Editor’s foreword

Although the study of populism has traditionally been the domain of Latin Americanists, research here has become increasingly comparative. One of the most important payoffs of this comparative work is conceptual. Rather than defining populism in structuralist, economic, or political-strategic terms, a growing number of scholars around the world are using an ideational conceptualization that draws heavily from earlier discursive theories. By employing the ideational approach, scholars have been able to provide empirical measures of populist discourse. In this article we explain and show the advantages of this ideational approach to a Latin American audience by presenting a new historical dataset measuring the discourse of Argentine, Chilean, and Peruvian presidents across the twentieth century. Our main intent is to clarify the ideational approach as well as to enliven the conceptual debate. While we are critical of alternative definitions, we acknowledge and reassess their theoretical insights.

En torno a estas tres interrogantes se estructura este texto: ¿Potenciar una agenda de género es contraproducente cuando un sujeto político es marcado por la categoría “etnia”? Cuando las demandas son étnicas, culturalistas, o identitarias ¿implican siempre una revalorización de la tradición que sitúa a las mujeres en lugares desaventajados o subordinados? ¿La agenda autonomista recoge la diversidad del mundo indígena? También se hace una breve referencia a los aspectos metodológicos de la investigación que inspira este texto. Finalmente se deja planteada una reflexión en torno a la figura del intelectual indígena. La relevancia de esta discusión se explica por un contexto sociopolítico que vive el movimiento indígena en Chile: una “reemergencia” que se advierte crecientemente a partir de los años 90. Es una situación en la cual ciertas demandas ancladas territorialmente han permeado otras esferas de la vida de un grupo tan heterogéneo como dinámico y en cuyo escenario se ha bosquejado una identidad mapuche que se construye en el terreno de la resistencia y que, por lo mismo, experimenta todo tipo de tensiones y potencia la construcción de agendas controversiales. Una de las figuras que encarna esta resistencia es la del intelectual indígena.

Report presented at the meeting of the Executive Council of the Latin American Studies Association in Lima, Peru, April 27, 2017.

Editors’ foreword to the special issue.

En los contextos post-descentralización, las relaciones intergubernamentales (RIGs) central-locales adquieren gran relevancia para comprender los procesos de asignación territorial de recursos públicos. La elevada autonomía local en la Provincia de Córdoba, Argentina, hace de ésta un caso apropiado para examinar la complejidad de factores involucrados en la distribución de recursos a municipios y, de este modo, generar aproximaciones heurísticas sobre estos procesos a nivel regional. Este estudio (a) da cuenta de la coexistencia de dos subsistemas de RIGs, a través de los cuales los gobiernos locales procuran acceder a recursos públicos de decisión discrecional, uno conformado por redes políticas formales y otro por una diversidad de redes políticas informales; (b) se observa un efecto sistemático de ambos tipos de redes sobre las chances de acceso de los gobiernos locales a recursos de decisión discrecional del gobierno provincial; (c) se advierte que los gobiernos locales adoptan una estrategia combinada de vinculación a ambos tipos de redes, priorizando el mecanismo de la cohesión en las redes formales y la intermediación en las redes informales.

Latin America’s largest federations have significantly reduced their levels of income inequality in recent years, perhaps reflecting a structural change toward egalitarianism. However, we argue that the political geography of federalism in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico strongly shapes preferences against centralized redistribution likely to promote equity in the long term. While federalism does not necessary lead to lower redistribution in theory, the geographic spread of income and malapportioned political institutions limit egalitarianism in these nations. These dynamics help explain why fiscal structures are distinct in Latin American federations as compared to federations in high-income countries. First, we show that the territorial structure of inequality and malapportionment are associated with lower redistributive effort in the global context and that the Latin American federations have extreme values for both variables. Second, using a new data set of income distributions within and across Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico over time, we demonstrate that the conditions that favor fiscal transfers from the national to subnational governments are consistently strong, but conditions are rarely favorable for centralized policies to equilibrate national income. Unequal income patterns are reinforced by legislative malapportionment, which encourages interregional transfers to regions and limits the political voice of more populated and unequal regions that would benefit from centralized redistribution.

Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples in Latin America face higher poverty rates and are disproportionately represented among the poor. The probability of being poor is between two and three times higher for indigenous and Afro-descendants than whites. Using comparable fiscal incidence analyses for Bolivia, Brazil, and Guatemala, I analyze how much poverty and inequality change in the ethnoracial space after fiscal interventions. Although taxes and transfers tend to reduce the ethnoracial gaps, the change is very small. While per capita cash transfers tend to be higher for the nonwhite population, spending on these programs is too low, especially when compared with the disproportionate number of poor people among nonwhites.

