Latin America at the Crossroads: Domination, Crisis, Popular Movements and Political Alternatives, by Roberto Regalado, 2007, Ocean Press, 263 pages, $17.95 paperback
At first glance, Roberto Regalado’s Latin America at the Crossroads appears to be yet another in the recent flurry of books documenting Latin America’s “pink tide.” Instead, Regalado, one of Cuba’s most prominent public intellectuals, brings us a treatise on the history of a Latin America that has arrived at a point “between the centuries,” where a “qualitatively higher form” of global domination has caused a crisis in the state’s ability to negotiate the contradictions of capitalism, resulting in a rise of popular movements and left political apparatuses attempting to represent them.
In analyzing the current situation in its historical context, he argues that there has not been a general shift to the left—a “pink tide”—but that, rather, what has been created is a model of neoliberal democracy “capable of ‘tolerating’ left governments as long as they are committed to governing with right-wing policies.” He allows that the governments of Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales do not fit within the schema of legitimacy imposed by imperialism (sadly, his confidence in the revolutionary potential in the 2006 Sandinista victory seems seriously misplaced) and that the “steamroller” of imperialist dominations has lost some small measure of its effectiveness. Nonetheless, he asserts that the conditions for the “progressive reform of capitalism” are absent, and may not reappear, and he therefore concludes that “the use of some type of revolutionary violence will be inevitable.”
Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask, by Nick Henck, 2007, Duke University Press, 528 pages, $24.95 paperback
In this first English-language biography of Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, better known to the world as Subcommander Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, Nick Henck retraces some of what is already familiar about this now infamous masked guerrilla: his upbringing of relative privilege, his higher education, his university professorship. But in this exhaustive study, readers also see each of the revolutionary seeds as they were sown: his initial contacts with members of National Liberation Forces at the Metropolitan Autonomous University, his travels to the south of Mexico with those comrades to create a southern wing of the FLN, which would become the EZLN, and his work in the decade between his move to the Lacandón jungle in 1984 and the offensive that put the Zapatistas on the world stage in 1994, a period during which he transformed from an urbane Mexico City professor into a full time guerrilla leader.
Drawing on nearly every published work ever written by Marcos, Henck argues that while the guerrilla leader is most well-known for his media savvy, more important is his “great flexibility of mind,” which allowed him to put aside the theoretical priorities he had brought with him as a radical intellectual and to become a conduit for the demands of the indigenous population of Chiapas. This makes him, Henck argues, “the most advanced stage so far in the evolution of the revolutionary,” posing the question: Who comes next?
Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, 2007, The New Press, 336 pages, $26.95 hardcover
Davis and Monk’s new edited collection of essays attempts to examine “the new geographies of exclusion and landscapes of wealth that have arisen during the long ‘globalization’ boom since 1990.” With case studies of cities like Dubai, Hong Kong, Kabul, Managua, and Medellín; countries like Brazil and Egypt; and the psychic cartographies of malls, monasteries, and museums, the authors examine the physical manifestations of neoliberalism’s “winner-take-all ethos . . . unfettered by any remnant of social contract,” mapping “terminal . . . stages in the late history of modernity.”
Forrest Hylton’s contribution on Medellín, the city that one historian called in 1989 “the world capital of crime,” is especially illuminating given Latin America’s long history as the testing ground of neoliberalism. The limpieza of Medellín’s red-light districts, drug markets, and gang-controlled areas by private narco-paramilitary security forces made way for urban redevelopment and foreign investment in the form of condos, luxury hotels, shopping centers, and corporate headquarters. This violent “pacification” of the city was carried out with strong support from a progressive municipal government that enjoys a high approval rating. Thus, the neoliberal makeover of the city, Hylton argues, creates a “ ‘weak’ or ‘thin’ citizenship, based largely on North Atlantic models of consumerism and electoral politics.” In Medellín, as in many of the locales described in this collection, condos are a poor substitute for citizenship.
