Several Latin American countries have experienced the emergence of neopopulist politicians who eschew ties to traditional parties and orient their campaigns toward the atomized poor. This article examines the role of television in the electoral success of these politicians. Using survey data, I assess the impact of television exposure on vote choice in the 1989 election of Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil, the 2000 election of Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and the 2001 election of Alejandro Toledo in Peru. These cases achieve variation on two predictors of media effects: the presence of a neopopulist outsider and biased television coverage of the campaign. Statistical analysis confirms our theoretical expectations of media effects in the first two elections (where coverage was biased) but not in the third. These findings suggest that bias is the more reliable predictor of television's impact on Latin American presidential elections, rather than the presence of a neopopulist candidate.

This essay seeks to categorize and assess works published since the 1950s on the activities of the tribunal of the Santo Oficio de la Inquisición of Lima and their repercussions on the social history of the viceroyalty of Peru. The studies made of the Inquisition in recent decades, in going beyond a merely descriptive focus or one biased by the old prejudices of the “Black Legend,” have highlighted the exceptional value of the records of the Lima Inquisition for acquainting researchers with interesting dimensions on the level of mentalities, ideas, attitudes, and behaviors—that is to say, in the expressions of the deepest impulses of the human soul. This trend has allowed historians to modify their image of the Inquisition in the Spanish metropolis and in its former colonies in America.

In vol. 39, no. 3, John T. Morris was incorrectly cited as co-author of John Tuman's Reshaping the North American Automobile Industry (Continuum, 2003). Morris was co-editor, with John Tuman, of Transforming the Latin American Automobile Industry (ME Sharpe, 1998).

The favelas of Rio de Janeiro, with their teeming masses trapped in misery, constitute the perfect site for investigating how social inequality is reproduced in Brazil. The latest survey of the shantytowns, conducted by the Instituto de Planejamento in Rio de Janeiro (IPLAN-Rio) reported that as of 1991, the city contained 661 favelas housing 962,793 persons in 239,678 shacks. The squatter settlements recreate in miniature but distorted form the entire history of modern Rio de Janeiro. The first squatter settlement was built in 1898 in Rio by Bahian veterans of the military campaign against mystic rebel Antonio Conselheiro. Yet only when the housing crisis of the 1940s forced the urban poor to erect hundreds of shantytowns in the suburbs did favelas replace tenements as the main type of residence for destitute Cariocas (residents of Rio). The explosive era of favela growth dates from 1940, when Getúlio Vargas's industrialization drive pulled hundreds of thousands of migrants into the Federal District, until 1970, when shantytowns expanded beyond urban Rio and into the metropolitan periphery. Even today, the favelas remain an officially unrecognized and illegal part of city. For this reason, many researchers assume that the shantytowns have no written history and that historians must rely on anecdotal evidence from residents for information on squatter life.

Why did machine-age modernist architecture diffuse to Latin America so quickly after its rise in Continental Europe during the 1910s and 1920s? Why was it a more successful movement in relatively backward Brazil and Mexico than in more affluent and industrialized Argentina? After reviewing the historical development of architectural modernism in these three countries, several explanations are tested against the comparative evidence. Standards of living, industrialization, sociopolitical upheaval, and the absence of working-class consumerism are found to be limited as explanations. As in Europe, Modernism diffused to Latin America thanks to state patronage and the professionalization of architects following an engineering model.