The Quandary of 1492

The year 1492 evokes a powerful symbolism.1 The symbolism is most charged, of course, among peoples whose historical memory connects them directly to the forces unleashed in 1492. For indigenous Americans, Latin Americans, minorities of Latino or Hispanic descent, and Spaniards and Portuguese, the sense of connection is strong. The year 1492 symbolises a momentous turn in historical destiny: for Amerindians, the ruinous switch from independent to colonised history; for Iberians, the launching of a formative historical chapter of imperial fame and controversy; for Latin Americans and the Latino diaspora, the painful birth of distinctive cultures out of power-laden encounters among Iberian Europeans, indigenous Americans, Africans, and the diverse offspring who both maintained and blurred the main racial categories.

But the symbolism extends beyond the Americas, and beyond the descendants of those most directly affected. The arrival of Columbus in America symbolises a historical reconfiguration of world magnitude. The fusion of native American and European histories into one history marked the beginning of the end of isolated stagings of human drama. Continental and subcontinental parameters of human action and struggle, accomplishment and failure, would expand into a world stage of power and witness. The expansion of scale revolutionised cultural and ecological geography. After 1492, the ethnography of the humanoid other proved an even more central fact of life, and the migrations of microbes, plants and animals, and cultural inventions would transform the history of disease, food consumption, land use, and production techniques.2 In addition, the year 1492 symbolises the beginnings of the unique world ascendance of European civilisation.

This article examines the role of the Supreme Court in the development of the Mexican political system. The judiciary provided an important source of regime legitimation, as it allowed for the consolidation of a state of legality and a claim to constitutional rule of law, at least in discourse. However, the judiciary was in effect politically subordinated to the logic of dominant party rule through both specific constitutional reforms since 1917 that weakened the possibility of judicial independence and a politics of institutional and political co-optation. The constitutional reform of 1994 has significantly altered the nature of the relationship between the executive and the Supreme Court.

In the image, the body loses its corporeal reality; in the rite, the non-corporeal becomes flesh.

Octavio Paz (1969: 120)

How are images constructed from one of Ecuador's political discourses? This article analyses: (1) the transition in 1857 from a state-centred form of administration of indigenous populations (the tribute system) to a decentralised form in the hands of private and local powers which effectively rendered these populations invisible; (2) the ensuing power-game between Conservatives and Liberals which aimed to forge a symbolic analogue of the indian and create a political field; (3) the manner in which the Liberal Revolution (1895) implanted a ‘ventriloquist's’ political representation which became a channel for indian resistance; (4) the research problems which ‘invisibility’ of the indians and the ‘ventriloquist's’ voice pose for historians.

This article explores the reasons for the spread of vigilante justice (linchamientos) in contemporary Guatemala. It investigates three specific linchamientos and suggests that the roots of such vigilante justice lie in a collapsing peasant economy, insecurity of all sorts, and an unravelling of the social fabric in rural communities through the militarisation of rural Guatemala.

The article also argues that linchamientos are caused partly by a conflict over the attempts by the Guatemalan state to impose a certain type of order in rural Guatemala. It discusses the literature on customary law, in Guatemala and in various other locales around the world, and suggests that attempts to impose a state sanctioned legal system without adequate provision for customary law has helped contribute to a perception that the legal system is illegitimate, not just incompetent.

A crucial development in current Latin American politics is the growing involvement of indigenous movements in democracies grappling with the challenges of regime consolidation. This article examines how Ecuador's indigenous movement consecrated new rights and national constitutive principles in the 1997–8 constitutional assembly. It argues that the indigenous movement defined the legitimacy and purpose of the assembly through an ideological struggle with other political actors, in turn shaping the context and content of constitutional reforms in Ecuador. The article concludes that softening the boundary between ‘cultural politics’ and ‘institutional politics’ is necessary in order to understand the impact of social movements in Latin America.

