This article challenges the assumption that the underlying principles of state-endorsed ‘multiculturalism’ stand in tension with neoliberal political-economic policies. Based on ethnographic research in Guatemala, it is argued that neoliberalism's cultural project entails pro-active recognition of a minimal package of cultural rights, and an equally vigorous rejection of the rest. The result is a dichotomy between recognised and recalcitrant indigenous subjects, which confronts the indigenous rights movement as a ‘menace’ even greater than the assimilationist policies of the previous era. It is suggested that the most effective response to this menace is probably not to engage in frontal opposition to neoliberal regimes, but rather to refuse the dichotomy altogether.

The purpose of this commentary is threefold. First, to review the origins and definitions of the concept of social capital as it has developed in the recent literature. Second, to examine the limitations of this concept when interpreted as a causal force able to transform communities and nations. Third, to present several relevant examples from the recent empirical literature on Latin American urbanisation and migration. These examples point to the significance of social networks and community monitoring in the viability of grass-roots economic initiatives and the simultaneous difficulty of institutionalising such forces.

Current interest in the concept of social capital in the field of national development stems from the limitations of an exclusively economic approach toward the achievement of the basic developmental goals: sustained growth, equity, and democracy. The record of application of neoliberal adjustment policies in less developed nations is decidedly mixed, even when evaluated by strict economic criteria. Orthodox adjustment policies have led to low inflation and sustained growth in some countries, while in others they have failed spectacularly, leading to currency crises, devaluations, and political instability. The ‘one-size-fits- all’ package of economic policies foisted by the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury on countries at very different levels of development have led to a series of contradictory outcomes that orthodox economic theory itself is incapable of explaining.

The extensive scholarship on ‘varieties of capitalism’ offers some conceptual and theoretical innovations that can be fruitfully employed to analyse the distinctive institutional foundations of capitalism in Latin America, or what could be called hierarchical market economies (HMEs). This perspective helps identify four core features of HMEs in Latin America that structure business access to essential inputs of capital, technology and labour: diversified business groups, multinational corporations (MNCs), low-skilled labour, and atomistic labour relations. Overall non-market, hierarchical relations in business groups and MNCs are central in organising capital and technology in Latin America, and are also pervasive in labour market regulation, union representation and employment relations. Important complementarities exist among these features, especially between MNCs and diversified business groups, as well as mutually reinforcing tendencies between these dominant corporate forms and general under-investment in skills and in well-mediated employment relations. These four features of HMEs, their common reliance on hierarchy, and the particular interactions among them add up to a distinct variety of capitalism, different from those identified in developed countries and other developing regions.

This article analyses the causes of the disparity in collective rights gained by indigenous and Afro-Latin groups in recent rounds of multicultural citizenship reform in Latin America. Instead of attributing the greater success of indians in winning collective rights to differences in population size, higher levels of indigenous group identity or higher levels of organisation of the indigenous movement, it is argued that the main cause of the disparity is the fact that collective rights are adjudicated on the basis of possessing a distinct group identity defined in cultural or ethnic terms. Indians are generally better positioned than most Afro-Latinos to claim ethnic group identities separate from the national culture and have therefore been more successful in winning collective rights. It is suggested that one of the potentially negative consequences of basing group rights on the assertion of cultural difference is that it might lead indigenous groups and Afro-Latinos to privilege issues of cultural recognition over questions of racial discrimination as bases for political mobilisation in the era of multicultural politics.

Historians all agree that the Cárdenas presidency was a crucial period in the development of twentieth-century Mexico. They would not agree as to the reasons for its importance. The range of interpretations is so wide and, at times, so nuanced, that it is risky to try to summarise the underlying disagreements. However, there are certain key differences which can be emphasised; and I shall begin this article with a quick review of what I consider those key differences to be.

‘In all matters of importance, style and not content is the important thing’: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest.

Populism is a concept which, despite repeated critiques, refuses to disappear from Latin American studies. This article reviews some of the literature, suggesting that populism is best defined in terms of a particular political style, characteristically involving a proclaimed rapport with ‘the people’, a ‘them-and-us’ mentality, and (often, though not necessarily) a period of crisis and mobilisation; none of which makes it exceptional, abnormal, ‘unmediated’ or irrational. Mexican – among other – examples are invoked. The article questions some received opinions: that populism is typically urban, relates to particular historical stages of development, or distinctively derives from either multi-class alliances or elite manipulation. It also queries the fashionable notion of ‘economic populism’. Finally, the article notes the recent phenomenon of ‘neo-populism’, embodied by Salinas, Menem, Fujimori, etc., which a suitably loose (‘stylistic’) definition can usefully accommodate, thus suggesting the continued, if limited, utility of the concept.

The ideology of mestizaje (mixture) in Latin America has frequently been seen as involving a process of national homogenisation and of hiding a reality of racist exclusion behind a mask of inclusiveness. This view is challenged here through the argument that mestizaje inherently implies a permanent dimension of national differentiation and that, while exclusion undoubtedly exists in practice, inclusion is more than simply a mask. Case studies drawn from Colombian popular music, Venezuelan popular religion and Brazilian popular Christianity are used to illustrate these arguments, wherein inclusion is understood as a process linked to embodied identities and kinship relations. In a coda, approaches to hybridity that highlight its potential for destabilising essentialisms are analysed.

