Over the last decade or so, North American and European scholars have popularised a research focus on new social movements, or so-called autonomous and democratic struggles generated from within civil society against the state. The underlying theoretical premise of this approach is that challenges to the state from social movements are a principal driving force of political change in modern society. Despite its grounding in the advanced capitalist context, many Latin American scholars have found elective affinity with the argument, as evidenced in the recent tidal wave of studies on social movements by Latin Americanists. Basing their work primarily on analyses of Brazil, Argentina and Chile, scholars have argued that social movements help challenge the legitimacy and political power of strong and centralised governments in Latin America, at the same time creating from the grassroots a political culture suggestive of democratic transformation. In sort, there is growing consensus that social movements play a central role in bringing democracy to Latin America.

The facts are by now sufficiently clear for it to be common ground in any discussion of late nineteenth-century imperialism that the British State was disinclined to interfere on behalf of British capitalists with Latin American interests when these were threatened by local firms or States. Equally it is clear that British capitalists did not invest in Argentina in the belief that, by so doing, they were actively assisting the foreign policy of the British State. The State provided no grounds for this belief and no inducement to invest, and had it done so it is unlikely that the capitalists concerned – a pretty liberal bunch by and large – would have responded to any greater extent than they felt was consistent with their economic advantage. Again, there were not, in Britain, territorially ambitious militarists and aristocrats with their sights set on the South American republics. This element was quite adequately catered for in the Empire. In short, the models of imperialism favoured by Hobson, Schumpeter, and other conspiracy theorists, however appropriate they may be in particular cases, cannot be generalized and have very little relevance to Argentina.

The 1989 presidential elections confirmed the thesis that Brazilian voters use their ballots as weapons to express their dissatisfaction with the performance of their governments and, in particular, with the incumbents' ability to cope with the serious economic difficulties that have plagued Brazil in recent decades. Nearly thirty years after the last free presidential elections, the ballots cast across Brazil and in all segments of the society reflected a heightened plebiscitary tendency, especially in the most developed regions of the nation, that is, in modern Brazil. Looking at recent political history, we can observe that this trend became generalised in the 1970s, with the crisis of the authoritarian regime. Faced with a two-party system (Arena and MDB) imposed by the ruling military, the electorate voiced its protest by voting against authoritarianism and, in principle, in favour of democracy. Now that the authoritarian regime is no longer there, democracy seeks its consolidation – but the voters continue voting against; that is, they continue to use their ballots to reject incumbent governments (the 1986 elections being the only exception). The big change, however, is that now, in addition to reproving administrations which they deem inadequate, the voters are also protesting against the backwardness and vices of traditional Brazilian politics and, more specifically, against the practices of corruption, favouritism, and privatism.

This paper examines the relationship of the Rio de Janeiro Tramway, Light and Power Company and the municipal council in the provision of streetcar services in Rio de Janeiro, 1903–1920. Using archival materials collected in Brazil and Canada, it demonstrates that the utilities company lost the contest for control of Rio de Janeiro's mass transit system to the municipal authorities. Although it had the advantages of capital, technology and skill, this Canadian enterprise did not dictate its demands to an acquiescent municipal council. Rather, the municipal council and prefecture managed to extract an expensive streetcar system from the company to service its growing city.

Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil, has long been held up as a model of how grassroots social movements, in alliance with a Left party in power, have deepened democracy in a highly clientelistic context. But what happened to this democratic reform when the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party, PT), which supported this initiative while it held the mayorship of Porto Alegre for 16 years, lost political power? This article examines the shifting fortunes of the participatory budgeting process following the defeat of the Workers' Party in the 2004 local elections. It explores how and why succeeding local administrations weakened participatory budgeting amid the changing political configuration of Porto Alegre, underscoring the critical role played by considerable executive branch powers in the process. The article concludes by examining what questions this raises for the sustainability of local democratic reforms.

This review essay critically examines the evolution of scholarly literature on Brazil's Partido dos Trabalhadores since the PT's founding in 1980. We periodise the relevant literature into four phases, examining the foundation of the PT, the party's early experience in subnational government, its transformation and moderation in the late 1990s, and finally its experiences in national government since capturing the presidency in 2002. After detailing strengths and weaknesses of this research, we also examine the trajectory of the PT in light of recent comparative work on the so-called ‘left turn’ in Latin America. We conclude by offering an agenda for future research on the PT.

