In revisiting Latin America to gather impressions for this essay, I soon convinced myself that the most conspicuous characteristic of the region's recent experience is diversity and that the most interesting stories to be told are about specific, often contrasting experiences of individual countries. So, except for the first and last sections, I shall not deal here with Latin America in overall terms. Rather, I shall present a series of loosely connected and necessarily brief “exercises” in comparative political economy. Not surprisingly, primary attention will be given to the four countries I visited this time: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. My endeavor throughout will be to gain some perspective on current or recent issues by tying them into events and discussions of earlier decades.

This article focuses on three central impediments to police reform in Argentina, each of which has generated an important, yet distinct, paradox. First, although advocates of federalism argue that police reform facilitates innovation, in practice, reform efforts at one level of government in Argentina have been sabotaged by officials at other levels of government. Second, although electoral pressures have pushed police reform onto the policy agenda, these same pressures have also obstructed reform efforts because politicians depend on illicit party-police networks for campaign financing. Third, despite copious evidence of police involvement in criminal acts, Argentina's crime wave has energized conservative civil society groups whose demand for a heavy-handed response to crime has derailed the most promising attempts to restructure the police force.

Since the late 1980s, peasants throughout Central America have begun to coordinate political and economic strategy. Agriculturalists from the five republics that constituted “la patria grande” of Spanish Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica) as well as representatives from Panama and Belize have founded regional organizations that meet to compare experiences with free-market policies, share new technologies, develop sources of finance, and create channels for marketing their products abroad. They have also established a presence in the increasingly distant arenas where decisions are made that affect their livelihood. Small-farmer organizations now lobby at the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and regional summit meetings. Central American campesinos have attended numerous regional gatherings of agriculture ministers and presidents, as well as events like the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the 1995 Western Hemisphere Presidents' Summit in Miami, the 1995 World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, and the 1996 Food Security Summit in Rome.

This article contributes to feminist state theory and studies of women's police stations in Latin America by examining the processes shaping the multiple and changing positions of explicit alliance, opposition, and ambiguous alliance assumed by policewomen regarding feminists since the creation of the world's first women's police station in 1985 in São Paulo. While studies of women's police stations tend to overlook the political conjuncture, much of the literature on the state and gender explains the relationship between the state and women's movements as a function of the political regime. I argue for a more grounded feminist state theory, taking into account interactive macro and micro, local and international forces. As this case study demonstrates, policewoman-feminist relations evolve due to interactions between the political conjuncture, the hegemonic masculinist police culture, developments in the feminist discourse on violence against women, and the impact of the contact policewomen sustain with women clients.

This article explores the relationship among trade liberalization, deindustrialization, and income inequality in the more industrially advanced Latin American countries. It argues that, among the most important liberal reforms implemented during the 1980s and 1990s, trade reform was especially detrimental to equality because it accelerated deindustrialization. The analysis provides evidence to support this mechanism. Therefore, as the liberalization of trade increased, the deindustrialization process produced an increase in inequality. In short, evidence shows how the process of economic integration to the global market, as it took place, produced an increase in inequality through the destruction of formal employment.

Since 2010, legal gains for LGBTQI communities in Latin America have exposed the contradictions of inclusion under a rights-based approach to sexual citizenship.Expanding neoliberal economies and multicultural incorporation has yet to resolve persistent inequalities or ongoing gender-based violence, in particular for trans and travesti populations in the region. Rather than depend on the symbolic and material protections of the state, however, many trans and travesti activists, artists, and performers argue that since the state is interested in normalizing sexual relations and gendered identities through legal recognition, it cannot be a source of identification,safety, or freedom. Focusing on recent work by Susy Shock (Argentina) and Claudia Rodríguez (Chile), this article demonstrates that“monstering” (to monster) has become a crucial form of epistemological resistance to neoliberal politics of inclusion and recognition in Latin America and of opening up new possibilities of imagining collective belonging.

This paper demonstrates that in Latin America a significant portion of the increased legislative party system fragmentation since the 1980s is explained by the recent political incorporation of ethnic populations. Until now, scholars have likely not identified this relationship because they have not used the nuanced measures of ethnic fractionalization that account for internal diversity of indigenous populations and race, and because they have not focused on the time period when ethnic peoples were politically incorporated. In addition to demonstrating this relationship statistically, we use two case studies from Bolivia and Ecuador to illustrate how in recent years the dynamic relationship between ethnic groups and political parties in Latin American legislatures has changed and resulted in the statistical association between ethnic fractionalization and party system fragmentation that we observe.

As you know, we have an institution called the sexenio when everything changes.

And we're here now for six years. You know how we all come in and get thrown out at the sexenio.

If someone has a chief who is capable and has the prospects for a good future, then that person will probably think, “Perhaps I can go with him at the sexenio”; and it happens in reverse, too, if someone has a chief who is not particularly capable but who has influential friends, some will want to follow him. There are a lot of changes and it affects our program, especially when people stop working to pursue their futures.

