In Review
Colombia Besieged: Political Violence and State Responsibility by The Washington Office on Latin America, 1989, 142 pp., $10 (paper). A concise examination of an established democracy, where...
...A good opportunity to see and hear the real Chico Mendes before Hollywood's version takes over...
...Free Association Books, 1988, 183 pp., $35 (cloth...
...A concise examination of an established democracy, where state of seige is the norm...
...Harvest of Violence: The Maya Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis ed...
...Tourism, the conditions of refugees and the destruction of Indian culture also receive careful examination...
...Pearce outlines the context of a two-party system which has monopolized government, forsaking nearly a quarter of the population to conditions of absolute poverty...
...More than a dozen North and Latin American anthropologists document the consequences of the Guatemalan military's genocidal policies on everyday life in several indigenous communities...
...Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century by Gerald Martin, Verso, 1989, pp 424, $19.95 (paper...
...In Nicaragua by Joel Kovel...
...Language and Politics by Noam Chomsky, ed...
...And she examines in detail the attempts by the poor and excluded to effect change...
...by Robert M. Carmack, University of Oklahoma Press, 1988, 288 pp., $21.95 (cloth...
...These in turn face the burgeoning power of paramilitary death squads, primarily responsible for Colombia having the world's highest homicide rate for a country not at war...
...For those who know him only as media analyst and critic of foreign policy, this wide-ranging book offers glimpses of his studies on language, anarchist theory and critiques of radical politics as practiced since the 1960s...
...In strengthening those [security] forces [with increased military aid], Washington augments the authoritarian and arbitrary elements that lie beneath the formal mechanisms of Colombian democracy and which directly threaten the beleaguered elements of civil participation in the Colombian political process...
...Other topics include the cocaine economy, the formation of urban "civic" movements and the paramilitary death squads which, under the auspices of the army, have killed 8,000 grassroots activists since 1986...
...David Stoll's "Evangelicals, Guerrillas and the Army" is especially instructive on the confluence of domestic and international sources of violence...
...The New Novel, which emerged after the Cuban Revolution, is seen as the consummation of the post-Mexican Revolution "Novel of the Land...
...A compelling video on the life of martyred union-leader Chico Mendes and the rubber tappers' struggle to preserve a livelihood intimately connected to the survival of the forest...
...In addition to placing Latin American literature in its appropriate historical context, Martin provides key documents of Latin America's written narrative culture...
...This outstanding interpretive history of Latin American narrative fiction concentrates on the parallels, relationships and developments between two key moments: The 1920s, considered the first great wave of Latin American fiction, and the 1960s when the "New Novel" of Social Realism and the more publicized Magical Realism appeared...
...The veritable lock-out of the poor from the political system is being challenged by guerrilla armies and combative peasant and worker organizations...
...Voice of the Amazon, directed and produced by Miranda Smith, (251 W. 30th St., Suite 16W, NY, NY 10001), 1989, 56 min...
...Colombia: Inside the Labyrinth by Jenny Pearce, Latin America Bureau, London, 1990, distributed by Monthly Review Press, 300 pp., $28 (cloth), $18 (paper), $15 for NACLA readers...
...In this series of previously unpublished interviews spanning 20 years, Chomsky expounds on the intersection of language and radical politics...
...A reflective memoir that explores the texture of everyday realities in wartorn Nicaragua...
...by Carlos P. Otero, Black Rose Books, 1989, 779 pp., $44.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper...
...An overview of the historical roots and current status of Colombian politics...
...Based on several trips and an extended period as a volunteer psychiatrist, Kovel comes to recognize that "the mess of life lived in a revolution may be truer to reality than the order of bourgeois democracy...
Vol. 23 • April 1990 • No. 6
