andLondon: Zed Books, ), pp. xiii + , $., $. pb; £., £.pb, £. e-book.

Roger Burbach, Michael Fox and Federico Fuentes present an insightful and intelli-gent discussion on the Left in Latin America and twenty-first-century socialism, pro-viding an excellent analysis of the multiple dimensions that underline the profoundchanges sweeping through the continent. The book critically examines two centralbut conflicting processes which have contributed to the region’s turbulent transition:the demise of the US as a hegemonic power in Latin America, and the rise and reju-venation of socialism following the collapse of the traditional socialist order. As LatinAmerica embarks on its ‘second independence’, the authors explore the growth andproliferation of a new generation of social movements and the subsequent rise ofNew Left leaders. Drawing on a wide range of discussions, this book delivers a com-prehensive account of the social struggles facing Latin American societies and theactors and ongoing socialist projects that are playing a crucial role in Latin

Book Reviews

America’s transformation and the construction of an alternative to neoliberalism andcapitalism.The first three chapters provide a broad outline of the social, economic and pol-

itical conditions under which Latin America’s transformation is taking place.Chapter examines the impact of neoliberalism and capitalist globalisation on thecontinent and the subsequent rise of social movements through social strugglesand popular mobilisation in response to the failure of neoliberal policies. Chapter moves on to discuss the decline of US hegemony in Latin America due to imperialoverstretch and the challenges it faces from ‘pink tide’ governments in the region.The chapter explores the rise of ‘new continentalism’ and the push for greaterregional collaboration and integration, focusing on regional trade organisationssuch as UNASUR and ALBA which are directly confronting neoliberalism andUS imperialism.Chapter analyses the continued support of capitalist modes of production, in

particular neo-extractivism, by New Left governments in Latin America. It raisesthe question of whether these governments are truly embarking on the constructionof a post-neoliberal society or if they are implementing a neo-developmentalisttwenty-first-century version of the import substitution industrialisation modelpopular in the s and s. It also considers why the New Left in LatinAmerica has been so hesitant to implement a socialist economy based on public own-ership of the means of production, but has instead continued to depend on extractiveand agricultural activities.Using country studies, the second part of the book demonstrates how twenty-first-

century socialism, rooted in democratic processes and procedures, is developing at avery distinct pace in each country and explores further the issues raised in the firstthree chapters. Focusing on Venezuela, chapter discusses the origins of theBolivarian revolution, the rise of Chávez and the rejuvenation of socialism. Thechapter considers how serious a challenge twenty-first-century socialism representsto capitalism and explores the barriers it faces both at home and abroad, in particularthe ongoing US intervention and intensifying class struggle in Venezuela.Furthermore, the authors explore the dynamic relationship that existed betweenChávez and the masses, and his ability to tap into the deep discontent among thepopular classes, engaging these citizens through a number of popular initiatives.Chapter discusses the emergence of new indigenous nationalism and communi-

tarian socialism in Bolivia. The chapter looks at the economic roots of the social revo-lution and Morales’ new economic model, centred on nationalisation and refoundingthe state. It examines how successful the Morales government has been in turning itsnew economic policies into reality and the empowerment of Bolivia’s indigenouspopular classes. The chapter also addresses the rising creative tensions betweensocial movements and the government and Bolivia’s shift away from US imperialismthrough the promotion of regional initiatives.Written by Marc Becker, chapter focuses on Ecuador and the emergence of buen

vivir socialism which incorporates the indigenous perspective of an alternative todevelopment based on the notion of a good life. Becker argues that out of all theNew Left governments in Latin America, the government of Rafael Correa hastaken on the more moderate and ambiguous position and has had the most difficultand complicated relationship with social movements. The chapter discusses theincreasing challenges the Correa government faces from social movements andpopular protests in response to its extractive policies, and examines Ecuador’s

