THE LATIN LEFT: PARTIDO, PERSONALISMO, Y SOCIALISMO

Andrew Kahn

DESCRIPTION:It is commonplace for media gurus in the U.S. to describe Latin America as democratic, market-based, capitalist-driven, and middle-class consumer-oriented. Certain countries fit this description better than others, and they include Columbia, Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina. Other nations, however, have moved in a different direction; Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Bolivia for example. The Latin American Left ranges across a spectrum of Socialist ideologies from Marxism-Leninism in Communist Cuba, to the National Liberation Movement of the FSLN in Nicaragua, to the capitalist-based social-welfare worker’s parties in Brazil and Peru. This series will examine today’s left-leaning trend in Latin America through the profiles of seven nations and their relations with EL Norte, the United States.

EIGHT LECTURES:

1. Fidelismo is slowly fading in Cuba as the government eases some restrictions on private ownership
   
   
2. Venezuela’s state-owned enterprises where oil is not enough and Chavez is too much
   
   
3. Civil rights abuses, militarism, and Rafael C orrea’s political paranoia in mile-high Ecuador
   
   
4. The return of the S andinistas to Nicaragua fails to make a difference
   
   
5. Peru’s “Alvarado Socialism” replaced by a thriving market-based capitalist economy with a social conscience
   
   
6. President Morales’ Bolivian state oil and gas monopoly and the power of Indian cocoa farmers
   
   
7. The Brazilian miracle, paying for government sponsored programs for the poor with capitalist dollars
   
   
8. The Latin Left and the United States - good and bad neighbors

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION: Andrew Kahn has studied political and social science on the undergraduate level at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and on the graduate level at the Universities of Pittsburgh and Maryland, and at New York’s New School University. He has taught at St. Cloud University in Minnesota and Western Connecticut University. He was a James Madison Fellow in Constitutional Law at the University of Indiana, and a Commonwealth Fellow in American and European History at Swarthmore and Haverford Colleges in Pennsylvania. Mr. Kahn helped found AEGIS, the Association for Education in Global/International Studies, at Stanford University. Over the past several years, Mr. Kahn has taught a variety of global-issue courses and delivered lectures for the Lifelong Learning Society at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) Boca.