Warriors and Scribes : Essays on the History and Politics of Latin America

Looks at the history of Latin American politics and government.

<i>Warriors and Scribes</i> opens and closes using the prism of biography to question the framing of Latin American political life from both a northern, Cold War perspective and from the trivializations of postmodernism. An investigation of Jorge Castaneda’s <i>Utopia Disarmed</i> reveals that Latin American politics are eminently transformable beyond the failed nostrums of multilateral organizations and collapsed dictatorships of the 1980s.<br>In surveying regional relations with the USA since 1800, and taking a wry look at Hollywood’s treatment of Central America under Reagan, Dunkerley points out that Anglo-America has possessed neither a uniform imperialist vocation, nor the consistent capacity to impose it. Two pieces written in the late 1990s – a reappraisal of Latin American Studies since the Cuban Revolution and a survey of the contemporary politics of Bolivia – reflect the author’s concerns with a place that was ‘American’ for half a millennium before the ‘Americanization through globalization’ became a watchword.