Which factors determine support for the armed forces? What is the effect of agency politicization on confidence? Existing studies, which draw largely from bureaucratically neutral militaries, find that interpersonal trust and demographic variables play significant roles in determining public confidence in the armed forces. I argue that this is different for a politicized agency. A loss of bureaucratic neutrality activates voters’ partisan attachments, inducing individuals to judge the agency on the basis of their ties to the governing party or leader. Using survey data from Venezuela, I show that government evaluation has a salient and bifurcated effect on respondents’ perceptions of their armed forces. Respondents sympathetic to the governing leader are more likely to have a favorable view of the military while those identifying as opposition are more likely to have a negative view. The results suggest that politicization of public agencies may impose an upper limit on public support regardless of institutional performance, undermine their representativeness and legitimacy, and weaken their mandates.

Agrarian studies in Peru experienced an unusual development in the seventies, when a new generation of scholars emerged whose impact has been considerable. The advances made are the result of their collective contribution. One consequence of recent research has been the displacement of a traditional view consisting of a schematic paradigm of the Peruvian countryside that long dominated the thought of social scientists and laymen. Its origins can be traced to the portrayals by Mariátegui and Haya de la Torre of Peruvian society of the twenties, which at the time were fresh and meaningful. The paradigm can be recognized in works such as Roel (1961) or CIDA (1966) that, despite their merits, failed to place sufficient emphasis upon the new trends that emerged in Peruvian agriculture following the Second World War. The structuralism of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) and the reformist agrarian thought of the fifties and sixties reinforced this accepted interpretation that was transformed into an increasingly ideologized vision of reality.

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar a relação entre os agentes estatais e umafração da classe economicamente dominante da economia cafeeira paulista—o “capital cafeeiro”—durante a Primeira República brasileira (1889–1930). Para tanto, escolhi como objeto de análise a política tributária promovida pelo governo do estado de São Paulo durante o período. A minha intencão é mostrar que os agentes estatais ao promoverem uma política tributária essencialmente calcada no imposto de exportação serviram-se de parte significativa do excedente pro-duzido pelo capital cafeeiro para financiar as atividades ordinárias do aparelho estatal paulista (educação, polícia, saúde, judiciário), o que muito desagradou aos membros daquela fração de classe. Estes reagiram à política oficial tanto pela via corporativa como pela via política, sem, contudo, conseguir revertê-la. Por fim, afirmamos que os conflitos políticos oriundos desse embate foram importantes para a configuração da cena política do final da Primeira República.

Latin American politics has taken a left turn in the past decade, with an increasing number of chief executives hailing from left-of-center parties. We investigate the political and socioeconomic factors explaining political ideology of the chief executive in a sample of one hundred elections taking place between 1975 and 2007 in eighteen Latin American countries. We find that the commodity booms in agricultural, mining, and oil are positively and significantly related to the probability that a country will have a chief executive from a left-of-center political party. However, for oil exports, we observe that this effect holds only for Venezuela. We also show that past political discrimination and government crises are positively and significantly associated with a move to more left-wing chief executives. Openness to trade and having a president from the right in the previous presidential term negatively affects the probability of having a more liberal president, although the effect of trade openness disappears when the incumbent president is a conservative. We also find that when a government crisis occurs during a term with a president from the right, the probability of having a president from the left in the following term increases significantly.

The fight against HIV/AIDS is an example of a global struggle for the promotion of sexual health and the protection of human rights for all, including sexual minorities. It represents a challenge for the understanding of its impact on political, social, and economic processes. My central goal in this piece is twofold. First, I underline the importance of a political and human rights perspective to the analysis of the global response to the pandemic, and I introduce the concept of policy networks for a better understanding of these dynamics. Second, I argue that, in the case of Mexico, the constitution of HIV/AIDS policy networks, which incorporate civil society and state actors, such as sexual minority activists and public officials, and their actions—both domestic and international—have resulted in a more inclusive HIV/AIDS policy-making process. However, serious human rights violations of HIV/AIDS patients and sexual minorities still remain.

