Politicians often buy votes with impunity. Brazil outlawed vote buying for many years, but prosecutions were rare. However, popular pressure mounted against the practice in the late 1990s. Over one million Brazilians signed a petition against vote buying, leading to the country’s first law by popular initiative passed by the national legislature. The law not only surmounted key obstacles to the popular initiative process but also dramatically increased prosecutions for clientelism during elections. Campaign handouts became the top reason that politicians were ousted in Brazil, with over a thousand removals from office. This study examines the role of civil society and the judiciary in the enactment and implementation of this important legislation.

Using data from the National Survey of Standards of Living conducted in Guatemala in 2000, this article tests the hypothesis that Guatemalan households use child labor and reduce child schooling to cope with household shocks. First, the authors use factor analysis to estimate the latent household propensity to natural disasters and socioeconomic shocks. Then, they estimate bivariate probit models to identify the determinants of child labor and schooling, including household propensity to natural disasters and socioeconomic shocks. Results suggest that households use child labor to cope with natural disasters and socioeconomic shocks. In contrast, the authors found no evidence that suggests that households reduce child schooling to cope with shocks. Findings also indicate that poor households are more likely to use child labor and schooling reduction as strategies to cope with socioeconomic shocks.

Late in 1982, elections were held in Brazil for governors, congressional representatives in both houses, state legislators, mayors, and city council members. According to many observers, they were the first truly free elections in twenty years, the first unhampered by the ominous presence of an institutional act that had overridden the Brazilian constitution.

“Social History” should be readily definable as the study of historical phenomena which transcend the individual and manifest themselves in human groups. But such a definition includes almost all meaningful history; it seems to fit precisely those political and institutional studies to which social history is ordinarily contrasted. Since our main concern here is with practical historiography rather than with questions of genre, I will simply indicate through description and elimination the kind of history I mean.

Debates surrounding race in Brazil have become increasingly fraught in recent years as the once hegemonic concept of racial democracy (democracia racial) continues to be subject to an ever more agnostic scrutiny. Parallel to these debates, and yet ultimately inseparable from them, is the question of what it is to be “white.” In this interdisciplinary paper, we argue that whiteness has become increasingly established in Brazilian public discourse as a naturalized category. Seeking afresh perspective on what we perceive to have become a sterile debate, we examine Machado de Assis and his work to illustrate how assumptions surrounding his short story “Pai contra mãe,” and indeed comments on the author's very body, reveal the extent to which whiteness has come to be seen as nonnegotiable and fixed. Placing a close reading of Machado's text at the heart of the article, we explain its implications for the scholarly debates now unfolding in Brazil concerning the construction of whiteness. The article then develops an anthropological reading of whiteness by pointing to the inherent differences between perspectives of race as a process and perspectives of race as a fixed and naturalized given.

El abandono del régimen de convertibilidad en 2002 implicó cambios sustantivos a nivel macroeconómico que tuvieron un fuerte impacto en el desempeño de los distintos sectores de la economía argentina. Sin embargo, durante la posconvertibilidad parece haberse registrado también cierta continuidad en determinados procesos económico-sociales: si bien desde los elencos gubernamentales se ha reivindicado sucesivamente la necesidad de recuperar un empresariado nacional fuerte, el peso del capital extranjero entre las empresas más grandes del país no ha disminuido. Esto es sumamente relevante teniendo en cuenta que la Argentina es una economía dependiente y, por lo tanto, el rol del capital transnacional en su proceso de acumulación es determinante. El objetivo del artículo es indagar sobre las continuidades y las rupturas en el proceso de extranjerización del gran capital en la Argentina a partir de un análisis de lo ocurrido con las quinientas empresas líderes de la economía durante el período 1993-2008.

América Latina es la región más afectada por la delincuencia en el mundo. Poco, sin embargo, se sabe sobre los costos sociales que esta genera. En este estudio, se emplearon seis rondas del Barómetro de las Américas (2004–2014) y el método de emparejamiento estadístico con el objetivo de estimar el costo de la victimización sobre la percepción de inseguridad, capital social y percepción de la democracia para 16 países de la región. Los resultados muestran que el costo de la victimización se expande a diversos aspectos sociales, afectando en mayor proporción a las mujeres. Además de incrementar la percepción de inseguridad y reducir la legitimidad y confianza en las instituciones encargadas de luchar contra la delincuencia, la desconfianza se desplaza a instituciones sin este rol, a terceros y afecta la propia percepción del barrio. En lo positivo, la victimización incentiva la participación en organizaciones, aunque especialmente en los grupos de menores ingresos y mayores recursos comunales.

This study offers a definition of preemptive reform, applies the concept to Mexico in the 1970s, describes the reaction of one target group of the Mexican reform effort, and develops a preliminary explanatory model of reactions to preemptive reform. Because preemptive reform has been an important element in Mexican politics, it is especially appropriate to examine the concept as it applies to the Mexican case. However, preemptive reform has been attempted elsewhere and these results may interest others who would seek to understand the phenomenon in a variety of settings.

