Debbie Sharnak's Of Light and Struggle: Social Justice, Human Rights, and Accountability in Uruguay is a good example of what we can miss if we rely on the so-called big countries to tell us the whole story of a region. Indeed, Sharnak notes that her book exemplifies “how actors from and events in smaller nations influence international history” (p. 85). For historians and other scholars of recent Latin American politics, Of Light and Struggle fills an important gap by outlining the Uruguayan experience of dictatorship, democracy, and accountability/impunity and placing that history within the context of the generally better-known Argentine and Chilean experiences. After many decades as a “model country” of stability and democracy (p. 22), by the mid-1970s Uruguay held the distinction of being the nation with the highest per capita number of political prisoners in the world, and of being a place where arbitrary detention and torture were...

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