Redeemers: Ideas and Power in Latin America

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 centuries--and looks closely at how these ideas were expressed in the lives of influential revolutionaries, thinkers, poets, and novelists. Here are the Cuban Jose Mart; the Argentines Che Guevara and Evita Peron; political thinkers like Mexico's Jose Vasconcelos; and the writers Jose Enrique Rod, Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, and Gabriel Garca Marquez. Redeemers also highlights Mexico's Samuel Ruiz and Subcomandante Marcos, as well as Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez, 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.