This article explores the dynamics of the youth gang (pandilla) phenomenon in contemporary urban Nicaragua, drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research conducted with a Managua pandilla in 1996–97 and in 2002. Pandillas and their violent practices are conceived as constituting a form of local social structuration in the face of broader conditions of high crime, insecurity, and socio-political breakdown. This form of ‘street-level politics’ changed significantly between 1997 and 2002, however, evolving from a form of collective social violence to a more individually and economically motivated type of brutality. This transformation is related to wider structural processes, which are described as coming together and precipitating a form of ‘social death’ in contemporary Nicaragua.

Brazilian discussions of race between 1880 and 1940 were partly a use of European scientific theory to rationalise the native system of colour discrimination. When scientific orthodoxy turned against ‘race’ between 1920 and 1945, much of the intellectual racism of Brazil also dispersed. Quite rightly, most intellectual histories of race in Brazil stress a disjuncture around 1930. However, from the 1870s onward, and most clearly after abolition, there was also a medical-psychiatric strand to ‘race’ that can be unravelled from the rest of the skein. Part of racial thinking in Brazil reflected the general medicalisation of social thought that began when early-nineteenth-century physicians called for hygienic reforms within upper-class families to protect children from hereditary or environmental contaminations. The Spencerian and Comtean positivist social science that became fashionable in Brazil after 1870 also contributed to medicalisation. It saw society as an organism, and compared the role of the social scientist to the role of the physician: to examine symptoms of disease and propose therapies. From the 1880s through the 1920s, the national ailment that the medicalised social thought of Brazil most often diagnosed, an ailment that connected individual health to national well-being, was degeneration.

Academic analyses of crime and policing in Latin America have generally focused on the failure of state institutions to guarantee a rule of law. This study, however, argues that the persistently high levels of violence in Rio's favelas [shantytowns] result not from the failure of institutions but, rather, from networks that bring criminals together with civic leaders, politicians, and police. These contacts protect traffickers from state repression and help them build political support among the residents of the where they favelas operate. Rather than creating ‘parallel states’ outside of political control, then, these networks link trafficker dominated favelas into Rio's broader political and social system.

Under the administrations of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002) and especially President Lula (2003–), conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes have become adopted as mainstream social policy in Brazil. This follows a marked trend since the 1990s in Latin America towards the setting up of targeted safety nets to alleviate poverty. Lula consolidated and expanded CCTs, firstly under Fome Zero and later Bolsa Família, now the largest such scheme in the world. Its four sub-programmes (educational stipends to boost school attendance, maternal nutrition, food supplements and a domestic gas subsidy) benefit some 30 million of Brazil's poorest people, with a target of 44 million by 2006. Since 2003, spending on Bolsa Família has risen significantly to consume over one-third of the social assistance budget for the poorest sectors and it remained a flagship policy in the run-up to the presidential elections of October 2006. Although coverage of Bolsa Família is impressive, however, systematic evaluation of its social and economic impacts is still lacking. Evidence from other CCT programmes in Latin America suggests that positive results may be achieved in terms of meeting some immediate needs of the poor. However, there have been many implementation problems. These include poor beneficiary targeting, lack of inter-ministerial coordination, inadequate monitoring, clientelism, weak accountability and alleged political bias. Given the heightened profile of cash transfers in Brazil's social policy agenda, key questions need to be asked. These concern, firstly, the extent to which Bolsa Família does indeed contribute to poverty alleviation; and secondly, whether it creates greater dependence of the poor on government hand-outs and political patronage at the expense of long-term social investment for development.

The Chilean victory in the war against Perú and Bolivia between 1879 and 1884 demonstrated that the country's institutions had reached a high level of consolidation and maturity. The normal renewal of the legislative bodies and the presidential election of 1881, along with the uninterrupted functioning of these institutions throughout the conflict was proof of this, as was the continuation, without respite, of the customary practice of political confrontation between government and opposition. From every point of view, the national mobilization in Chile occasioned by the war made apparent social cohesion and a deep-rooted sense of nationality.

The 2006 presidential elections in Brazil witnessed a dramatic shift of Lula's voting base away from the more developed regions of the country and towards the poorest areas. This paper uses municipal-level data to argue that while this shift represents an important change for the support base of Lula himself, it can mostly be explained by the government's massive cash transfer programme, the Bolsa Familia, and by the empirical regularity with which presidential candidates from the incumbent party in Brazil always perform better in the less developed regions of the country.

This paper examines relations between the state and capital in Argentina with respect to agricultural biotechnology. Argentina is one of the world's leading exporters of genetically modified (GM) crops and is a key player in the global politics of biotechnology. Whereas in other parts of the world, including other countries in Latin America, active civil societies and some governments have rejected the technology, Argentina has adopted it as a central accumulation strategy. The desirability of this strategy has been secured in material, institutional and discursive arenas of power, producing a particular expression of ‘bio-hegemony’. Looking at the role of business in the political economy of agricultural biotechnology is revealing both of the extent and forms of corporate power and contributes to an understanding of hegemony in practice.

