Many of the processes that are reshaping the globe find stark expression in Latin America—the extraction of key minerals for green technologies, the transformation of vast tracts of land for monocrop agriculture, the ravages of climate catastrophe, the rise of the new right, and the dynamics of Great Power competition. Amidst the mixed legacies of twentieth-century global South development, the tensions and trends of the international political economy are now concentrated in the region.
In Meridional, a monthly newsletter column, Fernando Rugitsky takes his cues from Gramsci’s “meridional questions” to situate the latest developments in a planetary context.
The Economic Consequences of the War
As negotiations and a so-called tenuous ceasefire place the war on Iran in a holding pattern of destruction and misery, it can seem misguided to...
Soy Republics
Corporate concentration and the far right in South America
The region's role as a key soy exporter has empowered reactionary politics and fuelled ecological resistance, in the biome and beyond.
Pinto’s Lesson
Styles of development in Latin America
Reconciling cepalino and dependency theory, Aníbal Pinto developed a powerful framework for understanding the internal fractures in the working class.
Battlefield Amazonia?
The political economy of the Brazilian rainforest
How the PT's environmental crackdown undermined its own ambitions for the biome.
Matrices of Empire
Explaining the assault on Venezuela
Washington's campaign to weaken Chinese influence in Latin America is crucial context for its abduction of Maduro. Will its aggression backfire?
Meridional
A new monthly newsletter on Latin America’s political economy
A new monthly newsletter on Latin America’s political economy. In 2020, the late Bruno Latour remarked that “Brazil is today what Spain was in 1936,...