I discuss how the chorographic view of landscape in Spanish cartography was at variance with the perspective of terrain represented in Andean mapping media when both traditions converged upon the implementation of the Crown-mandated surveys known as the “Relaciones Geográficas del Peru” (1577–1586). These surveys were collected and transcribed by modern editors for publication. The sole map included in the Relaciones may have been due to the self-interest of the Spanish author. The continued use of Andean media and the art of “memory mapping,” both of precontact origin, may explain why indigenous mappings did not enter the Relaciones record. This memory activity was, and is still, manifested during the ritualized traversing of community-held land boundaries. Therefore, the few extant paper-like mappings had been appended to land-litigation documents. I examine how the visualized route and the naming of topographical features underlie three sixteenth-century mappings and their accompanying judicial accounts (relaciones). These mappings and accounts display the native Andeans' adaptation of precontact place identification practices to Spanish boundary-marking methods. The mappings demonstrate a hybrid cartographic art, which combines manuscript and block print within the pictorial format. In one of the maps the artist-scribes include a relación in Quechua (and its Spanish version), a rare example of this genre in Andean letters. Indigenous cabildo authorities, exemplified by Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala, adopted writing practices by recording place names. This activity led to a pan-Andean lexicon of toponymns for judicial purposes. Contemporary ethnographic research on current walkabout customs could further elucidate the genesis of these Colonial Andean mappings and lead to the recovery of other specimens.

This article accounts for the role that partisan divisions played in shaping variation in mass preferences for market-oriented policies in Latin America during the 1990s. Most of the existing studies on attitudes toward market reforms have focused on issues such as the timing of reforms, the presence of economic crises, and how economic performance shaped citizens' preferences. Fewer studies have investigated whether partisan cleavages translated into divergent preferences toward market reforms. Were there systematic differences between left- and right-wing voters in their preferences toward market reforms? Did left-wing voters oppose these policies and right-wing voters favor them? Which of these structural transformations—state retrenchment or trade liberalization—witnessed greater mass polarization along partisan lines? This article answers these questions with the use of a mass survey on public opinion about market reforms conducted by Mori International in eleven Latin American countries in 1998.

In recent decades, the impacts of climate on society and on human well-being have attracted increasing amounts of attention, and the forecasts that predict such impacts have become more accurate. Forecasts are now distributed and used more widely than they were in the past. This article reviews three cases of such use of forecasts in Latin America. It shows that in all cases, the users are concentrated in particular sectors and regions (agriculture in the Argentine pampas, fisheries on the Peruvian coast, water resources in northeastern Brazil) and that the forecasts are distributed not by government agencies but by intermediate organizations—semistatal organizations or nongovernmental organizations. It draws on the concept of environmental citizenship to discuss these cases and assesses them for such attributes of citizenship as equity, transparency, accountability, and promotion of collective goals. It traces the implications of these cases for the current era of global warming.

Northern Veracruz has experienced dramatic transformations in its landscape over the longue durée. Geological forces shaped it into the northernmost tropical rain forest in the Americas. Paleolithic humans appeared as early as 7600 BCE and tinkered with it, exploiting it for their own survival for thousands of years. Their ecological footprint was light enough until the communities grew and adopted agriculture. At that point, around 2500 BCE, the landscape of the Huasteca Veracruzana became more humanized, but the survival of the rainforest was not at risk, even when the first towns formed in the first centuries of the Common Era. Urbanization and civilization were highly localized, collapsing for reasons not well understood. The rainforest thus endured to confront Spanish colonialism in the 1500s. Changes in the land were uneven under the Spanish, however, and the rainforest outlasted colonial rule as well as the turmoil of nineteenth-century national politics. Transformation came in the twentieth century, as a result of oil extraction. Under the oil barons, the Huasteca experienced the full impact of capitalism and industrialization. Between 1900 and 1940, the oil industry eliminated the rainforest, leaving the Huasteca open to further environmental change. In the aftermath of oil, the landscape shifted to grasslands and monocrop agriculture. Oil remained present but largely in disguise: as petrochemical inputs to force poor soils to sustain citrus production and cattle ranching.

