Scholarly literature has often characterized the popular bandit Chucho el Roto (1835?–1885) in terms of his legend as Mexico's urban Robin Hood, yet no study has attempted to discern how this legend took root and changed over time. This investigation brings together historical documents and literary texts about Chucho el Roto from the 1880s to the 1920s to analyze changing cultural perceptions of social class tensions in Mexico. It finds that Chucho provided a vehicle for both lower and upper classes to critically reflect on the morality of dominant society and to unite behind the resiliency and dignity of the oppressed working class. While the earliest literary text from 1889 criticizes Chucho for refusing to submit to dominant social norms and accept his place in the socioeconomic hierarchy, two post-1910 novels celebrate Chucho's banditry as a socialist-inspired political rebellion that resists assimilation into dominant political paradigms, including that of revolution.

Political parties are crucial for democratic politics; thus, the growing incidence of party and party system failure raises questions about the health of representative democracy the world over. This article examines the collapse of the Venezuelan party system, arguably one of the most institutionalized party systems in Latin America, by examining the individual-level basis behind the exodus of partisans from the traditional parties. Multinomial logit analysis of partisan identification in 1998, the pivotal moment of the system’s complete collapse, indicates that people left the old system and began to support new parties because the traditional parties failed to incorporate and give voice to important ideas and interests in society while viable alternatives emerged to fill this void in representation.

En el articulo analizaré las conmemoraciones del Primero de Mayo en la ciudad de Porto Alegre, capital de Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil, pensándolas como momentos privilegiados de la construcción de la identidad obrera en los cuales el proletariado, ganando las calles, presentaba orgullosamente sus símbolos y la fuerza de su cohesión frente a los otros sectores de la sociedad, y también como momentos de disputas en torno al significado de la fecha, a través de los cuales es posible observar tanto la influencia de la circulación de las ideas como las contradicciones del movimiento obrero internacional en el paso del siglo XIX al siglo XX

Este artículo sigue las sugerencias de Weber de estudiar cómo diferentes tipos de dominación se combinan en experiencias históricas concretas. Se analizan las sinergias y tensiones entre el liderazgo carismático de Rafael Correa y criterios tecnocráticos. A diferencia de líderes neopopulistas que encargaron sus políticas económicas a expertos neoliberales, Correa combina en su persona al experto con el político carismático. En su oratoria y en sus programas de televisión y radio semanales Correa compagina tecnocracia y carisma y se presenta como el profesor y redentor de la nación. Expertos posneoliberales están en las posiciones más importantes del régimen. Comparten con Correa la idea de estar liderando un ciclo de cambios profundos, de encarnar los intereses de toda la sociedad y no de sectores particulares, y la misión de llevar a cabo la refundación de la nación. Las tensiones entre criterios tecnocráticos y carisma se evidenciaron en la crisis política causada por una rebelión policial en la que los criterios carismáticos opacaron consideraciones racionales y estratégicas. Si bien el carisma y la tecnocracia pueden convivir en el discurso, el carisma es inestable y subvierte los intentos de gobernar a través del conocimiento de los expertos.

While political polarization may lead to gridlock and other negative policy outcomes, representation is likely to be enhanced when parties differentiate themselves from each other and make it easier for voters to see the connection between their personal ideologies and the electoral offerings. These differences between parties may be especially important in developing democracies, where voters are still learning parties' priorities and where parties do not always emphasize issues when campaigning. To test this proposition, I develop a measure of elite polarization in Latin America since the early 1990s based on legislative surveys. Individual-level voting patterns from mass survey data confirm that the connection between voters' self-placement on the left-right scale and their electoral choice is stronger in polarized party systems, even when controlling for other party system factors like the age of the party system or electoral fragmentation. This effect on voting behavior is not immediate, however, as voters take time to recognize the new cues being provided by the changing party system.

The transvestite, as a figure that contests both heteronormativity and machismo, has remained in the cinema of Latin America, unlike its literature, a rather unexplored theme. Although some films have attempted to deal with such a figure, they have devoted very little diegetic time either to the process of physical and psychological transformation from man to woman or to showing transvestism as the externalization of the character's self-perceived gender identity. This article aims to show that the lack of on-screen transvestism in Arturo Ripstein's El lugar sin límites (1978), Miguel Barreda's Simón, el gran varón (2002), and Karim Aïnouz's Madame Satã (2002) is caused by a kind of heteronormative filmic fear to depict the fluidity of sexuality beyond the biologically oriented binary man-woman. I suggest that Latin American audiences do not respond positively to transvestitic images (i.e., the cinematic acknowledgment of transvestism) because they transgress the fixity of gender roles within heteronormativity.

Many cross-national surveys examine the extent to which citizens of new democracies believe that democracy is always preferable to any other form of government. There is little evidence, however, regarding how such attitudes affect citizen behavior. This article examines the case of Bolivia, asking whether and how Bolivians' attitudes toward democracy affect participation, including contacts with public officials and involvement in political parties and social movements. Through analysis of nationwide survey data, I show that preferences for democracy have little effect on participation in party meetings or protests. Examining the relationship more carefully, I then show that, for Bolivians who favor institutional methods of representation, support for democracy increases attachment to the traditional political system and decreases protest; for citizens who favor popular methods of representation, it has the opposite impact. I conclude by discussing the implications for scholarship on democratization, which often conflates preferences for democracy with political stability.

