Fixed attitudes toward literature in Latin America display a consistent tendency to become unfixed in relatively short order. This is particularly true in the case of fiction dealing with Indian themes.

During the 1930s and the following decade, a number of diverse factors coincided to encourage cultivation of this facet of the Latin-American novel, in a manner quite different from nineteenth-century romantics who had glorified and idealized a remote, unreal indigenous past. Mounting socio-economic pressures, newly-awakened political movements, a widespread national consciousness, strengthened among novelists by the successes of the criollista writers of the 1920's (Gallegos, Güiraldes, Rivera) — all combined to encourage concentration on the Indian as a social problem.

Jaribbean scholars and analysts frequently point out that, despite its predominantly insular nature, it is not geography that accounts for the complexities and division of the Caribbean but, rather, history. Contemporary politics and international relations only confirm this judgment. As a result, and however unwillingly, we have become accustomed to viewing the region through narrow definitions and categories which, even though validated over time, contrast with the region's geographic, historical, political and economic reality.In the process, these limited views have given rise to persistent myths regarding both the region and its future.

Throughout its history, many names have been given to the area: from Antilles to West Indies to Caribbean Basin. The varying colonial contexts, as well as the diverse cultural and political assumptions of the main state actors involved in the area, have ascribed a wide variety of names to the region.

When speaking of the Caribbean, and taking into account the different historical assumptions and perceptions, three distinct definitions generally arise.

Crisis, breakdown, and disintegration have become operative concepts in journalistic, academic, and official assessments of contemporary affairs in Central America. The radicalization and Cubanization of the Nicaraguan revolution, the resurgence of revolutionary messianism and continuing violence in El Salvador and Guatemala, and the increasingly active and direct role which regional powers and European countries are playing in the region have turned Central America into a salient, global confrontational arena.

A systemic view, however, would miss important political processes continuing with surprising strength but unnoticed regularity in some Central American nations indirectly affected by revolutionary conflict and thus partially insulated from the region's high level of violence.

The purpose of this article is to provide a brief introduction and description of the dominant power components within the Brazilian university student movement in the area of political action. This is a field in which very little has been written, either in English or Portuguese. Because of this, and also due to the constant state of flux within the movement, this study must be considered as an initial effort toward understanding a rather complex area of Brazilian affairs. Much of what is described here may be radically changed within a few years, though in which direction is not yet clear. While extreme left groups now dominate the movement, some signs of democratic awakening are beginning to appear. These are, however, weak and sporadic efforts.

Could an individual’s perception of the possibility of a future ecological crisis be linked to their level of political trust? Studies of environmental attitudes have identified political trust as an important predictor of support for environmental taxation or risk perceptions surrounding specific local environmental hazards, but less is known about its role when environmental risks are perceived as diffuse and distant. Using original survey data from Ecuador, this article finds that political distrust predicts heightened ecological crisis perceptions and that higher educational attainment intensifies this relationship. A follow-up analysis of the AmericasBarometer’s Ecuador survey shows that political distrust also predicts higher concern about climate change. These findings suggest that when evaluations of political institutions reflect perceptions of environmental risks, individuals blame the government for environmental failures. The implications of this study are particularly relevant for political institutions in developing economies, where the public sector often spearheads development efforts.

This article evaluates 38 bills seeking to expand women's rights in Chile and finds that the successful ones often originated with the Executive National Women's Ministry (SERNAM), did not threaten existing definitions of gender roles, and did not require economic redistribution. These factors (plus the considerable influence of the Catholic Church) correlate in important ways, and tend to constrain political actors in ways not apparent from an examination of institutional roles or ideological identity alone. In particular, the Chilean left's strategic response to this complex web of interactions has enabled it to gain greater legislative influence on these issues over time.

