This study evaluates the role played by the legislature in one of Argentina's most important economic reforms of recent decades: the reform of tax incentives for regional development. As implemented by the last military government, this sytem of tax incentives provoked sharp distributive conflicts among provinces. Although a majority of legislators favored reform after the return to democracy in 1983, interprovincial conflicts created bargaining problems that prevented the passage of reform legislation through regular channels. Pro-reform legislators decided instead to delegate reform authority to President Raúl Alfonsín because he shared their interest in containing the fiscal cost of tax incentives. Subsequent uses of this delegated authority by two presidents promoted the interests of the enacting coalition that supported delegation. These findings support the usefulness of delegation models when carefully applied to Latin America and challenge theories that neglect the different ways that legislators shape economic reform.

Social spending by central governments in Latin America has, in recent decades, become increasingly insulated from political manipulation. Focusing on the 3×1 Program in Mexico in 2002-2007, we show that social spending by local government is, in contrast, highly politicized. The 3×1 Program funds municipal public works, with each level of government—municipal, state, and central—matching collective remittances. Our analysis shows that 3×1 municipal spending is shaped by political criteria. First, municipalities time disbursements according to the electoral cycle. Second, when matching collective remittances, municipalities protect salaries of personnel, instead adjusting budget items that are less visible to the public, such as debt. Third, municipalities spend more on 3×1 projects when their partisanship matches that of the state government. Beyond the 3×1 Program, our findings highlight the considerable influence that increasing political and economic decentralization can have on local government incentives and spending choices, in Mexico and beyond.

This article will examine the efforts made by Argentina and Brazil to attain a measure of technological autonomy in the fields of computers and nuclear energy. Grieco's study of the Indian computer industry and separate studies of the Brazilian computer industry by Evans and Adler have shown the inadequacy of the arguments raised by the dependency literature, namely, that in areas of highly sophisticated technology, owned mainly by multinational corporations, the developing country will fail in any attempt to achieve domestic technological development.

Electoral theories of governmental accountability assume that competitive elections produce responsive governments because they allow voters to punish or reward the performance of incumbent politicians at the ballot box. This research note investigates whether the increasing competitiveness of municipal elections in Mexico during the 1990s has improved the performance of local governments by focusing on the provision of potable water and drainage. The empirical evidence does not seem to support the electoral accountability hypothesis, but rather suggests that municipal governments are more responsive to the influence of socioeconomic modernity, as well as to the direct pressure of politically mobilized citizens. The findings cast doubts on the idea that competitive elections, by themselves, will significantly improve the quality of local governments in the country.

There has been much controversy over the nature of the institution of slavery, the relative humanity or lack of it in those slave holding nations which practiced it, and its benign or baleful effects upon the blacks on whom it was inflicted. Much has been said about the harshness of Anglo-American slavery and the relatively mild nature of Spanish American slavery, which respected a slave's basic humanity and rights of person, property, and family. Yet little has been done to quantify and document how those attitudes applied in practice. We have had little precise information about the slave family as it existed in the Spanish American colonies and the extent or use of slave property, or about the slaves' access to the legal system that might protect and defend his person, his property, or his family. New sources and methodology have begun to challenge long-held assumptions about both Anglo-American as well as Spanish American slavery. If any conclusion is warranted, it may be that slavery varied widely from place to place and was influenced perhaps as much by differing economic circumstances as by differences in cultural attitudes.

The ethnic question has been central to the historical process of nation-state building or “nationalization” in Mexico (Adams 1967). To a significant degree, this process has been a criollo and a mestizo project (Aguirre Beltrán 1976; compare Anderson 1983, 1988). Accordingly, indígena identity has been imposed on the non-criollo and non-mestizo population by the Mexican state, with the identification process historically displaying arbitrariness and inconsistency across a range of biological identifiers (especially phenotype) or cultural identifiers (especially language) or both (Marino Flores 1967). Following colonial precedents and in step with the evolving structure of political economy and society, the process of ethnic identification in postcolonial Mexico associated Hispanicity (via white skin color or Spanish descent or Spanish language) with the more valued locations higher in the ethno-class hierarchy and indígena identity with the lower, less-valued locations. In postrevolutionary Mexico, thanks to the contribution of anthropologist Manuel Gamio, the concept of mestizaje was stripped of biological content and culturized.

While Haiti's economic dependency and poverty are shared by other Caribbean nations, its history of underdevelopment serves as a prototype for them. Haiti's political independence, achieved in 1804, set the stage for an increasingly difficult struggle to survive among imperialist states. Haiti prefigured the modern Latin American experience and thus provides a classic example of how national aspirations in the hemisphere were derailed. Equally significant, it illustrates the manner in which commerce, rather than plantation enterprise or extensive capital investment, could foster socioeconomic decline.

Considerable research has been conducted on the relationship between socioeconomic inequality and political engagement. However, there is little consensus on the exact nature of the relationship, and considerable variation in the relationship exists even among countries with similar levels of inequality. This lack of clarity in the literature exists because the impact of inequality on engagement is not constant, but changes depending on the strategic choices of political leaders. Populist leaders; who tend to explicitly connect political and socioeconomic exclusion, can activate latent grievances around inequality. Using data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project, we show that inequality leads to disengagement among the poor in most contexts but increases engagement under populist rule. In other words, a primarily structural relationship is mediated by political variables. Even though the severity of inequality is outside the control of any political actor, leaders' reaction to inequality can dramatically alter its impact on mass political behavior.

