Steve Striffler and I were each hired as assistant professors at the University of Arkansas in the spring of 1999, Steve in anthropology, and I in history. By the time I arrived in Fayetteville, two weeks before the start of classes in August of that year, Steve was already leading a job action by faculty, staff, and graduate assistants, protesting against recent antilabor measures taken by university administration. He showed immediately that he did not hesitate to put his money where his mouth is â a commitment further revealed by his subsequent work on the line in a chicken processing plant as he prepared to write Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of Americaâs Favorite Food (2007).Strifflerâs history of the US Leftâs initiatives toward solidarity with exploited workers in Latin America over the past fifty years comes from this commitment, and is both a dispassionate scholarly study and a clear-eyed assessment of where we went wrong, with âweâ being those in the US who have committed their energies to solidarity with Latin America. Striffler tracks the evolution of attitudes and initiatives among North American academics, lay activists, union leaders, and NGO workers, among others, toward inequality and oppression in Latin America, marshaling a wealth of scholarly evidence in the service of an acute scholarly argument. But he also reveals some frustration with roads not taken, and an understanding that we must do better.Given this personal connection to the arc of the story, it is not surprising that Striffler is most demanding when assessing the Latin American forays of the US Left from the late 1980s through the early 2000s, the years in which Striffler himself made the transition from undergraduate through doctorate and into a prolific career as an engaged academic. Striffler turns a gimlet eye on solidarity with the Zapatistas, the expansion of fair trade coalitions, anti-sweatshop initiatives and other targeted corporate campaigns in this period. He recognizes both the aspirations and achievements of these initiatives, acknowledging that anti-sweatshop campaigns, for example, could not only make Kathie Lee Gifford cry (196â97), but could lead to improved conditions in specific factories and supply chains. But Striffler considers these largely isolated stabs at the hydra of neoliberalism. This was the pernicious genius of neoliberalism, atomizing workers and communities while facilitating the unchecked flow of capital. Small victories tended to be wiped away quickly.Striffler suggests that the US Left erred in implicitly accepting Margaret Thatcherâs TINA dictum â âthere is no alternativeâ to the shrinking of the state, loosening of restraints on capitalist exploitation, and the pursuit of growth (measured in shareholder value) to the exclusion of all other concerns. The solidarity initiatives of the late 1980s through the early 2000s were marked by acceptance â sometimes begrudging, sometimes willing â of an understanding of the inefficacy of the state. Rather than seeking to apply sustained pressure on the US government and/or facilitate sustained pressure on Latin American governments, activists turned to NGOs or nascent social media campaigns. What was the point of pressing for legislative or regulatory change when governments seemed to be either eager allies of corporations or hopelessly weak, or both?Striffler argues that this turn away from the state created the illusion of creative, successful, targeted campaigns, while making broad alliances unimaginable in the short term. This is persuasive but also tinged with overly rigorous self-criticism. Activists in the 1990s were charting a course between the shoals of corporate green-washing and the depths of a massive expansion of privatized armed violence throughout the hemisphere. As Striffler points out, corporations were quick to capitalize on fair trade certifications, casting their value in doubt and posing challenges for activists dedicated to expanding fair trade principles while attempting to challenge corporate power. At the same time, US activists dedicated to more radical change were confronted by the 1996 case of Lori Berenson, to remember one example. Berenson was condemned to a life sentence for an affiliation with Peruâs Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (MRTA) of ultimately indeterminate nature. (That the sentence was later commuted to twenty years did not change its implications for international observers.) The MRTA cadres that used Berensonâs rented Lima home as a safe house and arms cache suffered worse fates, only increasing the power of the episodeâs implications as a cautionary tale. In this context, the allure of targeted NGO campaigns and flexible solidarity campaigns is understandable. It is true that they offered little hope of staving off the greater depredations of neoliberal restructuring. But they made possible some positive change in an uncertain and shifting arena.The combined weight of such initiatives, moreover, did occasionally add up to something more substantive: the difference between an array of atomized in-groups and a loose-knit coalition is sometimes a matter of context and perspective. Throughout the 1990s, Brazilian leftists and their international allies lamented the rise of neoliberalism, characterized by a wave of privatizations and the shrinking of state protections. In retrospect, however, the NGO movement that transformed Brazilian politics in the period was relatively successful in applying pressure on the state for, among other things, the strengthening of a social safety net and the expansion of protections for vulnerable populations. The depredations of Brazilâs current reactionary government make clear that the 1990s were not so bad after all: neoliberal restructuring had pernicious consequences â including environmental repercussions that will be felt for decades â but it did not go unchecked. And the continued efforts of the veterans of that struggle, in international alliance, are vital to salvaging some of the gains of that period in the current context.If Strifflerâs account tends to sober reflection, it is nonetheless deeply persuasive. Striffler offers a commanding assessment of a half century of US solidarity initiatives with Latin America, establishing an illuminating historical periodization and diagnosis. But as Striffler indicates, this should not be considered a postmortem. It is instead a call to renewed action, to once again build broad alliances and exert pressure on the state to resist exploitation. Without doubt, such mobilization will need to embrace and expand the legacy of environmentalist campaigns initiated more cautiously in previous decades. The current political context is bleaker than it was in the early 1990s, for example. But this may make the terms of the conflict clearer, and the possibility for a transformative politics once again imaginable. The urgency of the need is beyond question. And Strifflerâs book provides a welcome analysis of the trajectory of previous initiatives, sometimes inspiring, sometimes sobering, always enlightening.