This essay documents growing partisan social uprootedness across Latin America over time, manifested in diminishing social trust toward parties, debilitation of links between parties and social collectivities, lowering levels of partisanship, and rising incidence of personalism in the electorate. It focuses on some unrecognized and undertheorized causal factors behind partisan involution in the region, putting emphasis on mutually reinforcing processes. First, it identifies forces endogenous to the traits of origin of diminished parties that foster their uprootedness and decay; second, it lays out some of the manifold ways that the weakening of political parties fuels regime malperformance, in a mutually reinforcing vicious circle; third, it outlines the existence of mutual feedback loops between political agency and structure; fourth, it identifies various agential sources of party decay. There are strong theoretical and empirical reasons to expect continued party deinstitutionalization across Latin America going forward.

How do bureaucrats implement public policy when faced with political intermediation? This article examines this issue in the distribution of land rights to informal settlements in the municipality of São Paulo, Brazil. Land regularization is a policy established over three decades, where politicians’ requests for land titles to their constituencies play a relevant role. Based on interviews and documents, this study finds that bureaucrats adopt a twofold approach to regulate distribution: they document informal settlements, enacting eligibility criteria; then, they manage and prioritize beneficiaries, accommodating qualifying political demands. In this process, they enforce eligibility rules consistently across cases, constraining political intermediation to a rational scheme. Therefore, bureaucrats reconcile nonprogrammatic politics and policy rules by separating eligibility assessment from beneficiary selection. This paper bridges urban distributive politics and street-level bureaucracy literature by revealing that policy implementers may use technical expertise to curb political influence and negotiate conflicting interests and constraints.

This article describes the process of legal contention between civil society, political parties, and state institutions for the baldíos lands in the Colombian Altillanura region in the last two decades, a region considered the country’s “last agricultural frontier.” The article focuses on the dual and sometimes contradictory roles of the state institutions, both as facilitators of baldíos grabbing and as guarantors of the peasants’ legal land rights. It analyzes the different attempts by the Colombian government to remove the legal limitations to land accumulation and the resistance put up by civil society and the political parties, which resorted to the existing legal mechanisms to deactivate those attempts. The results reveal the two-sided role of the state: while the government introduces legal changes to facilitate baldíos grabbing, state bodies are actively denouncing and sanctioning illegalities or ruling in favor of peasants deprived of their lands.

It is not easy to distinguish between cultural, economic and political causes of the War of Independence in Spanish America and separate them into three closed compartments. Then there are psychological obstacles. There is a feeling among many Latin Americanists that this topic is exhausted and further research will add nothing new. Others want a complete revision of the usual causes cited and demand more documentary study. They believe that the standard causes are based on too scanty research, mostly done in the last century from incomplete sources. Furthermore, there are the rising nationalists and indigenistas of our century, most of them poor historians, who insist that the role of the Indians and mestizos was much more important than historians have accepted. They consider past historians racially and economically prejudiced. Such a trend is especially strong in Mexico, Bolivia, and Cuba, the three countries that have faced a real social revolution. And, unfortunately, history often follows the flag.

La figura egregia del patricio puertorriqueño Eugenio María de Hostos ha resultado ser en los últimos años objeto de innumerables estudios los cuales han aumentado la bibliografía de este hombre de dimensión universal.

Una fase de su vida, sin embargo, ha sido pasada por alto. A pesar de que encontramos estudios y ensayos sobre sus ideas políticas, pedagógicas, sociológicas, filosóficas, moralistas, literarias y revolucionarias, no encontramos en esta extensa bibliografía ningún intento de examinar el pensamiento militar en Hostos. Esta dimensión militar hostosiana es para mí una de las manifestaciones más activas del “hombre completo”.

Será mi propósito en este breve ensayo demostrar el impacto del pensamiento militar como influencia y como parte integral de este “inquebrantable espíritu”.

The Aztecs discovered petroleum in Mexico and used it before the arrival of the Spanish in 1519. They burned it in tribute to their gods, caulked their canoes with it, smeared it on their bodies as a medicine, and utilized it as a dye and a glue. Over three centuries elapsed before an effort was made to turn black gold into cash. Ten years after Edwin L. Drake drilled his famous well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, a group of Mexicans unsuccessfully attempted to produce oil on the “Furbero” hacienda near Papantla in Vera Cruz state. It was not until May 1901 that Edward L. Doheny, a wily product of the rough-and-tumble American oil industry in which he had amassed a fortune, struck oil in Ébano, a jungle region of San Luis Potosí. Another pioneer in the development of Mexico's petroleum industry was Weeman Pearson, later Lord Cowdray, a Yorkshire entrepreneur who formed the fabulously profitable Mexican Eagle (Aguila) Company after discovering the “Golden Lane” fields in 1908 (Bermúdez, 1963; Sampson, 1975: 83-85; Grayson, 1978a).

