Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 416 pp., $16.00. Translated with an introduction by John M. Cohen.

Mario Vargas Llosa, Feast of the Goat: A Novel (New York: Picador USA, 2002), 416 pp., $15.00. Translated by Edith Grossman, originally published by Alfaguara under the title Fiesta del Chivo.

Michael Reid, Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 400 pp., $30.00.

Jaime Suchlicki, Cuba: From Columbus to Castro and Beyond (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2002), 278 pp., $24.95.

Lily Tuck, The News from Paraguay: A Novel (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 272 pp., $13.95.

City of God, 130 min., Miramax, 2002.

IT WOULD normally be far-fetched to combine into a book essay works as different as a novel about the improbable love between an Irish woman and a future Paraguayan dictator written by a Paris-born New Yorker, a novel—written by a Peruvian who resides in Spain—about a woman who works and lives in the United States in the 1990s but visits her ailing father in the Dominican Republic and remembers the dark years of the Trujillo dictatorship, a detailed and highly analytical account of recent economic and political developments in Latin America written by the editor of the Americas section of the Economist, and an electrifying film about street children who go through a real-life “survivor” experience in Rio de Janeiro. If you throw in a classic narrative by a sixteenth-century conquistador-turned-historian and advocate of indigenous rights in the Americas, and a detailed account of the history of Cuba—from Columbus to Castro, and beyond—relating all those works should seem a formidable task. But these are the top picks of America’s Southern Command, the Department of Defense’s arm in the region. They tell a story of a Latin America mired in income and social inequality, facing challenges of historical proportions, dictatorial leaders and international influence. At times these themes are at the very heart of the works, at others they lurk in the background, but all provide a glimpse into a region on the brink of monumental change.

Latin America seems to be inseparable from inequality in most works of literature, art and history. Whether one reads a fascinating description of Asunción (the lame capital city of Paraguay) in the 1860s written by an American, or one is violently immersed in the crude realities of gangs and violence in the slums (favelas) of Rio de Janeiro in the late 1990s as portrayed in a powerful film by a Brazilian architect-turned-filmmaker, the stark difference in living conditions, opportunities and outlook in life that separates the “haves” from the “have-nots” is a stubborn thread. It reminds readers and film audiences that, be it in the Caribbean heat or in the Andes-mountain cold, the uniform and lasting defining characteristic of Latin America is inequality.

By world standards, Latin America is not a poor region. With a real GDP of about $5,900 ($10,000 when purchasing power is equalized), Latin America stands literally halfway between industrialized countries and the much-more-populous and emerging economies of China, India and the impoverished African continent. Yet, a more-accurate description would be to say that Latin America brings together—often within the same countries, same cities and occasionally even same neighborhoods—the wealth and prosperity of the most-industrialized nations in the world and the dispossession, despair and hopelessness of the most deprived. Latin American cities are home to some of the world’s wealthiest men and women. But they are also habitats to tens of thousands of homeless children. In São Paulo, the most-prosperous city in Brazil, a visitor can easily be distracted by the sound of helicopters that bring high-paid executives to their downtown offices from the airport or their gated communities in the suburbs. But just as easily, a tourist will be interrupted by the sound of motorcycles speeding by through the crowded and impossible traffic or by the ever-present—but always heartbreaking—face of a nine-year-old girl begging for some reais to make ends meet. The high-scale commercial streets in most capital cities in Latin America will inevitably combine expensive stores with children performing circuslike acts at intersections, and adults offering to “care for” your vehicle when you park on the streets outside the most-glamorous mall.

