In 1930 the first successful military coup in Argentina in the twentieth century interrupted the normal functioning of the political and electoral institutions consolidated by the Sáenz Peña Law of 1912. This statute required secret balloting by all Argentine men eighteen and older. The coup of 1930, followed by a failed attempt to achieve legitimatization at the ballot box in 1931, reversed the development of electoral politics in Argentina by reverting to open fraud and provoking the abstention of the main national political party up to that time, the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR).

This study relies on Brazilian census data from 1960–2000 to analyze long-term trends in racial and gender wage disparities in the urban labor market of São Paulo, one of Latin America's most dynamic economies. Afro-Brazilians and women have made remarkable progress over the past four decades in securing hard-won legal rights and in gaining access to the highest levels of schooling, entrance into higher paying occupations, and narrowing the intraethnic gender wage gap. Despite such progress, Afro-Brazilians and women are paid less than similarly qualified white men, and wage discrimination is increasing. Placing the interplay of race and gender at the center of this analysis shows how the workplace barriers people confront on the basis of skin color and sex play a fundamental role in shaping social and economic inequality in contemporary Brazil.

This article reviews the environmental history of the Amazon basin from early prehistory to the 1850s, concluding at the start of the rubber boom. It argues that the Amazon's past can be understood in terms of a transition from wilderness to landscape, in a broadly similar way to the environmental history of Europe and North America. A detailed overview of the archaeological record suggests that both floodplain and upland environments were heavily influenced by human intervention during prehistory. The colonial and early republican periods also saw dramatic environmental changes. Interpretations of the Amazon that stress environmental constraints on human agency or portray it as largely virginal or unsettled prior to the modern period are at best an oversimplification.

Um desastroso extermínio de pássaros ocorreu no Brasil durante as primeiras décadas do período republicano, quando o comércio de penas atingiu níveis estrondosos. Os primeiros protestos contra tal situação vieram de naturalistas atuantes nos museus de ciência brasileiros, através do delineamento de dois argumentos principais. Em primeiro lugar, esses cientistas criticavam um liberalismo permissivo do Estado Republicano, responsável pelo abandono dos recursos naturais sem qualquer tipo de proteção. Em segundo lugar, tentavam persuadir os agricultores da utilidade dos pássaros, na maioria insetívoros, e cuja preservação seria absolutamente essencial para manter o equilíbrio natural, um dos pré-requisitos para a continuidade do crescimento econômico e para a construção de uma Nação moderna. Após 1930, com a centralização política promovida por Vargas, o argumento da utilidade dos pássaros foi empregado no reforço de valores morais do regime autoritário, em representações antropomórficas do meio natural.

Until a few years ago, Venezuelans and their historians held black and white notions about the regimes that had governed the country after it became a centralized state in the early twentieth century. As Venezuelan historian Santiago Gerardo Suárez pointed out, “The victor writes history.” And indeed, most portrayals of Venezuelan rulers after 1908 were strongly colored by the roles played by leading members of the political parties that emerged triumphant in 1958 when the modern democratic period was ushered in (Suárez 1965, 20). In fact, the most influential works were written by important politicians and others closely tied to political organizations.

The causes as well as the consequences of land reform are revolutionary. Land reform is not really reform at all. In an agrarian society, land reform is a revolutionary act because it redistributes the major source of wealth, social standing, and political power. Successful large-scale land reforms in Latin America and elsewhere occur only during social revolution or through the actions of invading armies imposing revolution from above. The land reforms in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Cuba, and Nicaragua occurred during revolutions; the land reforms in Japan and Taiwan were imposed by invading armies. The reform in South Korea apparently represented a combination of the two. Fundamental land reform without social transformation is a logical and practical impossibility. This is the reason why land reform as a counterrevolutionary strategy, such as the ill-fated “land-to-the-tiller” program attempted in Vietnam, is bound to fail.

This study evaluates the impact of state policies on forest cover in Costa Rica, focusing on the influence of public policies on private incentives for preserving forest cover. Three periods are analyzed: the “laissez-faire period” when high rates of deforestation were largely unrestrained; the “interventionist period” when state policies created protection for some wildlands, especially with the creation of parks and reserves, but when many regulatory policies produced mixed results at best; and the current “hybrid period” featuring major policy changes and mixing market-oriented and interventionist approaches but not always in a coherent design. Despite significant successes, current policies appear unlikely to provide sufficient incentive to maintain the desired amount of forest cover unless the international community compensates Costa Ricans for the benefits that their forests provide the world.

Brought to the New World by the first Portuguese colonists and, with time, increasingly associated with the Northeast's vast, dry interior, the pamphlet stories in verse known as folhetos or as literatura de cordel have continued to change along with Brazil. Long associated with semi-literate poets who composed for the Northeastern masses, these “stories on a string” have become increasingly popular among middle-class writers and consumers. Today, contemporary compositions by educated authors who rely on the Internet mingle with folheto classics—love and adventure tales with names such as The Mysterious Peacock, Lampião in Hell, and Green Coconut and Watermelon. This article explores one cordel author's vision of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and the subsequent U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Terror in the Twin Towers (Terror nas Torres Gêmeas) by Azulão—the nickname of Rio-based author João José dos Santos—is noteworthy not just for its immediate subject matter but also for its clear mingling of time-honored cordel elements with other features foreign to most earlier stories. These less traditional aspects of the folheto reflect both the particularities of the events about which the poet is writing and a number of larger changes that have taken place since the late 1950s in Brazilian folk and popular culture.

When President Alberto Fujimori suspended constitutional rule in April 1992, he ended Peru's twelve-year experiment in civilian democratic governance. Citing the growing insurgency of Sendero Luminoso, corruption in the political parties, and difficulties with the Peruvian Congress in passing his economic program, Fujimori announced that democracy would have to be “temporarily suspended” in order to build new institutions. This move was backed by the armed forces. Perhaps most surprising to outside observers was the widespread popularity of Fujimori's move, which reflected the growing disenchantment with traditional political parties of the right and the left. Democratic procedures and institutions during the 1980s had been precarious at best. The military's counterinsurgency campaign against Sendero Luminoso had transformed Peru into one of the hemisphere's worst offenders against human rights, with the highest number of forced disappearances in the world. But despite documented cases of torture and other violations of human rights by state authorities, Peruvian military forces acted with the knowledge that they were virtually immune from prosecution.