Deforestation in Latin America, especially in the Amazon basin, is a major source of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that contribute to global warming. Protected areas play a vital role in minimizing forest loss and in supplying key environmental services, including carbon sequestration and rainfall regulation, which mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change amid a rising tide of economic development in the region. The area of protected forest has expanded rapidly since 1980 to cover one-fifth of Latin America and more than two-fifths of Amazonia, a region whose rain forest captures some 40 percent of Latin America's carbon emissions. The reserve sector has traditionally suffered from severe underfunding, but the possibility of new resources being generated through financial compensation for “reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation” (REDD) or “avoided deforestation” under a new Kyoto protocol after 2012 could help strengthen the environmental and social roles of protected areas. However, a number of major implementation and governance challenges will need to be addressed.

This article looks into the factors that explain foreign direct investment (FDI) in Brazil by country of origin. We collected a sample of 180 countries with and without FDI in Brazil. We use multiple estimation techniques and controls to isolate the effect of country political risk on outward foreign direct investment and show that countries with lower levels of political risk undertake more FDI in Brazil, and that features of the policy environment of home countries drive the negative relationship between risk and FDI. Furthermore, we show that the aspect of the political and institutional environment that is most likely to drive this negative relation between risk and investment into Brazil is related to the effectiveness of national governments. Our findings broaden the understanding of the puzzling influence of political risk on FDI observed in previous studies, correct for sampling and selection biases, and have substantive implications for policy design to attract FDI.

This article studies how the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and, more generally, neoliberalism rearticulate the opposition between civilization and barbarism, and the vision of the world that underlies it. During a time in which many intellectuals have embraced a relativistic notion of culture that makes judgment problematic, neoliberals embrace this clear-cut value hierarchy with complete abandonment. In fact, one cannot but be surprised by the ease with which Vargas Llosa makes pronouncements based on the identification of individuals, groups, and political movements with either civilization or barbarism. However, the fact is that his reference to this dichotomy differs substantially from its nineteenth-century version and its colonial precedents. The implicitly racial hierarchization proposed by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and other nineteenth-century thinkers has been replaced in Vargas Llosa's writings by one based on cultural and social values.

The central hypothesis derived in this article is that the ability of Brazil's central government to bypass governors determined the success of delivering public goods federation-wide in the area of noncontributory social protection policy. The Workers' Party's (Partido dos Trabalhadores) first-term administration from 2003 to 2006 successfully reformed, expanded, and implemented four previously existing cash-transfer programs designed to alleviate poverty. The central administration's flagship program Bolsa Família was implemented in all of Brazil's municipalities, delivering benefits to more than 11 million households. A nonmajoritarian political system, the constitutional autonomy of municipalities, and the gradual hardening of post-1995 subnational budget constraints facilitated the ability of the central government to live up to the aspirations and expectations of the Brazilian public by combating hunger, poverty, and misery through this program. This article shows these institutional factors to have provided incentives for successful central-local collaboration in this social policy area.

Over the past few years, a burgeoning literature on Latin American politics has developed, focusing on explanations for the renewed success of the left in the region. Building on electoral trends and public opinion analysis, we argue that the region is experiencing the normalization of democratic politics rather than a backlash or a revolution. Furthermore, we believe that electoral support for the left reflects the disenchantment of voters with underperforming right-wing governments. Using a unique data set covering eighteen countries in the region, our statistical analyses demonstrate that retrospective voting provides a powerful explanation of the recent electoral success of the left in Latin America. Thus, the central implication of our argument is that electoral accountability is still the primary mechanism of controlling the executive in the region's young democracies.

The landscapes of the Greater Caribbean have been undergoing a process of ecological globalization since the arrival of European explorers and settlers in the late fifteenth century. The character of this ecological globalization has changed over time. Models of commodity-led economic development drove, directly or indirectly, the neo-Columbian exchanges of the long nineteenth century (roughly 1720–1930). The neo-Columbian exchanges differed from the Columbian exchanges of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in several key ways: They were increasingly mediated by imperial and transnational scientific institutions. The geographical scope of the exchanges grew, and the Greater Caribbean saw many new direct introductions of people, plants, and animals from Asia and the Pacific, as well as from the eastern part of the Atlantic World. A parallel movement of pathogens from Asia and the Pacific also introduced new epidemic diseases—especially crop diseases—to the Greater Caribbean. The neo-Columbian exchange drove the region's dramatic expansion in agricultural production, but this constructed abundance came at the expense of ecological impoverishment and fragility.