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Christine Hatzky, Julio Antonio Mella (1903–

1929): Eine Biograe (Frankfurt on the Main:
Vervuert, 2004), pp. 436, €56.00, pb.
MARCUS KLEIN
Journal of Latin American Studies / Volume 37 / Issue 04 / November 2005, pp 848 - 850
DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X05440201, Published online: 03 November 2005
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0022216X05440201
How to cite this article:

MARCUS KLEIN (2005). Journal of Latin American Studies, 37, pp 848-850
doi:10.1017/S0022216X05440201
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Reviews
J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 37 (2005). doi:10.1017/S0022216X05210209
Linda B. Hall, Mary, Mother and Warrior : The Virgin in Spain and the Americas
(Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 2004), pp. xiii+366, $65.00, $24.95 pb.
In Linda Hall’s discussion of the multiple manifestations of the Virgin Mary in the
Hispanic world the reader is invited to traverse a thousand years of Marian history,
from the Christian Reconquest of Spain up to the present day. The book charts the
Virgin’s transformations as she crosses continents and cultures, changing to meet
diverse needs. Far from remaining a meek (albeit persuasive) intercessor between the
faithful and her son, she adopts sometimes surprising attributes, from a universal
earth goddess and a mother to the world, to a commander of armies, an admiral of
the seas, a national figurehead, and even a street fighter in contemporary Chicano
communities in the USA. Throughout all this, however, the Virgin’s constancy is
clear, and Hall’s argument aptly demonstrates that, no-matter what guise Mary was
believed adopt, she invariably acted as the protector of the faithful and the scourge
of the ‘ infidel ’.
The millenarian devotion to Mary across the Hispanic world is more readily
understood from a perspective whereby the diverse images venerated are seen not
merely as statues, paintings or tapestries, but as images with which the faithful
interact, turning them into ‘ conduit[s] between the human being and the divine ’
(p. 4). As such, they provide a tangible link with the celestial, especially when they are
cared for, venerated and carried in procession. The resulting interaction sometimes
gives rise to rivalry between the followers of different Marian manifestations, such as
La Triana and La Soledad in Seville (pp. 252–3). The paradox of the Virgin’s inter-
action with different communities through diverse images has meant that she has
even found herself in the uncomfortable position of being supreme figurehead of
opposing armies : the Virgin(s) of Guadalupe and Los Remedios, for example,
commanded and protected both the rebel and the royalist forces during the 1810
Hidalgo rebellion in Mexico (pp. 192–4).
The thread of the text begins in Spain during the early years of the Reconquista,
when the Virgin, already linked with local pre-Christian cults of the earth-goddess,
became intertwined with Christian victories over their Muslim opponents. As time
progressed, she came to be seen as the most reliable patron of converted mosques
and newly founded churches and communities. This, Hall argues, appears to have
been connected with a move towards unifying religious devotion under a central
ecclesiastical and monarchical authority. Nonetheless, despite her universal
nature, Mary and her subsequent devotions were able to take on powerful local
characteristics.
As the Stella Maris, Star and Queen of the Sea, protector of sailors, Mary
crossed the ocean with Christopher Columbus and subsequent mariners. From
the Caribbean she travelled with Cortés to Mexico and with Pizarro to Peru, where
she was believed to have protected the conquistadors and even participated in
battles. It was not long, however, before the Virgin became naturalised within
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812 Reviews
the indigenous world. The process was sometimes actively encouraged by the
missionaries, but more often it took place surreptitiously and even despite opposition.
As Hall points out, Mary’s presence in the Americas can be read traditionally in
opposition to indigenous (pagan) gods (p. 114). Yet, the multiplicity of associations
with her image suggests numerous levels of continuity in indigenous earth and
fertility goddesses such as Coatlicue in Mesoamerica and Pachamama in the Andes.
Whilst many of these associations are suggested rather than proven through
Hall’s interpretation of imagery, they do much to reinforce the overall thesis. The
discussion of Guadalupe, for example, and of the recent and controversial canon-
isation of Juan Diego (the indigenous neophyte to whom she is believed to have
appeared in 1531), aptly demonstrates how the Virgin entered the indigenous
imaginaire and how, in turn, this appropriation was approved by the Catholic
hierarchy.
Hall’s discussion continues into the post-independence period and examines how
Mary, in the personae of Copacabana for Bolivia, Guadalupe for Mexico and the
Virgin of Luján for Argentina, became a symbol of national unity. Once again,
Hall’s argument demonstrates considerable continuity between the colonial and
the post-colonial periods. Regimes may have changed, different groups may have
appropriated the Virgin as their protector and patron, but Marian devotion remained
constant. This was the case even when particular forms of the Virgin’s image were
invoked as patrons of those committing horrendous crimes, such as Luján during
the Argentine dictatorship of 1976–82. At the same time, the mothers of the desa-
parecidos could and did invoke the Virgin as their protector and source of solace,
linked by their shared suffering.
Eva Perón similarly drew on the suffering and motherly aspects of the Virgin’s
image in the construction of her own public persona. Readers should not be
dismayed if this chapter seems overly hagiographical, as that, I think, is precisely
Hall’s point : to demonstrate how closely the Peronist hagiography attempted to
mirror that of the Virgin. The discussion ends with the final two chapters illustrating
how alive Marian devotion is today in contemporary tradition in Spain and the
Americas, even infusing the street culture of Hispanic North America. The Virgin
continues to protect and nurture her people as both a mother and a warrior.
Politicians like Vicente Fox of Mexico (p. 271) still manoeuvre to appropriate her
image, creating storms of controversy in the process. Contemporary artists provoke
local polemic by attempting to represent the Virgin in a manner that is meaningful
for them. Her image is so contested that it has even been banned from T-shirts
in some schools in the USA.
Mary, Mother and Warrior is a well-structured, clearly-written work, impressive in
its range and depth. If specialists of particular fields are disappointed that it only
briefly touches on their specific area, the remarkable scope and multidisciplinary
nature of the work – dealing with a thousand years of history, history of art and
social anthropology – more than make up for this. The book is an impressive
and very welcome contribution to the history of Marian devotion and, more broadly,
of religious culture in the Hispanic World.
University of Bristol ANDREW REDDEN

Reviews 813
James Dunkerley (ed.), Studies in the Formation of the Nation State in Latin America
(London : Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, 2002),
pp. viii+298, £14.95 pb.
Alan Knight’s contribution to this edited volume offers the hope that its essays
will improve our grasp of several ‘ grand notions – state, nation, civil society – which
we constantly encounter, cannot avoid, but still poorly understand ’. And his own
investigation – an exploration of the possibilities of quantifying these notions –
demonstrates how and why this is such a difficult task in the Latin American
context. In doing so, Knight points to the essays’ collective exploration of the
problem of evaluating Latin American nation-states when the tools we have avail-
able to us – including the very notion of ‘ nation-state ’ itself – come from other
places, other times, and other situations. Historians of Latin America face a double
challenge. We must, first and foremost, reconstruct the history of Latin America.
We have to do so, however, while navigating implicit questions about whether
or not Latin American countries have conformed to ideal types thought to exist
elsewhere, an endeavour that inevitably gives rise to often pernicious judgments of
relative ‘ success ’ or ‘ failure’. Most of the essays in this volume assert that deviation
from ideal types demonstrates not failure but rather the problems inherent in
assuming the existence of an ideal nation-state. But they do so while acknowledging
the crucial ways in which that ideal has shaped not only Latin American histori-
ography but also Latin American history. This makes for a multi-layered message
with, hopefully, multiple audiences.
The double challenge can result in what may seem to be contradictory impulses,
as these authors simultaneously question and use ‘ grand notions ’. On the one
hand, they tell us that Latin American nations have not followed the trajectory
that has supposedly made nation-states elsewhere. This is a place where war,
though ubiquitous, does not make states (Miguel Centeno), where it can be the
lightness rather than the increased weight of state presence that creates a sense of
nation (David McCreery on Goiás, Brazil), where a particularly penetrating official
rhetoric of ‘ progressive, secularising, liberal-patriotic discourse ’ could accompany
a weak state (Guy Thomson on Mexico), and where the early state was defined not
by integration but by ‘ autonomies and disconnectedness ’ (Paul Gootenberg on
Peru). That the nations of Latin America have not conformed is no surprise. But
these authors are also interested in the problem of how nonconformity occurred
in a context where ideal notions of state formation permeated the thoughts and
actions of governments and, to a certain extent, citizens. As James Dunkerley
writes in his thoughtful introduction, ‘ imagination mattered throughout ’ ; it is
crucial that statemakers imagined that they were, or soon could be, living in viable,
ideal-type nation-states. Complicating matters further, they were nonetheless
aware that their countries often lacked the preconditions – economic and political
structures, political traditions, and labour forces – upon which their ‘ models ’ had
supposedly built their states. Thus, statemakers both instituted policies intended
to spur a process of transformation and adapted those policies to fit their per-
ception of the differences between their homes and their models. Imagination
thus ‘ took the form not only of a consequential yearning but also social inven-
tion ’. In taking on these related processes, the essays in this volume comprise a
provocative and necessary reexamination of the state, both as it practised and as it
imagined.

814 Reviews
At the same time, too few of the essays here approach the problem ‘ from below ’.
What they say about the state can also be said about those often excluded from or
targeted for transformation within the state’s imagination. Social invention occurred
not just on the level of the state but also in the hands of the subaltern. Florencia
Mallon, in her comprehensive survey of the historiography, points to recent work
that has begun to untangle the way that subaltern peoples have engaged with the
ideal types presented to them. These people’s alternative versions of nation and
state, she suggests, did not conform to the ideal type either, and are also crucial to
any understanding of what the grand notions have meant in Latin America. For
the two processes of imagination were not separate ; state and society met in daily
interactions, in negotiations and sometimes in violence. What these essays point to
is an approach that can see all these developments and the interactions between
them simultaneously.
This is a tall order. But it is a crucial one. For several of the authors here, this
exploration is quite explicitly a political project. Historically, the question of Latin
America’s relationship to ideal types has spawned an impressive range of theories
and policy projects on an international level, from positivism to dependency to
modernisation to neoliberalism. The common theme of all of these has been the
failure of Latin America to live up to the demands of ideal-type nation-states, as
generally understood. Today, in the neoliberal moment, the past continues to be
served up as failure, and a reconsideration of history that avoids this assumption
has a lot to offer. But in avoiding that assumption, historians cannot afford to avoid
the grand notions that have contributed so mightily to it. To return to Alan Knight’s
concerns, the challenge is not just to achieve a grasp of these notions, but also
to approach them with both a realisation of their malleability and an understanding
of how absolutely central they have been and continue to be to the workings of
Latin American societies.
Rutgers University KAREN CAPLAN

Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo (eds.), The Argentina Reader : History,
Culture, Politics (Durham, NC, and London : Duke University Press, 2003),
pp. xiv+580, £20.95, pb.
The Argentina Reader is the third title – following The Peru Reader and The Brazil
Reader – in the excellent series sponsored by the Consortium in Latin American
Studies at the University of North Carolina and Duke University. The editors,
Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo, have brought together a great range of
material, from academic essays and contemporary journalism to poetry and fiction,
offering, in their terms, ‘ a complex set of cultural lenses through which the reader
can gain access to a diversified view of Argentina ’ (p. 11). The volume is divided
into ten sections, arranged chronologically, from the colonial period to the year
2000, and each section and each extract is introduced by the editors in a fluent and
engaging manner. Most of the extracts, both the primary material and the scholarly
essays, are selected from Argentine writers, though space is also given to ‘ the most
relevant texts written by foreigners ’ (p. 12), from Darwin’s observations on Rosas’
mistreatment of Amerindians in the nineteenth century, to the eccentric Polish exile
Witold Gombrowicz’s caustic comments on 1940s Argentine aristocratic culture,

Reviews 815
to recent work by British academics such as David Rock (on the Radical party),
Daniel James (on Peronism), Richard Gillespie (on the Montoneros) and the late
Simon Collier (on the origins of tango).
Of course, to convey a sense of the history, politics and culture of a country
over 500 years in some 80 short pieces requires a rigorous process of selection and
omission. The editors make their intentions clear in the introduction. The book is
aimed at an ‘ American public ’. The word ‘ American ’ should, perhaps, be substi-
tuted by ‘ English-speaking ’ : one would hope, of course, that had this volume been
available in the UK say in the early 1980s, some of the ignorance surrounding the
Falklands/Malvinas war might have been avoided. It looks to ‘ correct the almost
schizophrenic view of Argentina that still prevails today ’ (p. 6), though it is unclear
from this sentence to whom the word ‘ schizophrenia ’ refers. Is it the tourist/visitor
to Argentina who labours under the ‘ confusing stereotype of an underdeveloped
country with European manners ’ (p. 4), or does the schizophrenic mode of holding
in tension mutually contradictory or inconsistent elements or attitudes refer to wider
problems in Argentine society that the book seeks to address ? The book is edited,
for example, at a moment of economic and political crisis. How, the editors ask,
could one of the ten richest countries in the world in the 1920s be faced in
December 2001 with having to default on a $141 billion debt ? What went wrong ?
Without offering any easy answers, the work outlines the nature and complexity of
Argentine development.
The book also, ‘ resists the prevailing perception that Argentina is the
most European of all Latin American states _ Instead we choose to emphasize
Argentina’s heterogeneity’ (p. 6). Acknowledging heterogeneity means that the
editors give voice to groups usually considered marginal to the dominant discourses :
Amerindian and black communities, the Argentine cowboys, the gauchos, immi-
grant political activists. Thus, alongside the canonical figures of politics and letters,
Sarmiento, Alberdi and Echeverrı́a, we find extracts from the epic gaucho poem,
Martı́n Fierro, anonymous popular poetry, several references to nineteenth-century
Amerindian culture, the lyrics of twentieth-century folk singer Atahualpa Yupanqui,
and Osvaldo Bayer’s fascinating account of the early twentieth-century anarchist,
Simón Radowitzky. The book also traces an alternative lineage of women writers
and activists, alongside, or in opposition to, the ‘ founding fathers’ of the nation.
Juana Manuela Gorriti (1818–92) describes the status of women in the early
Independence period ; the poet Alfonsina Storni (1892–1938) explores early
feminism ; writer and cultural Maecenas Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979), founder and
editor of the influential literary magazine Sur, echoes Virginia Woolf’s plea that
the woman should have a right to ‘ a room of one’s own ’. An extract from Tomás
Eloy Martı́nez’s novel Santa Evita illustrates the extraordinary popularity and mythic
status of Eva Duarte de Perón (1919–52), while Hebe de Bonafini and Matilde
Sánchez recall the events – the murder and ‘ disappearance ’ of their children under
the military dictatorship (1976–83) – that led them to found the protest group,
‘ The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo ’.
With such a wide-ranging selection of texts, any talk of omissions might
seem churlish. However, since the target audience is ‘ American ’, or ‘ English-
speaking’, it might have been useful to have at least one essay exploring Argentina’s
relationship with the United Kingdom and the United States, perhaps a piece on
triangular trade in the 1920s and 1930s. Also, in the editors’ desire to get away from
the ‘ European’ image of Argentina, there is a slight danger of their understating

816 Reviews
the very strong economic and cultural ties of the Argentine elite to Europe. An
extract, say, by Francis Korn on the Prince of Wales’s visit to Argentina in 1925
would have illustrated this point. Victoria Ocampo talks amusingly in her memoirs
about entertaining the prince on this trip : in an evening’s entertainment, he danced
with Victoria Ocampo and brought along his Hawaiian guitar for a jamming session
with Ricardo Güiraldes on piano (Güiraldes at the time was writing his lament
to the disappearing gaucho, Don Segundo Sombra). The multiple ironies of such a
meeting, as well as the ease and familiarity of the interchange, illustrate clearly a time
and a moment. Less regal visitors to Argentina would probably have heard of four
names, Eva Perón, Che Guevara, Carlos Gardel and Diego Maradona. While the
first two from this list are covered in the book, it might have been useful to extend
Simon Collier’s article on tango to include Gardel and to put an article on
Maradona – by fellow player, coach and writer Jorge Valdano – alongside Archetti’s
analysis of the chants of football crowds. Some space might also have been found to
acknowledge the work of North American feminist writers on Argentina such as
Donna Guy and Francine Masiello.
But these few suggestions should not detract from what is a very well crafted,
well illustrated and consistently interesting volume. A final word should be given
to the quality of the translations : the volume reads effortlessly well, which speaks
both of the skill of the translators, especially the main translator, Patricia Owen
Steiner, and also to the generosity of funding bodies in Argentina and the United
States in covering translation costs. The Argentina Reader offers a great deal of material,
but also shows how much more writing from Argentina and Latin America could
and should be made available in English if publishing houses had the vision and,
more importantly, the resources.
University of Warwick JOHN KING