We describe and benchmark tienditas (in-home convenience-like retail stores) and the tiendita business sector using a large sample of 850 tienditas from Nicaragua and El Salvador. Three research questions concerning tiendita business dynamism, informality, and competitive scope shape our article. In general, we find that tienditas may range from subsistence operations to dynamic business enterprises primarily run by female microentrepreneurs; they typically skirt government oversight; and they compete fiercely in a monopolistically competitive business environment.

The Catholic Church of Peru supported the use of oral contraceptives between 1967 and 1976, believing that doctrine was compatible with controlling one's fertility. Yet the church did not treat fertility control only as a means to limit births or as an individual prerogative. Rather, it framed distribution of the pill within an education plan to promote the duties of responsible parenting. Joseph Kerrins, a U.S. Catholic physician, began the program in a poor area of Lima. By the late 1970s, the program operated in nineteen parishes. The program thrived even after the 1968 encyclical De Humanae Vitae, thanks to the support of priests, Peruvian and U.S. government agencies, physicians, and users of the program's services. Catholic family planning has been a more pragmatic and creative enterprise than hitherto believed. This article explores these developments within the context of the cold war and the transformations of the Catholic Church in 1960s Latin America.

En la primera parte de este artículo trazaremos la genealogía de la razón comunal indígena, la cual busca rastrear las condiciones de emergencia, existencia y transformaciones discursivas y de poder que hicieron posible plantear teóricamente la comunalidad como forma de vida de los pueblos indios en Oaxaca, México. Posteriormente, haremos dialogar el pensamiento comunal indígena con el giro descolonial latinoamericano, para examinar los aportes que puede generar la comunalidad en el diseño de una salida viable a la crisis civilizatoria del actual sistema-mundo moderno-colonial-capitalista. Finalmente, vamos a analizar los alcances epistémicos y políticos de la opción comunal para contribuir a la descolonización de las ciencias sociales y la construcción inter-civilizatoria del pluriversalismo transmoderno descolonial como nuevo proyecto universal de vida.

The history of independent Brazil may be divided into three major state-society cycles, and, after 1930, five political pacts or class coalitions can be identified. These pacts were nationalist; only in the 1990s did the Brazilian elites surrender to neoliberal hegemony. Yet since early in the twenty-first century they have been rediscovering the idea of the nation. The main claim of this essay is that Brazilian elites and Brazilian society are “national-dependent,” that is, they are ambivalent and contradictory, requiring an oxymoron to define them. They are dependent because they often consider themselves “Europeans” and the mass of the people as inferior. But Brazil is big enough, and there are many common interests around its domestic market, to make the Brazilian nation less ambivalent. Today the country is seeking a synthesis between the last two political cycles—between social justice and economic development in the framework of democracy.

A major question confronting analysts of Latin American labor concerns the relationships among unions, the state, and foreign powers. Some social scientists have argued that the relative autonomy of unions affects the strength of democracy in a given country (see Weffort 1978; Hall and Garcia 1989; Epstein 1989; Cohen 1989; Collier and Collier 1991). They have also asserted that Latin America's ability to control its own destiny has been shaped in part by the influence of foreign powers (particularly the United States) over social institutions like unions (Bergquist 1986; Buchanan 1991; Spalding 1992–1993). An evolving branch of labor studies that now offers a unifying perspective for examining this complex set of relationships is the perspective of labor internationalism.

By 1920 the state of São Paulo boasted the largest coffee economy in the world and was leading Brazil's transition from export expansion to industrialization and “dependent development.” The state was well on the way to becoming a showcase of socioeconomic development in Latin America. This essay explores the role played by the São Paulo coffee elite in the politics of this development process, particularly with respect to the demise of the regime known as the Old Republic in the Revolution of 1930.

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.

La violencia in Colombia, from 1946 to 1965, the largest armed conflict in the western hemisphere since the Mexican Revolution, was one of the world's most extensive and complex internal wars of this century. The study of the violencia strains at the limits of all the social sciences.

In both Mexico and Guatemala, indigenous languages are at risk of extinction. Because languages influence people's ways of thinking and help them identify with particular ethnic groups, indigenous language loss can result in severe problems that extend well beyond the demise of these languages. Although current multicultural reforms offer indigenous people unprecedented opportunities, these seemingly positive changes may actually threaten indigenous languages and cultures. Using the latest demographic census data, I present how socioeconomic, demographic, and community factors negatively correlate with indigenous language usage. I contend that indigenous language maintenance will become more difficult because neoliberal multiculturalism endorses indigenous cultural rights without putting forth other necessary changes. Establishing effective language preservation strategies requires us to recognize dangers hidden in the current multicultural agenda, to rigorously ask how we can destigmatize negative images attached to indigenous cultures, and to combat centuries-long oppression and discrimination against indigenous groups.