The Catholic Church of Peru supported the use of oral contraceptives between 1967 and 1976, believing that doctrine was compatible with controlling one's fertility. Yet the church did not treat fertility control only as a means to limit births or as an individual prerogative. Rather, it framed distribution of the pill within an education plan to promote the duties of responsible parenting. Joseph Kerrins, a U.S. Catholic physician, began the program in a poor area of Lima. By the late 1970s, the program operated in nineteen parishes. The program thrived even after the 1968 encyclical De Humanae Vitae, thanks to the support of priests, Peruvian and U.S. government agencies, physicians, and users of the program's services. Catholic family planning has been a more pragmatic and creative enterprise than hitherto believed. This article explores these developments within the context of the cold war and the transformations of the Catholic Church in 1960s Latin America.

A significant shortcoming in Latin American transitions to democracy has been the failure of some subnational units to follow suit, leading to the emergence of authoritarian enclaves. Recently, however, some of these nondemocratic regimes have moved toward a political opening. In this respect, the state of Bahia in Northeastern Brazil is intriguing. Antônio Carlos Magalhães and his associates, known as carlistas, were in office between 1970 and 2006, when Jaques Wagner, from the Worker's Party (PT), won the gubernatorial election. While the ascent of the PT was saluted as spearheading Bahia's democratization, numerous observers have signaled important elements of continuity, including personalism, clientelism, and top-down decision making. What changed and what didn't is thus a pertinent question. To answer it, I use Robert Dahl's procedural definition of democracy (completed and updated by more recent scholarship) as the guiding criterion to compare carlista and PT rule in Bahia. I conclude with a broad reflection on subnational democratization in Latin America.

In the national consciousness, Ecuador is a mestizo nation. However, it is also an ethnically diverse nation with sizable minorities of indigenous and Afro-descended peoples. In national surveys, there is also a considerable minority who self-identify as blanco (white). Although there is strong evidence of continuing discrimination and prejudice toward both indigenous and Afro-descended peoples, there is little public discussion or political action addressing such issues. The emergence of a powerful and resilient indigenous movement in the late 1980s gained international interest and acclaim in the 1990s, in part because of the peaceful mobilization efforts and effective bargaining tactics of the movement. However, indigenous leaders usually have not engaged in a discourse of racismo and/or discriminación. There has been much less social movement solidarity and activism among Afro-Ecuadorians, but their leaders commonly employ a discourse of racismo and discriminación. In August and September 2004, a survey of more than eight thousand adult Ecuadorians was conducted in regard to racism and related topics. In this research, we use several measures from this survey that focus on awareness of and sensitivity to issues of racism, prejudice, and discrimination. Self-identification of respondents enables us to contrast the responses of whites, mestizos, Indians, and Afro-Ecuadorians to the measures. Other independent variables of interest are level of education, the region in which the respondent resides, and whether the respondent lives in an urban or rural area. Regression results show differences among the ethnic groups in levels of awareness of racism, but more powerful predictors are level of education and rural residence.

Existing case-study research suggests that the recent increase in human rights violations in Latin America is attributed to the US-funded drug war. This narrative, which is referred to as the collateral damage perspective, stands in contrast to US human rights law, which makes governments' respect for human rights a precondition to receive aid. The apparent endogeneity between aid and human rights introduces bias that casts serious doubts on the validity of the collateral damage narrative. In addressing endogeneity, this article presents a simultaneous instrumental variable analysis of the human rights effects of US counternarcotic aid in the Americas. The results show that while counternarcotic aid to regimes increases overall violations of human rights, this effect is greater among democracies than autocracies. And with the exception of torture, this finding is consistent when disappearances, political imprisonment, and extrajudicial killings are also considered. The implication of this research suggests that policy makers in Washington risk losing regional support for US drug control policies if US laws that govern the allocation of aid are not effectively implemented.

Este artículo describe el proceso que llevó a Michelle Bachelet a la presidencia de la república en Chile, las condiciones que lo hicieron posible y las tensiones que vivió el país tras su instalación en el poder en el plano político y también cultural. Se pregunta por el impacto de tener una mujer en la máxima jerarquía política en una sociedad que vive las tensiones de la modernidad y por la medida en que su liderazgo profundizará las transformaciones sociales en curso.

Like many Guatemalan documents referred to by scholars in the past, the Libros Segundo y Tercero del Cabildo de Guatemala (Books Two and Three of the City Council of Santiago de Guatemala) have long been thought to be missing, thereby removing from consultation key sources concerning the events and circumstances of the early colonial period. It turns out that these two tomes, which span the years between 1530 and 1553, are not missing and have been part of the holdings of the Hispanic Society of America for the past century. We discuss how other documentary treasures were taken from Guatemala or disappeared from circulation altogether, identifying the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the period during which national patrimony was most under threat from both internal and external forces.

