Background
Initially launched by Documentation française in 1964 on the initiative of Alain Touraine, Problèmes d’Amérique latine was taken on by Institut Choiseul in 2002 and then by Editions ESKA in 2013. It is one of the leading French-language journals on contemporary political, economic, social, and cultural developments in Latin America and the only specialist journal on Latin American affairs to be published exclusively in French. Daniel Pécaut was the journal’s editor for some forty years, up until 2005. He was succeeded by Marie-France Prévôt-Schapira, from 2006 to 2010, and then by Gilles Bataillon and Évelyne Mesclier, who edited the magazine until 2017. The journal is currently edited by Gilles Bataillon and Sylvain Souchaud.
Content
The journal publishes four to five issues quarterly, sometimes on a particular country or region, and sometimes on Latin America as a whole. Issues devoted to a country or region include contributions from sociology, economics, geography, anthropology, and political science, most often focusing on socio-political developments at the end of a presidential term. The special thematic issues favor approaches that are sometimes exclusively political and sometimes have a more sociological, anthropological, socio-political, or socio-historical perspective. Socio-economic topics are tackled less frequently. The aim of the special issues is to juxtapose articles on individual countries in order to provide a comparative perspective. These issues are accompanied by varia (two to three articles per issue), which either expand on and complement the subjects addressed in previous issues or open up a discussion on subjects hitherto little explored by the journal. In these special issues there are also book reviews and shorter articles on the current situation in Latin America. Originally focusing exclusively on current affairs, the journal now also addresses literary, historical, and anthropological issues in order to root the analysis of the present day in the medium and long term. For this reason, historians, specialists in Latin American literature, and Latin American writers are now invited to contribute to the journal.
Be it special issues, varia, reviews, or shorter articles, the journal has always chosen to favor informative and descriptive articles and to avoid what seems to have become the scourge of the social sciences: jargon and methodological or theoretical question-begging. Our aim is to describe developments in Latin American societies, while accepting that phenomena can be contradictory or open to doubt.
The aim of the editorial board and the editors is to include both varia and shorter texts in special issues, as we consider it important to offer readers both a series of articles that focus on one theme and a number of other texts on quite different topics. A large proportion of our articles are provided by foreign colleagues, most of whom are Latin American, and we maintain close relations with the leading Latin American journals. We believe it is vital to enter into dialogue with the Latin American social sciences, whose richness and promise are too often undervalued. This approach, inaugurated by Daniel Pécaut and facilitated by Documentation française, is much more difficult to implement today. In the past, the journal was able to fund five or six translations per issue; today it can only count on two.
Organization
The two current editors were unanimously appointed by the members of the editorial board. Similarly, members of the editorial board and the scientific committee are chosen by the board itself and the two editors. Editorial policy is set by the editorial board and the editors, who meet nine to ten times a year to both monitor the preparation of the four annual issues and to draw up a calendar for the next two years. The special issues are supplemented by varia, short notes, and book reviews, and are published as and when they are completed.
Special issues, like varia and reviews, are generally commissioned from authors, either by the person responsible for coordinating the issue, or the editorial board, or the editors. All published articles are read and evaluated by two readers. Unsolicited articles are rarely sent to the journal.
