Has the new left in Latin America lived up to the expectations of being a progressive form of governance? Dr. North’s book examines this question through the study of six cases—Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, El Salvador, and Guatemala. She argues that the ideological usurpation of the ‘Pink Tide’ merely reconfigured the power of the old elites, but never disrupted the class structure. She explores how the traditional dominant class expanded to incorporate new elements, and how income inequality was addressed at modest levels while land and financial capital continued to accrue under the dominant class. Ultimately, the book underscores how the self-serving interests of the elites captured the government and its planning processes, thereby undermining the possibility of long-term social equity.

North, L.L. and Clark, T.D. 2018. Dominant Elites in Latin America: From Neo-Liberalism to the ‘Pink Tide’. Cham, Springer.

Online journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctwq20 Published in Spanish as: “Neoextractivismo y el nuevo desarrollismo en América Latina: ignorando la transformación rural”, Ecuador Debate (Quito, Ecuador, No. 104, August 2018), pp. 95-122.

Liisa L. North is Professor Emeritus, York University in Toronto, an Occasional Visiting Professor at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) and the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Quito, Ecuador, and current Fellow and former director of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) at York University. She is author or co-author of 11 books and more than 60 book chapters and journal articles on party politics, civil–military relations, political economic processes, and mining conflicts in various Andean region countries; on the civil wars, UN peacekeeping missions, and human rights and refugee crises in Central America; and on Canadian-Latin American relations.