Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War.

• Author: Gott, Richard

JUST WHY IS Latin America the way it is? Indeed why is it not like anywhere else? These have been the perennial questions of those external to the continent who take an interest in its affairs. Now they are being regularly addressed by a new generation of Latin Americans who have become aware of this foreign discourse and wish to participate in it. For an important development of the last thirty years has been the noticeable increase in Latin America's production of its own intellectual interpreters of the current (and the historical) scene, indigenous commentators familiar with both the United States and Europe who have been able to make the necessary connections and comparisons.

There have always been nationalist historians and writers, but now there are a plethora of political scientists working in universities or newspapers, and increasingly it is their voices and their views that predominate at international gatherings of scholars, businessmen, diplomats and journalists. And it is they who provide both the research and the reportage. This is the significance of many of the most recent books about Latin America available in the North American market, and notably of the ones here under consideration.

There has also been a marked alteration in the way that the affairs of the continent are discussed. For much of the past fifty years economic determinism was the order of the day. Whether it was Walt Rostow in the 1950s fitting Latin America's history into his "stages of economic growth," or the semi-Marxist dependency theorists of the 1960s feeding historical data into their ever more inflexible models, everyone seemed to agree that the economic history of the continent was the key to understanding what was going on. In the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, entire university departments, the vast resources of the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, the best brains of the State Department and the CIA, were all employed to focus on the region through the same prism. If the economic power of the state could be properly mobilized, if the political power of the landlords could be broken, if the bureaucracy could be modernized, then the difficult legacy of the past centuries would be overcome and Latin America would be able to walk into the sunshine: another Australia, a southern hemisphere Sweden, even--who knows?--another Japan.

These utopian (and in some ways not unattractive) visions have been rapidly fading in the past fifteen years, to be replaced by something entirely different. The engine of the state has been substantially dismantled rather than repaired; the landlords, far from being forced to hand over "land to the tiller," have been encouraged to embark on full-scale capitalist agriculture, largely dispensing with the efforts of the tiller altogether; and the unmodernized bureaucrats have been quite simply sent home. The economies of Latin America are now beginning to have a lean and hungry look (and so too, it might provocatively be added, are the people).

In this new situation, economic determinism has been replaced by something altogether more pragmatic. Journalists and academic observers of the current scene tend to concentrate on what they see and know, and refrain from fitting their knowledge into some preconceived ideological framework. Historians, meanwhile, ignore the long curves of Kondratiev and examine instead what was once unfashionable: the ebb and flow of cultures and civilizations--their art and language, their architecture and their social behavior--separate from the economic undercurrents; and they scrutinize the peculiar nature and achievements of the individuals who made up, and make up, the societies that they study.

For these new historians and writers, it has always been important to emphasize that Latin America is full of Latin Americans--not Swedes or Australians or Japanese (or for that matter North Americans). And who these Latin Americans were in the past and are today, what they do and what they want, are crucial questions in the contemporary discussion. Rousseau once pointed out that a Spaniard could live for a week on a German's dinner. On such significant differences have different societies been constructed. Nor is it enough just to be "Latin": contrast the manners and behavior during the World Cup of the Italians and the Brazilians.

THE THREE BOOKS considered here all fit more or less into this new mode of enquiry. While all three authors would, at an earlier stage in their lives, have considered themselves to be "on the Left," little ideological residue now remains in their writing--even in that of the most overtly political, Jorge Castaneda. While one of them, Claudio Veliz, "chose freedom" more than twenty years ago, the others have had it thrust upon them by the receding tides of history. All three provide powerful, interesting, and provocative interpretations of Latin American reality.

In the case of two of them, I must declare a personal interest. I have known Claudio Veliz for more than thirty years, first as a friend and colleague at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London in the early 1960s, and later at a similar institute that he was instrumental in setting up in Santiago de Chile. Veliz is a Chilean from (unusually) an established Protestant family, a product...