The liberation of Latin America
David Ransom thinks Latin Americans could be the first to
overturn a ruinous global orthodoxy.

I am the other
The old Argentina has fallen apart. David Ransom goes to Buenos Aires to see what's taking its place.

The tick and the time bomb
Michael McCaughan disentangles an explosive mix in Venezuela.

LATIN AMERICA - THE FACTS

Longing for Lula
A landslide has finally delivered Brazil's first-ever working-class President. Sue Branford joins the celebrations – but keeps her eyes on the prize.

Sound of the soul
If the Free Trade Area of the Americas is ever created, says
Jim Shultz, it won't be for want of resistance in Bolivia.

Enough already
Duncan Green on the first decade of the North American
Free Trade Agreement in Mexico.

The Divided States of Latin America
The price of disunity through the years.

Under the umbrella
Roberto Elissalde charts the rise, and compromise, of a 'Broad Front' in Uruguay.

Growing from the grassroots
A new alliance forged by indigenous peoples has joined the Government of Ecuador. Luis Angel Saavedra wonders how long they'll stay

Special report: The other Coke in Colombia
Lissa Rees reports on the call for a boycott of Coca Cola in
response to the mistreatment of workers in its bottling plants.

Buenos Aires, January. Half a world away the powerful gear up for war, here the economy is in tatters – but as South Americans from Guevara to Galeano would tell you, there’s always time for football. So I left David, the editor of this magazine, transcribing the previous day’s interviews and set out to visit the spiritual home of the most famous living Argentinean, Diego Armando Maradona.

I passed bespoke tailors and furriers with liquidación painted across the windows, bored shop assistants watching children pick over the garbage outside. Through the financial district, every bank bore graffiti labelling them ladrones – thieves. I crossed the Plaza de Mayo where the painted icons of the Mothers of the Disappeared sit in judgement before the Government headquarters. In the old dockyard quarter of La Boca, US tourists posed for photos with tango artistes beside the most evil-smelling, polluted river I’ve ever come across. This is your reward for being the IMF’s star pupil – everywhere the corrosive effects of inequality, as replicated through-out Latin America. Almost everywhere…

Luis, the guide at Boca Juniors’ stadium, was a typical porteño – charming, garrulous and possessed of a wry, slightly acid wit. He indicated four seats picked out in yellow, the best in the house: ‘Those belong to Maradona, he bought them in perpetuity.’
I imagined the nation’s hero, brought low by drug addiction, receiving his fanatical public. ‘He doesn’t attend many matches,’ Luis continued. ‘He can’t get the treatment he needs in Argentina. So now he lives in Cuba.’ And I’m sure Luis smiled at that point.

Ian Nixon
for the New Internationalist
Co-operative
iann@newint.org