Programs of economic liberalization have many common features all over the world, but they do not necessarily have the same consequences. Differences in their effects reflect differences in the countries themselves along with accidental factors of timing and external events, and they can also embody systematic consequences of alternatives within the programs. The starting point in this discussion is that different versions of liberalization—alternatives consistent with the basic strategy—can have significantly different effects on poverty and inequality.

An enduring paradox lies at the heart of Brazilian politics. The Brazilian Army has long suffered from corruption at the highest levels so extreme as to create disquiet throughout the institution. Yet the Brazilian military, like other armed forces in Latin America, has justified its involvement in politics and society by accusing civilians of corruption. Despite repeated revelations of military corruption, soldiers and civilians as well have sometimes accepted the armed forces' use of this moral discourse. For example, an anonymous businessman wrote General Pedro Aurélio de Góes Monteiro on 30 November 1954: “The country is on the brink of financial and economic ruin. This state of things is the result of the abuses of past governments and of the deceased President Vargas and the generalized corruption. … The only solution for the reestablishment of confidence in the exterior would be the delivery of the government to a military dictatorship” (emphasis in the original).2 Thirty years later, at the close of authoritarian rule in Brazil, a daring journalist named Carlos Alberto de Carli exposed rampant corruption within the military's intelligence services. Yet Carli himself dedicated his book in part to “the armed forces—the moral reserves of our people” (cover page, Carli 1985).

In the history of human migration, rarely has a situation arisen in which simultaneous voluntary immigration and emigration flows have dramatically transformed the ethnic composition of an independent country. Belize since its independence in 1981 provides an example of such an unusual combination of circumstances. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, anecdotal evidence began to accumulate suggesting that the country's population was undergoing profound structural changes that included realignment of its settlement patterns and alteration of its ethnic mix.

In the age of corporate empires and free trade, little attention has been paid to those who live and work on the margins of the mainstream capitalist economies. In Ecuador, these workers constitute a vast sector of the national population. Some 60 percent of urban dwellers and probably a much larger proportion of rural families exist below the poverty line, eking their living out of family plots of land or micro-enterprises (World Bank, cited in Larrea and North n.d.). Many of these belong to indigenous ethnic groups and nationalities. What is the effect of capitalist expansion on these workers and the way in which they organize their economy? Are they destined for Marx's “dustbins of history,” or have they been able to adapt to and even take advantage of capitalism without losing their historical specificity as noncapitalist producers?

The favelas of Rio de Janeiro, with their teeming masses trapped in misery, constitute the perfect site for investigating how social inequality is reproduced in Brazil. The latest survey of the shantytowns, conducted by the Instituto de Planejamento in Rio de Janeiro (IPLAN-Rio) reported that as of 1991, the city contained 661 favelas housing 962,793 persons in 239,678 shacks. The squatter settlements recreate in miniature but distorted form the entire history of modern Rio de Janeiro. The first squatter settlement was built in 1898 in Rio by Bahian veterans of the military campaign against mystic rebel Antonio Conselheiro. Yet only when the housing crisis of the 1940s forced the urban poor to erect hundreds of shantytowns in the suburbs did favelas replace tenements as the main type of residence for destitute Cariocas (residents of Rio). The explosive era of favela growth dates from 1940, when Getúlio Vargas's industrialization drive pulled hundreds of thousands of migrants into the Federal District, until 1970, when shantytowns expanded beyond urban Rio and into the metropolitan periphery. Even today, the favelas remain an officially unrecognized and illegal part of city. For this reason, many researchers assume that the shantytowns have no written history and that historians must rely on anecdotal evidence from residents for information on squatter life.