The United States and Latin America: The New Agenda »

The end of the Cold War removed hemispheric security from the top of the agenda of U.S.-Latin American relations. Democracy, trade and investment, drugs, and migration rose in importance. Pressures to eliminate the anachronistic U.S. embargo on Cuba increased. The new agenda also includes Latin America's growing ties to the countries of the European Union and other regions.

This book contains fifteen essays by distinguished U.S., Latin American, and European scholars on each of these issues, framed by overviews of the changing historical context from the nineteenth century to the end of the Cold War. Authors include such notables as Harvard scholars John Coatsworth, Jorge Domínguez, and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco; European academics such as editors James Dunkerley and Victor Bulmer-Thomas; and Latin American intellectuals such as Eduardo Gamarra and Rodolfo Cerdas-Cruz.

George Vickers - Times Literary Supplement

In some of the best essays, [the book's contributors] provide detailed analyses of the ways in which the counter-narcotics drive of the US generated resentment and undermines nascent democratic institutions in Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia. Elizabeth Joyce's superbly nuanced account of the US drug policy helps us to understand the inconsistencies and apparent irrationality of the annual 'certification' process, in which the US unilaterally grades countries on their cooperation with the drug war and imposes sanctions on those who fail the test.