This study examines the effect of democratization on a key education reform across three Mexican states. Previous scholarship has found a positive effect of electoral competition on social spending, as leaders seek to improve their reelection prospects by delivering services to voters. However, the evidence presented here indicates that more money has not meant better educational outcomes in Mexico. Rather, new and vulnerable elected leaders are especially susceptible to the demands of powerful interest groups at the expense of accountability to constituents. In this case, the dominant teachers' union has used its leverage to exact greater control over the country's resource-rich merit pay program for teachers. It has exploited this control to increase salaries and decrease standards for advancement up the remuneration ladder. The evidence suggests that increased electoral competition has led to the empowerment of entrenched interests rather than voters, with an overall negative effect on education.

In Mexican colonial history, the night the Aztecs of Tenochtitlán massacred Cortés's troops, 30 June 1520, is known as la noche triste. In Mexican contemporary history, the night of 2 October 1968 is known as la nueva noche triste, a night that saw the deaths of numerous student protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Tlatelolco) in Mexico City. It is also referred to as la noche de Tlatelolco or merely as Tlatelolco '68. Some writers contend that the events at Tlatelolco and the emergence of the student movement of 1968 leading to the confrontation are among the most important occurrences in Mexico since the revolution and that Mexico is profoundly different today because of them. It is therefore not surprising that a significant portion of the Mexican literature written since 1968 reflects in various ways the impact of these events on the Mexican national consciousness. A variety of texts, both fictional and nonfictional, appeared immediately after the incident, and others have continued to appear in contemporary Mexican literature in the ensuing years. These texts either address or refer to the dramatic occurences in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas and are collectively known as “Tlatelolco literature.”

This article examines the sources of economic growth for a group of Latin American countries in relation to their export performance in China. The analytical framework is based on an extended normalized quadratic profit function. The econometric results confirm that a favorable export record with China represents a positive source of growth for Latin America. However, it also creates long-run dependability conditions in terms of reduced prices and thinner profits that weaken its growth capacity. Latin American countries must seek product diversification away from their current commodity base and aggressively climb up the value chain to remain competitive worldwide.

As the recent decade of violence and tyranny slowly recedes into the past, few signs have yet emerged that Argentines are making headway in coming to terms with this troubled heritage. Although the memory of these years is less omnipresent, it still evokes a repulsion as intense—and as fascinated—as when these matters were first allowed to come out into the open. Some reasons for the exceptional depth and scope of the Argentine crisis have become clearer in retrospect, but this clarity does not make the remembering any less painful. The extreme savagery of the country's turn toward violence makes even the most insightful historical exploration of its causes pale in comparison with the memory of having experienced the consequences.

The recent release of over four hundred telephone conversations recorded in the Lyndon Baines Johnson White House from April to December 1965 provide historians with exciting new evidence on the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic. The role of the president in that civil conflict has been up to now mysterious since Johnson rarely committed himself to paper. Critics and scholars since have somewhat exonerated him as simply another decision maker misled by a panicky country team spreading rumors of an imminent communist takeover. The tapes suggest, however, that Johnson was both aware that evidence of a takeover was insufficient and perhaps more concerned with domestic politics than with the situation in Santo Domingo. Repeatedly, close advisors attempted to dissuade him from overplaying an anti-communist rationale. But everywhere he looked in Washington Johnson saw enemies who would exploit any hesitation on his part. Soon after committing 23,000 troops, he admitted his lapses in judgment while he simultaneously sought scapegoats for them. The tapes place Johnson once and for all at the center of one of the most serious crises in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations and reveal the darker side of his foreign policy instincts.

We analyze class structures in Latin America from a sociological perspective, defining social classes as labor market positions. We propose an adaptation of the Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero (EGP) class schema, which has become a standard in advanced industrialized countries but presents some limitations in accounting for labor relations in Latin America. Then, we use recent survey data for nine Latin American countries to delineate a map of current class structures and explore the association between social class and social/economic conditions. Our results indicate that class structures differ significantly not only between Latin America and advanced industrialized nations but also among Latin American countries. There is also a close association between class membership and socioeconomic conditions, including social protection and the risk of poverty. These results suggest that a sociological approach to social class is still pertinent to understanding the relationships among productive structures, labor markets, and living conditions in Latin America.

