The plea by Murillo, Shrank, and Luna (MSL) for a more “grounded” political economy approach to the study of Latin America is much welcome, and it merits a serious debate among scholars of the region. To help advance that debate, this essay raises several issues regarding the substance and methods of the political economy they advocate.

Democratic institutions, ranging from constitutional provisions and electoral rules to judiciaries, have been important in improving the rights of citizens across the world. If institutions matter for human rights, then it stands to reason that institutions built specifically to protect human rights, like the human rights ombudsman, should matter too. Using a comparative case study approach, this article examines the effect of the human rights ombudsman at the regional level on several human rights measures in Latin America between 1982 and 2011. The results suggest that the presence of an ombudsman, and some of its design features, have had effects on some social and economic rights, in keeping with the broad mandate given to this office.

This article studies the influence of the antineoliberal social movements in Peru and Ecuador in the face of the Multiparty Trade Agreement (MTA) between both countries and the European Union (EU). To identify and analyze this influence, a transdisciplinary theoretical framework was created, integrating debates and concepts from social movement theory and critical international political economy. In Peru, the movement used European allies to establish their demands on the EU’s agenda, which resulted in increased pressure on the government to enforce labor rights and environmental standards. In Ecuador, the movement was able to establish food sovereignty and the rejection of free trade in the national constitution. As a result, the negotiations with the EU were delayed and Ecuador achieved certain exceptions in its adhesion protocol. Nevertheless, both movements were unable to maintain their influence, due to political and socioeconomic dynamics on the domestic and global levels.

This article explores the role of informal customary institutions (usos y costumbres) in local public goods provision in Mexico. It argues that the presence of informal customary institutions offers submunicipal village communities considerable advantages in local distributive politics. Hamlet communities with dense customary institutions have higher collective action capacity to organize their citizens for small-scale protests in municipal centers, which grants them access to more social infrastructure projects controlled by municipal politicians. This article therefore suggests a novel theoretical mechanism through which customary institutions affect development outcomes: collective contentious action. The study tests the main empirical implications of this theory, drawing on an original survey of submunicipal community presidents in the states of Puebla and Tlaxcala and qualitative interviews.

Legislative allies are widely recognized as key to social movement success, but the emergence of their alliance with activists remains understudied. This article proposes a strategic approach to this phenomenon based on the cases of the environmental, labor, and LGBT+ movements in Chile and their allied legislators. According to this approach, an alliance emerges due to two necessary conditions. Movement organizations must display tactical capacity, which signals their adaptability and competence to participate in Congress. And a socially skilled leadership creates the trust required for movement leaders and legislators to cooperate during the lawmaking process. This approach emphasizes that alliances emerge from activists’ strategic efforts to build a social tie, whose effectiveness is mediated by legislators’ expectations and congressional norms. By specifying the strategic dimension of an alliance, this study highlights the capacity of activists to foster cooperative relations with state actors.

The per capita availability of fisheries products in El Salvador is about 3.3 pounds per annum. The level, while low, is not out of the ordinary for tropical America. Seafood in particular, but animal protein in all forms, is little consumed by the great bulk of the population. It is the better endowed economic classes and the fishermen who account for most of the consumption of fisheries products. Other groups, chiefly urban, regard fish and crustaceans as luxuries, ordering or serving them mainly during religious and other festive occasions.

Hay un lugar histórico en la obra del Padre Bernabé Cobo, que no ha podido ser ignorado de los investigadores de nuestro pasado social. Dice así refiriéndose al Pueblo de Santiago del Cercado, barrio de Lima, erigido como reducción para el doctrinamiento y la protección de los indios tributarios, mitayos y yanacones que acudían a ella:

La América Latina está acercándose al día de su definición. Cuando, después del fin de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, hubo una serie de cambios políticos y dictadores que habían gobernado durante largos años bajo regímenes patriarcales, cayeron de la noche a la mañana, hubo quien creyese que había llegado el fin de un ciclo histórico. Pero se trataba apenas de una fase transitoria. El continente, en busca de sí mismo, trataba de deshacerse de las tiranías anticuadas para encontrar su propio camino. El fenómeno no duró mucho porque aún existían nombres como Perón, Fulgencio Batista, Trujillo y Somoza, mientras vinieron nuevas dictaduras, consiguiendo en colaboración con las viejas mantener en pie la Internacional de las Espadas, que a cierto punto alcanzó englobar los siguientes países: Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Perú, República Dominicana y Venezuela. Mientras tanto, los regímenes democráticos no sobrepasaban de la media docena: Brasil, Costa Rica, Chile, El Salvador, México y Uruguay.