Las ciencias sociales por lo general han propuesto lecturas de las clases populares y de lo popular que han tendido a minimizar la existencia de formas de individualidad en su seno, dando lugar a visiones altamente colectivistas de sus miembros. Sobre la base de dos investigaciones empíricas de tipo cualitativo para el caso de Chile, realizadas mediante entrevistas semidirectivas y técnicas grupales, este artículo discute que, sin desconocer la comunidad de experiencias observable entre sus miembros, es posible dar cuenta de ciertos procesos individualizadores específicos en este grupo social. Frente a las numerosas adversidades de su existencia en un contexto de alta inestabilidad posicionai y exigencia de híperactuación, los miembros de los sectores populares urbanos tienden a afirmar su individualidad a partir de tres dimensiones: la fortaleza de carácter; la habilidad y el sentido de oportunidad; y el goce y la irreverencia humorística.

What do technology-driven bureaucratic sectors do when their budgets are cut? In Latin America, this type of state institution has come to expect budget reductions, given recurrent economic crises, lack of coherent science policy, and more recently, state rationalization policies. On the basis of in-depth interviews I conducted with nuclear specialists of the region and drawing from network theories, I argue that bureaucratic institutions with expertise in nuclear science and technology respond strategically to decreased government spending by becoming more active in transnational policy networks. I test this argument using social network and maximum likelihood techniques to study collaborative research projects in nuclear science and technology among twenty Latin American countries over a period of twenty years (1984–2004). Study findings confirm expectations and carry implications for how science policies are adopted in Latin American states under chronic budget deficits.

The institution of female domestic service in La Paz has been characterized by continuity as well as change, despite the profound social transformations brought about by the Bolivian National Revolution in 1952. Domestic service has historically been the most important source of employment for women in Bolivian cities and Latin American urban centers in general (Glave 1988; Arrom 1985; Kuznesof n.d.). Live-in domestic service continues to be the norm in La Paz, even though the number of live-out household workers is increasing. The dependent nature of the Bolivian economy and enduring gender biases have precluded the absorption of women into “formal sector” employment, and generally depressed wage rates do not permit most women in La Paz the luxury of being full-time mothers, wives, or daughters. As a result, salaried domestic service is not only persisting but expanding as a prolonged economic crisis forces growing numbers of female Aymara Indian immigrants from the countryside to seek wage employment in the homes of criollo women in the city.

The specific contribution of this study is to explore how a communitarian lifeworld. prepares the ground for practices of political clientelism without requiring the foundational favor“ noted in other contexts. Based on the encounter between ethnographies from two different communities of the Mesoamerican tradition in Mexico, the article argues that this lifeworld is forged by the habitual ways in which most collective tasks are carried out, that is, by forming and participating in networks. First, we offer a concrete description of the operation of two problem-solving networks of political clientelism in these communities. These networks are considered legitimate since they appear to be part of the communitarian practices. Second, we observe that the state often fails to reach out to the citizens with many social benefits, and we maintain that the problem-solving networks bridge the gap between the citizens and the state. Third, we argue that the ethnographic approach has been of paramount importance in reaching these findings, which are hardly attainable without this method. We consider that the workings of the clientelist networks represent a deep expression of people's communitarian lifeworlds.

In spite of important recent work on the history of technology and the dynamics of technological change in Latin America, the literature in this field remains relatively undeveloped. In part, this is due to a relative scarcity of available sources for conducting research. This research note argues that national patent records are an important and untapped source for a wide range of studies on technology and technological change. The research note announces the creation of major new comprehensive databases of patent records in several Latin American countries, part of a larger, ongoing project to compile and make publically accessible patent records across the region. We also provide an introduction to the history of patents in Latin America, followed by a discussion of both the use (and misuse) of patents as historical evidence and recent advances in collecting and using patent evidence in Latin America.

Capitalism is profoundly conditioned by the types of landed property and agrarian classes it confronts in its development, thereby determining fundamental features of the historically specific “social formation” that emerges in a given capitalist country. Such a social formation is not merely split into the constituent classes unique to the capitalist mode of production, but also incorporates, as Marx wrote of Western European capitalism, “strata of society which, though belonging to the antiquated mode of production, continue to exist side by side with it in gradual decay” (1967, vol. 1, p. 765). Or, as Joseph Schumpeter—certainly no Marxist—put it: “Any theory of class structure, in dealing with a given historical period, must include prior class structures among its data; … any theory of classes and class formation must explain the fact that classes coexisting at any given time bear the marks of different centuries on their brow” (1955, p. 111). Every concrete social class, therefore, is also an historical class, not a mere social category or analytic abstraction, and its existence depends on the particular history of the society of which it is a decisive constituent; and in that history, the protracted presence of agrarian elements has often been critical.

