Contesting Trade in Central America is a welcome analysis of the politics of market reforms in Central America. It is ‘welcome’ because the vast majority of Latin Americanists focus on larger countries, depriving the heterogeneous, and geopolitically strategic, Central American isthmus of the attention it deserves in the academic and practitioners' community. The book is thoroughly researched, a feature that is even more impressive given that it examines three countries that differ starkly in their political and socio-economic structure. The diversity of the three cases makes it particularly interesting.

I found this book informative and rich in detail. The comparative approach is refreshing, and provides the reader with a story that goes beyond a country-specific narrative. The sources are well used and referenced, and show that the author carried out an in-depth, long, and certainly interesting fieldwork. The book does an excellent job at explaining how civil society responded to the pro-CAFTA campaigns, how this differed in the three countries. The politics behind the signing of CAFTA is also well discussed. The opinions of businessmen, entrepreneurs, investors are somewhat less well represented in the book – something I found rather strange considering that the private sector had a key role in shaping trade negotiations, precisely because it is responsible for a large number of the jobs that CAFTA created and destroyed, depending on the sector and the interpretation of existing data. The author focuses on the anti-trade stance of workers and managers of protected industries, such as state monopolies and other public sector organisations, including universities. It would have been interesting to discuss further the opinion of some of the hundreds of thousands of employees of companies, mainly multinationals, which would have likely closed shops if the trade agreements had not gone through.

The analysis of Nicaragua and the Ortega government is particularly interesting. It illustrates the complex world of backdoor deals and political allegiances behind the superficial ‘right and left’ division. It explains how Ortega manages a pro-business environment and cooperates with Western donors while also pursuing ad hoc social projects financed by Venezuela, which are critical for its capacity to mobilise voters. The section on mining and anti-mining movements in El Salvador is also very interesting, as it unravels the dynamics of national and transnational networks of actors involved in the monitoring of large business. I found the analysis of Costa Rica less convincing. First, the author downplays the success story of Costa Rica. Unlike El Salvador and Nicaragua, Costa Rica went through a period of fast economic growth and diversification of its economy during the period of economic liberalisation (1990–2004). As the author describes, the debate about signing CAFTA was very heated in Costa Rica, and so was mobilisation. The two camps were roughly equal in terms of popular support, as shown by the results of the 2006 elections of and the referendum itself. Yet, Costa Ricans accepted peacefully the outcome of the referendum and the PLN, the pro-CAFTA party, won the following elections. Costa Rica continued to perform well from an economic perspective, recovering relatively fast from the 2009 crisis, while also maintaining its credentials as an environment friendly economy. Second, defining Costa Rica and the PLN as ‘right wing’ may be a bit extreme. Costa Rica's largest insurance, telecom and energy companies continue to be state owned. Its public sector health services are ranked among the best in the Americas. Market liberalisation in certain sectors, such as telecoms, has been more gradual than in most other countries of Latin America (except Cuba). Unsurprisingly, Costa Rica ranks below Chile and Uruguay, which the author considers to be ‘left-wing’, on the Economic Freedom Index (Heritage Foundation) and Doing Business Index (World Bank). In sum, although the signing of CAFTA was most contested in Costa Rica, it did not change the country's long-tradition of heterodox policies, which combine foreign direct investment attraction with state intervention in health and education.

In spite of some minor criticisms that could be raised regarding the Costa Rica case, the book is well written, very clearly structured and well presented. It is academically rigorous and yet pleasant to read. I recommend it to anyone interested in market reforms and their relationship with political dynamics in Latin America. The events and phenomena the author discusses with reference to Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua are actually relevant beyond Central America. The case of Costa Rica, for example, could be used to discuss the role of democratic institutions in managing civil society mobilisation and polarisation in peaceful ways. The case of El Salvador illustrates the transformation of traditional, Cold War rooted left-wing parties into more pragmatic organisations linked to local governments, non-governmental actors, and supportive foreign governments. The case of Nicaragua illustrates the renewed importance of the cult of personality in Latin American politics and the process through which a populist party machinery is developed, even in countries that lack the natural resource wealth of Venezuela or Ecuador. Perhaps the author could have been less modest and discussed further and more explicitly the importance of her study for other countries and contexts. I hope to see this sort of analysis in the next work of the author, which I will read with great interest.