Margarita Fajardo, The World that Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), pp. 281, $39.95 hb; £31.95 hb.

Abstract

arrest in London in 1998 for internationally condemned human-rights crimes. Loxton frames his research questions broadly in terms of key debates regarding party-building and electoral politics in Latin America during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The four country case studies are based on an extensive examination of primary and secondary materials, and the author admirably supplements those materials with interviews with conservative party leaders (cited simply as ‘national UDI leader’, ‘former PAN leader’, and so forth) in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala. Labelling the interviewees more precisely would have avoided ambiguity concerning the number and the position of the individuals whose views Loxton solicited (did he interview the same ‘national UDI leader’ on the different dates cited, or do different dates indicate interviews with more than one national UDI leader?). The interviews are, nonetheless, invaluable for the insights they offer into party leaders’ motivations, their perceptions of foundational events in the histories of conservative ASPs, and the challenges that conservative political parties face when engaged in multiparty democratic electoral competition.