Bolivia’s Elections Focus of King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center Panel, Dec. 1

New York University’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center will host “Bolivia—The Elections and Democracy in Historical Context,” a panel discussion, on Tuesday, December 1, 6 p.m., 53 Washington Square South (between Thompson and Sullivan Streets). Subways: A, B, C, D, E, F, V (West 4th Street). The event, which is free and open to the public, comes just prior to Bolivia’s December 6 elections. For more information, call 212.998.3650 or visit www.nyu.edu/kjc.

In 2005, Evo Morales and the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) won a victory of unprecedented dimensions in the history of Bolivian democracy. Depicted at home and abroad as representative of the indigenous and poor majority of the country, his government was closely associated with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. As Bolivia’s 2009 elections approach, this panel will ask how much the Bolivian experience of recent years responds to the country’s own history as well as to more recent regional developments: What were the lessons of the first MAS administration? How novel and radical were its policies? Can we expect a change in U.S.-Bolivian relations? Panelists include: NYU’s Sinclair Thomson, an associate professor of history, and Martín Sivak, a doctoral student who has written three books on the country; Brooke Larson, a history professor at SUNY Stony Brook; Laura Gotkowitz, an associate professor of history at the University of Iowa; and James Dunkerley, who holds the Andrés Bello Chair in Latin American Cultures and Civilizations at NYU this fall.

The panel discussion is part of a series organized by Dunkerley, a professor at the University of London. His published works include: Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America (1988); Americana: The Americas in the World around 1850 (2000); and Bolivia: Revolution and the Power of History in the Present (2007).