Through the application of an analytical model categorized as “missionary,” this article examines the cultural and political-religious frames that sustain the leadership of Hugo Chávez. It demonstrates that missionary politics is a forceful presence in today's Venezuela, and should be understood as a form of political religion characterized by a dynamic relationship between a charismatic leader and a moral community that is invested with a mission of salvation against conspiratorial enemies. The leader's verbal and nonverbal discourses play an essential role in the development of such a missionary mode of politics, which seeks to provide the alienated mass of underprivileged citizens with an identity and a sense of active participation in national affairs. This study argues that purely utilitarian and materialistic explanations of Chávez's leadership fail to capture these soteriological dynamics in his movement.

This study explores the evolution of the Green Grants program, run by Brazil’s Ministry of Environment, as a means for developing the concept of bureaucratic activism. When the Workers’ Party first took office in 2003, many social movement actors joined the government, especially in that agency. After 2007, however, most of these activists left the government. At the same time, the ministry substituted thousands of temporary employees for permanent civil servants. Surprisingly, this study finds that these public employees carried forward the environmentalist cause, even when this required contesting the priorities of superiors. Examining their attitudes and practices leads to a definition of activism as the proactive pursuit of opportunities to defend contentious causes. The case study helps to develop this concept and to demonstrate that workers inside bureaucracies can engage in activist behavior. It also explores the effects of bureaucratic activism on environmental policymaking in Brazil.

This article examines efforts to increase taxation of highly concentrated, undertapped income and profits in Latin America in the aftermath of structural adjustment. Argentina has advanced further than Chile in two policy areas: corporate taxation, which taps firm-level profits; and tax agency access to bank information, which helps reduce income tax evasion. These outcomes are explained by drawing on the classic concepts of business instrumental power, which entails political actions, and structural power, which arises from investment decisions. In Chile, strong instrumental power removed reforms in both areas from the policy agenda. In Argentina, much weaker instrumental power at the cross-sectoral level facilitated corporate tax increases. Bank information access was expanded after Argentina's 2001 crisis weakened the financial sector's instrumental power and reduced structural power.

Brazil’s 1993 law requiring candidates to report their campaign contributions has generated a new source of data to explore the supposition that Brazilian elections are extraordinarily expensive. An examination of these data from Brazil’s 1994 and 1998 general elections reveals that most money for Brazilian electoral campaigns comes from business sources and that leftist candidates have extremely limited access to such financing. The effect on democracy is that Brazil’s largely unregulated campaign finance system tends to decrease the scope of interest representation.

Has democracy promoted poverty alleviation and equity-enhancing reforms in Brazil, a country of striking inequality and destitution? The effects of an open, competitive political system have not been straightforward. Factors that would seem to work toward this goal include the voting power of poor people, the progressive 1988 Constitution, the activism of social movements, and governance since 1995 by presidents affiliated with center-left and left parties. Yet these factors have been counterbalanced by the strong political influence and lobbying power of organized interests with a stake in preexisting arrangements of social protection and human capital formation. An analysis of four key federal sectors, social security, education, health care, and public assistance, illustrates the challenges for social sector reforms that go beyond raising basic living standards to enhancing socioeconomic inequality.

If one interprets China's sizable rise in Latin America as an unprecedented phenomenon, it follows that the concurrent story of declining U.S. influence in the region is an event hastily acknowledged at best and ignored at worst. In this article, we ask whether Chinese economic statecraft in Latin America is related to the declining U.S. hegemonic influence in the region and explore how. To do so we analyze foreign direct investments, bank loans, and international trade from 2003 to 2014, when China became a major player in the region. We use data from 21 Latin American countries, and find that an inversely proportional relationship exists between the investments made by Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs), bank loans, manufacturing exports, and the U.S. hegemonic influence exerted in the region. In other words, Beijing has filled the void left by a diminished U.S. presence in the latter's own backyard.

The Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) emerged in Bolivia’s Chapare region in the 1990s. Born of a rural social movement of coca growers, it spread to the cities and became the country’s dominant political force as its leader, Evo Morales, was elected to the presidency in 2005. This article argues that the MAS is a hybrid organization whose electoral success has been contingent on the construction of a strong rural-urban coalition, built on the basis of different linkages between the MAS and organized popular constituencies in rural and urban areas. Whereas the MAS’s rural origins gave rise to grassroots control over the leadership, its expansion to urban areas has fostered the emergence of top-down mobilization strategies. The analysis also reveals how much popular sectors allied with the MAS have pressured the Morales government from below and held it accountable to societal demands.

Scholars believe that mass partisanship in Brazil is comparatively weak. Using evidence from a 2002 national survey, however, this study finds that the aggregate level of party identification actually falls only slightly below the world average and exceeds levels found in many newer democracies. Yet this finding is misleading, because the distribution of partisanship is skewed toward only one party, the PT. This trend results from a combination of party organization and recruitment efforts and individual motivation to acquire knowledge and become involved in politicized social networks. Partisanship for other parties, however, derives substantially from personalistic attachments to party leaders. This finding has implications for current debates about the status of parties in Brazil. Also important is the impact of the 2005 corruption scandal implicating the PT and President Lula da Silva's administration.

Are international labor rights campaigns making a difference in Latin America? This article reveals that Dominican policymakers and bureaucrats are responding to foreign pressure by redoubling their commitment to a distinctively Franco-Iberian model of labor law enforcement, in which skilled labor inspectors use their discretion to balance society's demand for protection with the economy's need for efficiency. In so doing, they provide an alternative to traditional collective bargaining practices—which at least partly decouples both the intensity of the enforcement effort and the degree of worker protection from the level of unionization—and an example for the rest of the region. The article therefore concludes by reconsidering the Central American experience in light of the Dominican findings and discussing their joint implications for our understanding of administrative reform, industrial relations, and globalization, not only in the so-called CAFTA countries but in Latin America more generally.

This article examines key ideological, economic, and institutional preferences of the Brazilian political elite in the first 25 years of the country's present democratic regime. Introducing the unified dataset of the Brazilian Legislative Surveys, it examines several crucial dimensions of politicians' attitudes, including elite placement on a traditional left-right scale, preferences concerning the fundamental economic model, direct comparisons of the recent Cardoso and Lula governments, and orientations toward Brazil's global and regional projection. On many of the central issues, attitudes have remained stable, but on the dimensions that have seen notable change, nearly all the change has been in the direction of decreasing polarization. In contrast to the experience of some neighboring countries, the Brazilian case demonstrates that the sustained practice of democracy can lead to attitudinal convergence and macro-political stability, even when the initial political and socioeconomic conditions appear daunting.

Since 1980 the maoist party known as Sendero Luminoso, the “Shining Path,” has been waging a guerrilla campaign against the civilian government of Peru. To the surprise of most observers, this group not only has survived but has expanded its scope of operations, kept the military on the defensive, and attracted a small but significant national following.

This limited success is puzzling because of the movement's small size, its lack of arms and its extreme radicalism, in a country with a diverse and substantial Left. Sendero Luminoso, calling itself the Communist Party of Peru, holds to an orthodox Maoist philosophy.

Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), founded in 1980s Los Angeles by Salvadoran immigrant youth, is today one of the largest street gangs in North and Central America. In recent years the group has acquired a reputation for extreme brutality and has ostensibly mutated into a fast-expanding, transnational organized crime network with possible ties to international terrorists. Drawing on key concepts in gang research and multiple methodological tools, this article seeks to sharpen understanding of MS-13’s structure and activities. While the group is active in many countries, it is transnational only in a symbolic manner, not in its configuration or span of authority. Impelled largely by Central American gang-suppression policies, MS-13 has evolved from a traditional street gang into a group with organized crime characteristics, but it remains a social phenomenon rooted in urban marginality. Ultimately, a more nuanced picture of Mara Salvatrucha can inform the search for more effective gang policies.

This article examines two decades of strengthening, expansion, and diffusion of gender quota laws in Latin America. The analysis departs from studies of quotas' adoption, numerical effectiveness, or policy impacts, instead focusing on states' use of coercive power to integrate women into public and private institutions. Viewing these policies in light of feminist theories of the poststructuralist state reveals how state institutions act to restructure government and promote gender equality. In building this argument, the article presents an up-to-date empirical survey and conceptual understanding of quota evolution in Latin America, including recent developments in countries such as Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.

