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.

In recent years the idea of “culture as resource” has been hailed as a new epistemological paradigm for assigning value and significance to artistic practice. This article acknowledges this idea as determining values assigned to art in the recent context of globalization. Yet it questions the heuristic hold of such an episteme for the interpretation of some cultural practices, especially those of musicians in a world where many of them are not so much administering resources as managing their scarcity. It thus explores the disjuncture between the idea of care of the self, invoked by using the performativity of culture as the basis of the resource paradigm, and the actual practices of musicians in promoting careers that demand investments of money, affect, time, and other resources in order to sustain those careers. In such situations, musicians often privilege other values of music—aesthetic desires, stylistic options, and so on—as primary epistemic and affective reasons for determining their choices and what they find valuable in music. I explore this through the work of two Colombian musicians with contrasting careers and musical styles and practices, Lucía Pulido and Charles King.

Latin American urban areas often comprise large low-income former shantytown areas that originated as illegal land captures and that have been consolidated through self-build over thirty years or more. Today most of the original households still live in their homes, often alongside adult children (and grandchildren). As part of the Latin American Housing Network study (www.lahn.utexas.org), this article reports on survey research for Mexico and describes the stability and nature of these shared arrangements and the considerable asset value now represented by these properties. Although these properties are often considered patrimonio para los hijos, many consolidator pioneers are aging, so that the issue of property inheritance has become salient, especially for second-generation adult children and their families. However, fewer than 10 percent of owners have wills, and most will die intestate, often having made verbal inheritance arrangements regarding their “estate.” This augurs the rise of a new round of informality of property holding that bears little relation to the national and state legal provisions that actually govern inheritance succession, whether through wills or via intestacy provisions. The article describes the various legal codes that prevail in Mexico relating to marriage and acquisition and assigning of property upon death, and it offers several case scenarios of interfamilial and intragenerational conflict, especially insofar as these relate to gender and social constructions of inheritance rights among the poor.

Does race influence political behavior in Brazil? Using data from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, we explore whether an individual's propensity to take part in a political association is affected by race, independent of socioeconomic position and of the availability of resources derived from this position. We found that white individuals participate more in political associations than do black individuals; however, after taking into account the differences in all types of resources, we found no difference in participation by racial groups. Nevertheless, by interacting race, skills, and income, it turns out that different racial groups use the same resources differently. A white individual's propensity to participate politically is significantly more affected by income than a similar black individual's propensity. Therefore, we argue that race mediates the effect of resources on political participation, which means that either different groups may use different resources or different groups can differ in how intensively they use resources.

Since 1993 to the present, a group of Mapuche activists has aired the bilingual radio show Wixage anai! in Santiago, Chile; on the other side of the Andes, another Mapuche collective, the Equipo de Comunicación Mapurbe, produced and broadcast a series of brief radio programs between 2003 and 2005 in Bariloche, southern Argentina. In this article, I argue that these radio programs constitute an exercise of Mapuche agency that challenges what I call the acoustic colonialism of corporate and criollo mass media in both countries. This article illustrates how Mapuche activists creatively use radio as a connective medium among Mapuche communities and a space for the public audibility of their own voices, sounds, and modes of speech. I analyze the history, cultural politics, and performative features of these two initiatives, engaging theoretical and critical views on sound media, state cultural policies, and politics of indigenous agency.

The last half-dozen years have witnessed an outpouring of Brazilian publications, both rigorous academic studies and popular essays, on women and their roles and activities within Brazilian society. Since the late 1970s, publishers and educated audiences have demonstrated an active interest in works on women that contrasts sharply with the hostile reception accorded Betty Friedan and the Brazilian translation of her Feminine Mystique in 1971. What was once a subject for ridicule has become a timely topic. In 1980 a compendium of the year's nonfiction titles revealed more books listed under the heading of feminism than under biology or botany, and almost as many as under anthropology or cooking.1 The expanding publications on socially determined sex roles have accompanied the development of a small, but active, feminist movement and a general increase in publishing activities in Brazil as the “redemocratization” process gains strength and readers seek more information on previously forbidden topics.

Carlos Fonseca's unequivocal bracketing of Augusto Sandino's political project with that of Latin America's premier Marxist revolutionary would have shocked most readers when it was written in 1972. In this and other seminal essays, one of the three founders of Nicaragua's Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) formally integrated Sandino the historical figure into the ideology of their revolutionary struggle. Sandino had fought a six-year guerrilla war against the U.S. forces occupying Nicaragua between 1927 and 1933. His assassination in 1934 by Anastasio Somoza's henchmen ushered in a forty-five-year dynastic dictatorship by a succession of Somozas. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, until Fonseca died in combat against the Guardia Nacional in 1976, his writings guided the FSLN's resurrecting and reconstructing of the image of Sandino in order to reshape it into the dominant symbol of a powerful revolutionary ideology.

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.

