Richard Feinberg

The author’s father, a distinguished physician and prominent human rights activist, was gunned down in 1987 in Medellín, Colombia, by one of the right-wing death squads that operated with impunity in the country at that time. This poetic memoir is many things at once: a sensitive son’s recollections of growing up in a loving family; a proud homage to his generous father, who was devoted to his relatives, his many medical students, and his wider community and whom Abad describes as “Christian in religion, Marxist in economics, and liberal in politics”; and a moving contemplation of human tragedy and memory (“an opaque, cracked mirror”).

In this important, encouraging study, a group of World Bank economists smashes the long-standing image of Latin America as a stagnant region marred by a yawning rich-poor divide.

Carpenter bases his sharp criticism of current U.S. counternarcotics policies not on libertarian principles relating to consumer choice (as one might anticipate from a senior fellow at the Cato Institute) but rather on pragmatic grounds. Shirk’s report shares many of Carpenter’s critical assessments, although his policy recommendations are not quite as bold.

In The Sandinistas and Nicaragua Since 1979, scholars sympathetic to the Nicaraguan revolution of the 1980s grapple with the transformation of the Sandinistas from youthful idealists into powerful elites enjoying unprincipled privileges. The Education of a Radical attributes this familiar transition to the limitations of political ideology and the inherent imperfections of human nature.

In this collection, scholars with the influential Chinese Academy of Sciences offer some interesting but dryly presented perspectives on the surge of Chinese activities in Latin America. Their analyses range from pleasantly realistic, to contradictory, to naive.

An eclectic anthology of critical cultural studies, Tijuana Dreaming brings to life the tumultuous history of the border town’s shifting identity. Pilcher’s Planet Taco, meanwhile, tackles one of the central debates in Tijuana Dreaming: Can there be an “authentic” Mexico in the context of mass migrations and rapid global economic and cultural change?

The traditional pessimism regarding Latin American economies is rapidly fading, and this high-quality collection of 11 success stories helps explain why.

In the ongoing debate over who was responsible for the failed U.S. invasion of Cuba in 1961, Rasenberger rejects accusations that the CIA acted as an independent rogue power and instead blames Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. Rasenberger’s real culprit is American political culture, with its paradoxical combination of hubris and insecurity, which simply could not tolerate sharing a hemisphere with an insubordinate Cuba.

Schneider hopes the middle and popular classes in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras will mobilize on behalf of more egalitarian fiscal policies and stronger states capable of implementing shared national compacts. Such revised states might be drawn closer to their more prosperous neighbor, Costa Rica, which benefits from relatively well-established institutions and a firmer commitment to social democracy.

Suddenly, China has become a major source of capital for other emerging- market economies, providing both long-term loans and direct investments to Latin America.

The veracity of this book’s claims hinges heavily on the credibility of defectors from Cuba’s intelligence agency.

Most Latin American economies have done quite well during the last ten years or so, enjoying relatively high growth rates, low inflation, and measurable poverty reduction. But is this success sustainable in a volatile global economy? And can Latin American countries accelerate their growth to East Asian levels?