PREFACE xi
Eduardo Duhalde, denounced his predecessors’ free-
market policies and pledged to create a “new model” of
development based on an “alliance between labor and
domestic industries.” His democratically elected succes-
sor, Néstor Kirchner, deepened and extended these re-
forms, threatening to default on the nation’s suffocating
foreign debt.
Although less violent, Peruvians likewise protested
the neoliberal reforms implemented by Alejandro To-
ledo, the nation’s fi rst president of indigenous descent,
who received a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford Uni-
versity. General strikes and weekly protests against To-
ledo’s efforts to privatize state companies led to rapidly
deteriorating popular support, which, according to the
Peruvian pollster Apoyo, plunged to less than 14 percent
in 2003. Presidential elections three years later anointed
Alán García on the campaign promise to overturn a de-
cade of neoliberal policy, but they also mobilized growing
support for a new, charismatic, nationalist leader, Ol-
lanta Humala, who identifi ed closely with Hugo Chávez
in Venezuela.
Brazilians similarly endorsed a new strategy for de-
velopment. The perennial candidate of the democratic
socialist left, Lula da Silva, who had consistently resisted
the neoliberal agenda during the 1990s, won a land-
slide victory in the 2002 presidential elections with 61
percent of the vote. In Venezuela, the charismatic, dem-
ocratically elected populist president Hugo Chávez redis-
tributed national wealth, alienating Venezuelan elites,
international bankers, and the U.S. State Department
alike. But he expanded his popular mandate for state
regulation of market forces by overturning an attempted
military coup in 2002, defeating a national referendum
designed to topple him in 2004, and winning reelection
in 2006 with 63 percent of the vote.
In terms of its organization, this text has developed
organically in response to valuable feedback from stu-
dents and faculty. In this book’s original planning, the
decision was made to reject the approach that tries to
cover the postindependence history of the twenty Latin
American republics in detail, including any discussion
of every single general who ever passed through a presi-
dential palace. Most teachers will agree that such con-
tent can discourage students by miring them in a bog of
tedious facts. Accordingly, it was decided to limit cover-
age of the national period in the nineteenth century to
Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, whose histories
best illustrate the major issues and trends of the period.
In addition to covering these four countries, the survey
of the twentieth century later broadened to include the
central Andean area, with a special concentration on
Peru and Cuba, the scene of a socialist revolution with
continental repercussions.
The Second Edition added a chapter on Central
America, where a revolutionary storm, having toppled
the U.S.-unsupported Somoza tyranny in Nicaragua,
threatened the rickety structures of oligarchical and
military rule in El Salvador and Guatemala. The Fourth
Edition recognized the political and economic impor-
tance of the Bolivarian lands of Venezuela and Colombia
by including a chapter on the modern history of those
countries. The Seventh Edition more fully integrated the
discussion of the Andean and Central American regions,
Cuba, and the Bolivarian republics into the text’s origi-
nal layout. Because teachers rarely have time to cover
all the Latin American countries in their survey classes,
this organization provides greater fl exibility, without
sacrifi cing historical continuity, as instructors select
those nations on which students should focus. This edi-
tion preserves this historical detail, which supplies a
foundation for the case study approach, but revisions
were made to satisfy the needs of instructors who are in-
terested in a comparative or thematic course design.
In a determined effort to respond to its readers’ sug-
gestions, to make the text more adaptable to different
pedagogical styles, and to restrain price infl ation, the
Eighth Edition offers perhaps its most signifi cant reor-
ganization. To facilitate its use in course designs that
employ both case study and comparative approaches,
Part Two now includes a more detailed overview that
highlights the major themes covered in the chapters on
nineteenth-century Latin America. It also expands the
coverage with a new chapter on the roles of slavery and
emancipation in shaping the postcolonial search for in-
dependent national identities. Veteran readers of this
text will now fi nd material on literary traditions that
refl ected nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural
developments posted to a more robust website that now
accompanies the text.
Part Three likewise has been reconfi gured to offer
greater comparative cohesion without sacrifi cing the
unique historical details that distinguish each country’s
national development. After a more robust overview
that introduces major themes in the twentieth-century
history of Latin America, the text now offers successive
chapters on the history of liberalism and populism in
Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, the Andean Repub-
lics, Chile, Central America, Venezuela, and Colombia.
The focus of Chapter 12 is the Mexican Revolution, the
fi rst social revolution in the twentieth century, which
decisively shaped Mexico’s quest for a unifi ed national
identity and bequeathed various institutions, ideologies,
and interests that later infl uenced populism elsewhere.
Chapter 13 examines Getulio Vargas and the populist
movement unleashed by Brazil’s 1930 revolution, its
historical antecedents, and legacies. Chapter 14 explores