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Political Economy

Agrarian Question as an Ecological Question

Historically, the agrarian question in Latin America was primarily concerned with addressing the unequal distribution of land and rural poverty through redistribution. Different types of agrarian reform policies in the twentieth century, frequently with different goals, tried to dismantle large estates owned by a few wealthy elites and allocate the land among landless peasants, small-scale farmers, or Indigenous communities. Due to neoliberal agriculture’s ecological destruction based on the so-called ‘green revolution’ paradigm, experimentally applied since the 1950s and then massively adopted since the 1970s, the contemporary agrarian question in Latin American has adopted an increasingly environmental emphasis attention. Agricultural commodities’ exchange value was completely merged with the war and chemical industrial complex through agrochemical inputs, expanding the extractive frontier, increasing the predominance of monocrops, and jeopardizing biodiversity The expansion of this extractive frontier and its concomitant problems, like the climate crisis and social dispossession, triggered socio-ecological resistance by indigenous communities, peasants, ecologist movements, against the profit-oriented objectives of governments and large corporations. The main goal of this special issue is to discuss and analyze the Latin American agrarian question as the epicenter of the global ecological crisis, offering interdisciplinary and pluri-methodological inputs within a critical perspective.The issue is divided [...]

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Assessing the Past Half Decade

Political developments in Brazil in February of 2024 have raised hopes that the perpetrators of the attempted coup of January 8th 2022 in Brasilia will finally be brought to justice. It is perhaps serendipitous that publication of our current Latin American Perspectives issue, though delayed by a few months, should come to press at this moment. Contained within its pages readers will find many articles which discuss some of the most important events and topics leading up to the coup attempt as well as its repercussions. In this issue readers will find information about a variety of crucial topics important for understanding the current state of Brazil, as well as gain insights into its future direction. Articles detail the political rise of Bolsonaro and his administration and the American involvement in the “long coup” which targeted the PT and Dilma Roussef which ultimately helped to place Bolsonaro in the presidency. Also discussed is the rise of the “new right”, a hybrid of neoconservative ideologies with neoliberal economic philosophies, as well as the contradictions between Bolsonaro’s populist nationalist rhetoric and the purposeful dismantling of the social welfare infrastructure while submitting to international economic interests, and the market capitalization of healthcare and [...]

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COVID-19 Coronavirus

This issue offers a range of pandemic-related insights into Latin America, among them an ongoing weakening of educational infrastructure in spite of pedagogical dedication and activism; the relationship between health crises and deepening gendered violence; the power of women’s collective organizing around livelihood strategies; a collective workers’ sense of abandonment, displacement, and disposability; a variety of perspectives on telework; and new pandemic-inspired economic “shock doctrines” and “disaster extractivism.” By treating COVID-19 as a disruptive social force, the issue’s essays contribute to lessons learned from the pandemic in an expansive and creative way that point toward multidimensional collective strategies for more equitable futures in Latin America.   TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE

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New Dawn or a False Hope for Mexico

This issue, edited by Verónica Silva and Jorge Márquez, offers an assessment of how the “Fourth Transformation” of AMLO has responded to the catastrophes left behind by the utterly failed neoliberal policies of the preceding decades. The authors address significant questions such as: Will it provide an effective bulwark against the return of neoliberalism in whatever form it may reinvent itself or will this latest pivot to the left stumble and succumb to the interests of capital, domestic and global? Indeed, what is the left nowadays, what are the prospects for a broad, successful resurgence, and is AMLO’s brand anything but left? What are the important economic, political, cultural, and ideological fault lines that we should think deeply about?Their contributions, including struggles over water privatization, PEMEX, mining concessions, and earthquake recovery, highlight the danger of confusing incremental improvements in isolated areas of economic and political life with a larger and self-sustaining transformation.  They critically examine the relationship of a weakened state to big capital and criminal organizations and offer varying perspectives ranging from considering Obradorismo as a domesticated, neoliberal populism “looking for the love of big capital” to viewing AMLO’s friendly policies toward some large capitalists as a pragmatic policy [...]

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BRAZIL UNDER BOLSONARO

January 2023 Issue Editors: James N. Green and Tulio Ferreira This issue, edited by James N. Green and Tulio Ferreira, provides a critical examination of the history and recent rise of the Brazilian right, which achieved political power with the election of former military officer and far-right authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro as president in 2018, and analyzes the multi-faceted domestic and international impact of Bolsonaro’s four years in office. It ties Bolsonaro’s nationalist, Christian fundamentalist, antidemocratic, homophobic, misogynist, and racist program to its roots in older Brazilian fascism and military dictatorship and situates it as part of a transnational and global phenomenon. In this consideration of the reasons for and impact of Bolsonaro’s election and policies, it emphasizes the complexity of contemporary Brazilian reality.PODcast TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE

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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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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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