The conventional wisdom about contemporary Venezuelan politics is that class voting has become commonplace, with the poor doggedly supporting Hugo Chávez while the rich oppose him. This class voting is considered both a new feature of Venezuelan politics and a puzzle given the multiclass bases of prior populist leaders in Latin America. I clarify the concept of class voting by distinguishing between monotonic and nonmonotonic associations between class and vote choice. Using survey data, I find that only in Chávez's first election in 1998 was class voting monotonic. Since then, class voting in Venezuela has been nonmonotonic, with the very wealthiest Venezuelans disproportionately voting against Chávez. At the same time, Chávez's support appears to have increased most among the middle sectors of the income distribution, not the poorest. Finally, I find that whatever effect Chávez may have had on overall turnout, his efforts have not disproportionately mobilized poor voters.

Produced along the Río de la Plata during the nineteenth century, shipped to Havana, and consumed by African slaves, the salt-cured beef known as tasajo affected both of those places and, to some degree, the Atlantic world in general. Initial exploration of the tasajo trail that connected Buenos Aires and Cuba employs primary sources such as nineteenth-century descriptions and shipping records to characterize the landscapes, places, routes, and agents of the largely unexplored research territory of that anomalous commodity: one that, unlike others such as sugar, slaves not only produced but also consumed; one that underpinned more prominent, latitudinal transatlantic flows such as the slave trade, yet itself flowed meridionally; one that, like all those flows, had an oceanic component that comprised an actively lived space of flows rather than a dead space of separation; and one that might be mundane, yet helped fuel major transformations of two of the principal nodes of Hispanic Atlantic.

This article proposes a conceptual framework to discuss the left and left turns in Latin American politics. It then proceeds to argue that winning elections—the recurrent criterion for these turns—might generate tremendous enthusiasm but is also a restrictive benchmark. Other indicators I discuss here include the left's agenda-setting capacity, its redefinition of the political and ideological center, and its incipient challenge of the liberal setting of politics as actors experiment with post-liberal arrangements.

Though much scholarly attention has been paid to the emergence of female-headed households in Latin America, there is debate over where to place these households within discussions of poverty and resource deprivation. Two issues complicate this debate: first, the lack of multi-resource models in quantitative analyses to fully assess types of resource accumulation, and second, the broad failure for analyses of female-headed households to differentiate between different kinds of female-heads of household.

Este trabajo tiene por objetivo examinar la presencia de movimientos chiítas radicales en América Latina, algunos de ellos comprometidos en acciones violentas, especialmente en dos zonas geográficas. Primero, en la denominada triple frontera de Argentina, Paraguay y Brasil, presencia vinculada con los atentados contra la embajada de Israel en 1992 y contra la Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina en 1994, ambos realizados en Buenos Aires. Segundo, en la zona de la Alianza Bolivariana para las Américas, particularmente en Venezuela, a partir de la existencia del denominado Hezbolá Venezuela, de la islamización chiíta de la tribu wayuu — que habita la zona de la Guajira en la frontera entre Venezuela y Colombia— y su relación con el Hezbolá originario del Líbano.

El estudio examina un conjunto de eventos ocurridos en La Plata, sede de la audiencia de Charcas, en 1781 a raíz de la difusión de rumores acerca de una presunta revuelta popular. En ellos podemos apreciar la incipiente conformación de una cultura política urbana que, aunque enraizada en tradiciones ideológicas pluriseculares, se erigió en abierta contraposición al orden vigente. Los alegatos colectivos de los vecinos patricios y plebeyos, las iniciativas del ayuntamiento y una serie de ceremonias públicas revelan significativas mutaciones en los modos de concebir las relaciones de los grupos urbanos, así como vigorosos cuestionamientos a los principios del absolutismo borbónico. Veremos aflorar marcados sentimientos de antagonismo entre los vecinos y los sectores peninsulares, formas de interpelación al “pueblo” que expusieron la repentina relevancia adquirida por las opiniones de la población local y la construcción de la ciudad como sujeto de la historia y actor político colectivo.