Gerardo della Paolera and Alan M. Taylor (eds.), A New Economic History of
Argentina (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. xviii+397,
£40.00 ; $60.00, hb.
The unimpressive economic performance of Argentina throughout much of the
twentieth century has attracted scholarly attention for a fairly long period of time.
During the post-war decades, explanations of the country’s economic failure were
dominated by structural approaches (the Dependency school, Developmentalism,
Marxism, etc.). For the most part, the authors who worked within these intellectual
paradigms concentrated their attention on the analysis of national macroeconomic
measures, social structures, international economic forces, and public policy. Very
much like in other Latin American countries, an important intellectual shift in
Argentine economic history has taken place in the last two decades. Following in
the trails of Carlos Dı́az Alejandro’s pathbreaking studies, a new group of scholars
emerged to seek a better, more ‘ scientific ’ explanation of Argentina’s economic
history. Emphasis on the market, but also new theory and methodology, are central
to this new approach. Neoclassical economic theory, sophisticated quantitive
methods, and concepts taken from the new institutional economic history are to
be found in its products. In the view of the most optimistic practitioners of this
way of delving into the Argentine past, there is little to learn from earlier stages of

Reviews 817
economic thinking, to the point that they tend to ignore (rather than to engage
in discussions with) all those interpretations that do not fit into the category of
cliometric economic history.
A New Economic History of Argentina is a sophisticated product of this way of
thinking. The editors of this volume have assembled a collection of thematic essays
on the economic history of twentieth-century Argentina with a strong quantitive
flavour that will be of much interest to both graduate students and scholars alike. As
in most collective volumes, contributions are uneven, both in scope and analytical
depth. Some chapters present clear, wide-ranging contributions to a certain field,
which reflect both insight and command of the relevant literature. Others, however,
depart from the book’s plan. Rather than state-of-the-art chapters, they can be better
described as products of their authors’ own particular, more specific research
agendas. It is interesting to note, too, that the most perceptive and interesting
chapters are those whose authors, while working within the context of the quanti-
tative paradigm, show a deep understanding of the merits of other, more traditional
ways of looking into the Argentine past. This suggests that it is not only Argentine
economic history, but also cliometricians, who can benefit from paying a closer
look to the wider historiographical picture.
For this reviewer four contributions merit special attention. Ricardo Salvatore
and Carlos Newland examine the early economic history of the country, from 1810
to c. 1870. In the last two and a half decades, traditional images of the economic
history of this period have been successfully challenged. Salvatore and Newland
offer a summary of this new literature, with particular reference to the growth of
the pampean rural economy and the institutional factors that conditioned its evol-
ution. Even if somewhat contentious, they also have something to say on welfare
and social equity. Finally, they pose important questions for future research.
Sebastián Galiani and Pablo Gerchunoff’s chapter presents a comprehensive
account of the working and evolution of the labour market during the twentieth
century. Blending labour economics and labour history, and placing their narrative
within the context of the wider forces that shaped Argentine economic history,
they have produced a fine piece of study that will remain influential for some time
to come. The chapter by Julio Berlinski is also very good. He offers a sophisticated
discussion of Argentina’s international trade and commercial policy characterised
by its wealth of quantitative information. Even though some readers will miss a
more narrative approach, together with greater discussion of the interpretations he
seeks to challenge, Berlinski’s paper merits close reading.
The contribution of Marı́a Inés Barbero and Fernando Rocchi provides an
insightful overview of the evolution of the industrial sector. This is a much debated
issue in Argentine economic history largely because, as the authors aptly note,
‘ incomplete industrialization ’ is regarded as central to an explanation of Argentina’s
poor economic performance. Barbero and Rocchi provide a brief but precise
description of the debate between the structuralist and the neoclassical approach,
and then move on to offer their own view, which they build combining elements
taken from those two quite different theoretical and methodological perspectives.
The book also includes chapters on monetary and fiscal policies, economic cycles,
capital accumulation, banking and finance and business, government and the law,
all of which present a wealth of quantitative information and some interesting
conclusions. The chapter on agriculture is perhaps the weakest of all. Readers
willing to make sense of the development of such an important sector in Argentine

818 Reviews
economic life will be disappointed. Finally, it is important to note that the book
provides relatively little on questions of social development, welfare, living standards
and equity – subjects on which research has been pouring out recently. These are,
however, minor weaknesses for a book that will remain as a major contribution to
Argentine economic history for some time to come.
Universidad Nacional de Quilmes-CONICET ROY HORA

Steven Levitsky, Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America : Argentine
Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,
2003), pp. viii+290, £50.00, £18.95 pb ; $70.00, $25.00 pb.
As Steven Levitsky notes in the opening lines of this important and enlightening
study of Peronism, one of Latin America’s most studied, yet most frequently mis-
represented, political phenomena, ‘ The new world economic order has not been
kind to labor-based political parties ’. Whilst traditional labour-based parties in both
developed and developing countries struggled to adapt to new economic and pol-
itical configurations during the 1980s and 1990s, Peronism managed both to win
power in 1989, and – uniquely in its history – to enjoy continued electoral success
throughout the following decade.
The question of how Peronism achieved this success whilst abandoning the
state-centred economic policies which had traditionally rewarded its core constitu-
encies and maintained Peronism as Argentina’s central political referent through
the second half of the twentieth century, is one which has exercised Argentine and
non-Argentine analysts alike in recent years. In adopting an organisational approach
and pointing to Peronism’s weak party institutionalisation as a crucial contributory
factor, Levitsky’s study makes significant steps towards a coherent explanation of
this apparent contradiction. Whilst such weak party institutionalisation in Latin
America has commonly been identified as a major factor explanatory of the
unevenness of democratic quality, Levitsky views that weak institutionalisation as
central to Peronism’s capacity to adapt to a changing environment. From 1989
onwards, the ability of Peronism to survive, prosper and maintain its popular
support whilst Carlos Menem pushed forward an economic and political pro-
gramme which to many Peronists appeared a repudiation of their movement’s core
values was, in fact, a direct consequence of that weak party institutionalisation.
Interviews with a substantial range of Peronists of all ranks, from both within and
outside the official Partido Justicialista (PJ) structure, illuminate the growing frag-
mentation of Peronist labour unions, and the gradual sidelining of those opposed
to the Menem revolution from positions of influence over the PJ. The PJ’s
symbiotic relationship with the labour unions, particularly the CGT, was increasingly
replaced by ‘ patronage-based territorial organisations ’, which by the early 1990s
had transformed the PJ from a labour-based to a clientelistic party, in which Menem
faced little meaningful opposition from party leaders and activists. As Levitsky
clearly shows, this process was facilitated by the absence of an effective central
bureaucracy, and by the lack of a firmly established and widely accepted structure of
formal party rules and procedures, long recognised as characteristic of Peronism.
Thus, whilst weak party institutionalisation has often been viewed as debilitating
democracy, Levitsky proposes that this lack of effective institutionalisation bestowed

Reviews 819
on the PJ a high degree of elasticity. That quality was central to the PJ avoiding the
implosion experienced by several other Latin American labour-based parties, on
which Levitsky focuses in a final, comparative chapter. It was also crucial to the
maintenance of democratic stability at a critical juncture in Argentina’s process of
democratic consolidation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the PJ faced the
challenge not only of neo-liberal economic restructuring, but also of instability in
civil-military relations. Levitsky’s book, then, underlines the significance of internal
party organisation, or lack thereof, both for the strategies produced by those parties,
and for their adaptive capacities in rapidly evolving external environments. As such,
it is a welcome and highly significant addition to debates on party institutionalisa-
tion, party systems, and democratisation. More specifically, in the present,
post-2001 stage of Argentine history, it is a valuable contribution to the under-
standing of Peronism itself, which remains the key to Argentine politics, and will
prove invaluable to assessments of Argentine politics both during and beyond the
current Kirchner presidency.
Queen Mary, University of London LAURENCE ALLAN

Colin MacLachlan, A History of Modern Brazil: The Past Against the Present
(Wilmington, DE : Scholarly Resources, 2003), pp. xxi+262, $65.00, $19.95 pb.
When I was asked to review Colin MacLachlan’s book, I was sceptical. Why yet
another ‘ History of Brazil ’? The 500th anniversary of the country’s discovery in
2000 had prompted Brazilians and Brazilianists in many countries to write critical
textbooks : Boris Fausto, A Concise History of Brazil (Cambridge UP, 1999); Thomas
E. Skidmore, Brazil : Five Centuries of Change (Oxford UP, 1999) ; Horst Pietschmann
et al., Eine kleine Geschichte Brasiliens (Suhrkamp, 2000) ; Joseph Smith, A History of
Brazil (Longman, 2002). So, what could MacLachlan add to our understanding of
Latin America’s biggest nation ? The publisher’s praise of the book for its strong
emphasis on Brazil’s rich cultural heritage further strengthened my doubts: carnival,
samba, capoeira and soccer may often be overlooked in conventional history text-
books but are the focus of many cultural studies analyses preoccupied with the
deconstruction of images and representations.
MacLachlan sheds light on the usual stereotypes without stepping into the trap of
either economic or cultural reductionisms. Soccer, for instance, is interpreted as a
‘ socio-psychological icon ’ reflecting a ‘ patriarchal society on the one hand and [_]
class and race frustrations on the other ’ (p. 179). We learn about the social descent
of the game from the foundation of elitist clubs within foreign communities of São
Paulo and Rio de Janeiro at the end of the nineteenth century to the differentiation
between working-class players and white upper-middle-class spectator-managers.
Getúlio Vargas’s new ministry of labour made players salaried employees under its
jurisdiction, but their clubs denied them membership status and access to their
facilities. Though the colour barrier in clubs began to lower gradually from the 1920s
and Afro-descendants gained increasing importance in the national team, they could
easily become the scapegoats when an important match was lost and, as the story of
Pelé proves, their official recognition and social ascent depended on the acceptance
of Brazil’s long-standing myth of being a racial democracy. Fan clubs, with a strong
base in the urban working class and among rural migrants, were independent from

820 Reviews
team clubs and often acted as a kind of association of mutual assistance. This is
just one example of how MacLachlan skilfully integrates economic, social, cultural
and political aspects and thereby provides invaluable material for lively classroom
discussions.
His book explores the formation of Brazil’s civilisation and national identity from
the colonial period to the present time. This includes an analysis of the legacies of
plantation slavery, immigration and a frontier-society for social structures, race
relations, and the use of land. MacLachlan emphasises long-term trends such as an
increasing urbanisation and science-driven professionalisation within the middle
class, the development of the country’s communication systems, and the emergence
of mass consumerism. He studies the paramount role of the media in nation-
building, politics, and advertising. However, instead of overloading the text with
statistics, he combines macro-historical approaches with well-chosen case studies.
We read about the importance of Hollywood stars, Walt Disney cartoons and the
Portuguese edition of Reader’s Digest in propagating American culture, goods, and
values during World War II ; the efforts of newspapers and radio in shaping the
image of Vargas during his second government ; TV Globo’s support for the 1964
military regime ; and megastar Xuxa as a questionable role model and advertising
vehicle. When looking at the different phases of state-led conservative modern-
isation, MacLachlan also explores the responses ‘ from below ’, ranging from retro-
grade social protests (quebra-quilos, Canudos) to very significant grassroots initiatives
(social and ecological base movements).
When exploring such complex issues as the extremely unequal distribution of
income or the need for sustainable development, MacLachlan avoids mono-causal
explanations portraying Brazil as the victim of domestic capitalism or imperialistic
policies. He shows that economic modernisation and the preservation of the
environment do not have to be mutually exclusive, that not all indigenous groups
react helplessly to deforestation and deculturalisation, and that the World Bank and
foreign corporations increasingly work together with international development
agencies and indigenous peoples in the search for an ecologically justifiable pro-
duction and marketing of rainforest goods and a way to guarantee the collective
intellectual property rights of tribal groups. MacLachlan also draws his readers’
attention to the more recent conflicts between Brazil’s aspired self-reliance and
attempts, by the international community, at a denationalisation of the Amazon as a
global ecological reserve the ruthless exploitation of which might justify a so-called
‘ humanitarian intervention ’.
Despite the enormity of the empirical detail which MacLachlan offers, few factual
errors occur : Auguste Comte was born in 1798, not in the year of the French
Revolution (p. 43), and Canudos was crushed in 1897, not 1891 (p. 54). Social
scientists would question the terminology in a statement like ‘ development, with
modernization as the objective, has been a remarkably consistent process in Brazil’s
history ’ (p. 211, see also p. 227ff.). Targeting the student market, the book avoids the
use of complex terms, such as enlightened absolutism, state and nation-building
or bureaucratic authoritarianism. The same applies to the engagement in historio-
graphical debates, the discussion of contested concepts, and the pointing to existing
lacunas of knowledge.
Although the sequence of chapters follows more or less the political periodisation
of Brazilian history (1822–1888/9–1930/7–1964–1985), it is not until the very end
of the book that MacLachlan briefly talks about ‘ historical stages’ (p. 227ff.).

Reviews 821
The text clearly stresses the prevalence of continuity in change. However, the wide
variety of topics discussed by MacLachlan may sometimes leave the student lost
in too much detail and not fully able to recognise the importance of certain ruptures,
most notably in 1937. Only in his epilogue does MacLachlan speak of a Vargas ‘ era ’
but when did it begin (1928, 1930, 1937 ?) and end (1945, 1954, 1964, after 1985 ?),
and what exactly was its legacy ?
All these are minor problems. MacLachlan’s excellent book should stand on the
shelves of everybody interested in studying Brazil and Latin America more generally.
Not since E. Bradford Burns’s History of Brazil (3rd ed., Columbia UP, 1993) has a
textbook offered such complexity, richness of empirical detail and student-friendly
narrative.
University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne J E N S R. H E N T S C H K E

Marina de Mello e Souza, Reis negros no Brasil escravista : história da festa de coroação
de Rei Congo (Belo Horizonte : Editora UFMG, 2002), pp. 387, pb.
The performative power of Afro-Brazilians has often been mobilised to confront
and resist hegemonic forces in Brazilian society. In recent years, histories of Afro-
Brazilian religious and artistic achievements have begun to shed light on the his-
torical dynamics and the cultural geographies of the African diaspora. As part of
this recent trend, Marina de Mello e Souza delves into the historical records of
congadas – dramatisations of the coronations of African kings and queens, diplomatic
missions and battles – in order to understand the ways in which African traditions
were mobilised, together with Catholic liturgy, in the construction of Afro-Brazilian
identities. Reis negros no Brasil escravista provides a remarkable genealogy of congadas.
Drawing upon a wide range of sources, Souza considers early encounters between
Portuguese and Africans in the kingdom of Kongo in the sixteenth century, the
horrors of the Middle Passage, and the creation of new social bonds and cultural
forms among Africans and their descendents in the Brazilian society up to the late
nineteenth century.
Souza begins the book with a brief study of the historic significance of kingship,
rites and symbols in both European and African cultures. She focuses specially on
the image of Portugal as a missionary kingdom, extending to the four corners of the
world in order to propagate the Christian faith. In this scheme of things, African
slavery had an important role to play, not only in providing funds for the pomp and
circumstance of the Portuguese nobility, but also in consolidating the image of a
missionary king bringing eternal salvation to African infidels.
Souza goes on to examine in some detail the relationship between the kingdoms
of Portugal and Kongo, focusing on the cultural exchanges that have shaped African
Catholicism since the fifteenth century. The wealthiest and most powerful state in
the Atlantic region of Central Africa during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
the kingdom of Kongo began to fall apart in the seventeenth century under a variety
of internal and external pressures. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the Kongo
capital Mbanza Kongo (also known as São Salvador) had been abandoned and the
kingdom had broken up into small territories ruled by warlords and members of
the old Kongo nobility. The emergence of the short-lived Antonianist move-
ment led by Beatriz Kimpa Vita was the most prominent of a series of popular

822 Reviews
movements which capitalised on the desire to restore the former glory of Kongo.
Many had Catholicism as their driving force : Kongo had been a Christian kingdom
since the fifteenth century. As Souza shows, some of the key symbolic elements
that would compose the congadas in Brazil emerged as the result of such cultural
encounters between Africans and Europeans.
Another ‘ source ’ for the symbolic archive of the congadas was the Atlantic slave
trade. Although the practice of slavery was not in itself a novelty in African societies,
the extent, complexity and intensity of new forms of commercial slavery since the
mid-seventeenth century had a significant impact on the social, economic, and
political relations in Central Africa. Following John Thornton, Souza emphasises
the role of local warfare in the slave trade ; prisoners of war on all sides became
commodities. The control of trade routes and markets enabled several provinces of
the Kongo region to become politically autonomous. Yet the symbolic power of
the nobility remained strong throughout the period, helping to unify otherwise
disparate groups. Language provided another unifying factor. Catholic, Bantu-
speaking enslaved peoples from Central Africa were transported to Brazil over a
long period of time ; in the course of the Middle Passage, Africans began to form
their own associations on board the ship, where they called each other malungo,
friend, brother, comrade.
Soon after arrival in Brazil, Africans created a variety of sacred and secular
associations for mutual help, solidarity, and liberation. One of these was the Catholic
lay organisation, or irmandade. Afro-Brazilians managed to operate effectively within
such Church groups, using them to their own advantage, and their own purposes.
In this context congadas were used by Bantu-speaking peoples as a model and
mechanism for self-government, helping to shape their socio-political institutions
and ideals. Above all, congadas reminded Afro-Brazilians of their noble past. Such
performances on American soil enabled slaves to become kings. Rather than
interpreting this as a matter of religious syncretism, Souza unveils the simultaneous
interplay between and juxtapositions of multiple beliefs, at work in the practice of
congadas. The product of a violent colonial experience, congadas have nonetheless
proved to be powerful rituals for Afro-Brazilians, providing them with the necessary
resources to embrace and survive multiple, harsh realities. In this skilful and
complex articulation of Brazilian and African history, Souza has a great deal to
contribute to broader discussions of cultural identity. This book should become
standard reading in courses on Afro-Brazilian cultural identities and African
diasporic history.
Birkbeck College, University of London LUCIANA MARTINS

