La inestabilidad política y los azares de la suerte han hecho frecuente en nuestra América el tipo humano del intelectual emigrado, que encuentra amistad y medios de vida en otros países del continente.

Entre los que corrieron esa suerte en la segunda mitad del siglo , pasado está el doctor colombiano, Florentino González, quien emigró a Chile y de este país a la Argentina, donde terminó sus días como profesor de la flamante cátedra de Derecho Constitucional en la Universidad de Buenos Aires.

De su personalidad, de su obra y de su pensamiento vamos a ocuparnos en este trabajo, dando especial relevancia a sus ideas sobre el gobierno y la administración municipal como gran resorte de la vida social y política en los países americanos.

Big Metrópole, América Do Sul é um estudo de urna metrópole que consta entre as maiores na América do Sul, e é fácilmente identificável. Foi entáo, por insistencia do autor em por énfase na universalidade dos processos que frequentemente observa no desenvolvimento rápido da urbanização, industrialização e comunicação moderna, é que foi dado o nome de Big Metrópole, América do Sul ao estudo feito sobre a cidade de Sao Paulo. É interessante notar que foi só com a urbanização, industrialização, e comunicação, moderna que Big Metrópole, América do Sul se enquandra dentro de padroes que se encontram em quase todas as novas grandes metrópoles em qualquer parte do mundo. O trabalho tambem nao tem a pretensáo de ser pioneiro no campo e o autor está cíente de trabalhos feitos com o mesmo espirito e é por causa disto que pode-se afirmar urna certa aceitagáo das hipóteses levantadas.

Representative government in Venezuela is in its infancy. Experience with the techniques of political competition within a democratic framework has until recently been almost non-existent. Yet the vigor and determination with which strides toward economic development and political legitimation are being executed suggest that perhaps the nation may be able to accomplish the task of creating a stable and effective polity without the sacrifice of respect for human dignity that has been so commonplace elsewhere. Political parties have had a key role in this process; they have, in effect, been instruments of transition.

This essay analyzes the evolution and growth of one of these parties — the Christian Democratic party — an organization which, ranking second in size only to Rómulo Betancourt's Acción Democrática, stands today in a pivotal position in the nation's distribution of political power.

This paper is an attempt at an interdisciplinary analysis of some of the problems relating to financial activities, decisionmaking, and social structure among elite Latin American kin and business groups. It represents a cooperative effort by two economists and an anthropologist that results, we believe, in a view of these problems that is of significance to both disciplines.

As Kaplan (1965) has pointed out, the great difficulty in developing true interdisciplinary research arises in translating the concepts and theories of one field into those of the other, or in developing a new common conceptual framework. What this paper does, very briefly, is to take the basic Tobin-Markowitz model, which is an attempt to describe the decision-making process of an investor putting together a portfolio in a risky world, and modify it to allow for the difficulty of obtaining accurate information about the economic environment in Latin America.

The founding of the Argentine National Observatory and much of its later development were the results of unusual inter-American cooperation. In 1870 the noted American astronomer Benjamin Apthorp Gould had realized his dream of inaugurating a major observatory in Argentina in order to extend to the Southern Hemisphere the kind of detailed examination of the stars already undertaken by the great observatories of the Northern Hemisphere. After a few false starts Gould was able to begin work in Córdoba thanks to the enthusiasm of President Domingo F. Sarmiento and the wholehearted support of his minister of public instruction, Nicolás Avellaneda. The Argentine government appropriated funds for the construction of an observatory and the purchase of a modest but adequate inventory of instruments.

In view of Latin America's growing bargaining power within the international system, the Chilean Heraldo Muñoz (1981) has assessed the power potential of several Latin American states, basing his calculations on abstract statistics. According to this categorization, Colombia has a power potential comparable to that of Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela. Colombians would probably be very surprised at such an analysis. As they see it, their country does not figure in international politics. Hence, the idea of a nation with a foreign nonpolicy (Drekonja-Kornat, 1982b) seems justified.

However, countries must adapt to new situations, and growing tensions in the Caribbean Basin are forcing Colombia to examine the apparent contradiction between its potential and its real capacity. This is particularly important when one considers that Colombia's low profile in foreign policy is not a product of abstentionist or neutral doctrines (as in the case of Canada, Switzerland, or Austria) but is the result of historical developments occurring after the secession of Panama.

The 1994 presidential election presents a paradox for students of Mexican politics in particular and democratization in general. The year witnessed many numerous and far-reaching changes, both planned and unplanned. An uprising in the state of Chiapas; the assassination of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio; a sweeping electoral reform; and a hotly contested presidential race marked the unprecedented year in Mexican politics. The election results, however, were the same as in every previous presidential election for more than sixty years: a victory by the PRI candidate, in this case Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León. How to explain this? What significance does the outcome have for understanding the process of regime democratization?