The United States Government, over the past several years, has endeavored to utilize its abundance of agricultural commodities for the promotion of economic development in certain foreign locales. The disposal of surplus food and fiber products purportedly serves the dual purpose of alleviation of domestic over-production and assistance to underdeveloped countries engaged in a struggle for economic advancement. The two programs which attempt an integration of surplus disposal with foreign economic assistance are Section 402 of the Mutual Security Act and the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act (PL 480).

In the United States in recent years in almost every state there has been a strong move toward more centralized coordination and control of higher education, a movement growing out of the rapidly rising costs of higher education as well as, perhaps, some public disillusion with the universities. This move toward centralized control means, of course, a shift of power away from individual universities.

A group in the Institute of Higher Education at Berkeley (Glenny et al., 1971) strongly favors coordination of universities; Lewis Mayhew (1972) of Stanford predicts that many states will opt for centralized control rather than coordination. The long tradition in the United States of nonacademic control of individual universities through boards of trustees made up of business and professional people rather than academic leaders probably has made the shift to centralized control by the nonacademic boards of entire state systems of colleges and universities more acceptable within and without the universities than has been true in most other countries where the legal decision-making power, the administrative and academic autonomy of the university, has been in the hands of members of the academic community.

The writer will attempt to draw attention to major like and unlike elements in the cultural patterns of Brazil and the United States, with an eye to mutual understanding. Obviously, this constitutes a task of considerable magnitude, and much reflection was required in order to decide which of the many possibilities should receive attention. Finally, it was decided to center on the following four aspects of the general subject: (1) the diversity of patterns of living in the United States, and the even greater diversity of ways of life in Brazil; (2) the higher degree of social differentiation in the United States, in comparison with contemporary Brazil; (3) the similarities and differences in patterns of living which result from the class structures found in the respective societies; and (4) the effects upon general social and cultural patterns of the institutions which have played the most important roles in producing the distinguishing characteristics of each of the societies: in the case of Brazil, the great patriarchial family or kinship unit, and in the case of the United States, the public school.

University students in Venezuela constitute about ten percent of the corresponding age group (calculated from Universidad Central de Venezuela 1970: 19, Table 5), and leadership of the country's economic and social development is increasingly in the hands of university-trained professionals. University enrollment has quadrupled since 1958, and young professionals who have graduated over the past fifteen years already represent a majority among university graduates in Venezuela. Research on students and elites, however, in Venezuela as elsewhere in Latin America, has concentrated on their divergent political attitudes while paying scant attention to the transformation of university students into members of the elite.

This paper reports on an exploratory survey of student and elite attitudes toward higher education and professional employment in Venezuela. Our findings provide some insight on the extent to which employment of high-level manpower is influenced by modern, achievement-oriented criteria, as compared with traditional, ascriptive criteria.

During the last national election in Peru, one of the candidates charged that the Indians probably lived better under the Inca rulers. Rather than being political hyperbole, this observation points up the stark reality which is the root cause of Peru's economic and social problems. With a relatively thin middle class, Peru's population of about 11.6 million is largely polarized into a small elite, whose wealth is conspicuous even by Latin American standards, and the larger proportion of the population living in the high sierra or in the slums surrounding each coastal city, which barely manages to exist under conditions of abject poverty. This skewed distribution of wealth and income, long apparent even to the most casual observer, has been confirmed by a recent study which indicates that the top 10 per cent of the spending units receive 60 per cent of the disposable income, and 8,760 spending units, representing only .25 per cent of the total, receive 35 per cent of the income.

Central America has always seemed to me a particularly fruitful object of study, of economic and particularly monetary affairs, because of the existence of six countries of not too different size and economic structure. This situation provides an opportunity for assessing the workings of certain economic principles.

In economic terms, the countries of Central America are very small units. For such units, economics can provide a few analytical propositions that seem prima facie plausible. One is that such economies need not indefinitely specialize in exports of primary products, but if they diversity and industrialize their economies, it must be for export. Industrialization for the domestic market is unlikely to permit sufficient economies of scale. In this regard, the Central American countries have industrialized much less than the small republics in the Far East, and accordingly have not enjoyed as rapid a rate of economic growth.