State of the Peoples: A Global Human Rights Report on Societies in Danger by Cultural Survival, Beacon Press, 1993, 272 PP., $18.00 (paper). Cultural Survival has assembled an invaluable guide to the world's indigenous peoples. The book combines a scholarly concern for accuracy and detail, with an activist agenda. The introductory essays persuasively argue that the defense of indigenous nations must go hand-in-hand with the struggle to preserve endangered ecosys- tems. The core of the book, entitled "Resources in Action," begins with concise summaries of the cases of indigenous groups at particular risk, grouped under such headings as land titles, logging, uranium mining and nuclear tests, and the exploitation of strategic minerals and energy resources. This is fol- lowed by more in-depth regional sections which contain cogent short essays by field researchers about endangered indigenous groups and the nature of the chal- lenges they face to their well-being and survival. Organized Labor in Venezuela, 1958-1991 by Steve Ellner, Scholarly Resources, 1993, 247 Pp., $40.00 (cloth). A casual reader will learn some- thingeither about trade unions, political parties, the Left, or Venezuela's industrial structure on virtually every page of Ellner' s latest book. Indeed, the greatest strength of this book is the amount of institutional information one can glean from it. Covering the role of Venezuela's labor movement dur- ing the "democratic period" begin- ning in 1958, Ellner takes on the thesis of Venezuelan "exceptional- ism": the idea that because of its great oil wealth, and to a lesser degree because of the astuteness of its dominant political parties and the early defeat of leftist guerrillas, Venezuelan development consti- tutes an exception to the Latin American norm. Rather than sim- ply dismissing the thesis as a myth, he carefully shows the effect of the myth on the actors who believed in it, and the consequent muting of both class struggle and military interventionism. After laying out the country's economic history, Ellner recounts the role of organized labor in the party systemparticularly Accin Democrtica' s domination of the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers. He contrasts the oil workers who abandoned their mili- tancy while remaining in the pro- tective party system, with the steel- workers who became more combative and independent. In this readable institutional history, Ell- ner presents not only a history of the trade unions, but a valuable chronology of the Venezuelan Left. Winds of Memory a video by Felix Zurita, 1992, 53 mins, $390 (sale), $75 (rental), First Run/Icarus Films. This film opens with a scene of an elderly Maya woman weaving as she declares in her indigenous tongue, "after 500 years, they still haven't discovered us. We've hid- den our face in order to resist." Winds of Memory attempts to unveil this unseen face. The film is most gripping when it captures the radical disjuncture between the rul- ing class' celebration of a postcard version of indigenous culture and the reality of brutal oppression. A high-society gathering at Cobn's annual folklore festival to select Miss Maya, the Indian Queen, is juxtaposed with an interview with festival promoter Benedicto Lucas Garcia, who oversaw the brutal pacification campaign of 1980. The unctuous general, ten years into retirement, asserts with a straight face that the "disappeared" live in Mexico and Cuba, and embraces for the camera two indigenous women to demonstrate his love for "his people." The Politics of Food in Mexico: State Power and Social Mobilization by Jonathan Fox, Cornell University Press, 1993, 280 Pp., $39.95 (cloth). This is an interesting academic study of the relations between social movements and state power in modern Mexico. The focus of Fox's study is the reform of the Mexican Food System (SAM) which the government embarked upon in the early 1980s. The gov- ernment implemented a set of mea- sures to increase production and alleviate hunger, which had the unintended consequence of mobi- lizing the rural poorat least tem- porarilyinto an effective political force. The interplay between state policy-making and popular mobi- lization is Fox's chief theoretical concern. Democracy and Socialism in Sandinista Nicaragua by Harry E. Vanden and Gary Prevost, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993, 172 pp., $32 (cloth). Not very often does one encounter a book that is: compact but compre- hensive; sophisticated yet accessi- ble; an introduction providing a definitive analysis; and a work for the general reader that must be read by the specialist in the field. This is just such a book. In the introductory essay, the authors trace competing concep- tions of democracy as they have evolved historically both within capitalist and socialist theory, and more concretely, within Russia, the United States, and Latin America. They link contradictory tendencies within the Sandinista movement both to authoritarian and bureau- cratic practices in actually existing socialisms, and to pressures to con- form to the representative model of democracy of Western industrial- ized countries, as well as to the marginalized and repressed concep- tions of direct participatory democ- racy subsumed in both traditions. Chapter 2, "The Genesis of San- dinismo" is an incisive and thor- ough account of the evolution of Sandinista theory and praxis. Van- den and Prevost locate the roots of Sandinismo in Nicaraguan history as well as in the overwhelming impact of U.S. imperialism on the political, economic and social evo- lution of the country. The authors suggest that Sandinismo emerged as an innovative and successful leftist movement from elements as diverse as Sandino' s war of libera- tion and his written legacy, Cuban foquismo, the ideology of the tradi- tional pro-Soviet Left, the coura- geous nationalism of Rigoberto Lopez Perez and Pedro JoaquIn Chamorro, and the fortitude and creativity of the FSLN's founders. The core of the book is devoted to tracing the trajectory of the San- dinista revolutionthe idealism that impelled it, the contradictions that bedevilled it, and the forces that undermined it. In the end, Van- den and Prevost argue, the innova- tiveness and adaptability of the Sandinistas, which carried them so far, proved inadequate. They attribute this failure not so much to concerted counterrevolutionary hostility, but more to the paradoxes within Sandinismo itself: van- guardi sm and democratic central- ism combined with participatory democracy, pluralism and elec- tions; centralized planning and state control atop a mixed economy; and finally, fighting an anti-imperialist war in the context of nonalignment and a collapsing Soviet bloc. The authors provide a well-craft- ed and convincing account of the electoral defeat, and give a useful post mortem and assessment of the challenges ahead. This slim vol- ume constitutes an invaluable addi- tion to the expert's Nicaragua col- lection, but it is equally valuable as a basic text for the novice.
