Environmentalism in Guatemala has emerged in conjunction with trends toward regional democratization and international economic globalization. These origins have helped form and continue to shape the organizational structure, membership, and policy orientation of the movement as well as its strategies and tactics for policy implementation. The ecology movement became closely associated with party politics during the democratization of the 1980s and eventually established an almost symbiotic relationship with the administration of the Partido Democracia Cristiana under Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo (1986-1990). But this early alliance with the Democracia Cristiana eventually weakened the movement's ability to make independent policy decisions and to protect itself from attacks by opposing parties. The relationship between the environmental movement and the state also reinforced the movement's dependence on international financing. These party and international connections have limited the organizational scope of the movement, with the result being that the ecological movement in Guatemala today remains small and urban-based and lacks a strong grassroots foundation.

Latin Americanists have devoted considerable attention over the past two decades to the relationship between economic growth and social inequality. A bibliography of the articles and books on the consequences of development for income, class, and gender would surely run to many pages. Yet within that impressive literature, much less attention has been given to the ways that structural changes have altered racial inequalities. Scarcer still are empirical analyses that document the manner in which changes over time have affected women and men within different racial groups.

While there is much disagreement concerning the political effects of Chile's two-member district binominal election system, most agree that it provides strong incentives for the formation and maintenance of coalitions. This article takes on these assumptions, contending that the electoral system's coalition-inducing tendencies are actually quite context dependent. Focusing primarily on the governing Concertación coalition and relying on analyses of relative levels of electoral support among parties, a “reward” insurance policy for electoral losers, and the timing and sequencing of elections, this article outlines the conditions under which the coalition-enhancing tendencies of the electoral system are at their strongest and their weakest. It finds that these variables align to provide a less than propitious environment for the maintenance of the Concertación coalition in the lead up to the 2005 elections. In theoretical terms, the article challenges direct and mechanistic connections between electoral formulae and party outcomes, arguing that we should not be surprised when subtle contextual variations cause theorized outcomes not to occur. These findings contribute to an emerging consensus that many of the theorized rules on the connection between electoral and party systems are more complex and context dependent than is usually supposed and should be applied with greater caution.

This essay analyzes the complexity and contradiction of resource-tenure regimes on tropical forest frontiers by drawing on a case study carried out in the department of Río San Juan, southeastern Nicaragua. The main attention is given to competing claims over productive resources and to contradictory relationships between the diverse modalities of resource control. The resource struggles emerging in Río San Juan are analyzed in the context of larger political-economic and socio-legal processes to understand the wider relations of politics and power that affect local resource access. The main goal is to reveal how control over resources is defined and contested in the everyday reality of legal pluralism where multiple legal orders intersect in people's lives, and where the conflicts over whose law applies, and who gets what resources and why, have increasing significance.

Like the precarious colonial state demeaningly referred to as “España la Boba,” the Dominican Catholic Church of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries endured the Caribbean ramifications of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. This onslaught included the cession of Santo Domingo to France in 1795, the protracted and bloody revolution in St. Domingue, disruptions in international trade, and invasions by Haiti in 1801 and 1805. Both the colonial state and the colonial church were further undermined by the declaration of Dominican independence in December 1821. Only weeks into Dominican independence, twelve thousand troops under the command of Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer invaded the eastern part of the island, fulfilling the long-held Haitian goal of unifying the island under Haitian rule. Although considerably weakened, the Dominican church survived as the single truly national institution in the sense that it retained influence throughout the Dominican territory. The church was also national in providing a central element in Dominican elite culture: fervent Catholicism. Thus it was not coincidental that clerics gravitated to the heart of the Dominican struggle for liberation and that the church continued to play a major role in defining political alignments during the forty years following Dominican independence.

