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Yearly Archives: 2022

SOCIAL STRUGGLE IN NEOLIBERAL CENTRAL AMERICA

November 2022 Issue Editors: Paulo Simões This issue explores changes in the strategies of Central American social movements confronting neoliberalism in recent years. Neoliberal structural reforms were initiated in Central America in the 1980s with structural adjustment programs, free-trade zones, and related policies inseparable from U.S.-funded wars, death squads, and other forms of repression. The “peaceful” period of the 1990s saw the heightened implementation of restructuring and neoliberal policies which have prompted massive rural-to-urban and international migration, increased resource extraction, weakened labor and environmental protections, reconfigured hierarchies of gender and sexuality, and increased wealth disparities. The articles in this issue analyze the creative ways in which Central American communities have strategized to improve their living conditions and challenge the root causes of their structural vulnerability that has persuaded numerous Central Americans to make the difficult and deeply painful choice to leave their communities and/or countries.   TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE

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Brazil: The Perils of Uncertainty

September 2022 Issue Editors: Paulo Simões The September issue of Latin American Perspectives provides a useful context to understand Brazil’s 2022 presidential elections and what is at stake. The articles deal with diverse topics including the political interests of Brazil’s financial sector, national capitalist interests, land occupations, social movement protests, educational reform, imprisoned women, and other subjects during the governments of Lula’s Workers Party (PT), which ruled Brazil from 2003 to 2016, as well as that of Jair Bolsonaro. Articles shine light on the complexity of issues facing governments and political parties, such as the role of Chinese economic ties and party relations with social movements. Some of the articles challenge the narrative fabricated by the right that the PT governments and particularly that of Dilma Rousseff were exceptionally corrupt and inefficient, flaws that allegedly stirred popular sectors to force her out of office.   TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE

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Marxism, Critical Thinking, and Andean Futures

July 2022 Issue Editors: Ronaldo Munck, Pascual García-Macías and Karina Ponce This issue examines the legacy and relevance of the thinking and life of José Carlos Mariátegui who died in 1930 and is considered Latin America’s first Marxist. Contributors take up his critical engagement with the peasants, the proletariat, the indigenous people and with women and show his relevance today. The issue also takes up the thinking of a group of other Andean region thinkers/activists in the radical tradition namely Agustín Cueva, René Zavaleta Mercado, and Orlando Fals Borda who in different ways illuminated the particular development path of Latin America in the tradition of Mariategui.   TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE

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Neoliberalism and Higher Education in Latin America

May 2022 Issue Editors: Robert Austin Henry and Bernadete Beserra This issue investigates the neoliberal transformation of higher education in Latin America since the 1980s and the resistance it has generated. It examines how higher education has became one more frontier for the expansion of corporate capital and accumulation of private wealth. Contributors take up the politics, economics, and culture of this process from a range of critical standpoints, analyzing the threat to the university as an essential space for free intellectual inquiry and showing the negative medium- and long-term consequences for social and economic development.   TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE

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Reassessing Development: Past and Present Part 2

March 2022 Issue Editors: Ronald H. Chilcote and Joana Salém Vasconcelos Latin American Perspectives was launched nearly a half century ago in the midst of a paradigmatic shift in thinking about development. Concerned with backwardness, underdevelopment, and dependency, the new thinking was led by Rodolfo Stavenhagen in Mexico, Agustín Cueva in Ecuador, Aníbal Quijano in Peru, and Vania Bambirra, Theotônio dos Santos, and Ruy Mauro Marini in Brazil—all founding editors of LAP. Four early LAP issues carried debate around essential questions and new theoretical direction. The January 2022 (Part 1) issue returns to this early historical thought and to contemporary Marxist debates of past and present theories of dependency and peripheral debates. The March 2022 issue (Part 2) looks at the relevance of this theory to contemporary Latin American case studies.   TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE

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Reassessing Development: Past and Present Marxist Theories pf Dependency and Periphery Debates

January 2022 Issue Editors: Ronald H. Chilcote and Joana Salém Vasconcelos Latin American Perspectives was launched nearly a half century ago in the midst of a paradigmatic shift in thinking about development. Concerned with backwardness, underdevelopment, and dependency, the new thinking was led by Rodolfo Stavenhagen in Mexico, Agustín Cueva in Ecuador, Aníbal Quijano in Peru, and Vania Bambirra, Theotônio dos Santos, and Ruy Mauro Marini in Brazil—all founding editors of LAP. Four early LAP issues carried debate around essential questions and new theoretical direction. The January 2022 (Part 1) issue returns to this early historical thought and to contemporary Marxist debates of past and present theories of dependency and peripheral debates. The March 2022 issue (Part 2) looks at the relevance of this theory to contemporary Latin American case studies.   TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE

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Political Report #1465 “Those Who Are Poor, Die Poor” | Notes on The Chilean Elections

by LAP Editor, Jeffery R. WebberPosted by SPECTRE Journal Premature obituaries of Chilean neoliberalism abound on the heels of the December 19 run-off presidential election. Gabriel Boric of Apruebo Dignidad (Approve Dignity, AD) – a coalition of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front, FA) and the Partido Comunista de Chile (Communist Party of Chile, PCC) – secured a surprisingly robust victory over his far-right opponent, José Antonio Kast (aka, JAK), of Frente Social Cristiano (Christian Social Front, FSC) – a coalition of Kast’s Partido Republicano (Republican Party, PR) and the Partido Conservador Cristiano (Christian Conservative Party, PCC).1 Boric took 55.9 percent of the popular vote to Kast’s 44.1 percent, with 1.2 million more people voting in the second round than in the first contest in November. That put voter turnout at 56 percent, the highest of any presidential election since 2012, when voting was made voluntary.2 The result represents a serious setback for forces of the far right in Chile, and, indeed, the region more generally – it wasn’t good news for Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, for example, who faces elections in 2022 that he was already likely to lose to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula”).Scenes of elation on streets across Chile [...]

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Latin American Perspectives, founded in 1974, is a theoretical and scholarly journal for discussion and debate on the political economy of capitalism, imperialism, and socialism in the Americas. Most issues focus on a single problem, nation, or region, providing an in-depth look from participants and scholars throughout the Americas.

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