There is a sense in which Latin America is poised on the brink of a new era of positive social change, but new initiatives must grapple with major social, economic and political obstacles; neoliberalism is one of these. This book seeks to map some of the major dimensions of this juncture in a comprehensive assessment of contemporary trends in Latin American politics. As such it is timely, engaging, and does much to reveal the contradictory dynamics at work today. This makes it a very useful book for general updates and a valuable asset for teaching.
Given that it is published by NACLA, we can guess from the outset that the argument will be broadly left-leaning and both highly interested in, as well as critical of, US policies in the region. We are not disappointed; all authors broadly concur with the conclusion that neoliberalism has had a detrimental effect, especially on the poor. The volume collects essays by a wide range of authors, some of whom are well known scholars in their field, such as Norma Chinchilla and Paul W. Drake. The essays are collected into three broad, but complementary and interlocking, sections. The first analyses Latin America in the world (dominated by discussion of the United States), the second focuses on topics of enduring relevance (including poverty, crime, drugs, human rights and migration), while the third looks at new developments in politics on the left (political parties, feminism, indigenous politics and labour).
One is struck when reading this panoramic book by the shocking persistence of certain patterns of inequality. In economic terms, Latin America is the most unequal region of the world, and this trend is becoming more, not less extreme, such that ‘if we omit the top 10 percent [of income earners] from the calculations of the Gini coefficient it turns out that Latin America and the United States have similar levels of income inequality’ (Luis Reygadas, p. 122). While regional power inequalities are obvious, it is still striking to read of a 1990 survey of US citizens in which they described ‘Hispanics’ (and ‘Negroes’) as poor, unintelligent, unpatriotic, lazy, violent and scrounging. (Lars Schoultz – pp. 49–71 – condemns this with the US euphemism ‘prejudice’, but this sounds like plain racism to me). Moreover, and despite prosecutions and memorials in the Southern Cone, impunity reigns in Guatemala where, after the assassination of Bishop Gerardi (who led a human rights report team) ‘seven witnesses were killed, while six witnesses, two prosecutors and one judge fled the country’ (Katherine Hite, p. 206). Generalised, low level impunity characterises legal and police systems across a region in which fewer than two percent of homicides are resolved, and support for Mano Dura policies is rising (Mark Ungar, pp. 171–92). Meanwhile, the destruction of society as a devastating collateral casualty of the US-sponsored war on drugs erodes still further bonds of trust (Coletta A. Youngers, pp. 72–95).
Other themes to emerge, though, are less distressing. The positive role of globalisation in facilitating progressive movements, as well as capital flows, is one such example. Feminist movements have generally (though not always) found great inspiration and cumulative power in regional and global initiatives, as described by Chinchilla and Leisl Haas (pp. 252–75), and neo-liberalism has forced labour movements to develop innovative collaborative strategies which have revitalised this valuable sector of political resistance (Mark Anner, pp. 298–315). The boundaries between political parties and social movements have also been significantly blurred, allowing new actors and issues to enter politics. This has often been productive for both ‘progressive’ political elites (where they have embraced the complexity of social inequality) and social movements, where their aims overlap (Carlos M. Vilas, pp. 232–51). However, it has not proved easy for the indigenous movement to enter the mainstream political realm and Shane Green predicts that ‘alongside any revolutionary “radicalism” there will continue to be a very real degree of compromise, contradiction and cooptation that takes place in negotiating the competing interests of ethnic struggle, neo-liberal economic power and democratic governance’ (p. 297).
This is a strong collection of comprehensive and insightful essays dealing with a range of the most pressing issues in Latin America today. However, given the title of the book Latin America after Neoliberalism I expected each author to discuss how twenty years of the neoliberal project conditions contemporary or future developments. Disappointingly, many essays addressed neoliberalism only tangentially, and could easily have fitted into a book called ‘Latin America Today’.
Those chapters which did address neoliberalism more directly included the excellent introduction (Hershberg & Rosen: pp. 1–25), the wide-ranging and biting polemic by Drake (pp. 26–48) on US economic doctrines, and the chapters on inequality (Reygadas: pp. 20–43) and poverty (Araceli Damián and Julio Boltinik: pp. 144–70) which gathered valuable statistical and analytical material (including asserting a masculinisation of poverty). However, they restrict their interpretation of neoliberalism to analysis of its economic prescriptions and their consequences, rather than embracing an analysis of its political and socio-cultural dimensions. William I. Robinson's discussion of polyarchy directly addresses neo-liberalism's strategic political project, but he underplays, to my mind, the intellectual and ideational foundations which ‘make sense’ of this strategy and which insinuate their way into society, reframing our ideas and subtly altering our assumptions. I was disappointed, for example, that Adler Hellman's revealing essay on migration did not reflect on the subtle irony that not only do tight border controls contravene the spirit of neoliberalism, as Herschberg & Rosen observe, migrants actually fulfil the free-market impulse by (after Norman Tebbit) ‘getting on their bikes’ and finding work, and they do so as individuals (not citizens), plugged into social (not political) networks and remitting money (not power) back to their families and home communities for personal and social (not political) projects. To my mind, migrants might be victims of neoliberalism, but they are also its agents, and it is this absorption and ‘naturalisation’ of neoliberal norms which will make it so very difficult to eradicate. For me at least, the neoliberal tide can only be convincingly turned (possibly) when we acknowledge and then openly challenge its ‘work’ in these non-economic, less obvious places.
