More than ten years have passed since the publication of Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina, thus providing a fitting opportunity to assess the impact of dependency theory after a decade of fiery debates and hopeful explorations. Cardoso and Faletto's book had an immediate and decisive influence, not only on the reading public but—perhaps more importantly—on the collective effort to define the issues and themes around which a new view of Latin America was to be built, based on the recognition of the central role of dependency in the shaping of Latin American realities.

Inequality in the distribution of land has long been viewed as the social dynamite that has set off many peasant uprisings in the twentieth century. The most extensive study to date of modern guerrilla wars in Latin America, by Timothy Wickham-Crowley, found land tenure and the overall agrarian structure to be a common element in upheaval in Cuba, Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Nicaragua, and El Salvador (Wickham-Crowley 1992, 306–7). Samuel Huntington's classic book on development and stability articulated the explanation for these agrarian insurrections: “Where the conditions of landownership are equitable and provide a viable living for the peasant, revolution is unlikely. Where they are inequitable and where the peasant lives in poverty and suffering, revolution is likely, if not inevitable, unless the government takes prompt measures to remedy these conditions” (Huntington 1968, 375).

Through examination of the Zapotec movement in Juchitán, Mexico, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Pan-Mayan movements in Guatemala, and the Afro-Reggae Cultural Group in Rio de Janeiro, this article will show that social movements are best analyzed through a combined focus on the circuitous historical pathways of their origins and emergence and on the diverse pieces of representation and meaning out of which they are made. This dual focus, in turn, enables us to understand how political actors form, the places where politics occurs, and the resignifications that lie at the heart of political conflict.

Since the mid-1970s, tens of thousands of persons in three out of the five Central American countries have revolted against their governments or fought to repress such rebellions. These conflicts have cost more than a quarter of a million lives and created more than two million internal and external refugees. In 1979 a bloody insurrection toppled Nicaragua's Somoza regime. El Salvador's crippling civil war has escalated and reescalated but remains stalemated. In Guatemala since 1980, brutal counterinsurgency warfare, pro-regime terror, and political reform have failed to eliminate a resurgent guerrilla rebellion. Yet while these countries have rent themselves with political violence, their neighbors Honduras and Costa Rica have in general remained politically peaceful.

All numbers on the makeup of Peru's republican population are wrong, the one point on which historians can agree. Peruvian governments had neither the capacity nor the will to mount thorough surveys of their scattered and elusive Andean subjects. Between the late viceregal census of 1791 (reporting a population of 1,076,000) and the first modern effort of 1876 (yielding a count of 2,699,000) lies a century of demographic no man's land, despite partial surveys claimed for 1812, 1836, 1850, and 1862. Unfortunately, historians cannot fly back in time and redo the head counts missed or mismanaged by successive governments, although this miracle has seemingly been worked for the older Incan and conquest periods.1 The best scholars can attempt at this point is to untangle the confusions of existing census documents and bring new evidence to bear on their strengths and weaknesses.

In the early 1960s, the dramatic mobilization of rural wage laborers and small farmers placed the agrarian question at the top of the Brazilian political agenda. The question facing governing elites was how to modernize an archaic agrarian sector that was widely perceived as posing a major bottleneck for development and a breeding ground for agrarian radicalism. Until that time, wage laborers and small farmers in various forms of land tenure had effectively been excluded from existing labor legislation, social security, and coverage by national law in general. Instead, various traditional and clientelist forms of social control regulated rural social relations. The new rural movements were led by relatively moderate urban groups or individuals seeking to create a rural political base. Their appearance soon after the Cuban Revolution however, and in the larger context of the cold war, triggered fears of possible revolution. National debate quickly centered not on whether but on how the Brazilian state should intervene in the countryside. Attempts by the populist government of President João Goulart to address the agrarian question were cut short by the military coup of 1964. In its wake, the fledgling rural movements were brutally repressed in a wave of state-sponsored repression and private landowner violence.