This article focuses on trends in the adult heights of various sectors of Mexican society between 1850 and 1950 as a proxy for their biological and material standards of living. The evolution of biological standards of living is an alternative way to assess whether or not economic development after 1850 was beneficial to the population, using a proxy that relies on a basic natural characteristic, adult height. The recruitment records of the Mexican rural and federal militia provide us with information on the secular trends of heights of the Mexican labouring classes, while a database of passport applications allows us to compare the evolution of living standards across social classes. It is argued that the benefits of industrialisation and improved economic performance fostered by the Díaz regime (1876–1910) did not have a favourable impact on the biological wellbeing of the labouring population. There are, however, signs of improvement in living standards with the launching of welfare programmes at the end of the Cárdenas administration. In contrast, the average height of the elites increased throughout the period, suggesting that there was a growing disparity in the evolution of living standards between social classes.

After long neglecting issues of citizen security and justice, democratisation theorists have recently begun to recognise the importance of the rule of law. Yet theorising the construction of state institutions of security and justice has tended to be piecemeal and divorced from broader theoretical debates. Using the case of post-war El Salvador, this article first argues that justice and security are tremendously important for the survivability and everyday relevance of democracy, given that crime is the chief threat to support for democracy.

Second, the article explores competing views of institutional reform. It finds support for path-dependent ‘mode-of-transition’ approaches that postulate heightened agency to adopt new rules and reform institutions during uncertain transition periods. However, more sceptical cultural and institutional theorists are right insofar as the formal removal of authoritarian structures and personnel is easier than the informal transformation of state practices and of society's attitudes about state services. The article also finds that security (i.e., military, intelligence and police) reforms operate differently to judicial reforms, which were more difficult and were less tied to the country's peace process. The interaction of these reform processes with a post-war crime wave helps explain why international observers consider El Salvador's reforms a success story, but many Salvadoreans do not.

This article highlights a number of themes useful in the gendered analysis of democratic consolidation in Latin America by means of a comparative analysis of Argentina and Chile. It starts from the assumption that much of the work on democratisation in Latin America – both orthodox and the literature concentrating on women and transitions – produced up until now, has been too voluntaristic in its approach. It argues that what is needed, particularly in the study of democratic consolidation, is an analysis not only of the impact of women and women's organisations on institutions and structures but also of how these institutions and structures can shape and change gender relations and different women's activities. Any gendered analysis of democratic consolidation must begin by examining the terms of transition which, while they can be subject to some renegotiation later, affect the nature of the subsequent system and the space available to different actors. It is argued that a number of characteristics of the post-transition system are significant: first the impact of more arbitrary populist or presidential systems, second the importance of women's organising both inside and outside the state and party systems and third the existence of an institutionalised party system.

The Eastern Border Region (EBR) of Paraguay (defined as the present-day administrative Departments of Amambay, Canendiyú and Alto Paraná) is one of the few remaining frontier zones suitable for intensive agricultural development in the southern cone of Latin America. Comprising 35 percent (about 5.4 million has.) of the area of eastern Paraguay, its natural resources remained largely unexploited until the mid-1960s, itself a reflection of the very poor growth performance of the Paraguayan economy throughout most of the 20th century in comparison with neighbouring countries.

This article compares the effects of tax reform on tax compliance in Argentina and Chile. After constructing three different comparative indexes of tax compliance, it proposes a comprehensive approach, which includes political, economic and sociological explanations to address the different behaviour of taxpayers in each country. It concludes that Chile was able to enhance better tax compliance because it has implemented a permanent, stable and rational policy that allowed for the development of an effective tax administration – a process never fully accomplished in Argentina. Tax reforms may enhance better compliance only after they reverse the entrenched evasion strategies of the taxpayers.

This article addresses the ‘coloniality of gender’ in relation to rearticulated indigenous Aymara gender notions in contemporary Bolivia. While female indigenous activists tend to relate the subordination of women to colonialism and to see an emancipatory potential in the current process of decolonisation, there are middle-class advocates for gender equality and feminist activists who seem to fear that the ‘decolonising politics’ of the Evo Morales administration would abandon indigenous women to their ‘traditional’ silenced subordination within male-dominated structures. From the dynamics of indigenous decolonial projections, feminist critiques, middle-class misgivings and state politics, the article explores the implications of these different discourses on colonialism, decolonisation and women's subordination.