In Brazil, black women are symbolically and practically associated with domestic work. The article examines feminist responses to black women's place in the socio-economic hierarchy of the city of Salvador, Bahia. These include proposals to introduce affirmative action and a ‘politics of presence’, involving the election of black women to represent the city's black female constituency. It describes the racial dynamics at work between black and white feminists in Bahia, signalling the contradictory tendencies that structure their relationship. Arguing against the view that a ‘politics of identity’ necessarily supports a new essentialism of race or culture, the article describes the diverse ideological and political influences upon the ideas and proposals of Bahian feminists. Black feminists construct racial difference as experiential and structural in origin. They adapt academic concepts and language in order to discuss their own lives and the specific social and cultural context of Salvador. The ethnographic and micro-historical perspective adopted here provides insight into ‘native’ understandings of affirmative action and a ‘politics of presence’ and suggests that criticisms of these measures on the grounds that they represent imported, non-Brazilian views of race are misplaced.

Through an analysis of the debates in 1871 on the Law of the ‘Free Womb’ in the Brazilian Empire, this article tries to understand the role of the slave mother and her freed children in the process of abolition. In addition, it discusses the possible obstacles and dangers the ‘Free Womb’ would present for the perpetuation of slaveowners' dominance.

This paper attempts to draw out the significance and meaning of the recorreo [sic] (recorrido) de los linderos (going around the boundaries), also called linderaje ritual in an Andean peasant community. In villages such as Kallarayan which lie in the crop and pastureland regions of Cuzco department, Peru, the recorreo is a regular point in the ritual calendar, occurring as part of the lead-up to Lent.1 The event, which occurs on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, contains multiple references to the Peruvian nation, to surrounding haciendas, to local apus (spiritual powers embodied in mountain peaks), and to the community: as such it is a ‘polyvalent’ ritual,2 juxtaposing and inter-mingling symbols and meanings which otherwise are kept separate.

Based on a national survey of women and the creation of a ‘conservatism-liberalism index’, this study shows that conservatism in Chile has deep religious roots and continues to be the most significant symbolic reference point in women's lives. The study concludes also that the female population is drawn more towards a ‘liberal’ vision, but liberal attitudes are not able to provide an alternative symbolic reference point to conservatism. This is because liberalism seems to be the result of popular exposure to the requirements of modern life rather than a discourse or ideology. For this reason, the opinions and attitudes of women are highly contradictory and heterogeneous and do not find their form, for the most part, in a clearly liberal discourse or in one which is wholly conservative. We are thus dealing with a kind of ‘liberalism through exposure’, the limits of which are to be found in the conservative ideology which underlies the liberal opinions expressed and is clearly visible in the proportion of the population which is highly educated and deeply religious.

This article examines the tensions between the Gran Colombian republican constitution of 1821 and Simón Bolívar's fear of a mulatto takeover. It focuses on Cartagena in the 1820s, where the mulatto general José Padilla challenged the socio-racial hierarchy and accepted notions of equality of the city, heading a three-day coup in 1828 against Bolívar's attempt to impose a new authoritarian constitution. Padilla failed to rally the mostly African-derived population of Cartagena behind the republican views of Francisco de Paula Santander and was promptly executed. Using the protagonists' correspondence, manifestos, criminal investigations, consular reports and censuses, the article analyses the factors in the city's demography, political leadership and culture, and in the composition of its military forces, that explain Padilla's failure. It highlights the role played by race and by Bolívar's views of mulattos in the process.

Based on archival research and on multi-sited fieldwork, this article offers the first available description of the food lootings that took place in Argentina in December 2001. The paper joins the current relational turn in the study of collective violence. It examines the existing continuities between everyday life, routine politics and extraordinary massive actions, and scrutinises the grey zone where the deeds and networks of looters, political entrepreneurs and law enforcement officials meet and mesh. The article reconstructs the looting dynamics at one specific site and highlights the existence of three mechanisms during the episodes: 1. the creation of opportunities by party brokers and police agents, 2. the validation of looting by state elites, and 3. the signalling spiral carried out by party brokers.

