How do bureaucrats implement public policy when faced with political intermediation? This article examines this issue in the distribution of land rights to informal settlements in the municipality of São Paulo, Brazil. Land regularization is a policy established over three decades, where politicians’ requests for land titles to their constituencies play a relevant role. Based on interviews and documents, this study finds that bureaucrats adopt a twofold approach to regulate distribution: they document informal settlements, enacting eligibility criteria; then, they manage and prioritize beneficiaries, accommodating qualifying political demands. In this process, they enforce eligibility rules consistently across cases, constraining political intermediation to a rational scheme. Therefore, bureaucrats reconcile nonprogrammatic politics and policy rules by separating eligibility assessment from beneficiary selection. This paper bridges urban distributive politics and street-level bureaucracy literature by revealing that policy implementers may use technical expertise to curb political influence and negotiate conflicting interests and constraints.

Latin American governments are increasingly adopting mano dura initiatives to combat gangs, organized crime, and insecurity. While mano dura has been a concept of increasing empirical interest, there seems to be limited conceptual clarity about the wide spectrum of strategies developed to combat crime and associated fear. This article proposes a definition of mano dura that has three different dimensions, each of them containing specific elements. The form of mano dura depends on formal, informal, and rhetorical practices. Drawing on 46 scholarly works in the social sciences, we develop our definition anchored in the knowledge of Latin American policing strategies, contributions on responses to crime in the region, and the conceptual development literature. With the purpose of supplementing our effort to standardize the usage of the term with the need to retain a degree of conceptual differentiation, we also offer a stylized model to better classify policing strategies in Latin America. In our stylized model, the numerous ways policies and narratives as well as their implementation (or not) interact can be grouped into four broad categories: full mano dura, institutional mano dura, performative mano dura, and covert mano dura.

Many studies suggest that mixed-member electoral systems produce different attitudes and behaviors among representatives. This article assesses how this type of electoral system shapes Bolivian legislators' perceptions of their roles as representatives, their district activities, and their relationships with their political parties. It examines these dimensions using elite survey data and interviews with legislators and their personal assistants. The results show that the electoral system does not produce a uniform impact. It shapes how legislators perceive their role as representatives and the nature of the relationship they build with their political parties, but it does not produce differences in the kinds of activities that both types of legislators carry out in their districts.

This essay documents growing partisan social uprootedness across Latin America over time, manifested in diminishing social trust toward parties, debilitation of links between parties and social collectivities, lowering levels of partisanship, and rising incidence of personalism in the electorate. It focuses on some unrecognized and undertheorized causal factors behind partisan involution in the region, putting emphasis on mutually reinforcing processes. First, it identifies forces endogenous to the traits of origin of diminished parties that foster their uprootedness and decay; second, it lays out some of the manifold ways that the weakening of political parties fuels regime malperformance, in a mutually reinforcing vicious circle; third, it outlines the existence of mutual feedback loops between political agency and structure; fourth, it identifies various agential sources of party decay. There are strong theoretical and empirical reasons to expect continued party deinstitutionalization across Latin America going forward.

It is not easy to distinguish between cultural, economic and political causes of the War of Independence in Spanish America and separate them into three closed compartments. Then there are psychological obstacles. There is a feeling among many Latin Americanists that this topic is exhausted and further research will add nothing new. Others want a complete revision of the usual causes cited and demand more documentary study. They believe that the standard causes are based on too scanty research, mostly done in the last century from incomplete sources. Furthermore, there are the rising nationalists and indigenistas of our century, most of them poor historians, who insist that the role of the Indians and mestizos was much more important than historians have accepted. They consider past historians racially and economically prejudiced. Such a trend is especially strong in Mexico, Bolivia, and Cuba, the three countries that have faced a real social revolution. And, unfortunately, history often follows the flag.

A moderna fase, iniciada no século XV, de contactos de europeus com regióes tropicais — contactos que têm importado na maior ou na menor europeização dessas regiões — permite-nos considerar êsse fenômeno em têrmos nao só de Historia Social e de Antropologia Cultural como de Sociología de Historia ou de Sociologia da Cultura. Em qualquer dessas especialidades, é assunto, ésse, de importancia máxima para a interpretacáo e a compreensáo do Homem Situado: assunto já de Antropologia Filosófica. Em têrmos, quer da primeira, quer de qualquer outra dessas especialidades — principalmente em têrmos, sociológicos ou antropo-filosóficos — já nos é permitido empregar a expressáo “eurotropical” para caracterizar, globalmente, ésse tipo de contactos interregionais, interraciais e interculturais.