We analyze vote buying in Argentina—the payment by political parties of minor benefits (food, clothing, cash) to citizens in exchange for their votes. How widespread is vote buying in Argentina, and what is the profile of the typical vote “seller”? Did the shift toward a neoliberal economic model in the 1990s increase or reduce vote buying? Why do parties attempt to buy votes when the ballot is secret and people could simply accept campaign handouts and then vote as they wish? We analyze responses to surveys we conducted in Argentina in 2002 and offer answers to these questions. Our findings suggest that vote buying is an effective strategy for mobilizing electoral support among low-income people when parties are able to monitor voters' actions, make reasonably accurate inferences about how individuals voted, and credibly threaten to punish voters who defect from the implicit clientelist bargain. Our results point toward ballot reform as one way to reduce vote buying in Argentina.

Este trabajo analiza la influencia política e ideológica que el grupo de discípulos de Alejandro Bunge tuvo en la definición de la política económica del primer peronismo. Se sostiene que su postura favorable a la industrialización en los debates de la entreguerra y el influjo que el catolicismo social ejerció en sus miembros le permitió al grupo ejercer influencia sobre la dictadura militar de 1943. El artículo estudia el papel del grupo en la Secretaría de Industria, la elaboración del primer régimen de promoción industrial y los debates económicos de la inmediata posguerra. Se argumenta que el grupo Bunge desempeñó un rol decisivo en la orientación de la política industrial peronista, moldeando sus características básicas y brindando al régimen de Perón los argumentos que la justificaban. A propósito de ello, el trabajo discute la interpretación que otorga excesivo énfasis a factores políticos y sociales, como el enfrentamiento de Perón con los Estados Unidos y las demandas del movimiento obrero, en la orientación que tomó la política industrial peronista.

This article examines the connections between financing, reputation, and industrial development in Argentina. It analyzes five leading merchant finance groups through a newly created data set of 1,282 directors and shareholders of fifty-nine manufacturing companies across ten sectors from 1890 to 1930. Merchant finance groups formed to pool capital for manufacturing investment in the absence of developed domestic banking institutions and equity markets. The leading five groups under study secured access to diverse sources of capital by developing personal connections and by their reputations. Although these five groups successfully adapted to an environment that lacked efficient credit markets, most manufacturers' companies were capital-starved due to the lack of industrial credit. Insufficient industrial credit resulted in dominant firms owned by a few merchant finance groups controlling the noncompetitive manufacturing sector.

The relationship between capitalism and democracy has been a focal question in political science for years. Compelling arguments have been advanced on all sides of the debate. Democracy promotes capitalism. Capitalism promotes democracy. The two are correlated but are caused by other variables, including everything from a given country's political culture to its position in the world economy. Now the recent turn toward neoliberal economic strategies in Latin America has revitalized the question of whether any one form of capitalism is more compatible with democracy than others.

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.

For many who thought of Venezuela as a consolidated democracy, the 1992 coup attempts came as a complete surprise. Those familiar with the deterioration of its democratic regime, in contrast, were more surprised that the coups did not succeed. This article provides an institution-centered explanation of the puzzle of why the 1992 coup attempts occurred, why they failed, and why the Venezuelan military has remained quiescent in the years that followed. Institutions of civilian control created during the post-1958 “Punto Fijo” period, particularly those based on fragmenting the officer corps, prevented the collapse of the democratic regime in 1992. These same institutions allowed civilians to regain authority over the armed forces during the Rafael Caldera administration and have ensured the subordination of the armed forces to elected authorities to the present. It is also argued that the institutional basis for civilian control has been dismantled during the Fifth Republic, heightening the likelihood of future civil-military conflict and threatening regime stability.

Slavery in the interior state of Minas Gerais has been a focal point of the voluminous historiography appearing on Brazilian slavery in the past twenty years. During the mineral boom of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Minas was the key region of the colonial Brazilian economy and the largest slaveholding capitania. The older literature on Brazilian history recognized the centrality of slave labor to the eighteenth-century mining sector but concluded that as the mining boom waned after 1750, slavery began to disintegrate. The history of Minas Gerais after the boom was interpreted as a long period of economic stagnation accompanied by reversion to cattle raising and subsistence agriculture, slow demographic growth, and the transfer of the Mineiro slave population during the nineteenth century to the more dynamic coffee-growing areas in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.