John D. French, Drowning in Laws : Labor Law and Brazilian Political Culture
(Chapel Hill, NC, and London : University of North Carolina Press, 2004),
pp. xviii+233, £40.50, £16.95 pb.
In this book John D. French discusses the importance and function of labour
and social legislation in Brazil after 1930, and especially during the presidencies
of Getúlio Vargas. It was in 1943, under Vargas’s Estado Novo, that legislation
pertaining to Brazilian workers was systematised in the Consolidaçao das Leis do
Trabalho, or CLT, a legal document that, as French shows, has proved a central

Reviews 823
reference not only for Brazilian workers, but also for scholarly interpretations of
the Vargas presidencies and the general relationship between state and labour in
Brazil. Indeed, French engages thoroughly with these interpretations and proceeds
to offer his own conclusions on topics such as the origins of the labour laws in the
1930s, the nature of the CLT and labour legislation in general, and the debate
around whether Vargas’s assent to power in 1930 represents a break or continuity
with respect to the state’s relationship with labour.
In the debate over origins, French agrees with scholars who have concluded
that it would be wrong to see Brazil’s labour system after 1930 as derived exclusively
from European – or rather, Italian – fascist and right-wing Catholic sources. Rather,
the new labour legislation after 1930 must be seen as the Brazilian expression of
popularised ideas and policies that could be deemed corporatist and that were
common in various countries and across the political spectrum in the aftermath of
World War I and the Russian Revolution. For example, Brazilian jurists and poli-
ticians often cited the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which proposed the inclusion of
labour rights in law. Furthermore, French argues that in order to properly under-
stand the origins and development of Brazilian labour legislation, we must also take
seriously the autonomy of the law’s internal organisation and the ‘ legal culture ’ that
he claims united the lawyers in the Labour Ministry in the 1930s. In his opinion,
these lawyers, of disparate political opinions, were united more than anything in a
self-perception as members of a generation of lawyers whose role it was to ‘ ‘ correct
Brazil ’ through law’ (p. 22).
A second debate addressed by French is over whether the CLT and labour
legislation in general should be considered a generous outorga, or gift, by political
leaders, or a conquest realised from below by the labouring masses. The outorga
thesis was central to the Vargas regime’s mythology and was criticised early on
by the political left, who emphasised that workers themselves had achieved their
legal gains through autonomous working-class action. French, however, does not
find evidence for such a conquest and asserts that, ‘ all alternative formulations of
the state’s role after 1930 agree that state initiative from above was the fundamental
factor ’ (p. 29). Nevertheless, French argues, the labour initiatives of the early 1930s
should not be considered a disinterested outorga, but rather as an attempt by a weak
national state to build a firm social base for their power. Reiterating the importance
of a theme developed in his previous work, French places the state’s efforts in the
context of the regionalist and oligarchical rivalries that prevailed in the early 1930s
and proceeds to show how state and labour needed each other, as ‘ the industrial
working class and its activist minority in practice welcomed state action as a
counterbalancing force from outside the private employer-employee nexus ’ (p. 37).
French’s book also makes a contribution to historiographical debates about
the degree to which the Vargas regimes represented a real rupture with the past
in the field of state-labour relations. In getulista mythology, the Revolution of 1930
has been hailed as the symbolic moment when the social question ceased to be
treated as a caso de polı́cia, or ‘ police matter ’, with the state instead offering workers an
institutionalisation of state-labour relations through law. However, as French shows,
critics have pointed out that the Liberal Alliance platform of 1930 was not the
first expression of the need for a legal response to the emerging labour problem.
Nor did the promulgation of labour laws in the 1930s change the fact that worker
agitation continued to be considered as a caso de polı́cia under Vargas. In fact, French
claims there was actually a ‘ consolidation of a repressive ‘‘ common sense ’’ among

824 Reviews
government policy makers ’ (p. 135) in the early 1930s, an attitude that would only be
reinforced during the dictatorship of the Estado Novo. Thus, he concludes, ‘ worker
agitation was as much if not more a caso de polı́cia under Vargas as it had been during
the First Republic ’ (p. 139).
Drowning in Laws is an excellent discussion of – and engagement with – several
of the most important threads in the historiography on Vargas and Brazilian state-
labour relations, reflecting French’s substantial experience in this field. It is,
however – somewhat surprisingly if we are to judge by the title – less about labour
law. French points out the often paradoxical reference to labour law in workers’
rhetoric as, on the one hand, an ideal and a hope, and, on the other, as a fraud.
But even if this discursive element – how the law is talked about – is important,
it can only be a starting point to finding out how the law actually worked. Here,
French offers little more than the general reflection that there existed an abyss
between the CLT on paper and the CLT in practice and that the slow process of
the labour courts often prevented workers from obtaining their legal rights.
While this is plausible, it does not help us understand more about the nature of
Brazilian labour law. How did severance pay, pensions, accident compensation,
union recognition and collective bargaining work in practice ? Were there differ-
ences – and what were they – between the individual and collective aspects of
labour law ? How did interpretations of the laws change over time ? How did the
federal nature of the Brazilian state influence the workings of labour law ? What
were the legal strategies used by employers to circumvent the laws ?
And what were the legal strategies attempted by workers to enforce them ?
These are all questions the answers to which would have helped us understand
more, both about the nature of the CLT, and why workers simultaneously rejected
and idealised it. We might even understand more about why workers resorted to
the labour courts in increasing numbers in the period following the courts’ estab-
lishment, in spite of all the evident obstacles they faced.
University of Bergen LINE SCHJOLDEN
J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 37 (2005). doi:10.1017/S0022216X0529020X

Stephen Nugent and Mark Harris (eds.), Some Other Amazonians : Perspectives on
Modern Amazonia (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, University
of London, 2004), pp. ix+211, £14.95; $19.95 ; E20.00, pb.
Some Other Amazonians poses a simple but critical question: if most ethnographic
research in the Amazon has focused on Amerindian groups, and more recently on
the socio-ecological impact of ‘ development ’, what other social realities have been
missed ? Each of the authors of this collection’s nine articles addresses that question,
revealing the Amazon to be a diversely populated region, with multiple, and often
poorly understood, local histories. As might be expected from Stephen Nugent’s
and Mark Harris’s prior pioneering work on caboclo communities, Some Other
Amazonians challenges common stereotypes of the Amazon as a region where
‘ nature ’ prevails and ‘ civilisation ’ is destructive. The anthropologists, historians
and economists that the editors have assembled write of other Amazonians – other
people, economies and connections that help define a specifically Amazonian
modernity, other Amazonians who do not fit the dominant scholarly and popular
moulds for the region.

Reviews 825
Other people. The strongest articles in Some Other Amazonians undermine what
the editors call ‘ the hegemony of _ primordialism and modernization ’ in regional
scholarship by bringing people other than Amerindians and developers into ethno-
graphic focus (p. 6). Nugent’s history of Sephardic Jews in the Lower Amazon since
the 1820s is a case in point, as it demonstrates the long and continuous habitation of
Moroccan Jews in the region. His research in Belém and Santarém fills an important
ethnographic gap and also contributes to Jewish diaspora studies, as he explicates
a hierarchy of prestige within the socially and geographically dispersed Jewish
community in the Amazon. Nugent deftly explains how santareno Jews are margin-
alised by belenenses, who in turn are held peripheral by São Paulo Jews.
Similarly, Rosa Elizabeth Acevedo Marin and Edna Maria Ramos de Castro
follow the conflicts that have marked the formation of quilombos (communities
descended from escaped slaves) in the Trombetas region. Their history shows that,
both well before and long after the tumultuous Cabanagem rebellion (1835–6),
quilombo communities were able to maintain their integrity and resist domination
by external political or economic forces. This work is timely due to the growing
conflict over land claims in the Trombetas region, and the general lack of ethno-
historical scholarship available to support quilombolas’ claims.
Harris’s contribution also has a political goal in mind, as it approaches ‘ other
Amazonians ’ through the framework of ‘ the agrarian question ’ posed throughout
Latin America, but, as he points out, rarely asked in the Amazon. Histories of
land and labour in the Amazon have been approached too broadly, he argues, and
scholars would do well to explore the empirical realities of the diverse migrants
to the region, provisionally comparing Amazonian caboclos with other peasantries.
Harris’s intervention is a refreshing countercurrent to most scholarship on the
Amazonian floodplain, which, rather than tracing the longue durée of the developing
peasant landscape as he proposes, tends to frame social processes in terms of natural
resource management and community conservation.
Other economies. Three of the volumes’ authors develop critiques of orthodox
economic history in the region by pointing out Amazonians’ agency in the devel-
opment of endogenous and export-driven markets. Gregory Prang chronicles the
development of the ornamental fish industry along the Rio Negro, and asks broader
questions of the possibilities for innovation within the aviamento debt system.
He notes that the global ornamental fish market developed at a time of significant
economic uncertainty in the region – the end of the late nineteenth-century rubber
boom – and offered a degree of freedom from patron/client relations. Scott
Douglas Anderson highlights another post-rubber industry in his discussion of
sugar cane, which flourished in the lower Amazon from 1930s–1970s. The Amazon
supplied sugar and rum to markets throughout Brazil, and Anderson’s study
challenges prevalent assumptions about the region’s peripheral status. As
Amazonian rum and sugar met their demise via government interventions (highways
and inflationary economic policies), the Amazon has in effect been de-industrialised,
and thus re-naturalised, as a result of external intervention.
In his explication of the vital role that regatões (itinerant river traders) have played
in the economic history of the Amazon, David McGrath foregrounds the perspec-
tives of these controversial middlemen in the aviamento system. Rather than positing
the regatão as an instrumental tool of the wealthy patrons, McGrath tells of the
relationships that developed between caboclo extractivists and river traders as they
conspired against the bosses downriver. McGrath mines the economic and social

826 Reviews
history of the region to show that the conventional view of merchant capitalism is
flawed in its assessment of caboclos and regatões as powerless, opposing interests.
Other connections. A third theme developed in the volume concerns how social
scientists have inadequately documented practices of social reproduction unique
to the Amazon. For example, Raymundo Heraldo Maues’s short chapter on the
genealogy of a uniquely Amazonian concept, malineza (evil), nicely illustrates how
social analysis might follow practices out from the Amazon, as opposed to assuming
that the region’s cultural life is only comprised of the shreds of other locales. Maues
relates malineza to other Brazilian concepts, and argues that it is more apt than the
similar and widely discussed panema for exploring the local significance of evil and
sorcery. Also concerned with describing the unique elements of Amazonian of social
life, Deborah de Magalhães Lima documents how small communities in the Middle
Solimões, facing threats of external intervention, have developed an expansive, yet
endogamous, kinship system to control land tenure. Kinship is not defined by
blood, but rather indicates a strategic connection; Lima notes that this differs from
other rural kinship practices throughout the world, where ‘ relatedness ’ is often
defined much more narrowly.
Finally, in her article addressing the social legacies of 1960s–1970s development
initiatives, Neide Esterci notes a prominent connection between the Amazon and
the global liberation theology movement in the development of the Catholic Church
in the Araguaia region. By revisiting the role played by the church in the region’s
land conflicts, she contends that the alliance between Araguaia colonists and
church activists echoed throughout the Brazilian Catholic Church. Over subsequent
years, Amazonian pastoral politics played a decisive role throughout Brazil in
organising rural workers, mostly through the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), a
Latin America-wide initiative of priests and labourers that started in the Amazon.
In sum, all students of the Amazon will find Some Other Amazonians useful : its
interdisciplinary breadth is impressive and instructive. Latin Americanists more
generally, and scholars interested in the regional, national and global reach of local
histories, will also appreciate the attention to the details of Amazonian social
history. The volume’s project is innovative and important, successfully complicating
‘ primordial ’ and ‘ modernising ’ suppositions about the Amazon, it shows the way
for scholarship and policy that might take the diverse inhabitants of the region
more seriously.
University of California at Santa Cruz J E R E M Y M. C A M P B E L L

Jennifer L. McCoy and David J. Myers (eds.), The Unraveling of Representative
Democracy in Venezuela (Baltimore, MD, and London : The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2004), pp. xx+342, £35.50, hb.
Political scientists offered two basic explanations in the 1990s for Venezuela’s
political crisis, which was put in evidence by two abortive coups in 1992 and the
impeachment of President Carlos Andrés Pérez the following year. One group of
writers blamed the rigidity of political institutions that were set in place by inter-
party pacts at the outset of the modern democratic period in 1958. Others attributed
the crisis to Venezuela’s dependence on oil income. This book presents a broader

Reviews 827
view of the multiple problems facing Venezuela over an extended period of
time. Thus editors, Jennifer McCoy and David Myers, assert in the introduction
that ‘ no single approach satisfactorily explains ’ (p. 6) the nation’s political chal-
lenges. Myers in the first chapter and McCoy in the last outline diverse contributory
factors, including leadership, political economy and cultural patterns. They also
point to the importance of distributive practices (as opposed to redistributive
ones in favour of the poor) consisting of funnelling oil money to interest groups
in order to stave off discontent and guarantee national security at a time when
democracy had not yet been consolidated. Over time this discretionary spending
undermined normal budgetary allocation and, in the words of Nelson Ortiz, ‘ few
mechanisms of accountability ’ (p. 74) were created. Other factors include the
disillusionment of the urban poor. The editors also make reference to economic
factors in addition to the obviously important decline in oil income, such as
‘ growing income inequality ’ (McCoy, p. 265). The breadth of the editors’ approach
is a welcome corrective to those works on Venezuela that focus almost exclusively
on institutional arrangements including electoral systems and the rules governing
executive power.
The book’s central thesis is that Venezuelan democracy entered a ‘ grey zone ’
at the time of the implementation of foreign exchange controls in 1983 and that
the process of the ‘ unraveling ’ of democracy was accelerated following the election
of Hugo Chávez in 1998. The breadth of the focus of the editors in their attempt
to pinpoint problem areas is reflected in the individual chapters, which discuss
the role of intellectuals, the military, civil society, foreign policy, the political party
system, decentralisation and economics. These chapters demonstrate that while
democracy seemed to be prospering and was eulogised by political writers, certain
developments indicated danger. Ortiz traces the deepening of the rifts within the
business sector dating back to the 1970s, when a representative of the emerging
economic elite won the presidency of the peak organisation FEDECAMARAS over
the traditional sector. By the 1990s the two sectors were battling for control of
flagship companies, at the same time that both suffered heavy blows as a result of
the financial crisis of 1994. The Venezuelan business sector lost even more ground
as a result of multinational buyouts with minimum local participation, a trend that
was given impetus by the process of privatisation (which unfortunately Ortiz does
not refer to). The end result of this private sector ‘ implosion ’ (p. 191) was that
business organisations failed to play an active, constructive role in strengthening
democracy in the 1990s, and more recently were unsuccessful in two attempts to
topple the Chávez government. In his chapter on party politics, José Molina paints
a similar picture of developments the significance of which was downplayed at
the time but contributed to the weakening of the political system in the 1980s and
1990s. Molina shows that political party identification fell significantly and that
after 1989, when the two-party system appeared to be intact, leftist parties made
important inroads in local and state elections. Damarys Canache in her chapter
‘ Urban Poor and Political Order’ explores the discontent of the urban poor, a sector
the political preferences of which were long considered indistinguishable from
the rest of the population. She relies on surveys to show that the urban poor were
disproportionately inclined to support state intervention in the economy in the
1990s during the heyday of neoliberalism and were pessimistic about the economy’s
future prospects. Finally, Richard Hillman’s chapter shows how intellectuals adher-
ing to a Lockean perspective (as opposed to that of Rousseau defended by leftists)