With the so-called linguistic turn, historians have begun to study the ways in which a multitude of cultural forms are imbricated in the colonial and imperial project. In analyzing the infinite ways in which power is exercised and manifested, historians are turning a critical eye toward a myriad of cultural productions for a better understanding of how culture, politics, and power work in concert. One example is the increasing scrutiny given to geographical conceptions and representations. In Latin American colonial studies, a number of recent works have analyzed the ways in which deep, culturally rooted structures of spatial perception and representation have influenced the colonial process. This essay attempts to bring a number of those works into meaningful dialogue with one another with respect to the cultural and political facets of cartography. It also introduces work by scholars studying other regions of the world that may push the field farther and the work of the “new cultural cartographers” who have problematized traditional notions about the mimetic quality of maps and their presumed objectivity. In sum, this essay surveys recent literature pertaining to colonial cartography in Latin America, analyzes a number of comparative and theoretical studies that may broaden future research, and suggests that cartography and maps offer a fruitful avenue for further study and analysis of colonialism, imperialism, and state formation.

A comprehensive survey of recent research on latin american urbanization would be a large task for a team of specialists, particularly if it were to include local as well as comparative studies, the working papers which circulate through government and academic offices, and all the scholarly disciplines which now contribute to the topic. This paper is no more than a sampling of research on selected aspects of urbanization, interlarded with commentary and a bit of opinion. Except for Section 1, emphasis is upon scholarly output of the past five years. Whatever unity the presentation may have springs from the interests of a historian who is less concerned with physical and social engineering than with identifying cultural and institutional imperatives of the past which shape contemporary social process.

How does corruption interact with inequality? To answer this question, we employ a field experiment that examines the manner in which police officers in a major Latin American city respond to socioeconomic distinctions when requiring a bribe. In this experiment, four automobile drivers commit identical traffic violations across a randomized sequence of crossroads, which are monitored by transit police. We identify the effect of citizens' perceived wealth on officers' propensity to solicit bribes and on the size of the bribes that they solicit. We complement our experimental results with qualitative findings from interviews with police officers. Our core finding is that officers are more likely to target lower class individuals and let more affluent drivers off with warnings. The qualitative results suggest that officers associate wealth with the capacity to exact retribution and therefore are more likely to demand bribes from poorer individuals. We conclude that a multimethod approach provides a richer account of corrupt behavior than that found in most contemporary research.

Latin Americanists have devoted considerable attention over the past two decades to the relationship between economic growth and social inequality. A bibliography of the articles and books on the consequences of development for income, class, and gender would surely run to many pages. Yet within that impressive literature, much less attention has been given to the ways that structural changes have altered racial inequalities. Scarcer still are empirical analyses that document the manner in which changes over time have affected women and men within different racial groups.

The economic history of Latin America has become more voluminous, complex, and fascinating in the past decade. The new work has already provoked noteworthy commentaries; one could even write an historiography of the historiography. The purpose of this essay is to comment on (and applaud) the re-emergence of political economy in the economic history of the region. By this I mean the renewal of interest in the Big Questions that inspired the structuralists, “cepalinos,” Marxists, dependentistas, and modernizationists of the post-World War II generations. Economic historians are again worrying about the long, long run, about the connections between social stratification, political power, and economic strategy, and about the relative impact of structures, endowments, and institutions on economic growth and development.

Today women in Guatemala are killed at nearly the same rate as they were in the early 1980s when the civil war became genocidal. Yet the current femicide epidemic is less an aberration than a reflection of the way violence against women has become normalized in Guatemala. Used to re-inscribe patriarchy and sustain both dictatorships and democracies, gender-based violence morphed into femicide when peacetime governments became too weak to control extralegal and paramilitary powers. The naturalization of gender-based violence over the course of the twentieth century maintained and promoted the systemic impunity that undergirds femicide today. By accounting for the gendered and historical dimensions of the cultural practices of violence and impunity, we offer a re-conceptualization of the social relations that perpetuate femicide as an expression of post-war violence.

Scholars have argued that social capital—understood to mean those social networks, norms, and trust that allow citizens to act together more successfully to pursue shared goals—encourages political participation and a more robust democratic experience. Consequently, international development agencies have made promotion of social capital a major emphasis in recent years. Using data from the 1999–2001 wave of the World Values Survey, I show that in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Peru this relationship holds true. Greater involvement in nonpolitical organizations does lead to more participation in explicitly political activities. Higher levels of interpersonal trust also promote political participation. However, despite encouraging results from studies of popular participation in the region, Latin American levels of organizational involvement and political participation are moderate by the standards of more mature democracies, and levels of trust are relatively low.

