The Andes in Focus: Security, Democracy, and Economic Reform (review)

This is the tenth and final volume on contemporary issues in Latin America from the Western Hemisphere/Latin American Studies Program of The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. It contains nine chapters that detail post-1990 developments in each of the Andean republics (Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, and Ecuador), along with two chapters on U.S. policy toward the region, an Introduction, and a Conclusion. Ten authors, most with ties to SAIS, provide the analyses. Although the quality of individual chapters varies, as is usually the case with edited volumes, together they offer a detailed perspective on the most important issues and developments in each country between 1990 and the early 2000s, and on the concerns and initiatives of the United States in the region. Given the fact that each country analyzed has experienced multiple crises of governance and economic malaise during this period, the interested reader has the opportunity to garner valuable information and insight about a sub-region of Latin America that specialists consider to be the most troubled in the Western Hemisphere.

Each country chapter provides a brief historical background to set post-1990 developments into their appropriate contexts, but concentrates on recent crises and their denouement, with a useful summary chronology of the most important events at the end. While the brief Introduction offers what its author, Russell Crandall (Davidson College), describes as a conceptual framework of democracy, economic reform, and security, the lack of any elaboration through discussion of the extensive literature on these concerns or specification of the relationship between them relegates their use in the volume to unifying themes rather than conceptual analysis of country cases. The reader is better served by considering each case study in terms of the generally excellent synopsis of developments and challenges related to each of the three themes than as the systematic application of a coherent framework to them.

Each of the country studies has merit. From this reviewer's perspective, however, the cases of Venezuela (by Juan Carlos Sainz Borgo of the Universidad Central de Venezuela and Guadelupe Paz of SAIS) and Ecuador (by Fredy Rivera Véliz of FLACSO Ecuador and Franklin Ramírez Gallegos of the Centro de Investigaciones Ciudad, Quito) offer particularly cogent and well researched analyses of Venezuela's system crisis and populist resolution and Ecuador's continuing political immobilization. Riordan Roett (the project's director and head of SAIS's Western Hemisphere/Latin American Studies Program) provides a most valuable comparative synthesis in the concluding chapter through the analysis of data on each country case from the annual Global Competitiveness Report (GCR). He finds part of the explanation for the recurring crises in the Andean region in the consistently low rankings each country receives on various GCR indices. Of the two chapters on U.S. policy toward the region, the treatment by Mark Williams (Middlebury College) stands out. Through the application of a "realist" and "liberal institutionalist" framework and with basic relevant Andean country data, he makes the case that the region really does matter to the United States in terms of the unifying themes of democracy, economic reform, and security, and then goes on to address the major challenges for U.S. policy in each area.

Taken as a whole, this collection is less than the sum of its parts. Nevertheless, several of the chapters are superb and together more than justify the book's purchase. It has value for upper level undergraduate courses on Latin American politics as well as for the political risk analysis community, and, if combined with a broader and more historical text, would give the reader a solid grounding in the multiple issues facing this troubled region.