Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War

Latin America faces deepening poverty, overwhelming daily violence and a widening gap between rich and poor. Castaneda, a political science professor at Mexico's Autonomous University, asserts that the Latin American left should abandon its quest for a socialist utopia and instead should strive for a market economy that incorporates the best features of Western European and Japanese postwar capitalism. These include redistributed taxation, worker involvement in production decisions, reduced income inequalities, social spending on housing, education and health, government regulation and a coordinated industrial policy. This insightful academic study covers Nicaragua's Sandinistas, Peru's Marxist-Maoist Shining Path guerrillas, Argentina's Peronists, populist movements galvanized by Castro's Cuba, and left-of-center reformists in Chile, Mexico and Brazil. Castaneda is co-author of Limits to Friendship: The United States and Mexico. (Sept.)