This biography of Beatriz Allende (1942–1977)—revolutionary doctor and daughter of Chile's socialist president, Salvador Allende—portrays what it means to live, love, and fight for change. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, Beatriz and her generation drove political campaigns, university reform, public health programs, internationalist guerrilla insurgencies, and government strategies. Centering Beatriz's life within the global contours of the Cold War era, Tanya Harmer exposes the promises and paradoxes of the revolutionary wave that swept through Latin America in the long 1960s. Drawing on exclusive access to Beatriz's private papers, as well as firsthand interviews, Harmer connects the private and political as she reveals the human dimensions of radical upheaval. Exiled to Havana after Chile's right-wing military coup, Beatriz worked tirelessly to oppose dictatorship back home. Harmer's interviews make vivid the terrible consequences of the coup for the Chilean Left, the realities of everyday life in Havana, and the unceasing demands of solidarity work that drained Beatriz and her generation of the dreams they once had. Her story demolishes the myth that women were simply extras in the story of Latin America's Left and brings home the immense cost of a revolutionary moment's demise.

Brazil, the largest of the Latin American nations, is fast becoming a potent international economic player as well as a regional power. This English translation of an acclaimed Brazilian anthology provides critical overviews of Brazilian life, history, and culture and insight into Brazil's development over the past century. The distinguished essayists, most of whom are Brazilian, provide expert perspectives on the social, economic, and cultural challenges that face Brazil as it seeks future directions in the age of globalization. All of the contributors connect past, present, and future Brazil. Their analyses converge on the observation that although Brazil has undergone radical changes during the past one hundred years, trenchant legacies of social and economic inequality remain to be addressed in the new century. A foreword by Jerry Davila highlights the volume's contributions for a new, English-reading audience. The contributors are Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira, Cristovam Buarque, Aspasia Camargo, Gilberto Dupas, Celso Furtado, Afranio Garcia, Celso Lafer, Jose Seixas Lourenco, Renato Ortiz, Moacir Palmeira, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, Ignacy Sachs, Paulo Singer, Herve Thery, and Jorge Wilheim.

A woman reporter in a Latin American country and a photographer are sent on a routine assignment. The two uncover a hideous crime, the revelation of which could challenge the terrorism of the military regime.

To many observers, Anastasio Somoza, who ruled Nicaragua from 1936 until his assassination in 1956, personified the worst features of a dictator. While not dismissing these characteristics, Knut Walter argues that the regime was in fact more notable for its achievement of stability, economic growth, and state building than for its personalistic and dictatorial features. Using a wide range of sources in Nicaraguan archives, Walter focuses on institutional and structural developments to explain how Somoza gained and consolidated power. According to Walter, Somoza preferred to resolve conflicts by political means rather than by outright coercion. Specifically, he built his government on agreements negotiated with the country's principal political actors, labor groups, and business organizations. Nicaragua's two traditional parties, one conservative and the other liberal, were included in elections, thus giving the appearance of political pluralism. Partly as a result, the opposition was forced to become increasingly radical, says Walter; eventually, in 1979, Nicaragua produced the only successful revolution in Central America and the first in all of Latin America since Cuba's.

Fidel Castro described Salvador Allende's democratic election as president of Chile in 1970 as the most important revolutionary triumph in Latin America after the Cuban revolution. Yet celebrations were short lived. In Washington, the Nixon administration vowed to destroy Allende's left-wing government while Chilean opposition forces mobilized against him. The result was a battle for Chile that ended in 1973 with a right-wing military coup and a brutal dictatorship lasting nearly twenty years. Tanya Harmer argues that this battle was part of a dynamic inter-American Cold War struggle to determine Latin America's future, shaped more by the contest between Cuba, Chile, the United States, and Brazil than by a conflict between Moscow and Washington. Drawing on firsthand interviews and recently declassified documents from archives in North America, Europe, and South America--including Chile's Foreign Ministry Archive--Harmer provides the most comprehensive account to date of Cuban involvement in Latin America in the early 1970s, Chilean foreign relations during Allende's presidency, Brazil's support for counterrevolution in the Southern Cone, and the Nixon administration's Latin American policies. The Cold War in the Americas, Harmer reveals, is best understood as a multidimensional struggle, involving peoples and ideas from across the hemisphere.

This collection of thirteen original essays by experts in the field of Caribbean studies clarifies the diverse elements that have shaped the modern Caribbean. Through an interdisciplinary examination of the complexities of race, politics, language, and environment that mark the region, the authors offer readers a thorough understanding of the Caribbean's history and culture. The essays also comment thoughtfully on the problems that confront the Caribbean in today's world. The essays focus on the Caribbean island and the mainland enclaves of Belize and the Guianas. Topics examined include the Haitian Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; labor and society in the nineteenth-century Caribbean; society and culture in the British and French West Indies since 1870; identity, race, and black power in Jamaica; the "February Revolution" of 1970 in Trinidad; contemporary Puerto Rico; politics, economy, and society in twentieth-century Cuba; Spanish Caribbean politics and nationalism in the nineteenth century; Caribbean migrations; economic history of the British Caribbean; international relations; and nationalism, nation, and ideology in the evolution of Caribbean literature. The authors trace the historical roots of current Caribbean difficulties and analyze these problems in the light of economic, political, and social developments. Additionally, they explore these conditions in relation to United States interests and project what may lie ahead for the region. The challenges currently facing the Caribbean, note the editors, impose a heavy burden upon political leaders who must struggle "to eliminate the tensions when the people are so poor and their expectations so great." The contributors are Herman L. Bennett, Bridget Brereton, David Geggus, Franklin W. Knight, Anthony P. Maingot, Jay R. Mandle, Roberto Marquez, Teresita Martinez Vergne, Colin A. Palmer, Bonham C. Richardson, Franciso A. Scarano, and Blanca G. Silvestrini.

An account of the violence and repression that defined the murderous Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s. Manz, an anthropologist, spent over two decades studying the Mayan highlands and remote rain forests of Guatemala. In a political portrait of Santa María Tzejá, where highland Maya peasants seeking land settled in the 1970s, Manz describes these villagers' plight as their isolated, lush, but deceptive paradise became one of the centers of the war convulsing the entire country. After their village was viciously sacked in 1982, desperate survivors fled into the surrounding rain forest and eventually to Mexico, and some even further, to the United States, while others stayed behind and fell into the military's hands. Manz follows their flight and eventual return to Santa María Tzejá, where they sought to rebuild their village and their lives. From publisher description.