828 Reviews
became disillusioned with Venezuelan democracy even before Chávez entered the
political scene.
The authors do not hold Chávez and his followers solely to blame for Venezuela’s
current political difficulties. They show that in some cases developments prior to
1998 led to the nation’s current challenges and that the opposition to the Chávez
government shares responsibility for current problems. Thus Molina states ‘ it is
important to note that Chávez is a consequence, not the cause, of the party system’s
unraveling ’ (p. 169). Molina adds that ‘ personality-centered politics is the name
of the game ’ not only in the chavista movement but ‘ across the political spectrum ’
(p. 176). Rafael de la Cruz points out that the excessive centralism of the Chávez
government is a continuation of the policies of his predecessor Rafael Caldera, who
reversed the decentralisation policies of the early 1990s. This ‘ backlash ’ (p. 272),
according to McCoy, was supported by the traditional political parties and had the
effect of weakening democratic institutions.
Nevertheless, the editors and most of the authors agree that the crisis of the
years prior to 1998 has deepened since then as a result of the chavista movement’s
efforts to achieve hegemony and its ‘ systematic attack on institutional structures and
organized interests ’ (p. 279). These arguments, however, are marred by various
important omissions. Thus, for instance, McCoy states that Chávez’s firing of state
oil company president Guaicaipuro Lameda was part of an effort to gain control of
the industry and that it set off a strike of company executives which in turn set the
stage for the April 2002 coup. In fact, Lameda’s dismissal came as no surprise since
he publicly criticised government oil legislation and thus became a political liability
for the Chávez administration. In addition, she points to the opposition’s fear of
Venezuela’s transformation ‘ into another Cuba ’ (p. 289) as explaining efforts to
force Chávez out of office. In doing so, she fails to acknowledge that economic
interests affected by specific measures taken by the Chávez government were at
stake. Specifically, the Chávez government’s land reform, its budgetary allocations
in favour of the non-privileged, and its decision to halt privatisation had an adverse
impact on key sectors of the opposition. In short, in addition to the theoretical
contributions by McCoy and Myers, the book consists of ten well-written and
informative thematic chapters. Its main virtue is its rejection of singular and
simplistic explanations and the multiplicity of topics and themes it considers in its
attempt to understand Venezuela’s political crisis both before and after Chávez’s
assumption of power.
Duke University STEVE ELLNER

Robert H. Holden, Armies without Nations : Public Violence and State Formation in
Central America, 1821–1960 (Oxford and New York : Oxford University Press,
2004), pp. x+336, £40.00, hb.
When Edelberto Torres-Rivas published his historic Interpretación del desarrollo
centroamericano in 1969, he shifted debate away from the myopic understanding of
a country’s development to the greater region of Central America. Since the frag-
mentation of Central America into five countries through the successful policies
of the Carrera regime in 1839, and with the addition of Belize and Panama to this
motley mix of history and politics, historians and social scientists almost blindly

Reviews 829
worked with Carrera’s political map in their investigations focusing only on
individual countries. Torres-Rivas, like Fernand Braudel, encouraged us to move
beyond the particular to this integrated and thriving geographical region we know
as Central America.
Robert Holden’s Armies without Nations builds on this solid foundation of an
integrated, regional history and provides a crucial conceptual framework through
which to understand how individuals and groups within these particular and
emerging nations chose to employ similar tools and methods of social control to
assure political power. ‘ Two sequential but closely related global experiences ’,
Holden argues, frame his analysis : ‘ the formation of modern states ’ and ‘ the
increasing capacity of the agents of those states, as well as their collaborators
and adversaries, to more efficiently monitor, threaten, kill and maim ever greater
numbers of people and to destroy more and more of their property ’ (p. 3).
Holden analyses each country (with the strange exceptions of Belize and Panama)
into two chronological parts. From Independence to the beginning of World War II,
he looks at the appearance of public violence during the nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century state formation, and then analyses the impact of US policies
during the Cold War to 1960. In the first part, caudillo politics shaped violence
through patronage and repression. Given the near complete absence of a judicial
system, armed bands loyal to a supreme leader shaped policies of these pretender
nations. As the national elite moved to institutionalise its army and consolidate
power, the vestiges of nineteenth-century caudillismo disappeared. Borrowing Perry
Anderson’s insight, Holden argued that an ‘ upward displacement ’ of violence
occurred from caudillo armies to institutional brigands. Holden sees an important
parallel in the transfer of power in the Old Country from the feudal lords to the
absolutist state. Given the nascent army’s triumph over local bosses, a new
centralised power emerged, not civilians, but the armed forces themselves (39).
Thus, Holden concludes, no coherent idea of state emerged apart form the army.
In the second part, Holden explains that a fundamental transformation of public
violence took place post World War Two. A transnational character to violence
emerged. Military and police institutions collaborated with the US representatives
bolstered by a thriving international market in arms trade, by a revolution in the
technology of tools of violence, and in a world shadowed by the Cold War drama
between Soviet communism and US capitalism. In the probably the most significant
contribution to the study of Central America in this book, Holden provides a
detailed analysis how these fledgling armies took advantage of the US lend-lease
programme to expand their capacity to violence. Weapons flowed into these countries
with on site training provided by US advisors. Holden artfully notes that ‘ World War
II was a deus ex machina for the new isthmian dictators at this decisive moment
in Central American state formation ’ (p. 121). Smart graphs and charts and a
handy statistical appendix bolster this portion of the argument. Holden credits the
US for a Machiavellian stabilisation of the region through its post-1945 alliance with
the various Central American nations. ‘ Washington in effect stabilized [Central
America’s political] process by injecting into it US trainers, academy directors, and
advisors – agents of the globalization of public violence ’ (p. 228). Holden concludes
that Washington became a reliable collaborator with these national armies to con-
front communism even while paying lip service to liberal democracy.
In one way, this book’s weaknesses can be attributed to the success of the regional
public violence. Restricted access to crucial military and police archives in Guatemala

830 Reviews
and El Salvador forced the author to research more in Nicaragua, Honduras and
Costa Rica, and less in Guatemala and El Salvador (p. vii). It is not surprising that
such a regional divide in access to documents follows a pattern of severity of
violence. Holden’s essential insight into the US role in bolstering, even maturing, the
armed forces into concerted war machines overlooks the real differences in the level
of violence meted out particularly in Guatemala and in El Salvador over the
twentieth century. Why does the northern half of Central America witness such
nauseating levels of violence during the twentieth century compared to the southern
half of the region ? Why does Costa Rica emerge as the exception to the rule in
Holden’s conclusions that no Central American country fielded an army and an idea
of nation among its citizens ?
Ethnicity. Plain and simple. A voracious public violence ripped at the indigenous
communities in both of these countries, and to lesser degrees among the indigenous
populations in Honduras and Nicaragua. Where populations tended to be more
homogenous and less indigenous, armed forces inflicted less public violence. The
authorities of Guatemala and El Salvador have been unable to pacify and integrate
the indigenous peoples into their concept of nation in both periods of Holden’s
analysis. Curiously, though, the US collaborated more in institutional terms (in
constant 1990 dollars) with Nicaragua and Honduras than with the brutal agencies
of death in Guatemala and El Salvador from 1950 till 1960.
If the author had included Panama in his analysis, it is likely that Panama and
Nicaragua would have dominated total US military sales and grants, making the US
investment in local armed forces more dependent upon the geography of transocean
travel than the ultimate drive to confront communism.
University of Mississippi D O U G L A S S S U L L I V A N -G O N Z Á L E Z

Karen Kampwirth, Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution : Nicaragua, El Salvador,
Chiapas (Athens, OH : Ohio University Press, 2004), pp. xv+279, $28.00, pb.
Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution, in the words of Karen Kampwirth, ‘ tells the
story of how, the guerrilla wars [in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Chiapas] led to
the rise of feminist movements, why certain women became feminists as a result
of their experiences with the guerrilla organizations, and what sorts of feminist
movements they built ’ (p. 5; emphasis in original). In just under 200 well-written
and provocative pages she does just that. Based on interviews with 205 women,
mostly from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Chiapas, with a handful in Cuba,
Kampwirth has written a book that will be useful to both students and experts
alike. Additionally, Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution speaks to an interdisciplinary
audience, including women’s studies, Latin American studies, political science,
sociology and history.
Using the positive cases of Nicaragua, El Salvador and the Mexican state Chiapas,
and the test cases of Poland, Iran and Cuba, Kampwirth persuasively argues that
there are at least three reasons why revolutionary movements can inadvertently
engender feminists and feminist mobilisation. The first reason is an ideological one :
that is, revolutionary guerrilla groups tend to promote egalitarianism. Kampwirth
explains that many of the women she interviewed recalled that the time they
spent as guerrillas or members of other revolutionary groups were often the

Reviews 831
times they received the most equal treatment from men. As a result, once the
struggles ended and their male colleagues attempted to return gender relations to
their pre-revolutionary inegalitarian ‘ norms ’, women revolutionaries were taken
aback by this contradiction and in many cases refused to accept it. The second
cause of feminism and feminist mobilisation in the wake of revolution entails the
resources acquired by women revolutionaries during their struggles, namely self-
confidence and organisational skills. The final reason was the persistence of pre-
existing networks which naturally served as a feminist infrastructure. She
demonstrates her point in the rest of the book, drawing specifically from the stories
of the women revolutionaries and feminists whose experiences serve as the data for
her thesis.
I found the book quite an enjoyable read. Kampwirth does an excellent job
highlighting the women’s words and experiences, making it clear that her analysis
came from them rather than shaping their stories to match her hypotheses. The
book also reads like an historical document that captures the often untold but
inspiring stories of women revolutionaries and feminists. Indeed, one of the most
exciting parts of the text is its ability to speak to specialists and non-specialists alike.
The author offers a tremendous amount of historical detail about the revolutionary
struggles in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Chiapas, but in a very accessible manner.
As a result she walks the novice through a well-presented story and provides
the experts in the field greater detail than was previously available. Furthermore, the
eloquent weaving in of the women’s testimonies keeps the reader more interested
and attached to the story in a way that certainly could not have happened without
their inclusion in the book. Her ten years of research are certainly reflected in the
plethora of women we meet in the book and the richness of her analysis.
In addition to the methodological accomplishment of conducting a comparative,
transnational study based on over 200 interviews, methodological strength of the
book lies with the variety of cases Kampwirth includes. Some scholars of revolution
might consider the inclusion of El Salvador and Chiapas inappropriate for any study
of revolution because in sociological terms El Salvador was a ‘ failed revolution ’ and
Chiapas only part of a much larger country. However, as feminist scholars have
repeatedly shown, we must expand the analytical lenses if we are truly to capture
the gendered dynamic of, in this case, politics. One of the particularly powerful
messages implicit in the book is that gender is infused into everything. The author
demonstrates this point – one very central to women’s studies – by showing how
gender relations and identities are at once transformed by revolutionary movements
while at the same time transforming those very movements.
Feminism and the Legacy of Revolution reads particularly well as what might be
considered part two to Karen Kampwirth’s first book Women and Guerrilla Movements :
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Cuba (Penn State, 2002) and works as a great com-
panion to Shayne’s The Revolution Question : Feminisms in El Salvador, Chile, and Cuba
(Rutgers, 2004). Together all three books document the stories of women whose
histories have been largely overlooked by academic scholars of revolution and leftist
activists as well. Kampwirth eloquently concludes her book : ‘ men (and women)
who continue to insist that emancipatory political projects have nothing to do with
gender relations and personal lives are precisely the people who make feminism
likely ’ (p. 196). Indeed, those same folks should read Feminism and the Legacy of
Revolution and see how inaccurate that all too common assertion truly is.
Emory University JULIE SHAYNE

832 Reviews
Robinson A. Herrera, Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Sixteenth-Century Santiago
de Guatemala (Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 2004), pp. x+261,
$50.00, hb.
This an interesting book that breaks new ground on an important epoch of the
evolution of the city of Santiago de Guatemala, present-day La Antigua Guatemala.
It is about the development of the city, which was the main urban centre between
New Spain (Mexico) and Panama, from the years 1541–42 (when the city was moved
to Panchoy) and 1598 or 1600, when Santiago emerged as the most important
economic, political, religious and artistic centre for The Reino or Audiencia de
Guatemala, which included the present State of Chiapas in Mexico and the five
Central American Republics. The book begins when the city’s economy and popu-
lation started to grow rapidly, and ends when it faced a major crisis after cocoa and
indigo exportations declined. It covers three generations : among the Spaniards,
those who were part of the conquest, and the first two generations who knew no
other home but Santiago; among the other ethnic groups, those that were slaves or
dependants of the firsts Spaniards, and the free descendants of the latter. In 1543 the
city started to evolve from being bi-racial (with Spaniards in the core and Indians in
the surrounding barrios) to becoming multi-ethnic, with a more complex distribution.
Herrera is assistant professor of history at Florida State University. An earlier
version of his work was his doctoral dissertation. The merit of his book is that it
gives attention to partially neglected segments of Santiago’s society. For example,
while Spanish encomenderos and high ecclesiastics appear due to their social and
economic importance, they are not the centre of the narrative, in part because they
have already received attention in various other monographs. He deals with all
ethnic groups in detail (Europeans, Indians, Africans, mestizos and mulatos), which
allows a more complete picture of interethnic interactions of Santiago’s sixteenth-
century society. Women are not overlooked (they were important as small shop-
keepers, panaderas, etc.), and neither are the surrounding native pueblos in the valley
of Panchoy and the Corregimiento del Valle. The book clarifies the change of attitude,
the formation of a new culture by the absorption of aboriginal culture by Spaniards,
and of European cultural elements by the Indians ; it explains the beginning of
miscegenation and sheds light on the consolidation of the city and its surroundings
into the most important economic and cultural area of the Audiencia, which radiated
its influences to the whole Reino de Guatemala.
The work is organised in eleven chapters. It begins with a historiographical
introduction. In the following chapters it considers the rise of Santiago as a regional
commercial centre, including the role played in that process not only by rich
merchants, but also by petty dealers (tratantes), farmers (labradores) and muleteers
(arrieros). Herrera demonstrates the importance of credit in that process, since he
discovers that economically active members of this city accumulated debts.
Following earlier works, specially Heinrich Berlin’s, Historia de la imaginerı́a colonial
en Guatemala (Guatemala, 1952), he confirms that indigenous and black artisans
received early training as artists and craftsmen. Slaves apprenticed their craft with
their masters and taught it to their free-born mulatto children ; the same happened
with Indians and mestizos.
Herrera uses information from the colonial cronistas, modern historians (specially
Murdo J. MacLeod and Christopher H. Lutz), and many documents from the
Archivo General de Centro América (AGCA) in Guatemala city and also from the Archivo

Reviews 833
Histórico Provincial de Sevilla, a repository rarely used by historians of Spanish America.
He has made excellent use of the escrituras de escribanos (the modern notaries) from the
AGCA, as his most important source. Unfortunately, when he gives the archival
identification number of each instrument or escritura, he does not give the name of
the escribano, as has been usual among other works. The name of the escribano is useful
and facilitates the work of future researchers. An important element that Herrera
does not clarify is the failure of an early Spanish effort, during the sixteenth-century,
to establish nahuatl as the only native language in Guatemala. That is the reason why
Mayan languages have remained, even today, as living languages in Guatemala. Maps
1 and 3 should have been larger to allow an easier reading of the names.
As a Guatemalan historian I welcome this new book on the history of Santiago de
Guatemala, especially on a century that needs new contributions. I hope it will soon
be translated into Spanish.
Universidad del Valle de Guatemala J O R G E L U J Á N -M U Ñ O Z
J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 37 (2005). doi:10.1017/S0022216X0534020X

Beatriz Manz, Paradise in Ashes : A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror, and Hope
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), pp. xix+311, $24.95 pb ;
£16.95 hb.
Beatriz Manz has written a remarkable book about Guatemala during the terrifying
decades of the last century when some 200,000 Guatemalans were killed, most of
them Mayan Indians targeted by genocidal governmental violence.
Its centre is the story of a single village, Santa Marı́a Tzejá, in the verdant
northern forest of the Quiché province near the Mexican border, which Manz
visited repeatedly over 30 years. She situates its life and people within larger
structures of power in Guatemala and beyond. The Guatemalan army and the civil
patrols, the exploitative economy and racist culture, US policies and the larger,
changing international frame are woven through her analysis. She makes adept use
of the two major projects in Guatemala that reflect on national reality during this
period – the Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI) and the UN Commission on
Historical Clarification (CEH) – as well as human rights reports, various other
publications and a number of confidential US government documents.
Manz is insightful about how villagers’ lives are shaped by institutions and larger
structures of power but also how they are capable of finding power – in themselves
and in community – and using it. She analyses the concrete ways that the Church
empowered people by engaging them in their own education into the rights they
possess as human beings and the rights they had to claim and fight for. Life in the
refugee camps of Mexico, which she knew first hand, enabled villagers not only to
survive but also bring home new skills and a new sense of what their community
could be. Villagers are acted upon in terrible ways, but they are also actors – in
the old phrase of concientización and the liberationist Church, not merely objects of
history but also its subjects. It is this thread running through the book that ultimately
justifies the balance of its subtitle as a ‘ journey of courage, terror and hope ’.
The village of Santa Marı́a Tzejá is not typical of Guatemala, as Manz is the first
to recognise, and her whole book evokes its vivid, specific character. The people
of the village come alive in their individuality – with their particularities and

