In the first decades of the twentieth century, Bolivian intellectuals and politicians debated how the country's Indian population should be incorporated into social and political life as the nation became increasingly integrated internally and forged stronger links to the world market. Public health was central to this discussion because of elite fears of contagion due to greater contact between Indians and non-Indians and the realization that if Indians were to be productive members of society, then their physical well-being had to be considered. This study examines the proposals of two Bolivian doctors, Jaime Mendoza and Nestor Morales, for improving the health of the native population in the context of the larger national debate about ethnicity and citizenship.

The Honduran Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve has become a place of struggle over natural resources. This paper examines a land contest between the Miskito Indians and the Garifuna, an indigenous group and Afro-indigenous group respectively. The area in question is Lasa Pulan, a one square kilometer of forest and farmland, historically shared by both Miskito and Garifuna collectives. Through discursive analysis, this paper traces contemporary discourse and practice that these actors employ to justify exclusive claims to Lasa Pulan. Such contemporary claims are structured by longstanding colonial and postcolonial racial ideologies that stereotypically label blacks as “immoral” and “violent” and Indians as “ignorant” and “backward. ” This paper argues, through analysis of Miskito and Garifuna claims to Lasa Pulan, that natural resource struggles are simultaneously racial struggles, and it acquaints policy makers with the multiple tenure arrangements in pluricultural Honduras.

This article reviews the recent literature on the so-called myths of racial democracy in Latin America and challenges current critical interpretations of the social effects of these ideologies. Typically, critics stress the elitist nature of these ideologies, their demobilizing effects among racially subordinate groups, and the role they play in legitimizing the subordination of such groups. Using the establishment of the Cuban republic as a test case, this article contends that the critical approach tends to minimize or ignore altogether the opportunities that these ideologies have created for those below, the capacity of subordinate groups to use the nation-state's cultural project to their own advantage, and the fact that these social myths also restrain the political options of their own creators.

Not since the heyday of foreign tax missions in the 1960s has tax reform been discussed as intensively in Latin America. During the 1980s, major tax reforms took place in Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, and Colombia, and somewhat similar reforms occurred in the previous decade in Chile and Uruguay. Moreover, tax reform seems to be climbing higher on the policy agenda in countries as diverse as Guatemala, Venezuela, Paraguay, and Peru.

The Argentine (Peronist) Justicialista Party (PJ) underwent a far-reaching coalitional transformation during the 1980s and 1990s. Party reformers dismantled Peronism's traditional mechanisms of labor participation, and clientelist networks replaced unions as the primary linkage to the working and lower classes. By the early 1990s, the PJ had transformed from a labor-dominated party into a machine party in which unions were relatively marginal actors. This process of de-unionization was critical to the PJ's electoral and policy success during the presidency of Carlos Menem (1989–99). The erosion of union influence facilitated efforts to attract middle-class votes and eliminated a key source of internal opposition to the government's economic reforms. At the same time, the consolidation of clientelist networks helped the PJ maintain its traditional working- and lower-class base in a context of economic crisis and neoliberal reform. This article argues that Peronism's radical de-unionization was facilitated by the weakly institutionalized nature of its traditional party-union linkage. Although unions dominated the PJ in the early 1980s, the rules of the game governing their participation were always informal, fluid, and contested, leaving them vulnerable to internal changes in the distribution of power. Such a change occurred during the 1980s, when office-holding politicians used patronage resources to challenge labor's privileged position in the party. When these politicians gained control of the party in 1987, Peronism's weakly institutionalized mechanisms of union participation collapsed, paving the way for the consolidation of machine politics—and a steep decline in union influence—during the 1990s.

Much of the literature on Latin American women's movements finds that movements have grown weaker since transitions to democracy in part because of the institutionalization of gender policy within states. This article advances an alternative argument drawing on evidence from the Chilean case. Using a historical institutionalist approach and the framework of state feminism, I outline the way Chile's Servicio Nacional de la Mujer (SERNAM) has altered the institutional context in which women's movements act. I show that SERNAM has affected both the shape of the movement (most notably the power relations among its various segments) and the strategies that different segments employ to pursue their interests. I argue that instead of weakening the women's movement, SERNAM actually provides the movement with important resources, most notably a discourse of women's equality and a set of objectives around which to mobilize. There is evidence that Chilean women's organizations are responding to this new institutional context by linking up previously dispersed groups, using SERNAM's own discourse to pressure the state to fulfill its commitments to women and, most importantly, to ensure that, in addition to gender, class and ethnicity are also addressed as sources of women's marginalization.

During the 1990s, the Argentine federal government dramatically increased the number of workfare programs targeted to the unemployed. The distribution of employment programs, however, varied across provinces. Previous studies suggest that this uneven distribution has taken place because politicians have not distributed programs according to formal eligibility criteria, but rather, in a clientelistic manner to entice voters' support.

