Many of the processes that are reshaping the global political economy find stark expression in Latin America—the extraction of key minerals for green technologies, the transformation of vast tracts of land for monocrop agriculture, the ravages of climate catastrophe, the rise of the new right, and the dynamics of Great Power competition. Amidst the mixed legacies of twentieth-century Global South development, the tensions of trends of the world-system are now concentrated in the region.

In Meridional, a monthly newsletter column, Fernando Rugitsky takes his cues from Gramsci’s “meridional questions” to situate the latest developments in a planetary context.