834 Reviews
contradictions and changes wrought by experience. Some two dozen photos of
them let us know what they look like (and we want to know what they look
like) – Miguel Reyes, Roselia Hernández, Father Luis Gurriarán, Rosa Botón Lux
and her daughter. Their words carry the broader lines of interpretation with which
Manz shapes the story, but she also respects them as individuals, listening and
recording, trying to discern their meaning yet not judging them. Their lives convey
insights about humanity as well as Guatemala and the larger world through these
30 years.
Paradise in Ashes is a work of both anthropology and contemporary history, and
Manz is very conscious of both sides of the work. She emerges very clearly as
an anthropologist, with respect for the methods and craft of the discipline. She has
a stubborn dedication to finding the truth, as best she can – to know the facts that,
as she says, quoting Hannah Arendt, possess ‘ a strength of their own _ beyond
agreement, dispute, opinion or consent ’. She lays out, for all to see, the ways
in which she tries to do her work – above all in winning the trust of the villagers,
who have so many reasons for distrust. She works hard to build confianza and to
be worthy of it.
At the same time Manz is someone with clear ethical commitments – com-
promiso – that she also acts upon, an ongoing engagement to live out her values
concretely in the situations in which she finds herself over this whole period. There
are many examples throughout the book. Her role in keeping the villagers in
touch between the militarised Santa Marı́a Tzejá of 1983–94 and the refugee camps
of Mexico is one ; another is her role in the painful, difficult but ultimately hopeful
reunification of the most recent decade.
Paradise in Ashes is also a book about historical memory – collective memory and
individual memory of a violent, conflictive, traumatic time. It exemplifies what
scholars in Spanish increasingly call tiempo presente – history written when the events
of a recent past are still alive in the changing memories of a significant part of the
population.
It is no injustice to journalists – who conventionally claim this role of writing
‘ the first draft of history ’ – to say that Paradise in Ashes is more than an excellent
work of journalism. It is that – a compelling story clearly told, based on thorough
research and direct, first-hand knowledge. But it is more than journalism because
Beatriz Manz was there, over and over through 30 years – an inconceivably long
assignment for even the most indulgent of editors! And with that engagement
came a unique ability – as unique in its own ways as Santa Marı́a Tzejá itself – to
sort through and interpret complex and sometimes contradictory realities and then,
finally, commit what she learned to the page.
Those who like Beatriz Manz are committed to the cause of human rights dwell
a great deal on repression, torture, and violent death. They focus on the terrible
injustices caused by structures of power and those that direct them – as they must,
of course. But it is also important to remember the light with the dark – the courage
and the resistance of those that fight against those injustices in their own societies.
They are also part – the hopeful, humane part – of history. And they are central to
the book Beatriz Manz has written – a book that should and will be read for many
years to come.
Santiago, Chile ALEXANDER WILDE

Reviews 835
O. Hugo Benavides, Making Ecuadorian Histories : Four Centuries of Defining Power
(Austin, TX : University of Texas Press, 2004), pp. x+231, $50.00 ; £38.00, hb.
The publishing boom on present-day Ecuador continues. In the light of recent events,
authors have considerable scope for writing revisionist histories of the country.
Meanwhile, the complexities of current politics and socio-cultural relations high-
light the on-going need to interrogate the ways in which knowledge about this
small country is produced, circulated and given meaning within diverse contexts and
among highly varied actors. Hugo Benavides’ book represents a contribution in this
regard, in his analysis of how archaeology and history contribute to the production
of nationalist hegemonies, and how historical accounts around the female, homo-
sexual or indigenous subject re-inscribe the hegemonic relations underpinning
state nationalism. As an anthropologist, Benavides is concerned to uncover the
rituals of commemoration around the archaeological site of Cochasquı́, provide
alternative readings of pre-colonial male harems, and explain how newspapers
provide a forum for diverse readings of historical and archaeological meanings.
By encountering hegemony through these avenues, Benavides recognises that
his account is partial yet provides a convincing portrait of how, when and where
hegemonic accounts of the meaning of Ecuadorian-ness are constructed and
enacted.
In the Introduction and Chapter 1 (‘ Ecuador’s political hegemony: national and
racial histories ’), Benavides outlines his theoretical framework which draws heavily
on Foucault’s post-structuralist account of power, in addition to Gramsci’s writing
on hegemony and that of Stuart Hall on the fracturing of identity. In line with much
recent work on Latin America, Benavides argues that nation-building is fundamen-
tally a cultural project in which hegemony, reconversion and institutional powers
interact to produce authoritative accounts of state, nation and identity, all the time
being subject to resistance and alternative readings.
Chapter 2 provides an overview of the institutional history and context of
the Cochasquı́ archaeological site, north of Quito, a site that plays a central role in
accounting for national histories to Ecuadorean and other tourists. As a site first of
pre-Inca resistance to the Inca expansion, then as a site through which reactions to
the Spanish conquest can be articulated and expressed, the guides, official histories
and sanctioned readings of the Cochasquı́ site work in various ways to smooth over
these contradictions within the overarching hegemony of Ecuadorean nationalism.
Importantly too, the site functions as a place where authenticity and spirituality
are expressed and channel forms of belonging and identity, as illustrated by its use
by shamans, the occasional wedding, and folkloric performances. These themes are
continued in Chapter 3, where Benavides examines in detail how the representation
of the history, territory and gendered history centred on the site underpin national
mechanisms of appropriation. As the principal window onto hegemonic relations
in Ecuador, the Cochasquı́ site is also discussed in Chapter 4, where ‘ fractured
subjects’ of the female subject and the male homosexual are considered in the
context of a patriarchal national project. Official histories are decoded as maintain-
ing an underlying hierarchy of white-mestizo men over women and weaker men.
Although this theme is covered elsewhere, Benavides brings it into focus by means
of an analysis of ‘ Queen Quilago ’, the larger-than-life resistance leader against
the Incas and future wife of Huayna Capac. Chapter 5 addresses the ways in which
indigenous organisations and authors have written alternative histories, shows the

836 Reviews
difficulties of writing counter-hegemonic histories and the vigour with which
these alternative histories are produced and circulated within their own institutional
circuits. Chapter 5 highlights the degree to which historical narratives are embedded
and made meaningful within certain contexts, and the political urgency felt by
the indigenous confederations, not least CONAIE, to provide distinctive readings
of the country and their own political objectives. In comparison with the previous
chapters, Chapter 6 discusses the diversity of voices found within the national
press (in reality, the two major regional presses of Quito and the major coastal
port of Guayaquil). This chapter centres upon the controversy of Saint Biritute, a
pre-Hispanic totem taken from its coastal village to Guayaquil amid much political
dispute about its ‘ appropriate ’ resting place.
Despite its theoretical validity and coherence, the book’s scope is relatively limited
in that its themes are not developed and extended through rich description and
wider referencing to work on Ecuador and neighbouring states. The book makes
selective use of the existing literature, thereby missing the chance to make points
with more depth. For example, the work of Blanca Muratorio and Andrés Guerrero
is only infrequently mentioned, although their contribution to these debates has
been central. Similarly, the lively debates in Ecuadorean feminist studies do not
come across, although half of Chapter 4 concerns the fractured female subject.
Additionally, the book’s remit appears to have been artificially truncated to make
no mention of the discipline of anthropology (this lacuna is mentioned in the
conclusion). The discussion about individual bodily engagements, including the gaze,
in the site (Chapter 3) currently fails to acknowledge the extensive literature on
viewers’ resistance to particular readings. In this context, more detailed anthropo-
logical work, perhaps in analytical conjunction with Butler on performance or
Williams on ‘ structures of feeling ’, would have been interesting.
Overall, this book will be of interest to Ecuadorean(ist) scholars, especially those
concerned with the meanings of history at a time of great social and political
upheaval. In light of the fact that much theory and Ecuadorean background is
taken for granted, it is not a good introduction to these themes, but provides a
theoretically informed and grounded account of issues that have great salience and
importance in the country today.
University of Cambridge S A R A H A. R A D C L I F F E

Peter Wogan, Magical Writing in Salasaca : Literacy and Power in Highland Ecuador
(Oxford : Westview Press, 2003), pp. xv+175, £15.50, pb.
This book by Peter Wogan is about the power that written words in the form of
documents, archives, and lists have for the Salasaca people of Highland Ecuador.
The volume consists of an introductory and five chapters through which the author
unfolds his arguments, the core of which is that among the Quechua- and Spanish-
speaking Salasaca people, literacy is a ‘ sophisticated indigenous commentary on
church and state power’ (p. 2) and that ‘ literacy symbolism leads to the heart of
power relations ’ (p. 4).
These statements are reaffirmed in each of the subsequent chapters. Chapter
Two analyses the relationships between witchcraft and writing, focusing on the book
of St Gonzalo, a popular Catholic saint and also a powerful witch who, in exchange

Reviews 837
for a considerable sum of money, will harm those whose names are written in his
book. Chapter Three explores the sources of the Salasaca’s belief in the magical
power of books like that of St Gonzalo. The author finds that these beliefs are
rooted in a re-signification of the Church and state archives by the Salasaca, given
that these archives have always been a means of controlling and monitoring
Salasacas’ lives, and so they ultimately define personal existence (p. 51).
Chapter Four shows other examples of the ‘ magic ’ that writing has among the
Salasaca : through the description of the story about a man’s near-death experience,
told to the author by his Salsaca landlady. Wogan explores local beliefs about the
existence of God’s book, where God writes down people’s names and dates of birth
and death, therefore establishing people’s coming to life and the extent of it. This
belief is consistent, the author says, with the existence of another form of written
record : the lists of the Dead, that Salasaca people write down with the names of
their dead kin to be read loudly during the mass for the celebrations of the Dead,
in November. In this way, Wogan states, the Salasaca appropriate and re-signify
literacy symbolism as a source and meaning of state and Church power. Their
obsession with recovering these lists in order to save them in a secret place in
the house, until the following celebration, is explained by Wogan by the fact that
‘ Salasaca understandably want to snatch some of these powers for themselves ’
(p. 103).
Chapter Five explores writing in relation to weaving, a major activity and source
of income for the Salasaca. The brief concluding chapter puts the Salasaca case into
the wider perspective stating the importance that the study of writing and literacy
has for the social sciences.
The book certainly addresses a very important topic in both Andean ethnography
and anthropology in general, namely, the importance of inserting into anthropo-
logical analyses ‘ marginal writings ’, writings that have traditionally been neglected by
anthropologists in favour of high cultured texts. Two of the written texts analysed
by the author, the books of St Gonzalo and the list of the Dead, are windows into
the whole lived cosmology of Salasaca people. In this respect, they help to locate
those written products of a particular society that gain meaning in anthropological
terms, and so enhance the anthropological endeavour.
However, the courageous challenge that the author accepts in giving marginality
a voice, would have been better sustained by an equally strong bet on ethnography.
A key feature of anthropology has always been its stress on the importance of
putting texts/words in close relationship with daily practice ; its insistence that
words alone (written or oral) play a limited role in helping us understand and make
sense of identities, history, societies, and cultures. The ‘ marginality ’ of the written
texts mentioned earlier, therefore, refers also to the limitations that come from
giving them a central place in the analyses of socio-cultural processes, as Wogan
does, because the Salasaca’s world is not only written and spoken but mainly
experienced, lived. Reading and entering a culture only through some written texts
produced by it does not give full justice to the complexity and richness of that
culture.
The written texts that Wogan analyses have not landed in an ‘ unoccupied ’
ground, and do not exist in a vacuum. While being part of a wider historical, social,
political, and cultural context, they are also important elements of people’s daily life.
It is this ‘ empirical ’ daily world and working of these texts that I would have
expected to find in this book.

838 Reviews
The highly suggestive written texts that the author puts at the core of his analysis
are not exclusive of Salasaca, but are found – with local specifications – all over the
Andes. The regional literature shows that these texts condense the way in which
indigenous people make sense of their historical experience with a foreign culture
in which they stand in a relation of intimate dependency. All over the Andes,
contemporary local saints and religious characters, the Dead and their ceremonies,
the relationships between Indigenous peoples and the state and the Church are the
products of this intimate relationship in which colonial and now ‘ modern’ forms
have been reworked into Andean structures. This is part of what some scholars
define as the emergence of a series of ‘ indigenous modernizations ’.
Written in a clearly sympathetic, narrative and fluent manner, that allows also
non-specialist readers to enjoy the author’s journey among the different paths of
his analysis, this book makes a pleasant reading for students interested in the
Andes and, more generally, in issues of literacy.
University of St Andrews EMILIA FERRARO

David J. Robinson, Collaguas II. Lari Collaguas : economı́a, sociedad y población,
1604–1605. Homenaje a Franklin Pease G. Y. (Lima : Fondo Editorial de la
Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and Syracuse, NY : University of
Syracuse, 2003), pp. cxii+514, pb.
The greater part of this book comprises a transcription of a visita that was
conducted in Lari Collaguas in the Colca Valley in the district of Arequipa, Peru,
between 1604 and 1605. Although visitas were essentially judicial inspections
aimed at making tax assessments, because they generated such detailed lists of
individuals, households, their lands, products and livestock, they have come to be
regarded as some of the richest sources for understanding many aspects of the
demography, social organisation and economic life of Andean peoples in the early
colonial period.
A few visitas were published in the early twentieth century, but they came to
greater prominence in the 1960s and 1970s with the work of scholars such as John
Murra, Waldemar Espinoza, Franklin Pease, Marı́a Rostworowski and David Cook.
At present over forty visitas have been published, although not all are as extensive or
complete as the best-known ones of Huánuco (1562) and Chucuito (1567). Among
them are a number of visitas to a part of the Colca Valley, known as Collaguas, a
region that comprised three repartimientos – Yanque Collaguas, Lari Collaguas
and Cabanaconde. The visitas of Yanque Collaguas undertaken in the 1580s and
1590s were published in 1977 by Franklin Pease under the title of Collaguas I. 1
This book, Collaguas II, relates to a visita of Lari Collaguas which was undertaken
1604 and 1605 at the request of the local protector de naturales who complained
that encomenderos were continuing to exact tribute from communities while they
were suffering from food shortages due to damage caused to agricultural production
by the recent eruption of the Huaynaputina volcano. The visita inspected 8,750
people in nine villages in the Colca Valley and puna.
1
Franklin Pease G. Y. (ed.), Collaguas I (Lima : Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1977).

