Kelly Bauer, Negotiating Autonomy: Mapuche Territorial Demands and Chilean Land Policy (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), ix + 179 pp.

Abstract

production of human resources for health and the island’s disaster preparedness programmes. These two chapters provide a deeper glimpse into the underlying values and structures of the Cuban healthcare system. However, this insight does not carry over into the only chapter about Central America, which looks at maternal health in Guatemala, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, with the remaining countries in this sub-region not represented in this book. Although there is abundant data about maternal health and the services these three countries can provide, the authors instead use diary and movie excerpts to channel the voices of mothers and the type of care they receive. Nevertheless, the authors come to the same conclusion as other scholars: ‘... racial and patriarchal attitudes continue to define the healthcare options available ... throughout the region’ (p. 9). This is not a new conclusion, but it is one that is very weakly supported by the data presented in the chapter. Part 4, on the Andean region, which covers Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia and Venezuela, dives deeply into pressing issues for the sub-region. It begins with a chapter on the politics of public health in postrevolutionary Bolivia, but also tackles discourses on transness and disability and the relationship between ancestral knowledge and modern medicine. Finally, Part 5, on the Southern Cone, helps us understand the development of some of the strongest healthcare systems in the region. This includes the underlying architecture and stakeholders that shaped the foundations of the Argentine health system, how it compares to the Chilean system and, most importantly, how the right to health exists in Brazil and Argentina. Given that this right is enshrined in most, if not all, the constitutions of the region, this is timely and interesting, and leaves the reader wanting to know more about how these fit into the structure of all the health systems represented in this book. This book does well in meeting its overall aim of showing how the various national approaches to public health and healthcare delivery reveal lessons that go beyond the health sector and how historical, cultural, political and economic values shape the health system and how healthcare, in turn, shapes the history, the culture and the politics of Latin America.