In this article, I compare the attitudes to the recent democratic transition in Latin America in La fiesta del Chivo, the 2000 novel, and in its 2005 film adaptation. In the novel, Mario Vargas Llosa describes how Joaquín Balaguer, the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo's puppet president, put on the mask of a democrat, absorbed Trujillo's absolute power, and went on to serve as president for twenty-four years. In the novel, Balaguer is a stand-in for the Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori, who prepares to serve as president for a third term in a row. Why do Balaguer and the artificial democratic transition that he enacted go missing in the film adaptation? The film details instead the crimes of the dictator Trujillo and his inglorious end. I argue that the director adapts the novel's message to a changed political reality in Peru: the dictator Fujimori fled, and the newly elected president is restoring democratic institutions and government accountability.

What is the impact of exposure to criminal violence on support for political institutions in Latin America? The increase in criminal violence in the region since the return to democratic rule makes this a timely question. Several scholars have demonstrated the impact of a series of variables (political performance, economic performance, interpersonal trust, perception of corruption) on citizens' support for political institutions (system support). The goal of this study is to assess the impact of two additional variables (victimization and perception of violence) that have been neglected in the literature. I test the impact of exposure to violence on system support by using survey data from the 2004 edition of the Latin American Public Opinion Project. My findings demonstrate that both victimization and high perception of violence have a negative impact on system support in Latin America.

O projeto de integração regional Mercosul inclui o ensino de espanhol e português nos países membros. A Argentina e o Brasil têm leis obrigando a ofertar essas línguas aos estudantes no ensino médio, porém os processos de promoção, financiamento e implementação desses compromissos, como o contexto de implementação dessas iniciativas, são marcadamente diferentes. Neste trabalho analiso os últimos vinte anos de política lingüística regional à luz de fatores extralingüísticos e discuto algumas das razões que podem estar influenciando a maior autonomia regional do ensino de português em Buenos Aires, em contraste com uma maior dependência do ensino de espanhol em São Paulo vis-a-vis a Espanha.

During the 1990s, the Argentine federal government dramatically increased the number of workfare programs targeted to the unemployed. The distribution of employment programs, however, varied across provinces. Previous studies suggest that this uneven distribution has taken place because politicians have not distributed programs according to formal eligibility criteria, but rather, in a clientelistic manner to entice voters' support.

I conduct a balanced pooled time series analysis for twenty-four provinces for the period 1993–2002 and find that partisanship, institutional features of the Argentine federal system, social mobilization, and economic factors strongly determine the way in which presidents have distributed employment programs. The results challenge the assumption that these programs have been exclusively used as clientelistic handouts to buy people's votes, and point to the necessity of looking at institutional, social, and economic variables to better understand the criteria used by federal politicians to distribute means-tested programs.

Today women in Guatemala are killed at nearly the same rate as they were in the early 1980s when the civil war became genocidal. Yet the current femicide epidemic is less an aberration than a reflection of the way violence against women has become normalized in Guatemala. Used to re-inscribe patriarchy and sustain both dictatorships and democracies, gender-based violence morphed into femicide when peacetime governments became too weak to control extralegal and paramilitary powers. The naturalization of gender-based violence over the course of the twentieth century maintained and promoted the systemic impunity that undergirds femicide today. By accounting for the gendered and historical dimensions of the cultural practices of violence and impunity, we offer a re-conceptualization of the social relations that perpetuate femicide as an expression of post-war violence.

This research note provides a preliminary discussion of changing agricultural and food procurement strategies in a smallholder farming community in Piribebuy District, Paraguay. Although considerable attention has been paid to the contemporary problems of soy agriculture in Paraguay, it is also important to engage with the experiences of smallholders who are not involved in or affected by soy cultivation, as this highlights farmers' diverse everyday experiences and their agricultural priorities. We consider three issues that have emerged as key to farmer agricultural decision making in this community: farmer perceptions of environmental changes, processes of dietary delocalization via the movement of food from urban centers to rural communities, and the intersection of labor issues and aging farmers.

En el presente artículo se analizará el modo en que las Fuerzas Armadas de Argentina utilizaron el ámbito educativo durante la última dictadura militar en Argentina a fin de consolidar su visión sobre la coyuntura social y política de ese país a través de la formación de futuras generaciones. Con este objetivo se prestará principal atención a las transformaciones en la enseñanza de la historia nacional y más concretamente, en la enseñanza de la historia reciente. El estudio de las transformaciones impulsadas por el régimen dictatorial en la enseñanza de la historia de Argentina posibilitará la reflexión acerca del modo en que se promovió mediante la enseñanza de la historia nacional una reorganización moral y educativa como parte esencial de las herramientas transformadoras que habilitaron y desplegaron la dictadura militar entre 1976 y 1983.

Electoral theories of governmental accountability assume that competitive elections produce responsive governments because they allow voters to punish or reward the performance of incumbent politicians at the ballot box. This research note investigates whether the increasing competitiveness of municipal elections in Mexico during the 1990s has improved the performance of local governments by focusing on the provision of potable water and drainage. The empirical evidence does not seem to support the electoral accountability hypothesis, but rather suggests that municipal governments are more responsive to the influence of socioeconomic modernity, as well as to the direct pressure of politically mobilized citizens. The findings cast doubts on the idea that competitive elections, by themselves, will significantly improve the quality of local governments in the country.

In the past few decades, a new era of socioenvironmental institutions and policies has promoted experimentation with alternative proposals for managing land and resources in the Amazon region. The rubber tappers' home state of Acre was transformed by the florestania policies of the “forest government” regimes that built on the rubber tappers' identity and history to promote forest-based development and to extend citizenship rights. Beginning in 1999, the state became a laboratory for experimentation with new approaches to development, at a time of rapid changes among both urban and rural populations. This article uses data from household surveys in the capital city of Rio Branco, as well as extensive secondary literature, to trace the evolution of these new policies and projects and their ambiguous implications for citizenship and sustainable development.

In prose and poetry and throughout his career, Roque Dalton used the life story of his U.S. émigré father to explore the themes of power, dependency, and identity that interested him and other Salvadoran intellectuals of his era. Yet it was a theatrical image of Winnall Dalton, that of a marauding, gunslinging cowboy, that other writers took as fact and that became part of the poet's posthumous reputation. I show here that the image of a western outlaw is wrong and that Winnall Dalton came from a comfortable, Mexican American family in Tucson that had fallen on hard times just before he migrated to Central America around 1916. Dalton delved into the paradoxes of his own upbringing—raised in a working-class neighborhood as the illegitimate offspring of a millionaire, a Marxist revolutionary who was the son of pure capitalism—almost until his death in 1975. Taken together, the shifting depictions of his father all point to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of Dalton's views on power and the nature of identity than previously understood in the context of the revolutionary struggle that ultimately consumed him.