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A more important issue for many Uruguayans involved the handling of economic policy by the Broad Front, a coalition of left-wing parties, with Uruguay registering average growth of nearly 6 percent a year during the last nine years. Even as growth slowed this year, cautious economic policies were seen as shielding the country from external shocks.

“Practically 70 percent of Uruguayans hold a positive or very positive view of the economic situation in the country,”

during his first term, Dr. Vázquez also governed with his own style, reserving one morning each week to continue practicing medicine.

An increase in violent crime also weighed on voters, and Mr. Lacalle Pou, the conservative challenger and son of a former president, ran on a platform seeking to crack down on crime, reduce inflation and improve Uruguay’s schools.

Spearheading the "no" vote in Colombia was former president and current senator Alvaro Uribe, whose father was killed by FARC rebels.

It has thrived as a stable democracy amid neighbors governed by leftist leaders.

his makes it even more important that the parties … continue to respect the ceasefire

More than 220,000 people have died on the battlefield or in massacres during the conflict between leftist guerrillas, government troops and right-wing paramilitaries.

Santos has used his two terms in office to open negotiations with rebel leaders in four years of talks.

The peace accord was indeed a major achievement and, although the referendum was a setback,

hopefully this award will help peace builders maintain the momentum needed to keep the process moving forward,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Director Dan Smith said in a statement.

They control fuel companies, television stations and public construction projects, which has many critics comparing his family to the right-wing Somoza dynasty that Mr. Ortega helped topple in 1979.

They complain they are broke and say the reason they are not more successful is that they do not have international aid, as they did during the Reagan administration.

Though Mr. Ortega enjoys strong support among the poor, he was widely criticized for constitutional changes that repealed term limits, allowing him to run this year for a third consecutive term.

The government denies that politically motivated rebels in the country still exist, despite occasional attacks on police stations and the killings of Sandinistas and known contras

“It is a silent, dirty war that is not recognized,” said Bishop Abelardo Mata, a Roman Catholic leader who has served as something of a mediator between the two sides.

Venezuela has provided Nicaragua with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of oil a year on preferential terms, and the government acknowledges that much of it is invested in private companies closely tied to the Ortega family and its allies.

“The Ortega-Murillo family is getting richer while the country people starve,” a rebel who calls himself Commander Rafael said about the president and his wife, Rosario Murillo

He said the Ortega administration must be doing something right. In January, the World Bank projected Nicaragua’s economy to grow by 4.2 percent in 2016, one of the highest rates in Latin America.

It is no wonder: 38 percent of the Venezuelan oil is used to fund social projects. More than 35,000 houses have been distributed among the poor in the past two years, according to a government website. World Bank statistics show that the poverty level dropped six percentage points from 2005 to 2009.

“He might have an expensive car, but the other presidents before him had their luxuries but did not help the people,” Veronica Aguilar, 55, said of Mr. Ortega.

The rebels are not buying it. In a sign of the new allegiance the socialist administration has to the country’s richest people, the government has lifted import taxes for luxury items like yachts and helicopters.

Last week three Americans, working for the US Department of Homeland Security, were expelled from Nicaragua without explanation.

After more than a decade out of power Ortega was re-elected in 2006 and has tried to reintroduce socialist policies. He has also announced plans for a huge canal, to rival the Panama Canal, which would be funded by a Chinese consortium.

Several Latin American leaders would like to succeed him, but no one meets the necessary conditions: Cuba's blessing, a fat wallet, a country that carries enough demographic, political and economic weight, potent charisma, a willingness to take almost limitless risks, and sufficient autocratic control to allow him or her to devote major time to permanent revolution away from home.

Cuba has made Venezuela into its foreign-policy proxy, the Castro brothers need Caracas to remain the capital of the movement for it to retain any vitality. While Cuba is dependent on the roughly 100,000 barrels of heavily subsidized oil Chávez's regime supplies to Cuba daily, the island nation has a grip on Venezuela's intelligence apparatus and social programs. Chávez himself acknowledged last year that there are almost 45,000 Cuban "workers" manning many of his programs, though other sources speak of an even larger number. This strong connection allows Cuba to exercise a vicarious influence over many countries in the region. Caracas's clout in Latin America stems from Petrocaribe, a mechanism for helping Caribbean and Central American countries purchase cheap oil, and ALBA, an ideological alliance that promotes "21st century socialism."

Critical in all of this is the money at Maduro's disposal. The sales of PDVSA, the state-owned oil cash cow, amounted to $124.7 billion in 2011, of which one-fifth went to the state in the form of taxes and royalties, and another fourth was channeled directly into a panoply of social programs. This kind of management makes for very bad economics, a reason why the company needs to resort to debt to fund its basic capital expenditures, and for decreasing productivity,

China has helped mitigate the impact. The China Development Bank and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China have lent Caracas $38 billion to fund some social programs, a bit of infrastructure spending, and purchases of Chinese products and services. Another $40 billion has been promised to fund part of the capital expenditures needed to maintain the flow of oil committed to Beijing.

“If I were teaching this in a course,” said Merilee Grindle, president of the Latin American Studies Association and director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, “I would take his comments, add them in and use them to generate a far more interesting discussion about how we see and interpret events at different points in time.” And that seems to be exactly what many professors plan to do.

“Open Veins” has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has sold more than a million copies. In its heyday, its influence extended throughout what was then called the third world, including Africa and Asia, until the economic rise of China and India and Brazil seemed to undercut parts of its thesis.In the United States, “Open Veins” has been widely taught on university campuses since the 1970s, in courses ranging from history and anthropology to economics and geography. But Mr. Galeano’s unexpected takedown of his own work has left scholars wondering how to deal with the book in class.

“Reality has changed a lot, and I have changed a lot,” he said in Brazil, adding: “Reality is much more complex precisely because the human condition is diverse. Some political sectors close to me thought such diversity was a heresy. Even today, there are some survivors of this type who think that all diversity is a threat. Fortunately, it is not.”

In the mid-1990s, three advocates of free-market policies — the Colombian writer and diplomat Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, the exiled Cuban author Carlos Alberto Montaner and the Peruvian journalist and author Álvaro Vargas Llosa — reacted to Mr. Galeano with a polemic of their own, “Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot.” They dismissed “Open Veins” as “the idiot’s bible,” and reduced its thesis to a single sentence: “We’re poor; it’s their fault.”

Mr. Montaner responded to Mr. Galeano’s recent remarks with a blog post titled “Galeano Corrects Himself and the Idiots Lose Their Bible.” In Brazil, Rodrigo Constantino, the author of “The Caviar Left,” took an even harsher tone, blaming Mr. Galeano’s analysis and prescription for many of Latin America’s ills. “He should feel really guilty for the damage he caused,”