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Central and South America
Here are some of our favorite guides and literature on Mexico, Central and South America that we have previously featured on our home page.

The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes On a Latin American Journey
Ernesto
( Ocean Books, $14.95)

In 1952, out of medical school in Argentina, Ernesto "Che" Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado decide to travel around South America on a motorcycle. The journey, once the motorcycle died, involved more hitchhiking than motorcycling. In his descriptions of bike accidents, generosity, asthma attacks and working with lepers, Che demonstrates a talent for writing. It reads like a slow wakening: his political consciousness is barely a glimmer here. It is in his second trip through South America, recounted in his Back on the Road (Otra Vez) that the political consciousness sharpens and radicalizes.
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Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World
Peter Chapman
( Canongate, $24.00)

Of the more than 300 varieties of bananas, the Cavendish variety is the one constant on supermarket shelves. Large and thick skinned, it was the banana of choice on the United Fruit Company's plantations throughout Central America. Unlike salt or cod, subjects covered by Mark Kurlansky, banana distribution and consumption is very much the story of modern global capitalism and empire. Beginning in Costa Rica, the United Fruit Company built the railroads, bribed the politicians and acquired the lands that gave it control over the banana market in the 20th century. Author Peter Chapman's book shows how the banana, once enjoyed only by America's elite, became the world's most popular fruit. He follows the many tentacles of the company in this brutal history. Its native and imported labor from China, Italy and the West Indies was paid in scrip, redeemable at company stores. It encouraged the coup against the Arbenz government in Guatemala and participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. It did business with Somoza and the powerful families of El Salvador. Now known as Chiquita Brands International, the Company was most recently in the news for successfully at the World Trade Organization the European Union over protectionism. The book's title in England, Jungle Capitalists is a fitting description of the bare-knuckled story of the once notorious company.
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God's Middle Finger:Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre
Richard Grant
( Free Press, $15.00)

Richard Grant had long been fascinated by the Sierra Madre, a vast land of extremes that lies over much of western Mexico. It is a range marked by barrancas, steep-sided ravines where one can stand on snowy peaks and look down onto the backs of tropical birds flying over rainforest canopy. This forbidding geography provides refuge for outlaws and narcotraficantes as well as bored, drunk rednecks. Grant encounters all of these in his journey, and his fate often depends on their whims. The book opens with the author literally being hunted for sport. Later he finds himself forced to snort cocaine with crooked cops in a dirty cantina. He takes his brushes with danger in stride, turning nerve-wracking experiences into enlightening anecdotes.
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The Yage Letters: Redux
William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg
( City Lights Books, $13.95)

This is a great collection of writings sure to interest any Burroughs junky. Written in 1953, the “letters” between William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg chronicle the South American journey taken by the former in his search for the shamanic hallucinogen "yage." With a distinctive and raw prose style, Burroughs relates his experiences and reflects upon the profound social and spiritual implications of his insight. Included in the letters is material that would later appear in Naked Lunch, as well as the shorts “Roosevelt After Inauguration,” and “Am I Dying, Meester?” The new edition also includes an introduction by editor Oliver Harris as well as previously unpublished writings by both Burroughs and Ginsberg. Conceived as a literary work and not in fact as real correspondence, the letters give a vivid impression of the immediacy in a reporting-out-of–the-jungle style. In this prose, Burroughs attempts to push outside the confines of normal consciousness and question the presumed authority of the individual ego. The result is a fascinating account of this search for the ultimate fix- the quest for understanding, for “God’s Own Medicine”.
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