The Aztecs discovered petroleum in Mexico and used it before the arrival of the Spanish in 1519. They burned it in tribute to their gods, caulked their canoes with it, smeared it on their bodies as a medicine, and utilized it as a dye and a glue. Over three centuries elapsed before an effort was made to turn black gold into cash. Ten years after Edwin L. Drake drilled his famous well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, a group of Mexicans unsuccessfully attempted to produce oil on the “Furbero” hacienda near Papantla in Vera Cruz state. It was not until May 1901 that Edward L. Doheny, a wily product of the rough-and-tumble American oil industry in which he had amassed a fortune, struck oil in Ébano, a jungle region of San Luis Potosí. Another pioneer in the development of Mexico's petroleum industry was Weeman Pearson, later Lord Cowdray, a Yorkshire entrepreneur who formed the fabulously profitable Mexican Eagle (Aguila) Company after discovering the “Golden Lane” fields in 1908 (Bermúdez, 1963; Sampson, 1975: 83-85; Grayson, 1978a).

It is now six years since the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) toppled the regime of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Even today, the nature of the FSLN - its road to power, its political complexion and orientation, and its objectives - remains the subject of heated debate. Some still argue that the Sandinista regime is a nationalistic, non-aligned, although radical, Third World government. Others emphasize the Marxist-Leninist overtones characterizing its seizure and consolidation of power, its foreign relations, and its efforts to introduce socialist transformation to Nicaraguan society.

Basically, there are two exaggerated views of Nicaraguan foreign policy: one depicts Nicaragua as a communist pawn of Moscow and Havana; the other views Nicaragua as a classical non-aligned Third World nation. Neither school of thought reflects the complex reality of Nicaraguan politics and foreign policy.

By Mid-1986, The Contadora Group's search for a negotiated peace in Central America had reached a seemingly insurmountable impasse. Negotiations were deadlocked over the issues of arms limitations, democratization, and US support for the Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries (contrarevolucionarios or contras). The United States and its closest Central American allies - Costa Rica, Honduras and El Salvador - demanded that Nicaragua reduce the size of its armed forces and install a democratic political system before they would end support for the contras Nicaragua's Sandinistas, in turn, refused to disarm until the United States and its Central American neighbors halted their support for the contras, they also rejected all proposals for direct negotiations with the contras.

The post-World War II period in Latin America, as elsewhere, has been marked by the presence of two somewhat contradictory phenomena in the field of armaments. On the one hand, most of the countries have continued their long-standing tradition of devoting a substantial portion of their national budgets to the military and have expanded their arsenals of weapons and stocks of military equipment. On the other hand, several governments have suggested various arms control measures for the Latin American countries. The aim of some of these suggestions has been a reduction in the level of armaments, equipment, and force size; the aim of other suggestions has been more modest—to freeze armaments and forces at existing levels; and the aim of still other suggestions has been to ban nuclear weapons from the region.

La figura egregia del patricio puertorriqueño Eugenio María de Hostos ha resultado ser en los últimos años objeto de innumerables estudios los cuales han aumentado la bibliografía de este hombre de dimensión universal.

Una fase de su vida, sin embargo, ha sido pasada por alto. A pesar de que encontramos estudios y ensayos sobre sus ideas políticas, pedagógicas, sociológicas, filosóficas, moralistas, literarias y revolucionarias, no encontramos en esta extensa bibliografía ningún intento de examinar el pensamiento militar en Hostos. Esta dimensión militar hostosiana es para mí una de las manifestaciones más activas del “hombre completo”.

Será mi propósito en este breve ensayo demostrar el impacto del pensamiento militar como influencia y como parte integral de este “inquebrantable espíritu”.

Desde el momento mismo de la conquista y establecimiento de los españoles en el Nuevo Mundo ha sido de importancia singular el problema de la aculturación de la población indígena. En la primera mitad del siglo XVI se planteó una amplia discusión doctrinal con profundas consecuencias prácticas, en la que fueron agentes activos centrales las más altas instancias políticas y administrativas del Estado español coetáneo, desde el Consejo de Indias a la persona del propio Monarca, encontrándose en el origen de las más importantes decisiones de orden legislativo adoptadas por la Corona, con sus momentos culminantes en la Junta de Burgos, mandada reunir por Fernando III de Aragón en 1512 para estudiar expresamente la problemática humana e ideológica (en la época esencialmente religiosa) de los indios americanos, y en las Leyes Nuevas de 1542 promulgadas por Carlos V bajo la immediata influencia del “grupo de presión” del que era figura prominente el dominico Bartolomé de las Casas.

