Based on an original US survey, this article argues that, on average, US conservatives today feel substantially cooler toward Latin American countries than liberals do. They also desire massively tougher Mexico border policies and much less foreign aid than liberals do. Averages can hide substantial differences within groups, however. Not all liberals and conservatives are alike, and their differences shape attitudes toward Latin America. For instance, our survey reveals that libertarians and economic conservatives oppose foreign aid to places like Haiti out of a belief in the Protestant ethic of self-help and opposition to income redistribution. Communitarians and economic liberals, by contrast, are more supportive of foreign aid to Haiti. Cultural conservatives fear the impact of Mexican immigration on Christian values and a WASP American national identity more than cultural liberals do. But race and racism continue to divide Americans the most consistently in their attitudes and policy preferences toward Latin America. The policy implications of ideologically divided public opinion for US immigration reform are also addressed.

En este trabajo se analizan los procesos económicos en las dos principales unidades económicas y demográficas del territorio argentino en la primera mitad del siglo XIX. Se emplea para ello la abundante información historiográfica disponible y se analizan en detalle dos censos económicos de Córdoba en 1838 y de Buenos Aires en 1839. Por un lado se observa la divergencia creciente en esta etapa entre estas dos economías luego de la independencia, comparando sus dinámicas y sus tamaños relativos. Seguidamente se analiza la relación entre estos desempeños con los niveles de distribución de riqueza, con la intención de ponerlos en discusión con los modelos analíticos vigentes.

¿Cuáles son las condiciones bajo las cuales surgen los gobiernos de corte populista? A partir de un enfoque clásico de representación política (Pitkin 1985) y con datos de encuestas de opinión (Latinobarómetro 1996–2008), este trabajo analiza (1) en qué medida los deficientes resultados de las políticas públicas y la ausencia de rendición de cuentas aumentan la desconfianza ciudadana en las instituciones representativas y cómo esta desconfianza contribuye al surgimiento de liderazgos populistas como una forma de resolver un problema de principal y agente, a través de una rendición de cuentas simbólica. Según se propone aquí, en un inicio los liderazgos populistas contribuyen a disminuir la distancia de los ciudadanos con el sistema político y aumentan la calidad de la representación, en especial la percepción ciudadana de una rendición de cuentas efectiva a través del vínculo directo del pueblo con el líder. Paradójicamente, el aumento de esta dimensión informativa y argumentativa de la rendición de cuentas va de la mano del deterioro progresivo de la dimensión electoral o sustantiva, haciendo difícil su sostenibilidad —analítica y empírica— desde el enfoque de la teoría democrática.

The striking development of Chilean public primary education during the nineteenth century has often been noted. Existing explanations emphasize industrialization and social change in shaping societal demand for schooling, and elite consensus, the role of individual leaders, and low levels of inequality and social heterogeneity in shaping the state's educational provision. This article complements existing state-centered arguments by showing that the institutions of local and regional administration were also crucial in transforming policy changes into real progress in primary education. As Chilean schooling spread and became systematized over the course of the nineteenth century, local state officials not only effectively carried out the state's educational policies but also refined it independently and even pushed for the deepening of educational development, and particularly the systematic control of schooling.

This article highlights the interfaces between micro-level livelihoods, social networks, and macroeconomic trends and policies. Specifically, it analyzes the role of farmer groups in livelihood adaptation of smallholder maize producers in southern Mexico. We show how neoliberal market changes have shaped the local social structure with constraining and enabling effects on households' ability to adapt, while in turn the outcomes of the neoliberal policy reforms are being (re)shaped by the responses of the farmers, thereby changing the structural context. We provide evidence for the heterogeneity of adaptation processes and show that farmers' participation influences the outcomes of neoliberal policy reforms.

El autor, abogado y consultor independiente, nos da cuenta, de primera mano, de la conflictiva Asamblea Constituyente de Bolivia (AC), donde delegados constituyentes elegidos produjeron una nueva constitución política del Estado en 2006–2007. En la AC, movimientos sociales desafiaron modelos de democracia tradicionales representativos, empujando nuevos modelos participativos los cuales incorporaban reivindicaciones étnicos para la justicia. El artículo examina los principales actores (partidos políticos, movimientos sociales, organizaciones no gubernamentales y grupos opositores) y los obstáculos al proceso como la falta de consenso sobre metas y estrategias, la capacidad institucional limitada y una estructura reglamentaria que facilita el veto minoritario de la decisión mayoritaria. El autor concluye que estos problemas finalmente hicieron posible que los intereses y partidos alrededor de la AC dictaran los resultados en lugar de los delegados elegidos.

