Mexican political scientist and journalist (for Newsweek International and the Mexican journal Proceso) Jorge Castañeda is a man with a mission. In this book he seeks to chronicle, analyze—and contribute to—the disarming of the Marxist-inspired revolutionary Latin American Left, a movement that profoundly affected the history of the region in the 30 years between the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat in Nicaragua in 1989. In its place, Castañeda envisions a new democratic and pragmatic Left, able to promote the “just” development of Latin American societies without engendering the wrath of the United States.
Castañeda’s basic criticism of the Left is that it failed to effect fundamental reform of the grossly exploitative societies of the region. Throughout the Cold War, its socialist aspirations inevitably called forth decisive U.S. opposition. The new Left Castañeda envisions will not have that problem—as long as it is truly committed to democratic political principles and accepts the fundamentals of global capitalism.
Castañeda defines the Left broadly. He includes not only the traditional socialist and Communist parties and the labor movement, the guerrilla groups spawned since the Cuban Revolution, and the new popular movements of the 1980s, but also (and more problematically) the so-called populist regimes of the 1940s and 1950s. In his analysis, however, he privileges the armed revolutionaries—and the intellectuals sympathetic to them. He is fascinated with the internal politics, contradictions, and fate of the armed Left, although he never reveals explicitly the basis of his own credentials and intimacy with it (p. 357, n. 40). Interviews with revolutionaries and leftist intellectuals, conducted in the early 1990s, provide the new empirical information in the book. For the rest, Castañeda relies on published information, particularly recent studies by social scientists and international organizations like the World Bank, which he uses to good advantage to show the region’s growing social inequality and declining importance in the world economy.
Privileging the armed Left enables Castañeda to advance his political agenda but distorts the history of the Latin American Left as a whole and its prospects in the post–Cold War era. Judging from his citations (the book has no bibliography), Castañeda has not read that history or the background of U.S. opposition. His chapter on the pre-1960 Left is the most disappointing of the book. He explains the origins of the Left’s antipathy to the United States as a consequence of nationalist intellectual concerns rather than U.S. economic and political penetration of the region. He attributes U.S. hostility to Latin American reform (which, in the case of Castañeda’s Mexico, preceded the formation of the Soviet Union itself) to (often irrational) Cold War security concerns rather than to capitalist imperatives, which underlay those concerns.
Castañeda emphasizes the pluralism of U.S. democracy and the opportunities it presents for Latin American development and reform in the post–Cold War era. Perhaps that explains why this study, ostensibly written for the Latin American Left and funded by the Program on International Peace and Cooperation of the MacArthur Foundation, was first published in English in the United States. Castañedas detailed prescription (in chapters 10 through 14) for democratic political and social reform and an economic policy that draws on the social democratic and developmentalist promise of European and East Asian capitalism is the most useful dimension of the book. Successful reform, he stresses, will depend on the Left’s ability to form alliances across the social spectrum and in the United States itself.
Castañeda recognizes, however, that the key to reform is to build a popular movement; although for him, popular support depends more on the Left’s moral commitment to denouncing and eliminating poverty than on developing a coherent organizational strategy and a post-socialist plan. Yet it is just this moral imperative that motivated the middle-class revolutionary leaders and intellectuals of the armed Left that Castañeda now seeks to transcend. Forging a viable leftist politics for the future will involve paying much more attention to the history and current struggles of labor and popular movements, and much less to those of middle-class revolutionaries and intellectuals, than this book implies.