Latin America is not economically stagnant. In recent years, the economy of the region has performed quite well. In 2008, Latin America will have its sixth consecutive year of economic growth, at an average of slightly less than 4 percent. According to the Economic Commission for Latin America, at the end of 2008 Latin America’s GDP will be 25 percent higher than in 2002. Given that the region experienced a profound economic crisis in the 1980s (dubbed the “lost decade”) and an uneven performance in the 1990s (with countries that adopted market-friendly policies growing faster), the recent run is much-welcome news for that 35 percent of the population still living in poverty. Although this performance might not be stellar when compared to China or India, Latin America is already more developed than those two giants, and thus finds it difficult to grow at a fast pace. But, the $100 billion that came in as foreign investment in 2007 will help stimulate future growth. Moreover, the positive trade balance enjoyed by most countries in the region has helped reduce their foreign-debt burden and created opportunities for governments to implement targeted social-spending programs. Naturally, it remains to be seen for how long the commodity boom will last. Latin American countries export abundant raw materials, minerals and foodstuffs. Some of the well-managed economies like Brazil, Chile and Peru have even accumulated huge fiscal surpluses. Yet, just because they have their coffers full of money, governments will not inevitably adopt sensible policies to alleviate poverty and foster future economic growth. While countries like Brazil and Chile have dramatically reduced poverty in recent years, others—such as Argentina or Bolivia—have not been as successful despite economic prosperity.

Remittances sent by nationals living abroad—coming mostly from the United States, but also from Europe and Latin America—are also playing a bigger role in poverty alleviation. This is true in a growing number of countries—mostly in Mexico, but increasingly in Central America, the Dominican Republic, and even as far south as Ecuador or Peru. As a result, America’s historical role in promoting—or hindering—economic development in the region has taken on an added dimension. It is not just Washington’s promotion of democracy and free trade—or its opposition to socialism and other revolutionary efforts—that affect development south of the Rio Bravo. Now, the evolution of the domestic U.S. economy has immediate effects on poverty alleviation in Latin America. The more employment there is for immigrants—be they legal or undocumented—the more progress the southern countries will make in alleviating poverty and combating inequality. Unaffected by White House policies toward Latin America, immigrants have produced millions of direct links between the American economy and development in their hometowns.

The old version of American imperialism, marked by cold-war concerns, has become diversified. Today’s “imperialism” is less homogeneous, making it much more difficult for the United States to muscle Latin American governments into accepting American positions. This “imperialism” is no longer driven exclusively by policies drawn up in Washington, but also increasingly by the link between jobs in American cities and remittances sent to towns in Mexico, Ecuador or El Salvador. It is now the ATM and the Western Union office that symbolize the modern imperial-colonial links between Latin America and the United States, not marines occupying the streets. As a result, deli workers in Manhattan, Wal-Mart employees, and landscapers and farm laborers all over America wield influence over their home countries alongside the U.S. government and American policy makers.

LONG BEFORE America cast its influence over Latin America, dispatching soldiers to Cuba, Panama and Haiti and supporting coups in Chile and Argentina, the Spanish Empire left an indelible mark on the continent, shaping its destiny. Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s The Conquest of New Spain, brilliantly translated by the late John M. Cohen, constitutes a keen and clever description of how Latin America not only came into existence but also how it was founded on a premise of inequality. Very much defined from the outside—by the other, rather than by its own inhabitants—the concept of Latin America accidentally came into being on October 12, 1492. Before the “encounter” of the two worlds, the two large existing civilizations of the Americas, the Inca and the Aztec, did not even know of one another. It was through the sword and the cross that the hundreds of different civilizations and indigenous tribes were brought uniformly together as a Latin American continent during Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule.

Conquistadores’ greed and lust for gold led them to keep labor costs low among the oppressed natives—eventually including the slaves that were brought to supply cheap labor. Yet, in Díaz’s brilliant descriptions of the events that led to the conquest of the Aztec Empire in Tenochtitlan—present-day Mexico City—one can also find evidence to discredit the widely shared view that life in the Americas was almost like paradise before the arrival of “the West.” The brutal ways the Aztecs treated some of the indigenous groups in their domain made it easier for Hernán Cortés to recruit indigenous warriors in his quest to conquer the Aztec Empire.