This essay examines three recent historical approaches to the political economy of Latin America's relative economic backwardness. All three locate the origins of contemporary underdevelopment in defective colonial institutions linked to inequality. The contrasting view offered here affirms the significance of institutional constraints, but argues that they did not arise from colonial inequalities, but from the adaptation of Iberian practices to the American colonies under conditions of imperial weakness. Colonial inequality varied across the Americas; while it was not correlated with colonial economic performance, it mattered because it determined the extent of elite resistance to institutional modernisation after independence. The onset of economic growth in the mid to late nineteenth century brought economic elites to political power, but excluding majorities as inequality increased restrained the region's twentieth-century growth rates and prevented convergence.

Through a genealogical analysis of the terms mestizo and mestizaje, this article reveals that these voices are doubly hybrid. On the one hand they house an empirical hybridity, built upon eighteenth and nineteenth century racial taxonomies and according to which ‘mestizos’ are non-indigenous individuals, the result of biological or cultural mixtures. Yet, mestizos’ genealogy starts earlier, when ‘mixture’ denoted transgression of the rule of faith, and its statutes of purity. Within this taxonomic regime mestizos could be, at the same time, indigenous. Apparently dominant, racial theories sustained by scientific knowledge mixed with, (rather than cancel) previous faith based racial taxonomies. ‘Mestizo’ thus houses a conceptual hybridity – the mixture of two classificatory regimes – which reveals subordinate alternatives for mestizo subject positions, including forms of indigeneity.

During the last 25 years Chilean society has experienced profound socioeconomic, political and even cultural changes. From 1964 to 1970 there was a ‘revolution in liberty’ under Eduardo Frei, from 1970 a ‘Chilean road to socialism’ under Salvador Allende, and from 1973 to 1989 a ‘silent revolution’ under Augusto Pinochet.

Focusing on the first large-scale protests in Chile after the reinstatement of democracy in 1990, this article examines the emergence of the 2006 Pingüino movement and shows how it succeeded in mobilising thousands of secondary school students against the neoliberal education model. It argues that several distinct but intertwined dimensions explain the movement's emergence. In 2006, secondary school student groups merged to form a single organisation and adopted a horizontal and participatory decision-making mechanism. At the same time, shortcomings in the education reforms of the 1980s and 1990s were revealed in terms of quality and equity, creating grievances that were fed into the movement's collective action frame. Finally, President Bachelet's rhetoric of a ‘government of citizens’ as an attempt to counteract the elitist nature of the Concertación's governance formula signified an opening of the structure of political opportunities that the students knew to take advantage of.

The theoretical interpretation of social and economic change in the Brazilian Amazon has been dominated by a political economy in which the notion of the frontier, variously defined, has been central. Brazil is of course not the only country where a fuzzily defined idea of frontier development has been important, and we can think, as Turner did for the United States, of a Brazilian frontier thesis. It can be boiled down to a simple contention, although the arguments are often complicated: the frontier, now restricted to Amazonia, is the absorption of peripheral regions by an expanding capitalism. This perspective, fundamental to numerous studies of Amazonia, sees a tendency towards homogeneity in economic structure and social relations in the cycle of frontier development, with capitalism ending up as the dominant force. It regards the key subjects in the dynamic of the frontier as the peasantry, who are acted upon by the bourgeoisie and the state, and argues that the dynamic of events within the frontier is determined outside it, in the forms of capital accumulation in the national economy and the way regional economies are articulated to it. Although first formulated in the 1970s, it remains overwhelmingly the most influential theoretical approach to explaining Amazonia's modern history, irrespective, one is sometimes tempted to think, of the direction that history has actually taken.

In Tlatelolco, in the symbolically laden Plaza of the Three Cultures, there is a famous plaque commemorating the fall of Tenochtitlán, after a heroic defence organised by Cuauhtemoc. According to the official words there inscribed, that fall ‘was neither a victory nor a defeat’, but the ‘painful birth’ of present-day Mexico, the mestizo Mexico glorified and institutionalised by the Revolution of 1910. Starting with the experiences of 1968 – which added yet another layer to the archaeological sedimentation already present in Tlatelolco – and continuing with greater force in the face of the current wave of indigenous movements throughout Latin America, as well as the crisis of indigenismo and of the postrevolutionary development model, many have begun to doubt the version of Mexican history represented therein.1 Yet it is important to emphasise that the Tlatelolco plaque, fogged and tarnished as it may be today, would never have been an option in the plazas of Lima or La Paz. The purpose of this essay is to define and explain this difference by reference to the modern histories of Peru, Bolivia and Mexico. In so doing, I hope to elucidate some of the past and potential future contributions of indigenous political cultures to the ongoing formation of nation-states in Latin America.

As suggested by the plaque in Tlatelolco, the process and symbolism of mestizaje has been central to the Mexican state's project of political and territorial reorganisation. By 1970, only 7.8 % of Mexico's population was defined as Indian, and divided into 59 different linguistic groups.