This article introduces the concept of international clientelism and discusses how this diplomatic tool was employed by Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro as a means to get political support from several Latin American and Caribbean countries. We operationalize the concept and apply it to assess Venezuelan practices put forth in the region. We argue that the reach of Caracas’s diplomatic strategy is broader and deeper than that of simple vote-buying tactics, as it implies the promotion of structural rather than contingent ties, shielding the country against unfavorable moves in international fora. An empirical test using data for all LAC countries for the years 1999–2015 confirms that clientelistic linkages produced political support for Venezuela at the United Nations General Assembly while also moving its partners away from the United States in that institution.

This essay reviews the following works:

North American Borders in Comparative Perspective. Edited by Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera and Victor Konrad. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 408. $40.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780816539529.

Fencing In Democracy: Border Walls, Necrocitizenship, and the Security State. By Miguel Díaz-Barriga and Margaret E. Dorsey. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. ix, 178. $24.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781478006930.

Border Optics: Surveillance Cultures on the US-Mexico Frontier. By Camilla Fojas. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 208. $28.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781479807017.

The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War. By Peter Guardino. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 502. $39.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780674972346.

Illusions of Empire: The Civil War and Reconstruction in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. By William S. Kiser. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. Pp. 262. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780812253511.

The Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-Century Americas: Literature, Translation, and Historiography. By Carmen E. Lamas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. ix, 277. $80.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780198871484.

Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands. By Kelly Lytle Hernández. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2022. Pp. 384. $30.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781324004370.

Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona. By Eric V. Meeks. Revised edition. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020. Pp. xi, 368. $32.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477319659.

Refugiados climáticos: Un gran reto del siglo XXI. By Miguel Pajares. Barcelona: Rayo Verde Editorial, 2020. Pp. 280. $33.00 paperback. ISBN: 9788417925345.

Even though a vast literature has addressed perceptions and beliefs on taxes, progressivity and redistribution, few studies have specifically studied the perceptions of economic elites in this regard. This group is relevant for its affluence and influence, and therefore elites’ ideas and preferences have a major impact on tax-policy configuration. This study analyses the perceptions of the economic elite on redistribution and progressivity in Chile. Based on in-depth interviews and historical documents, such notions are examined by mixing concrete evaluations of income tax and value-added tax (VAT) and more general attitudes towards the role of the tax system in economic development. Results show that redistribution is negatively evaluated, which coexists with a strong willingness to contribute to poverty relief through social initiatives outside the state. Additionally, progressivity is sidelined while highlighting growth, tax neutrality, and incentives to entrepreneurship as the main priorities of tax design. The historical analysis shows that although the Chilean tax regime has always been based on indirect taxes and levies on natural resources, neoliberal reforms and ideological renovation during the Pinochet dictatorship narrowed the general framework of tax ideas among business and political sectors and reversed progressive advances in inequality reduction and direct taxation that had been made during the previous decades.

Drawing on ethnographic research in El Oasis, a highly precarious self-built settlement in Medellín, Colombia, this article examines the illegal practice of autoconstruction as a material expression of hope. It focuses on the multilayered, symbolic meaning of self-built housing, as it represents the pursuit of dignity, permanence, and agency—as opposed to poverty, uncertainty, and lack of agency—and an active and material form of hoping for a better future in the city. The state plays an ambiguous role in residents’ perspectives, who conceive of it, simultaneously, as a threat to and a guarantor of their future in the city. This ambiguity becomes materialized in the physical form of residents’ self-built housing, as residents either embrace or refrain from making improvements to their houses in response to shifting perceptions about the state’s intentions regarding the future of the settlement.

This essay examines how the inhabitants of Putumayo, a department of Colombia both divided and held together by licit and illicit authority structures and markets, engage with varied political orders as they advance individual and collective economic and political projects. Putumayo’s inhabitants adopt four basic strategies to maintain their often illicit livelihoods amid state repression. The first is intellectual resistance, wherein they develop explanations for their involvement in illicit markets that they can use to alter local and national state behavior. The second is protest, through which groups of peasants mobilize to support their illicit but socially normalized economic endeavors. A third is evasion or malicia, in which peasants seek to strategically adhere to state policy to misdirect the state as they continue to grow coca. Fourth, some peasants pursue a strategy of exit, going deeper into the jungle in search of land where they can peacefully grow coca.

