What motivated right-wing and conservative parties to endorse a policy of land expropriation and redistribution in Brazil? I argue that urban-dominated right-wing parties endorsed agrarian reform in order to: (i) reduce crime in wealthier metropolises by reversing rural–urban migration; and (ii) gain competitive advantage against left-wing challengers. To test this argument I conduct process tracing, analysing over 500 elite statements about agrarian reform, drawn from archival, interview and survey data. In addition, I model land expropriations at the municipal level and show how right-wing administrations disproportionately expropriated land in the states of origin of migrants and, within those, in localities where the Left was more competitive. My results portray how two externalities of inequality – crime and competition with the Left – motivated conservative support for agrarian reform in Brazil.

The literature on political participation has consistently found that protest positively and significantly correlates with voting. However, Chile can be considered a deviant case to this pattern. During the last decade, Chileans who participated in street demonstrations were unlikely to participate in elections. What explains this anomaly? We argue that this rupture between participation in protest and in elections results from an effective distancing between social-movement organisations (SMOs) and institutional politics. However, this distancing of SMOs from party politics has not been homogeneous. To examine this heterogeneity, we conduct a comparative design of two cases: the labour and student movements. Based on a mixed-methods study that combines interviews with movement leaders and surveys of protest participants in marches, we seek to highlight the mediating role of SMOs in the promotion of different forms of political participation.

The Chilean economic model has been widely studied both as a pioneering experiment in neoliberal policies and in regard to the growing social mobilisation against inequalities it has provoked. Insufficient attention has been paid, however, to the role of intellectuals in justifying and criticising the model. This article examines cultural battles over the economic model among the country's main columnists between 2010 and 2017, analysing debates as to the model's virtues and vices, achievements and failures. It shows how debate surrounding the model is highly reactive to current political events, yet occurs in somewhat of an elite bubble, centred on conceptual discussions and daily political events that tend to be dissociated from popular concerns.

Nicaragua is often held up as an exception within the Central American panorama of criminal violence, widely presented as the safest country in the region due to its particular revolutionary legacies, the (supposed) absence of transnational gangs and drug-trafficking organisations, and the National Police's representation as an efficient and professional force. This commentary proposes an alternative reading of Nicaragua's contemporary political economy of violence in order to reveal the profoundly misleading nature of this prevalent view. In particular, it highlights how Nicaragua is governed through a particular political ‘settlement’ underpinned by drug trafficking, police and judicial corruption, as well as ‘mafia state’ governance. These factors have coalesced to establish a highly efficient and engrained ‘narco-state’ whose undoing is unlikely in the short term.

This article provides a picture of the political economy of tourism and violence in Medellín. It analyses the way criminal actors and tourism entrepreneurs share a territory, by shedding light on the extortion of tour guides, street performers and business owners in some of its barrios populares (poor neighbourhoods). The main objective is to demonstrate how intimate relationships – between and among kin, friends, long-term acquaintances – impact what is considered the criminal governance of tourism. This contribution shows that extortion in Medellín meets only limited resistance from tourism entrepreneurs. It also emphasises how criminals, tourism actors and tourists themselves contribute to the creation of fragile secured spaces in the developing touristscapes of Colombia's second city.