Latin American

From the publisher:
Preface by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis

This is the inside story of Argentina’s remarkable movement to create factories run democratically by workers themselves.

In 2001, the economy of Argentina collapsed. Unemployment reached a quarter of the workforce. Out of these terrible conditions was born a new movement of workers who decided to take matters into their own hands.

They took over control of their workplaces, restarted production, and democratically decided how they would organize their work. “Occupy, resist, produce” became the watchwords of this vibrant movement.

Sin Patrón tells the story of Argentina’s occupied and recovered workplaces.

Or rather, it lets the workers themselves tell their stories. Appearing for the first time in English, this book explores ten case studies of recovered companies, featuring interviews with movement leaders that provide a history from the shopfloor—history that is still being made today.

From the publisher: Authentic Journalist Nancy Davies' reports from the Mexican city of Oaxaca throughout 2006 during the rise of the Popular Assembly movement are now compiled into one book (with additional updates by Davies).

NYT Book Review: Once in a rare while a writer re-examines a debated episode of recent history with such thoroughness and integrity that the truth can no longer be in doubt. Mark Danner did just that in a long article that took up most of last week’s issue of The New Yorker. Mr. Danner’s subject was the massacre in December 1981 in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote. Over the years politicians and journalists have differed bitterly about what happened there—who did the killing, indeed whether there was a massacre at all. The argument is over now. After the Danner report, no rational person can doubt that Salvadoran Government forces carried out a massacre. They killed hundreds of people in El Mozote and other hamlets nearby: men, women, children, infants. They killed with a savagery that is hard even to read about. Chepe Mozote was 7 years old at the time, one of a group of children taken by the soldiers to a playing field near the school. He told Mr.

From the publisher: Published to acclaim--and death threats against its author and bombings of his union's offices in Colombia, The Profits of Extermination uncovers the role of multinational mining and energy companies in Colombia's violence. Through legal maneuvers, corruption, and direct use of paramilitary violence, foreign companies have taken over Colombia's resources, displacing and murdering those who have challenged them.

From the publishers:

When the Soviet Union dissolved, so did the easy credit, cheap oil, and subsidies it had provided to Cuba. The bottom fell out of the Cuban economy, and many expected that Castro’s revolution—the one that had inspired the Left throughout Latin America and elsewhere—would soon be gone as well. More than a decade later, the revolution lives on, albeit in a modified form. Following the collapse of Soviet communism, Castro legalized the dollar, opened the island to tourism, and allowed foreign investment, small-scale private enterprise, and remittances from exiles in Miami. Capitalism, God, and a Good Cigar describes what the changes implemented since the early 1990s have meant for ordinary Cubans: hotel workers, teachers, priests, factory workers, rap artists, writers, homemakers, and others.

From the publisher:

The Spanish cleric Bartolomé de Las Casas is a key figure in the history of Spain’s conquest of the Americas. Las Casas condemned the torture and murder of natives by the conquistadores in reports to the Spanish royal court and in tracts such as A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552). For his unrelenting denunciation of the colonialists’ atrocities, Las Casas has been revered as a noble protector of the Indians and as a pioneering anti-imperialist. He has become a larger-than-life figure invoked by generations of anticolonialists in Europe and Latin America.

From the publishers: Berenson recalls the nearly five-year-old and continuing nightmare that began with a phone call announcing the arrest of her daughter, Lori, in December 1995, in Peru on charges of treason and terrorism. Lori was in Peru as a human-rights activist and journalist. The Berensons, both university professors, launched an ongoing campaign that has engaged major news organizations, human-rights advocacy groups, and prominent politicians to secure the release of their daughter, who has never been tried. But the "Kafka-like military tribunals" of Peru, the high-profile political investment of President Fujimori in the imprisonment of the "gringa terrorist," and a decided lack of interest by the U.S. State Department have stretched the agonizing period even beyond the turmoil of the recent presidential election.

From the publisher: "Look, my friend. I don’t speak the language here, I’ve got no money, the food stinks, there’s no rice, no beans. I’d rather be arrested in Brazil than stay in this dump of a country."
—Lula, the new Brazilian president, on being advised to stay in the United States after his brother’s arrest for political activity in Brazil, 1975

From the publisher: Elisabeth Wood's account of insurgent collective action in El Salvador is based on oral histories gathered from peasants who supported the insurgency and those who did not, as well as on interviews with military commanders from both sides. She explains how widespread support among rural people for the leftist insurgency during the civil war in El Salvador challenges conventional interpretations of collective action. Those who supplied tortillas, information, and other aid to guerillas took mortal risks and yet stood to gain no more than those who did not.

Winner, 2005 Gregory Luebbert Book Award of the Comparative Politics section of the American Political Science Association

Honorable Mention, Best Book Award of the Comparative-Historical section of the American Sociological Association

From the publisher:

Intimate Enemies is the first book to explore conflicts in Chiapas from the perspective of the landed elites, crucial but almost entirely unexamined actors in the state’s violent history. Scholarly discussion of agrarian politics has typically cast landed elites as “bad guys” with predetermined interests and obvious motives. Aaron Bobrow-Strain takes the landowners of Chiapas seriously, asking why coffee planters and cattle ranchers with a long and storied history of violent responses to agrarian conflict reacted to land invasions triggered by the Zapatista Rebellion of 1994 with quiescence and resignation rather than thugs and guns. In the process, he offers a unique ethnographic and historical glimpse into conflicts that have been understood almost exclusively through studies of indigenous people and movements.