WHAT IF LATIN AMERICA RULED THE WORLD?
How the South Will Take the North Through the 21st Century

By Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

Bloomsbury. 472 pp. $30

Reviewed by Michael Shifter

Will this be Latin America’s century? Will the region’s recent economic and social progress make it a power to be seriously reckoned with on the global stage? Oscar Guardiola-Rivera certainly thinks so. His notably upbeat outlook is in line with a recent report in the Economist, “Nobody’s Backyard: The Rise of Latin America”; on the magazine’s cover, maps of North and South America are inverted.

Guardiola-Rivera, a Colombian who teaches international law and globalization at the University of London, also echoes Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano, best known for “Open Veins of Latin America.” (Originally published in 1971, that is the book Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez gave to Barack Obama at a hemispheric summit meeting last year.) Guardiola-Rivera’s “What if Latin America Ruled the World?” is as broad in its historic sweep as Galeano’s classic. Both explore centuries of European and U.S. exploitation of Latin America, the plundering of a resource-rich continent.

But Guardiola-Rivera does not share Galeano’s fatalism. On the contrary, for him, “the peoples of the South have risen up and now stand together.” To buttress the argument, he does his best to highlight the unique virtues of Latin America’s indigenous communities and social movements that have, he believes, enabled the region to “resist some of the most extreme consequences of the globalist and unfettered market policies that have wreaked havoc elsewhere in the developed world.”

Complete article via The Washington Post