Reviews
Silent Revolution: The Rise of Market Economics in Latin America by Duncan Green, Latin America Bureau/Monthly Review Press, 1995, 266 pp., $16 (paper). Duncan Green begins his biting critique...
...The book is specifically directed to a U.S...
...The book covers the rise and fall of import-substituting industrialization, the way that the IMF and World Bank used the debt crisis to foist neoliberalism on skeptical Latin American nations, the scripted transition from stabilization to structural adjustment and export-led growth, and the human and environmental costs of the neoliberal model...
...In lucid prose, Castafieda makes the intricacies of contemporary Mexican politics accessible to the non-specialist...
...From immigration to NAFTA, from Chiapas to the peso debacle, from the political assassinations to the rise of Mexico's drug barons, Castafieda leads the reader through Mexico's murky political landscape, offering insights into these separate but related issues...
...audience-for whom Mexico matters and "should matter...
...in economics...
...This remarkable book yokes together those two disconnected worlds...
...In the process, he makes the intricate concepts of neoliberalism-from inflation to exchange rates, trade accounts to interest rates-intelligible to a reader who doesn't have a Ph.D...
...by Jorge Castafieda, The New Press, 1995, 257 pp., $23 (cloth...
...The Mexican Shock: Its Meaning for the U.S...
...Duncan Green begins his biting critique of neoliberalism with a vignette of a Bolivian World Bank official snidely looking down from the window of his ninth-floor office in La Paz at a street swarming with protesters who can be faintly heard chanting "Bolivia will never belong to the gringos...
...Castafieda also takes a number of jabs at Cuauht6moc Cdrdenas' Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) for its inability to unite Mexican civil society into a coherent opposition force...
...He admonishes the United States for downplaying Mexico's problems in its zeal to see NAFTA passed...
...Everything seems ultimately solvable if only Mexico's elites would get it together and make the right decisions (for the most part, the ones Castafieda himself has suggested, in his self-styled role of political advisor...
...The masses exist insofar as they exert pressure from below, but they are not key actors or decision-makers...
...In this sense, despite his concern about promoting democracy, reducing inequality, and eliminating poverty, Castafieda has not escaped the very elitism he so criticizes...
...Of course, the $64,000 question is: so what is the alternative...
...The book's final chapter is devoted to an analysis of other models-from CEPAL's "neo-structuralism" to the grassroots strategies of local organization and mobilization...
...He is unflinching in his criticism of Salinas, both for his unwillingness to engage in democratic reforms and his handling of the economy...
...The challenge," Green concludes, "is to determine what margin for maneuver truly exists, avoiding the twin pitfalls of defeatism or demanding the impossible which have historically plagued the left...
...Green shows how-in the name of implanting a functioning market economy in Latin America-the region's economic output has been sucked northward in the form of loan repayments, its "family silver" has been sold off to foreign capital, and 60 million more people have joined the ranks of the poor...
...In this collection of essays, Jorge Castafieda scrutinizes the volatile events that have unfolded in Mexico since 1993...
...At times, however, he glosses over complex issues with rather simplistic explanations...
...Castafieda spares no one in his wide-ranging critique of Mexico's powers-that-be...
Vol. 29 • January 1996 • No. 4
