The present study analyzes the role of collective remittances in promoting democratic consolidation amid the decentralization of political decision making in Mexico. Specifically, 1 analyze how the remittance-matching program 3 × 1 para Migrantes conditions municipal politics in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. To this end, I evaluate 3 × 1 para Migrantes investment patterns across Guanajuato's forty-six municipalities for the period 2001–2011. The results of my study indicate that, under the right conditions, remittances channeled through the 3 × 1 program stimulate higher levels of voter participation and in this manner have the potential to contribute to democratic growth. However, data patterns also indicate that 3 × 1 investments share a positive correlation with election cycles, demonstrating that local authorities may use the 3 × 1 program to garner political support. In this respect, my analysis calls into question the depth of democratic consolidation at the municipal level in the state of Guanajuato.

Peasant activists affiliated with the Confederación Campesina del Perú (CCP) seized the Pomacocha hacienda in Ayacucho in 1961. The invasion triggered over a decade of serious conflict between those peasants who supported local CCP activists and those who opposed them. The campesinos who challenged Pomacocha's CCP activists did so using the rhetoric of anticommunism, and they were in turn derided as “yellows,” or conservatives. Peasant anticommunism stemmed from conflicts over money, religion, participation, and especially political rivalries, as the staunchest anticommunist peasants in the community belonged to the rival APRA party. The Pomacocha case shows that landowning elites, the church, government officials, and the military had no monopoly on the Cold War rhetoric of anticommunism; peasants likewise mobilized counterrevolutionary discourses to further their own interests. Ultimately, anticommunism allowed campesinos to pierce through the political neglect that characterized indigenous peasants' relationships with the twentieth-century Peruvian state.

Las hipótesis sobre la relación entre competencia política y gasto particularista predicen consecuencias opuestas. Una sugiere que la competencia política —el gobierno sin mayoría<— constriñe al ejecutivo y reduce el particularismo, la perspectiva opuesta predice un mayor particularismo como resultado del intercambio de apoyo legislativo por beneficios. Ambas descansan sobre un supuesto que no siempre se cumple: la presencia de actores con poder de veto en el congreso. Este artículo argumenta que este supuesto es crucial para ambas hipótesis y muestra que allí donde aquel no se cumple estas últimas no se sostienen. Explora los efectos del gobierno con y sin mayoría en contextos de debilidad institucional del congreso a través de un análisis del gasto en bienes públicos locales de los gobiernos subnacionales en México y Argentina y muestra que el gobierno sin mayoría no conduce a ninguno de los resultados anticipados por los modelos existentes.

Por primera en vez Chile una mujer triunfó en las elecciones presidenciales. Sugerimos que la victoria de Michelle Bachelet se explicó, en primer lugar, por sus atributos personales. Los chilenos la evaluaron como la candidata más confiable y con mayor cercanía, valorando además sus condiciones como posible gobernante. En segundo lugar, se vio favorecida por un ambiente político y económico derivado de la reconocida gestión del ex presidente Ricardo Lagos. Un tema crucial que atraviesa todo el escrito corresponde a la solidaridad de género. Se sostiene que el apoyo de las mujeres fue determinante para el triunfo de Bachelet, cuestión que se corrobora tanto a nivel de encuestas en términos de intención de voto como de resultados electorales finales por comuna.

Why is Colombia, a country with fertile arable lands, increasingly importing its food supply as a consequence of shrinking lands dedicated to crop production, whereas land inappropriate for pasture and livestock has been expanding exponentially? The answer lies in the land laws approved since the 1930s, coupled with the state's economic policies, which have reduced the opportunity costs of investing in this sector. Both have provided an institutional matrix to transform parts of the rural economy from food production to a rentier political economy spearheaded by cattle ranching. This article explains why cattle ranching has become increasingly prominent since the 1950s for a segment of the dominant classes that is predisposed to invest in this endeavor despite the risks and low economic returns. More important, the article explains how the institutional matrix (laws and policies) and precarious property rights in rural areas provided the incipient narco-bourgeoisie, since the mid-1970s, with a pivotal incentive to choose cattle ranching as a favorite means to launder money, speculate, and exercise political power, consequently cementing rentier capitalism.

El abandono del régimen de convertibilidad en 2002 implicó cambios sustantivos a nivel macroeconómico que tuvieron un fuerte impacto en el desempeño de los distintos sectores de la economía argentina. Sin embargo, durante la posconvertibilidad parece haberse registrado también cierta continuidad en determinados procesos económico-sociales: si bien desde los elencos gubernamentales se ha reivindicado sucesivamente la necesidad de recuperar un empresariado nacional fuerte, el peso del capital extranjero entre las empresas más grandes del país no ha disminuido. Esto es sumamente relevante teniendo en cuenta que la Argentina es una economía dependiente y, por lo tanto, el rol del capital transnacional en su proceso de acumulación es determinante. El objetivo del artículo es indagar sobre las continuidades y las rupturas en el proceso de extranjerización del gran capital en la Argentina a partir de un análisis de lo ocurrido con las quinientas empresas líderes de la economía durante el período 1993-2008.

In 1955, a monument to Inca warrior Rumiñahui was erected in Otavalo's central plaza. In this article, I study the ways in which competing imaginings of the Ecuadorian nation have shaped the material and symbolic trajectory of the monument. The monument was the outcome of a struggle for hegemony between nonindigenous elites. The current appropriation of the monument by the local indigenous population, however, is at odds with the ideological purpose for which it was built. The initiative to build the monument emerged from the public sphere—which at that time excluded indigenous peoples—in a context of national debates about the Indian problem. The widespread notion that the indigenous people of Otavalo were exceptional propelled the local nonindigenous elite to debate the Indian problem and shape, in the process, a public sphere. Elucidating the workings of the public sphere in the racialization of indigenous peoples, I aim to contribute to the academic literature about the relationship between Indian and nation in Ecuador. This literature has focused on the role that either the state or the private sphere has played in this racialization and has not paid enough explicit attention to the public sphere.

This article analyzes new forms of distinction and inequality generated within Uruguayan squatter settlements as a result of neoliberal policies, class polarization, and the downward mobility of previously integrated populations that have migrated to the informal urban periphery. Based on ethnographic research in Montevideo, this article shows how newly impoverished Uruguayans have dealt with their new spatial proximity and ever-increasing socioeconomic proximity to chronic poverty through the maintenance of symbolic boundaries between themselves and the chronic poor. This boundary work is dependent on the reproduction of a series of moral oppositions, highly reminiscent of hegemonic discourses on the culture of poverty, which cast the chronic poor as dirty, lacking in values, apathetic, disorganized, and responsible for their own poverty.