In contemporary Latin America, deep-seated social discontent with political elites and institutions has been, paradoxically, the counterpart of democratic stability and resilience. This paradox suggests that scholarly assessments of democracy are, at least partially, at odds with citizens’ own views of democracy. This article thus develops a framework to describe citizens’ everyday experience with civil, political, and social entitlements associated with democracy. It introduces the framework by analyzing the structural underpinnings of democratic discontent in Chile and then applying it to the analysis of perceived citizenship entitlements in 18 countries, using the AmericasBarometer data. Significant variance is observed across time and both across and within countries. The descriptive findings also imply that only a (declining) minority of Latin American citizens feel fully entitled to civil, political, and social citizenship rights. We advocate the need to bring the demand side of democracy back to the analysis of democratic shortcomings and crises.

The Spanish consulado — or Catalan consolat de mar — emerged from the medieval economy of Mediterranean towns. From a simple maritime court, its prototype in thirteenth-century Valencia, the Consulado evolved into a permanent tribunal with appellate as well as original jurisdiction in mercantile disputes. Ultimately, the consular court constituted one of three divisions of the guild merchant. The matrícula, or guild membership, comprised resident merchants who met various qualifications of age, property, and vocation. In annual assemblies the guildsment elected the judges of their court, usually a prior and two consuls. The prior and consuls were at once judges, active merchants, and members ex-officio of an executive council or junta. This governing body represented the merchant class in negotiating with other groups, especially public officials. It administered customs and taxes, enforced trade regulations, carried out public works projects, and in many other ways intervened in the economic life of the community.

On October 16, 1962, the President of the United States — the late President Kennedy — was informed of the results of aerial surveillance of Cuba: missiles with a definite “offensive” capability were being prepared for launching! Six days later, on October 22, in an evening radio and television address to the nation, President Kennedy presented, in no mistakable terms, the new military threat to the United States posed by Cuba, and announced actions to be taken that were equally unequivocal and dramatic.

This paper explores the importance of patterns of urbanization and migration in Colombia for the design of appropriate policies for regional, urban, and intermediate-city development. An opening section reviews the growth of the nineteen major municipios over the period 1918 through 1964, the date of the most recent available census. When these cities are ranked by size from largest to smallest, one observes a high degree of stability of rankings over the fifty-year period considered. This stability supports the hypothesis that an articulated hierarchy and system of cities has developed. That development in turn owes much to the flow of migrants into these cities. Largely as a result of the intensive migration into the four largest cities, their share of the total population of the 19 urban municipios rose from 46 percent in 1918 to 62 percent by 1964.

In 1817, Henri de Saint-Simon won the nineteen-year-old Auguste Comte over to his views concerning the lamentable condition of post-revolutionary French society and the necessity for a radical scheme of reform, and it was during the political turmoil of the second quarter of the nineteenth century that Comte, intending to reorder society through the application of scientific knowledge to social ills, presented his philosophy of positivism. Comte's project was nothing less than a blueprint for universal reform that would not only save France from ruin but would also, hopefully, rescue all of humanity. In its entirety the Comtean doctrine included a philosophy of history, a theory of knowledge and pedagogy, a method or logic of science, a positivist ethic (the so-called "subjective synthesis"), a socioeconomic plan, a theory of government, and a type of secular faith which he called the Religion of Humanity.

Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney is faced with a number of difficult choices concerning Canada's foreign policy in Central America. These choices are particularly problematic because their repercussions may have an important impact on Canada- US relations. On the one hand, the Prime Minister must heed public opinion in Canada which favors increased government concern about human rights and economic development in Central America. On the other hand, he must consider American security interests and not irritate or embarrass the United States and President Reagan in particular.

Canada's middle power status puts it in a difficult quandary, for it seeks to retain an independent role in Central America, while it finds its influence circumscribed by its proximity to the US superpower. Its ability to wield tangible authority is thus severely attenuated. Canada's asymmetrical relationship with the United States allows it a certain degree of latitude in formulating foreign policy but imposes important constraints as well.

CONASUPO (Compañia Nacional de Subsistencias Populares) is a vertically integrated distribution system for staple goods in Mexico. It is an autonomous, public enterprise, and it has broad policy formulation and implementation responsibilities as an agency for development. CONASUPO competes with private sector producers, wholesalers, and retailers, in addition to its special roles in economic and market development.

