Immediately after the Sandinista victory of July 1979, the Nicaraguan agrarian reform began with the expropriation of Somoza's agricultural estates and their conversion into state farms. Four years later, the land expropriated under the 1981 Agrarian Reform Law was being distributed to peasant production cooperatives and increasingly to individual peasant farmers. This article will analyze this shift in Sandinista agrarian policy and attempt to explain the factors shaping the course of the Nicaraguan agrarian reform. The focus is on the central policy debate of the first four years: the extent to which the agrarian reform should favor state farms, production cooperatives, or individual holdings. That debate encompassed a series of related issues that will be examined here, including the rhythm of technological modernization, capital-intensive versus labor-intensive investment schemes, the pace and depth of socialist transformation, and the entire question of tactical and strategic alliances within the revolution.

The issue to be addressed in this article is the limited exploration thus far of how rural women in Latin America themselves define and interpret the world around them and what meaning, if any, they attach to key terms employed by researchers concerned with development issues. A review of the literature reveals that despite the great strides made in the last two decades in understanding Latin American women as rural producers, research to date has dealt with the questions of gender ideology and identity in an extremely limited way. Two potential directions for future research will be suggested here: a critical reassessment of some of the analytical categories that have been taken as givens, and a focus on the social-political construction of gender identity and experience from the point of view of rural women. To explore the possibilities of these suggestions, the phrase “division of labor by sex” will be analyzed in light of recent anthropological and feminist contributions to other (primarily non-Latin American) areas of the literature. A second point that will be discussed is how life stories, when collected self-critically, can reveal the potential tension between the active negotiation of meaning by analysts and by the rural women they interview. I will argue that these new directions in research are essential if scholars are to appreciate varying interpretations of development.

Populism is one of those terms (democracy is another) that is frequently employed in the study of politics and varies in meaning from context to context and from author to author. Thus the term has been invoked in studies of such agrarian-based movements as nineteenth-century agrarian unrest in the United States and the narodniki of prerevolutionary Russia as well as being applied to the largely urban-based populism of Latin America. Moreover, most of those who have sought to characterize the populist parties in Latin America have done so in broad terms that encompass any party or political movement that has both a mass base and a cross-class composition. Torcuato DiTella's well-known definition characterized populism (in Latin America or elsewhere) as “a political movement which enjoys the support of the mass of the working class and/or the peasantry, but which does not result from the autonomous organizational power of either of these two sectors. It is also supported by non-working class sectors upholding an anti-status quo ideology.” Other Latin American students of populism such as Francisco Weffort and Ernesto Laclau, along with most others who have studied the phenomenon, have similarly broad conceptions of it.

State corporatist representation of organized labor interests has been an enduring characteristic of modern Latin American politics, transcending differences in national ideologies and political regimes. In recent years, much attention has been devoted to analyzing various corporatist experiments that have emerged in the region and elsewhere. As a result, it is now possible to distinguish among corporatist systems that are state or societal, Ibero-Catholic, traditional, or modern “rationalist,” inclusionary or exclusionary, bifrontal or segmental; and analysts have moved on to “disaggregate” the structure of corporatism in a variety of political contexts.

In much of Latin America during the 1950s, Raúl Prebisch, then Executive Secretary of the Comisión Económica para América Latina (CEPAL, known in English as the Economic Commission for Latin America, or ECLA), was recognized as a progressive and innovative development theorist and policy activist. In certain government circles in the United States, meanwhile, he was viewed with suspicion as a leftist critic of standard economic wisdom. Yet in his home country of Argentina during the same period, Prebisch was commonly identified with both conservative groups and liberal economic thought.

As the recent decade of violence and tyranny slowly recedes into the past, few signs have yet emerged that Argentines are making headway in coming to terms with this troubled heritage. Although the memory of these years is less omnipresent, it still evokes a repulsion as intense—and as fascinated—as when these matters were first allowed to come out into the open. Some reasons for the exceptional depth and scope of the Argentine crisis have become clearer in retrospect, but this clarity does not make the remembering any less painful. The extreme savagery of the country's turn toward violence makes even the most insightful historical exploration of its causes pale in comparison with the memory of having experienced the consequences.