Violence has permeated the Central American landscape for much of its history. Of the Central American republics, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua have suffered most from violence in recent decades, and they are also the countries that have received the most scholarly attention. Recent analyses of violence have emerged from an array of disciplines ranging from ethnohistory to political economy and have focused on subjects as divergent as cold war politics and the problems of land tenure.

This article reviews the environmental history of the Amazon basin from early prehistory to the 1850s, concluding at the start of the rubber boom. It argues that the Amazon's past can be understood in terms of a transition from wilderness to landscape, in a broadly similar way to the environmental history of Europe and North America. A detailed overview of the archaeological record suggests that both floodplain and upland environments were heavily influenced by human intervention during prehistory. The colonial and early republican periods also saw dramatic environmental changes. Interpretations of the Amazon that stress environmental constraints on human agency or portray it as largely virginal or unsettled prior to the modern period are at best an oversimplification.

Este artículo sigue las sugerencias de Weber de estudiar cómo diferentes tipos de dominación se combinan en experiencias históricas concretas. Se analizan las sinergias y tensiones entre el liderazgo carismático de Rafael Correa y criterios tecnocráticos. A diferencia de líderes neopopulistas que encargaron sus políticas económicas a expertos neoliberales, Correa combina en su persona al experto con el político carismático. En su oratoria y en sus programas de televisión y radio semanales Correa compagina tecnocracia y carisma y se presenta como el profesor y redentor de la nación. Expertos posneoliberales están en las posiciones más importantes del régimen. Comparten con Correa la idea de estar liderando un ciclo de cambios profundos, de encarnar los intereses de toda la sociedad y no de sectores particulares, y la misión de llevar a cabo la refundación de la nación. Las tensiones entre criterios tecnocráticos y carisma se evidenciaron en la crisis política causada por una rebelión policial en la que los criterios carismáticos opacaron consideraciones racionales y estratégicas. Si bien el carisma y la tecnocracia pueden convivir en el discurso, el carisma es inestable y subvierte los intentos de gobernar a través del conocimiento de los expertos.

Asking who “really” speaks and acts for indigenous people is an increasingly important political question in Latin America. This article explores how an “unlikely” Evangelical Protestant Indian organization (FEINE, the Ecuadorian Evangelical Indigenous Federation) and a seemingly more “authentic” Bolivian indigenous federation of communities claiming pre-Columbian authority structures (CONAMAQ, the National Council of Markas and Ayllus of Qollasuyo) have grown in representational strength, or the ability to convince others that they speak for specific constituencies. Through this historically and ethnographically based comparative political study, I argue that indigenous representation is produced across scales, both from “below” (as communities and leaders organize and mobilize) as well as from “above” (as elites and opportunity structures favor some groups over others). FEINE and CONAMAQ present mirror images of the ways in which indigenous people negotiate local-global networks and discourses: FEINE Indianized Protestant Evangelicalism while CONAMAQ transnationalized local ayllu authority structures. This multi-scale analysis suggests that how Indians are spoken about transnationally shapes who gets to speak for Indians locally.

although at times quite thin, there does appear to be a common thread of agreement running through most of the classic and contemporary literature on theories of revolution—this being the simple proposition that the majority of the participants engaging in such activity are dissatisfied, discontented, and often disaffected individuals. If we can think of “revolution” for the moment in its most general terms—to subsume under such a conceptual label both the simplest manifestation of civil disorder to the most grandiose occurrence of what might be called basic social change—then, it seems, we are in a position to illustrate the emergence of this basic proposition throughout the literature.

Much of the intense debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has focused on the number and kinds of jobs that Mexico could gain and the United States could lose as a result of more extensive economic integration (Faux and Lee 1992; Hufbauer and Schott 1993; Lustig, Bosworth, and Lawrence 1992; Weintraub 1993). This debate has raised the related issue of the nature of Mexico's industrial capability, a topic that predates NAFTA and will remain central regardless of the final outcome of the treaty. This article will explore that capability by focusing on a key question: Is Mexico a potential site for high-tech production or does its comparative advantage lie in labor-intensive low-tech operations?