‘By studying political parties we imply that the party is a meaningful unit of analysis. Yet we go above the party as a unit, for we also study the party system. By the same token we can go below the party as a unit and study, thereby, the party subunits.’1 This statement by Giovanni Sartori, while published in 1976, might well have been a beacon for budding stasiologists of the early 1960s — certainly for those with a particular interest in Latin America. Following upon such Western European—orientated classics as the works of Maurice Duverger, Sigmund Neumann and Alfred Diamant,2 there seemed genuine intellectual impetus to produce significant scholarship on the parties of what were then customarily termed either the developing or the ‘non—western’ polities. For Latin America, the time appeared ripe for conceptual progress. To be sure, there was justification in remarking that the study of parties in the region was relatively new, while ‘methodo—logical accomplishments have been primitive’.3 Yet this condition was presumably transitory.

In the years to follow there were more serious exploratory efforts, and in time a modest number of case—studies began appearing.4 When the cyclical alternation of democratic and dictatorial regimes began to swing toward the latter by the early 1970s, however, scholarly interest dropped off. More generally, stasiological research went into decline.5 For students of Latin America, only the recent trend toward democratisation has stimulated a revival of interest in parties, campaigns and elections.6 Thus Lorenzo Meyer, for instance, described parties as institutions necessary ‘to channel the energies of social movements, labour unions, and other antiauthoritarian forces present at the beginning of the re—emergence of civil society’.7

In the thirty years between 1950 and 1980, Latin America experienced rapid growth. During this period, output expanded at an annual rate of 5.5% with per capita increases averaging 2.7% a year. Table 1 provides country details. The star is clearly Brazil, whose share in regional product increased from less than a quarter to more than a third. At the other extreme are two groups: the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile and Uruguay), whose mid-century leading position in the region was eroded by below average performance; and a group of smaller countries, including several in Central America. On average, Latin America's record, viewed from an immediate post-World War II perspective, is impressive. It far exceeded the target of the Alliance for Progress implemented in 1961, which called for an annual rate of 2% per capita. It also compared very favourably with European per capita income growth in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, which was 1.3% from 1850 to 1900 and 1.4% between 1900 and 1950. Long-term US economic growth has been at 1.8%.

Yet two factors combine to make the 1950–80 Latin American growth performance seem less positive. One is its dramatic reversal in the 1980s, a period in which GDP per capita fell by 8.3%. By 1989, with the exception of Brazil, Chile, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, per capita GDP had fallen below its 1980 level. At the extreme, Venezuela, Nicaragua and El Salvador show levels below those attained in 1960. The 1980s have truly been a lost decade and thus one tends to underestimate the earlier achievement.

Using a variety of new sources directly pertaining to different types of rural estate, and contrary to interpretations of rural Chile as a traditional society unaffected by economic modernisation, this article analyses the transition of the hacienda system in central Chile towards agrarian capitalism during the period of export-led growth from the 1860s to 1930. It argues that the expansion of the ‘landowner enterprise’, along with developments in mechanisation and irrigation, resulted in the marginalisation of the precarious ‘peasant enterprises’ operated by tenants and the gradual proletarianisation of the agricultural workforce. The development of agrarian capitalism transformed the collective action of rural workers, which assumed modern forms such as strikes and unionisation, and thus became significant in national politics. The first wave of rural conflicts, which took place in the early 1920s, can therefore be understood as the response of the emerging rural working class to the agrarian expansion that Chile experienced as part of the process of capitalist modernisation.

On 30 July 1989 Chileans cast ballots in an historic but unheralded plebiscite, and approved a massive revision of the Constitution that in 1980 the Pinochet regime had crafted to institutionalise its rule. Some observers had doubted that it would be possible to change Pinochet's prized ‘Constitution of Liberty’, while others have since questioned the significance of the reforms that were achieved. In fact, as a result of the July referendum, 54 modifications involving 12 of the document's 14 chapters were enacted before the Constitution even went fully into effect. Moreover, since the reestablishment of democracy in Chile, the coalition government of Patricio Aylwin has won passage of still other constitutional reforms involving administrative decentralisation, and has introduced draft legislation designed to bring about changes in the judicial and electoral systems. His successor, Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei, is also committed to reform.

Although peasants have always been linked to larger economic systems, the expansion of capitalist agriculture and the augmented incidence of migration throughout the Third World in recent decades have transformed the peasantry and made it reliant on wage work in labour markets tied to the world economy as never before. In Latin America this transformation has taken many forms, but the overwhelming direction has been towards changing subsistence farmers into wage labourers. The overall effect has been that few rural households persist independent of wage labour, while the majority combine income from resource-poor landholdings with wage earnings. The dependence on off-farm income is especially significant among smallholder farm families who derive the majority of household income from off-farm sources.

Cohabitation is a distinctive feature of low-income groups in Latin America. In the past, it has been linked to colonial legacies including notions of familial honour, poverty, and a kinship system focused on blood ties. By contrast, some scholars consider rising levels of cohabitation in the present day to be an effect of modernisation, through increased gender equality. The present research, based on life histories of young, poor, urban co-habitees in Chile, aims to show that rising cohabitation is linked to targeted social policies and also to declining patriarchy, which is distinct from gender equality.

