While information regarding Latin American studies programs in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union is becoming widely available to North American scholars, Latin Americanists in the United States may be surprised to know that a small, but growing, number of scholars, teachers, and researchers are studying Latin America in the People's Republic of China. This report describes the state of Latin American studies in China, its principal universities, research centers, scholarly organizations, and periodicals devoted to research on Latin America, as well as the research topics that interest Chinese scholars and the professional problems confronting Latin American studies in China. The interviews and research were conducted, usually in Chinese, in Peking and Shanghai.

To understand the momentous transformation in Argentine-Brazilian relations from rivalry to Mercosur, scholars need to analyze negative cases, when rapprochement was attempted unsuccessfully. This article examines the failed 1972 summit between Presidents Alejandro Agustín Lanusse and Emílio Garrastazú Médici, which is poorly explained by existing theories of international relations and overlooked or misinterpreted in many regional histories. I argue, based on research in the Argentine Foreign Ministry Archives, newly declassified US government documents, and a reexamination of published primary sources, that rapprochement failed in 1972 primarily because bureaucratic interests in the armed forces and foreign ministries of both states depended on the continuation of rivalry. Organizational politics, not popular nationalism or presidential diplomatic errors, best explains the persistence of Argentine-Brazilian conflict in the early 1970s. Successful cooperation between rivals therefore may require not only agreement between national leaders but also the support of the state apparatus on both sides.

Within the last two decades, theories about world systems have played a decisive role in shifting the boundaries of discourse on long-term social change. The triumph of world-system analysis was nearly a “bloodless coup”: few scholars were terribly anxious to defend the theoretical bastion of modernization theory that it supplanted; at best they reinterpreted the old theory within the new framework (for example, Rostow, 1975, 1978; Parsons 1977, 213; Moore 1979).

THE GOVERNMENTS OF LATIN AMERICA, HAVING BEEN PREOCCUPIED MAINLY with industrialization since World War II, began to give more attention to social development during the Sixties. Priorities of development policy, stressed under the Alliance for Progress, now include education and health; improvements in both areas are regarded as means of raising output as well as furthering social progress. Analyses of Latin America's human resources, however, have concentrated mainly on manpower requirements and corresponding educational needs. They have been supported by evidence of high returns to investment in education,2 while studies of the region's health conditions have yielded no comparable evidence in support of health sector investments. Health improvements are evident, but economic analysis has not yet shown to what extent they are attributable to health expenditures alone. Poor health is closely associated with poverty, low education, and rural residence, but causal relationships among these and other variables remain largely unexplored.

Las Cortes influyen de forma directa e indirecta en el proceso legislativo. Hasta el momento, los estudios sobre Congreso en Colombia se han enfocado mayoritariamente en la influencia directa de la Corte Constitucional. Este artículo explora su influencia indirecta. Usando la Reforma Penal Militar de 2012 como estudio de caso, mostramos cómo la Corte cambia los cálculos y comportamiento de los congresistas. Debido a su independencia y accesibilidad, la Corte Constitucional amplía el abanico de estrategias disponibles a las coaliciones minoritarias de oposición en el Congreso. Aquí identificamos dos prácticas de obstrucción: invitar a la Corte (mediante la motivación o aprovechamiento y la documentación de vicios de procedimiento), y demandas ante la Corte. Juntas, estas estrategias les permiten a oposiciones minoritarias bloquear leyes adversas y avanzar su agenda en el proceso de construcción de políticas públicas.

In the study of agrarian politics in general and the history of rural Colombia in particular, four broad, interrelated perspectives are relevant to the understanding of rural politics: peasants and rebellion, the interaction of local and national politics, patron-client relations, and regionalism. Principal issues and trends within each of these areas are explored here, and an effort is made to generate specific questions for historical investigation. The present state of research on rural history and politics in Colombia is also surveyed, and observations are advanced on how new research orientations originating in these perspectives may contribute to our understanding of social and political developments in Colombia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Do large-scale and unexpected events, such as natural disasters, affect elections? This article studies the political dimension of the 19-S earthquake that hit Mexico City in 2017, a few months before the 2018 elections. Using fine-grained geospatial data, the results show that candidates from the city-level incumbent Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) had a small increase in vote share in 2018 compared to the previous election in precincts more exposed to damaged caused by the earthquake (in terms of both distance-based and per capita measures), accounting for the seismic profile and socioeconomic characteristics of the neighborhood. The article shows that the implementation of disaster-recovery policy explains part of this relationship. Moreover, voters were as electorally responsive to a future risk reduction strategy as to a reconstruction credit.

Carolina Maria de Jess was a fiercely proud black Brazilian woman who lived in a So Paulo favela with her three illegitimate children (each with a different father). She had learned to read and write by continuing to study on her own after only two years of primary school. In 1958 fragments of her diary came to the attention of an enterprising journalist, Audlio Dantas, who helped her get it published. For a brief period, Carolina Maria de Jess became an international celebrity as the author of the best-selling book in Brazilian publishing history. For many reasons, however, Carolina fell from favor: the rise of a military dictatorship in 1964, which led to an accompanying reaction against social criticism, and especially the ways in which she handled her fame and related to the press and the literary elite. Within a few years, she was forced to move back into the favela and scavenge for a living. A brief flurry of publicity in 1969 about her fallen condition prompted a slight improvement in her circumstances, but she was soon forgotten again. Carolina died in 1977, on the verge of indigence. Her complete life story has never been told, and most Brazilians today are unaware that a black favelada in the 1960s became the symbol (to foreigners, at least) of the struggle to rise above poverty. Most Brazilians neither read her books nor consider them noteworthy. Evidently, the author of what The New York Times called a rarely matched essay on the meaning and the feeling of hunger, degradation, and want touched no nerve in the Brazilian sensibility.