Using an innovative survey of six major street demonstrations in Mexico City between 2011 and 2013, this study compares political attitudes of protest participants and nonparticipants. The analysis offers three relevant findings. The results suggest that in comparison to protest nonparticipants, demonstrators tend to be more politically involved and experienced individuals, mobilized through their personal and organizational networks. The intensity of these factors’ effects as protest participation predictors varied across demonstrations, showing that protest participation is triggered by different factors. And the diversity of mobilizing factors shows that protest participation in Mexico City is complex, and is a common form of political participation for the plural, mobilized civil society.

A marked improvement has occurred since 1968 in Havana's relations with Moscow and the traditional Communist parties of Latin America. Previously, however, from approximately 1966-1968 Fidel Castro's actions and words came perilously close to precipitating a formal split between his regime and the pro-Soviet parties of the hemisphere. At one time, sporadic criticisms of standard Communist party revolutionary strategy and tactics escalated in frequency and gravity. An ideological offensive advanced as Castro flaunted an independent Marxist line in both domestic and international affairs. Havana proceeded to exacerbate growing tensions in the uneasy alliance between guerrilla movements and Communist parties in several Latin American countries.

Attempts to establish the factors prompting these actions have to date focused on Cuban reactions to developments in the Venezuelan revolutionary movement during 1964-1966.

As nacoes, como sociedades políticas, vivem sob o império de interésses vitáis, que criam reações emocionáis e convições racionáis, edáo ao povo e á sua lideranga um comportamento unitario histórico. Todas elas tém aspiragoes permanentes que sao fruto do processo histórico, das características do povo e da etapa do desenvolvimento económico.

É no processo histórico que se revelam novas energías espirituais, forgas económicas em expansáo, vitalidades políticas que podem manifestar e garantir a perspectiva de expansáo das aspiragoes nacionais, no campo interno ou internacional, maiores ou menores conforme a capacidade do povo, da lideranga e da fórga económica.

Quando se fizer a história da literatura brasüeira de nosso tempo, que lugar ficará reservado a Tristão de Atayde? O de crítico literario? O de crítico de idéias e problemas macionais e universais? O de sociólogo, filósofo, psicólogo, economista? Ou o de doutrinador e homem de ação católico?

Ninguém, creio eu, estará disposto, hoje em dia, a negar-lhe o laurel e a palma que lhe cabem em qualquer dessas categorias ou esferas de saber. A sua fecunda e variada obra testemunhará sempre urna presença em todos os domínios do pensamento brasileiro, seja qual for o ângulo de apreciação. Mas, nos cinquenta anos laboriosos da atividade de escritor de Tristão de Atayde, não haverá aspectos mais salientes, relevantes ou expressivos?

Como se sabe, êle começou a sua carreira fazendo crítica literária pura e simplesmente, ou antes de corpo e alma, sem se embaraçar com o sentido da existência em termos religiosos ou filosóficos de cristianismo ou catolicismo.

Much has been heard in the postwar years about “Hemispheric Solidarity.” In popular belief, this concept not only has concerned matters of security for the Western Hemisphere but frequently has been extended to cover practically all of the international relations of the American states. Particularly, there has been the widespread assumption that the Latin-American states form a bloc in the United Nations — and, incidentally, a bloc of twenty votes in the pocket of the United States.

Despite repeated conflict with organized labor, the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94) pushed an aggressive divestment agenda that transformed Mexico into Latin America's leading privatizer. Explanations of Salinas's achievements typically emphasize centralized presidential power (including control over the ruling party) and autonomy; technocratic and political savvy; and weak labor opposition. This article questions such a pure “capacity-outcome” approach. Of equal importance are the learning effects of repeated interaction between the state and labor, which changed the course of divestment struggles and thereby influenced their outcomes. Lessons learned in successive confrontations led to patterns of interaction conducive to widescale privatization. The article develops this argument through comparative analysis of major divestment episodes in the aviation, mining, steel, and telecommunications sectors.

It is difficult to write about a martyr. One has to contend with the keepers of the flame, who have strong personal and political reasons for preserving the hero's image. Moreover, myths usually contain elements of truth. Although Leonardo Ruiz Pineda is not known as widely as Zapata, Sandino, Che, or Camilo Torres, there are unmistakable efforts on the part of Venezuela's democratic leaders to include him in the pantheon of Latin America's recent revolutionary heroes.

By Mid-1986, The Contadora Group's search for a negotiated peace in Central America had reached a seemingly insurmountable impasse. Negotiations were deadlocked over the issues of arms limitations, democratization, and US support for the Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries (contrarevolucionarios or contras). The United States and its closest Central American allies - Costa Rica, Honduras and El Salvador - demanded that Nicaragua reduce the size of its armed forces and install a democratic political system before they would end support for the contras Nicaragua's Sandinistas, in turn, refused to disarm until the United States and its Central American neighbors halted their support for the contras, they also rejected all proposals for direct negotiations with the contras.