Book Reviews

anti-imperialist position and its leading role in new regional initiatives aimed at achiev-ing hemispheric integration.Chapter examines Brazil’s role in supporting the more radical Left governments

in Latin America whilst confronting US hegemony both within the region and abroadby blocking US economic interests and promoting regional integration. The chapterlooks at Brazil’s foreign and domestic policy under Lula, in particular the implemen-tation of reformist poverty alleviation and social programmes and Brazil’s transform-ation into one of the most important players on the world stage. It traces the roots andgrowth of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT) and the Movimentodos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (Landless Workers’ Movement, MST) and discussesthe frequent conflicts between the government and its former allies over the growthand support of agro-industry, neo-extractivism and renewable energy programmesunder the PT. Lastly, chapter discusses the major transformation that Cuba is cur-rently undergoing as new social and economic measures are implemented under RaúlCastro. As Cuba fights to overcome its economic difficulties and move beyond thelegacy of twentieth-century socialism, the authors question what these changesmean for socialism in Cuba.The authors successfully present a sophisticated study on twenty-first-century

socialism in Latin America which undergraduates and postgraduates interested insocial and political science and will find extremely useful. This book makes an impor-tant contribution to the discussion on the future of the Left in Latin America andprovides critical insight into the political and social challenges that New Left govern-ments face as they embark on the challenge of constructing an alternative tocapitalism.

MALAYNA RAFTOPOULOSInstitute of Latin American Studies,University of London


Leigh Binford, Tomorrow We’re All Going to the Harvest: Temporary ForeignWorker Programs and Neoliberal Political Economy (Austin, TX: University ofTexas Press, ), pp. xvi + , $., hb.

Advanced capitalist states have long drawn on the most marginalised members ofsociety to fulfil seasonal farm labour demands, thus keeping food prices and theminimum wage low. Temporary foreign worker programmes in the early twenty-first century, however, represent an effort to legitimise this long-standing practice asa ‘win-win-win’ scenario for growers, sending and receiving country governments,and migrant workers. Proponents argue that programmes of this kind offer a comp-lementary solution to farmers’ labour needs in the global North and poverty formigrants from the majority world. In Tomorrow We’re All Going to the Harvest,Leigh Binford critically evaluates the putative merits of Canada’s SeasonalAgricultural Worker Programme (SAWP), which has been heralded internationallyas exemplifying best practices. When even a supposedly model arrangement isriddled with exploitation and abuse, he queries, what does this augur for other tempor-ary foreign worker programmes?Encompassing a wealth of fieldwork from the early s, Binford draws on in-

depth interviews and observation from two primary SAWP sending and receivingregions: Tlaxcala, Mexico, and south-west Ontario, Canada, respectively. He uses

Book Reviews

the theoretical concepts of social fields and fields of power, as developed by WilliamRoseberry, to disentangle the networks of relationships between SAWP institutionsand individuals. Particularly illuminating are the excerpted interviews with Mexicanmigrants and their families, consular officials and Canadian horticultural employers.These narratives underscore the lived, human dimension of migrants’ experiences aswell as the structural constraints shaping power inequities in the SAWP. Thishighly readable text, which stands as a singularly comprehensive overview of theSAWP, speaks primarily to scholarly audiences. Those engaged in related publicpolicy and activism would also find it insightful. It would be a welcome addition touniversity courses on the political economy of agriculture, labour, immigration andracialisation.After situating the programme historically within post-war agrarian developments

in Canada and Mexico, the author turns to a key contradiction. On the one hand,most migrants express overall satisfaction with the SAWP and seasonally return towork in Canada. Simultaneously, many migrants report overwork, substandardworking and housing conditions, and employer mistreatment. Mounting criticismsof the programme often converge on how SAWP migrants’ legal status in Canadahinges on remaining employed by the initial grower who hired them. Given thethreat of arbitrary dismissal (and repatriation) or receiving a negative evaluationfrom their employer that could preclude future SAWP employment, many farmworkers accept long hours and difficult working conditions without complaint.Binford explains the contradiction between the ‘systemic exploitation’ (p. ) ofthis unfree labour regime and workers’ ostensible satisfaction on the basis of whathe calls a ‘dual frame of reference’ – that is, workers often favourably compare theSAWP with ‘the cold brutality of making a living in Mexico’ (p. ). His key theor-etical argument here is that neoliberal restructuring and consequent loss of employ-ment in rural Mexico (the point of reproduction) has enabled the wringing ofsurplus value from migrants in Canada (the point of production). Both locationsgive rise to the social field of power in which migrants’ conditioning unfolds.Binford asserts that in order to construe the SAWP as a fair, reciprocal exchangebetween workers and employers, one must disregard the transnational differencesbetween where both groups stand within this social field of power.Readers concerned with international development will take interest in Binford’s

