Castro's Cuba is isolated; the guerrillas who once spread havoc through Uruguay and Argentina are dead, dispersed, or running for office as moderates. And in 1990, Nicaragua's Sandinistas were rejected at the polls by their own constituents. Are these symptoms of the fall of the Latin American left? Or are they merely temporary lulls in an ongoing revolution that may yet transform our hemisphere? This perceptive and richly eventful study by one of Mexico's most distinguished political scientists tells the story behind the failed movements of the past thirty years while suggesting that the left has a continuing relevance in a continent that suffers from destitution and social inequality. Combining insider's accounts of intrigue and armed struggle with a clear-sighted analysis of the mechanisms of day-to-day power, Utopia Unarmed is an indispensable work of scholarship, reportage, and political prognosis.

Based on in-depth interviews with seventy-four intellectuals of the lefts in Cuba and Mexico, Reinventing Revolution explores the rapidly changing thinking of progressives on the big-and enduring-questions of democracy, economic alternatives, and national sovereignty. Offering a unique world-systems perspective on the sociology of intellectuals and

Written by specialists on the region, this book provides a comprehensive account of the left across Latin America.

DIVComing from a broad cross-section of academic disciplines and theoretical positions, this collection of essays questions and reworks Marxist critiques of capitalism that center on the West and which posit a uniform model of development. More specifically/div

Written by one of the most promising young scholars on the Mexican intellectual scene, The Shadow of Ulysses attempts to reconnect the American and Mexican intellectual experiences by exploring historical as well as contemporary issues in both countries. The book's first chapters discuss the relationship between American and Mexican intellectuals in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution and offer a sociological comparison of the 1960s intellectual generations in the United States and Mexico. Later chapters provide a critical assessment of two prominent Mexican public intellectuals well known to the American reader: Carlos Fuentes and Jorge Castaneda. The Shadow of Ulysses, the Mexican edition of which was awarded the Alfonso Reyes National Prize, offers a rare glimpse into the development of contemporary Mexican thought and reveals the under-recognized intellectual ties that existed between our two countries in the first half of the twentieth century.

The Sandinista Revolution and its victory against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua gripped the United States and the world in the 1980s. But as soon as the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1990 and the Iran Contra affair ceased to make headlines, it became, in Washington at least, a thing of the past. Mateo Jarquin recenters the revolution as a major episode in the history of Latin America, the international left, and the Cold War. Drawing on research in Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, and Costa Rica, he recreates the perspective of Sandinista leaders in Managua and argues that their revolutionary project must be understood in international context. Because struggles over the Revolution unfolded transnationally, the Nicaraguan drama had lasting consequences for Latin American politics at a critical juncture. It also reverberated in Western Europe, among socialists worldwide, and beyond, illuminating global dynamics like the spread of democracy and the demise of a bipolar world dominated by two superpowers. Jarquin offers a sweeping analysis of the last left-wing revolution of the twentieth century, an overview of inter-American affairs in the 1980s, and an incisive look at the making of the post–Cold War order.

Reassesses the role of revolution as a force that has shaped the development of world politics.