From the laboratory of neoliberalismpopularly 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 Chavez and Morales, against the privatization of water in Bolivia. Across Latin America, people have built social movements that are starting to take back control of their countries and their lives.In Dispatches from Latin America, 28 authors report on 11 different countries from Mexico to Argentina, together mapping the contemporary political and social terrain. Drawn from the pages of the well-respected NACLA Report, this collection offers us 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.

From the esteemed New Yorker correspondent comes an incisive volume of essays and reportage that vividly illuminates Latin America’s recent history. Only Alma Guillermoprieto, the most highly regarded writer on the region, could unravel the complex threads of Colombia’s cocaine wars or assess the combination of despotism, charm, and political jiu-jitsu that has kept Fidel Castro in power for more than 40 years. And no one else can write with such acumen and sympathy about statesmen and campesinos, leftist revolutionaries and right-wing militias, and political figures from Evita Peron to Mexico’s irrepressible president, Vicente Fox. Whether she is following the historic papal visit to Havana or staying awake for a pre-dawn interview with an insomniac Subcomandante Marcos, Guillermoprieto displays both the passion and knowledge of an insider and the perspective of a seasoned analyst. Looking for History is journalism in the finest traditions of Joan Didion, V. S. Naipaul, and Ryszard Kapucinski: observant, empathetic, and beautifully written.

A kaleidoscopic, fast-paced tour of Latin America from one of the Spanish-speaking world’s most outstanding writers. Lamenting not having more time to get to know each of the nineteen countries he visits after winning the prestigious Premio Alfaguara, Andrés Neuman begins to suspect that world travel consists mostly of “not seeing.” But then he realizes that the fleeting nature of his trip provides him with a unique opportunity: touring and comparing every country of Latin America in a single stroke. Neuman writes on the move, generating a kinetic work that is at once puckish and poetic, aphoristic and brimming with curiosity. Even so-called non-places—airports, hotels, taxis—are turned into powerful symbols full of meaning. A dual Argentine-Spanish citizen, he incisively explores cultural identity and nationality, immigration and globalization, history and language, and turbulent current events. Above all, Neuman investigates the artistic lifeblood of Latin America, tackling with gusto not only literary heavyweights such as Bolaño, Vargas Llosa, Lorca, and Galeano, but also an emerging generation of authors and filmmakers whose impact is now making ripples worldwide. Eye-opening and charmingly offbeat, How to Travel without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of the Americas.

How social movements of the past and present are shaping Latin American politics today These are uncertain times in Latin America. Popular faith in democracy has been shaken; traditional political parties and institutions are stagnating, and there is a growing right-wing extremism overtaking some governments. Yet, in recent years, autonomous social movements have multiplied and thrived. This book presents voices of these movement protagonists themselves, as they describe the major issues, conflicts, and campaigns for social justice in Latin America today. Latin America Bureau, a London-based, independent organization providing news and analysis on the region, spoke to people from fourteen countries, from Mexico to the Southern Cone. The book captures the voices indigenous activists, fighting oil drilling in their homelands; mothers from favelas seeking justice for their children killed by police; opponents of large-scale mining projects; independent journalists working, at great personal risk, to expose corruption and human rights violations; women and LGBT people confronting violence and discrimination; and students demanding their right to a free, universal and high-quality education system. Though their locations and causes are disparate, these people and their movements share learning and activism, and their cooperation helps to link the movements across national borders. Voices of Latin America is essential reading for students, travelers, journalists—anyone with an interest in social justice movements in Latin America.

"The twin cities of Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora, for years straddled an indistinct border," but with the maquiladora industry, a crackdown against undocumented immigrants, and drug smuggling, "neither Nogales will ever be the same."--Cover.

Years before Hillbilly Elegy and White Trash, a raucous, truth-telling look at the white working poor -- and why they have learned to hate liberalism. What it adds up to, he asserts, is an unacknowledged class war. By turns tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of "the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks." Deer Hunting with Jesus is Joe Bageant’s report on what he learned when he moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia. Like countless American small towns, it is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. Two in five of the people in his old neighborhood do not have high school diplomas or health care. Alcohol, overeating, and Jesus are the preferred avenues of escape. He writes of: • His childhood friends who work at factory jobs that are constantly on the verge of being outsourced • The mortgage and credit card rackets that saddle the working poor with debt • The ubiquitous gun culture—and why the left doesn’ t get it • Scots Irish culture and how it played out in the young life of Lynddie England

During the Second World War, the FDR administration placed the FBI in charge of political surveillance in Latin America. Through a program called the Special Intelligence Service (SIS), 700 agents were assigned to combat Nazi influence in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. The SIS’s mission, however, extended beyond countries with significant German populations or Nazi spy rings. As evidence of the SIS’s overreach, forty-five agents were dispatched to Ecuador, a country without any German espionage networks. Furthermore, by 1943, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover shifted the SIS’s focus from Nazism to communism. Marc Becker interrogates a trove of FBI documents from its Ecuador mission to uncover the history and purpose of the SIS’s intervention in Latin America and for the light they shed on leftist organizing efforts in Latin America. Ultimately, the FBI’s activities reveal the sustained nature of US imperial ambitions in the Americas.