The dependency perspective has become a major thrust, both in bourgeois and Marxist conceptions of development and underdevelopment in Latin America, but the distinctions between the two interpretations have been blurred. No unified theory of dependency yet exists, but a variety of theoretical tendencies tends to cluster in the literature on dependency. The discussion that follows differentiates between the bourgeois and Marxist interpretations by focusing on some fundamental weaknesses of dependency theory that emanate among those who utilize a Marxist analysis. In particular, there is concern that dependency theories ignore social classes and class conflict or that these theories tend to present mechanical schemes in which external rather than internal aspects are determinant. Further, it is argued that dependency theories are nationalist in ideology and advocate autonomous capitalist development rather than offering solutions or strategies for the transition from capitalism to socialism.

Within the past few years, the study of Latin American politics has been increasingly influenced by a theoretical perspective that the outcome of World War II temporarily relegated to the “dustbin of history.” This perspective is the corporate one, long associated with the political perversions of Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and a handful of postwar continental regimes such as Spain and Portugal which were considered by most observers to be political backwaters.

This essay explores the various ways Mexicans and Colombians envisioned and employed modernity in the nineteenth century, especially the flourishing and collapse of an alternative mentalité I call American republican modernity. I argue that in the late 1840s a vision of civilization emerged that privileged political progress, measured by the success of republican projects and the enactment of extensive citizens' rights, as a marker of modernity over older visions, defined by high culture or wealth. Because conceptions of modernity deeply affected the hegemonic rules of political life in Spanish America, I also suggest how such a discourse enabled subalterns to exploit this language to promote their inclusion in new nation-states. The article concludes by exploring the collapse of this alternative modernity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as Western notions of modernity—involving technological innovation, industrialization, and state power—became dominant.

Criminal Enterprises and Governance in Latin America and the Caribbean. By Enrique Desmond Arias. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. ix + 301. $75.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107153936.

Sharing This Walk: An Ethnography of Prison Life and the PCC in Brazil. By Karina Biondi. Edited and translated by John F. Collins. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 194. $24.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781469623405.

Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico. By Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Pp. ix + 379. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477312759.

The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime, and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil. By Graham Denyer Willis. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. ix +192. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780520285712.

The Politics of Drug Violence: Criminals, Cops, and Politicians in Colombia and Mexico. By Angélica Durán-Martínez. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 328. $29.95, paperback. ISBN: 9780190695965.

Making Peace in Drug Wars: Crackdowns and Cartels in Latin America. By Benjamin Lessing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. vii + 326. $34.99 paperback. ISBN: 9781316648964.

En la niebla de la guerra: Los ciudadanos ante la violencia criminal organizada. By Andreas Schedler. Mexico City: Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, 2015. Pp. 282. $17.99 paperback. ISBN: 9786079367480.

Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador. By Sonja Wolf. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Pp. vii + 304. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9781477311660.

En un contexto histórico de expansión educativa, mejora de los rendimientos de la educación y aumento de la participación de la mujer en la actividad económica, este artículo examina y compara las pautas y tendencias en homogamia educativa en México y Brasil entre 1970 y 2000. Concretamente, tratamos en perspectiva temporal y comparada las siguientes cuestiones: grado y alcance de la homogamia educativa y simetría en las relaciones de género. Para ello utilizamos las muestras armonizadas de microdatos de los censos de México 1970, 1990 y 2000, y de Brasil 1970, 1980, 1991 y 2000, puestas a disposición por el proyecto IPUMS-International. Los resultados muestran un aumento de la homogamia entre las capas más instruidas y una disminución de la hipergamia femenina en ambos países. Comparativamente, la homogamia educativa es mayor en Brasil que en México, reflejo de una mayor desigualdad social, mientras que las diferencias de género son mayores en México.

Este artículo explora la relevancia del Caribe para entender la colonialidad, la decolonialidad, y el giro decolonial. Confronta y comienza a corregir los efectos de cierto latinoamericano-centrismo en las formas usuales de entender el giro decolonial en América Latina, el Caribe mismo, y otras regiones. Se identifican tres sentidos distintos del giro decolonial: el giro decolonial como analítica, el giro decolonial como sociogénesis histórica, y, de forma más estrecha, el giro decolonial como una red de intelectuales que se han distinguido por sus estudios sobre la colonialidad y la decolonialidad. El articulo explica como el Caribe, el pensamiento caribeño, e intelectuales caribeños han jugado un rol importante en cada una de estas dimensiones.

The belief survives among us
[Latin Americans] that United States
scholars would write better histories
of Latin America if they studied
less and invented more.
Daniel Cosío VillegasHistory and the Social Sciences in Latin America

This article will analyze the way in which U.S. historians' writing on Latin America, especially on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has been influenced by the changing relationship between the United States and Latin America. It will also trace more briefly the changing approaches of historians from Latin America. In my view, the two groups have taken different routes but have arrived at much the same destination.

This article introduces the topic of pandillas (street gangs) and their implications for security in Central America. There is minimal scholarly literature on pandillas and security. In part this is due to serious challenges in analyzing pandillas. First, pandilla members consider truth to be situational; data derived directly from them is suspect. Second, those who know most about them are involved in NGOs that rely on foreign assistance for their work. The project reports they produce go to funders abroad and are generally not published. Third, to research and write on pandillas is dangerous.