This essay argues that in the early Porfiriato Mexican officials deftly negotiated the pace and sequencing of the country's reinsertion in the world economy. Despite the government's financial weakness, officials flouted international conventions and obtained the foreign capital necessary to spark growth before settling the foreign debt, in default for more than fifty years. Rather than simply accommodating powerful private financial interests, the government's plans and policies often provoked conflict with its bankers and creditors. However, by employing a wide set of strategies that ranged from manipulating competitors to selectively not enforcing agreements to exploiting nationalist sentiment among local elites, Mexican policymakers preserved their autonomy and advanced a coherent set of policies. In addition to successfully exploiting international capital markets, the Mexican government also successfully maneuvered to establish a more competitive local market. The government's ability to exploit these capital flows, without undermining domestic support, helps explain the regime's early economic growth and political resilience. The findings of this essay extend to the financial realm previous historical scholarship that has noted that the early Porfirian regime enjoyed a surprising degree of autonomy from its economic partners.

This essay examines the influence that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru (TRC, 2001-2003) had in the recent novels Abril rojo (2006) by Santiago Roncagliolo, La hora azul (2005) by Alonso Cueto, and El camino de regreso (2007) by José de Piérola. In particular, I focus on how the TRC's treatment of mental health issues have provided these writers with new ways to approach violence and social justice after the twenty years of terrorist and state violence (1980-2000) that cloud Peruvian history. As part of its investigations, the TRC paid close attention to the mental health of the victims and the psychosocial effects of violence. Its investigation influenced the writers I study, who use representations of mental illnesses to allegorize the country's situation after the years of violence and to imagine processes of justice and reconciliation that will reestablish a healthy national community.

Democratization studies initially focused on processes at the national level, but in recent years, there has been a growing interest in the spatially uneven nature of democracy at, the subnational level This article draws on examples from Argentina and develops an analytical framework of closed games to analyze the functioning of subnational democracy. It argues that the less democratic provinces or states of nationally democratic countries are not necessarily authoritarian and that the concept of subnational authoritarianism prevents us from seeing political dynamics that may arise in the context of a reasonably well-functioning electoral democracy and may result in subnational closed games. The article takes into account the role of political families, media ownership, control of access to business opportunities, and control of the provincial state.

The Rio de Janeiro state archive's collection of entry logs for the city's central detention center, going back to the mid-nineteenth century, provides a rare glimpse into the lives of Rio's—and Brazil's—poor and working classes who otherwise left few written records behind. During the time when the institution maintained the entry logs, police exercised broad power to make arrests. Although relatively few detainees were ever prosecuted or even formally charged, the detention center kept detailed records of detainees' physical appearance, attire, home address, nationality, sex, affiliation, and so on, as well as information about any criminal charges. This article explores the wealth of empirical data that the entry logs provide. It also suggests how scrutinizing this type of document across time shows how record keeping itself changed, in turn affording researchers rare insight into the inner workings of modern Latin American society.

This article looks at the Chocó Department, where black and indigenous ethnic movements demanded collective land rights and autonomy to safeguard local livelihoods from resource-intensive economies. However, after decentralization and state restructuring reforms granted constitutional protections of local ethnopolitical autonomy in the nineties, most indigenous and black communities failed to benefit from the new rights. This has been explained as the result of human rights violations, neoliberal development, and armed groups' appropriation of regional economies, which created stressful conditions for self-governance. In such a scenario, autonomy was maintained only by communities that could resist violence and hold regional or national governments accountable. I build on these claims and add that the difference between the intent and the actual outcome of the reforms is explained by the way new institutions were territorialized or adapted by specific actors to local dynamics. In the Chocó Department, reforms were territorialized in a context of weak institutions, government corruption, and resource-intensive land-use changes that worked against ethnopolitical autonomy by enabling local intermediaries, who frequently made decisions that went against community rights.