El régimen militar (1973–1990) ha sido investigado en diversos ámbitos: político, jurídico, institucional, económico, derechos humanos, mediático, entre otros. Sin embargo, poco se ha indagado respecto a los cambios y alteraciones que experimentó el entorno estético cotidiano como consecuencia de la dictadura. Menos aún se ha investigado sobre aquellas actividades culturales y/o manifestaciones artísticas que fueron promovidas o apoyadas por el régimen militar. Éstas, analizadas desde una perspectiva de conjunto, podrían dar cuenta de aquellos rasgos que marcaron su producción simbólica, ya sea promoviendo ciertos modos de ver, ritos y sensibilidades o reprimiendo aquellas prácticas e imaginarios propios del sistema democrático. El presente artículo considera algunos antecedentes del golpe estético que vivió Chile entre los años 1973 y 1975, como consecuencia del golpe militar generado el 11 de septiembre de 1973. La expresión golpe estético simboliza el proceso de transformación y cambio experimentado en aspectos de la vida cotidiana, producto del quiebre que se produjo con el proyecto socio-cultural de la Unidad Popular (UP).

This article evaluates postelector al conflicts in Mexico’s Oaxaca state before and after the state government legally recognized usos y costumbres—local leader selection via traditional practices (rather than parties and secret ballots). Assessing usos y costumbres within the normative debate between multiculturalists and pluralists on incorporation of ethnic minorities, the article compares the level of postelectoral conflict in usos y costumbres and non-usos y costumbres municipalities. It argues that since such conflicts have increased in Oaxaca over the last decade while simultaneously diminishing dramatically in Mexico’s other 31 states, the cause is probably unique to Oaxaca. Conflict may be at least partially attributed to perverse implementation incentives created by the law’s provocation of conflicts requiring mediation (rather than judicial verdicts). While further research is needed to test normative claims that usos y costumbres increase governing institutions’ credibility and foster positive group identities, the article concludes that while the customary practices “experiment” has failed at least by one criterion, it may warrant reconsideration if customary elections can be viewed as a set of evolving, instrumental processes, rather than as fixed, static, and essentialist conditions.

The African influence on Latin American Spanish is undisputed, and yet the field of Afro-Hispanic linguistics is hampered by the lack of widespread Hispanic creole dialects, or even areas of widespread Afro-Hispanic language usage. A few tiny dialect pockets continue to exist, however, such as the palenquero dialect of Palenque de San Basilio in northern Colombia, and the special dialect of the negros congos of Panama's Caribbean coast; until the first decades of the twentieth century, a partially creolized Bozal Spanish (spoken by African slaves who had learned Spanish as a second language, and only imperfectly) was still to be found in Cuba as well as vestigially in Puerto Rico and perhaps the Dominican Republic. Given the geographical inaccessibility of many areas of Latin America containing large African populations, it is possible that additional traces of vestigial Afro-Hispanic language may still be found or may have recently disappeared.

The phenomenon of peasant revolt in the Andean area of South America has been both sustained and violent from Spanish colonial times to the present. The revolt of Túpac Amaru II, who led a rebellion against Spanish colonialism near Cuzco in 1780, has been the best-known incidence of this phenomenon, although the southern highlands region, sometimes known as the mancha india (“Indian stain”), was the center of numerous local revolts during the period 1860–1920, and the focus of several peasant land invasions during the two decades 1950–70.

Few periods in South American history have so captured the imagination and begged the attention of scholars as the Amazon rubber boom. For fifty years, the extraction of wild rubber from the jungles of the Amazon fueled unprecedented economic expansion in the region: per capita incomes in the Brazilian Amazon climbed by 800 percent; the regional population increased by more than 400 percent; urban centers and secondary towns blossomed along the river banks; and the vast Amazonian forest lands were integrated into national political spheres and the international market economy. But when low-cost rubber from British plantations in Asia flooded world markets in the 1910s, rubber prices plummeted, sharply curtailing financial returns from wild rubber extraction. The price shock drove scores of traders and export houses into bankruptcy when they were unable to collect debts that were based on the future value of rubber. Urban real estate prices crashed, and service industries withered along with their customers' incomes. By the early 1920s, the boom was over, and per capita income levels had shrunk to pre-boom levels. Today, nearly a century later, such incomes (in real terms) have yet to return to boom levels in many areas despite massive state investment in Amazonia.

Until now, discussions of theories of media and society or media and the state in the North American literature have been limited. The four theories of the press advanced by Fred Siebert, Wilbur Schramm, and Theodore Peterson cover the main approaches of Western liberal society, the libertarian and social responsibility models, and some aspects of the Eastern bloc in the “totalitarian” model. Under the heading of “authoritarian,” however, a number of very diverse systems are lumped together. One major variation seen in Brazil is the continued vitality of the corporatist model of state and society, which has distinct implications for the role of mass media. In particular, aspects of corporatism seem to be combining with aspects of democracy and mass mobilization politics in ways that shed light on the role of the media in constructing or undercutting ideological hegemony in the heterogeneous, class-divided societies of Latin America.

