Peter Ross

Along the Bolivian Highway: Social Mobility and Political Culture in a New Middle Class

argumento, o porque agregan un dato contextual al análisis, pero sus diferentes perspectivas teóricas permanecen fuera del discurso de Boldy y no afectan sus supuestos de lectura. Boldy da testimonio parcial de la ‘actualización’ en los estudios sobre Borges, y nos informa del ‘flujo constante de nueva investigación sobre Borges’ (188), pero el companion mantiene una distancia desconfiada de este flujo. Es curioso, por ejemplo, que Louis sea referida por el libro sobre el fascismo, pero que en el momento de tratar este tema ni Louis ni crı́tico alguno sean finalmente citados. El Borges de Boldy es el Borges anarco-liberal e irónico, el intelectual lúcido de doble linaje, que alcanzó una cumbre de la narración universal en Ficciones y El Aleph, y que por esomismomerece un libro acompañante. Desde el inicio, Borges recibe el lugar de héroe de las letras, y su obra es leı́da como un consagrado objeto de desciframiento, tarea que Boldy cumple delicada y tenazmente. Por estosmotivos, el volumen deBoldymerece ser colocado junto a Borges and His Fiction de Gene Bell-Villada, como una nueva introducción en inglés al Borges canónico, útil para el aula y lector curioso.

State planning and the public health sector in Argentina 1946–1955: Successes, failures and contradictions

Abstract During the Peronist period, 1946–1955, Argentine national public health authorities, under the energetic leadership of Dr Ramön Carrillo, attempted to provide for the physical, mental, and social health of the population by means of the establishment of a unified, centralised state health system. This project was a major departure from the pluralist unplanned model of the past, and the various systems that followed the overthrow of Peron, most immediately the pluralist model based on decentralised planning that was initiated in 1957.1 The Carrillo project represents the closest correspondence between the nation state and the delivery of health services in Argentine history. However, as Juan Llovet has pointed out, the state is heterogeneous, multifaceted, and plagued by internal tensions. 2 This paper examines some of those tensions with regard to the public health sector during the Peronist period, and seeks to clarify why the Argentine state was unable to construct a fully centralised, unified health system, or to consolidate the advances made in this area of public welfare.

Steven Palmer and Iván Molina, eds, The Costa Rica Reader, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2004

Abstract This book is one of the Duke University series of countries of Latin American readers (others focus on Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Cuba) that are aimed at providing an overview of the history, politics and cultures of particular countries to students, academics and curious travellers, including those of an armchair persuasion. The objective is ambitious both in terms of the breadth of the audience and the scope of the content since it covers five hundred years ofhuman experience in that small area of Central America that we now know as Costa Rica. Methodologically, the book consists of a collection of primary and secondary source material, for the most part written texts, although there are some photographs including art works.

Neoliberalism and its discontents: A review of recent writings on the economic, political and social dilemmas of Argentina

Abstract Of all the turns to neoliberalism in Latin America, the most surprising in terms of intensity and rejection ofthe Import Substitution Industrialisation (lSI) model of development has been that of Argentina. This turn was not something that happened overnight. The military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 embraced the tenets of monetarism and reduced tariffs, lowered wages, and overvalued the peso, resulting in the bankruptcy of many national industrial firms that could not compete with imports, and a comcomitant crisis for exporters which eventually lost the government the support of many in the agro-industrial sector who had been its most fervent admirers. But the military did not shrink the state sector, in part due to its own involvment in production and in part because it relied on at least the passivity of the state sector and many of the unionised who, since the mid-1940s, had remained loyal to classical Peronism and its dream of national development.

Kevin Foster,Fighting Fictions: War, Narrative and National Identity, London, Pluto Press, 1999, 288pp.

Abstract War, one would like to think, has its reasons, or at least its beguiling justifications, but the Falkland/Malvinas conflict to most outsiders appeared bizarre in the extreme. Fought over a bunch of islands in the bitterly cold South Atlantic by, on the one hand, a Latin American country in the grip of a vicious military dictatorship, and, on the other, a fading imperialist power anchored in the North Atlantic 8000 miles away and edging, however uneasily, toward greater integration with Europe, the suffering and the deaths of the combatants looked unnecessary and pointless. Sure, there was all that wool, the fishing rights, and the possibility of oil, but neither the Argentine nor British leaders advanced resources as a motive, and the costs of maintenance of sovereignty by either could well outweigh the income to be wrung from that harsh environment especially given the obvious need for a greater military presence than had existed prior to the Argentine invasion in early April 1982. In a gross sense, the reasons were obvious. For the Argentine military it was a last throw of the dice given the perilous state of the economy and the blood on its hands, and for Margaret Thatcher it was an opportunity to reveal her toughness. However, as Kevin Foster argues, while these explanations, in hindsight, appear determinant, they are not sufficient to explain fully the tragedy. After all, the British could have rewritten their history to emphasise their role in decolonisation, and both sides could have reached some agreement to avoid armed conflict—there were plenty of willing mediators.