Since the 1980s, liberalized and newly stable markets have helped usher in an unprecedented mining boom across the Latin American region. However, despite the fact that this boom contributes to notable economic growth, protests in opposition to the expansion and practices of mining companies have also grown, often with violent results. How protests are policed matters, but more important for democracy is how state actors respond when violence is employed. We examine two instances of police repression of mining protests: one in Cajamarca, Peru, and the other in Catamarca, Argentina. We argue that, despite significant differences in context, there are important similarities in state discourse between countries. In particular, a vocabulary of protester wrongdoing and calls for a remedy of “dialogue” are employed in both cases as a way to facilitate the continuation and expansion of both mining and the repression of protests.

The concept of sumak kawsay, buen vivir or “good life”—in Bolivia, suma qamaña, or vivir bien—has been widely diffused on an international level since the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly in 2007–2008 and the Bolivian one in 2006–2009. Good life has been understood as an alternative to capitalist modernizing development that is based on the indigenous ideal of harmony between individual, society, and nature. Nevertheless, in the usage of the indigenous movement, which initiated the diffusion of this concept, good life is a local and territorial conception of a lifestyle. While this notion of locality is largely ignored or invisibilized by the Ecuadorian government and by nonindigenous intellectuals, and to some degree even by national indigenous organizations, local indigenous organizations integrated good life into their discourse of territorial autonomy in a pluralist state. Good life allows for local decolonialization, a concrete and local fight against the structures of “the coloniality of power” framed within a discursive panorama that includes concepts of plurality and autonomy. This text analyzes sumak kawsay as a key concept of local decolonialization, emphasizing its relation to similar concepts and the differences in its usage by different actors.

Increasing exclusion and inequality in Honduras have posed escalating security risks for women in their homes and on the streets. In this article, we examine gender-based violence against women, including gender-motivated murders (feminicides), the everyday acts that can result in their deaths, and impunity for these crimes. Rather than analyzing these murders as interpersonal acts or linking them to economic deprivation, we examine the actions and inactions of the state that have amplified violence in the lives of Honduran women. We distinguish between the state’s acts of omission and acts of commission in order to identify the political responsibility and failures that create a fertile ground for these killings. A context of multisided violence that facilitates extreme violence in the lives of women is present in Honduras, especially considering the diminishing power of civil society groups and increased political repression after the 2009 coup. We identify root causes of the wide (and widening) gap between laws on the books—which have been passed mostly to satisfy international and domestic organizations pushing for change—and laws in action, that is, implementation on the ground. Although we focus on Honduras, we note similar experiences of extreme violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, and in other countries in the Latin American region.

This article deals with the disputed terminology used to refer to the Brazilian military regime (1964–1985). On one side is the traditional “military dictatorship” nomenclature, which places the armed forces at the center of the political system during the period in question. Conversely, the more recent “civil-military dictatorship” terminology notes that the regime depended on civilian allies in business and government, as well as popular support, throughout its existence. My entry point is a heated 2012 debate between journalist Pedro Pomar and the radical art collective Coletivo Zagaia. I explore how new social actors that emerged after redemocratization have become central to the struggle over human rights in Brazil and, more specifically, how the dictatorship is remembered in the present. This debate among scholars, activists, bloggers, and journalists is fundamentally about memory, accountability, and, I argue, the quality of Brazilian democracy today.

Following the implementation of the Lei das Cotas (Affirmative Action Law) in Brazil, there has been debate as to whether students who were admitted through affirmative action perform at the same level as students admitted through traditional methods. This article examines the results of the Exame Nacional de Desempenho dos Estudantes (ENADE) from 2009 to 2012 to determine whether there is a relationship between students’ performance at the university level and the manner of their admittance. We find that students admitted to public universities under affirmative action perform at similar levels to students who were not, whereas quota students in private universities perform slightly better than students admitted through traditional methods.

Se presenta un análisis temático de tres debates parlamentarios claves para el tema de la libertad de expresión en el ámbito mediático en Chile desde la vuelta a la democracia: la discusión en torno a la Ley de Prensa 1993–2001, el Informe de la Comisión Especial sobre las Libertades de Pensamiento y Expresión 2007–2010 y el debate de la Ley de Televisión Digital 2008–2014. En todos ellos, la batalla principal se ha librado por el significado mismo de la libertad de expresión, por su contenido meramente negativo —como la libertad de “injerencia” estatal— o el positivo que supone un Estado activo. Los ganadores de los debates argumentaron en contra de la regulación viéndola como una intromisión estatal limitante para el mercado, y reduciendo así la noción de la libertad de expresión a la libertad de empresa.