Spain remained the preeminent power in the region until Latin American colonies—very much inspired by the independence of the United States and the 1787 Constitutional Convention—began to declare independence, starting with Haiti in 1804 and ending with Simón Bolívar’s victory in 1821 over Spanish troops in Peru, the stronghold of the Spanish Empire in South America. Two years later, President James Monroe issued his famous doctrine, declaring that the U.S. government would not tolerate European meddling in the affairs of the newly independent Latin American countries. U.S. influence in the region rose steadily; when it prevailed in the 1898 Spanish-American War, Washington took over Madrid’s colonial mantle in Latin America. Although formally independent, several Latin American republics—particularly Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua—quickly developed a colonial relationship with Washington. Many critics of American policy have argued that Washington systematically treated Latin America as its “colonial backyard” throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on that widely shared—but not entirely accurate—belief, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez likes to refer to the United States as “The Empire.”

RECOUNTING THE ruin of a country by the arrogant and unfulfilled imperialist dreams of a ruler, Lily Tuck’s The News from Paraguay is a brilliantly written novel that tells the story of Ella Lynch, an Irish woman who met Francisco Solano, the son of a Paraguayan dictator, in Paris. The novel is much more about Lynch than about the corrupt and inept government of Paraguay or the profound inequality between those in power and the masses. But the powerless and hopeless peasants serve as a background for Tuck to narrate how the dreams and aspirations of the young woman end up rotten and destroyed in the humid and somewhat-inhospitable environment of nineteenth-century Paraguay. Ella fell in love with Solano and traveled with him to Paraguay. Though he never married her, they had five children. Solano went on to become the dictator of Paraguay and, under his watch, the country entered a war against the regional giants Argentina and Brazil. This Triple Alliance War was devastating for Paraguay.

Tuck’s News from Paraguay can also be read as a traveler’s account of the realities of Paraguay under Solano’s rule. Although Lynch lived in close proximity to the realities of poverty and dispossession—and was herself a victim of the excessive power of the Catholic church as she was never allowed to marry Solano—this novel is clearly written with Paraguay in the background. At the center of the story are the suffering and perils of an Irish woman who allowed herself to be seduced by the foolish imperialist dreams of a man from a little-known country in South America.

Tuck’s novel reminds us that Latin American countries have not been the hopeless victims of foreign imperialism. More often than not, the suffering and oppression endured were inflicted upon them by homegrown dictators. Even those supported by the United States—or tolerated for their anti-Communist stances during the cold war—often inflicted such pain and suffering upon their own populations that even the most-outspoken American anti-Communist ideologues were embarrassed. In fighting Communism, many Latin American strongmen went well beyond reasonable limits and so openly violated human rights that they alienated their populations from the more-compassionate democratic values normally promoted by the United States.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s Feast of the Goat narrates life under the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and the role the United States played in propping up the state. The work is among the best novels written by the prolific and highly acclaimed Peruvian writer. Vargas Llosa, who once ran for president of Peru on a market-friendly platform, currently resides in Spain. His weekly syndicated columns combine a strong defense of democratic values with unrepentant advocacy for market-friendly initiatives. Once a supporter of the Cuban revolution, Vargas Llosa then sided with liberal democracy in the 1980s. Though because of his political conversion he lost many of his former friends from the famous Latin American literary boom of the 1960s, he has continued to produce magnificent literature.

Rafael Leonidas Trujillo ruled the Spanish-speaking nation of Hispaniola from 1930 until he was murdered in 1961. A strong anti-Communist, Trujillo was a ruthless dictator who believed that order and progress—with concentration of power, and the corruption and nepotism associated with it—would bring about development to his impoverished nation. With strong support from the U.S. government, Trujillo built a cult of personality. A well-known womanizer, Trujillo ran affairs as if the Dominican Republic was his own private hacienda. Although the phrase is apocryphally attributed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt when referring to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, Trujillo could have well been deemed “a son of a bitch, but our son of a bitch.”

A narrative told through the memories of a middle-aged Dominican woman who now resides in the United States and has traveled to visit her dying father in Santo Domingo, the novel chronicles the events that led up to Trujillo’s assassination. A permanent candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Vargas Llosa might have written Feast of the Goat to show that his opposition to dictators does not discriminate along ideological lines. He dislikes right- and left-wing dictators alike.