Based on extensive and long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2002 and 2009, and by analysing the presence, use and struggles over public space of cartoneros and vecinos in middle-class and central neighbourhoods of the city of Buenos Aires, this article examines practices, moralities and narratives operating in the production and maintenance of social inequalities. Concentrating on spatialised interactions, it shows how class inequalities are reproduced and social distances are generated in the struggle over public space. For this, two social situations are addressed. First, we explore the way in which cartoneros build routes in middle-class neighbourhoods in order to carry out their task. Second, we present an analysis of the eviction process of a cartonero settlement in the city.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the inhabitants of greater Buenos Aires formed innumerable football clubs, as part of a burgeoning civic culture. Many of these clubs not only proved enduring but helped to shape the sense of neighbourhood that dominated much of the cultural and political world of the city. In this they differed from clubs in other South American cities, which tended to have much less of a barrio identity. However, successful soccer teams required assistance to acquire land and construct stadiums. The evidence of club records and the local press shows that as the clubs grew in size and importance, politicians and other leading neighbourhood figures became critical in obtaining the necessary resources for them, but in turn they made use of their association with the clubs to aid their election campaigns and build up their constituencies and clienteles.

During the past decade, agrarian reform emerged as a panacea for the problems of Latin America, with a popularity which transcended political and cultural divisions. This apparent accord vanished, however, in the many meanings given to the term and the divergent policies claiming to implement its principles. In Chile where the hacienda system, with its large estates (latijundios) and satellite dwarf holdings (minifundios) has defined for three centuries the rural economic, political and social structure, agrarian reform has been endorsed by successive governments of very different political persuasions and viewed as the key both to rural revolution and its prevention.

The Huasteca, a region with a semi-tropical climate and abundant vegetation, has become one of the most violent and conflict-ridden parts of rural Mexico. Starting in the mid-1970s, a series of land invasions involving mainly Nahuatl-speaking Indian peasants broke out in the district of Huejutla in the northeastern portion of the state of Hidalgo (also known as the Huasteca Hidalguense). Militant agrarian peasants, who cut fences, confiscated coffee orchards and ripped out cultivated grasses, justified their use of direct action both in terms of Mexico's agrarian code and Nahuatl notions of village boundaries; similarly, local landowners appealed to their rights as property owners and the legal system in general in order to persuade law enforcement agents to evict peasant intruders and have them arrested. Many poor peasants, who live in usually cohesive communities, also became bitterly divided over whether or not they should join in land invasions, and some people on both sides took the law into their own hands and meted out their own version of justice through abductions, corporal punishment and even executions. The resulting violence and political turmoil culminated in the expropriation, by the Mexican government, of 18,000 hectares of privately owned land and the implementation of a programme of social reform.

The political economy of Bolivia has been dominated by the extraction and export of mineral wealth; in the nineteenth century by silver, in the twentieth by tin. The decline of silver in the 1890s neatly coincides with the rise of tin so that there has been little consideration of the origins of the latter. Casual references suggest that they are to be found in the decision of silver miners to turn their attention to tin deposits once the decline in the price of silver destroyed the profitability of working the nobler metal. This shift in attention from one mineral to another was facilitated by the completion of the railway from the Pacific coast to Oruro, the centre of the tin-mining district, in 1892 which reduced the cost of exporting to European markets. The apparent innocence of the birth of the industry contrasts sharply with the negative images that have been inextricably associated with it in its period of maturity. Then it became ‘dominated’ by the figures of Patiñio, Hochschild and Aramayo, and few who have commented on the industry have been able to avoid referring to them as ‘tin barons’.

‘Demanding adherence to principles is, either, to accept the federal system with all its advantages and dangers, or to denounce it frankly and proclaim the empire of central government, granting it the power to correct the abuses that local authorities might commit.’Ignacio Vallarta

The annulment of the 2000 gubernatorial elections in Tabasco marked a fundamental precedent for electoral justice in Mexico and the role of the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary (Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación – TEPJF) in federal, state and local elections. Successive constitutional reforms that ended with the ‘definitive’ electoral reforms of 1996 have consolidated a regime of electoral dispute adjudication at the federal level, giving political parties the right to appeal state cases before federal authorities. Whereas a clear tendency exists towards greater decentralisation of power under ‘new federalism’, in the electoral field centralism concentrated on the TEPJF and the Supreme Court of Justice has been adopted. However, in the context of political pluralism and a more authentic federalism, the TEPJF's new role has caused conflicting reactions. Some sectors are insisting on the need to limit this institution's powers so that in the future it can only rule over subnational elections based on well-defined criteria that respect specific jurisdictional principles.

The economic activities of the state have rightly been regarded as a crucial factor in the remarkably rapid process of capitalist expansion experienced by Mexico in the two decades after the Second World War, and must also be seen as such in the imbalance that has emerged over the last ten years –an imbalance that itself led to an accelerated growth of the public sector. State intervention in the process of capital accumulation during the period of dependent import-substituting industrialization is common to the experience of Latin America as a whole, but in Mexico the scale and scope of this intervention appear to have been greater than elsewhere, generating an important debate over the size of the Mexican public sector in the 1960s, and now providing a significant case to be examined in the light of current discussions as to the relative autonomy of the state in capitalist economies.