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The transcription of the visita, which runs to over 500 pages, was undertaken
by Laura Gutiérrez Arbulú, currently director of the Archivo Arzobispal in
Lima. The edition follows international transcription norms with only a few minor
deviations. The document itself, although drawn up between 1604 and 1605, was
subsequently used on a later inspection in 1641 when the deaths of those who
had died in the interim were noted in the margin. This information is also included
in the transcription.
The book is introduced by substantial essays written by David Cook and David
Robinson. David Cook, who has undertaken research in the Colca Valley since
the 1970s, offers a fascinating personal narrative of the efforts by local historians
to locate and analyse the visitas relating to Collaguas, and particularly the labours
of Franklin Pease, to whom the book is dedicated. He also provides a useful
overview of the nature, role and history of visitas in the Andes and includes a list
of those that have been published. David Robinson, who has also worked with the
visitas of Collaguas, provides an excellent preliminary analysis of the social organis-
ation, resource use and demography in the region, during which he raises many
questions for future research. He also comments on the nature of the manuscript
itself, its limitations, and the norms used in transcription, which are all essential for
reading the text.
This visita differs in some respects from others that have been published.
Undertaken in the early seventeenth century, it provides a glimpse of the impact
of the reforms of Viceroy Toledo in the 1570s. It contains an exceptional amount of
detail on the location of the lands cultivated by individuals and the crops and live-
stock they raised. It suggests that despite the Toledan resettlement schemes,
which removed many communities from their lands, the vertical archipelago system
elaborated by John Murra was still functioning. However, in the social sphere
greater changes appear to have taken place. Robinson shows how the Toledan
reforms had a major impact on the structure of ayullus and their subdivisions such
that in the early seventeenth century they bore little relationship to the theoretical
prehispanic structure based on kinship and power. An analysis of household struc-
ture is more difficult in this visita than some others since single persons, including
widows, widowers and orphans, are listed separately for each community rather
included under individual households, while other residents such as forasteros are
excluded. An analysis of the social organisation is also complicated by the existence
of both Quechua and Aymara names and the precise location of social units is not
clear. Did they form compact villages, as envisaged by the Toldean reforms, or were
they more dispersed ? A curious feature of the visita is that some four or six names
account for 50 per cent of women’s names, and children do not necessarily take
the names of their parents. Robinson’s analysis raises many interesting issues that
future researchers will wish to explore.
This is a well-produced book. The text is clear and the introductory chapters,
which include some excellent maps and diagrams, add greatly to its value. Given its
immense importance to Andean scholars, there is a case for its reproduction in a
digital and searchable form. In titling his book Collaguas I Franklin Pease had a vision
that other volumes would follow to give voice to ‘ the people without history ’.
Collaguas II is a fitting tribute to his work and it is to be hoped that his vision will
continue to inspire the production of further volumes of this kind.
King’s College London L I N D A A. N E W S O N

840 Reviews
Ulrick Muecke, Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Peru : The Rise of the
Partido Civil (Pittsburgh, PA. : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), pp. x+294,
$39.95, hb.
This detailed and rich study of the Partido Civil is a welcome addition to the growing
body of work on the politics of nineteenth-century Peru. Its title, however, promises
slightly more than it delivers because it implies that it either comprised all the
political culture of the nineteenth century, or that more than this phenomenon will
be explored. This contradicts the blurb on the back cover that describes a book
‘ more ambitious than its title would suggest ’ and ‘ the best study on nineteenth-
century Peruvian political history in several decades ’. These assessments do a
disservice to a very solid and well-written book that tackles in an effective and well-
researched way how this particular party emerged, developed and dominated the
politics of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Muecke has managed to transcend the study of the individuals of the elite
that created the Sociedad de Independencia Electoral and to delve deeply into
the way diverse political networks operated throughout the country, initially to
obtain electoral victory and later to maintain the power of the party. He has used
the tools available to a political scientist to study the behaviour of its members
in the legislature, and he has shown very clearly that despite what most Peruvians
from both the left and right have long believed, the Partido Civil was in fact a
political party as understood in today’s terms. The book is divided into three
parts – the first charts the bourgeoisie’s rise to power, the second the development
of the party, and the third its apogee. The structure helps us understand how a group
of people within the elite became mobilised and interested in taking control of the
political apparatus, how they went about achieving it and how they consolidated
their gains.
The work is at its strongest when it paints a detailed portrait of the political
milieu of the 1870s and the gradual abandonment of long-held ideas based on
prejudice. The description of the way the presidential campaign was conducted in
the first years of the decade, by using electoral clubs throughout the country, their
regional composition and their links to other voluntary associations, shows that
elections were more than just a farce and that they in fact ‘ played a key role in
political life because they encourage debate and forged political contacts and, despite
their shortcomings, were able to legitimise power ’ (p. 83). Muecke’s study of the
voting patterns of the party faithful sheds light on the importance of congress in this
period and dispels its image as an irrelevant institution. The detailed description
of the way regional networks functioned and how they related to Pardo and the
party, exposes the inner workings of the political culture of the country during this
period and ‘ brings the state back in ’. Muecke also shows how the Partido Civil was
able to transcend its leader and become a political party in its own right. That
process began during the 1877 presidential campaign, which instead of being
coordinated solely by Pardo, as in 1870, was headed by the Junta Directiva, continued
while the leader was exiled in June 1877, and was consolidated after his death in
November 1878.
The author, however, suffers from the lack of work on the previous period, which
leads him to assert, for instance, that the National Guard was a ‘ new institution ’
created by the civilistas (p. 38). The Guard had, in fact, existed in many guises from
the time of independence and had been the basis of both Agustı́n Gamarra’s and

Reviews 841
Ramón Castilla’s strategy to reform the army and create a more centralised state.
He also contends that ‘ for a long time after independence, the Peruvian state did
not consist of much more than the government palace in Lima, which was captured
by one caudillo one day and another one the next ’ (p. 45). This long-held view is
being challenged by current work and has been shown to be of limited use by
authors such as Aljovı́n, Chambers, McEvoy, Mendez, Thurner and Walker, all of
whom have described a much more complex society in the transit from colony to
republic.
Muecke succeeds in the task he sets out for himself, namely, the study of what
‘ day-to-day political activities were really like and how they developed Peruvian
national politics and political culture ’ (p. 8). This work is essential to anyone inter-
ested in the study of networks as well as those concerned with the development
of political ideas in Peru and Latin America, not only in the nineteenth but also
in the early twentieth century. The book, however, remains limited to a detailed
study of the development of the Partido Civil and does not properly tackle the wider
questions of the evolving relationship between civilism and militarism.
Institute for the Study of the Americas,
University of London, and Yale University NATALIA SOBREVILLA PEREA

Mario Fumerton, From Victims to Heroes : Peasant Counter-rebellion and Civil War
in Ayacucho, Peru, 1980–2000 (Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers, Thela Latin
American Series, 2002), pp. 367, E22.50, pb.
Based on fieldwork conducted in 1997 and 2000, this monograph plots changing
trends in peasant-guerrilla-state/military relations during Peru’s bloody civil war
(1980–96). Focusing the analysis largely on the district of Tambo (in the department
of Ayacucho), the ‘ central assertion is that peasant counter-rebellion is a form of
resistance to exogenous forces, and its primary motivation is the defence of life,
property, livelihood, and autonomous space for action’ (p. 20). To this end, early
chapters outline the origins and growth of the PCP-SL in Ayacucho during the
late 1970s and early 1980s. Initial favourable reactions to the insurgents among the
rural population, when allied to the military’s hamfisted response, allowed Sendero
to enjoy ‘ the Ayacuchan peasantry’s widespread sympathy’ (p. 60) prior to 1983.
Early unsuccessful attempts at the formation of civil defence patrols are also
examined, along with the subsequent emergence of more spontaneous grass
roots militias in the Apurı́mac river valley, the creation of which reflected mounting
tension between the guerrilla ‘ fish ’ and campesino ‘ water ’ over issues of market
contact, the forced requisition of crops and labour, excessive senderista violence,
forced removal of elected village leaders, etc. Most of these events, which occupy
the first four and a half chapters, have been described elsewhere (see C. I. Degregori
(ed.), Las rondas campesinas y la derrota de Sendero Luminoso, Lima 1996).
Thereafter, the author starts to break new ground and the monograph becomes
more original. The personal and political trajectory of a controversial figure
central to the early organisation of civil defence militias in the Apurı́mac river valley
(‘comandante Huayhuaco ’) is examined, his transformation from drug trafficker to
national counter-insurgency celebrity being narrated in an informed and sensitive
fashion (pp. 123–41). Also illuminating is the account of how peasant anti-guerrilla

842 Reviews
tactics gradually became more sophisticated and effective through a process of
self-education during combat with Sendero. This involved the employment
of smaller more mobile, but better trained and armed militia units ; improved
co-ordination between neighbouring villages ; a greater priority being given to
intelligence gathering ; and related attempts to reintegrate captured senderistas into
the community instead of executing them summarily or turning them over to
the military. Interestingly, the peasant militias initiated this policy under their own
initiative well before the repentance law and similar measures were implemented
by the Fujimori administration. An ability to develop adequate policies to address
pressing difficulties helps explain why, by the late 1980s, the village-based militias
proved more efficacious in countering Sendero than the often bumbling efforts
of the army and police. Other issues that are discussed informatively include
the organisational structure of the civil defence committees, their internal everyday
functioning, personality clashes and other sources of schism, as well as their (often
strained) relations with Peru’s civil and military authorities.
The quality of the data has been enhanced significantly via access to the records
of the civil defence committees, which has been augmented by material from
official sources, both inside and outside the army. Overall, the author is to be
congratulated for the quality of the fieldwork under difficult circumstances. It is
a pity, therefore, that he has been let down by his publishers. Being based on a
doctoral dissertation, the text required a thorough edit – especially chapters I
to IV. The text is also peppered with grammatical and typographical errors that
should have been corrected. These problems and a number of factual errors
notwithstanding (e.g. the claim that Mariátegui ignored issues of ethnicity and race),
the book makes a valuable contribution to the literature on the PCP-SL and its
complicated relationship with the rural poor in Andean Peru.
University of Liverpool LEWIS TAYLOR

Estanislao del Canto, Memorias militares (Santiago de Chile : Centro de Estudios
Bicentenario, 2004), pp. lii+532, pb.
Estanislao del Canto served in the Chilean army during a pivotal period in his
nation’s history. Beginning the War of the Pacific (1879–84) as a company officer,
del Canto would serve in all the campaigns leading up to and including the 1881
capture of Lima. He spent the next two years waging a brutal counter-insurgency
campaign against the forces of Peru’s General Andrés Cáceres. Following the
restoration of peace, del Canto, now a colonel, returned to Chile where he
became first director of the Escuela Militar and then Santiago’s chief of police.
Resenting what he perceived as President José Manuel Balmaceda’s high-handed
methods, del Canto, never known for his subtlety, began complaining. The president
responded by removing del Canto from his command, ordering him to
Iquique where he served as the head of the police. This move proved provi-
dential for the pro-Congressional forces when they launched a rebellion in
January, 1891. Del Canto immediately defected to the revolutionaries, eventually
becoming commander of the anti-Balmaceda army. Thanks to him, the rebels
triumphed and del Canto emerged as one of the leaders of the newly constituted
army.

Reviews 843
Although he had emerged as one of the principal figures in the 1891 Civil War,
del Canto did not fulfil his ambition to become president of Chile. That honour,
fell to Admiral Jorge Montt. Angry at Montt, del Canto also came to loath Emil
Körner, the German officer Balmaceda had hired to revamp the army. Körner,
who had also fought for the rebel cause, claimed that he alone had directed
the congressional forces and hence he should direct the post-1891 army. Not
surprisingly, del Canto became the vocal critic of the proposed changes suggested
by Kórner and his protégé, Colonel Jorge Boonen Rivera. Although Montt forced
del Canto to resign, the move backfired because the now civilian del Canto only
increased his criticism of Körner’s policies. The situation degenerated to such a
point that del Canto and Boonen Rivera exchanged pistol shots on the Argentiine
border. Boonen-Rivera, who almost perished, went on to become one of the
leaders of the army ; del Canto remained a bitter veteran, living on a pension and his
memories.
In addition to del Canto’s memoirs, this volume, ably edited by Alejandro San
Francisco, also contains an interview conducted with the retired general by
Armando Donoso, as well as del Canto’s description of the 1891 Civil War
battles of Placilla and Cóncon. This book begins with an excellent introductory
essay, written by San Francisco, that places del Canto within the Chilean power
elite.
The republication of del Canto’s memoirs does all historians an important
service. Scholars interested in late nineteenth-century Chilean political and military
history will find this work extremely important. Alejandro San Francisco deserves
our appreciation for reviving this work, along with its prefatory essay.
California State University, Long Beach W I L L I A M F. S A T E R

Peter Winn (ed.), Victims of the Chilean Miracle : Workers and Neoliberalism in the
Pinochet Era, 1973–2002 (Durham, NC, and London : Duke University Press,
2004), pp. xiii+423, £70.00, £18.95 pb.
In the literature on the process of democratisation in Chile, the role of labour has
been rather neglected. This is now remedied in an excellent collection of detailed
case-studies of workers in certain sectors of the Chilean economy. Indeed it is
more than that, as most of the chapters – for example, Rachel Schurman on the
fisheries sector, or Thomas Miller Klubock on the forestry sector – offer compre-
hensive analysis of the sector as a whole, tracing the general trends in development
over the long term. Although the authors are sympathetic to the plight of the
workers and unions, their arguments are balanced and based upon careful
and exhaustive fieldwork. All the authors are North American or work in US
universities, and it is a tribute to the health of area studies at least in this specialism
that the editor has been able to put together such a valuable set of essays. Although
several authors play tribute to the pioneering work of Chilean writers on labour
before and during the dictatorship, it is striking how this area of study has fallen
into relative neglect within Chile. Further evidence of the dominance of neo-
liberalism?
However, if the editor is to be congratulated on the selection of authors, he
is to be criticised for the choice of title. To call it ‘ the Pinochet era ’ up to 2002

844 Reviews
is simply unfair, and indeed many of the chapters offer evidence in support of
that accusation. Several authors point to the possibilities of using labour law in
their struggles. Joel Stillerman provides the example (p. 193) of a successful strike
in the metalworkers sector, with a Supreme Court ruling in their favour. If
management still found ways to evade their obligations, this is hardly the style of
the Pinochet era. Rachel Schurman in her study of the fisheries sector also reports
on improvements based on additional legal rights (p. 315) and states that the
1991 Aylwin labour law reforms brought benefits to the workplace. Thomas
Klubock shows in his study of the copper workers of El Teniente how the workers
moved to a strategy of community rather than workplace activism. Heidi Tinsman
in her study of women agricultural workers points to the development of
strategies based upon non-workplace issues (housing, food and day-care facilities)
and to the greater emphasis of ethnically-based demands. And she also reports
that wages in the sector have risen from US$1 or $2 a day in the mid-1980s to
US$11 a day in 2002 (p. 282) – hardly an acceptable wage but still a significant
improvement. Volker Frank in a very thoughtful contribution is quite critical of
the strategy and tactics adopted by the unions, not least by the central union
confederation, the CUT (p. 110).
It is worth making these points because, while there is never any doubt that the
economic success of the government – it is misleading to call it a miracle – has
brought disproportionate benefits to the employers and disproportionate costs
to the workforce, and while there are obvious policy continuities between the
dictatorship and the democratic governments, it is not the same era. Indeed, one of
the strengths of these chapters is the precise way in which they trace the ways in
which there have been changes and the ways in which there have not – not least
in the editor’s own chapter on the textile industry. And the editor’s assertion that
the miracle has come to an abrupt end with the crisis of 1999–2001 is rather
contradicted by the subsequent resumption of growth.
Nevertheless, this remains an outstanding set of essays. Not one is weak and
all have different qualities. Volker Frank offers an interesting set of suggestions
on the form that a different – and plausible – model of labour relations might
take ; he is sensitive to the restrictions on government action placed by the
power of the right, and critical of some aspects of union behaviour. Peter
Winn puts the crisis facing the textile industry in the global context, criticises the
over-politicisation of unions during the Popular Unity period, and traces in
convincing detail the distinct development of major firms in the sector. He tells
a sad story – though one that is familiar to the textile sector in so many other
countries in the world. Stillerman offers a highly informed and informative
account of the fortunes of the metalworkers – and indeed of the sector as a
whole. Klubock has two chapters – one on El Teniente and a particularly fine
one on the forestry sector that is almost as much about environmental politics
and policies as it is about labour conditions. And he offers a convincing
argument for the environmentally sensitive and economically rational policy of
the Popular Unity government in this sector. Rachel Schurman provides an
excellent account of the fisheries sector as a whole – again with a great deal on
the environmental aspects – and the contradictory results for women of working
in this sector. They are obviously exploited and face horrendous working con-
ditions, but by the sheer fact of being independent wage earners are empowered
in the domestic arena.

Reviews 845
Perhaps there is at times a little too much yearning for the good old days of
class confrontation and heroic strikes, and at times a little too much criticism
of Chileans for their ‘ consumerist ’ and individualistic attitudes. Yet overall this is
a most impressive book and one of the best published on Chile in recent years.
St Antony’s College
Oxford ALAN ANGELL

Louise Haagh, Citizenship, Labour Markets and Democratization : Chile and the
Modern Sequence (Basingstoke : Palgrave, in association with St Antony’s College,
Oxford, 2002), pp. xxviii+291, £50.00, hb.
This is one of many books to examine the nature of the Chilean transition under
democracy since 1990. Some have referred to this as a form of neostructural
change after the more overtly neoliberal political economy of the Pinochet dic-
tatorship, with government taking a more proactive role in social if not economic
policy. More specifically, Louise Haagh attempts to examine the changing relation-
ship between citizenship and labour markets during the first ten years of the tran-
sition. It appears to be heavily based on a doctoral dissertation and subsequent
post-doctoral research with limited adaptation for a wider audience – apart from a
six-page introduction and a seven-page conclusion.
The key concept that Haagh wishes to introduce is that of occupational citizen-
ship. Haagh defines occupational citizenship very broadly as the effective means
of sustaining and developing a productive existence. The book becomes quite
narrowly focused on the political nature of labour markets and the contrasts
between the dictatorship and the democratic transition of the 1990s. The book is
divided into three parts, the first examining some broad theoretical issues linked
to citizenship and democratisation and resurrects the work of T. H. Marshall on
citizenship and social class. Haagh adheres to Marshall’s concept of a mainstream
in citizenship and membership of community, and she argues that the idea of
a mainstream is absent in the stage of welfare reform in Chile in the 1990s. This
Marshallian-inspired chapter is complemented by a discussion on human resources
and market reforms. After a very brief survey of controversies in labour market
flexibilisation, the theme of occupational citizenship is contextualised in terms of
the development of human resources. The chapter ends with a contextual section
on market reforms and labour institutions in the dictatorship.
The second part focuses on one of the key themes of the author’s
research – labour politics in Chile’s democratic transition. An informative chapter
on business elites is rather marred by a lack of reference to Eduardo Silva’s classic
1996 book on the subject. A more complete analysis of trade unions, political
parties and the accommodation to the political structures imposed by Pinochet
follows. Finally, this part discusses the pacts between business groups and trade
unions within the democratic transition and details experiences of pacts within
the metallurgical, banking, port and bakery sectors ; a short coda on the re-
reform of the Labour Code under the Frei administration ends this section
(strangely analysed before the earlier Aylwin reforms which are in the third part of
the book).