The experience of dictatorship has been one of the essential themes of the Latin American experience. During the twentieth century, all Latin American countries endured at least one authoritarian government. In fact, Costa Rica, free only since 1948, is the oldest uninterrupted democracy in the region. At the height of the cold war in the 1960s and 1970s, democratic regimes survived only in Colombia, Venezuela and Costa Rica. As the cold war came to an end, all the countries of Latin America, with the exception of Cuba, experienced transitions toward democracy. Yet, democracy has not advanced evenly across the region. Although dramatic progress has been achieved in countries like Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, democracy is much weaker in Ecuador, Bolivia and Colombia. Though democratically elected, Hugo Chávez has shown little esteem for checks and balances, separation of powers and respect for the opposition. Yet despite these setbacks, Vargas Llosa’s novel reminds us that, on the whole, Latin America has come a long way. Though imperfect and even weak in some countries, democracy is still the only legitimate game in town. The days when Latin American countries were ruled by strongmen like Trujillo are long gone. Even somewhat-authoritarian and personality-cult-prone leaders like Chávez are nowhere near as powerful and dictatorial as Trujillo was.

JAIME SUCHLICKI’s Cuba: From Columbus to Castro and Beyond is a must for those interested in understanding recent political developments in the island country and the impact of U.S. policy on them. Although the book’s last edition dates back to 2002, Suchlicki masterfully summarizes the history of the country before the 1959 revolution and the most-important developments under Fidel Castro’s rule. Moreover, Suchliki also cleverly discusses the options the revolutionary government has as Fidel slowly fades away. Because he so appropriately anticipated—six years in advance—the path the Cuban revolutionary government would take when Fidel Castro retired, one is inclined to trust Suchlicki’s predictions for what will come to Cuba in the coming years.

Faced with the need to correct a failed economic model and to satisfy demands for more freedom—and eventually democracy—Castro has proven stubborn. After the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba could no longer count on subsidized oil and financial support from Moscow; a dramatic recession that shrank the size of the economy by about 30 percent between 1991 and 1993 resulted. The Castro government was forced to adopt desperate measures to attract foreign investment and much-needed cash to pay for the country’s energy needs, and the country entered into what was appropriately named a “special period.” Yet, Castro came short of embracing capitalist economic policies and held political rights at bay. Unlike the Chinese Communists, who enthusiastically embraced capitalism, Castro’s regime simply made the necessary concessions to survive. Castro’s gamble paid off. With the arrival to power of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Cuba obtained ample access to much-needed oil. A quid pro quo ensued: subsidized oil for Cuba; doctors and teachers from the island to spread Chávez’s revolution. Although Cuba-Venezuela relations were strengthened after he published his book, Suchlicki correctly identified oil as the most-pressing need for the Castro government. Rather than adopting reforms that would first bring about economic liberties and then, with the right policies promoted by other friendly Latin American democracies and other interested nations, political liberties as well, Cuba goes on obstinately trying to centrally plan its economy.

Sympathizers of the Cuban Revolution would historically point to equality as a sufficient justification for the lack of freedom. Absolute equality when all are equally poor does not seem an attractive remedy. In Cuba, it was argued, all people are in fact born equal and have access to education, health, food and housing. The intention may have been to give everyone equal access to these things, but the crisis of the 1990s has led to income disparities thanks to developments like expansion of the tourism industry to get ready cash and remittances sent from abroad by relatives who fled since the revolution. As a result, inequality has proven obstinate. The price Cuba has had to pay to produce an equal society is probably too high in terms of economic development and political freedom.

But the revolution has lived on because of two variables. Suchlicki highlights the often-ignored fact that Cuba is a military dictatorship. The Cuban military, tightly run by Raúl Castro—Fidel’s younger, seventy-two-year-old brother—has kept the government in power. The other factor is the historically failed and counterproductive policies successive U.S. governments have applied to the Communist island. In addition to an embargo that hurts the people more than the government, the perception of U.S. imperialism has helped Fidel position himself as the lesser of two evils before the Cuban people. Since colonial times, imperial powers have repressed Cuban attempts at independence. Spain first, and also the United States. Once America gained control of the island in the Spanish-American War of 1898, it ran social, economic and political affairs there. When it granted Cuba independence in 1902, the United States retained veto power over all legal matters (in the infamous Platt Amendment added to the Cuban constitution). The United States also kept a military presence on the island. Guantánamo might be on the tips of everyone’s tongues for other reasons right now, but it remains evidence of U.S. imperialism from another era. Fidel Castro skillfully played the nationalist card to build up support among Cubans. Until the U.S. government learns to develop a more-sophisticated and more-efficient policy to help strengthen democratic and reformist forces within Cuba, the anti-imperialist flag will contribute to lengthening the already fifty-year-old communist dictatorship.

