In this article, I outline a framework to examine women's lives in eastern Guatemala, how multiple forms of violence coalesce in their everyday lives, and how these become normalized so as to become invisible and “natural.” Women in western Guatemala, mostly indigenous, have received the attention of scholars who are interested in unearthing the brutality of state terror and its gendered expressions in Guatemala. My discussion builds on previous research conducted among indigenous groups in Guatemala and renders a depiction of the broad reach of violence, including expressions that are so commonplace as to become invisible. I argue that an examination of multiple forms of violence in the lives of women in eastern Guatemala, who are nonindigenous, exposes the deep and broad manifestations of living in a society engulfed in violence, thus depicting the long arm of violence.

The Dominican Republic has emerged as the world's foremost exporter of organic bananas and cocoa, a top exporter of organic coffee, and an export pioneer in new commodities like organic mangos. Pursuing a contextualized commodity network approach, I explain the rise of organic products within the broader forces fueling nontraditional agro-export growth and identify the key factors configuring organic export networks today. The article analyzes the implications of global organic market trends for Dominican exports and for the thousands of small producers involved. My research finds that despite their historical prominence, rising international competition and buyers' quality expectations are working to displace or disempower small Dominican organic producers. Strong producer associations and transnational movement ties are critical in shoring up the position of small organic producers in the Dominican Republic and may be similarly crucial in other Latin American countries.

This article reports the results of a pioneering and in-depth survey of the research and information-seeking behavior of the student members of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) living in the United States and Puerto Rico. The results suggest that the new generation of Latin Americanists in the universities surveyed are confident in their abilities to carry out research on the region within their respective disciplines. However, most of these students have not received formal instruction by course instructors or librarians on how to carry out their research on Latin America. Use of the Internet as a research resource is popular but has not replaced the use of the library and long-standing research strategies such as footnote-chasing. While the reported use of library electronic resources is very high, awareness of Latin America-specific and electronically-available research tools such as HLAS, HAPI, and LAPTOC is low. The survey is the first step in reassessing the ever-changing needs and research patterns of this cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary group of academic library users and future leaders in Latin American studies.

Previous research suggests that Mexican female migrants face more barriers than their male counterparts. However, few studies examine how the educational characteristics of female migrants differ from those of male migrants and how selectivity may have changed in the context of evolving gender dynamics in both countries. This study uses U.S. and Mexican census data from 1960 to 2000 to compare the educational attainments of recent Mexican immigrants to Mexican nonmigrants. Both male and female immigrants are positively selected—that is, more educated than nonmigrants in Mexico—and that selectivity increased from 1960 to 2000. Women are more highly selected than men throughout the past four decades, but earlier female migrants tended to have more education than more recent female migrants, who tend to come from the middle of the educational distribution.

In an era of increasing economic liberalization, much has been written on the challenges facing alternative trade movements. Religion is often overlooked in such research, and I examine how the faith identity of one set of actors influenced their involvement in the Central American coffee trade. On the basis of ethnographic research in Nicaragua, I examine how religious networks, ethics, and values shaped the economic behaviors of an evangelical Christian coffee network. Ultimately, I find religion had a mixed impact. Local networks brought actors together in a common mission for economic justice, although transnational connections mattered little beyond providing aid. Although religious' ethics promoted a sense of fairness, more radical was a focus on transparency, which altered economic relationships among those in the coffee chain. Finally, actors leveraged their spiritual vision to challenge market dynamics and redefine the coffee product, although this vision both constrained and advanced efforts toward true empowerment of farmers.

Costa Rica es un país que de manera sistemática ha mostrado altos niveles de satisfacción de vida a pesar de que su ingreso per cápita no es alto. Datos recientes de la encuesta Gallup del 2008, la cual se hace en más de 140 países del planeta, muestran que los costarricenses tienen la satisfacción de vida más alta del mundo. Esta investigación sigue un enfoque de dominios de vida para entender la satisfacción de vida de los costarricenses y plantea que la satisfacción de vida es el resultado de la satisfacción personal en cada una de las diferentes facetas o áreas concretas donde se ejerce como ser humano. La investigación muestra que el ingreso, aunque estadísticamente significante, no es determinante de la satisfacción económica, y que la satisfacción económica no determina la satisfacción de vida. La investigación concluye que para los costarricenses el nivel de vida es solo uno de los aspectos que influyen en su satisfacción de vida; por ello, su satisfacción de vida es muy alta a pesar de que su ingreso per cápita es comparativamente bajo.