Land reform has been one of the most contentious issues in Brazilian political history. Government administrations since the 1960s have adopted the banner of reform, and the country has implemented vast colonization and redistribution programs, but the objectives and the effects of those programs have varied widely. Throughout this long history, considerable scholarship has focused on the programs themselves as well as on the increasingly radical social movements that have fought for more enduring reform. Most of this work, however, has invoked the state as the site of policy making and political direction and paid little attention to the state workers responsible for actually implementing reform. In this article, I present a qualitative analysis of the agency in charge of land distribution and settlement since 1970, the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA). I argue that understanding the politics of reform requires attention to the political culture within INCRA, which can only be explained through examination of the agency's long history as first a tool of frontier colonization and then a response to social mobilization.

This essay reviews the following works:

Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina. Edited by Paulina Alberto and Eduardo Elena. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xviii + 373. $120.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781107107632.

Reimagining Black Difference and Politics in Brazil: From Racial Democracy to Multiculturalism. By Alexandre Emboaba Da Costa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. vii + 233. $105.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781137386335.

Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law, and the New Civil Rights Response. By Tanya Katerí Hernández. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. vii + 247. $35.99 paper. ISBN: 9781107695436.

The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families. By Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 311. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9781477307885.

Blackness in the Andes: Ethnographic Vignettes of Cultural Politics in the Time of Multiculturalism. By Jean Muteba Rahier. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. ix + 243. $110.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781137272713.

Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism, and Blackness in Mexico. By Christina A. Sue. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 234. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 9780199925506.

Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, Race, and Color in Latin America. By Edward Telles and the Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 320. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9781469617831.

“We went to visit neighbors and found brothers.” So began the text of the Rockefeller report on United States-Latin American relations in 1969. The phrase captures not only a part of the governor's personal style, but also some themes of inter-American relations. Many scholars and public officials in the United States start their analyses and their policies from the following premises: there is a special relationship between the United States and Latin America, a positive, cooperative, warm, quasi-familial bond quite beyond the ordinary interstate bond; and there is a mutuality of interests among these countries of the Western Hemisphere that resembles family ties in the best sense. In case these premises are not self-evident, it is appropriate to use a rhetorical style more positively effusive than perhaps the facts may warrant.

La tensión entre diferentes subjetividades articuladas por la clase social, las performances de género y la homosociabilidad urbana dieron forma a las expresiones culturales y estrategias militantes de los homosexuales argentinos entre las décadas de 1950 y 1980. El modelo homófilo (de “amor al igual,” denominación predominante entre los movimientos homosexuales de los cincuenta y sesenta) de políticas de la respetabilidad y el activismo liberacionista de ruptura con el orden moral burgués estaban enraizados en la conflictiva relación entre los “entendidos”, o u homosexuales de clase media o alta que valoraban el decoro y la masculinidad autodisciplinada, y las “maricas” de clase trabajadora que proyectaban una feminidad sexualizada y hedonista. Las relaciones con el movimiento sexo-disidente transnacional emanaron de y resaltaron el potencial político de estas subjetividades. Al mismo tiempo, el contexto represivo de mediados de los años setenta llevó a un fortalecimiento de las redes de solidaridad internacional, que contribuyeron a la continuidad de las luchas del Frente de Liberación Homosexual de la Argentina tras su disolución en 1976.

This article reviews the historical and theoretical foundations of communication for development and, in particular, communication for social change, a recently coined concept that remains anchored to an anthropocentric and unsustainable perspective of development. Based on the review of literature, we would like to open a dialogue between the field and Latin American contemporary debates, with a special focus on a number of theoretical frameworks that share a radical critique of modernity and stand for a biocentric turn in social sciences: the so-called modernity/coloniality research program, critical ecology, and indigenous epistemologies. We propose approaching communication theories from the indigenous worldview of “good living” (buen vivir) and quote several inspiring participatory projects that apply the new epistemologies to the field.