Rural Latin America in Transition: Development and Change in Mexico and Venezuel

Ray Watters is a geographer and one of the founders of the Wellington School of Geography established along with figures such as Keith Buchanan, Terry McGee and Harvey Franklin. He established a program of internationally recognized research and publication spanning work in Latin America, Pacific Islands, Asia and New Zealand, and involved the establishment of the journal Pacific Viewpoint (now Asia Pacific Viewpoint), and as editor for 20 years. Early interests in agricultural systems shifted to wider concerns for the structural conditions that conditioned the lives of rural people inhibiting their progress.
Those of us who work in that school now recognize and seek to extend that legacy. Ray has maintained a remarkable record of research and publication through to the present.’

–John Overton, Wellington Director of Development Studies, School of Geography, Environmental and Earth Science at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; PHD Cambridge University, Fulbright Scholar, Distinguished New Zealand Geographer Award, Senior Professor

This book provides an in-depth and broad study on rural Latin America over a 60-year period. Using a case study approach of Mexico and Venezuela, peasants and lower rural classes are examined at the local, meso and national levels. Additionally, the study analyzes government policies, development, and leadership in each country. Latin America has tried to ride the waves of globalization, worldwide economic and environmental crises; the author examines Mexico and Venezuela's relations with the political hegemony of superpowers like the US, EU and China. The material will appeal to researchers, graduate students and policy makers in the fields of rural development, Latin American politics, and international relations.

Ray Watters is Emeritus Associate Professor at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. As a geographer/anthropologist he started his career studying shifting agriculture for the Food and Agriculture Organization in Venezuela, Mexico, and Peru. He has led projects for the United Nations and various governments of developing countries. Many of his studies involved geographic, historical, anthropological, and economic analyses, as well as village fieldwork on peasantry. Research projects he led resulted in ten major reports.