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...Moving to 'el centro' T he three decades following Fidel Castro's triumphal entry into Havana on January 8,1959, produced great hope and equally great frustration on the part of the Left in Latin America, with Salvador Allende's election as president of Chile and the coming to power of Nicaragua's Sandinistas as peaks, and the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia and the bloodbaths carried out by the Argentine, Brazilian, Chilean, and Uruguayan military as valleys...

...Even more glaring is his neglect of the so-called "Democratic Left" in Latin America, a term applied to a group of reformist social or Christian Democrats such as Jose Figueres of Costa Rica, Romulo Betancourt of Venezuela, and Eduardo Frei of Chile...

...The latter segment of the book contains some troublesome errors and omissions...

...The contemporaneous disintegration of international communism, long a wellspring of intellectual and tactical support for Latin radicals, reinforced this downbeat finale...

...Moreover, in the post-cold war era they can expect to be able to govern without interference from Washington, so long as they maintain certain norms of behavior (such as the preservation of democratic institutions and respect for human rights...

...For example, the book begins with the story of the disappearance of $64 million in ransom money collected in 1974 by the Argentine Montoneros, a group of armed leftist youths, as an illustration of the complexity of the Latin Left, but fails to mention the strong evidence suggesting that the most prominent Montonero was a paid agent of the Argentine military regime...

...Yet revolutionary and reformist movements emerging from the port side of the political spectrum have not vanished in Latin America, in large part because the economic and social injustices that gave these movements their raison-d'etre have not vanished...

...The strong showings by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva in recent presidential elections in Mexico and Brazil give some indication of the popular support still enjoyed by the Left...

...Workers and peasants who were persuaded to join in the struggle met similar fates...

...Moreover, the economic model that some Latin nations are now borrowing from the United States—with its emphasis upon deregulation, privatization, removal of trade barriers, and greatly elevated reliance upon market forces and private initiative—will in the short run impose even greater hardships upon the poor...

...In an ambitious, thoughtful, serious, and substantive endeavor, he describes how the Left brought upon itself, and then managed to survive, three decades of failure and frustration, and offers a detailed prescription for its future as a viable political force...

...The coda to this period was the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas on February 25, 1990 (although some may argue that the final note will not be struck until the Castro regime collapses...

...Thus, a historic moment seems at hand for the Latin Left...

...Moreover, resort to both organized and random violence continues, as the recent uprising in Mexico, the activity of Peru's "Shining Path" extremists, and the crime wave in urban Brazil—which amounts to de facto class UTOPIA UNARMED The Latin American Left after the Cold War Jorge G. Castaneda Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50,498 pp...

...In their eagerness to emulate the Cuban revolution, many of the region's best and brightest young people took up arms and paid a stiff price, in the form of torture, imprisonment, and death...

...This movement of the Center-Left faded when the Cuban revolution galvanized the continent, gained the unconditional support of the region's young people and intellectuals, and set off a process of radicalization that ventured even further to the Left than the traditional...

...Joseph A. Page warfare—amply demonstrate...

...Having learned of the futility of armed struggle, the virtues of democracy, and the weaknesses of the command economy, those who find the status quo unacceptable are in a position to reinvent themselves and develop credible alternatives to the conservative agenda...

...In a part of the world where a large segment of the population falls below most definitions of the poverty level, policies that not only ignore but also exacerbate human misery seem hardly likely to appeal to a majority of voters...

...Jorge G. Castaneda, a Mexican political scientist with degrees from Princeton and the University of Paris, sets about to appraise this window of opportunity...

...This gives them the opportunity to win fair and free elections...

...Utopia Unarmed is more successful in analyzing the policy options available to the Left than in describing revolutionary and reformist movements in the hemisphere...