contribution to contemporary debates on guest worker programmes as a form ofpoverty alleviation. Those who endorse these programmes often claim that migrants’sacrifices and remittances contribute to long-term economic development for theirfamilies and home communities. In chapter , however, Binford demonstrates that,despite material improvements to some migrants’ lives, the SAWP only allows mostMexican participants to avoid poverty on a temporary, year-to-year basis while theyparticipate in the programme. Drawing on Amartya Sen’s concept of developmentas an overall reduction in human ‘unfreedoms’, Binford makes the compelling casethat the SAWP deprives participants of many non-economic freedoms, such astheir political capabilities. Accordingly, the SAWP cannot be defended on thegrounds that it provides holistic development or long-term poverty alleviation forMexican communities.While Mexico is the main migrant-sending country of concern in this book, a chapter

co-authored by sociologist Kerry Preibisch considers how, since the s, labour marketsegmentation between Caribbean and Mexican SAWP workers has evolved to the dis-advantage of the latter. They attribute this to a ‘soft’, albeit insidious form of racism in

Book Reviews

which employers and rural communities circulate racial discourses that stereotype a givenracial/national group as being inherently better suited to working with particular crops.The climate of ethnic/national competition thwarts potential solidarity betweenMexican and Caribbean workers. It also discourages migrant-sending countries fromdemanding better conditions for their workers because a given sending country caneasily be replaced by another, more acquiescent one.On the topic of organising migrant farm workers, in many respects Canadian labour

groups face an even greater challenge than their US counterparts, as Binford points outin his comparison between the Canadian United Food and Commercial Workers(UFCW) union and the US Farm Labor Organizing Committee. He implies thatso long as the SAWP persists, farm worker-driven structural change or widespreadunionisation remain doubtful prospects. In light of dominant trends among neoliberalstates toward larger, less regulated temporary foreign worker programmes, he questionswhy the UFCW bothers trying to organise migrants rather than opposing the pro-grammes altogether. Elsewhere in the text, Binford is usually careful to highlightmigrants’ perspectives; here, however, I think he misses some important nuance bysidestepping the complicating point that many migrant farm workers do not wantthe SAWP to be terminated. Moreover, when historically white-dominated unionsoppose temporary foreign worker programmes outright, they are often accused (some-times correctly) of xenophobia or racism. A discussion of this classic union challengewould have further strengthened this section.My quibbles with the book are minor and mainly aesthetic. The title is somewhat

clunky, and it is unclear how the quote from which it derives relates to the key themesof the text. There are also some errors in Canadian geography; the province of NewBrunswick is denoted as ‘New Britain’, and repeated references to the Ontariotown of St. Catharines use the incorrect spelling of ‘St. Catherines’. These do not,of course, detract from the overall strengths of the book. In its rigour, depth andscope of analysis, Tomorrow We’re All Going to the Harvest stands as an incisive con-tribution to pressing questions about the implications of temporary foreign workerprogrammes for contemporary agriculture, neoliberal capitalism and transnationalhuman rights.

ANELYSE M. WE ILERUniversity of Toronto


Patricia I. Vásquez, Oil Sparks in the Amazon: Local Conflicts, IndigenousPopulations, and Natural Resources (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press,), pp. xix + , $., $. pb.

Since the turn of the century there has been an increase in conflicts in Latin America,and in particular in the Amazon, related to oil and gas and to natural resources ingeneral. Why? Patricia I. Vásquez, an energy practitioner with years of experiencein the region, points to ‘structural flaws’ in national governance systems and to the‘transient triggers’ of local conflicts. In the making and escalation of conflict, theweaknesses of formal institutions combine with local stressors related to the qualityof civil and business organisations. Vásquez’s argument is built on a comparison ofColombia, Ecuador and Peru and draws on hundreds of interviews with actors directlyinvolved in conflicts. The book helps to fill a notable gap in knowledge on contempor-ary resource conflict and indigenous peoples in the Andean Amazon.

