John Summa and John Travers, filmmakers, are currently working on The Power of Their Song: The Untold Story of Latin America’s New Song Movement. | Print
Geography Archives: Latin America
Savings, Investment and Growth: Theory and Reality
Neoclassical economic models are based on the assumption that investment is financed from household savings. Accordingly, capital accumulation will be maximized by policies aimed at increasing household savings rates and capital imports (“foreign savings”). These models also predict that capital should flow from rich to poor countries, attracted by higher rates of return. However, facts […]
Repression and Resistance: Examining Mexico’s Tlatelolco Massacre through a Gendered Lens
Elaine Carey. Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. 240 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8263-3545-6. The 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre has been a topic of scholarly inquiry ever since the fateful day when hundreds of Mexican students lost their lives at the hands of […]
Loyalism and Mau Mau
Daniel Branch. Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xx + 250 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-11382-3; $24.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-13090-5. The two related themes in Kenya’s history that have drawn the most debate and interpretations are land and the Mau Mau war. Daniel Branch’s study […]
Update on the Venezuelan Economy
Executive Summary: After nearly six years of record economic growth, the Venezuelan economy went into recession in the first quarter of 2009, shrinking by 3.3 percent that year. A number of analysts see this as the end of an “oil boom” and the beginning of a long period of recession and stagnation. For example, in […]
Mexican Community Theater: A Different View of Immigration
In a small, crowded theater in New York’s West Village the night of August 8, a group of thirty indigenous women from central Mexico finally got a chance to perform their play before a U.S. audience. The cast, members of the community group Soame Citlalime (“Women of the Star” in Náhuatl), had spent the past […]
Who Will Allow Brazil to Reach Its Economic Potential?
The biggest economic question facing Brazil, as for most developing countries, is when it will achieve its potential economic growth. For Brazil, there is a simple, most relevant comparison: its pre-1980 — or pre-neoliberal — past. From 1960-1980, income per person — the most basic measure that economists have of economic progress — in Brazil […]
Pachamama and Progress: Conflicting Visions for Latin America’s Future
Miners in Potosí, Bolivia set off sticks of dynamite as cold winter winds zipped through the city, passing street barricades, protests, hunger strikers, and an occupied electrical plant. These actions took place from late July to mid-August against the perceived neglect of the Evo Morales administration toward the impoverished Potosí region. This showdown in Bolivia […]
From Old to New Developmentalism in Latin America
Excerpt: The paper is divided into seven short sections. In the first, I discuss the need for a national development strategy to compete in the present stage of capitalism; in the second, I discuss old or national developmentalism, its relation to the Latin American structuralist school of thought, and its success in promoting economic growth […]
Will Chinese Workers Challenge Global Capitalism?
Paul Jay: In China in June, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party said that it’s time for workers’ wages to go up. And there’s been a lot of discussion about whether China’s actually restructuring its economy to try to boost domestic demand. Certainly in what leaders say in other parts of the world they […]
Does Washington Want Normal Diplomatic Relations with Venezuela?
While President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and the new President of Colombia, Manuel Santos, met in Santa Marta, Colombia, last Tuesday and agreed to normalize relations after a fierce diplomatic fight, there are no indications that such détente is in the cards for Venezuela and the United States. Washington, it now appears, may not even […]
Left Think Tank Mystifies Iran-Saudi Tensions
No one should be surprised when The Economist or another controlled opinion source misrepresents tensions in the Persian Gulf as religious rivalry while overlooking decades of U.S. and Israeli success in stoking them for imperial gain. The so-called mainstream press typically repeats unsubstantiated charges to pretend that Arab client states of Washington buy tens of […]
Hungary’s Defiance of IMF and European Authorities Scares the Guardians of Austerity in Europe
The government of Hungary has taken on a lot of powerful interests in the last couple of months, and so far appears to be winning — despite provoking outrage from “everybody who’s anybody.” “The IMF should hold the line,” shouted the Financial Times in an editorial the day after Hungary sent the IMF packing in […]
Is José Serra Campaigning in Washington or in Brazil?
What is José Serra trying to do? In his campaign for president of Brazil he has accused Bolivia of complicity in drug trafficking and criticized Lula for trying to mediate in Washington’s fight with Iran and for refusing (along with the most of the rest of South America) to recognize the government of Honduras, which […]
Cruel But Not Unusual: The Punishment of Women in U.S. Prisons, An Interview with Marilyn Buck and Laura Whitehorn
Marilyn Buck died on 3 August 2010, less than a month after her release from federal prison. The interview below was first published in the July-August 2001 issue of Monthly Review. — Ed. After years of neglect, the issue of women in prison has begun to receive attention in this country. Media accounts of overcrowding, […]
A New Type of Political Organization? The Greater Toronto Workers Assembly
At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Left around the world is undergoing reformation. As the Great Recession has vividly demonstrated, more than three decades of neoliberal capitalism have eroded many of the significant gains won in the immediate decades following WWII. From wage and benefit concessions to reductions in […]
Latin America: Stop Using Colombia against Left-wing Governments
In March I wrote about the Obama Administration’s contribution to the election campaign under way in Venezuela, where voters will choose a new National Assembly in September. I predicted that certain things would happen before September, among them some new “discoveries” that Venezuela supports terrorism. Venezuela has had thirteen elections or referenda since Hugo Chávez […]
Ties of Friendship
The Colombian government thanks Uncle Sam: “Thank you for helping me tighten the ties of friendship that unite the neighboring countries.” Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) is a Cuban cartoonist. This cartoon was published in Cambios en Cuba on 26 July 2010. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). See, also, Mark […]
Kenneth Rogoff Is Wrong on Debt and Deficits
In much of the world, including the United States and Europe, a debate is taking place about whether the government’s first responsibility should be to reduce unemployment — which is at elevated levels — or to reduce government deficits and debt. Many of the arguments for deficit reduction are simplistic, based on ignorance, or ideologically-based. […]
Latin America and Caribbean: CELAC Steams Ahead
A high-level meeting in Venezuela earlier this month, in which senior Latin American and Caribbean diplomats from 32 countries discussed the creation of a new forum for regional concertation, slipped under the radar of the entire U.S. media. Indeed, the only English-language report on the event that appeared in the mainstream media was filed by […]