STILL, LATIN America as a whole is presently enjoying its most-successful economic run in the last three decades. Though critics correctly point out that, given its terms of trade, Latin American countries should be growing much faster, having six consecutive years of economic expansion is something Latin America has been rather unaccustomed to in recent decades. Most troubling though, the benefits of economic growth are not reaching everyone. Although poverty has decreased significantly as a percentage of the population (close to 35 percent in 2007), the number of people living below the poverty line has actually increased in absolute numbers in the last two years. Inequality remains an unaddressed problem.

Government programs designed to provide subsidies to the poor have worked well in Brazil, Mexico and other countries. Earmarked spending giving cash and food subsidies to families who send their children to school have proved a success. Brazil’s Bolsa Familia and Mexico’s Progresa-Oportunidades are conditional cash-transfer programs that have helped bring down poverty. But, because the tax structure in most of the Latin American countries is not sufficiently progressive and because there is still plenty of waste in public spending, even targeted spending focused on the most needy has failed to reduce inequality. Ironically, many government programs end up subsiding the middle and upper classes. In Venezuela, a gallon of subsidized oil costs less than twenty cents. Because the wealthy are more likely to own cars, the Venezuelan government—despite all the revolutionary rhetoric of its leader Hugo Chávez—continues to use some public resources to subsidize the wealthy rather than the poor. The very popular provision to offer higher education free of charge for all continues to be a third rail in many countries in the region. Because the children of the better off are more likely to attend university (especially the higher-quality ones that have competitive admissions systems), the government ends up subsidizing the future physicians, engineers and lawyers rather than those at the bottom of society. As a result of well-intentioned but ill-conceived policies, public spending cannot mitigate the inequality that is naturally produced by market-friendly economies, much less can government spending correct historically inherited inequalities.

Yet, as Reid’s Forgotten Continent appropriately reminds us, the past few years have seen more progress than retreat. The cautious optimism, fed by the slow but stable growth seen in Mexico, the more-rapid growth experienced by Brazil, and the success in achieving economic growth in countries such as Chile, Colombia, Peru, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, has created a window of opportunity for Latin American countries to address, once and for all, the underlying reasons for the persistence of inequality. If they succeed, future works from Latin America will finally be free from that gray background of inequality. That would be an absence that no one would miss.

Forgotten Continent is an essay that luminously discusses recent political developments in the region. Although the intense and not-always-coherent verbal tirades by Hugo Chávez against President George W. Bush (which include comparisons to “the devil” and to a “donkey”) have understandably captured the attention of most foreign observers, Latin America’s reality is not what Chávez’s anti-imperialist rhetoric seems to imply. Since Mexico entered into a free-trade agreement with Canada and the United States in 1994, other Latin American countries have followed suit. Chile, Peru, the Dominican Republic and five Central American countries have their own free-trade agreements with the United States. Colombia and Panama have also agreed on treaties, but they have not been ratified by the U.S. Congress. True, the promise of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) made in Miami in 1995 by all democratically elected presidents of the Americas wasn’t realized by the promised 2005 date. Yet, free trade is making progress in the region. Even President Chávez, whose opposition to real or perceived U.S. imperialism seems to guide many of his actions, has embraced the idea of free trade. His alternative to FTAA is ALBA, the (of course) Bolivarian Free Trade Initiative for the Americas.

Reid’s volume is written with the agile and fact-rich style familiar to readers of the Economist. Yet, the book also fares well when read with more-demanding and severe academic eyes. Full of conveniently placed citations and references, the book is both a great, compelling essay and a notable scholarly work. Opinionated and an advocate of a no-nonsense approach, Reid’s work will captivate experts and amateurs alike. No one who seriously aspires to discuss Latin American politics, economics and culture should go without reading Forgotten Continent. Those who openly acknowledge total ignorance about Latin American affairs can find in this book a notable opportunity to get almost everything in less than four hundred pages.

