Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay by Kregg Hetherington (review)

Book Reviews their part, the architects who sought to use the rebuilding effort as a laboratory for modernism and planning were defeated by their professional rivals, engineers, in alliance with the local elite. In the end, the Peronist state was forced to scale back its plans for San Juan. Unable to transform regional politics, Perón pursued an alliance with the local caudillo, Federico Cantoni. The Peronist state enshrined housing as a basic right but accepted a modest reconstruction plan for the city that did not fundamentally challenge the power of the wine elite. The full reconstruction of the city would not be achieved until after Perón’s overthrow in 1955. By exploring the rise of Peronism from the perspective of San Juan, Healey’s book transforms our understanding of the movement. Inevitably, though, other elements of the story fall out. For example, while he demonstrates the intersection of electoral politics with the world of design and architecture, Healey pays very little attention to mass culture or consumption , two areas that have recently drawn the attention of many historians of Peronism. More interestingly, workers, typically seen as the protagonists of Peronist history, play only a bit part in Healey’s account. Healey argues persuasively that the centrality of labor in the Peronist movement was not pre-determined. In fact, he claims, it was partly the failure to construct a broad, multiclass alliance in San Juan that opened the door to the regime’s reliance on the working class. Nevertheless, the story of how the political struggles over rebuilding affected and were affected by ordinary Sanjuaninos remains for future historians to tell. We can only hope that these historians will produce as rich and nuanced an account as Healey has done here. The Ruins of the New Argentina is an exemplary model of a provincial history with national relevance. Matthew B. Karush Department of History and Art History George Mason University GUERRILLA AUDITORS: THE POLITICS OF TRANSPARENCY IN NEOLIBERAL PARAGUAY. By Kregg Hetherington. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 231, $23.95. Kregg Hetherington’s Guerrilla Auditors is an ethnography of post-Cold War development politics in Paraguay. Most of the ethnographic work for this book was realized in the rural Caaguazú district between 2003 and 2006. Shifting his narrative back and forth between rustic campesino gatherings and the air conditioned archives within state bureaucracies, Hetherington argues that the contentious negotiations between campesinos and the state about the creation of land documents demonstrates that transparency , one of neoliberalism’s main tenets, is not what it seems. “Transparency presents itself as a universal good that is nonetheless inherently exclusive” (2). Hetherington argues that campesinos’ supposed illiteracy, 143 The Latin Americanist, June 2013 economic irrationality, and their predilection for populist leaders provide a foil for “new democrats,” an analytic category representing Asunción’s professional and technocratic class steeped in neoliberal development ideology. Hetherington finds the rifts between campesinos and new democrats in the recent authoritarian past, under General Stroessner’s heavy-handed rule (1954 to 1989). In the 70s and 80s, Stroessner promoted a massive land re-distribution campaign that seemed to favor would-be small landholders . Ostensibly, the land reform proposed to build a new nation and modern economy on the shoulders of campesinos as they developed redistributed land. But receiving a land title was the last step in a long bureaucratic process for campesinos, which involved demonstrating that they had sufficiently developed a homestead. In this way, Stroessner’s Cold War land reform propaganda suggested that rights were material goods acquired through labor, linking the idea of political subjectivity to the development of uncultivated land (105). Hetherington argues that in the transition years after the 1989 coup that removed Stroessner from power, campesinos (formerly Stroessner’s political base) and new democrats (the opposition to Stroessner and the ruling Colorado Party) articulated increasingly divergent goals for national development. Given campesino’s connection with Stroessner and his land reform, new democrats see campesinos as anachronisms in the new democratic age. Campesino interests do not fit into neoliberal goals of market rationality, which involve selling thousands of acres of land to Brazilian soy farmers. Hetherington situates his most insightful arguments in how...