The Argentine (Peronist) Justicialista Party (PJ) underwent a far-reaching coalitional transformation during the 1980s and 1990s. Party reformers dismantled Peronism's traditional mechanisms of labor participation, and clientelist networks replaced unions as the primary linkage to the working and lower classes. By the early 1990s, the PJ had transformed from a labor-dominated party into a machine party in which unions were relatively marginal actors. This process of de-unionization was critical to the PJ's electoral and policy success during the presidency of Carlos Menem (1989–99). The erosion of union influence facilitated efforts to attract middle-class votes and eliminated a key source of internal opposition to the government's economic reforms. At the same time, the consolidation of clientelist networks helped the PJ maintain its traditional working- and lower-class base in a context of economic crisis and neoliberal reform. This article argues that Peronism's radical de-unionization was facilitated by the weakly institutionalized nature of its traditional party-union linkage. Although unions dominated the PJ in the early 1980s, the rules of the game governing their participation were always informal, fluid, and contested, leaving them vulnerable to internal changes in the distribution of power. Such a change occurred during the 1980s, when office-holding politicians used patronage resources to challenge labor's privileged position in the party. When these politicians gained control of the party in 1987, Peronism's weakly institutionalized mechanisms of union participation collapsed, paving the way for the consolidation of machine politics—and a steep decline in union influence—during the 1990s.

Brought to the New World by the first Portuguese colonists and, with time, increasingly associated with the Northeast's vast, dry interior, the pamphlet stories in verse known as folhetos or as literatura de cordel have continued to change along with Brazil. Long associated with semi-literate poets who composed for the Northeastern masses, these “stories on a string” have become increasingly popular among middle-class writers and consumers. Today, contemporary compositions by educated authors who rely on the Internet mingle with folheto classics—love and adventure tales with names such as The Mysterious Peacock, Lampião in Hell, and Green Coconut and Watermelon. This article explores one cordel author's vision of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and the subsequent U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Terror in the Twin Towers (Terror nas Torres Gêmeas) by Azulão—the nickname of Rio-based author João José dos Santos—is noteworthy not just for its immediate subject matter but also for its clear mingling of time-honored cordel elements with other features foreign to most earlier stories. These less traditional aspects of the folheto reflect both the particularities of the events about which the poet is writing and a number of larger changes that have taken place since the late 1950s in Brazilian folk and popular culture.

When citizens lack stable political attitudes, leaders cannot easily be held accountable for their record in office, party system consolidation becomes more difficult, and public opinion is unable to offer much substantive guidance about policy-making. Ultimately, democratic governance is likely to suffer. In this article, we analyze a recent four-wave panel survey to assess the stability of political attitudes in Mexico. We find that the degree of attitude stability in Mexico varies across different types of dispositions. Although citizens hold reasonably firm views about the country's main political actors, preferences over issues are less consistent. These findings suggest both possibilities and constraints for democratic governance.

Through a case study of small-scale Kaqchikel Maya farmers involved in non-traditional export agriculture (NTAX) in the Central Guatemalan highlands, this article examines the tensions between the mostly positive perceptions of farmers and the negative assessments of many who study NTAX production. In a context of severe political-economic structural inequalities and potentially high social and cultural costs, quantitative household survey results demonstrate a modest decrease in concentration of land in favour of Maya smallholders; more gender-egalitarian relations of production than expected; and largely positive local perceptions of economic and social change. Qualitative analysis interprets these findings in light of Maya-affective ties to land, preferences for continuity in traditional labor organization and subsistence maize production, perceptions of risk, and the transfer of traditional marketing skills. We find that Kaqchikeles are shaping alternative modernities as they deal with new sets of political-economic and social constraints.

The Andean khipu was a medium of colored knotted cords used to record different types of information in the pre-Columbian and colonial periods. Although currently there is no way to read the khipu that have survived, numerous texts written in the colonial period claim to have relied on khipu as sources of information. A comparison between two khipu transcriptions of Inca biographies on the one hand and the European biographical genre on the other reveal a distinctly Andean poetics—in the sense of a structural format—with very suggestive links to semiotic conventions of the khipu.

Desde hace más de quince años, el debate sobre la gobernabilidad democrática latinoamericana gira en torno al problema de la “pugna de poderes”, enfatizando el potencial desestabilizador de los conflictos entre el Ejecutivo y el Legislativo. Este ensayo se basa en el análisis histórico de cuarenta y cinco disputas constitucionales en dieciocho países latinoamericanos entre 1950 y 2000. En la primera parte se propone el concepto de crisis presidencial como categoría analítica para estudiar este problema. Las secciones segunda y tercera exploran los efectos de estas crisis sobre la estabilidad del régimen político y su impacto sobre el equilibrio de poderes a lo largo de las últimas cinco décadas. En las conclusiones se sugiere que los efectos desestabilizadores atribuidos al presidencialismo son históricamente contingentes y se exploran los parámetros bajo los cuales ha operado el nuevo presidencialismo latinoamericano a partir de la década de los noventa.

Despite the increasing sensitivity of researchers to historical and contemporary landscape manipulations in the Amazon basin, there is still a powerful consensus in both popular and scholarly literatures that, with the exception of predatory deforestation, the physical environment of the region is largely unmodified by human intervention. An emerging body of scholarship has challenged this view by describing ways that Amazonian populations have managed terrestrial ecosystems on a variety of spatial and temporal scales. In this research report, we present both new and previously published data showing that Amazonians also intervene in fluvial systems, manipulating rivers and streams to modify the landscape. We argue that these practices, occurring in many different forms, are widespread and commonplace throughout the region, and that, taken together with the emerging evidence for terrestrial manipulation, provide compelling reason for a fundamental reassessment of conventional views of Amazonian nature.