846 Reviews
The third part essentially continues the theme of the second. The politics
and development discourse of labour legislation under the Aylwin administration
provides the framework for Chapter Six. Haagh concludes that the labour reform
was a ‘ master act of legitimation : to employers, of the status quo ; to labour,
of political inclusion ; and to citizens of democratization ’ (p. 122). An interesting
interlude on training policy in the 1990s provides the focus for Chapter Seven.
Haagh concludes perceptively that there was a pervasive legacy of ideological
polarisation as well as institutional inertia with a ‘ dichotomy between the state as a
structure separate from the productive sphere, and a private sector seen as merely
an ensemble of unconnected firms ’ (p. 145). Perhaps it has taken the Lagos
government of the early twenty-first century to make some inroads into this
‘ inherited ’ dichotomy from the dictatorship.
The argument continues by examining the changing labour relations in the
democratic transition and is based on an analysis of a survey of 245 local labour
leaders carried out in autumn 1992. This section points to the deficiencies of
the 1991 Labour Code as Haagh argues that many employers saw minimal forms
of inclusion as a risk, an attitude that acted against investment in human resources
in many firms. Chapter Nine continues the analysis by focusing on trade union
strength and their attitudes towards labour flexibility. A brief conclusion comments
on the Chilean case study in relation to broader issues of labour institutions and
economic development.
Haagh’s book benefits from a detailed political analysis of the first ten years of
Chile’s democratic transition, with valuable insights into the role of trade unions
and local labour leaders. There is, however, relatively little on such key issues as
the role of union leaders in the employment problems generated by the huge growth
of temporary labour in the export-oriented sectors. This is part of a wider problem
that the book has in exploring labour markets in a democratic transition from a
mainly political perspective. There is very little analysis of the economic basis of
the dramatic changes in labour markets in Chile, particularly those linked to the
export-oriented sectors. This is a shame as it could be argued that the Chilean
economic model is distinctive due to the paradigmatic change from an inward-
oriented to an outward-oriented economy. It could also be argued that these changes
of economic model have brought the greatest changes to Chile’s labour markets
with a major diversification in the primary-producing sectors (with large increases
in the use of temporary labour), a significant reduction in manufacturing employ-
ment and a dramatic rise in the service sector, with employment in high-order
services notably concentrated in Santiago. However, such economic themes are left
to one side.
University of Birmingham ROBERT GWYNNE

Carmelo Mesa-Lago (ed.), Economı́a y bienestar social en Cuba a comienzos del
siglo XXI (Madrid : Editorial Colibrı́, 2003), pp. 207, pb.
This is another interesting volume by Carmelo Mesa-Lago, pioneer of studying
and monitoring Cuban economic performance after the Revolution. Mesa-Lago
is Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, and
Professor of International Relations at Florida International University. The volume

Reviews 847
is published in Spanish, and several of the chapters are based on material already
published in English, but it also has new materials, not published elsewhere.
Chapter 1 is a review of the economic and social policies during the various
phases of the Castro government since 1959. Chapter 2 is a critical, in-depth analysis
of the post-Soviet dependency period after 1990, and the search for a new economic
model. In Chapter 3 Mesa-Lago discusses the erosion of the social welfare system,
and the worsening of one of the hallmarks of the revolution, the equal distribution
of income and social benefits. Chapter 4 is a critical review of attempts to measure
‘ human development ’ in the context of Cuba, with a special monitoring of the
zigzagging attempts by the UNDP with its Human Development Index. Chapter 5
compares the Cuban ‘ model ’ in relation to two other celebrated success stories,
Chile and Costa Rica. It is a kind of summarised version in Spanish of a much
celebrated book, Mesa-Lago’s magnum opus, entitled Market, Socialist, and Mixed
Economies. Comparative Policy and Performance in Chile, Cuba and Costa Rica (2000). In
the final chapter, Mesa-Lago presents some ideas for necessary reforms of the
economic and social system in Cuba.
The first chapter is a brilliant overview of the economic and social policies
of Castro’s Cuba. Many readers are familiar with Mesa-Lago’s interesting, but
not uncontroversial, method of splitting up Cuban policies/performance in
successive idealist and pragmatic cycles. His thesis is that two identifiable idealist
cycles (1966–70 and 1986–90) led to a ‘ double crisis ’ (crisis for economic organis-
ation as well as for development strategy) with negative effects not only on econ-
omic performance, but also on social achievements, jeopardising the very raison d’être
of the regime. Although I entirely agree with the conclusion on the first idealist
cycle in the 1960s, and its negative effect on living standards, I am sceptical
about Mesa-Lago’s conclusion about the second idealist period (the ‘ Period of
Rectification ’, 1986–90). That the subsequent period, after 1990, was disastrous
(at least during the first five years) is evident, but it is not clear that this was
the consequence of the ‘ idealism ’ of the preceding period. I would argue that the
collapse of the ‘ socialist camp ’ in Europe, and especially the demise of the Soviet
Union (Cuba’s primary benefactor) is the main explanation of the crisis that fol-
lowed in Cuba in the 1990s (‘ Special Period in Peace Time ’). It is true that the
inertia in the Cuban system, sooner or later, would have led to a crisis at any rate,
but the events in Eastern Europe accelerated that process.
The following two chapters are devoted to in-depth analyses of the economic and
social situation in Cuba after 1990. Together with the final chapter (Chapter 6),
which is a summary of the whole volume, these chapters discuss the various reform
attempts in Cuba. Especially interesting is Mesa-Lago’s endeavour to bring the
views of Cuban economists into this debate. Mesa-Lago, and also most the Cuban
economists he cites, is particularly concerned about the mismanagement of the
economy, its negative impact on growth, and not least on social equity, that was
once the pride of the Revolution. He suggests a range of reforms, from changes in
the fiscal system to changes of the pension system. Most Cuban economists would
agree, while Fidel probably would not _
Chapter 4 is perhaps the most interesting. It is a meticulous and detailed account
of the fate of the Cuba’s Human Development Index (HDI) in the corridors of
the UNDP, its ups and downs on the Index ladder, and its successive responses
in Havana, from euphoria to disappointment and rejection (when Cuba from time
to time has been removed from top position). In this review it is impossible to

848 Reviews
summarise all the facts of this saga. It should just be said that Mesa-Lago has
done an admirable job of trying to find out how all these successive mishaps
came about at the UNDP. I am sure that the HDI analysts never dreamt of being
so undressed in public. Now, it should be said to the defence of UNDP, that
constructing the HDI is a recent endeavour, the composition of the index itself
is changing continuously, and a comparison over time with over Latin American
countries perhaps does not make much sense in the first place. For the record,
there do today exist reasonably good estimates of a Cuban benchmark GDP-PPP
(an important ingredient in HDI). One reasonable estimate has been prepared by
the well known Penn World Tables group at the Center for International
Comparisons at the University of Pennsylvania. If that benchmark figure is
reasonably correct, Mesa-Lago would have to adjust the Cuban GDP figures
upwards, although that would probably not have too much of an impact on his
main arguments and criticisms of the Cuban model.
Chapter 5 attempts to compare the Cuban model in the light of other economic
models in Latin America, in this case those of Chile and Costa Rica and Chile. The
chapter is a summary of the impressive volume referred to above. Those interested
in comparative economics should benefit from reading this thoughtful piece, which
is based on meticulous and well-researched work. The conclusion is perhaps not
surprising, that all three models have done pretty well – looking over a wider time
span of 40 to 50 years – in terms of social welfare (with a slight advantage for Cuba).
On the other hand, Chile and Costa Rica both surpass Cuba in terms of economic
growth and economic management. Although this could seem to be a fair verdict, it
is not clear why the author sees the need to distinguish between Chile and Costa
Rica as different models, ‘ market ’ versus ‘ mixed ’ economy. Are they so different
after all, Chile and Costa Rica, and which model is better ?
Mesa-Lago’s book is a highly interesting account of the rise and fall of the Cuban
economic model. It is well written, exemplarily well documented, and should be
obligatory reading for scholars interested in what happened to the Cuban model
and what options lie ahead.
International Organisation for Knowledge Economy
and Enterprise Development, Malmö, Sweden CLAES BRUNDENIUS

Christine Hatzky, Julio Antonio Mella (1903–1929) : Eine Biografie (Frankfurt on
the Main : Vervuert, 2004), pp. 436, E56.00, pb.
Originally submitted as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Hanover in 2003,
the study sets out to provide a re-assessment of the short but eventful life of
the Cuban Communist and nationalist Nicanor McPartland, better known under
his adopted name Julio Antonio Mella. Hatzky, as she points out in the intro-
duction, is particularly interested in revealing the man hidden behind the idealised
and self-serving image created and propagated by the Cuban historiography
after 1959, which portrays Mella, simply and simplistically, as a predecessor of
the revolution and as an ‘ icon of Cuban Marxism-Leninism ’ (p. 19). The facts and
events in Mella’s life that do not fit the narrow-minded ideological framework of
the communist regime and its historians are often glossed over, as for instance
his expulsion from the ranks of the Partido Comunista de Cuba (PCC) a few months

Reviews 849
after its establishment because he would not toe the party line. Hatzky wants ‘ to tell
his life-story anew ’, with all its continuities and ruptures. This implies, she argues,
that ‘ The meaning (Sinnzusammenhang) of his life has to be reconstructed, its
chronological setting has to be worked out anew and its places have to be inspected
again so as to shed light on historical facts ’ (p. 25).
Hatzky opts, not entirely surprisingly for a biography, with a chronological
approach. Apart from the introduction and the conclusion, the dissertation-
cum-book is divided into two chapters, ‘ Kuba 1903–26’ (chap. 2) and ‘ Exil in
Mexiko 1926–29 ’ (chap. 3), with Mella’s flight from Cuba to Mexico in early 1926
representing the dividing line between them. (In an extensive appendix some
documents, newspaper articles by Mella and pictures of him, some of them taken
by his partner, Tina Modotti, are reproduced.) In addition to the not so readily
available and easily accessible secondary literature, Hatzky draws on noteworthy
range of unpublished primary sources from archives in the Americas – Cuba,
Mexico and the United States – and Russia. Her work in the Moscow-based Russian
State Archive of Socio-Political History, which houses, amongst other things, the
archives of the Communist International and its local party chapters, is particularly
valuable. Throughout the study she produces new documents, especially in her
discussion of Mella’s roles within the PCC and its sister party in Mexico. Hatzky
covers her ground very well.
Notwithstanding the highly sympathetic and at times partial trend of the work,
the Mella portrayed in the pages of Hatzky’s opus is considerably more complex,
multifaceted, and contradictory than the Mella of the official Cuban historiography.
Hatzky above all addresses his difficult relationship with the communist parties
of both Cuba and Mexico (what she prefers to call the ‘ communist structures ’) and
attempts to explain its possible causes. At the same time, I started to wonder if,
when all is said and done, the myth of Mella cultivated by the Castro regime
after 1959 is not out of all proportion to the historical Mella. It seems that this
glorification is more significant than anything he ever did during his admittedly
short life and even shorter political career, which lasted all of six years, from his days
as a student leader at the Universidad de La Habana until his assassination by killers
paid by the regime of the Cuban dictator Machado. All his energy, commitment and
activities, which reached fever pitch during his exile in Mexico, cannot hide the fact
that his immediate impact on Cuban politics was very limited.
A more detailed analysis of the uses and abuses of the Mella myth would have
been welcome. This aspect could have completed the more traditional biographical
approach. I also would have appreciated it if Hatzky had spent more time on
demonstrating the influence of Marxism and Leninism on Mella’s thinking. We
are repeatedly told he read Karl Marx and Lenin and, one occasion, that he even
translated some of their texts from the English into the Spanish (p. 146).
Unfortunately, Hatzky does not mention which publications Mella read, let alone
translated. (Marx does not appear in the bibliography, which is rather surprising.)
At a more profane level, the readability of the text would have greatly benefited
if Hatzky had translated the shorter quotes from the Spanish inserted into the
main text. As it happens, a sentence may start in German, continue in Spanish, only
to end in German. This peculiarity does the author’s work a disservice, just like
the structure, which is at times muddled; on more than one occasion the reader
is confronted with facts and events that are only properly explained a few pages
later. One can hope that the Spanish version of the study, to be published in Cuba,

850 Reviews
will address some of these issues. One thing that is certain is that this study will then
be accessible for a much wider readership. And that is something the book deserves,
whatever its shortcomings.
Bonn MARCUS KLEIN

Jens Andermann and William Rowe (eds.), Images of Power : Iconography, Culture
and the State in Latin America (New York and Oxford : Berghahn Books, 2005),
pp. x+299, $60.00 ; £36.50, hb.
Given low levels of literacy in postcolonial Latin America, how is the form of the
nation-state generated ? How is the political idea of the state created and made
manifest ? According the authors in this stimulating collection, the answer to such
questions lies in the realm of the image. Emphasising the political aspects of visual
culture, the thirteen essays in the collection cover enormous ground, both topically
and geographically. Topics include national museums, international art markets,
dance, photography, monuments, and the space of the state. Geographically, the
collection ranges across Latin America although there is a heavy privileging of
Mexico and Argentina.
The text is organised into four sections. In the first (Memory and the Public Arena),
the contributors examine the ways in which visual practices oriented toward the
public generated a particular kind of image of the national past. Magali Carrera
examines the relationship between the corporeal and the corporate – of how the
body politic in New Spain and early Republican Mexico was manifested in visual
culture. Gordon Brotherston looks at the use of pre-colonial iconography in
post-revolutionary Mexico, including a fascinating (and at times amusing) discussion
of the use of codices by Rius and Barajas in their political critiques of Mexico’s
Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Beatrı́z González Stepan analyses the role of
needlework in allowing Venezuelan women access to the public sphere. With
compositions made of fish scales, wheat, crumbs and hair, women were able to
make public their own nationalist and patriotic sentiments, which often eschewed
celebrating the traditional figures of Bolı́var and Guzmán Blanco. Alvaro Fernández
Bravo looks at museums in Argentina as theatres of memory and their efforts to
construct an image of the Argentine past during a period of substantial immigration.
In part two (Self and Other in the Avant-Garde), Trinidad Pérez analyses closely the
work of Ecuadorean artist Camilo Egas and his iconography of the Indian in
Ecuador. In her contribution on tango and samba in Argentina and Brazil, Florencia
Garramuño eloquently argues for an understanding of art and iconography that
does not juxtapose primitive with modern or national with cosmopolitan ; rather,
she suggests that such European oppositions obscure the ways such dyads actually
complemented each other to ‘ create a modern iconography of nationality ’ in Latin
America (p. 140). Her insights are extended in the following essay by Andrea Giunta
on Argentine art in the 1960s and the ambivalence of the meaning of ‘ international ’.
The term was filled with contradictions as Argentine artists sought both to situate
their work in relation to the global art world (the universal) without erasing its
uniqueness as Argentine art (the particular).
In part three (Masses and Monumentality) Hendrik Kraay examines in absorbing
detail the construction and after-life of the Dois de Julho monument erected in

