Since 1973, Venezuela has had extraordinary oil revenues. These go to the government and from the government to its employees and contractors. The monies have filtered into the Venezuelan economy, where large profits have been made in selling imported goods, construction, banking, and light industry. There are opportunities for investment in Venezuela, but the affluent Venezuelan is already a participant in a multitude of businesses; thus, when Florida real estate brokers sold properties in Caracas, Venezuelans, who had been looking for places to invest monies, were obvious customers. Indeed, so great had been the number of purchases of Miami condominiums that the Venezuelan government, in November 1977, put restrictions on sellers in Venezuela of foreign land and real estate, but not on the buyers. Monies have continued to flow out of Venezuela, which (at the time of this writing) has no restrictions on the capital exporter.

The theme of the first world congress of rural sociology pointed to the importance of technological change in agricultural production throughout the world and the social changes that accompany or follow it.

Examples can indeed be found in Latin America of rural technological change being succeeded by social change, but that proposition alone does not provide a good characterization of the present rural scene. Great social changes are being incubated, there is much latent and some open conflict, but little technological change leading to development.

The March 1976 coup that overthrew a turbulent Peronist government in Argentina also ended one of the few experiments with worker control of industry in Latin American history. For nearly three years, the Buenos Aires local of the country's strong light and power workers' union, the Sindicato de Luz y Fuerza, administered the great public utility SEGBA (Servicios Eléctricos del Gran Buenos Aires), provider of electric power for the capital city and much of the province of Buenos Aires. This experiment with worker control was all the more noteworthy because it was not undertaken by the maverick Cordoban local of Luz y Fuerza, led by Agustín Tosco, principal spokesman within the labor movement for socialism. Rather, the initiative was taken by a bastion of traditional Peronist trade unionism led by Juan José Taccone, the implacable foe of Tosco's clasista positions.

Recent criticism of the Spanish American novela total likens the genre's “totalizing” approach to social representation to that of state-administered nationalism, in which differences are either systematically erased or institutionalized through demographic segmentation in order to construct homogeneous, “democratic” consensus among political agents. In this view, the total novel misappropriates others' voices for the cultural elite's own political and commercial ends. In contrast, the testimonio is held up as a more democratic genre that distributes representational authority among a variety of agents. This essay reevaluates the relationship between the novela total and testimonial modes of discourse, arguing that Mexican author Fernando del Paso's total novels draw on the litigious power of testimonial as well as modernist aesthetics of rupture to disrupt the narrative of democratic consensus constructed by Mexico's Partido Revolucionario Institucional and to postulate a civil society that congeals as a horizontal, aggregative ethical community in opposition to state politics.

In the first part, I will describe briefly the intuitive relevance of Professor Markos Mamalakis' “Theory of Sectoral Clashes” to the Mexican case. In part II, I will briefly comment on aspects of the theory which are relevant to empirical verification. And finally, in part III, I will attempt to derive and test some of the empirical implications of this hypothesis.

This study concerns the structure of power in Brazil during the early seventies, when economic growth, and political repression, were at their height. The objective is not to discover the power structure, as if there were serious doubt about its existence or even much mystery about its composition. For all the curiosity value of first-hand information about elites in a virtually closed political setting, there is a danger of confirming what is already known about the workings of authoritarian rule. The point of departure here is that “what everybody knows” about the Brazilian power structure is not so much wrong as it is limited and in some ways misleading. In order to understand this, it is first necessary to outline the common ground among scholars regarding interelite relations in Brazil and then to suggest how this view might be modified.

This essay reviews the following works:

Social Identities in the Classic Maya Northern Lowlands: Gender, Age, Memory, and Place. By Traci Ardren. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 210. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 9780292768116.

The Archaeology of Wak’as: Explorations of the Sacred in the Pre-Columbian Andes. Edited by Tamara Bray. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2014. Pp. xvi + 403. $70.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781607323174.

The Power of Huacas: Change and Resistance in the Andean World of Colonial Peru. By Claudia Brosseder. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 456. $65.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780292756946.

Ancient Zapotec Religion: An Ethnohistorical and Archaeological Perspective. By Michael Lind. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2015. Pp. xviii + 386. $70.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781607323730.

Inca Sacred Space: Landscape, Site and Symbol in the Andes. Edited by Frank Meddens, Katie Willis, Colin McEwan, and Nicholas Branch. London: Archetype Publications, 2014. Pp. vii + 309. £65.00 paper. ISBN: 9781909492059.

Maya Imagery, Architecture, and Activity: Space and Spatial Analysis in Art History. Edited by Maline D. Werness-Rude and Kaylee R. Spencer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015. Pp. xiv + 426. $75.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780826355799.