El presente artículo estudia la expansión de las tecnologías digitales en el mercado audiovisual del Perú, una de las economías emergentes de Sudamérica. Se argumenta que el arribo al Perú del video CD y del DVD propició el incremento exponencial de la piratería de productos audiovisuales y, a la vez, el desarrollo de una industria de videos controlada por sectores sociales populares, ajenos a la institucionalidad empresarial, cultural y política dominante. La base productiva de esta última está compuesta por microempresas formales dedicadas a la grabación y venta de videos orientados a segmentos de bajos ingresos en base a contenidos locales. La distribución, por su parte, es realizada principalmente a través de redes de piratería. El perfil de esta industria evidencia las tecnologías digitales facilitan la democratización de la producción, comercialización y consumo de imágenes, la ampliación de oportunidades para la circulación de contenidos audiovisuales distintos al gusto y canon euronorteamericano y la aparición de modelos de negocio abiertos que no dependen de los derechos de autor para acumular capital. Este artículo está estructurado en cinco partes. En las cuatro primeras analizamos el origen, cadena de valor, productos y modelos de negocio de la industria de videos. La última parte explica el fracaso de la lucha emprendida por el Estado contra la piratería y propone como alternativa promover economías lícitas a través de políticas culturales basadas en sistemas de información y financiamiento, así como en el equilibrio entre los derechos de autor y los derechos del consumidor.

This article works to understand what happens to women working in the public sector, especially women in traditionally male occupations, such as the police. Moreover, in Latin America and in most developing countries, it is crucial to examine the interaction between precarious jobs and gender discrimination. The article finds that gender discrimination is accentuated in organizations with precarious labor conditions. To illustrate this problem, it examines the police force in Mexico. This is a crucial case study for understanding the phenomena: Mexico is an extremely violent country, but conditions in the police force are highly precarious for workers. Moreover, this labor precariousness has an even greater impact on female police officers. In addition to working in a profession characterized by instability, they also face structural barriers to the performance of their duties and greater obstacles to entry and promotion within the organization. Furthermore, women face the glass ceiling as well as a hostile work culture that expresses itself through discrimination.

El criollismo ha sido elaborado—desde diversos géneros—como espacio del consenso identitario aún en momentos de graves tensiones simbólicas. Se trata de un lugar construido sobre la capacidad de desplazamiento de la voz letrada, en función de adaptarse a los cambios producidos en la esfera cultural. Con el fin de trazar algunos de los hitos de este proceso de apelación identitaria en el caso específico de Venezuela, revisaré textos, publicados en su mayoría en la prensa, a lo largo del siglo XIX y principios del XX. La lectura de este corpus mostrará la trama de discursividades sobre la cual se asienta la autoridad letrada que emitió el discurso criollista.

The present article analyzes the media produced by the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, especially its national cable TV station and online news agency. We discuss whether these media sources promote accountability and participation. Our findings suggest that although these sources have been employed, according to the logic of audience democracy, to promote the public visibility, credibility, and reputation of Brazil's federal representatives, they do contribute to enhancing the accountability and quality of Brazilian democracy, insofar as they provide access to relevant information about legislative processes.

Produced along the Río de la Plata during the nineteenth century, shipped to Havana, and consumed by African slaves, the salt-cured beef known as tasajo affected both of those places and, to some degree, the Atlantic world in general. Initial exploration of the tasajo trail that connected Buenos Aires and Cuba employs primary sources such as nineteenth-century descriptions and shipping records to characterize the landscapes, places, routes, and agents of the largely unexplored research territory of that anomalous commodity: one that, unlike others such as sugar, slaves not only produced but also consumed; one that underpinned more prominent, latitudinal transatlantic flows such as the slave trade, yet itself flowed meridionally; one that, like all those flows, had an oceanic component that comprised an actively lived space of flows rather than a dead space of separation; and one that might be mundane, yet helped fuel major transformations of two of the principal nodes of Hispanic Atlantic.

When I first undertook the task of compiling information on ecological research in Middle America it seemed best to concentrate on one facet of this many-faceted science. After some time and reflection, however, I concluded that a greater service would be performed for the reader by an overview of most of the subject area encompassed by ecology. I have attempted to present this overview in the pages that follow.

The reader is warned that depth has been sacrificed for breadth and that no attempt to review all the literature has been made. To do so would require far more space than is available. Therefore it is certain that some readers will find missing what they may consider to be a specially important or interesting paper. To them I offer apology.

This article analyzes two sets of narratives that describe the area contained within the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Araripe Basin Geopark, the first such geological preserve in the Americas. The first group includes scientific-sounding accounts of fossils, sediments, and geological formations. The second is a series of “folk” stories that describe the sacred geography of a part of the northeastern Brazilian backlands best known for their economic backwardness and religious mysticism. Although at first glance the two sets of narratives appear wholly divergent, both treat the natural world as ancient, fluid, composed of interrelated elements, mysterious, and deeply worthy of protection. These shared conceptions have important policy implications in strategizing a sustainable tourism that will preserve the region's geological and cultural heritage while bringing economic benefits to the local population.