México se encuentra inmerso en un proceso que se caracteriza por el aumento de la violencia armada. Sin embargo, esta no es la única forma de violencia que se vive en los pueblos. Este artículo analiza el proceso de transformación de la vida cotidiana y las condiciones de vida de los habitantes de Huitzilac, Morelos, México, debidas a la presencia de actividades delictivas como el robo, secuestro y asesinato; la firma de tratados comerciales internacionales que ha provocado la desaparición de la actividad manufacturera; y la inseguridad en la tenencia de la tierra como parte de un proceso de manipulación de la legislación agraria.

Chilean democracy is today more consolidated and inclusive than before the military dictatorship or at any point since the center-left Concertación government came to power. Yet the 1973 coup and Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship remain a defining moment in Chilean history. After all, democracy has been built on the foundations set in place by the country's 1980 Constitution. Although the Constitution has been amended several times, it is a reminder that Pinochet is the father of today's Chile, and the Concertación coalition a deserving stepfather. Four consecutive Concertación governments have helped heal deep social and political wounds and have presided over the most successful period of growth and progress in the nation's history. I discuss the shortcomings of Chilean democracy before 1973 and the status quo of democracy. Although I acknowledge the threat these might pose to further democratic consolidation, they are evidence of a healthy and working democracy.

When studying the politics of taxation it is important to evaluate changes to the tax code in terms of rates, bases, and exemptions instead of just revenues. With that objective in mind, we have compiled a more comprehensive database of tax reforms for Latin America. In this article, we present a description of the database as well as the stylized facts. We also explore the economic and political determinants of reform such as the role of the economic and politico-institutional variables, and compare the results to the consensus. We find two interesting results. First, determinants of reforms seem to have changed over the years as democracies have solidified. Second, disaggregating reforms in various ways is a better strategy for understanding the mechanisms behind tax reforms than looking at the overall number of reforms. Having developed an exhaustive database that allows such disaggregation we provide motivation for future research on this topic.

Este artículo problematiza la construcción de las categorías de víctima y victimario en el Informe Rettig (1991) y el Informe Valech (2004) desde la óptica de la teoría de género. El estudio de estas construcciones discursivas compele a mirar hacia atrás y adelante: atrás en el sentido de localizar las raíces de ciertos discursos en los nuevos movimientos sociales y la lucha democrática de los años setenta y ochenta, y adelante en el sentido que la hegemonía de ciertos discursos elegidos por la Concertación como legítimos siguen estableciendo los parámetros del actual escenario político chileno y probablemente lo seguirán haciendo en el futuro cercano. Esta investigación propone que una de las grandes desventajas de la política actual y su forma de enmarcar los discursos, es su capacidad de producir una falsa ruptura entre la violencia de antes y la violencia de hoy, particularmente en relación a la violencia de género.

This article examines the sources of economic growth for a group of Latin American countries in relation to their export performance in China. The analytical framework is based on an extended normalized quadratic profit function. The econometric results confirm that a favorable export record with China represents a positive source of growth for Latin America. However, it also creates long-run dependability conditions in terms of reduced prices and thinner profits that weaken its growth capacity. Latin American countries must seek product diversification away from their current commodity base and aggressively climb up the value chain to remain competitive worldwide.

Global health-care models for developing countries urge integration of traditional medicine with Western biomedicine. This article shows how residents of a remote Peruvian village negotiate among biomedicine, traditional medicine, lay indigenous medicine, and local knowledge of medicinal plants. Villagers' health-care choices reveal that they often resort to medicinal plants before modern pharmaceuticals. Their discourses show that these choices reflect social and cultural processes beyond the medical: the revitalization of Andean identity, the conflictual relationship that villagers have with modernity, and the desire to evade or subvert the power that Western medicine has over them. This article elaborates the concept of the healthscape as an individual's subjective vision of a landscape's medical resources and institutions, limited by cost and accessibility and shaped by the uneasy coexistence of Western and indigenous medical systems.

Participatory democrats argue that citizen engagement at the local level serves an important educational function. Through involvement in participatory mechanisms, citizens develop various skills, become better informed, and cultivate a greater sense of political efficacy. There has been considerable debate in the academic literature over the extent to which participation can produce these benefits, but deliberative and participatory theoretical approaches have been criticised for neglecting power dynamics within participatory mechanisms themselves, and for overlooking structural inequalities between women and men. Numerous critics have charged that participatory mechanisms tend to mask, but not eliminate, gender inequalities, particularly in societies where these remain firmly entrenched. While the theory on the educational function of participatory democracy is well developed, there remains a lack of empirical work on the impact of participation on women in Latin America, a region that has been at the forefront of democratic innovation. Based on extensive fieldwork in Venezuela, Ecuador and Chile, this article identifies the types of skills that women gain through participation, and questions the extent to which these reproduce traditional gender roles.

Afro-Brazilian communities (quilombos) hold rights to a collective territory where they live and that supports their livelihoods. Historically, Afro-Brazilian smallholders have been subjected to contradictory programs and policies that either restrain traditional practices such as shifting cultivation or aim at empowering these communities. This is the first attempt to adopt the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) theoretical framework to study the historical transformation of the institutional structure in Afro-Brazilian territories of the Ribeira Valley, São Paulo, Brazil. Our results reveal a history of long-term, continuous relationships between locals and external groups, sometimes combative and at other times cooperative, reflecting tensions and contradictions. As a result, quilombo communities have gradually emerged as leaders in an institutional arrangement that is moving toward co-governance or partnerships. We believe that if these communities achieve full economic and political autonomy, they might be able to self-govern their territories and reconcile the dual goals of local development and environmental conservation.

Este ensayo propone un análisis deconstructivo del problema del habla y la escritura en Vidas secas (1938) de Graciliano Ramos. Al examinar la razón de la aparente discapacidad lingüístico-alfabética de los protagonistas de la obra, la crítica ha permanecido hasta el momento dentro de un esquema oposicional (habla/no-habla) que debería ser reevaluado por fuera de ese mismo esquema. Siguiendo las ideas de Jacques Derrida, el artículo considera a Fabiano y a su familia una suerte de filósofos que, en su divagar mental y físico, realizan una crítica onto-teológica y logocéntrica del sistema de diferencias metafísicas naturaleza/cultura y humanidad/animalidad. A la luz de las teorías de Giorgio Agamben, Fabiano representa igualmente al homo sacer, en tanto proscrito bajo estado de excepción en donde se anula la diferencia entre animalidad y humanidad. Como subalterno, el personaje se ubica en un espacio liminal, incluido por su misma exclusión.