This essay analyzes the complexity and contradiction of resource-tenure regimes on tropical forest frontiers by drawing on a case study carried out in the department of Río San Juan, southeastern Nicaragua. The main attention is given to competing claims over productive resources and to contradictory relationships between the diverse modalities of resource control. The resource struggles emerging in Río San Juan are analyzed in the context of larger political-economic and socio-legal processes to understand the wider relations of politics and power that affect local resource access. The main goal is to reveal how control over resources is defined and contested in the everyday reality of legal pluralism where multiple legal orders intersect in people's lives, and where the conflicts over whose law applies, and who gets what resources and why, have increasing significance.

Like the precarious colonial state demeaningly referred to as “España la Boba,” the Dominican Catholic Church of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries endured the Caribbean ramifications of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. This onslaught included the cession of Santo Domingo to France in 1795, the protracted and bloody revolution in St. Domingue, disruptions in international trade, and invasions by Haiti in 1801 and 1805. Both the colonial state and the colonial church were further undermined by the declaration of Dominican independence in December 1821. Only weeks into Dominican independence, twelve thousand troops under the command of Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer invaded the eastern part of the island, fulfilling the long-held Haitian goal of unifying the island under Haitian rule. Although considerably weakened, the Dominican church survived as the single truly national institution in the sense that it retained influence throughout the Dominican territory. The church was also national in providing a central element in Dominican elite culture: fervent Catholicism. Thus it was not coincidental that clerics gravitated to the heart of the Dominican struggle for liberation and that the church continued to play a major role in defining political alignments during the forty years following Dominican independence.

We analyze vote buying in Argentina—the payment by political parties of minor benefits (food, clothing, cash) to citizens in exchange for their votes. How widespread is vote buying in Argentina, and what is the profile of the typical vote “seller”? Did the shift toward a neoliberal economic model in the 1990s increase or reduce vote buying? Why do parties attempt to buy votes when the ballot is secret and people could simply accept campaign handouts and then vote as they wish? We analyze responses to surveys we conducted in Argentina in 2002 and offer answers to these questions. Our findings suggest that vote buying is an effective strategy for mobilizing electoral support among low-income people when parties are able to monitor voters' actions, make reasonably accurate inferences about how individuals voted, and credibly threaten to punish voters who defect from the implicit clientelist bargain. Our results point toward ballot reform as one way to reduce vote buying in Argentina.

Este trabajo analiza la influencia política e ideológica que el grupo de discípulos de Alejandro Bunge tuvo en la definición de la política económica del primer peronismo. Se sostiene que su postura favorable a la industrialización en los debates de la entreguerra y el influjo que el catolicismo social ejerció en sus miembros le permitió al grupo ejercer influencia sobre la dictadura militar de 1943. El artículo estudia el papel del grupo en la Secretaría de Industria, la elaboración del primer régimen de promoción industrial y los debates económicos de la inmediata posguerra. Se argumenta que el grupo Bunge desempeñó un rol decisivo en la orientación de la política industrial peronista, moldeando sus características básicas y brindando al régimen de Perón los argumentos que la justificaban. A propósito de ello, el trabajo discute la interpretación que otorga excesivo énfasis a factores políticos y sociales, como el enfrentamiento de Perón con los Estados Unidos y las demandas del movimiento obrero, en la orientación que tomó la política industrial peronista.

This article examines the connections between financing, reputation, and industrial development in Argentina. It analyzes five leading merchant finance groups through a newly created data set of 1,282 directors and shareholders of fifty-nine manufacturing companies across ten sectors from 1890 to 1930. Merchant finance groups formed to pool capital for manufacturing investment in the absence of developed domestic banking institutions and equity markets. The leading five groups under study secured access to diverse sources of capital by developing personal connections and by their reputations. Although these five groups successfully adapted to an environment that lacked efficient credit markets, most manufacturers' companies were capital-starved due to the lack of industrial credit. Insufficient industrial credit resulted in dominant firms owned by a few merchant finance groups controlling the noncompetitive manufacturing sector.

The relationship between capitalism and democracy has been a focal question in political science for years. Compelling arguments have been advanced on all sides of the debate. Democracy promotes capitalism. Capitalism promotes democracy. The two are correlated but are caused by other variables, including everything from a given country's political culture to its position in the world economy. Now the recent turn toward neoliberal economic strategies in Latin America has revitalized the question of whether any one form of capitalism is more compatible with democracy than others.

This article contributes to feminist state theory and studies of women's police stations in Latin America by examining the processes shaping the multiple and changing positions of explicit alliance, opposition, and ambiguous alliance assumed by policewomen regarding feminists since the creation of the world's first women's police station in 1985 in São Paulo. While studies of women's police stations tend to overlook the political conjuncture, much of the literature on the state and gender explains the relationship between the state and women's movements as a function of the political regime. I argue for a more grounded feminist state theory, taking into account interactive macro and micro, local and international forces. As this case study demonstrates, policewoman-feminist relations evolve due to interactions between the political conjuncture, the hegemonic masculinist police culture, developments in the feminist discourse on violence against women, and the impact of the contact policewomen sustain with women clients.