I conduct a balanced pooled time series analysis for twenty-four provinces for the period 1993–2002 and find that partisanship, institutional features of the Argentine federal system, social mobilization, and economic factors strongly determine the way in which presidents have distributed employment programs. The results challenge the assumption that these programs have been exclusively used as clientelistic handouts to buy people's votes, and point to the necessity of looking at institutional, social, and economic variables to better understand the criteria used by federal politicians to distribute means-tested programs.

In the 1990s the Cuban regime displayed two unexpected characteristics. One was survival. The other was the implementation of uneven economic reforms, meaning that some sectors of the economy were revamped, while others remained untouched. This article connects these two outcomes by arguing that uneven economic reforms explain regime survival. Uneven economic reforms served to strengthen the power of the state vis-à-vis society, and within the state, the power of hard-liners. This new type of state, which I call “the gatekeeper state,” dominates society through a new mechanism—it fragments the economy into different sectors of varying degrees of profitability and then determines which citizens have access to each respective sector. While some authoritarian regimes stay alive by providing widespread economic growth, the Cuban regime in the 1990s survived instead by restricting access to capitalist rewards. This has permitted the incumbents to navigate through societal pressures and postpone regime transition.

The literature on the cycle of studies on Brazilian race relations written in the 1950s, supported by UNESCO, has considered it a milestone that offered solid findings about the variety of such relations and the existence of racial prejudice and discrimination in Brazilian society. Some evaluations of these studies have asserted that the results of the UNESCO Project frustrated expectations that Brazil could be used as a positive example for race relations and an instrument in the struggle against racism in the period following the Holocaust. This research note takes a different stand in arguing that from the early stages of the organization of the project, Brazilian, French, and U.S. social scientists favored broadening the geographical scope under investigation because they were aware of several patterns of race relations and racial prejudice in Brazil. Originally, a limited and idealized regional focus was to center on the state of Bahia, but soon the scope of investigation became almost national in including Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Pernambuco.

This article examines trajectories of nationalism in twentieth-century Argentina, Mexico, and Peru through the analytical lens of schooling. I argue that textbooks reveal state-sponsored conceptions of nationhood. In turn, the outlooks and practices of teachers provide a window for understanding how state ideologies were received, translated, and reworked within society. During the late nineteenth century, textbooks in Mexico, Argentina, and Peru conceived of the nation as a political community, emphasized civilization for having achieved national unity, and viewed elites as driving national history. During the twentieth century, textbooks eventually advanced a cultural understanding of the nation, envisioned national unity to be achieved through assimilation into a homogeneous national identity, and assigned historical agency to the masses. Yet teacher responses to the textbooks varied. In Mexico, under Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), teachers predominantly embraced textbooks that promoted a popular national culture. Teachers in Argentina under Juan Perón (1946–1955) and in Peru under Juan Velasco (1968–1975) largely opposed the texts.

Consensus is growing about the fundamental principles underlying economic policy reforms. In addition, a series of recent comparative studies have increased scholarly understanding of the political conditions necessary for launching such reforms. Yet understanding of the factors that make reforms sustainable over the longer term is far less developed. A wide-ranging and unresolved debate continues over the roles played by institutions, politicians, interest groups, and the popular sectors. The influence of such groups tends to be marginal during the initial implementation of policies, a process involving an insulated group of technocrats. As the reforms proceed, the opposition of different societal groups to specific policies may have some impact but is less critical to the success or failure of the adjustment program than overall economic performance (see Geddes 1995). The primary strength of these groups is retrospective and collective: they can vote reforming governments out of office. Elections—and therefore voter behavior—are critical in sustaining economic reforms over the long term. Voters can reverse economic reform programs, and at times they do. Yet they also can play a major role in making programs more sustainable by legitimating their continuation at the ballot box.

In the “fourth wave” of transitions to democracy sweeping the globe over the past twenty years, the Chilean case stands out as an exception. Although most instances of democratization following military rule have tended to yield rightist governments, Chile is one country in which the ruling coalition that emerged was Center-Left in ideological orientation.

In response to the growing salience of re-centralization in several Latin American countries that decentralized in the 1980s and 1990s, this paper examines presidential efforts to re-centralize fiscal power in the 1990s. In our study of re-centralization in Argentina and Brazil, we assess the utility of four common political economy explanations: the presence of economic crisis; the partisan powers of the president; the division of formal powers between the branches; and the extent of intra-bureaucratic conflict. We find that the success of economic stabilization measures facilitated re-centralization in both countries, though the pathways connecting the two phenomena were partially distinct. In Argentina, key re-centralization measures were rapidly achieved after stabilization as the result of the president's strong partisan powers and in the form of political deals within the Peronist party. Subsequently, the dissipation of President Carlos Menem's powers over the course of his second term facilitated the “return of the governors.” In Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso re-centralized despite weak partisan powers, largely by using his reputation as a successful stabilizer to build a broad reform coalition. In Cardoso's Brazil, strong partisan cohesion in important cabinet posts also served as a partial substitute for the lack of partisan power in the legislature. These findings suggest the need for a closer examination of re-centralization efforts, particularly in the wake of macroeconomic stabilization and economic reform.