Well-financed opposition parties can exert their organizational strength to undercut the territorial advantages of political machines and clientele networks. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, leftist parties in Brazil's Northeast region brought conservative dominance to an end. The Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) led this shift, not only garnering regional majorities in presidential elections but also winning multiple governorships and increasing its share of federal and state legislative seats in the region. In contrast to arguments attributing recent electoral shifts in the Northeast to civil society, aggregate growth, and conditional cash transfers, we argue that the territorial expansion of the PT organization played a central role. A spike in party finances between 2001 and 2003 enabled the PT, for the first time, to establish party offices in northeastern municipalities from the top down. Drawing from underutilized data and sources, we show that the PT leadership eroded conservatives' monopoly on rural territory in the Northeast by strategically targeting hundreds of conservative-dominated municipalities and investing resources to stimulate the formation of local offices. The study demonstrates that this top-down territorial targeting produced considerable electoral gains for PT candidates across federal and state races.

Rio de Janeiro's bailes funk, or funk dance parties, with their often intensely violent and aggressively sexualized nature, are fundamental expressions of the culture of the city's favelas, or squatter towns, with tremendous significance for enormous crowds of poor, young people who attend them. This article draws on ethnographic research and participant observation, conducted by the author throughout years of living in the favela of Rocinha, and close readings of funk lyrics to explore the utopian impulse at the core of the baile funk experience, especially in community dances sponsored by gangsters held in the streets of favelas. Like some other cultural expressions of African diaspora communities, these bailes conjure up and sustain a morally and politically charged musical space that joins the young people together, emotionally elevating them above the harsh conditions of their lives into a spiritual state that makes available to them the feeling of living in a better world.

Migrar desde Centroamérica hasta Estados Unidos comporta un costo económico y social cada vez más elevado. Las tarifas de los polleros se han incrementado; en México los centroamericanos corren un grave riesgo de ser secuestrados, y si logran cruzar con éxito la frontera estadounidense deben permanecer escondidos para evitar ser deportados. Este artículo, fundamentado en una metodología cualitativa que incluye entrevistas en profundidad a treinta y cinco polleros que conducían centroamericanos a Estados Unidos y a cincuenta migrantes de Centroamérica, pretende dar respuesta a la siguiente pregunta: ¿por qué se arriesgan los centroamericanos a transitar por México para llegar a Estados Unidos si el costo económico es tan elevado, la probabilidad de éxito tan baja y el riesgo de sufrir agresiones de carácter grave es tan elevado? El estudio concluye que el principal impulsor de este fenómeno migratorio es el apoyo económico de los empleadores para que los centroamericanos puedan cruzar de modo subrepticio la frontera estadounidense.

La ponencia “La función ideológica de la historiografía cubana en la década del sesenta del siglo XX”, analiza, desde una perspectiva general, el mundo ideológico de los años sesenta en Cuba y la unidad concreta que se da entre el discurso político y la producción historiográfica de la etapa. Se define esta historiografía como un arma ideológica fundamental para legitimar el presente revolucionario y el nuevo ideal social que lo guiaba. Se resume brevemente la política editorial e institucional de esta primera década revolucionaria orientada a convertir la historia en un fenómeno de masas y en una fuente esencialmente ideológica capaz de crear, no sólo en los intelectuales, sino en la totalidad del pueblo cubano, la nueva conciencia socialista. Se describen los temas fundamentales de esta historiografía, haciendo un apartado en el tema de la formación de la nación cubana, destacando la significación ideológica de cada una de estas temáticas y del tema de la formación nacional en particular, dada su importancia central en la historiografía de la década. Se enumeran y describen de forma general los aspectos en que se da el tratamiento teórico de este tema, así como los autores y las obras emblemáticas. Se hace referencia al hecho de que, a pesar del impulso que la Revolución dio al oficio del historiador y a la historia como ciencia propiamente, la producción historiográfica de dicha etapa resultó más reinterpretativa que investigativa, lo que denota la sublimación de su función ideológica por encima de la teórica.

Con los gobiernos de Hugo Chávez (1999-2013) se produjo en Venezuela un cambio de régimen político de una democracia representativa a otra “participativa y protagónica”. Este artículo presenta resultados de una investigación sobre los orígenes del concepto participativo constitucional, que son de manera preponderante derivados del pensamiento social de la Iglesia Católica. La primera parte revisa ideas sobre la participación desde Concilio Vaticano II; la segunda, cómo estas ideas pasaron luego a propuestas políticas del partido socialcristiano COPEI (Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente). La tercera indaga sobre el concepto participativo en la izquierda venezolana; y la cuarta y quinta partes examinan la participación en las propuestas de la Comisión para la Reforma del Estado y en la fallida reforma constitucional de 1992, donde quedó asentado el principio participativo que sería copiado a la Carta Magna de 1999.