Much has been heard in the postwar years about “Hemispheric Solidarity.” In popular belief, this concept not only has concerned matters of security for the Western Hemisphere but frequently has been extended to cover practically all of the international relations of the American states. Particularly, there has been the widespread assumption that the Latin-American states form a bloc in the United Nations — and, incidentally, a bloc of twenty votes in the pocket of the United States.

Peruvians who are planning more extensive development of their Northern coast area find the lack of accurate data regarding land surveys, land tenure, and land values a serious obstacle. An effective register of the real property of the area based on a sound cadastral system is urgently needed.

A typically faulty element in the agrarian structure of economically underdeveloped countries is the so-called land division or cadastral system regnant. Generally, the main objectives of these systems would be to record and measure the tenure characteristics of (agricultural) land. Their contents would vary according to the goals of the system and the resources available for establishing and maintaining it. The essential components are a registry of rights in land and its accompanying map.

President Kennedy, in his inaugural address, spoke of an “Alliance for Progress” with Latin America and more recently of an expanded Latin-American aid program. His phrase “Alliance for Progress” underscores the fact that the U. S. chooses not to be identified with blind defenders of the status quo but to support evolutionary change calling for political, social, and economic reform.

What motivates U. S. citizens to tax themselves to help the underdeveloped countries help themselves? One observes an interesting mixture of goals with respect to U. S. aid programs. There is no single enforced purpose handed down from higher authority. Each citizen indicates and advances his own preferences with some sort of compromise or majority view prevailing when necessary. One peculiarity of a democratic society is the pluralism of motivations and purposes.

For more than a decade, enormous attention has been given by academic economists, researchers, and policy makers to the problem of economic growth of the less-developed countries. The aspirations of leaders and the people of these countries for accelerated economic progress which has been characterized by the apt phrases the “revolution of rising expectations,” and the “New Awakening,” have played a major role in this new orientation in economic thought and action. Another interesting fact is that governments have emerged as consciously active “agents of change” carrying a heavy responsibüity for the success or failure of development programs.

It is difficult to write about a martyr. One has to contend with the keepers of the flame, who have strong personal and political reasons for preserving the hero's image. Moreover, myths usually contain elements of truth. Although Leonardo Ruiz Pineda is not known as widely as Zapata, Sandino, Che, or Camilo Torres, there are unmistakable efforts on the part of Venezuela's democratic leaders to include him in the pantheon of Latin America's recent revolutionary heroes.

Partimos da noção de estrutura social, cuja conceituação já propuzemos, noutra oportunidade, nos seguintes têrmos: quando falamos em es- ‘ trutura social referímo-nos a urna sociedade encarada do ãngulo das relagóes dos homens entre sí e dos homens com as coisas materiais que o cercam; relações interdependentes e geradas históricamente na atividade social de produzir e reproduzir as condições essenciais de sobrevivencia do grupo. Dêsse modo, tôda estrutura social contém, no mínimo, essas tres partes, que lhe são inseparáveis: por base, urna forma histórica de produção; por corpo, um sistema de estratificação social; por cúpula, um conjunto de instituigóes e de valôres sociais — cujo escôpo é sancionar e manter, como um todo, o sistema estreitamente interdependente formado por essas partes.

A marked improvement has occurred since 1968 in Havana's relations with Moscow and the traditional Communist parties of Latin America. Previously, however, from approximately 1966-1968 Fidel Castro's actions and words came perilously close to precipitating a formal split between his regime and the pro-Soviet parties of the hemisphere. At one time, sporadic criticisms of standard Communist party revolutionary strategy and tactics escalated in frequency and gravity. An ideological offensive advanced as Castro flaunted an independent Marxist line in both domestic and international affairs. Havana proceeded to exacerbate growing tensions in the uneasy alliance between guerrilla movements and Communist parties in several Latin American countries.

Attempts to establish the factors prompting these actions have to date focused on Cuban reactions to developments in the Venezuelan revolutionary movement during 1964-1966.