Este artículo explica los efectos de la violencia y, en particular, el tipo de violencia relacionado con los cárteles de droga y su influencia sobre la competitividad electoral a nivel local (municipal). Resulta pertinente comprender y estimar este efecto para asegurar que la democracia, definida sobre la base de su requisito más elemental—es decir, elecciones libres y justas —, no se deteriore o transite al autoritarismo en los gobiernos locales. Los resultados revelan un deterioro en la competitividad electoral a nivel local debido a la violencia relacionada con el tráfico ilegal de drogas. Las estrategias represivas del gobierno mexicano no han sido efectivas en prevenir este resultado.

Scholars have recast debates on globalization by emphasizing both national actors’ selective appropriation of transnational practices and their hybrid reinvention in national settings. Drawing on Nestor García Canclini’s concepts of “global communities “ and “hybrid cultures, “ I explore these debates by comparing gay and lesbian activists’ first experiments in electoral activism in Mexico and Brazil, both occurring in 1982. The different electoral strategies that prevailed in each country drew on the transnational arena in different ways. To explain these differences, I consider the relative strength of competing sectors within heterogeneous social movement fields and their variable participation in competing global communities. The relative influence of these sectors and thus the relative salience of specific transnational practices, in turn, reflected each movement’s embeddedness in broader opposition movements to authoritarian regimes. Finally, I argue that these practices should be read contextually, with attention given to their transformation and limitations in national settings.

Land reform has been one of the most contentious issues in Brazilian political history. Government administrations since the 1960s have adopted the banner of reform, and the country has implemented vast colonization and redistribution programs, but the objectives and the effects of those programs have varied widely. Throughout this long history, considerable scholarship has focused on the programs themselves as well as on the increasingly radical social movements that have fought for more enduring reform. Most of this work, however, has invoked the state as the site of policy making and political direction and paid little attention to the state workers responsible for actually implementing reform. In this article, I present a qualitative analysis of the agency in charge of land distribution and settlement since 1970, the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA). I argue that understanding the politics of reform requires attention to the political culture within INCRA, which can only be explained through examination of the agency's long history as first a tool of frontier colonization and then a response to social mobilization.

This article analyzes whether public investment has crowded out private investment in Bolivia during the 1988–2010 period. The evidence demonstrates that this is generally the case, as public investment has been shown to consistently run counterclockwise to private investment. Interestingly, the quality of the institutional setting and the openness of the economy to trade with other nations do not seem to matter to the relation between public investment and private investment. The findings suggest, however, that increases in domestic credit to the private sector lessen the crowding-out effect, which calls attention to the importance of a stable and healthy financial system as a way to encourage private investment.

This article examines the symbolic transformations and material consequences of an irrigation development project designed to empower indigenous peoples in Cañar, Ecuador. It argues that the project deepened market society and reproduced colonialism more than it empowered indigenous peoples, but indigenous people found ways to appropriate project resources and embed the market in alternative principles of social life. Market society deepened through the neoliberal hegemony of international development policy and through the indigenous movement's incorporation of market rationalities. Colonialism recurred through hierarchical representations of knowledge and skills reminiscent of long-standing stereotypes of natives, which local indigenous leaders internalized. Both processes unfolded through constructions of value and acts of evaluation. The gap between the market ideal communicated in the irrigation development project and the conditions of actually existing markets that local indigenous people engaged after project closure limited the concrete empowerment of indigenous peoples.

This article takes issue with influential views in Brazil that depict the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST), the largest popular movement in this country, as a threat to democracy. Contrary to these assessments, it argues that a sober review of the MST's actual practice shows that it is far from an antistate or antidemocratic organization. Quite to the contrary, the MST demands that the state play an active part in reducing the nation's stark social inequities through the institution of an inclusive model of development. The MST's contentious edge has contributed to Brazil's ongoing democratization process by (1) highlighting the role of public activism in building political capabilities among the poor and catalyzing downward redistribution policies; (2) facilitating the extension of basic citizenship rights, broadening the scope of the public agenda, and strengthening civil society through the inclusion of groups representing the most vulnerable strata of the population; and (3) fostering a sense of hope and utopia through the affirmation of ideals imbued in Brazil's long-term, complex, and open-ended democratization process.

Who benefits and who loses during redistribution under dictatorship? This article argues that expropriating powerful preexisting economic elites can serve to demonstrate a dictator or junta's loyalty to their launching organization while destroying elite rivals out of government that could potentially threaten the dictator's survival Expropriation also provides resources for buying the support of key nonelite groups that could otherwise organize destabilizing resistance. An analysis of the universe of fifteen thousand land expropriations under military rule in Peru from 1968 to 1980 demonstrates the plausibility of this argument as a case of redistributive military rule that destroyed traditional elites and empowered the military. Land was redistributed to “middle-class” rural laborers who had the greatest capacity to organize antiregime resistance if they were excluded from the reform. This finding directly challenges a core assumption of social conflict theory: that nondemocratic leaders will act as faithful agents of economic elites. A discussion of other modernizing militaries and data on large-scale expropriations of land, natural resources, and banks across Latin America from 1935 to 2008 suggests that the theory generalizes beyond Peru.