Rural Latin America in Transition: Development and Change in Mexico and Venezuela

by Ray Watters

Overview

This book provides an in-depth and broad study on rural Latin America over a 60-year period. Using a case study approach of Mexico and Venezuela, peasants and lower rural classes are examined at the local, meso and national levels. Additionally, the study analyzes government policies, development, and leadership in each country. Latin America has tried to ride the waves of globalization, worldwide economic and environmental crises; the author examines Mexico and Venezuela's relations with the political hegemony of superpowers like the US, EU and China. The material will appeal to researchers, graduate students and policy makers in the fields of rural development, Latin American politics, and international relations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030650353
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	01/28/2021
Series:	Governance, Development, and Social Inclusion in Latin America
Edition description:	1st ed. 2021
Pages:	322
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ray Watters is Emeritus Associate Professor at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. As a geographer/anthropologist he started his career studying shifting agriculture for the Food and Agriculture Organization in Venezuela, Mexico, and Peru. He has led projects for the United Nations and various governments of developing countries. Many of his studies involved geographic, historical, anthropological, and economic analyses, as well as village fieldwork on peasantry. Research projects he led resulted in ten major reports.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Working in Latin America: The Paradoxes of Developmentalism.- Chapter 3. The Agroecological Revolution.- Chapter 4. Southern Mexico: Revolution, Agrarian Reform and Rural Development.- Chapter 5. Mexico in the New Emerging World Order.- Chapter 6. Recent Developments in Mexico Can Mexico Remake itself? - Chapter 7. Economic Backwardness in the Venezuelan Andes.- Chapter 8. The Situation in the Llanos.- Chapter 9. Venezuela Revisited: 1979 and 2010: Betancourt.- Chapter 10. The Economic Crisis and the Chávez Presidency.- Chapter 11. Venezuela 2013–2019: Chaos and decline.- Chapter 12. Maduro Makes a Mockery of Democracy in Venezuela.- Chapter 13. Epilogue.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Ray Watters is a geographer and one of the founders of the Wellington School of Geography. In this school, along with figures such as Keith Buchanan, Terry McGee and Harvey Franklin, he established a program of internationally recognized research and publication. It spanned work in Latin America, the Pacific Islands, Asia and New Zealand, and involved the establishment of the journal Pacific Viewpoint (now Asia Pacific Viewpoint), which Ray edited for some 20 years. Early interests in agricultural systems shifted to wider concerns for the structural conditions that conditioned the lives of rural people and inhibited their progress. Those of us who work in that school now recognize and seek to extend that legacy. Ray has maintained a remarkable record of research and publication through to the present. We also marvel at the way Ray Watters has continued his research and writing well into his retirement.” (John Overton, Wellington Director of Development Studies, School of Geography, Environmental and Earth Science at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; PHD Cambridge University, Fulbright Scholar, Distinguished New Zealand Geographer Award, Senior Professor)