The scholar examining nineteenth-century Central American (here defined as including Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica) foreign relations, particularly foreign trade relations, constantly finds quite positive statements regarding British, French, and United States economic power in Central America. These often allege political domination of the individual nations through foreign economic influences. Invariably such claims are based either upon “common knowledge,” without supportive data, or upon data of a highly selective, unsystematic, or arbitrary nature. Confronted with the choice of accepting or challenging these allegations, the scholar may choose the previous “general wisdom,” “create” his own “wisdom,” or institute as systematic a study of foreign economic trade and navigation ties as existing data sources permit. For the scholar wishing to undertake a detailed study, this essay will describe the location, abundance, reliability, and accuracy of data relative to nineteenth-century Central American trade and navigation as encountered in sources from Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, the United States, Great Britain, France, Hamburg (until 1873), Bremen, the German Empire (beginning about 1880), Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium. While the following discussion focuses upon the use of United States and European archives and the statistical and commercial serials for gathering data on Central American trade and maritime activity, obviously many of these same sources, archives, or serials possess identical data for most other Latin American countries or regions.

Todo genuino movimiento literario, todo amanecer, toda ruptura, ha tenido indefectiblemente su primera exteriorización en las hojas provocativas de una revista. La revista descubre, polemiza; el escritor de revistas anticipa, es el guerrillero madrugado, el pionero que zampa terrenos intactos. La revista es vitrina y es cartel. El libro ya es en cierto modo un ataúd, quizás más duradero y más perfecto, pero menos jugoso y vital.

Many Bolivians engage in corruption through intermediaries, like civil society representatives and lawyers, instead of paying officials directly. People vocally resent that intermediaries add an extra layer of costs and opaqueness to corruption but still choose to pay bribes through intermediaries that knowingly take advantage of them. Why do intermediaries facilitate corruption? While other studies on corrupt intermediaries find that they reduce uncertainty and transaction costs, this study contributes to corruption research by finding that intermediaries engage in cartel-like behavior by disproportionally helping officials and intentionally increasing uncertainty and costs for the average citizen. Ethnographic evidence from street markets in La Paz demonstrates that civil society actors like street vendors’ union representatives advance their careers by collecting and delivering bribes to specific bureaucrats. Collusive relationships between bureaucrats and intermediaries hide and perpetuate corruption, while giving the appearance of a transparent government that is responsive to civil society.

This article analyzes the impact of state policies since the 1970s on household food security in several Mapuche communities in the Araucanía region of Chile (Region IX). The author highlights key transformations in the national economy and food system and endeavors to link those to local phenomena, in particular the absorption of the local livelihood strategies and food systems into capitalist markets and the high incidences of food, insecurity. The article concludes that a reconceptualization of macroeconomic and indigenous policies are required to rebuild the material and social foundations of rural Mapuche communities that provide the bases from which their inhabitants can reconstruct a mutually beneficial relationship with the broader Chilean society and avert the continued acceleration of tension and violence.

War and revolution are the cataclysmic events of our age which affect man and society more profoundly than any other human phenomenon. In Russia and China war brought revolution. Today, in an age of competitive ideologies and competitive nuclear armament, men fear that revolution will lead to war.

The global conflicts that have wracked Eurasia in this century have not touched Latin America directly. The only international conflict of roughly comparable intensity was the Chaco War (1932–1936) in which hostilities were confined to two small powers, Bolivia and Paraguay. Bolivia's defeat was part of a train of events that lead directly to the Revolution of 1952.

Are individuals opposed to immigration because of perceived job competition with immigrants? Despite almost two decades of research, the literature on immigration attitudes continues to struggle for a clear answer. This study is designed to evaluate the labor competition hypothesis in an alternative and important immigration context, Chile. The cultural proximity of natives and immigrants in Chile mitigates the issue of cultural threat and thus permits a focused appraisal of the role of economic competition. Also, the prevalence of both high- and low-skilled immigrant labor may generate competition in diverse employment sectors in Chile. Using data from an original Internet survey experiment, I test how an immigrant's skill level, country of origin, and ethnicity influence Chilean attitudes toward immigration. The results suggest that individual immigration attitudes are not influenced by concerns over job competition but rather evaluations as to the broader economic effects of certain types of immigrants. Well-educated Chileans, like their European and American counterparts, prefer immigrants who pursue high-skill employment.

Literature on the latin american university is largely of a polemical and speculative nature, generally devoid of empirical grounding and theoretical significance. Research, in the sense of a systematic quest to enhance our powers to understand, predict, and control relationships among variables, is of recent origin. Parker (1964), in a review of over two hundred U.S. doctoral dissertations written on Latin American education, noted that few studies were concerned with university reform or the influence of universities on social, economic, and political improvement. Lipset (1966, p. 153), in a general survey of literature on university students in underdeveloped countries, observed that the influence of university studies, patterns of recruitment, modes of teaching on intellectual, professional, political and cultural standards and aspirations or the assimilation of students into the various spheres of adult activity is still terra incognita.

Psychology is both a science and a profession. its development in any geographical area can be roughly gauged by such manifestations of scientific and professional activities as training, research and publication, and professional structures and organizations. The following analysis is based on a mail survey of schools of psychology conducted in late 1964 and personal visits by the author to thirty-two psychological institutions in Latin America in the summer of 1965.

