Since the discovery of abundant oil resources in the 1920s, Venezuela has had an economically privileged position among the nations of Latin America, which has led to its being treated by economic and political analysts as an exceptional case. In her well-known study of Venezuela’s political economy, The Paradox of Plenty (1997), Stanford political scientist Terry Karl argued that this oil wealth induced extraordinary corruption, rent-seeking, and centralized intervention that res...

Pretty Modern is a riveting account of Brazil’s emergence as a global leader in plastic surgery. Intrigued by a Carnaval parade that mysteriously paid homage to a Rio de Janeiro plastic surgeon, anthropologist Alexander Edmonds conducted research that took him from Ipanema socialite circles to glitzy telenovela studios to the packed waiting rooms of public hospitals offering free cosmetic surgery. The result is provocative exploration of the erotic, commercial, and intima...

The Pulitzer Prize–nominated book that served as the basis for the Oscar–winning movie starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.Charles Horman was an American freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker who had traveled to Chile in the early 1970s to explore a country that was undergoing significant changes under the then-Marxist President Salvador Allende. In the course of his research, Horman seems to have uncovered information about CIA involvement in a plot to ...

Combining anthropological methods and theories with political philosophy, Sian Lazar analyzes everyday practices and experiences of citizenship in a satellite city to the Bolivian capital of La Paz: El Alto, where more than three-quarters of the population identify as indigenous Aymara. For several years, El Alto has been at the heart of resistance to neoliberal market reforms, such as the export of natural resources and the privatization of public water systems. In October 2003, protests ...

Featuring some of Juan Saer's most loved characters, The One Before is his first story collection to appear in English.

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento was a writer and journalist who would become the seventh president of Argentina. His 1845 book, "Facundo: Or, Civilization and Barbarism" is considered a cornerstone of Latin American literature, a work of creative non-fiction that illustrates the region's development, modernization, power, and culture. Literary critic Roberto González Echevarría describes the work as "the most important book written by a Latin American in any discipline or genre." Sarmiento wrot...

After three years of indecisive but bloody war, guns lay silent in the Chaco Boreal in June 1935. Fifty years of bickering between Bolivia, a landlocked country seeking a river exit to the sea, and Paraguay, a land-hungry country seeking territorial aggrandizement and supposed mineral wealth, had culminated in open warfare in June 1932. By 1935 the antagonists, near exhaustion, finally agreed to discuss their differences.Leslie B. Rout, Jr., examines three facets of the dispute and...

Democracy has always been an especially volatile form of government, and efforts to create it in places like Iraq need to take into account the historical conditions for its success and sustainability. In this book, Joel Horowitz examines its first appearance in a country that appeared to satisfy all the criteria that political development theorists of the 1950s and 1960s identified as crucial. This experiment lasted in Argentina from 1916 to 1930, when it ended in a military coup that lef...

A Finalist for the PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for BiographyThe most definitive biography to date of the poet Pablo Neruda, a moving portrait of one of the most intriguing and influential figures in Latin American historyFew poets have captured the global imagination like Pablo Neruda. In his native Chile, across Latin America, and in many other parts of the world, his name and legacy have become almost synonymous with liberation movements, and with the language of erotic love.

During the first quarter-century of the Cold War, upholding human rights was rarely a priority in U.S. policy toward Latin America. Seeking to protect U.S. national security, American policymakers quietly cultivated relations with politically ambitious Latin American militaries—a strategy clearly evident in the Ford administration's tacit support of state-sanctioned terror in Argentina following the 1976 military coup d'état. By the mid-1970s, however, the blossoming human...

A concise guide to the war with Mexico, one of the most decisive conflicts in American history.After smashing Mexico's armies the young republic bestrode the North American continent like a colossus with one leg anchored on the Atlantic seaboard and the other on the Pacific. It was a bitter, hard fought war that raged across Mexico through the northern deserts, the fever-ridden Gulf cities and the balmy haciendas of California.This accessible book covers th...

This book studies the development of banks and stock and bond exchanges in São Paulo, Brazil, during an era of rapid economic diversification. It assesses the contribution of these financial institutions to that diversification, and argues that they played an important role in São Paulo's urbanization and industrialization by the start of the twentieth century. It finds that government regulatory policy was important in limiting and shaping the activities of these institutions, but that pr...