This article focuses on the role of multinational corporations in the Colombian conflict, particularly how they contributed to the escalation of land conflicts and to the violent transformation of the rural economy into one based on rentier capital. It also explores how these companies helped in fomenting and financing the war system, an element that could partly explain the protracted persistence of the Colombian conflict.

This article examines the implications of the Ecuadorian Indian movement for democratic politics. During the 1990s, the movement successfully fostered indigenous and popular participation in public life, influenced government policies, and became a contender in power struggles. But in the institutional domain, the participatory breakthrough had mixed effects. While the movement fulfilled functions of interest representation and control of state power, its involvement in a coup attempt demonstrated that its political socialization had not nurtured a sense of commitment to democracy. The evidence is discussed by reference to the proposition that civil society actors may or may not contribute to democracy. The article argues that the study of the democratic spinoffs of civil activism requires a context-specific approach that considers the particularistic orientations of civil associations and pays attention to their definition of means and ends, the institutional responses evoked by their initiatives, and the unintended consequences of their actions.

In May 1992, Pedro Collor de Mello accused his brother and then-president of Brazil, Fernando Collor de Mello, of involvement in an extensive corruption scheme operated and directed by his former campaign manager, Paulo César Farias. Pressured by opposition forces, the Brazilian Congress set up a commission of inquiry to investigate the widely publicized charges. Despite a combination of both passive resistance and active harassment on the part of government, the commission began a searching probe into Farias' diverse and shady dealings. Following leads uncovered by investigative journalists, the commission found conclusive evidence that Farias had, indeed, paid for many of the president's personal expenses, up to and including a $2.5 million landscaping job for the Collor mansion grounds. Much of this money came from the private enterprise sector in return for favors, like government contracts, which Farias was able to obtain by using his influence with the Collor administration.

How does the state ensure the implementation of national policies in a context of decentralized political authority? This article identifies a new strategy utilized by national bureaucrats to regulate the behavior of subnational politicians: mobilizing civil society as government watchdog and political advocate. In the context of decentralized governance, in which local politicians administer most social sector programs, reform-minded bureaucrats often find that they have little control over the implementation of their progressive policies. In Brazil’s AIDS policy sector, however, bureaucrats have ensured the successful implementation of their policies by developing allies outside government. These state actors—here called activist bureaucrats—have been largely overlooked in the English-language literature, yet they form a new layer of politics in Latin America.

In these polarized and challenging times, not even perceptions of personal risk are immune to partisanship. This article introduces results from a new survey with an embedded social media experiment conducted during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. Descriptive results show that progovernment and opposition partisans report very different expectations of health and job risks. Job and health policy have become wedge issues that elicit partisan responses. The analysis exploits random variation in the survey recruitment to show the effects of the president’s first speech on national television on the perceived risk and the moderating effect of partisanship. The article presents a framing experiment that models key cognitive mechanisms driving partisan differences in perceptions of health risks and job security during the COVID-19 crisis.

This article analyzes the evolution of the network of Brazilian federal accountability institutions over the course of the past generation, between the transition to democracy and the end of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s second term. Substantively, the article charts the significant gains that have been made in accountability institutions. Theoretically, it evaluates the evolution of these institutions as a consequence of the distribution of rules, routines, roles, and resources across a larger institutional network, demonstrating that changes in the various bureaucratic agencies have mutually reinforced each other and generated autocatalytic processes of reform.

This essay argues that neoliberalism has strengthened the sustainability of democracy in Latin America but limited its quality. Drastic market reform seems to have abetted the survival of competitive civilian rule through its external and internal repercussions. By opening up Latin American countries to the world economy, neoliberalism has exposed them to more of the international pressures for preserving democracy that intensified with the end of the Cold War. At the same time, the move to market economics has weakened leftist parties, trade unions, and other proponents of radical socioeconomic reform, reassuring elites and preventing them from undermining democracy. But tighter external economic constraints limit governments' latitude and thereby restrict the effective range of democratic choice; and the weakening of parties and interest associations has depressed political participation and eroded government accountability. The available evidence therefore suggests that neoliberalism has been a mixed blessing for Latin American democracies.