After the end of the Cold War, the Latin American left reemerged as a powerful political alternative in many countries. The “Left Turn” is one of the most notable changes observable in Latin American contemporary politics. The current left is very different in comparison to the 1960s one. Liberal democracy and human rights are now part of its own ideas and agenda. The end of the Cold War and the breakdown of Communist regimes in Europe and Asia are not enough to explain this transformation. As editor Jessica Stites Mor states in the introductory chapter to this collective book, it is the Latin American Cold War itself – not its end as a global conflict – that can better explain the rise of a democratic- and human rights-oriented competitive left.

Stites Mor calls attention to the fact that such a shift can be interpreted, among other possible influential trends, as a consequence of violent repression against left-wing parties and movements and massive violations of basic human rights experienced by thousands of its militants under anticommunist authoritarian regimes or counterinsurgent civil wars, supported by the US, especially after the overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973. After the traumatic end of the Chilean “pacific rode to socialism,” Latin Americans in exile in Europe and the US developed a strategic involvement in transnational activist networks. It was through this experience that human rights advocacy began to substitute the previous dominant calls for socialism, and claims for democracy eclipsed the revolutionary strategies.

So engagement in these networks is a key issue to be considered. As the editor says and as several of the works collected show through the analysis of particular cases and experiences, the influence of transnationalism should not be considered only as a global force affecting local (national or subnational) communities. On the contrary, its role can only be evaluated as a result of the interaction between global and local levels. This relationship has been usually understood only as a vertical process of transmission of values and practices from the global to the local level. At the same time the former level has been identified with the North and the latter with the South. The authors of the essays presented by Stites Mor give evidence about the role of national and subnational actors in the formation of transnational networks, and the process of critical adaptation of transnational values by local actors, with its own practices, identities and traditions.

The first part of the book includes three essays on early transnational solidarity movements or events in Cold War Latin America, all of them dated before 1973. Margaret Power's work on the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party offers a brief history of the international solidarity network, with the cause of independence promoted by Nationalist Party activists in Latin America and the US in the 1950s. Ernesto Capello analyzes local reactions to Nelson Rockefeller's goodwill presidential mission through twenty Latin American countries in 1969. Between official acceptance and street protests, he recognizes an important “pliable center,” represented especially by “common people” trying to escape from Cold War pressures. Sara Sanders focusses on the 1968 student protest in Mexico. She considers it a movement with national origins and only later connected, partly as a strategy of international validation, to youth rebellion in the US and Europe.

In the second part of the book, Russell Cobb examines the debates among some of the most notable writers of the Latin American literature “boom” of the 1960s. Beginning with a revision of criticism of Pablo Neruda due to his participation in a PEN Club conference celebrated in New York in June 1966, the author identifies two alternative and confronting types of transnationalism after the Cuban Revolution: on the one hand the cosmopolitans, represented by Neruda's open attitude to sharing activities with writers and cultural institutions in the US; on the other the revolutionaries, those writers like Gabriel García Márquez, identified with Casa de las Américas, a nongovernmental state-sponsored cultural center created in La Habana in 1959. Alison Bruey's contribution illuminates the intersection between local and transnational levels through the study of the emergence of a grassroots solidarity movement in Chile during Pinochet's dictatorship (1973–90). In her chapter on Cuban military and educational cooperation with Angola (1975–91), Christine Hatzky examines the conceptual and practical importance of the South–South dimension of transnationalism – closely related with the notion of Third World – in the context of the polarization between the US and the USSR.

In the third part of the book Brenda Elsey shows the importance of the cultural dimension of transnationalism during the Cold War. Her approach to culture is different from that of Cobb. Elsey examines the development of a transnational Chilean solidarity movement in relation to four expressions of “popular culture”: the 1974 FIFA World Cup, the 1987 world beauty contest, tapestry craft art, and folk music. In each case the author highlights the importance of the intersection between popular culture and politics for the transnational approach. She also emphasizes the importance of reciprocal influence between local and global levels of activism and solidarity networks for the constitution of political communities based, among other things, on common notions of human rights. The same issue is examined by Molly Todd in her chapter on the Salvadorean refugees living in Honduras under UN sponsorship during the 1980s. Todd stresses the crucial role of local community organization in promoting and orienting international aid. Finally, the book ends with a self-interview by the US scholar and gay activist James Green. He gives testimony of his experience as a participant in the origins of the Brazilian gay liberation movement in the 1970s. Green's contribution focusses on the tensions between the socialist left and the gay movement during political liberalization under authoritarianism, something he had previously experienced in the US in a different political context.

Considered as a whole, Stites Mor's book constitutes a very interesting contribution to a renewed transnational approach in two main research fields: Cold War Latin America and international human rights studies. Strictly speaking, this contribution doesn't innovate but reinforces and expands some existing critical trends in these areas. These trends can be summarized in the following statements. Transnationalism may be seen not mainly as a process of hierarchical imposition from outside, but as an interaction between global and local (national, regional, subnational) actors, events and institutions. Consequently, transnationalism doesn't imply – at least not necessarily and not always – a reinforcement of the primacy of the North over the South. On the contrary, it creates space for South intervention in global affairs, including South–South collaboration. At the same time, the approach proposed in the book has implications for the study of the origins of the Left Turn in Latin America. This major recent change in Latin American politics can be partly explained as an indirect result of left transformations related to its engagement with transnational solidarity and human rights networks during the last two decades of the Cold War. Again, this is not a new idea,Footnote ¹ but it is very well illustrated by the study of particular cases in most of the nine essays collected in Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America.