The decade between 2010 and 2020 has been a time of great transformations and turbulence in Latin America. The so-called "pink tide" of leftist leaders collapsed and was replaced by right-wing governments, as well as a boom in authoritarian populism. We have witnessed a disturbing period in which economic inequalities have also deepened, the devastation of nature has accelerated, and widespread discontent of large sections of the population has manifested itself in social outbursts.
The years of the spiral. Chronicles of Latin America brings together Jon Lee Anderson's journalistic work over the decade, during which he has traveled from rivers in the Amazon and guerrilla camps in Colombia, to a dozen presidential palaces. He has interviewed sicarios, novelists and representatives in order to offer a mosaic of unmatched proportions. These more than forty chronicles record phenomena such as haiti's devastating earthquake, historic Colombian peace agreements, and the precarious restoration of relations between the United States and Cuba. Here appear characters such as Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, Fidel Castro, Dilma Rousseff, Jair Bolsonaro, Manuel Noriega and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, among many others. From a just distance between journalistic neutrality, an insatiable curiosity, and a willingness to personally approach sometimes extremely extreme realities, Jon Lee Anderson has produced a record of great breadth and significance to come to understand what happened in one of the most convulsive decades in recent Latin American history.