Partiendo de la discusión reciente sobre la integración económica en dos regiones periféricas, Asia y América del Sur, este artículo evalúa si existen condiciones de convergencia económica en el ámbito de los grupos denominados Asociación de Naciones del Sudeste Asiático más China, Japón y la República de Corea (ASEAN+3, por sus siglas en inglés) y el Mercado Común del Sur (Mercosur), que puedan llevar a una mayor integración monetaria o financiera en ambas regiones. Por una parte, se analizan los aspectos históricos e institucionales de la construcción de los acuerdos de integración regional, destacando los elementos económicos y políticos que están favoreciendo o dificultando un mayor acercamiento económico-financiero entre los países miembros de los dos bloques regionales. Y, por otra, utilizando el referente analítico de la teoría de áreas monetarias óptimas, se estima si ambas regiones obtendrían ventajas al abandonar su autonomía en la gestión macroeconómica, especialmente en lo que se refiere a la política monetaria y cambiaria, a cambio de una adhesión a un sistema monetario coordinado internacionalmente.

This essay explores the intellectual foundings of Argentine constitutionalism from the 1830s to the 1850s. Focusing on the writings of Juan Bautista Alberdi and some of his critics, it argues that Argentine constitutionalism had liberal roots but invoked arguments that could neither bring unity to the state-building coalition nor resolve some basic tensions within the framework of national sovereignty.

Studies on the Argentine public administration have usually underlined the weakness of Argentine state bureaucracies. On the basis of these assertions, scholars have tended to equate the number of state jobs with cases of patronage. By doing so, they have neglected the crucial issue of the scope of appointments effectively controlled by political parties. This article applies an innovative empirical inquiry to measure the extent of party patronage, assessing where, how deeply, and to what extent parties reach into the Argentine federal state structures. While the results by and large confirm the widespread notion of the broad scope of political appointments in Argentina, they refute the conventional hypothesis of a state thoroughly colonized by parties. Overall, the results suggest that parties' distribution of public jobs in the Argentine federal state is oriented less to mass-style patronage than to gaining effective and broad control over state institutions.

Abordamos aquí los discursos y prácticas de hombres, mujeres e instituciones respecto a las mujeres afrocolombianas, que conforman un fenómeno migratorio reciente en el mercado del sexo de las ciudades mineras del norte de Chile. Veremos cómo la irrupción e instalación de estas mujeres generan tensiones no resueltas en la configuración de las relaciones de género en los enclaves productivos, al ser percibidas contradictoriamente como amenaza y como oportunidad en relación a los acomodos tradicionales de las relaciones de género en la región, en sus dimensiones económicas, laborales, matrimoniales y familiares. Planteamos que la estigmatización y la discriminación de la condición racial, nacional, sexual y laboral de estas mujeres se articula y contradice con experiencias heterogéneas del deseo afectivo y sexual que afecta intensamente la conformación y reproducción de las masculinidades mineras y sus contratos socio-sexuales.

The article is a schematic cultural-historical analysis of a major genre of regional popular music in Brazil, baião (the precursor to today's forró). Using Gramscian terminology appropriate to a discussion of hegemony and resistance, I argue that the early proponents of baião had to wage a cultural war of maneuver to challenge the existing hegemony of the Rio de Janeiro culture industry and to gain new respect for the northeastern Brazilian people and their culture. After success in this initial endeavor, subsequent generations of musicians have carried on a war of position to maintain baião's, and later forró‘s, prominence on the national stage. The article also analyzes certain common themes in forró (e.g., saudade, or nostalgia, for the home region and a critical view of the urban Southeast) as tactics that have contributed to forró‘s continuing relevance to Northeasterners and to its successful struggles of maneuver and position.

Robert J. Sampson and W. Byron Groves (1989) analyzed data from 238 British neighborhoods to test the mediating effect of indicators of social disorganization. Basing their work on that of Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay (1942), these researchers created indicators such as friendship networks, organizational participation, and the control of street-corner teenaged peer groups, and developed a theory of community level. In this article, we apply the formal logic of Sampson and Groves using data from the first Belo Horizonte victimization survey. In addition, we use data from the 2000 Brazilian Census and the Military Police. The results support the social disorganization theory and demonstrate that crime-rate differences are an effect of community level.

What interests of Latin American women create distinctive attitudes toward justice system equality that differ from those of Latin American men? Building on recent work on general justice system bias and using 2003 Latinobarómetro data, I test this question in three Central American countries (Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua) using two sets of attitudes toward justice system performance (equal punishment and equal treatment). Women are significantly more likely to believe that the criminal justice system provides unequal treatment before the law than are men, while women and men express the same level of belief that the justice system provides equal punishment. Evidence indicates that women connect unequal treatment to economic factors and follow a conflict model of criminal justice, which posits these attitudinal differences as a function of the group's subordinate position in society.

We present a new data set on the left-right placement of major Brazilian political parties serving in the first five legislatures under democracy. On the basis of survey responses of more than 850 federal legislators from 1990 to 2005, we generate party placements on an ideological scale where 1 = “left” and 10 = “right.” The data are rescaled to account for idiosyncrasies in responses as well as variation in use of the survey scale across time. We discuss both the validity and the reliability of our new measures by comparing them to other data sets. We further discuss three substantive issues that the data reveal. First, ideological polarization has moderated over time. Second, the median legislator has shifted noticeably to the left and now stands equidistant from the influential PT and PSDB, the parties that have anchored recent presidential elections. Third, Brazilian political elites continue to shun self-identifications associated with political conservatism or neoliberalism.