This essay reviews the following works:

The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World. By Ralph Bauer. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. 670. $79.50 hardcover. ISBN: 9780813942544.

On the Lips of Others: Moteuczoma’s Fame in Aztec Monuments and Rituals. By Patrick Thomas Hajovsky. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Pp. vii + 194. $45.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781477307243.

Time and the Ancestors: Aztec and Mixtec Ritual Art. By Maarten Jansen and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Pp. ix + 615. $182.54 hardcover. ISBN: 9789004340510.

En busca del alma nacional: La arqueología y la construcción del origen de la historia nacional en México (1867–1942). By Haydeé López Hernández. Ciudad de México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2018. Pp. 389. $44.99. paperback. ISBN: 9786075391120.

The Value of Things: Prehistoric to Contemporary Commodities in the Maya Region. Edited by Jennifer P. Mathews and Thomas H. Guderjan. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017. Pp. iii + 309. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780816533527.

In the Lands of Fire and Sun: Resistance and Accommodation in the Huichol Sierra, 1723–1930. By Michele McArdle Stephens. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Pp. ix + 177. $50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780803288584.

Género, ciencia y política: Voces, vidas y miradas de la arqueología mexicana. By Apen Ruiz Martínez. Ciudad de México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2016. Pp. 251. Paperback. ISBN: 9786074847970.

The Fifteenth Month: Aztec History in the Rituals of Panquetzaliztli. By John F. Schwaller. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 264. $39.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780806162768.

If David Bell in his book Men on Horseback (2020) focuses on what is political charisma, how it functions, and what it means ‘to write its history’, this article examines how Brazil's ex-President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (‘Lula’) acquired charisma during the dramatic 1978–80 metalworkers’ strikes in the industrial ABC region of São Paulo, Brazil. While generating a vast literature, scholars of the ABC strikes have evaded the question of how Lula, the gifted organiser, emerged as a recognisably charismatic figure. This article explains where, when and why this happened and how a charismatic bond was forged as 100,000 stigmatised, fearful, self-doubting ‘peons’ came to constitute themselves as a locally articulated social actor, a group in fusion, whose boldness and creativity led to extraordinary feats of organisation and mobilisation. Arguing against conflating charisma and populism, it also establishes the utility of the theorisation of group-making advanced in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) by Jean-Paul Sartre.

This article disputes recent studies that find no relationship between homicides and vigilantism. Using a unique panel dataset that controls for time and region, this study shows that the relationship exists. The evidence is consistent with the theory of low-capacity states: high homicide rates indicate unchecked criminal enclaves that further corrode trust in police. The territorial gaps in the central state’s presence that O’Donnell once called “brown areas” cost people their lives. Vigilantes react through defensive movements in which ordinary people substitute for the police to fill a security gap. The panel results also indicate that wealth inequality matters. Business people reportedly finance the vigilante organizations, which helps them to sustain collective action over time. Together with income inequality, Mexico’s low-capacity state facilitated an armed vigilante movement between 2012 and 2015.

This essay reviews the following works:

Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil. By Jacob Blanc. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Pp. 320. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781478004899.

For Land and Liberty: Black Struggles in Rural Brazil. By Merle L. Bowen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. xxii + 248. $99.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781108832359.

Agriculture and Industry in Brazil: Innovation and Competitiveness. By Albert Fishlow and José Eustáquio Ribeiro Vieira Filho. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Pp. xiv + 244. $70.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780231549523.

Migration and the Making of Industrial São Paulo. By Paulo Fontes. Foreword by Barbara Weinstein. Translated from the Portuguese by Ned Sublette. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi + 280. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822361343.

An Economic and Demographic History of São Paulo 1850–1950. By Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Pp. xxviii + 448. $75.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781503602007.

Brazil’s Long Revolution: Radical Achievements of the Landless Workers Movement. By Anthony Pahnke. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018. Pp. xx + 274. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780816536030.