Although a large number of democracies have extended political rights to expatriates, relatively little is known about the depths of transnational political engagement. How attentive are expatriates to politics in the country of origin? When expatriates judge leaders “back home,” are their evaluations based on the same ideological considerations as those of citizens in the country of origin? Drawing from original surveys conducted during presidential elections in Mexico (2006) and Colombia (2010), in which both emigrants and citizens within the country were sampled, this study addresses these questions. The results indicate that for each nationality group, living abroad is not associated with a drop in political attentiveness, and time abroad does not in and of itself depress attention to politics from a distance. Moreover, emigrants and individuals in the country of origin do not vary in the extent to which ideological preferences are used to judge presidents, which is a key marker of political sophistication. These results suggest that in the context of Mexican and Colombian politics, living abroad does not markedly diminish the potential for effective democratic engagement.

The recent discovery in Lima's National Museum of History of a sixteenth-century inspection of the royal repartimiento of Yanque Collaguas in the district of Arequipa, has stimulated a search for further important documentation about the region. The investigation was made possible by financial support from the Ford Foundation under its Peruvian program for projects in the social sciences (PA73–807). The project is coordinated by Dr. Franklin Pease G. Y., with the active participation of Dr. N. David Cook, Professor Juan Carlos Crespo (Catholic University, Lima), and Dr. Alejandro Malaga Medina (University of San Agustin, Arequipa).

This article examines the breadth and depth of anti-Americanism in contemporary Latin America. Using individual-level data from 2012, we employ regression analysis to understand why some Latin American citizens are more likely than others to distrust the government of the United States. By examining the attitudes of citizens of countries that are part of different groupings—such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas and the Pacific Alliance—we find great variation in the levels and predictors of anti-Americanism. While citizens' ideology is a common predictor in most countries, other variables such as the receipt of remittances, the perception of insecurity, and nationalism appear as predictors in only some. Furthermore, although there is a positive correlation between presidential approval and anti-Americanism in countries where leaders have an overtly anti-American discourse, this relationship disappears in countries where the president is perceived as neutral, and it is inverse in countries where the president is perceived as pro-American.

Indigenous peoples of Ecuador have organized and mobilized over the past thirty years, partly to reshape their identities after centuries of domination. This research is a preliminary effort to explore the contemporary complexity of that identity. Best viewed as a quantitative case study, this analysis uses responses from seventy-six indigenous college students to a self-administered questionnaire. The authors found that indigenous students with greater “acculturation experiences” with mestizo culture were more strident in rejecting elements of that culture than were their colleagues who had had fewer encounters with mestizo elements of Ecuadorian society. While the tendency to identify oneself ethnically by rejecting the dominant culture represents only one dimension of ethnic identity (maintaining distinctiveness), the authors consider the findings important for future research on the dynamics of the process of ethnic identification.

This essay seeks to categorize and assess works published since the 1950s on the activities of the tribunal of the Santo Oficio de la Inquisición of Lima and their repercussions on the social history of the viceroyalty of Peru. The studies made of the Inquisition in recent decades, in going beyond a merely descriptive focus or one biased by the old prejudices of the “Black Legend,” have highlighted the exceptional value of the records of the Lima Inquisition for acquainting researchers with interesting dimensions on the level of mentalities, ideas, attitudes, and behaviors—that is to say, in the expressions of the deepest impulses of the human soul. This trend has allowed historians to modify their image of the Inquisition in the Spanish metropolis and in its former colonies in America.

A crisis of urban violence has emerged in northern Central America during the past two decades. Although youth gangs are responsible for only a portion of this violence, punitive approaches to dealing with gang violence have sharpened public hostility toward gang members and created a context conducive to the practice of “social cleansing” aimed at reducing gang violence by eliminating gang-affiliated youth through extrajudicial executions. Against this backdrop of public anger and resentment aimed at gang youth, a sizeable number of Evangelical-Pentecostal pastors and lay workers have developed ministries aimed at rescuing gang members and restoring them to society, often making considerable sacrifices and taking personal risks in the process. After describing the difficulties and risks associated with leaving the gang, this article takes a sociological approach to gang member conversions to discover the resources that Evangelical-Pentecostal congregations and gang ministries offer to former gang members facing the crisis of spoiled identity. I draw on semistructured interviews conducted in 2007 and 2008 with former gang members and gang ministry coordinators in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and a handful of follow-up interviews conducted in 2013.

Deforestation in Latin America, especially in the Amazon basin, is a major source of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that contribute to global warming. Protected areas play a vital role in minimizing forest loss and in supplying key environmental services, including carbon sequestration and rainfall regulation, which mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change amid a rising tide of economic development in the region. The area of protected forest has expanded rapidly since 1980 to cover one-fifth of Latin America and more than two-fifths of Amazonia, a region whose rain forest captures some 40 percent of Latin America's carbon emissions. The reserve sector has traditionally suffered from severe underfunding, but the possibility of new resources being generated through financial compensation for “reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation” (REDD) or “avoided deforestation” under a new Kyoto protocol after 2012 could help strengthen the environmental and social roles of protected areas. However, a number of major implementation and governance challenges will need to be addressed.

