Product Description

Dispatches charts Latin America's aspirations and challenges.

From the laboratory of neoliberalism—popularly known as "globalization"--Latin America has transformed itself into a launching pad for resistance. As globalization began to spread its devastation, robust and thoughtful opposition emerged in response--in the recovered factory movement of Argentina, in the presidential elections of indigenous leaders and radicals like Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, against the privatization of water in Bolivia. Across Latin America, people are building social movements to take back control of their countries and their lives.

In Dispatches from Latin America, 28 authors report on countries from Mexico to Argentina to map the contemporary political and social territory. Drawn from the pages of the well-respected NACLA Report, this collection offers a riveting series of accounts that bring new insight into the region’s struggles and victories.

With shrewd analysis rendered in accessible language, Dispatches lays plain the complex and vitally important conditions unfolding in 21st-century Latin America.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #627582 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 376 pages

About the Author
Vijay Prashad is professor and director of International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of the widely acclaimed Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Beacon, 2001) and Karma of Brown Folk (Minnesota, 2000) both chosen as one of the 25 best books of the year (2001 and 2000 respectively) by the Village Voice. [[probably end it here]]Other books by Prashad include Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare (South End Press, 2003); Fat Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism (Common Courage, 2002); War Against the Planet: The Fifth Afghan War, US Imperialism, and Other Assorted Fundamentalisms (Leftword, 2002); and Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community (Oxford, 1999).

Teo Ballvé is an editor of NACLA Report on the Americas, a contributing news editor for Resource Center of the Americas, and a contributor to Narco News.He divides his time between New York City and Latin America.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
They Rise From the Earth: The Promise of Latin America

By Vijay Prashad

Nadie sabe donde enterraron los asesinos estos cuerpos, pero ellos saldrán de la tierra a cobrar la sangre caída en la resurrección del pueblo.

Nobody knows where the assassins buried these bodies, but they'll rise from the earth to redeem the fallen blood in the resurrection of the people.

—Pablo Neruda (Canto General; tr. Jack Schmitt)

Every generation of North Americans must come to terms with Latin America.

For us, front and center, is the question of neo-liberal policy. Latin America suffers and struggles against a bundle of policies promoted by the US government in Washington, DC, by the banks in New York City, London as well as Madrid, and by Latin America's own oligarchies. Poverty and hopelessness, the harvest of neo-liberalism for workers and peasants, has led to displacement and migration. Many of those who come north, to El Norte, for work and to rekindle their hopes, are products of the neo-liberal policies exported from North America. The battle against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and for a fair US immigration policy is principally a fight for the creation of a just dispensation in the Americas. Resistance against neo-liberalism has fueled the rise of left-wing governments and movements across Latin America. They bear within them the answers to many of our common challenges. It is worthwhile to see what they are up to and up against, as well as to see how we, in North America, can get sympathetically involved in the movement for the future of Latin America.

The book you hold in your hands is our attempt to provide a map of Latin America's aspirations and challenges. It is offered to you by Teo Ballve and myself as a way to get you acquainted with the fast-changing developments in Latin America, from an assessment by Emir Sader of the Lula regime in Brazil to Raúl Zibechi's cartography of worker control over some of Argentina's factories. The large and the small experiments are documented and analyzed. Nothing is seen from a utopian standpoint, because this would doom our appraisal to inevitable failure. These are largely materialist estimations based on the constraints of the histories of each separate Latin American society, of the hierarchies that check the imagination of the population. Oftentimes, we get carried away with this or that current, but in most cases, the writers in this volume are also constrained by the politics of possibility.