Some deem the Bolsa Família program (BF) in Brazil to be a quintessentially clientelistic tool, thought to have produced colossal sociodemographic transformations in the base of support of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, particularly in the 2006 election. An earlier article (Bohn 2011) maintained that significant changes in Lula's electoral base took place prior to his reelection; other social policies, such as the Benefício de Prestação Continuada, contributed significantly to the changes in Lula's camp; and, most important, that the link between the receipt of social benefits and vote is less straightforward than those who view Bolsa Família as a clientelistic program assume it to be. This work addresses some of the criticisms that the article received and reinforces the need for further research that uses individual-based data to disentangle the complexity of the electoral behavior of the poor in highly unequal societies.

In Latin America's young democracies, actors in the private sector may influence military security work through resource transfers, with implications for state accountability and democracy in the region. This analysis finds that in Ecuador and Peru local army commanders—who frequently decide when and where army operations are conducted—make decisions not according to technical evaluations of security requirements but rather on the basis of how much local clients pay. The article's local political economy perspective enables us to identify client influence, even in cases in which client and national security interests overlap. The study also helps bridge two literatures: research on Latin American civil-military relations, which has devoted a great amount of attention to military autonomy vis-à-vis the government without systematically analyzing third-party influence on armed forces, and scholarship on security privatization, which has examined such third-party financing but without underscoring the fact that clients can engage with the military directly, bypassing the national government.

In this article I consider the temporality of postapocalyptic narrative and use a contemporary postapocalyptic novel, Plop (2004), by the Argentine author Rafael Pinedo, to open up new considerations of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's classic Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (1845). Following the method proposed by Jorge Luis Borges (1966) in “Kafka and His Precursors,” it is my position that Pinedos novel invents a new, postapocalyptic Facundo, thus converting Sarmiento into one of the American continent's first postapocalyptic authors. Furthermore, Pinedos novel reframes the “civilization or barbarism” debate under the contemporary sign of ecological catastrophe, allowing the reader to arrive at new and startling conclusions about language, the environment, and disaster.

En los primeros códigos civiles, las mujeres fueron definidas como sujetos de incapacidad de hecho relativa, limitación que venía asociada a la potestad del varón dentro del matrimonio. Este artículo aborda el reconocimiento de la capacidad civil plena de las mujeres en Uruguay (1946), Brasil (1962), Argentina (1968) y Chile (1989) como parte de un proceso complejo hacia la erosión (pero no disolución) del patriarcado. Para ello pone en práctica una metodología específica para el análisis del fenómeno legal que permite revelar los mecanismos discriminatorios. Asimismo, asume una perspectiva sociológico-histórica comparativa que muestra los diferentes recorridos hacia la reforma de la ley civil y los elementos que le son comunes. Se explicitan las distintas trayectorias, asumiendo que las dinámicas internas son únicas, pero mostrando que es posible identificar un mismo patrón de cambio: la modernización conservadora. En efecto, las mujeres casadas quedaron fijadas como sujetos de inferioridad jurídica, incluso cuando se les otorgó formalmente la capacidad civil plena. La modernización trajo cambios, pero el proceso estuvo dominado por las fuerzas de la tradición.

Indigenous peoples have been used and imagined as guardians of the Brazilian frontier since at least the mid-nineteenth century. This association was central to the foundation of the Indian Protection Service (Serviço de Proteção aos Índios, or SPI) during the early 1900s and culminated with the Amazonian Vigilance System (Sistema de Vigelância da Amazônia, or SIVAM) at the turn of the millennium. Throughout the period, the abiding desire to establish defensive dominion over disputed national territory subjected individuals and groups identified as “Indians” to the power of overlapping discourses of scientific progress, national security, and economic development. A trinity of Brazilian modernity, these goals interpellated native peoples primarily through the practice and rhetoric of education, which grounds their historical relationship with dominant national society. Drawing on SPI records, government documents, journalism, personal testimonies, and visual media, this article traces the impact of this modernist trinity on indigenist policy and in the lives of those who have been affected by its tutelary power. By transforming private indigenous spaces into public domain, Brazil's politics of anti-imperialist imperialism propagated a colonialist, metonymic relationship between “our Indians” and “our America” into the twenty-first century.

This article is concerned with the problem of reading and interpreting the Argentine literary magazine Sur, which was published regularly between 1931 and 1970 (and irregularly thereafter) as an elegant fusion of fiction, poetry, philosophy, plastic arts, and social commentary. That a magazine should be chosen as a research topic reflects the reality of Argentine literary life in the twentieth century. Such publications offered many writers their main opportunity to put forward ideas in the forms of works of literature and critical or general essays. Most magazines lasted for very few years, but Sur, thanks to the quality of its contributors and the sound financial base of its founder, Victoria Ocampo, was to have an important influence on several generations.

This essay reviews the following works:

Illegal Drugs, Drug Trafficking and Violence in Latin America. By Marcelo Bergman. Buenos Aires: Springer International, 2018. Pp. v + 170. $89.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9783319731520.

More Money, More Crime: Prosperity and Rising Crime in Latin America. By Marcelo Bergman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. vii + 392. $39.95 hardcover. ISBN: 9780190608774.

Tough on Crime: The Rise of Punitive Populism in Latin America. By Michelle D. Bonner. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. Pp. vii + 204. $40.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780822945826.

Argentina’s Missing Bones: Revisiting the History of the Dirty War. By James P. Brennan. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 195. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780520297937.

Modernity at Gunpoint: Firearms, Politics, and Culture in Mexico and Central America. By Sophie Esch. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. Pp. vii + 284. $28.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822965381.

A History of Political Murder in Latin America: Killing the Messengers of Change. By W. John Green. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. Pp. v + 360. $26.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781438456645.

Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean: Subnational Structures, Institutions, and Clientelistic Networks. Edited by Tina Hilgers and Laura Macdonald. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. v + 298. $99.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107193178.

Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability. By Antonius C. G. M. Robben. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. vii + 294. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780812250053.

Organized Crime, Drug Trafficking, and Violence in Mexico: The Transition from Felipe Calderón to Enrique Peña Nieto. By Jonathan D. Rosen and Roberto Zepeda. Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2016. Pp. vii + 158. $80.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781498535601.

On 10 October 1988, President Miguel de la Madrid authorized loading of the first of two reactor units at the Laguna Verde nuclear power plant, on the Mexican gulf coast above the port of Veracruz. De la Madrid's decision to move ahead with Laguna Verde, Mexico's first foray into commercial nuclear energy production, came as no surprise. What was extraordinary was that it proved to be one of the most controversial policy actions of his sexenio. Culminating twenty years of planning and development, the Laguna Verde project, which had been emblematic of Mexico's technical progress and promise at its outset, had turned into a political albatross.

Much of the focus of, indeed much of the impetus for, the current discussion of science and technology policy for the Latin American industrial sector has involved comparisons of foreign and domestic ownership. While such traditional concerns as the quantity of repatriated profits and interference in domestic politics (in the case of foreign firms) continue to be important, much of the recent literature is on comparative financial performance, growth, technology, and the interrelationships among these elements. The following conclusion is ubiquitous: Domestic enterprises, due largely to “technological” shortcomings, are simply unable to compete with the foreign firms and are therefore restricted both to secondary positions within individual product markets and to the less profitable sectors.

A little more than fifty years ago, French medievalist Marc Bloch (1928) tried to persuade his fellow historians of the importance and usefulness of the “comparative method.” Explanations, he argued, based on “those proverbs of common-sense psychology which have neither more nor less validity than their opposites” had to be replaced by causal explanations arrived at with the help of systematic comparison. In response to these exhortations, most historians, as Bloch himself noted, “express polite approval and then go back to work without changing their habits.” Nevertheless, the last decades have seen a remarkable growth in comparative studies in history as well as in the social sciences in general. Since 1959, the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History has played a crucial role in this regard. Yet the results of comparative historical studies have not been such as to challenge the skepticism of many historians who associate comparative approaches with facile analogies, pseudo-similarities, and questionable generalizations. Comparison too often seems to imply the sacrifice of the unique and differentiating features of each situation in the past for the sake of some broad scheme. Many historians are put off by social scientists, such as sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt (1963), whose ambitious comparative schema seem marked by typologizing with little empirical basis. To quote Bloch once more, the empirical historian will probably never become a philosopher of history or a sociologist although “he may, according to his state of mind, grant them admiration or a skeptical smile.”

O Brasil tem apresentado, ao longo da história, resultados educacionais pífios em relação a seus vizinhos latino-americanos. A literatura sugere que uma possível causa do atraso educacional tenha sido o viés elitista das políticas educacionais. Este trabalho traz novas evidências de que as políticas educacionais conduzidas pelo governo federal foram elitistas no período 1930–1964. Embora o ensino primário fosse responsabilidade dos estados, grande parte das receitas tributárias estava sob o poder da União. Assim, as políticas educacionais federais eram importantes para determinar os resultados em todos os níveis de ensino. As evidências coletadas em discursos e em dados de financiamento educacional mostram que as políticas do período tenderam a dar pouca importância ao ensino primário. Em particular, há evidências de que os governos de Getúlio Vargas e Juscelino Kubitschek, os mais compromissados com a estratégia de industrialização por substituição de importações, privilegiaram o ensino superior, em detrimento do ensino primário para as massas.

In this article I focus on the nexus of urbanization, the environment and public health that was exposed by the 1912 bubonic plague epidemic in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I utilize the concept of “urban health penalty,” developed by demographic historians of the industrial revolution in Europe, to account for the declining health of the working class in cities. While in Europe poor health among the urban poor was associated with industrialization, I argue that in San Juan chaotic, unplanned urbanization reflected the effects of colonialism. I further examine how the epidemic exacerbated the class and racial divisions that contributed to the disastrous living conditions, and speculate as to whether the environmental neglect of the neighborhood by authorities was due to the fact that it was home to many poor people of African descent. I also highlight the varying understandings of the causes and appropriate responses to plague.

This article explores the experience of the Afro-Colombian movement over the course of two peace processes, investigating the relationship between opportunities for participation and effective inclusion. The 1991 Constituent Assembly that emerged from the peace processes of the late 1980s presented a particularly open opportunity for civil society participation, and yet the Afro-Colombian movement was unable to gain representation in negotiations for a new constitution. In the 2016 peace process with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or FARC, despite insistence from the government that its negotiations with FARC were exclusively bilateral, the Afro movement was able to gain a seat at the table along with its Indigenous counterparts and generate a commitment from both parties to protect ethnic rights, known as the Capítulo Étnico (Ethnic Chapter). In contrast to existing literature that focuses on international actors as drivers of inclusion, we argue that effective inclusion reflects in large part the internal capacity, coherence, and unity of the movements themselves.

It has become rather common to say that the economic importance of Latin America for the United States has declined sharply, mainly owing to the fact that the region's relative position in the external trade of the United States has deteriorated progressively. While the figures do indeed reveal that the region now plays a lesser role in U.S. foreign commerce than it did some decades ago, it would be grossly misleading to assume that the overall economic importance of Latin America for the United States and other core powers also has declined. Economic relations between the Latin American periphery and the United States should not be analyzed merely in quantitative terms, on a bilateral basis, and only at certain points in time. It is necessary to shift attention to the structural level, to verify, for example, whether this decrease in the Latin American share of world trade necessarily implies a breakdown of the bonds that have existed historically between core and periphery economies.