A case study of why Third World countries are still poor, the premise of this book is that while some progress has been made in transforming the political economy of Ecuador, certain behaviors, beliefs and attitudes have kept the country from developing in ways that otherwise would have been possible. As the author asserts, for almost five centuries the cultural habits of Ecuadorian citizens have constituted a stumbling block for individual economic success. Still, he concludes, people's cultural values are not immutable: inconvenient customs can be changed or influenced by the economic...

Written by former President of Ecuador Osvaldo Hurtado, Dictatorships in Twenty-First-Century Latin America explores the most important Latin American political phenomenon to emerge in the first two decades of the twenty-first century: democratic governments elected by citizens have become autocratic governments through the manipulation of the constitutional order and the legislative and judicial functions. Unlike traditional Latin American dictatorships, those of the twenty-first century have not been established by the military but by civilian politicians who were voted into power by the...