How have governments in Latin America been able to counteract two decades of neoliberalism and pursue post-neoliberal developmental reforms, and what tools have they used to do so? We argue that post-neoliberal projects are possible through the use of three necessary conditions in a context of economic bonanza: (1) extensive use of the legal-constitutional framework to facilitate interventionism; (2) an increase in the centrality of public planning agencies to design those policies; and (3) growth of the bureaucracy to implement the policies. Through a case study of Rafael Correa's Ecuador, we show how a constituent assembly, empowerment of the state planning agency, and an increase in the size of the public administration allowed the president to combat neoliberalism and pursue his ambitious Buen Vivir (Good Living) plan. This simple framework offers important clues for understanding post-liberalism and the return of the state in Ecuador and beyond.

This paper examines how practices of leadership have been negotiated and have changed over time in the context of a grassroots health promotion project in Lima, Peru. Tracing these trajectories in the context of the evolution of women's organising in Peru informs a broader analysis of the changing role of grassroots women in development projects, feeding into debates around the professionalisation and depoliticisation of grassroots activism and providing new empirical material on gendered experiences of grassroots leadership. The paper recognises the increasing dominance of neoliberal management mechanisms but argues that the depoliticisation of grassroots women leaders is not simply a straightforward trickledown of neoliberal development practices but is produced through the interplay of local socio-political processes and personal biographies of activism with more macro-level development trends and discourses.

When the Spaniards first reached Mexico, one of the things which most impressed them was the existence of cities as large and as architecturally magnificent as any they had known in Europe. The growth and development of urban life has been examined in detail elsewhere, and for present purposes it is sufficient to note that, in areas where the techniques of intensive agriculture encouraged large nucleated settlements, the basic pattern of town life was established during the first millennium B.C.

The economic role of the Brazilian State has received much attention recently from economists. Those who have studied it generally assume that the State first became economically active on a large scale after 1930 when it fostered industrialization. They also assume, often implicitly, that politicians and bureaucrats have had a great deal of freedom of action in policy formulation and that greater state economic intervention increases national independence from foreign markets and capitalists.1

In his pioneering works on Primitive Rebels and Bandits, Eric Hobsbawm analyzed certain forms of rural banditry as primitive social protest. Such ‘social banditry’ was distinguished from ordinary banditry primarily by virtue of its continued incorporation into the traditional peasant society, its attacks against landlords and other authorities and its ‘affinity for revolution, being a phenomenon of social protest, if not a precursor or potential incubator of revolt’. Social banditry was analyzed by Hobsbawm as a reaction of peasants to alien authorities, injustices and major social up-heavals such as war, conquest, or industrialization.

The past decade has witnessed a rich harvest of regional studies of the Mexican Porfiriato. There are two predominant currents in the recent literature. One group of scholars has focused attention on the political sphere, examining the process whereby the Porfirian central state increased its power at the expense of the regional peripheries. Invariably, the federal cause was advanced by Don Porfirio's ability to manipulate local factional struggles, playing off contending parentescos or élite family networks. Another group of historians has explored the external dimension of the Porfirian regional economy, examining patterns of cooperation and conflict between local élites and foreign investors. The contradictory nature of such transnational alliances and their impact on non-élite groups have now been analyzed for several important Porfirian regions.

How do global rights regimes promote compliance? Can they form the basis for effective advocacy campaigns at the domestic level? In this paper, we address these questions via a case study of the role played by the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Argentinian politics. We argue that ratification of the convention strengthened the coherence and leverage of rights-based domestic activists and ultimately led to the introduction of a new rights-inspired legal code for children. We trace the emergence of a local compliance coalition for children's rights and the subsequent campaign for rights-based reform. Our analysis suggests that global rights conventions can alter the domestic political opportunity for advocacy, strengthen rights-based claims and bring about changes on the ground.

This paper will explore the problématique of human rights in processes of political democratisation, specifically in the case of transitions from military to democratic regimes, and mostly in the Southern Cone of Latin America. It is, therefore, a historically-bounded analysis, rather than a more general enquiry into issues of human rights in the contemporary era. The construction of a general theory cannot be undertaken without consideration of the diversity of human rights experiences; democratisation in these countries is but one such experience.