Redeemers: ideas and power in Latin America (1st ed.)

In Redeemers, acclaimed historian Enrique Krauze presents the major ideas that have formed the modern Latin American political mind during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuriesand looks closely at how these ideas were expressed in the lives of influential revolutionaries, thinkers, poets, and novelists.

Here are the Cuban Jos Mart; the Argentines Che Guevara and Evita Pern; political thinkers like Mexicos Jos Vasconcelos; and the writers Jos Enrique Rod, Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, and Gabriel Garca Mrquez.

Redeemers also highlights Mexicos Samuel Ruiz and Subcomandante Marcos, as well as Venezuelas president Hugo Chvez, and their influence on contemporary Latin America.In his brilliant, deeply researched history, Enrique Krauze uses the range of these extraordinary lives to illuminate the struggle that has defined Latin American history: an ever-precarious balance between the ideal of democracy and the temptation of political messianism.