This large and ambitious book represents a missed opportunity. The increasing political and social importance of popular movements in contemporary Latin America certainly requires a comprehensive effort to understand their causes and consequences, but unfortunately this is not it. The sponsorship of the University of the United Nations should have provided sufficient resources for coordinated and, above all, comparative research; but the actual result is an ungainly collection of unconnected essays that are occasionally rich in historical material but consistently lacking in analytical insight.
The collection contains a wealth of (rather uneven) information, but there are problems of empirical scope and balance. First, any reader wanting simply to get up to date with these developments will be disappointed to find that the accounts all stop in 1983. Second, much more emphasis is given to Central America and the Caribbean than would be justified by their economic and political weight within the continent. Third, although the avowed intention is to study movements “with national dimensions” (p. 5), there is no further discussion of the empirical criteria for their selection.
Possibly more damaging to the collection’s analytical outcomes is the crude class reductionism of its approach to popular movements. This is signalled very clearly in Daniel Camacho’s introduction, which not only propounds the pure class determination of all such movements but also defends an unadulterated and outmoded notion of the vanguard party as essential to successful popular struggles. Not all the subsequent essays express the same conceptual naiveté and abstraction, but a general lack of theoretical inquiry means that much material remains resistant to interpretation. Even a rather good essay like Patricio León’s discussion of Chile fails to specify the relationship between the trade union movement, which is his focus, and the broader popular movement that emerged in opposition to the dictatorship.
Such is the dearth of good secondary sources on popular movements that students of the phenomenon may be prepared to discount these failings, just as they may choose to ignore inadequate references and misspelled proper names (especially in English and Portuguese). But they will still be waiting for a theoretically grounded and comparative inquiry that goes beyond separate social histories and attempts to explain the political significance of the popular movements.
