Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda's recently completed major work, the four-volume Historia doble de la costa, presents historians and social scientists studying Latin America with what the author calls a “revolutionary challenge.” In Fals's view, the Historia doble offers a way of researching, writing, and disseminating a history capable of stimulating the democratic transformation of Third World societies. This essay will take that challenge seriously and explore its implications from the perspective of the discipline of history. The first section will survey Fals Borda's intellectual and political development and his evolving critique of his own methods and results. The second section will develop a critique of the Historia doble in terms of the “internal logic” of history as a discipline. The essay will conclude by arguing that Fals's democratic goals are paradoxically subverted by his chosen means and that historians would do well to reconsider the democratic promise of their own methodology.

Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's Para leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck) is considered one of the most significant works of Latin American cultural criticism. Despite the significance of Donald Duck to the history of Latin American cultural criticism and to Dorfman's own trajectory as a writer, thus far, critical studies of Dorfman tend to gloss his essays, ignore his journalism, and focus solely on his literature, especially on his play La muerte y la doncella (Death and the Maiden). While the attention to Death and the Maiden is certainly well founded, it is worth considering how these two works complement each other in Dorfman's career, given the apparent lack of a shared aesthetic between the playful cultural criticism of Donald Duck and the sparse language of Death and the Maiden. In fact, attending to Donald Duck and Dorfman's other nonfiction texts reveals the ways that he has worked across styles and genres on a series of central issues that form the core of his work. As a complement to research on Dorfman's literary production, this article focuses on his media criticism and his journalism, two areas of his work that have received the least critical attention, to suggest that Dorfman's literary production must be understood as part of a larger project, one that includes his essays, journalism, and other cultural activities.

Brazil today constitutes one of the major manufacturers of microcomputers in the world, a seemingly surprising feat for a country that many view as part of the Third World. How was it possible for a developing nation like Brazil to create a high-technology industry and join the exclusive club of highly industrialized countries like the United States, Japan, and Germany as one of the major manufacturers of computers? Many political scientists, economists, and sociologists have tried to explain this exceptional phenomenon in primarily political terms. Most have studied the rise of nationalistic technocrats who began in the mid-1970s to implement a series of regulations that made it possible for Brazilian manufacturers to monopolize the domestic markets for minicomputers and microcomputers.

This study focuses on a dimension of partisanship overlooked by most comparative studies on campaign effects: individual-level stability, a measure of short-term partisanship. Some voters in young democracies are able to develop partisanship as a screen through which they observe the political world, leading them to interpret new information in a manner that reinforces their political predispositions. However, some voters lack long-term partisan attachments, enabling them to update their party identification as the campaign unfolds. These voters have a harder time reinforcing their precampaign dispositions and are more likely to change their vote intention. The findings suggest that for some voters, partisanship and vote choice are empirically intertwined.

Although written a decade apart, these quotations reflect recent research focusing on the inter-relationship, or lack thereof, between the functional and genetic aspects of the Latin American militaries and their roles in the development process. Generally, the literature has attempted to interweave the military with its role as a subsystem in the larger political system, or it has centered upon the sociopolitical origins or institutional life style of the military establishment. Problematics confronting social scientists have concerned the rationale for military intervention in the political process, the motivational aspects and the divergent variables reflecting the possibilities for the future. The term “military intervention” as used by most social scientists gives a false impression, for it implies that the military operates from outside the political system, when in fact it is recognized as a principal subsystem in most Latin American nations. Throughout this article, therefore, the term ‘military intervention’ is intended to connote an active involvement in the political process by the military establishment functioning from within the overall political system.

In an era of increasing economic liberalization, much has been written on the challenges facing alternative trade movements. Religion is often overlooked in such research, and I examine how the faith identity of one set of actors influenced their involvement in the Central American coffee trade. On the basis of ethnographic research in Nicaragua, I examine how religious networks, ethics, and values shaped the economic behaviors of an evangelical Christian coffee network. Ultimately, I find religion had a mixed impact. Local networks brought actors together in a common mission for economic justice, although transnational connections mattered little beyond providing aid. Although religious' ethics promoted a sense of fairness, more radical was a focus on transparency, which altered economic relationships among those in the coffee chain. Finally, actors leveraged their spiritual vision to challenge market dynamics and redefine the coffee product, although this vision both constrained and advanced efforts toward true empowerment of farmers.

