What Justice? Whose Justice? Fighting for Fairness in Latin America ed. by Susan Eva Eckstein, Timothy Wickham-Crowley (review)

I14 The Latin Americanist Spring 2005 What Justice? Whose Justice? Fighting for Fairness in Latin America. By Susan Eva Eckstein & Timothy Wickham-Crowley (eds). Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University Press, 2003, p. 362, $24.95. Edited books pose a challenge of strategic emphasis for the editors and the reviewer. This review focuses on the whole, while admitting the parts are often better. The editors seemingly chose the inverse approach. Drawing from the universe of papers presented at a LASA Congress highlighting social justice, they have produced an eclectic and uneven collection. They make an effort to pull it all together, but as their three-part title, four internal divisions, the six objectives outlined in their introduction, and the absence of a concluding chapter suggest, have not quite succeeded . The common theme is less justice than “injustice” in the many forms it takes in contemporary and historical Latin America . Even then, certain, otherwise excellent selections (Anibal Perez-LiBh on presidential crises, Sybil Delaine Rhodes on Brazil’s participatory budgets) do not quite fit. It bears mentioning in passing that only one article (Lisa Hilbink writing on Chile) focuses on the legal and judicial issues conventionally subsumed under the label “justice” and that all other authors, whether using the term or not, are writing about something else. If, as explained in the preface and introduction, one principal aim was to illustrate the different disciplinary approaches to the theme, this was accomplished, but at the cost of considerable inconsistency in focus, methodology, quality, and even the definition of the problem. I am not convinced disciplinary distinctions are really the crux of the matter, and in any case, it is hard to appreciate them when the authors vary so much in the topics they are investigating and in their level of analysis. It is a long stretch between Philip Oxhorn’s theoretical discussion of the sequencing of citizenship rights, or Terry Karl’s arguments about the region’s “vicious cycle of inequality” to Leigh Payne’s recounting of Argentine torturers’ confessions or Beatriz Manz’s analysis of patterns of remembering violence in a Guatemalan village, and it is hard to imagine any single reader not discounting some selections as entirely irrelevant to his or her interests. The editors admit the work includes a political agenda. Still, some chapters (June Nash on women’s movements in Chiapas) wear their politics a bit too obtrusively on their sleeves, producing an interpretation of events many may find questionable. There is also a cross-cutting problem of the quality of data and analysis. Many selections draw Book Reviews I15 their evidence from secondary sources, often hardly covering the waterfront, or use illustrative excerpts from interviews. This becomes more problematic the broader the authors’ aims, but even in pieces generalizing less widely, the conclusions reached frequently exceed the weight of the supporting material. This said, many chapters (which ones depends on the reader) present ideas and arguments meriting a book of their own, a characteristic comprising the volume’s greatest strength and shortcoming. It is a tantalizing sampler, likely to leave even those enamored of a particular topic or approach frustrated by the inevitably incomplete treatment. Most of the authors have so condensed their material that a reader not versed in the histories of the countries covered or the broader questions addressed may be lost in the alphabet soup of party acronyms (Pkrez-Lifiiin;Marc Chernick on Colombian violence; John Peeler on indigenous politics ) or fail to grasp the significance of the example (Hilbink on Chilean judicial “exceptionalism”). The book’s natural audience may be students in introductory courses, but many articles require considerably more background if one is to capture their implications . Initially written for a series of specialized panels, most selections do not speak to the general reader or, for that matter, to each other. Finally, there is a tension here between what David Scott Palmer, writing on community organizations in Ayacucho, Peru, calls micro (or informal) and macro (or formal) politics, with the overview pieces reverting to the reductionism we used to see in discussions of the region’s political parties. Parties or movements are defined by their formal platforms with little attention to internal...