DESPITE POSITIVE economic strides in recent years, the lives of many of the underprivileged in Latin America are still gloomy. The United States can change this by helping Latin American democracies build institutions that increase government accountability and responsiveness. Democracy must promote competition among the political elites. Too often, Latin American countries have seen their political parties evolve into oligopolies that concentrate power and undermine accountability. Even with its own shortcomings, the American political process is much more transparent and inclusive. Rather than imposing its own values in a one-size-fits-all approach, the United States should actively engage with democratic leaders and nongovernmental organizations in the region to help them develop mechanisms and institutions that can strengthen their own democratic systems. If democracy is to succeed, social inclusion and a fair distribution of opportunities are necessary for legitimacy. Via active engagement, not unilateral impositions, the United States can best promote and consolidate democracy, especially in countries where electoral democracy is the only game in town but democratic practices are not always enforced and respected by democratically elected leaders. Moreover, the United States should share its own experience of extending social and economic inclusion to marginalized groups. For their successful integration is the best guarantee that democracy will consolidate and flourish in the region.

The exclusion of large segments of the population inevitably threatens democracy. In fact, it presently constitutes the biggest threat to democracy in Latin America. One of the clearest depictions of this underbelly is Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s City of God. This work lives up to a distinct tradition in Latin American film. Brutal and violent street reality can be mediated by showing it through the innocent and hopeful eyes of children. Brazilian filmmakers have known this for quite some time. Pixote: The Law of the Weakest (1981), by Brazilian Hector Babenco, was acclaimed as a masterfully produced depiction of street children’s lives in Rio de Janeiro. Fifteen years later, Who Killed Pixote? (1996), by Brazilian José Joffily, presented the tragic end in the real life of the child actor who played Pixote in the classic film. Highlighting that reality sometimes trumps fiction, these two films seemed to have marked contemporary Brazilian cinema. In recent years, Central do Brasil (1998) by Walter Salles and the documentary Ônibus 174 (2002) by Jose Padilha and Felipe Lacerda also show reality through the eyes or by looking at the experiences of children. Naturally, one can also trace that tradition back to Brazilian literature. Capitães da Areia (Captains of Sand) written in 1937 by Jorge Amado, one of Brazil’s most-notable novelists, presented life in Rio de Janeiro through the eyes of children. But Meirelles and Lund’s City of God stands out among such a selective group. Their film shows life and death in the slums of Rio de Janeiro: children using weapons, killing adults and each other, and, sadly enough, sparing no one from the spiral of violence, drugs and hopelessness. This is not a film to see when one needs a feel-good ending. But it is certainly an eye-opener.

Be it novels, films or insightful political analyses, the descriptions of Latin American societies, the snapshots of daily life in the region, all share in common a background of a profound and persistent inequality. A savvy observer might suggest that the United States is also decisively more unequal than other industrialized nations. Yet, social and economic mobility is far superior in the United States than in Latin America. No wonder many aspiring men and women have emigrated—mostly from Mexico, but from as far as Ecuador, Peru and Chile—to the United States. To be sure, the United States is more unequal now than thirty years ago and social mobility is also declining. But that should only make Latin America a more-urgent case to study for Americans. Although the average person stateside is four times as wealthy as one from Latin America, the increasing levels of inequality in the United States will likely see the emergence of undesirable societal patterns all too familiar to Latin American nations. In many regards, one could see the unequal societies of Latin America as what the United States might end up resembling if inequality and social mobility continue to worsen. Rather than the United States representing the future of Latin America, the increasing distance between the “haves” and “have-nots” in the United States might turn the future upside down. A reversal of imperialist fortunes may be best abated by moving to make Latin America an equal.

Jorge Castañeda is the Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. He is the former foreign minister of Mexico (2000–2003). Patricio Navia is a professor at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile and in the General Studies Program at New York University.