For many who thought of Venezuela as a consolidated democracy, the 1992 coup attempts came as a complete surprise. Those familiar with the deterioration of its democratic regime, in contrast, were more surprised that the coups did not succeed. This article provides an institution-centered explanation of the puzzle of why the 1992 coup attempts occurred, why they failed, and why the Venezuelan military has remained quiescent in the years that followed. Institutions of civilian control created during the post-1958 “Punto Fijo” period, particularly those based on fragmenting the officer corps, prevented the collapse of the democratic regime in 1992. These same institutions allowed civilians to regain authority over the armed forces during the Rafael Caldera administration and have ensured the subordination of the armed forces to elected authorities to the present. It is also argued that the institutional basis for civilian control has been dismantled during the Fifth Republic, heightening the likelihood of future civil-military conflict and threatening regime stability.

Slavery in the interior state of Minas Gerais has been a focal point of the voluminous historiography appearing on Brazilian slavery in the past twenty years. During the mineral boom of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Minas was the key region of the colonial Brazilian economy and the largest slaveholding capitania. The older literature on Brazilian history recognized the centrality of slave labor to the eighteenth-century mining sector but concluded that as the mining boom waned after 1750, slavery began to disintegrate. The history of Minas Gerais after the boom was interpreted as a long period of economic stagnation accompanied by reversion to cattle raising and subsistence agriculture, slow demographic growth, and the transfer of the Mineiro slave population during the nineteenth century to the more dynamic coffee-growing areas in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

Indigenous peoples of Ecuador have organized and mobilized over the past thirty years, partly to reshape their identities after centuries of domination. This research is a preliminary effort to explore the contemporary complexity of that identity. Best viewed as a quantitative case study, this analysis uses responses from seventy-six indigenous college students to a self-administered questionnaire. The authors found that indigenous students with greater “acculturation experiences” with mestizo culture were more strident in rejecting elements of that culture than were their colleagues who had had fewer encounters with mestizo elements of Ecuadorian society. While the tendency to identify oneself ethnically by rejecting the dominant culture represents only one dimension of ethnic identity (maintaining distinctiveness), the authors consider the findings important for future research on the dynamics of the process of ethnic identification.

Este ensayo explica la evolución del debate en torno a la legalización de drogas psicoactivas ilícitas en Colombia. Este debate tuvo un protagonista central: el Presidente Ernesto Samper Pizano (1994–1998). En los años setenta fue un activo participante en la polémica a favor de una actitud más liberal y menos prohibicionista sobre la marihuana. Desde el poder dos décadas después, fue el que impulsó la major criminalización del fenómeno de las drogas. Este trabajo traza ese recorrido histórico y analiza los motivos pragmáticos para que Samper se movieira entre la legalización generosa y la prohibición categórica. Su pensamiento y su comportamiento reflejan en buena medida una actitud relativamente extendida en Colombia frente a los narcóticos: la oscilación entre convivir y combatir las drogas. En uno y otro escenario, el papel de Estados Unidos ha sido fundamental. El peso de Washington y su cruzada anti-drogas resultaron notoriamente influyentes en las discusiones colombianas sobre qué hacer con el narcotráfico y los narcotraficantes. Al inicio de un nuevo milenio, Colombia está frente a un abismo, un abismo en parte originado por la prohibición de drogas.

Local politics in Latin America have been attracting a great deal of scholarly interest as of late (Fox 1994; Nickson 1995; Reilly 1995). This interest can be attributed in part to the simple fact that over the past two decades, the institutional weight of Latin American local governments has continued to grow, spurred as much by the popularity of decentralization policies as by the seminal crisis of the central states in the region. Faced with shrinking resources and painful structural adjustment programs, local governments were often left with no other choice but to divest themselves of responsibilities they could no longer meet.

This article examines one formative moment in the making of a working class in Brazil to show how workers refashioned multiple identities in response to interlocking structural transformations from artisanal to factory production, from homogeneous to heterogeneous ethnic communities, and from a male labor force to one that was increasingly female. Anarchist labor organizers contested the myth of the happy artisan and conflated the exploitation of artisans and factory workers to advance class consciousness. Ethnic ties that had initially fostered organization began to hamper class solidarity, now strained under new ideological conflicts, and facilitated effective resistance from employers. As appeals to ethnicity became problematic, appeals to gender emerged: women workers made themselves visible and audible and played an important role in the evolution of the movement. The ways in which they were seen and heard in the streets, however, contrasted with their representations in elite discourse, which sought to use gender to manipulate divisions within the emerging working class.