This study evaluates the impact of state policies on forest cover in Costa Rica, focusing on the influence of public policies on private incentives for preserving forest cover. Three periods are analyzed: the “laissez-faire period” when high rates of deforestation were largely unrestrained; the “interventionist period” when state policies created protection for some wildlands, especially with the creation of parks and reserves, but when many regulatory policies produced mixed results at best; and the current “hybrid period” featuring major policy changes and mixing market-oriented and interventionist approaches but not always in a coherent design. Despite significant successes, current policies appear unlikely to provide sufficient incentive to maintain the desired amount of forest cover unless the international community compensates Costa Ricans for the benefits that their forests provide the world.

Urban violence is an emerging challenge to development and democracy across Latin America. How do cities negotiate this challenge alongside pressures to compete in global markets and enable greater political participation? This article analyzes the politics of urban violence in the intriguing case of Medellín, Colombia, which international donors and policy makers herald as having reshaped its urban governance and economic appeal through its response to violence. The article provides a within-case comparative analysis of contrasting outcomes in the trajectories of the political projects Medellín launched in response to urban violence amid the drug wars of the early 1990s and the subsequent urbanization of the Colombian civil war. I argue that a focus on urban political economies and patterns of armed territorial control contributes to our understanding of the politics of urban violence, reveals limitations for the diffusion of the Medellín model, and identifies promising avenues for future research.

Although racial injustice and inequality are widely acknowledged in Brazil, recent experimental research concludes that citizens there do not rely on racial cues when voting. In this article, we test for the impact of candidate race on vote choice. We find evidence of identity-based voting in Brazil that interacts with ballot size. When facing a short ballot with only a few candidates, most subjects chose candidates without regard to race or color. But when presented with a large ballot with many candidates, white and brown subjects show a significant preference for same-race candidates. Self-identified black subjects, however, demonstrated a strong and consistent preference for black candidates regardless of choice set size. These results are particularly important given Brazil's electoral rules that provide voters with overwhelming numbers of candidates from which to choose.

Several Latin American countries have experienced the emergence of neopopulist politicians who eschew ties to traditional parties and orient their campaigns toward the atomized poor. This article examines the role of television in the electoral success of these politicians. Using survey data, I assess the impact of television exposure on vote choice in the 1989 election of Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil, the 2000 election of Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and the 2001 election of Alejandro Toledo in Peru. These cases achieve variation on two predictors of media effects: the presence of a neopopulist outsider and biased television coverage of the campaign. Statistical analysis confirms our theoretical expectations of media effects in the first two elections (where coverage was biased) but not in the third. These findings suggest that bias is the more reliable predictor of television's impact on Latin American presidential elections, rather than the presence of a neopopulist candidate.

Immediately after the Sandinista victory of July 1979, the Nicaraguan agrarian reform began with the expropriation of Somoza's agricultural estates and their conversion into state farms. Four years later, the land expropriated under the 1981 Agrarian Reform Law was being distributed to peasant production cooperatives and increasingly to individual peasant farmers. This article will analyze this shift in Sandinista agrarian policy and attempt to explain the factors shaping the course of the Nicaraguan agrarian reform. The focus is on the central policy debate of the first four years: the extent to which the agrarian reform should favor state farms, production cooperatives, or individual holdings. That debate encompassed a series of related issues that will be examined here, including the rhythm of technological modernization, capital-intensive versus labor-intensive investment schemes, the pace and depth of socialist transformation, and the entire question of tactical and strategic alliances within the revolution.

More than half a century has passed since structuralism appeared as an “indigenous” program of economic development in Latin America. Given the poor performance of the region's economies largely under the guidance of neoliberal doctrines since 1980, the question of whether structuralism—associated with the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, or CEPAL—still has any relevance is a legitimate one. In any event, structuralism's influence during the third quarter of the last century is admitted by friend and foe alike. My intent is not to determine whether structural analysis was “correct,” but to examine some of the forms it took and show why they were important. These were structuralist approaches to import substitution, informality, and economic historiography. I further consider structuralism as a movement, and the reasons for its success and subsequent decline. The essay closes with a brief consideration of how structuralism survives today, given the vast changes in economic development theory over the last half century.