Foreign Affairs en Espanol.

THIS MONTH, INSTEAD OF REVIEWING A book, I'm casting a critical eye on a magazine. It's a new publication, Foreign Affairs en Espanol (Foreign Affairs in Spanish), and I've recently read the second issue, Summer 2001, with great pleasure. According to the masthead, Foreign Affairs en Espanol is a joint project between the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and the Instituto Technologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM). Launched in Mexico in December, its mission is to encourage debate and reflection on international political issues in Latin America via articles by intellectuals, sociologists and political leaders, among others.

Foreign Affairs has been published in English since 1922. Many consider it the world's foremost journal on U.S. foreign policy, as well as global economic and political issues. The journal has a circulation of 220,000 copies, 110,000 of which are published in English, 20,000 in Japanese and 90,000 in Portuguese. Now, another 5,000 issues have been added to that number--the first printing of the new Spanish-language edition. Just more than half the articles recently appeared in the English-language edition. The rest are written exclusively for the edition.

Why do I make an exception in my review this month? Because Foreign Affairs en Espanol is an extraordinary resource, aimed at a Latin American population hungry for new and original visions. The timing for a serious and daring intellectual debate is good, now that the fiery discourse of left-wing revolutionaries and guerrillas--once determined to take their countries by storm--has all but died out. Indeed, those who continue to listen to their supposedly redemptive rhetoric are few. Instead, reality revealed that rhetoric to be a disguise for a very different plan: The desire of a privileged few, the so-called "vanguard of the proletariat," to impose absolute power on the majority.

Moreover, in a clear example of the irony of history--an irony which seems to poke fun at humanity almost constantly--pure, hardcore capitalism, with market forces as a panacea for socioeconomic ills and inequalities, has hit rocky ground.

Marxism in Latin America failed spectacularly. (Only a politician who loves excess as much as Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez could possibly refer to the Cuban political system as a "sea of happiness.") But, after two decades of non-stop effort, free-market philosophies, while improving the macroeconomic landscape, have not resolved Latin America's epidemic problems either. Poverty, under-development, unemployment, corruption, ethnic marginalization and a growing divide between the elite and the majority continue to define the region. Neither Marx nor Adam Smith has managed to work in Latin America.

In referring to this dilemma shortly before his death, Mexican writer and poet Octvaio Paz said that the 20th century was ending with a great question mark. Foreign Affairs en Espanol steps out onto the stage of ideas at an historic moment. The magazine explores the topics of our time, like the fragility of Latin American democracies, or "democracies with adjectives," as Argentine writer and professor Natalio R. Botana has pointed out. "Low-intensity democracies, elected-but-hard-to-govern democracies (or, in the extreme, ungovernable), representative democracies, non-liberal or illiberal democracies, imperfect democracies, immature democracies" is how he characterizes them.

Other themes the magazine treats include the clash of cultures and identities, the problem of vast inequality in the distribution of wealth and the importance of access to natural resources and raw materials in order to compete globally.

Latin America is an extraordinary repository of political thought and intellectually rigorous publications. This new magazine joins them, and does so with the ambitious goal of establishing a ubiquitous presence throughout the continent. In accord with our technology-driven times, Foreign Affairs en Espanol also has a Web site, www.foreignaffairs-esp.org.

Judging from what I have read in its pages, pondering where Latin America is going--as the publication's director, Rafael Hernandez de Castro, says, "documenting the paths Latin Americans should follow"--is time well-spent.