Are women and men in positions of authority judged differently? If a gender evaluation gap exists, is it due to persistent stereotypes or notions of gender solidarity? We explore gender differences in judgement through a survey experiment in Argentina with a national sample of 4,068 employees. Respondents were asked to recommend a salary increase for a “bad boss” whose behavior was characterized as aggressive and at the limit of what is fair and appropriate. The survey experiment measures the extent to which respondents punish and reward female and male managers differently. The main finding is that women are more likely to punish male bad bosses, and men are more likely to punish female bad bosses. We explain variation as a function of respondents’ social and personal networks. Study findings carry significant implications for the study of the gender pay gap.

This note reports on research in Latin America and the Caribbean concerning international relations and foreign policy. It lists persons in the region who are working on these subjects, comments on changing priorities in research by Latin Americans, broadly evaluates the quality of their research, considers the institutional loci and contexts for Latin American work in this field, and discusses the relevance of work in Latin America and the Caribbean to scholars in the United States and other Northern countries, and to those in developing countries beyond Latin America. The report draws on a considerable number of books, journal articles, and unpublished memoranda made available by colleagues, on correspondence with a number of Latin American social scientists, and on several interviews. These notes are surely not complete, and inadvertent inaccuracies may be included, but this version is presented with the hope that it will be helpful to others in its present form and that it may stimulate the submission to LARR of additional pertinent material.

En este trabajo se revisan los principales factores que permiten explicar la emergencia del movimiento piquetero argentino en una de las regiones donde se manifestó más tempranamente: las localidades salteñas de Tartagal y Mosconi. A diferencia de lo que se ha venido afirmando, la idea de la existencia de un estado de bienestar antes de las contrarreformas neoliberales de la década de 1990, y la caracterización del movimiento piquetero, las rebeliones populares (puebladas) y las asambleas populares de la zona como nuevas formas de organización y protesta vinculadas al efecto de las contrarreformas, resultan inadecuados. Con respecto a la primera, se mostrará que nunca existió en la zona algo parecido a un estado de bienestar; sobre la segunda, que existían experiencias de lucha previas dentro de las que el corte de ruta y la Asamblea Popular ya habían sido implementadas, y que esas experiencias nutrieron los acontecimientos posteriores.

This essay reviews the following works:

Neoliberalismo corregido y progresismo limitado: Los gobiernos de la Concertación en Chile, 1990–2010. By Manuel Antonio Garretón. Santiago: Editorial ARCIS, CLACSO, 2013. ISBN: 9789568114961.

Radiografía crítica al “modelo chileno”: Balance y propuestas. Edited by Gonzalo Martner and Eugenio Rivera. Santiago: Lom, USACH, 2013. ISBN: 9789560004420.

Economía política del fracaso: La falsa modernización del modelo neoliberal. By Alberto Mayol and José Miguel Ahumada. Santiago: El Desconcierto, 2015. ISBN: 9789569370151.

Los chilenos bajo el neoliberalismo: Clases y conflicto social. By Carlos Ruiz and Giorgio Boccardo. Santiago: El Desconcierto, 2015. ISBN: 9789569370106.

Chile and the Neoliberal Trap: The Post-Pinochet Era. By Andrés Solimano. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ISBN: 9781107003545. (Reprinted in Spanish as Capitalismo a la chilena. Y la prosperidad de las élites. Santiago: Catalonia, 2012. ISBN: 9789563241426.)

This essay reviews the following works:

The Cambridge History of Religions in Latin America. Edited by Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Paul Freston, and Stephen C. Dove New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xii + 830. $250.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780521767330.

Native Evangelism in Central Mexico. By Hugo G. Nutini and Jean F. Nutini Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. Pp. vii + 197. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780292744127.

New Centers of Global Evangelicalism in Latin America and Africa. By Stephen Offutt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. viii + 192. $80.18 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107078321.

The Roots of Pope Francis’s Social and Political Thought: From Argentina to the Vatican. By Thomas R. Rourke Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Pp. vii + 220. $80.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781442272712.

Until recently, the Córdoba Reform of 1918 was the symbolic landmark in twentieth-century Latin American higher education. Achieving a pioneering victory in Argentina, the Reform soon became influential throughout much of the region, and university autonomy from government emerged as its most cherished legacy. Despite frequent violations, the principle of autonomy often promoted a substantial degree of university self-rule and even sanctuary for free expression. In 1968—fifty years after the Reform's genesis—the Mexican government's brutal repression of university students seemed to symbolize a secular change. Many observers feel that events of the last decade have reduced autonomy to little more than a cherished memory. Autonomy has indeed suffered a tragic fate in Cuba, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile, among the more important nations. But what about Mexico? This article argues that the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) remains substantially autonomous. This is, admittedly, a relative statement; no public university is completely independent of government control. However, UNAM seems to enjoy considerable self-rule and is notably autonomous in cross-national perspective.