Across Latin America armed groups have come to dominate large sectors of social political and economic activity in poor and working-class communities. While scholars have noted the importance of religion in offering individuals and communities protection from violence, there has been relatively little study of the place of religion in contemporary armed activity in the region. This paper looks at the role of religion in the governance practices of an armed group in one Rio de Janeiro favela. The article will show that religious activities in this context provide an important arena in which members of the armed group can discuss autonomous and collaborative strategies to address security issues in the city. Most critically, religious discourse provides space to move discussions of politics in this community away from issues of citizenship and rights and into a discussion of justice and the distribution of resources among poor communities.

Jauja, rinconcito de mi valle.

Andean folk song, Juan Bolvar

The military government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975) coined the phrase, Campesino, el patrn no comer ms de tu pobreza! (Peasant, the patrn will feed no more on your poverty). Clearly a favorite slogan of the self-described Peruvian Revolution, this saying appeared frequently on posters and in newspaper notices. Although linked to Velasco's agrarian reform program and peasant organizations like the Confederacin Nacional Agraria (CNA), which emerged from the plan, this aphorism was said to have originated with Jos Ga-Meja, La reforma agraria en el Per (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1980). I take the agrarian reform process into consideration because of its impact on my generation, which experienced all of its effects intensely.

For too many years, women have been missing from or misrepresented in Latin American history. Like women elsewhere, they have not received proper credit for the role they played in their nations' development. Even with the increasingly scholarly attention now focused on women in Latin America, historical research lags far behind that on their counterparts in the United States or Western Europe. Many questions of approach, methodology, and sources, among others, remain to be answered and much labor must be expended before we can know the history of women in Latin America. But if we wish to have the necessary monographs and accumulated data before attempting to write syntheses, we must explore diverse aspects of women's lives, roles, and experiences, often concentrating on women in a single country or time frame.

Since General Augusto Pinochet’s detention in 1998, an unprecedented number of human rights trials has taken place across Latin America. The main source of evidence employed in these proceedings are victims’ testimonies: in fact, records documenting human rights violations are generally unavailable, having either been destroyed or hidden. When archives do exist, they do not usually identify individual perpetrators or victims, nor do they directly establish criminal responsibility. This article focuses on two criminal trials that unfolded in Argentina and Italy and closely probed the atrocities of Operation Condor. It contends that archival documents only contain remnants of truth and fragments of evidence. These slivers have to be interpreted, contextualized, and sometimes even questioned in order to render them relevant and useful to criminal investigations of past atrocities. Specifically, the article deconstructs the role that different trial actors—including public and private prosecutors, archivists, experts, witnesses, lawyers, and judges—played in the courtroom, engaging in proactive efforts to piece together the evidence that archival records possess and activating their content.

Although the US preserves a dominant position in Latin America, China’s rise poses economic and political challenges and has set up a potential battle for the hearts and minds of the Latin American populace. To explore this theme, this article considers the level of support among Latin Americans toward China and the United States at the country and individual levels, the causes of variance thereof, and whether the views of China, the newcomer, covary with views about the region’s traditional power broker. We provide evidence that the views do not covary, either positively or negatively, largely because while attitudes toward the United States are structured by ideology and other factors, attitudes toward China are relatively unstructured. This lack of structure appears to be the result of China’s success in appealing to diverse sectors of Latin American society, which, in turn, should positively influence its future trajectory.

In presidential systems such as those of Latin America, the institutionalization of legislatures as autonomous representative bodies able to constrain executives and check abuses of power is an important aspect of democratization. Drawing on the experiences of Mexico's state governments, this paper seeks to explain differences in legislative institutionalization. It argues that pluralism within the legislature, rather than electoral competition in itself, provides the best explanation for institutionalization. A process-tracing analysis of the state legislature of Michoacán supports this argument, and a statistical analysis of Mexico's thirty-one states confirms that pluralism in the electorate does shape legislative pluralism—and so indirectly the extent of pressures for institutionalization—but reveals that differences in state electoral laws also play an important role.

During the 1820s, the works of English utilitarian philosopher and jurisconsult Jeremy Bentham attained a remarkable diffusion throughout Spanish America, enjoying a high reputation among the leaders of the revolt against Spanish rule. Colombian Francisco de Paula Santander professed himself to be Bentham's admirer, while Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda took his advice on freedom of the press. Simón Bolívar, el Gran Libertador, went so far as to assure Bentham that his name was never pronounced “even in these savage regions of America, without veneration nor without gratitude.”