In March 1973, for the first time since the military coup of 1966, a presidential election was held in Argentina. It also was the first time since 1955 that Peronist parties were allowed to present candidates in every province. The present note originated in an initiative by Darío Canton to collect occupational and electoral data from polling places in several Argentine cities. He had the cooperation of Beba Balvé and Lucía Osvaldo of the Centro de Investigaciones en Ciencias Sociales, Buenos Aires. The three were responsible for gathering data in Buenos Aires (Canton), Rosario (Balvé), and La Matanza (Osvaldo). Subsequently, collaboration with researchers Jorge R. Jorrat and Héctor Caldelari from interior provinces made it possible to include comparisons with data from Córdoba and Tucumán. The analysis of the data and, ultimately, this note are the sole responsibility of the two authors whose names appear above.

In 1877 Miguel Luis Amunátegui, noted historian and Chile's Minister of Education, observed aptly that while the Chinese bound their daughters' feet, his countrymen bound their daughters' minds. Amunátegui's dictum reveals an official concern for women's education that was unique in nineteenth-century Latin America. Chile's efforts to remove the “bindings” from the minds of its young women are important in several respects. Education was in fact the linchpin of an ambitious strategy to revamp and modernize every aspect of Chilean society. Because of the centrality of formal education in this experiment and the intensity of thinking on the subject, when women's education was addressed in official circles, female roles were being defined as part of a coherent national ideology. The Chilean experiments in education thus provide a rare opportunity to observe explicit, detailed reflection on women's roles. Unequivocal official commitment to public education in Chile also resulted in the creation of a large bureaucracy that in turn collected immense quantities of data on household size, family income, occupation, and related subjects. Much of this data concerns women and insofar as it documents the “social bedrock” so often obscured to scholars, it is immensely useful for women's history.

The development of the Mexican sugar industry during the twentieth century has reflected both the general problems of industrialization in the hemisphere and the distinct historical conditions that were shaped by the Revolution of 1910. The broader problems can be assessed in terms of the implications of peripheral capitalist development for the internal dynamics of social class relations and for the corresponding political factors that set the boundaries for government policy options.

Early advocates of decentralization lauded it as a strategy for strengthening democratic institutions, but later scholarship has emphasized decentralization’s negative consequences, especially for political parties. This article argues that the impact of political decentralization on established parties is shaped by the context in which the reforms occur, with poor economic performance and limited programmatic differentiation making parties more vulnerable to the challenges posed by decentralization. The article explores how decentralization under such circumstances has contributed to party decay in Latin America, where declining support for established parties has been significant, in some places undermining democratic stability and governability. The article employs cross-national time-series analysis and case studies. The quantitative evidence indicates that political decentralization weakens existing parties in contexts of poor economic conditions and little ideological differentiation in the party system. Case studies elaborate the processes through which decentralizing reforms together with economic conditions and party linkages affect party systems.

Since 1929 Argentina has undergone a remarkable series of political and economic changes. During the twenties it was a showcase of economic growth based on export expansion, as well as a model of bourgeois democracy in its parliamentary form. Yet that Argentina now lies in the distant past, and nowadays the name Argentina is likely to conjure up military coups and economic stagnation. This transformation deserves more attention than it has yet received. The question, “What went wrong in Argentina?” is as important for students of underdevelopment as is the question, “What went wrong in Germany?” for students of advanced industrialization.

Many have attributed the recent unprecedented wave of redistribution in Brazil to national economic and political factors such as the commodities boom, changes in minimum wages or premiums to skilled labor, the rise of the Partido dos Trabalhadores and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and a commodities-driven economic boom. Yet much less attention has been devoted to the study of inequality at the subnational level, where trajectories of inequality across states remain incredibly varied. This article argues that Brazil’s most recent democratic transition enhanced political competition in many Brazilian states, which in turn has contributed to the amelioration of inequality. Using an original time-series cross-sectional dataset covering the highly redistributive period of 1998–2015, this article finds that Brazilian states with higher political and party competition have lower levels of inequality than those with less competitive party systems.

Studies of how previous political experience affects a candidate’s electoral success have overlooked the experience that candidates get from running campaigns even if they lose. This article argues that experience running for office, whether successfully or unsuccessfully, could give candidates several benefits, such as expertise in running strong campaigns, a network of connections, and visibility among the electorate. As a result, candidate experience, not just office-holding experience, should be positively correlated with electoral success. The article tests this expectation in Brazil using a database of candidates for seven types of elected offices between 1998 and 2018. It finds that candidates who ran for, but lost, elected offices are more likely to win when they run in future elections for the same and lower-ranked offices, compared to candidates with no experience running for office. Thus, candidate experience, not just office-holding experience, is important for explaining electoral success in politics.

Lima is one of several cities in Latin America that have been the subject of a relatively large number of studies by anthropologists. About thirty years' worth of anthropological research in Lima has accrued, yet little has been done in the way of synthesis, although Millones (1978), Osterling (1980), and Lloyd (1980) have made summary comments toward this end in introductions to their recent books. No ethnography of the entire city has been attempted, and in many ways, the research has been concerned only with relatively smaller units and bounded groups, particularly squatter settlements and highland migrants. Nor have the linkages between studies and groups often been made. I will briefly discuss here, within a typological framework, the ethnographic studies carried out in Lima with an eye to describing and integrating the nature, focus, and methods of these studies.