The book starts with a historical overview of oil and gas-related conflicts. Today, ofthe studied cases, Peru and Ecuador have the larger number of conflicts and the mostviolent ones, according to the data gathered. These contemporary resource conflicts inthe Amazon are directly linked to the expansion of the oil industry that took place inthe s. Old political conflicts concerned the foreign or national ownership of oil.New political conflicts, however, are linked to local communities, indigenous ones inparticular, contesting resource development in general and oil development in particu-lar. The development of oil in the Amazon coincided with the emergence of the ques-tion of the rights of indigenous peoples. As a consequence, the global politicaleconomy of extractives entered a new era.However, the advancement of environmental and indigenous peoples’ rights in the

Amazon is not only a product of changes in international conditions such as variationsin oil prices or the influence of transnational movements. Vásquez identifies nationalcontextual conditions common to the three Amazons. In chapter , she points tostructural flaws in the national legal systems and in formal institutions. Althougheach country has specific characteristics, they share common problems including sub-optimal decentralisation processes, the underdevelopment of local governmentcapacities, the contradictions and flaws of the institutional system, and the corruptionand ineffectiveness of the judiciary. The author examines each structural flaw butdraws largely on secondary sources. Here the book lacks an ethnographically informedaccount of these institutional features: interviews with local actors could have beenused to illustrate the claims based on the secondary sources.A highlighted structural flaw is the contradictory institutional environment set by

the state. The author borrows from Guillaume Fontaine the term ‘state schizophrenia’to refer to the confusing policy that calls for environmental protection of specific areaswhile at the same time allowing for the expansion of the oil frontier within thosezones. The emblematic examples of state schizophrenia were the seven oil blocks estab-lished within the borders of the Yasuní Park in Ecuador – but the Correa governmentappears now to have decided to get rid of state schizophrenia and to favour oil. As thissuggests, the state is a non-monolithic social construct, where diverse public andprivate agendas are reinvented.In relation to the failures of the national judiciary systems, the book stresses the

growing importance of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and theInter-American Court of Human Rights. Rulings by the Inter-American legalsystem are seen as instrumental in shaping domestic politics and ultimately influencingnational legal systems. It is not the only international resource for legal action.Emblematic cases such as that of Texaco have also been litigated in the UnitedStates. Back in the domestic sphere, the author praises institutional innovationssuch as the Office of the Ombudsman in Peru for their positive role in thediffusion of conflict and the promotion of justice.In chapter , Vásquez identifies four common local stressors of conflict: the level of

radicalisation or cohesion of the organisations involved in the dispute, the extent andnature of civil society involvement, the availability and efficiency of institutionalmediation, and the strategies of oil companies for incorporating safeguards or for deli-vering services to the affected communities. The development of this insightful charac-terisation is unsatisfactory: each subject deserved a chapter of its own. Again, moreextended use of primary sources would have been desirable.Can this situation be solved? Can the structural flaws be corrected and the local

stressors managed better? Vásquez is optimistic with respect to dealing with the

local stressors of group dynamics. The lessons, her research suggests, are that local stres-sors can be softened with the participation of legitimated ombudsman-type entities tofacilitate dialogue, the expansion of participatory mechanisms for designing localdevelopment projects, the ‘optimisation’ of oil revenue redistribution and ‘the com-pletion of social and environmental mappings of the areas to be developed prior to thegranting of licenses’.Vásquez is less optimistic about the ability to fix structural flaws, which are decades-

old constructs. These sets of problems demand heavy lifting: the ill-implementeddecentralisation, the weak local capacities, the widespread corruption and clientelism,and the weak presence of the central government and poor communication amongstate bodies are not easy to solve.The author makes clear that her goal is to contribute to understanding conflict

dynamics and to advance usable policy prescriptions. She argues that the developmentof contextual knowledge is needed for both the study of problems and the design ofsolutions. Investigations should delve into the particular socio-political and economicscenarios of each conflict, including the history of past disputes in the area: ‘it is pri-marily these particular and very contextual dynamics of the dispute that need to beaddressed to reduce the risk of violence’ (p. xvii). But Vásquez maintains that resolvinglocal conflicts will require a strong political commitment that goes beyond ensuringthat oil and gas revenues are distributed in an equitable way. The solution will notbe purely economic and of the one-size-fits-all variety. A new social contract isbeing rewritten ‘between indigenous communities and the rest of society’ (p. ),she observes.

JOSÉ CARLOS ORIHUELAPontificia Universidad Católica del Perú

Book Review: Derrick Hindery, From Enron to Evo: Pipeline Politics, Global Environmentalism, and Indigenous Rights in Bolivia (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2013)

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