This essay reviews the following works:

Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. By Martín Arboleda. New York: Verso, 2020. Pp. xiv + 288. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781788732963.

Legacies of the Left Turn in Latin America: The Promise of Inclusive Citizenship. Edited by Manuel Balán and Françoise Montambeault. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. xxvii + 472. $60.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780268106577.

Growth without Development: Peru in Comparative Perspective. By Rubén Berríos. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. Pp. ix + 156. $90.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781498550734.

Who Speaks for Nature? Indigenous Movements, Public Opinion, and the Petro-State in Ecuador. By Todd A. Eisenstadt and Karleen Jones West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, Pp. x + 288. $19.53 hardcover. ISBN: 9780190908959.

Latin America’s Pink Tide: Breakthroughs and Shortcomings. Edited by Steve Ellner. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. Pp. vi + 364. $39.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781538125632.

The Myth of Economic Development. By Celso Furtado. Translated by Jordan B. Jones. Newark: Polity Press, 2020. Pp. xxx + 90. $19.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781509540143.

After the Pink Tide: Corporate State Formation and New Egalitarianisms in Latin America. Edited by Marina Gold and Alessandro Zagato. Oxford: Berghahn, 2020. Pp. 218. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781789208764.

Bolivia in the Age of Gas. By Bret Gustafson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii + 328. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781478010999.

Resource Radicals: From Petro-nationalism to Post-extractivism in Ecuador. By Thea Riofrancos. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. xi + 264. $26.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781478008484.

Los ciclos políticos y económicos de América Latina y el boom de materias primas. Edited by Francisco Sánchez and Mercedes García Montero. Madrid: Tecnos, 2019. Pp. 376. $24.75 paperback. ISBN: 9788430975495.

Las fronteras del neoextractivismo en América Latina: Conflictos socioambientales, giro ecoterritorial y nuevas dependencias. By Maristella Svampa. Beilefeld: Beilefeld University Press, an imprint of Transcript Verlag, 2019. Pp. 142. Open access e-book. ISBN: 9783839445266. DOI: 10.14361/9783839445266-003.

Some historians and political scientists have probably passed each other on their way to incorporate the paraphernalia of their respective disciplines. The historians are showing greater interest in theoretical questions and a growing methodological sophistication. The political scientists have begun to test their models against well-known events which have been previously researched by the historians. Obviously, this trend is no harbinger of disciplinary convergence although it underlines the similarity of interests between quantitatively oriented historians and developmentally oriented political scientists.

El presente artículo reflexiona sobre una de las maneras a través de las cuales la sociedad boliviana contemporánea ha intentado resolver el brusco vaciamiento de la concepción de lo nacional en la era neoliberal. El artículo argumenta que la hoja de coca ha sido uno de los elementos más importantes en llenar este vacío. Su poder simbólico ha hecho posible bajo determinadas circunstancias (políticas, sociales y culturales) pasar de ser un elemento clave de representación local a otro nacional. Asimismo, la hoja de coca contiene la siempre problemática relación entre lo local y la política global de su erradicación. Precisamente, uno de los aspectos que contribuye al fortalecimiento de la hoja de coca como símbolo en determinado momento es la lucha de los productores de coca en contra de tales políticas. Como marco de referencia de la argumentación se utiliza la noción de sistema-mundo de Immanuel Wallerstein, la idea de globalización de Thomas Barnett y la concepción de representación de Ernesto Laclau.

This article explores one of the earliest large-scale uses of biocidal agro-chemicals in Latin America, the United Fruit Company's hand-spraying of its banana plantations to control sigitoka disease from 1938 to 1962. After discussing the environmental context of sigatoka and the early development and implications of the spray technology, the essay focuses on the thousands of workers who applied the chemicals. Using Costa Rica as a case study, it explores workers' sense of the personal costs of their work as well as their ambiguous relationship to the larger banana workers' union movement. Because of differences in ethnicity, age, and masculine status, pesticide workers were not part of the labor movement's militant core, but their participation in strikes gave unions great power for a time. This power, along with workers' individual job actions, forced fundamental changes in the pesticide program, demonstrating the importance of integrating labor into the study of environmental change in agricultural capitalism.

