Latin America at the End of Politics (review)

This is neither an academic book nor, apparently, one aimed at a scholarly audience (although an endorsement from Mark Falcoff indicates that the author "has something to teach both specialist and beginner"). The text has some simple and striking illustrations, a four-page bibliography of marked eclecticism, no index, and a title so provocatively beyond anything it can deliver by dint of reasoned argumentation that one might legitimately fear exclusive reliance upon whimsical allusion. This series of largely anecdotal and sometimes reflective essays blends character study, cultural generalization, and policy proposal in an almost picaresque survey. Colburn is not ostensibly writing an autobiography, but one encounters in some passages a modest but knowing apologia pro vita sua. The book's approach is not unlike that of the "historioculturalists" promoted by the late Richard Morse, whose citrus humor is absent here, as in similar texts by Howard Wiarda and Glen Dealy. Colburn slips a reference to John Locke into his first chapter but does not explicitly follow Dealy's scriptural assertion of sociocultural dichotomies. However, this book, like Dealy's Latin Americans: Spirit and Ethos, has a Central American genesis and a strong isthmian flavor. It rather loses its edge as we move south of Panama, and references to "decades of ideological struggle, much at the service of an elusive socialist ideal" reflect the author's post-Sandinista experiences rather than a comprehensively conservative tract.

Colburn is laudably keen to make Latin America accessible to a popular North American audience, taking just six pages to introduce "Latin America as a place" (that is apparently limited in time to the last two decades). There is no real history here at all, not even of the most condensed variety. The approach is perhaps best captured by the final sentence of this first section: "Me, I wonder where these changes, all so unforeseen, are taking us" (p. 15). In the 14 chapters that follow—most less than ten pages in length—Colburn works through the gamut of human experience: from urbanization to painting via shopping and crime. As a result, generalization, representative illustration, and selective statistics perforce prevail. The work is true to its genre and is best not approached with any other expectation. My own sense is that the presentation is snappy enough but rather too suave to capture sophomoric attention, while it is too determinedly sprightly to hold the interested lay reader anxious for insights beyond the grasp of op-ed articles. That, though, is surely where Forrest Colburn is reaching.