In contrast to the rich scholarship documenting the traumatic post-contact destruction of indigenous populations in the Latin American tropics, little is known about their contemporary population dynamics. What accounts for the “demographic turnaround” reported for some groups? How widespread is population recovery, and what are its implications for indigenous political resurgence? We address these questions by compiling recent (post-1980) demographic indicators for over one hundred lowland indigenous populations. Despite remarkable socioeconomic and cultural diversity among these groups, we find compelling evidence that they nevertheless share a common trajectory of very rapid growth over the past two decades, especially in contrast to non-indigenous populations. We briefly review the implications of their dramatic physical resurgence and show how closer attention to this phenomenon is overdue. We discuss the relevance of indigenous societies' recovery to scholarship and praxis in the areas of health and education, cultural and political gains, and demographic theory.

Chile has gained a reputation as the Latin American economic success story of the 1990s. Domestic savings rates are high, foreign investment continues to expand, inflation remains single-digit, and economic growth has averaged 6 percent annually from 1984 to 1995. In the seven years of democratic government since 1989, the poor have begun to share some of the benefits of this growth. From 1989 to 1993, unemployment fell from 12.2 percent to 4.9 percent, and social expenditures increased by a third in real terms (Hojman 1995). But Chile's impressive recent record of sustained economic development coupled with improvements in social justice has incurred significant environmental costs that raise doubts about the ecological sustainability of the Chilean model (Meller, O'Ryan, and Solimano 1996).

On International Women's Day in March 1958, ten thousand women gathered in the largest stadium in Caracas to celebrate the fall of the dictatorship of Major Marcos Pérez Jiménez and to commemorate the many women who had taken an active role in opposing it. This gathering was the first mass meeting following the demise of authoritarian rule. Despite the array of political views represented in the audience and on the dais, unity was stressed by every speaker. Women had struggled against the dictatorship united, and united they would promote their own rights in the fledgling democracy. But within a year, the women's group that had sponsored the rally disbanded. Women did not hold another nonpartisan meeting for sixteen years, and then only when the United Nations' International Women's Year in 1974 galvanized the two thousand participants. During the first thirty years of democracy in Venezuela, women held no more than 5 percent of congressional seats and few of the decision-making positions in political parties.

In the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberalism and changing policy-making regimes presented social actors throughout Latin America with new challenges and opportunities. This article analyzes the political strategies developed by two organizations representing small manufacturers in Mexico for responding to these sweeping economic and political changes, emphasizing the organizational bases of political activism. Strategies are assessed according to organizations' public expression of support for or opposition to economic policies, the extent to which organizations work within existing arrangements for interest representation, and the political alliances made by small business organizations and their leaders. One strategy in Mexico entailed acquiescing to radical economic policy changes, deploying significant resources to preserve a set of corporatist institutions that regulated business association, and supporting the government incumbents. Another strategy entailed voicing persistent public criticism of neoliberalism, spearheading a national campaign against business corporatism, and supporting the Center-Left opposition. Analysis of these strategies demonstrates the important effects of institutional legacies during periods of regime change. The perseverance of corporatist institutions can make it difficult for weak actors to shed old modes of activism, notwithstanding a changed array of material and political incentives.

A major archive has recently been established in Paraguay that reveals the internal operations of the security forces during the lengthy authoritarian regime of President Alfredo Stroessner (1954–1989). Featuring open access, the archive dubbed by the media as “el archivo del terror” comprises a wealth of primary material on a significant but little researched aspect of the contemporary history of Latin America. This archive provides unique insight into the day-to-day workings of a totalitarian security system and the objectives and strategies of those who headed it. The archive also has regional significance because no comparable archive exists for the period of military rule in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, or Uruguay. Thus it should prove to be of considerable interest to academics analyzing topics like the nature of Latin American military regimes, the practice of national security doctrine, human rights, and related themes.

For several years the Círculos Bolivarianos were a key organized component of the movement supporting President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and the question of their democratic qualities a source of considerable controversy, but until recently there was little data to test the competing claims of supporters and opponents. We report the results of a survey of 110 members of Círculos and several interviews carried out in four Venezuelan states during June and July 2004. After providing basic information on the Círculos, we analyze their tendency to contribute to a democratic civil society. We find that respondents had highly democratic goals and methods; however, their organizations embodied a charismatic mode of linkage to Chávez that undermined their ability to become institutionalized. In addition, although the Círculos performed valuable social work, they often reinforced clientelistic relations between Chávez and the voters, and they did not significantly enhance the level of pluralism in the broader civil society.

The recent return of peace to El Salvador is providing increasingly favorable conditions for scholarly research. This encouraging climate will help Salvadoran and guest researchers make up for years of difficult and repressive conditions. Some researchers may begin by examining contemporary questions related to the recent revolutionary process, but historical research should also be greatly facilitated. Entrepreneurial searches for archival materials on the period preceding the mid-twentieth century can be surprisingly successful when one combines a national outlook with careful regional probing. This research note will provide a guide to archival and other historical materials available in the United States and El Salvador and will place these sources in the context of major questions left unanswered by the historiography covering 1700 to 1940.

As one moves from the social science literature of religion and politics to the literature of women's movements in Latin America, the silence is deafening regarding the phenomenon of Pentecostalism, a movement primarily made up of women. This article argues that Pentecostalism does fit into the newer analyses of feminism and women's movements in the region in a much-needed interdisciplinary approach. The research is a literature review reinforced by field study in Central America. Pentecostalism provides an arena where women help each other and can learn civic skills to participate in fledgling democracies in Latin America.

By analyzing the Brazilian government's surprise endorsement of affirmative action in 2001, this article explores how the state constructs race in society and how ideas drive policy change. After decades defending the myth of “racial democracy,” the state admitted to racism and endorsed an extreme form of affirmative action—quotas—for Afro-Brazilians in government service and higher education. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2002, this article explains the recent policy turnaround as a dialectic between social mobilization and presidential initiative framed within unfolding international events. The presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso nurtured a transformation in political action on race at the same time that the president himself initiated major shifts in official discourse; later, preparations for the World Conference on Racism, held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, provoked national soul-searching on racial inequalities. The conference itself provided an occasion, and a moment of reckoning, for Brazil to jettison past policies and embrace a new approach. I conclude that ideas emerging from social networks, made salient by presidential interest, and legitimized by international agreements may account for discursive policy change, but that implementation of affirmative action will require attention to material interests and electoral incentives.