The issue of whether Central Americans in the United States are ‘political’ or ‘economic’ migrants has been widely debated, yet little empirical research has informed the controversy. Earlier studies have relied primarily on cross-sectional aggregate data. In order to overcome these limitations we draw on recent surveys conducted in five Nicaraguan communities by the Latin American Migration Project. Using retrospective data, we reconstruct a history of a family's migration to the United States and Costa Rica from the date of household formation to the survey date and link these data to national-level data on GDP and Contra War violence. While out migration to both Costa Rica and the United States is predicted by economic trends, US-bound migration was more strongly linked to the level of Contra War violence independent of economic motivations, especially in an interactive model that allows for a higher wartime effect of social networks. We conclude that elevated rates of Nicaraguan migration to the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s were a direct result of the US-Contra intervention. The approach deployed here – which relates to the timing of migration decisions to macro-level country trends – enables us to address the issue of political versus economic motivations for migration with more precision than prior work.

A number of recent studies1 suggest that prostitution – ‘The act or practice of indulging in promiscuous sexual relations, especially for money’2 – in western society increased dramatically in the late nineteenth century, both in real terms and in popular consciousness. ‘Large scale, conspicuous prostitution’, they argue, ‘was a by-product of the first, explosive stage in the growth of the modern, industrial city…’ It is a proposition of this article that such changes were, in fact, far more widespread. From the evidence of Guatemala it appears that prostitution also increased during these years in agricultural export societies. Under the impact of demands from industrializing nations, colonial and neo-colonial regimes overhauled domestic economic and social structures to increase raw material and food production for export. Unprecedented but unstable economic prosperity, urbanization, and the social disorganization resulting from the implementation of systems of forced labour and removal from the land created a climate propitious for an increase in and institutionalization of commerical sex. This paper is an examination of the growth of female prostitution in late nineteenth-century Guatemala City, of the situation and attitudes of the women involved, and of state efforts to control the traffic. More broadly, it argues that attempts to regulate prostitution must be understood as part of a liberal drive to mobilize and control society as a whole in the interest of a class-defined vision of national development.

This article presents a history of ‘Project Cybersyn’, an early computer network developed in Chile during the socialist presidency of Salvador Allende (1970–1973) to regulate the growing social property area and manage the transition of Chile's economy from capitalism to socialism. Under the guidance of British cybernetician Stafford Beer, often lauded as the ‘father of management cybernetics’, an interdisciplinary Chilean team designed cybernetic models of factories within the nationalised sector and created a network for the rapid transmission of economic data between the government and the factory floor. The article describes the construction of this unorthodox system, examines how its structure reflected the socialist ideology of the Allende government, and documents the contributions of this technology to the Allende administration.

Introduction: the Repudiation of the Centenário

13 May 1988 was the 100th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil. In honour of that date, various official celebrations and commemorations of the centenário, organised by the Brazilian government, church groups and cultural organisations, took place throughout the country, even including a speech by President José Sarney.

This celebration of the emancipation was not, however, universal. Many Afro—Brazilian groups staged actions and marches, issued denunciations and organised cultural events repudiating the ‘farce of abolition’. These were unprecedented efforts to draw national and international attention to the extensive racial inequality and discrimination which Brazilian blacks – by far the largest concentration of people of African descent in any country in the western hemisphere – continue to confront. Particular interventions had such titles as ‘100 Years of Lies’, ‘One Hundred Years Without Abolition’, ‘March for the Real Liberation of the Race’, ‘Symbolic Burial of the 13th of May’, ‘March in Protest of the Farce of Abolition’, and ‘Discommemoration (Descomemoraçāo) of the Centenary of Abolition’.1 The repudiation of the centenário suggests that Brazilian racial dynamics, traditionally quiescent, are emerging with the rest of society from the extended twilight of military dictatorship. Racial conflict and mobilisation, long almost entirely absent from the Brazilian scene, are reappearing. New racial patterns and processes – political, cultural, economic, social and psychological – are emerging, while racial inequalities of course continue as well. How much do we know about race in contemporary Brazil? How effectively does the extensive literature explain the present situation?