O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar a reação da organização indígena na região do norte do Cauca, na Côlombia, em face do confronto armado em seu território no período 2000–2005, tentando explicar como esta organização consegue realizar um tipo de resistência ativa ao conflito. O estudo é essencialmente do tipo etnográfico e trabalha com uma perspectiva que privilegia o estudo dos elementos culturais e identitários para a compreensão das ações coletivas, aos moldes de Sonia Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino e Arturo Escobar (2001) em seu livro “Política Cultural e Cultura Política nos Movimentos Sociais Latino-Americanos”.

O artigo apresenta as interpretações e definições de conflito armado e paz encontradas nos discursos dos membros do movimento indígena nortecaucano. Argumenta-se que, no caso indígena, a cultura e seu processo identitário no âmbito da organização são fontes importantes de elementos simbólicos que sustentam os processos de resistência e ao mesmo tempo criam um espaço alternativo importante sobre o tema do conflito armado e da paz no país a partir da sociedade civil, em contraponto às visões tanto do Estado quanto dos atores armados e suas propostas sobre este tema.

Este artigo aprofunda o viés sociocultural da relação entre a comunidade e os recursos hídricos. O objetivo foi investigar as práticas sociais experienciadas e compartilhadas em relação à água em uma comunidade que vive a margem de dois rios. O estudo é qualitativo e baseia-se nas pesquisas bibliográfica e de campo realizadas em 2011 e 2012. Os sentidos circulantes entre os informantes deixaram entrever duas matrizes culturais principais: a matriz histórica e a matriz simbólica.

Urban violence is an emerging challenge to development and democracy across Latin America. How do cities negotiate this challenge alongside pressures to compete in global markets and enable greater political participation? This article analyzes the politics of urban violence in the intriguing case of Medellín, Colombia, which international donors and policy makers herald as having reshaped its urban governance and economic appeal through its response to violence. The article provides a within-case comparative analysis of contrasting outcomes in the trajectories of the political projects Medellín launched in response to urban violence amid the drug wars of the early 1990s and the subsequent urbanization of the Colombian civil war. I argue that a focus on urban political economies and patterns of armed territorial control contributes to our understanding of the politics of urban violence, reveals limitations for the diffusion of the Medellín model, and identifies promising avenues for future research.

Bolivia was the poster child for economic liberalization policies adopted throughout Latin America since the 1970s. The country is also currently viewed as a place where the neoliberal or market-oriented economic model has been exhausted, as indicated by high levels of societal protest and recent democratic instability. Using available subnational data from Bolivia, we examine the determinants of societal protest across the country's nine provinces for the 1995–2005 period. Consistent with recent literature, we find that provinces with higher levels of political competition have lower levels of societal protest. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, which suggests that neoliberal reforms depoliticize and demobilize collective actors, we find that economic liberalization increases the level of protest activity. Taken together, the article draws attention to the paradoxical effect of neoliberalism to simultaneously debilitate certain types of popular resistance and activate others.

Although racial injustice and inequality are widely acknowledged in Brazil, recent experimental research concludes that citizens there do not rely on racial cues when voting. In this article, we test for the impact of candidate race on vote choice. We find evidence of identity-based voting in Brazil that interacts with ballot size. When facing a short ballot with only a few candidates, most subjects chose candidates without regard to race or color. But when presented with a large ballot with many candidates, white and brown subjects show a significant preference for same-race candidates. Self-identified black subjects, however, demonstrated a strong and consistent preference for black candidates regardless of choice set size. These results are particularly important given Brazil's electoral rules that provide voters with overwhelming numbers of candidates from which to choose.

During the last decade, the term Establishment has gained currency among Colombian opinion makers—be they newspaper columnists, politicians, or even academics. After surveying the ambiguities of the concept in the United Kingdom and the United States—the countries where it was first popularized in the 1950s and 1960s—this paper focuses on the usages of the expression in the Colombian public debate. Based on a variety of sources—including op-eds and newspaper reports, interviews with leading public figures, and other political and academic documents—I show how generalized the term has become. I examine how the prevailing language gives the “Establishment” a central role in shaping political developments in the past decades. It blames the Establishment for the country's most fundamental problems while conferring on this same Establishment the power to solve them. However, any attempt to identify what is meant by the Establishment soon reveals an extremely confusing picture. In the final part of the paper, I highlight some of the implications of the general usage of such a vague and contradictory concept for the quality of democratic debate, the legitimacy of the political system, and the possible solution of the armed conflict in Colombia.