Sept. 11: The View from Latin America
Essays by Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira, Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín, Monica Hirst, Farid Kahhat, Aldo Marchesi, and Luis Rubio

New volume from the SSRC and the New Press: Critical Views of September 11

Following the events of September 11, the Social Science Research Council began an initiative to bring social science perspectives to bear on the events themselves, their precursors, and what has come after. This initiative aimed to build a set of essays for teachers of social science, and potentially for journalists and others to bring together a wide range of disciplinary and analytic perspectives, as well as various global vantage points. Several social scientists from Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as researchers with experience and interest in the region, agreed to participate in this initiative, and this section of the web site features essays that were contributed.

"Everybody is now learning that bombing errors are tolerable, and that legislation against civil liberties may be necessary. Certainly, several Colombian actors started to produce (at the speed of light) new legislation tending in this direction as soon as they felt that the gates were open. For the US government, criticizing and restricting such actions by others will become increasingly difficult."

--Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín, "Learning about Terrorism in Colombia"

"The peculiarity of the charges against the United States is that they don’t match with either the way America normally behaves or much less so with the way Americans see themselves."

--Luis Rubio, "Terrorism and Freedom:  An Outside View"