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.

There is variation among the Latin American sending countries in the timing, sequence, and form by which they have approved retention-of-nationality laws (dual-citizenship laws) and have extended political rights to their migrants abroad. This variation is the product not only of the characteristics of the migration in each country but also of the specificity of their political and electoral systems and of the historical relationship between the state and its citizens. I focus my analysis on Latin American migration to the United States, which, although not the only destination, has attracted the majority of Latin American migrants and has significantly influenced, with its immigration policies, the policies of Latin American sending countries towards their émigrés.

Este artículo propone una genealogía crítica de la trilogía escénica brasileña compuesta por la tragedia Orfeu da Conceição (1956) de Vinicius de Moraes; el filme Orfeu negro (1959), dirigido por Marcel Camus y el filme Orfeu (1999), dirigido por Carlos Diegues. Mediante el análisis comparado de los procesos creativos de estas obras, y de los múltiples vínculos ideológicos e históricos que las enlazan, mi ensayo demuestra la manera en que el viejo mito griego de Orfeo reconfigura y actualiza su carácter mítico en el Brasil escénico del siglo XX, en una trayectoria que recorre el teatro y el cine, el jazz y la bossa nova, el negocio del espectáculo y los discursos de identidad en Brasil, Francia, los Estados Unidos, y sus respectivas lenguas. Termino con una síntesis de estos procesos, recuperando el bosquejo mitológico de mi introducción a la luz de una reflexión general sobre mitografía.

This article examines the effect of perceived ethnoracial identity on electoral politics in the Dominican Republic and provides an explanation for the low salience of race and ethnicity in political behavior in Latin America. I argue that, under certain conditions, individuals will deal with ethnoracial discrimination and stratification through exit rather than voice —that is, they will reclassify their way out of marginalized ethnoracial categories instead of voting for candidates or parties that share their ethnoracial identities. This tends to be the case where ethnoracial group identity is inchoate and group boundaries are permeable. I also argue that where ethnoracial group loyalties are weak and immigration is widespread, citizens may emphasize national origin over race or ethnicity. Findings from an original field experiment and survey in Santo Domingo show that candidates did not consistently support candidates that shared their ethnoracial attributes, but they did slightly favor candidates perceived as white. Respondents strongly discriminated against candidates of Haitian origin.

Despite a growing literature on the left in Latin America, few studies have considered the fate of the right. This article examines a highly successful conservative party, the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which held power for close to two decades in El Salvador. The ARENA party used mano dura policies—defined by the introduction of discretionary crimes, diluted due process guarantees, and military participation in policing—to boost its support among constituencies plagued by crime. Two key factors prompted ARENA party strategists to emphasize security. First, a credible electoral threat existed from a leftist party hesitant to resort to harsh security measures. Second, factional divisions drove party strategy. Business elites who formed the core of the ARENA party refused to abandon unpopular economic reforms. Mano dura policies allowed the party to maintain support from traditional elites and their rural bases without reversals to its economic program. Party centralization facilitated the programmatic shift.