In the last ten years, the rural history of the colonial Río de la Plata and to a lesser extent that of the first half of the nineteenth century have witnessed an unprecedented boom. Research projects, new sets of questions, and the utilization of new sources and methodologies have all proliferated. Today we have undoubtedly come a long way in our understanding of these issues from where we were only a decade ago.

Despite the increasing sensitivity of researchers to historical and contemporary landscape manipulations in the Amazon basin, there is still a powerful consensus in both popular and scholarly literatures that, with the exception of predatory deforestation, the physical environment of the region is largely unmodified by human intervention. An emerging body of scholarship has challenged this view by describing ways that Amazonian populations have managed terrestrial ecosystems on a variety of spatial and temporal scales. In this research report, we present both new and previously published data showing that Amazonians also intervene in fluvial systems, manipulating rivers and streams to modify the landscape. We argue that these practices, occurring in many different forms, are widespread and commonplace throughout the region, and that, taken together with the emerging evidence for terrestrial manipulation, provide compelling reason for a fundamental reassessment of conventional views of Amazonian nature.

Much of the literature on Latin American women's movements finds that movements have grown weaker since transitions to democracy in part because of the institutionalization of gender policy within states. This article advances an alternative argument drawing on evidence from the Chilean case. Using a historical institutionalist approach and the framework of state feminism, I outline the way Chile's Servicio Nacional de la Mujer (SERNAM) has altered the institutional context in which women's movements act. I show that SERNAM has affected both the shape of the movement (most notably the power relations among its various segments) and the strategies that different segments employ to pursue their interests. I argue that instead of weakening the women's movement, SERNAM actually provides the movement with important resources, most notably a discourse of women's equality and a set of objectives around which to mobilize. There is evidence that Chilean women's organizations are responding to this new institutional context by linking up previously dispersed groups, using SERNAM's own discourse to pressure the state to fulfill its commitments to women and, most importantly, to ensure that, in addition to gender, class and ethnicity are also addressed as sources of women's marginalization.

In the early hours of 1994, a few hundred men and women of the Ejército Zapatista Liberación Nacional (EZLN) blocked the Pan American Highway between Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital of Chiapas, and San Cristóbal de las Casas and the road to Ocosingo, declaring war on Mexico's ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). This move signaled to the world that indigenous populations intended to make themselves heard at home and abroad as Mexico restructures its economy according to the neoliberal model promoted by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The rebels captured and briefly held the municipal buildings in San Cristóbal, Altamirano, Las Margaritas, and Ocosingo. Speaking for the rebels, Subcomandante Marcos declared that their war was “a final but justified measure”: “We have nothing, absolutely nothing. Not a decent roof, nor work, nor land, nor health care, nor education.”

The observation that redemocratization in Latin America is a fragile process has become a commonplace in the social science literature of the past few years. The social movements crucial to the return of procedural democracy have, we are told, lost their momentum to the very forces they helped to restore. Electoral democracy has returned in many places with neoclientelistic overtones that are eroding the gains in consciousness achieved in the nonelectoral years (Hagopian 1993). The absence of a common enemy, most often an authoritarian military regime, has tended to mask less visible but often equally pernicious enemies in the form of violence that is nonofficial but tolerated nonetheless (Pinheiro 1992). And although procedural democratic practices may have returned for the middle classes, nothing inherent in the transition to democracy guarantees either procedural or substantive democracy for the lower classes (Huggins, ed., 1991; O'Donnell 1992; Fox 1994a).

In 1819 José Ignacio do Couto Moreno composed this sentimental poem about his adopted hometown, a small river port in the interior of Minas Gerais. He felt compelled to write it after suffering considerable ribbing by his colleagues during a festive occasion in Rio de Janeiro. Couto Moreno was homesick, and his fellow partygoers could not resist teasing him for demonstrating nostalgia for home and hearth. They challenged him incredulously, “What possible attraction could such distant and brutish backlands hold?”