Differences in the degree of economic development and diversification among members of economic integration systems could easily create obstacles to economic integration, as they tend to have an impact on the distribution of costs and benefits of economic integration processes.

There are several reasons why the Least Developed Members (LDMs) within integration movements in Latin America are likely to be losers in the integration processes taking place within the region. First, the economies of these countries are less diversified than those of the more advanced countries. The LDMs have manufacturing sectors which are not well developed and which are concentrated in productive branches which process natural resources. When these countries join an integration movement with countries with more advanced and diversified manufacturing sectors, they would tend to import manufactured goods which are more protected than the natural-resource-based goods which they are likely to export.

In many Latin American countries, social policy preferences among economically vulnerable citizens seem largely unpolarized. However, current studies rarely confront citizens with realistic policy options and often lack the required detail to capture the heterogeneity of economic vulnerability. Drawing on the dualization debate, we expect individuals facing different degrees of vulnerability to show distinct social policy preferences. Using original survey data from Mexico and a conjoint experiment, our findings reveal a complex divide, where the most economically vulnerable are least supportive of public solutions. Sharing the home with a formal labor market participant does not seem to mitigate social policy skepticism among the vulnerable. In contrast, magnified vulnerability via household composition reduces support for welfare policy expansion. Social policy preferences become much less distinct when policy design alternatives are introduced, suggesting reduced expectations about the state’s role and a lack of clarity about the tangible benefits of social policy reform.

Import substitution industrialization was the postwar development policy of choice in Latin America, and the diagnosis of its weaknesses heavily influenced subsequent policy recommendations. Yet few attempts have been made to test the predominant sectorally based explanation of ISI's failings against alternatives. This article develops a model of direct (clientelistic) linkages between politicians and their supporters and tests it against the standard sectoral model based on indirect linkages. Examining three features of process (economic sector influence, legislative voting, and exchange rate policy) and analyzing the distributional implications of the overall policy in Brazil, this article demonstrates that a clientelist model provides a more complete and coherent account of the empirical record. By demonstrating that variation in linkage type alters the political constraints on policy choice, the analysis also provides new insight into enduring puzzles, including the better performance in East Asia.

This study addresses a void in the literature on public attitudes toward police in Latin America. It integrates three theoretical models of the determinants of citizen satisfaction with police work in Chile: demographic, quality of life in the neighborhood, and experiential. The study tested the integrated model using a novel random sample of 996 individuals living in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago. The results underscore the importance of legitimacy centered on fair treatment, respect for human rights, and the perception that the police represent society. The findings are also significant for the Chilean institutional political process and for the Latin American police reform debate.

This article explores the tension between multicultural legal reforms and the liberal state-building project in present-day Mexico. Specifically, it traces the process by which the Mexican state challenged and eventually forced changes to customary restrictions on women in public life in some indigenous communities in the southern state of Oaxaca. The study argues that the act of formalizing autonomy for indigenous communities, in the context of Mexico’s homogenizing neoliberal state, had the unanticipated effect of exposing exclusionary practices to state scrutiny, which eventually forced those communities to recognize women’s political rights. Thus the effort to protect indigenous practices facilitated the territorial and juridical expansion of the Mexican state into formerly autonomous areas of the countryside.

Irresponsible fiscal behavior by subnational units is a concern for federal or decentralized systems, especially in the developing world. States' expenditures in Brazil have been no different. Still, spending varies considerably among the Brazilian states, even after controlling for their financial resources. This article provides a political explanation for the variation in current spending, focusing on intergovernmental political relationships. It argues that credit claiming for pork distributed in a state plays a crucial role and that governors elevate state spending in order to make up for their loss in political credit from the pork distributed by the president. Analyzing data from the period 1996–2005, it finds that expenditures decrease as the relative number of federal deputies from the state governor's party increases compared to the number of deputies from the president's governing coalition when the national agenda encourages federal pork distribution in the states.

Studies of the Brazilian Landless Movement, particularly the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, Landless Rural Workers' Movement), note two periods of collective action: the time when tactics such as land occupations are deployed to acquire land (luta pela terra) and subsequent mobilizations to develop territory (luta na terra). The latter period, which includes fostering educational opportunities and coordinating economic production, features prolonged interaction with government authorities. Instead of demobilizing during institutionalization, this study argues, postoccupation practices are as contentious as seizing territory. This is apparent in the movement's efforts to influence public policies that lead to the creation of schools where a contentious, movement-centered identity develops. Documenting the movement's efforts in education provides a way to understand how the current moment in rural contention in Brazil—called by some the time to acumular forças (accumulate forces)—remains collective and political instead of indicating movement decline.