Former Chilean president Ricardo Lagos provides a fascinating glimpse inside his country's meteoric rise on the world stage. A leader in the underground resistance movement against Augusto Pinochet and his Dirty War, Ricardo Lagos burst onto the national stage in 1988 when he gave a speech denouncing the dictator, the first of its kind. Revolution soon followed, as Chileans took to the streets to oust a criminal despot and pave the way for democracy. In The Southern Tiger, Lagos chronicles...

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...

Mexico is a country in crisis. Capitalizing on weakened public institutions, widespread unemployment, a state of lawlessness and the strengthening of links between Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, narcotrafficking in the country has flourished during the post-1982 neoliberal era. In fact, it has become one of Mexico's biggest source of revenue, as well as its most violent, with over 12,000 drug-related executions in 2011 alone.In response, Mexican president Felipe Calderón, arme...

An extraordinarily vivid, unflinching series of portraits of South America today, written from the inside out, by the award-winning New Yorker journalist and widely admired author of Samba.

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...

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...

Fidel Castro described Salvador Allende’s democratic election as president of Chile in 1970 as the most important revolutionary triumph in Latin America after the Cuban revolution. Yet celebrations were short lived. In Washington, the Nixon administration vowed to destroy Allende’s left-wing government while Chilean opposition forces mobilized against him. The result was a battle for Chile that ended in 1973 with a right-wing military coup and a brutal dictatorship lasting nearly twenty ye...

Augusto Pinochet was the most important Third World dictator of the Cold War, and perhaps the most ruthless. In The Dictator's Shadow, United Nations Ambassador Heraldo Munoz takes advantage of his unmatched set of perspectives -- as a former revolutionary who fought the Pinochet regime, as a respected scholar, and as a diplomat -- to tell what this extraordinary figure meant to Chile, the United States, and the world.Pinochet's American backers saw his regime as a bulwark...

The story of the growing resistance of Mexican communities to the poverty that forces people to migrate to the United StatesPeople across Mexico are being forced into migration, and while 11 percent of that country’s population lives north of the US border, the decision to migrate is rarely voluntary. Free trade agreements and economic policies that exacerbate and reinforce extreme wealth disparities make it impossible for Mexicans to make a living at home. And yet...

Emmy Award-winning journalist and Univision anchor Jorge Ramos looks back on groundbreaking interviews with rebels such as President Barack Obama, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Spike Lee, Barbara Walters, Fidel Castro, and more.After 30 fascinating years uncovering the hard truth, journalist Jorge Ramos opens up for the first time about life-altering lessons by sharing captivating never-before-told stories. Widely recognized for his unapologetic, no-holds-...

Following the acclaimed Uncle Sam and Us and the influential Does North America Exist? Stephen Clarkson — the preeminent analyst of North America's political economy — and Matto Mildenberger turn continental scholarship on its head by showing how Canada and Mexico contribute to the United States' wealth, security, and global power.This provocative work documents how Canada and Mexico offer the United States open markets for its investments and exports, massive flo...

Like tentacles on a vast octopus, the firsthand investigations in The Blood Bankers all lead to one core. A financial detective of sorts, investigative journalist Jim Henry analyzes a range of scandals, including the looting of the Philippines by the Marcos family and the financial collapse of nations throughout the developing world. A rogues' gallery of international criminals owes its existence to the dramatic growth of the underground global economy over the last two decades. Our world ...