The mistakes the United States has made in Latin America—and the high price it will pay for themCould it be that for the first time in history, the United States needs Latin America more than the other way round? Since the early 1800s, the United States regarded the region as its “backyard,” but in the past decade South America’s leaders have increasingly snubbed US efforts to persuade them to adopt free-market economics and sign trade agreements. While Washington ...

How the “First State” has enabled international crime, sheltered tax dodgers, and diverted hard-earned dollars from the rest of usThe legal home to over a million companies, Delaware has more registered businesses than residents. Why do virtually all of the biggest corporations in the United States register there? Why do so many small companies choose to set up in Delaware rather than their home states? Why do wealthy individuals form multiple layers of private com...

The legal home to over a million companies, Delaware has more registered businesses than residents. Why do virtually all of the biggest corporations in the United States register there? This book reveals how a systematic enterprise lies behind the business-friendly corporate veneer, one that has kept the state afloat financially by diverting public funds away from some of the poorest people in the United States and supporting dictators and criminals across the world.Hal Weitzman sh...

In this hugely praised narrative, New York Times reporter Larry Rohter takes the reader on a lively trip through Brazil's history, culture, and booming economy. Going beyond the popular stereotypes of samba, supermodels, and soccer, he shows us a stunning and varied landscape--from breathtaking tropical beaches to the lush and dangerous Amazon rainforest--and how a complex and vibrant people defy definition. He charts Brazil's amazing jump from a debtor nation to one of the world's fastest...

Fernando Henrique Cardoso received a phone call in the middle of the night asking him to be the new Finance Minister of Brazil. As he put the phone down and stared into the darkness of his hotel room, he feared he'd been handed a political death sentence. The year was 1993, and he would be responsible for an economy that had had seven different currencies in the previous eight years to cope with inflation that had run at 3000 percent a year. Brazil had a habit of chewing up finance ministe...

What happens in Spain, among the euro zone's largest economies, matters. Its high unemployment (over 26%), burgeoning public debt, and banking crisis will be formative for the zone's future. In Spain: What Everyone Needs to Know®, a timely addition to Oxford's acclaimed What Everyone Needs to Know® series, veteran journalist William Chislett provides much-needed political and historical context for Spain's current economic and political predicament. Chislett recounts the ...

Every year the United States spends millions of dollars to help the war-ravaged country of Colombia. But help it with what? In Colombia and the U.S. Mario Murillo explores the misdirected and devastating impact that U.S. military "aid" continues to have on the war torn-people of Colombia. Beginning with a brief history of Colombia, Murillo analyzes the complex forces driving Colombia's current decades-old guerilla war, U.S. involvement, media perceptions, and possible paths to peace. Wheth...

A study of Mexico - political, social, cultural, economic - by a journalist who was for the past 6 years the NYT bureau chief in Mexico City. With portraits of Mexico's top leaders, about a nation whose stability is vital to our national well-being.

The second edition of A Concise History of Brazil offers a sweeping yet accessible history of Latin America's largest country. Boris Fausto examines Brazil's history from the arrival of the Portuguese in the New World through the long and sometimes rocky transition from independence in 1822 to democracy in the twentieth century. In a completely new chapter, his son Sergio Fausto, a prominent political scientist, brings the history up to the present, focusing on Brazil's increasing global e...

The fascinating Bolivian president Evo Morales is vying with the brash and provocative leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, to be the most influential figure in South American politics today. Since coming into office four years ago, Morales has been intensely critical of the United States, speaking out against the drug war at the United Nations and implementing socialist programs at home, including the nationalization of British Petroleum holdings and other foreign investments. And he has rea...

There are few international relationships as intimate, as passionate-and as dysfunctional-as that of the United States and Cuba. In The Cuba Wars, Cuba expert Daniel Erikson draws on extensive visits and conversations with both Cuban government officials and opposition leaders-plus key players in Washington and Florida-to offer an unmatched portrait of a small country with outsized importance to Americans and American policy.

For more than ten years, Caracas Chronicles (CaracasChronicles.com) has distilled Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela for English-speaking readers, providing both context and a home for lively discussion. This compilation by its editors, Toro and Nagel, brings together their best work.With Hugo Chávez's passing, Venezuela enters a new era. The time has come to look back on a decade of unprecedented upheavals. From a sharply critical stance, Blogging the Revolution surveys the evolutio...