It is the object of this article to describe how marketing decisions are made in CONASUPO. The environment within which market decisions are made in CONASUPO sets the parameters for its decision processes and influences the types of marketing strategies that it pursues.

The Supposed emergence of a New World Order has quickly become one of the cliches of the 1990s. First enunciated by President Bush in the context of US attempts to mobilize international support for the Gulf War, the phrase has already been defined and redefined in countless journalistic analyses of recent events in Eastern Europe, the Gulf itself and lately of course the Soviet Union. This is not the place to add directly to that debate. It is obvious that the world order of the 1990s is very different from the post-1945 order. Briefly expressed, it is constituted by the interplay between, on the one hand, a new but still unequal diffusion of power between the core states of the world (the United States, the European Community [EC], and Japan) and, on the other, a new concentration of power in the hands of international capital.

When Commodore David Porter resigned from the US Navy to accept the post of commander-in-chief of Mexico’s nascent naval forces, he began a tradition of US involvement with Latin American armed forces that has endured to the present day. Porter’s decision was supported by President John Quincy Adams, who hoped that it would both strengthen the US influence in Mexico and act as a curb on possible Mexican efforts to seize Cuba, a prize which the president coveted himself (for details, see Long, 1970). These objectives signaled another enduring heritage: efforts by the United States to use ties with Latin American military institutions to promote agendas that were frequently unrelated to, or even at variance with, national interests in Latin America. This would be especially true whenever the United States perceived itself as competing with other nations for influence in the region. In 1826, the rival was Great Britain; in this century, it was first Germany and then the Soviet Union, but, in all cases, the bottom line was the same: a determination to make Washington’s influence paramount.

This article seeks to explain the highly interventionist Brazilian automobile policy of 1995, which drastically departed from the neoliberal principles guiding Brazilian economic policy at the time. This seemingly inconsistent policy stemmed from two overlapping bargains. The first, between the private sector and the government's developmentalist, and hence more permeable elements, shaped the policy's content and design. A second, more crucial intrastate bargain pitted the defenders of the previous development model against the team of neoliberal, technocratic economists who had centralized economic decisionmaking authority since mid-1993. These economists' support for the automobile policy must be understood as a response to the macroeconomic and political challenges they faced in 1995. This study highlights the importance of examining the undisclosed actions of the state and the role of intrastate cleavages in political economy outcomes.

Scholars of Brazil’s public health system commonly note the intertwined roles that federal, state, and municipal governments play in delivering care, yet few studies systematically examine varying service performance in areas with overlapping mandates, such as state capitals. This study addresses that gap by developing and analyzing a novel measure of municipal primary care provision that accounts for the proportion of the population without access to private services in 11 large capital cities, then comparing them to the noncapital municipalities in their states. The study finds that capitals generally underperform the noncapital municipalities in primary service delivery. It then draws on a comparative case study in two major capitals, Salvador and Belo Horizonte, and their encompassing states to explore how a history of cooperative or adversarial relations between state and local governments conditions the impact of partisanship, participatory institutions, and public health activists on primary care delivery.

Defining the rights that must be protected in a democracy is an integral component of the process of democratization. In the case of Argentina, the definition of these rights results partly from important debates between human rights organizations (HROs) and the state. Argentine HROs have framed their demands for state protection of human rights in terms of the need to protect the family. Yet HROs' successes in using international courts as arbiters may be reducing their need to present their demands in this framework.

Although Ecuadorian presidents tolerate most opposition voices most of the time, they routinely try to restrict the basic political liberties of particular critics. In doing so, they initiate executive assaults. Why do some of these executive assaults succeed while others fail? This article analyzes patterns of support for and opposition to publicly contested assaults in Ecuador between 1979 and 2004. Using a combination of statistical tests and a case study, it develops an argument based on the relative power of different types of organizations and associations to influence the outcomes of assault conflicts. The analysis demonstrates that executive assaults fail only when neither the state security forces nor the business sector supports them. In this situation, particular business organizations are able to force presidents to back down. The analysis provides new insights into the social foundations of democratic practice in Ecuador, and Latin America more broadly.