During the 1990s Peru's Alberto Fujimori and Argentina's Carlos Menem were the two main political successes of Latin American populism. Both completed two successive presidential terms, a unique accomplishment in the continent, and overcame the political instability that previously beset their nations. Scholars who analysed these and other contemporary regimes concluded that Latin American populism was flexible and resilient enough to adapt to a radically different environment from that of the 1930s and 1940s, when it had emerged as a major force. Some political scientists labelled as ‘neopopulism’ the newer variant of populism in the context of globalisation and widespread acceptance of neoliberal policies. These scholars stressed two salient features of neopopulism that contrasted with ‘classical populism’ of the 1930s and 1940s: its social base consisting of members of the informal economy, as opposed to the organised working class; and its implementation of neoliberal policies, as against the model of import substitution and state interventionism.

Bridging the ways in which scholars have looked at the co-option of both gender and cultural rights through neoliberal governance in Latin America, this article will examine how gender has been utilised by the state as a discourse of governmentality in order to regulate indigenous subjects. Moreover, the article will explore how indigenous women activists in Mexico are creating a practice of autonomy as a vital strategy to move beyond rights discourse and challenge the ways in which neoliberal states have selectively co-opted social movement demands. Through their grassroots forms of consultation, indigenous women activists shift the concept of autonomy as a right granted by the state to a practice of decolonisation that is part of everyday life and community sociality.

This is a piece of comparative history, not an exercise in folkloric whimsy. It does not attempt to probe the secrets of lo mexicano, la mexicanidad, or any of the other quasi-metaphysical concepts which litter the field of Mexican cultural history.1 Nor does it pay too much attention to those more positivistic analyses which try to encapsulate Mexican (political) culture in terms of statistical comparisons.2 Rather, it offers some comparative generalisations about Mexican history in the national period, stressing both broad patterns of socio-economic development and specific politico-cultural factors. Thus – for better or worse – its model is Barrington Moore rather than, say, Octavio Paz or Gabriel Almond. It also draws inspiration – and borrows its title – from the work of E. P. Thompson, which in turn has been developed by Eley and Blackbourn in the German context, Corrigan and Sayer in the English.3 Its purpose is to offer some explanations of the distinctiveness (as well as the commonality) of Mexico's history, compared to the history of Latin America, in the national period.4

Let us begin at the end. In the last fifty years, Mexico has experienced relatively rapid economic growth coupled with relative political and social stability.5 The achievements of the ‘stabilised development’ of the 1950s and 1960s are well known: a solid regime, rapid growth rates, low inflation, rising per capita income.6 And, while the 1980s were a decade of relative stagnation, Mexico's relative position within Latin America has not deteriorated.7 Furthermore, the prospects for future development – of a capitalist kind, with all that that entails – look better now than they did in the late 1980s; all the more if the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S.A. is concluded, as now seems probable.

Two of the most striking aspects of social change in recent decades in Latin America have been the rise of indigenist movements and the spread of evangelical Protestantism. To date they have been analysed separately, but this article shows that a comparison of the two in the context of Bolivia can prove highly productive. Although in many respects evangelismo and katarismo are diametrically opposed, there are some striking similarities. They draw their adherents from the same social base, undermine the notion of a homogeneous nation-state and also clearly reject the position of cultural mestizaje at the root of Bolivian state ideology. Thus, at a time when ‘hybridised’ cultural forms are supposed to be becoming more common in Latin America and around the world, these two social movements explicitly contest hybridity.

From March 1981, when a radical local administration took office, the municipality of Juchitán, Oaxaca, located in the Southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec, has been in the national (and more recently the international) spotlight. The newly elected officials were from the COCEI, the Coalición de Obreros, Campesinos y Estudiantes del Istmo (Coalition of Workers, Peasants and Students of the Isthmus), a radical local political group which had, for tactical reasons, formed an electoral alliance with the Mexican Communist Party (since August 1981 the leading component of the PSUM or Unified Socialist Party of Mexico, organized to contest the 5982 presidential election). Land reform was one of the major issues — along with municipal corruption and the paucity of educational, health and other services — mobilized substantial proportions of a largely agricultural-based population to support the COCEI against the PRI, the Revolutionary Institutional Party which has ruled Mexico without serious challenge since 1929.