Reviews 851
Salvador, Bahia. Kraay does a wonderful job of tracking the ambivalent reception
of the monument, in the process complicating the image of power associated
with iconography. In her contribution, Andrea Noble provides a fascinating
genealogy of the life of the famous ‘ Villa en la silla ’ photograph from the Mexican
revolution, examining how the photograph rapidly (d)evolved from an image to an
icon, reified and paradoxically rendered invisible. Graciela Montaldo melds political
theory and visual culture in her thought-provoking study of the concept of ‘ the
mass ’ (or ‘ the multitude ’) and its appearance in photography and literature in
twentieth-century Argentina.
Part four (Spaces of Flight and Capture) moves in to a different realm of iconography :
the visualisation and ‘ capture ’ of space by the state. In a brief but suggestive
essay, Claudio Canaparo looks at the conquest of the Argentine desert through
technological means : telegraph lines, railroads, and clocks, as much as artillery,
functioned to generate a territory that could be captured and modified. Focusing
on a similar terrain, Gabrielle Nouzeilles examines late nineteenth-century travel
narratives of Patagonia. Her essay is a skilful reflection on the relationship between
tourism, modernity, and the circulation of geographical imaginations. The final
contribution, by Mary Louise Pratt, is a wide-ranging and passionate essay that
takes the Virgin of Zapopan as a lens through which to understand new experiences
of territoriality under the reign of late capitalism. Pratt’s essay stands out in
particular for its direct engagement with the market and the functioning of capital,
reminding us of the grim continuities that have outlasted the rise and (apparent)
decline of the territorial state. With her dismantling of euphemistic images (such as
‘ flow ’) that naturalise and obscure the workings of transnational capitalism, Pratt’s
essay is a fitting conclusion to a collection on the power of imagery.
Such a brief overview cannot do the essays in this collection justice. Amply
illustrated and nicely organised, the collected essays represent some of the most
innovative work being done in the field of visual culture in Latin America. Of
particular value is the range of theoretical interests and perspectives brought to
bear on visual culture by the contributors. This is theoretical and disciplinary
eclecticism at its best. Each essay is refreshing and original and there is little
redundancy despite the length of the book. The emphasis throughout the collection
is on representation and power but many of the essays also track out the compli-
cated histories behind the facades of marble-smooth monuments, coordinated
nationalist exhibitions, and static photographs. They succeed admirably in shatter-
ing the image of a monolithic, united intellectual and political elite putting ideas
in to practice. In the process the reader is introduced to an array of protagonists
usually overlooked in analyses of the production of the state : museum directors,
petty bureaucrats, cloistered women, art critics, and cultural commentators, among
others.
The collection is prefaced by a brief introduction that nicely lays out the struc-
turing poles of theoretical work on iconography (Panofsky and Benjamin) and
provides a solid theoretical grounding within which to situate the essays, particularly
as they relate to iconography and politics. That said, the introduction is something
of a missed opportunity. Given the relative dearth of English-language works
available on visual culture in Latin America, especially ones with essays of such
range and rigour, it could have worked to synthesise the collected essays better
and to situate them in an historiographic, not only theoretical, genealogy. Still, these
are small quibbles given the breadth and depth of the collection and its contribution

852 Reviews
to the field of visual and cultural studies of Latin America. It is a shame it is only
available in cloth as it would serve as an excellent text for advanced undergraduate
and graduate courses in visual studies, visual culture and the cultural history of
Latin America. For scholars working on visual culture, the state and cultural history,
this is an essential volume.
Cornell University R A Y M O N D B. C R A I B

Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum (Chicago : University of Chicago Press,
2004), pp. xix+336, $22.50 ; £16.00, pb.
There is a marvellous diagram in one of Michael Taussig’s earlier books, The Magic of
the State (1996), that illustrates the bare bones of the economy of a ‘ democratic
Elsewhere where gas is dirt cheap and cars abound. Oil out ; guns, ammo, videos,
and cars in ’ (p. 148). The ‘ democratic Elsewhere’ of The Magic of the State is trans-
parently Venezuela, but My Cocaine Museum indicates a rather similar structure of
international exchange for Colombia : gold and cocaine out ; guns, ammo, videos,
and outboard motors in. Reduced here to its brutal underlying simplicity, this is the
pattern of Latin American economic history : raw material (silver, guano, bananas,
coffee) out ; weaponry, luxury goods and technology in.
For Taussig, this structure is quite literally marvellous. From his first book,
The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (1980), he has traced in detail, fascination and
awe the transmutation of matter into money (and back again). Against the usual
assumption that commodification implies only standardisation and routinisation,
stripping nature of its unique aura, Taussig insists on the enchantment that persists
in and haunts capitalist markets. As he puts it here, ‘ I don’t want to end up
with some smug trade-off between money and nature. I want to alienate money’s
alienation. Make its strangeness strange. I want to make going into a store and
buying your daily food, for instance, seem like a miracle ’ (p. 111).
Gold and cocaine, the raw matter of My Cocaine Museum, are privileged compo-
nents of this mysterious system. The power of global capitalism transforms the
mud and dirt of the Colombian coast into objects of desire for Wall Street bankers.
But in this transformation and refinement, these ever-malleable, essentially formless,
substances carry with them a history of oppression and enslavement : ‘ Death
stalks these substances in equal measure to the way they enliven life, enchant and
compel ’ (p. 253). Arguing that gold and cocaine are ‘ congealed miasma ’ (p. 253),
Taussig returns to the scene of their production. He describes the violence, the
poverty, but also the enchantment that pervades the mangrove swamps and
the tropical rivers that for over 500 years have variously drawn, damaged and
disconcerted Indians, conquistadors and pirates, African slaves and French capital,
Russian engineers and Marxist guerrillas. Women pan for gold dust in minute
amounts ; men burrow into cliffs by candlelight or dive down into the pitch black
to excavate beneath river beds ; the FARC and with them the paramilitaries encroach
from the other side of the Andes, signalling a shift in the coastal economy and
bringing with them new forms of violence and corruption.
Taussig’s approach is both wildly expansive and stubbornly consistent. My
Cocaine Museum is an eclectic collection of stories and anecdotes, readings and
reflections, that range from Charles Dickens to Franz Kafka and Seamus Heaney,

Reviews 853
taking in biology, geology, philosophy, economics, and history interwoven with
accounts of ethnographic fieldwork across three decades. It includes a list of island
prisons, from Devil’s Island to El Frontón, and of tax havens, from Anguilla to
Vanuatu. The book’s index includes entries such as ‘ Al Qaeda : and Enron ’, ‘ bore-
dom : and ethnography ’, and ‘ color : and Burroughs ’. Taussig acknowledges that
he may ‘ seem like a mad poet on the loose, desperate for new experience, dreaming
of exaggerated realities ’ (p. 174). At the same time, he returns endlessly to the
same concerns : for instance to the author he calls ‘ one of my favorites ’, Walter
Benjamin ; to the commodity, the state, and the strange conjunction of primitivism
and modernity found in each ; and to the power of sympathetic magic, the
shamanism inherent in mimesis and imitation.
Whether because of his expansiveness or because of his repetition of idées fixes,
Taussig’s prose often runs away with him. (His celebrated Shamanism, Colonialism,
and the Wild Man [1987] is surely at least 100 pages longer than it need be, while The
Magic of the State reads like a good article struggling to emerge from a less convincing
book.) My Cocaine Museum is generally more coherent. It is very convincing in its
account of the political economy of gold, and the sensory experience of its primitive
accumulation at the forgotten frontier where modernity and nature meet : he con-
veys with astonishingly tactility the heat, the boredom, the rain and the stickiness of
the miasmic scene of wealth’s production in a town where cash is always in short
supply.
Surprisingly, however, Taussig has much less to say about either cocaine or
the guerrilla that accompany cocaine’s arrival, who together ensure that ‘ the coast is
no longer boring ’ (p. 141). Taussig is much less at ease with what Fernand Braudel
would term the histoire événementielle, the history of events rather than the longue durée
of myth and prehistory that he extracts from even the most intensive processes
of production and exchange. The FARC haunt this text : they incarnate what is
for Taussig the intangible event that marks the arrival of the new. It is symptomatic
that the one point at which we think we have met the guerrilla, they turn out instead
to be a pair of ‘ daring scam artists ’ who defraud the villagers of their jewellery (gold,
of course) (p. 140). Even the paramilitaries, parasitic mimic men of the guerrilla,
are treated more substantially, albeit at one remove through a friend of Taussig’s
who is the ex-girlfriend of a para leader. The guerrilla remain, even more so than
gold, formless and almost sublimely unrepresentable.
Taussig admits that gold and history have ‘ real histories [_] chains of cause
and effect over time ’. He chooses, however, ‘ another, quite different tack. [_] This
other world is the world of physics and chemistry, sex and silence, dreams and
nightmares, and I call it the world of immanence ’ (p. 314). But is this absolute
separation not misleading ? Is not the history of cause and effect also experienced
tactilely, immanently ? Surely the guerrilla bring together immanence and history,
in a specific combination of affects and habits. It is strange that through a variety
of stratagems, either as here in the recourse to the under-theorised notion of
‘ prehistory ’ or as in The Magic of the State in the fictionalisation of a ‘ democratic
Elsewhere ’, Taussig should wish to keep contemporary history at arm’s length.
At the same time, here in his account of the now decommissioned island prison
La Gorgona, and in Law in a Lawless Land and its ‘ diary of a Limpieza ’, he also returns
to it, to the point at which history becomes immanence.
University of British Columbia J O N B E A S L E Y -M U R R A Y

854 Reviews
Frank O. Mora and Jeanne A. K. Hey (eds.), Latin American and Caribbean
Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004),
pp. x+419, $22.95, pb.
Region-wide studies of Latin American foreign policies have generally highlighted
the difficulty of presenting a unified theoretical framework which does justice to
the diversity of foreign policy dynamics experienced in the region. Empirical
studies have often provided valuable insights into the comparative foreign policy
environment of individual countries, whilst international relations theory has
underlined the significance of systems-level factors for those countries’ foreign
policies. Neither approach, however, has yet been capable of a generalised theory
which adequately deals with the complexity of inputs to, or outcomes of, Latin
American foreign policies. In this book, Mora and Hey and their contributors
take tentative but positive steps towards addressing this shortcoming. The case
studies of sixteen individual countries, plus CARICOM, are in empirical terms a
valuable complement to Tulchin and Espach’s 2001 study of Latin America in
the ‘ new international system ’. More significantly, Mora and Hey make explicit
their aim of providing a common analytical position from within which the case
studies are examined. The studies thus adhere to a three-tier ‘ levels of analysis ’
strategy, which focuses on the role of international or macro variables (the system-
level), of domestic political institutions (the state), and on the significance of
individual leaders in foreign policy (the individual). This Rosenau-influenced
approach has reaped clear dividends in at least one dimension: by placing both
domestic and international politics in comparative perspective with regard to each
other, and across the countries considered throughout the seventeen essays, the
relative weight of domestic and international dynamics are, by and large, clearly
highlighted.
Both theoretical and comparative studies of regional foreign policies have often
concentrated either on the regions’ more ‘ significant’ countries – notably Argentina,
Brazil, Chile and Mexico – or those considered to have been, in terms of the inter-
national system, ‘ rogue states ’, notably Cuba. Whilst this volume includes those
countries, it also covers a range of less frequently considered cases, the Dominican
Republic, Bolivia and Paraguay amongst them – a welcome addition to the litera-
ture. Unsurprisingly, it is in these smaller countries that the impact of systemic
factors is seen to have been greatest. Yet even Brazil, the leading regional power
at the global level, and increasingly active in non-regional alliances, experiences
international dynamics as the single most significant factor in shaping its foreign
policy. But whilst each country study underlines the fundamental role of systemic
factors, the impact of the domestic side is fully integrated within them. Thus, regime
changes in Venezuela, the consequences of crisis management in Ecuador, and
the impact of leftist insurgencies, natural disaster and political infighting in Peru,
are amongst factors highlighted by contributors as profoundly significant for
foreign policy formulation in the region. In that respect, the authors depart from
perceptions of Latin American foreign policy as being overbearingly centred on
systems-level variables, most notably the impact of US policies and of globalising
tendencies. And whilst the contributors do not set out directly to examine the role
of non-elite citizens in foreign policy issues, the three-level approach and contem-
plation of domestic variables is suggestive of the need to ‘ locate ’ and include the
citizen in IR theory.

Reviews 855
More and Hey’s book raises some critical questions about the extent to which
Latin American republics might expect to exercise autonomy in their foreign
relations in the early twenty-first century, or if the complementary forces of
dependency and realism in international politics will continue to limit their room
for manoeuvre, as well as suggesting a broader scope for studies of foreign policy
in the region. Such questions will remain at the centre of debates on Latin American
and Caribbean foreign policy for the foreseeable future.
Queen Mary, University of London LAURENCE ALLAN

Susan Eva Eckstein and Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley (eds.), What Justice?
Whose Justice ? Fighting for Fairness in Latin America (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
CA : University of California Press, 2003), pp. xiv+362, $60.00, $24.95 pb ;
£39.95, £16.95 pb.
This collection of essays comes out of a Latin American Studies Association inter-
national congress organised by the editors. As case studies on an individual level,
several of the essays make valuable contributions to different scholarly debates,
although their contribution to a wider debate about social justice might be deemed
modest.
Recurrent themes in the chapters relate to citizenship and democratisation in
Latin America. Philip Oxhorn finds that T. H. Marshall’s theory of how, in Western
democracies, the history of citizenship rights is one of gradual expansion, starting
with civil rights and then subsequently including political rights and – finally – social
rights, does not apply to Latin America. According to Oxhorn, the granting of
political rights in many new democracies in Latin America ‘ has been accompanied
by the increasingly precarious nature of civil rights and the increasing limits – if
not actual reversals – of the social rights of citizenship ’ (p. 36). In part, he blames
this failure to secure important citizenship rights on a weak civil society in Latin
America.
Oxhorn’s notion of a weak civil society seems challenged by several of the
other essays in the volume, however. With an analysis of citizen responses to con-
flict and political crisis in Peru, David Scott Palmer addresses a debate about the
character and quality of democratisation in Latin America. His chapter shows that
local populations try to find their own solutions to meet basic needs and wants
when (central) government is unable or unwilling to do so. In his case study of
Ayacucho this has been made possible through the new presence of various
government agencies and NGOs, resulting in many different kinds of interactions
between these organisations and the local communities. In Palmer’s opinion,
this local political dynamic has aided the construction of a more viable local civil
society, and could be expected to contribute to the strengthening of democratic
processes and practices over time.
John A. Peeler’s chapter treats the development of indigenous peoples’ political
organisations in Guatemala, the Central Andes and Chiapas over the past two dec-
ades, which Oxhorn himself admits as an exception to his general hypothesis that
civil society is weak in Latin America. Peeler claims traditional models of unitary
citizenship do not allow space for difference and have problems accommodating
the idea of distinct communities coexisting within one polity, but ethnic groups

856 Reviews
nevertheless increasingly demand recognition as constituents of pluri-ethnic or
pluri-national states, rather than as individually equal citizens of nation-states. This
does not preclude the fact that that indigenous groups sometimes also organise
primarily on the basis of class and economic issues, however, rather than on the
basis of ethnic and cultural difference, as Peeler himself points out.
The importance of the ethnic dimension to citizenship, as well as to injustice, is
reiterated forcefully in Beatriz Manz’s chapter on how a Mayan community
in Guatemala remembers the violence of the past. June Nash’s essay on Zapatista
women reminds us that citizenship also has an important gendered, in addition to an
ethnic, dimension.
Another group of chapters engages primarily with debates regarding issues of
accountability and governance. That by Lisa Hilbink examining the historical role
of the judiciary in Chile questions the perception of Chile as ‘ a country generally
considered at an advantage in the region in terms of its prospects for consolidating
both the rule of law and democracy ’ (p. 65). Her chapter shows that, in fact, in the
period between 1964 and 1994 the Chilean judiciary played a consistently illiberal
role under both democratic and authoritarian regimes, so challenging the notion
of Chilean exceptionalism in the Latin American context.
Other essays that examine issues of accountability and governance are those
by Anı́bal Pérez-Liñán, who compares impeachment processes in Brazil, Venezuela,
Colombia, Ecuador, and Paraguay ; Leigh A. Payne, who analyses the role of
perpetrators’ confessions in achieving truth and reconciliation in the aftermath
of dictatorship in Argentina ; and Sybil Delaine Rhodes, who coins the term ‘ pro-
gressive pragmatism ’ to explain the particular local governance model employed
by the PT in Porto Alegre in the 1990s.
Like Hilbink’s chapter, Marc W. Chernick’s essay addresses a specifically national
discussion – the persistence of violence in Colombia – in addition to contributing
to a more general discussion of accountability. As distinct from many authors, who
have tended to see Colombia’s periods of violence as unrelated events, Chernick
gives emphasis to the continuities that exist when it comes to the geographic zones
of the violence, the actors involved, the illegal use of state and para-state violence,
and in the regional and social causes of violence. He claims that the lack of
accountability of those responsible for the violence, through the practice of granting
amnesties, has helped institutionalise illegal and unjust forms of political authority.
The essay that most directly engages with a notion of social justice (or rather
injustice), is Terry Lynn Karl’s chapter on inequality, where she draws our attention
to the fact that Latin America is the region in the world with the greatest inequities,
which affect ‘ virtually all aspects of economic, social, and political life ’ (p. 133).
Karl depicts a vicious cycle, in which poverty and high levels of inequality
impede growth, and growth rates are subsequently too low to adequately address
the problems of poverty and inequality. In this respect, it could be said that her
essay is an equally powerful contribution to the long-standing debate about Latin
American development as it is to a debate about social justice.
In that they all address debates about citizenship, democratisation, accountability,
governance, and development, these essays serve as useful points of discussion.
However, their value as a contribution to a debate about social justice is question-
able. While it is true that the essays touch upon issues of social justice, they fall far
short of being the ‘ building blocks for a more general theory of justice ’ that the
editors promise in the preface (p. xii). At best, they are descriptions of some of

Reviews 857
the myriad forms of injustices that exist in Latin America, and the various ways
in which people struggle to correct them. But inasmuch as the essays in general
rarely go beyond the conclusion that injustices exist, and that people affected
by them try as best they can to fight them, they contribute little to what we already
know.
University of Bergen LINE SCHJOLDEN

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