Displays of wealth and opulence in the face of dire need and poverty have become commonplace as the rich and the poor increasingly share city spaces around the globe. Research shows that it is the perception of inequality, more than raw measures of inequality, that has important political consequences and that is most concerning for social well-being. In this article, I propose a theoretical move from a general, statistically driven conceptualization of inequality to a spatially informed concept that recognizes how people experience inequality. Relying on findings that show that the perception of inequality is most important for life chances, I suggest that it is key to understand not only where inequality is located but how it is spatially distributed. Using the Mall of San Juan as an example of a spatially polarized landscape in Puerto Rico, and referring to other cases in Latin America, the article shows how the spatial distribution of inequality highlights the perceptual fields of citizens who may celebrate, succumb to, respond to, attune to, and/or challenge the inequalities accordingly. To shift from an accounting of inequality through the concept of segregation to recognizing the experience and perception of inequality through spatial polarization shifts the scholarly and policy frames of inequality research and policy.

Dependencia theory is in vogue among social scientists throughout the world. Having originated in Latin America in the early 1960s, it was widely embraced both there and in parts of Europe and Africa by the end of the decade. In the 1970s, North Americans joined the flood of scholars attempting to grapple with the problems of underdevelopment in the so-called Third World from a perspective explicitly rejecting traditional theories of development. With this new stream of researchers came new tools and new approaches to the study of peripheral societies, tools and approaches intended to complement those previously used within the dependencia tradition.

Theories on the relationship between religion and social change over the past decade have received significant new empirical inputs from developments in Latin America where religious symbols and institutions have undergone some dramatic alterations under the influence of various modernization processes. Sociologists and anthropologists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe stressed the basically conservative effect of religion on society, and concluded that religious institutions are normally obstacles to change as a result of their traditionalistic orientation and association with established social structures. However, there is a growing uneasiness with the conclusions of these major theorists (Spencer, Malinowski, Durkheim, Marx, Weber) in the light of developments in major religions in some areas of the Third World, particularly Roman Catholicism in Latin America. Popular reporting as well as recent scholarly research have noted significant shifts to the left in parts of the Latin American Church, exemplified by strong episcopal condemnations of social injustice, growing political activism of militant clergy groups, and the emergence of new pastoral and social programs aimed at religious and societal reform. The conclusion in much of this literature is that the Church is undergoing a major transformation and this new phenomenon will provide a powerful stimulus for social change throughout the continent.

In 1977 concern for the long-range effects of policy-making prompted President Carter to direct the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of State to study the “probable changes in the world's population, natural resources, and environment through the end of the century.” The projections of that commission, as detailed in The Global 2000 Report to the President (Barney et al. 1981), foresee a growth in the world's population of as much as 70 percent, combined with staggering increases in demand for the world's resources of water, minerals, soils, and forest products.

A central issue in the analysis of military regimes in Latin America is their policy impact. How successful are military governments in promoting economic development? How do their policies and performances compare with those of civilian governments? The sheer volume of research on the causes of military takeovers in Latin America implies that regime changes have important consequences. Yet to date we are far from having satisfactory answers to the questions posed above. As a recent study of public policy in Latin America noted, “If students of Latin American politics were to inventory verified propositions regarding the performance of Latin American regimes, the resulting list might not exceed zero” (Ames and Goff 1975, p. 175).

This study uses the hedonic wage method to estimate the value of statistical life (VSL) in Chile and then extrapolates this value to different Latin American countries. The data are obtained from the National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey (Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica Nacional, CASEN 2013), which includes information on socioeconomic and labor variables at the individual level. Records of fatal and nonfatal occupational risk in each economic sector are obtained from the Superintendency of Social Security (Superintendencia de Seguridad Social). The results of the best hedonic wage estimate for the Chilean case (which corrects for endogeneity and selection bias) show that the VSL is US$3.7 million, with a confidence interval of 95 percent ranging between US$3.4 million and US$4.0 million. A meta-analysis that relates the VSL to GDP per capita is conducted to extrapolate the findings to other Latin American countries, with average values ranging from US$0.01 million for Haiti to US$5.2 million for Puerto Rico.