During the 1980s, the major security themes that Caribbean scholars studied were geopolitics, militarization, intervention, and instability. The interface between domestic and international politics led to linkages among some of these themes and their domestic, regional, and international dimensions. For example, the militarization of Grenada in the 1980s was predicated on the need to defend the Grenadian revolution against foreign intervention and local counterrevolution. Ironically, the same buildup created the climate that led to the self-destruction of the revolution and presented the United States with a golden opportunity to intervene. In doing so, the United States succeeded in fulfilling a preexisting geopolitical aim of its own. Elsewhere in the region, militarization and concerns about stability in Dominica, Barbados, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines raised security concerns within the Eastern Caribbean, where several countries created the Regional Security System (RSS) in 1982 to bolster subregional security and became willing accomplices of intervention when the United States intervened in Grenada a year later.

Insurgency has largely subsided in Central America, but the academic debate over the causes of the violence in the 1980s waxes hotter than ever. As scholars, we have an obligation to subject our theories to the acid test of reality. As individuals interested in the policy process, we must evaluate the outcomes of those policies, even though they are sometimes based on faulty readings of our theories. The increasingly rich body of literature and data available on Central America compels observers to move away from the speculation that dominated early scholarship on the region and toward serious empirical tests of our theories. In doing so, scholars will be in a position to evaluate the policies pursued by the United States and various Central American governments. My article in this journal on land tenure in El Salvador attempted to address both theory and policy with new data (Seligson 1995). Judging by the reactions of Martin Diskin and Jeffery Paige, the conclusions that I drew have succeeded in stimulating a rich debate.

This article suggests that transnational motives have remained key components of legitimation strategies for regional realignment in Latin America. Specifically, we assess the legitimation strategy of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and the associated political movement, Chavismo, as a recent case of transnational identity politics. Studies of Chavismo have stressed its role in the changing balance of power in early twenty-first-century Venezuela and the redrafting of global alliances, through a series of organizational moves and petrodollars. Combined with these political and economic boosters, Chavismo’s impact was sustained through a strategy that sought legitimation by drawing on earlier narratives of the solidarity of “Nuestramérica” (Our America), used in reshaping transnational networks within the region and beyond. This identity layer provided a basis for regional and international realignment and organizational creation, even if more recently it lost traction and became criticized for its unfulfilled promises and growing gap between rhetoric and implementation.

Gangs’ territorial control affects the lives of residents in thousands of neighborhoods across Latin America, particularly in northern Central American countries. I argue that gang dominance constrains the ability of neighborhood residents to mobilize politically and consequently resist gang violence through institutionalized channels. Living in gang-controlled neighborhoods results in fewer incentives and opportunities to make political elites accountable for one’s personal safety. Even residents who have already experienced crime firsthand are discouraged from turning to politics as a strategy to change the status quo. My theoretical insights identify mechanisms through which gangs’ neighborhood control affects nonelectoral and electoral participation. To test my hypotheses, I rely on census and public opinion data collected in seventy-one neighborhoods in El Salvador. This article offers the first systematic statistical analysis of the effect of gangs’ territorial control on political participation in the Latin American context. The findings suggest that living under gang rule undermines residents’ right to engage freely in politics in nuanced ways.

Since 1981 the Brazilian economic and political system has passed through a period of crisis and upheaval. The country's foreign debt has been at the center of its economic problems, and the debt crisis has defined many of the contours of the political crisis. This article will examine Brazil's accumulation of the Third World's largest foreign debt and the consequences of both the debt and the debt crisis for the Brazilian pattern of economic and political development. The article will focus on the role of economic interests, specifically the role of different sectors of the Brazilian business community, in the borrowing boom and bust.

Natural-resource-based export-oriented growth strategies have resurfaced as the dominant development approach in Latin America. While a growing literature exists on the economic, equity, gender, and environmental impacts of this development strategy, insufficient attention has been paid to its significance for labor. This article seeks to help fill this gap by analyzing its effects on Chilean workers. Based on a study of the fruit, forestry, and fishing sectors, my work shows that this type of development strategy can be very labor-absorbing and can offer significant benefits for labor when it leads to “agro-industrialization.” Nonetheless, although working conditions clearly improved after the late 1980s, it is likely that the first decade of the twenty-first century will not be a repeat of the 1990s. The hypercompetition that now characterizes these sectors is putting tremendous pressure on firms to reduce costs, including that of labor. Stripped of basic state protections and left with little social power, Chilean workers are much more vulnerable than they were before.