They arrived first in July 1898 in scattered numbers, in the company of an army of conquest, and subsequently in successive waves during the military occupation. By the time U.S. military rule over Cuba came to an end in May 1902, no less than a score of Protestant denominations had inaugurated evangelical activities in Cuba, including Northern and Southern Baptists, Southern Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, the Disciples of Christ, Quakers, Pentecostalists, and Congregationalists. In fact, so many missionaries arrived in Cuba at one time that denominational competition quickly got out of hand. In February 1902, an interdenominational conference convened in Cienfuegos to impose order on the U.S. evangelical enterprise. The resulting comity plan established spheres of influence for the principal Protestant denominations in Cuba: Northern and Southern Baptists divided the island between them, with Northern Baptists in the two eastern provinces and Southern Baptists assigned to the four western ones; Quakers and Methodists divided eastern Cuba between them; Presbyterians and Congregationalists located their missions in the western zones; and Episcopalians concentrated in Matanzas and Santiago de Cuba.

Despite calls to improve and systematize research on political participation in Latin America more than a decade ago (Kling 1964, Flores Olea 1967), the burgeoning literature on the subject has yet to achieve full recognition. Thus certain contradictory and incomplete traditional images still linger in the scholarly literature (Booth and Seligson 1978a). These treatments vary dramatically and almost bewilderingly: while one suggests that Latin Americans are becoming increasingly politically mobilized, two others hold that mass participation is very low and that most political activity is restricted to socioeconomic elites. Other images portray mass political participation as irrational and dwell upon political violence. Such familiar notions have often intertwined. For example, a common picture depicts most Latin Americans, and especially peasants, as politically passive and quiescent until provoked, when they may burst violently into the political arena (for example, see Forman 1971, Singelmann 1975, Handelman 1975b, Moreno 1970). Similarly Wiarda (1974, pp. 4–5) discusses how the image of mobilization often combines with that of violence, producing the notion that the rising political awareness and participation of Latin Americans leads inexorably to ever greater levels of conflict (e.g., Schmitt and Burks 1963, Hadley 1958, Petras and Zeitlin 1968, Petras 1968).

This article examines patterns of change and continuity in Latin American foreign policies. It asks two interrelated questions: How can we conceptually and empirically account for foreign policy change? And why do states change their foreign policies in Latin America? To answer these questions, we used the results of a new expert survey on foreign policy preferences in the region between 1980 and 2014. The results we obtained using both linear and nonparametric specifications are very clear and consistent: presidential ideology is what matters the most. Simply put, a change in the ideology of the president produces a change in foreign policy that is almost equivalent in magnitude, all other theoretically relevant factors set to their means.

Historical research on Chilean population has been thwarted for some time by intractable sources and rudimentary methods. Nevertheless, within the past two decades researchers have begun to achieve some successes. Attention has turned from simply ascertaining gross population totals and growth rates to a much wider range of topics. Significant examples include: the relationship between population growth, illegitimacy, vagrancy, and labor supply; the social context of marriage, family formation, and kin ties; the nature, frequency, and intensity of mortality crises; demographic responses to population pressure; the social and economic repercussions of European immigration; and the determinants and consequences of rapid growth and redistribution of population in the twentieth century (Góngora, 1965; Bauer, 1975; Hurtado, 1966; Solberg, 1969; Young, 1974; Sadie, 1969). To study these topics satisfactorily we must both maintain the healthy skepticism of our distant precursors (e.g., Barros Arana, 1880–1900; Palacios, 1904; and Vergara L., 1900) and integrate the demographer's analytical tools with the historian's skill in finding, selecting, and interpreting a whole range of quantitative and qualitative documents. Demographers have demonstrated that even post-1920 data collected by the Chilean Statistical Bureau have substantial and varying degrees of error, notwithstanding the considerable advances in data collection techniques, improvements in the educational levels of the population, and economic inducements to insure the public's cooperation (Somoza and Tacla, 1969; Gutiérrez, 1969). In the not too distant past, civil administrators and priests received crude, if any, instructions, administered several hundred square kilometers of poorly defined territory, and faced an almost insurmountable task of enticing information from a widely dispersed, highly mobile, poor, and uneducated populus. Consequently, historical studies with exclusively demographic ends, using narrowly defined data bases and relying principally on arithmetical or statistical techniques, may prove to be extremely frustrating to carry out and somewhat barren in their findings. Attempts to replicate European studies with Chilean materials, whether simple aggregations of annual totals or tediously reconstructed family life histories, will run a high risk of failure unless researchers incorporate broader questions of social history, exploit an extensive range of documentation, and integrate historical, demographic, and statistical reasoning. While little mathematical sophistication may be necessary—elementary measures may prove the most powerful—a mature, sensitive understanding of the logic of these disciplines, which comes only with considerable study and experience, is essential. The slavish application of demographic formulae and the invention of ill-considered measures are direct pathways to embarrassing nonsense.