Literature published a decade ago reflected a pessimistic view of the market-oriented reforms that Latin America carried out in the 1980s and 1990s, and many politicians have attacked these reforms openly. Indeed, the atmosphere is so negative that it would be reasonable to assume that many of the reforms have been reversed. This paper will take a new look at the situation ten years later. Our argument is that the reforms have generally not been reversed. The reversal that has occurred has been with respect to privatisation in a few countries; negative public opinion is also concentrated on privatisation; and the reforms helped to enable Latin America to take advantage of favourable conditions leading to high growth in the 2004–8 boom period and a relatively strong performance during the 2008–9 crisis. While much remains to be done to raise growth and improve distribution, objective information about the reforms is needed when policies for the future are made.

This ethnographic article discusses how race emerges between discourses of class and space at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Following a legal decision, this academic institution was required to implement racial quotas to combat social exclusion and raise the number of ‘black’ students in public higher education. A crucial question is whether such racially based policies help redress social inequalities, or whether they actually increase discrimination by reifying ‘racial’ differences in Brazil. I argue that the social diversity promoted by quotas at the university stresses certain urban tensions and unequal dynamics that come to be reflected within the university. However, it also reveals novel and positive paths by which policies can negotiate these contrasts.

Popular attitudes towards crime in Latin America induce local legislators to support harsh sentencing frameworks. What, therefore, explains the adoption of non-prison sentences across the region? Using Brazil as a case study, this article claims that sentencing reform is a consequence of the growing autonomy of bureaucrats who manage the criminal justice system. Insulated from patronage networks and granted broad mandates to pursue solutions to pressing penal crises, these policy elites use their position in the state to develop new rules and facilitate their approval despite popular opposition to measures that limit the state's punitive capacity. The findings point to the importance of bureaucratic autonomy for the enactment of policies that can benefit the underprivileged but do not enjoy widespread support from voters.

This article, inspired by a TV interview with the Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez, revises the ways that the fiction in One Hundred Years of Solitude has been accepted as history. In particular, it raises some questions about how literary critics and historians have accepted as history García Márquez's rendition of the events during the strike that took place in Colombia in 1928. It examines the repressive nature of the Colombian regime and of the strike itself; it also examines the idea that following the strike there was a sort of ‘conspiracy of silence’ to erase the truth from the nation's history.

El Salvador has undergone a deep economic transformation over recent decades, from a model based on agro-exports to an open, transnational service-based economy. This transformation has occurred in a context dominated historically by a small group of elite families that formed family-owned diversified business groups (DBGs). This paper studies the leading groups' strategies in confronting transnationalisation. It shows that the DBGs have adapted to the new realities through a combination of sector shifts, internationalisation and the adoption of different kinds of relationships with multinationals. In spite of this, there is little evidence that the DBGs have become less important or subordinate to multinational corporations. Rather, they have, in different ways, exploited their local and regional knowledge and networks to confront competition at home and expand at the regional level.

In this article I wish to provide an overview of the changing priorities that successive Mexican governments have given the social development sector since the administration of President Echeverria (1970–6). This will be set against a backcloth of political reform and an opening of the political space in which parties other than the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) have been allowed to function, albeit under certain constraints. In addition I will examine important changes that have been undertaken both in the nature of social policies themselves, but also in the patterns and efficiency with which public agencies have delivered this particular social good. I argue that in Mexico, as in many advanced capitalist countries since Bismarck's Prussia during the late nineteenth century, social welfare provision is an important element in the understanding of political management and 'statecraft'.1 As well as providing a temporary palliative to offset some of the negative outcomes of rapid urbanisation and economic growth based upon low wage rates and trickle-down, social policy provides an arena through which scarce societal resources may be negotiated. As I will describe, those patterns of negotiation change for a variety of reasons: as power relations shift; as economies reflate or turn into recession; as the level of state intervention and control intensifies or slackens; as our diagnosis of specific problems and the policy instruments we develop become more sophisticated and sensitive to local needs; and last, but not least in the context of Mexico, are included changes that arise from human agency as different presidents take executive office.

The essential explanation of Argentina's 1989 hyperinflations is that the stabilisation programmes immediately preceding them drove the public sector in particular, the central bank – into ‘debt distress.’ These stabilisation programmes sought to anchor prices on an appreciated exchange rate, sustained by tight monetary policies that maintained high interest rates. The problem was that the government and the central bank had heavy domestic-debt burdens, and their combined interest bill far exceeded their non-interest surplus. To finance the interest without creating money, the government and central bank had to add continually to the outstanding debt stock as they capitalised the interest due. The debt swelled, and interest rates were pressured upward. Heavy pressure against the exchange rate, devaluation and hyperinflation then ensued when the public-sector debt stock exceeded what financial markets could be persuaded to hold at reasonable interest rates.