As Latin America has moved through the second half of the twentieth century, both the public and private sectors have required increasing levels of technological skills and specialized expertise. In the public sector, this necessity has occasioned the rise to prominence of a sector known in Latin America as profesionales y tcnicos. This emergent elite has assumed a significant role in shaping and implementing public policy because its members command skills critical to the functioning of modernizing technological society. As a result, participation by professionals and tcnicos has become central to bureaucratic efficiency, economic development, and the manipulation of symbols that reinforce political legitimacy. Yet the political role of professionals and tcnicos has been little explored, and direct relationships between professional elites and national parties, often central to the democratization of developing nations, have received minimal attention.

Why should one publish in LARR? How does one publish in LARR? These questions are asked by graduate students, foreign colleagues, and researchers moving into Latin American studies. For the benefit of such prospective authors, it may be worth reviewing the pros and cons of publishing in this journal.

Activities commemorating (positively or negatively) the Columbian quincentenary have moved the story of this encounter out of the libraries, off the dusty shelves of nineteenth-century museums, and back into the political arena where it began. In the United States and Canada, as in Latin America, the search for a usable history that would include Native Americans has prompted reassessment and revision of the historiography of Indian-white relations. This research note will review some of the more important ethnohistorical issues raised in North America and comment on possible comparative studies for the Southern Cone.

Asking who “really” speaks and acts for indigenous people is an increasingly important political question in Latin America. This article explores how an “unlikely” Evangelical Protestant Indian organization (FEINE, the Ecuadorian Evangelical Indigenous Federation) and a seemingly more “authentic” Bolivian indigenous federation of communities claiming pre-Columbian authority structures (CONAMAQ, the National Council of Markas and Ayllus of Qollasuyo) have grown in representational strength, or the ability to convince others that they speak for specific constituencies. Through this historically and ethnographically based comparative political study, I argue that indigenous representation is produced across scales, both from “below” (as communities and leaders organize and mobilize) as well as from “above” (as elites and opportunity structures favor some groups over others). FEINE and CONAMAQ present mirror images of the ways in which indigenous people negotiate local-global networks and discourses: FEINE Indianized Protestant Evangelicalism while CONAMAQ transnationalized local ayllu authority structures. This multi-scale analysis suggests that how Indians are spoken about transnationally shapes who gets to speak for Indians locally.

Judicial reform presents a paradox: why would a ruling party agree to judicial reforms that limit its own political power? In the Argentine case, I argue that although the ruling Peronist party could be induced in 1994 to initiate reforms (introduce constitutional revisions to strengthen the judiciary), the party then proved unwilling to accept the costs of an independent judiciary and failed to implement these changes (via enactment of congressional legislation). Only once the Peronists believed that they were unlikely to maintain political power did they implement the revised constitution's judicial advancements. Implementation of judicial reform in such a situation may serve the ruling party as an “insurance policy” in which a stronger judicial branch reduces the risks the ruling party faces should it become the opposition. My research suggests that the likelihood of implementation, the crucial determinant of judicial reform, increases as the ruling party's probability of reelection declines.

Several databases now provide information on large-scale companies in Latin America. This information is being made available on a commercial basis to clients (mainly financial institutions interested in emerging markets in Latin America). The information is also available to academics, however, and promises to be a rich source that thus far has been undervalued by Latin Americanists. This research note will explore the possibilities generated by one database, Economática in São Paulo.

This research note seeks to offer some resolution to the theoretical disagreements over how democratization affects civil society, specifically in a transition toward democracy that occurs through pacted settlements of an armed internal conflict. Using a comparative study over time of the labor movement in El Salvador, the authors demonstrate that while unions of the political center and left have weakened since the signing of the Salvadoran Peace Accords, independent labor groups show higher levels of organizing and right-leaning unions have maintained nearly constant levels of organizing. But the labor movement has become atomized because unions have been unable to redefine their once-common political goals to adopt other unified stances in the postwar period. The data show that the unions that have relinquished excessively politicized stances or never claimed them are the ones that survive and sometimes grow in the postwar environment. These findings have implications for the nature of the emerging Salvadoran democracy and the economic well-being of its citizens.