Paid domestic workers represent a historically discriminated-against group comprising mostly ethnically marginalized, resource-poor migrant women. In twenty-first-century Peru, social and labor rights have not improved significantly for those in the sector despite more than a decade of sustained economic growth that took off in 2002 and lasted until 2014. Though the present national trend suggests that the absolute number of workers in this sector is dropping and that the tendency of workers to “live in” with their employers is reversing (trends that might signal improved working conditions for those in the sector), significant gaps still exist between the rights of domestic workers as compared to other workers. This article analyzes the intersectionality of gender, ethnicity and/or migration status, and class as one possible explanation for the continued vulnerability of paid domestic workers. We examine statistical information on the present situation in Peru, including a trends analysis of the National Household Survey from 2004 to 2013, and share the results of our qualitative research on the sector for the same period. We conclude with recommendations for future studies.

Displays of wealth and opulence in the face of dire need and poverty have become commonplace as the rich and the poor increasingly share city spaces around the globe. Research shows that it is the perception of inequality, more than raw measures of inequality, that has important political consequences and that is most concerning for social well-being. In this article, I propose a theoretical move from a general, statistically driven conceptualization of inequality to a spatially informed concept that recognizes how people experience inequality. Relying on findings that show that the perception of inequality is most important for life chances, I suggest that it is key to understand not only where inequality is located but how it is spatially distributed. Using the Mall of San Juan as an example of a spatially polarized landscape in Puerto Rico, and referring to other cases in Latin America, the article shows how the spatial distribution of inequality highlights the perceptual fields of citizens who may celebrate, succumb to, respond to, attune to, and/or challenge the inequalities accordingly. To shift from an accounting of inequality through the concept of segregation to recognizing the experience and perception of inequality through spatial polarization shifts the scholarly and policy frames of inequality research and policy.

In 2014, Chile introduced a tax reform on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that began to be collected in 2017; the reform is restricted to large industrial and power generation sources with thermal power greater than 50 megawatts (MW). Therefore, this study evaluates each industrial source’s option to reduce its taxes by switching to cleaner fuels (investing in new combustion equipment, such as boilers and dual burners). The results show that a tax of US$5 per ton of CO2 for industrial sources of more than 50 MW of thermal power is wholly ineffective in reducing emissions. If a carbon tax is applied to all independent sources of power, only a few industrial sources are predicted to change their current fuel, mainly changing coal to biomass. The conclusion is that the carbon tax serves to raise tax revenues rather than reduce emissions.

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la dinámica de los procesos de segregación residencial y las desigualdades económicas en la ciudad de Montevideo desde los años 90 hasta la primera década y media de los 2000. En Montevideo en las últimas dos décadas se han registrado avances significativos en la reducción de las desigualdades económicas, a pesar de lo cual, las desigualdades en el espacio urbano no han disminuido en igual medida. Se elabora una metodología de construcción de índices e indicadores cuantitativos de desigualdad y pobreza a través de fuentes estadísticas oficiales (encuestas nacionales a hogares). La evolución de estos indicadores entre los años 1996 y 2015 se observa y compara para diferentes regiones de la ciudad. Éstas surgen de un índice de segregación residencial a partir de información socioeconómica de los hogares a nivel de segmento censal, para esto se utiliza como fuente los censos de población, vivienda y hogares del año 1996. Los principales, indicadores de desigualdad económica considerados son el índice de Gini, la incidencia de la pobreza y los índices de entropía generalizada; también se ensaya un análisis comparativo del valor de la vivienda a nivel de barrios en Montevideo para los años 1996 y 2015 con el fin de identificar áreas que han depreciado o apreciado su valor.

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.

This article envisions the Caracas Metro as infrastructure that forms and is formed by political subjectivity and urban space. The first section provides a brief history of the metro as conceived by modernization-minded politicians in the twentieth century. Here the Metro is seen as playing a pedagogical function in accordance with a larger tradition of Venezuelan positivism. The second section examines a shift in the social and political composition of Caracas after El Caracazo of 1989. In response to neoliberalization, social movements reshaped the terrain of politics and the city in a way that can be usefully conceptualized as demands for the right to the city—that subjects have the right to access, shape, and themselves be shaped by the urban environment. I conclude with an analysis of 2014’s violent antigovernment protests. The tactics and targets of these protests—barricades and direct attacks on public infrastructure such as the Metro—illustrate the perceived threat democratized urban space poses to traditional elites in the context of social change.