The phenomenon of peasant revolt in the Andean area of South America has been both sustained and violent from Spanish colonial times to the present. The revolt of Túpac Amaru II, who led a rebellion against Spanish colonialism near Cuzco in 1780, has been the best-known incidence of this phenomenon, although the southern highlands region, sometimes known as the mancha india (“Indian stain”), was the center of numerous local revolts during the period 1860–1920, and the focus of several peasant land invasions during the two decades 1950–70.

Although most government leaders espouse the principle of “health for all,” few pay more than lip service to the ideal by allocating adequate resources for its development. In Cuba, however, health care is a basic human right and the responsibility of the state. Cuban leaders consider health indicators to be measures of government efficacy, and as a result, health care has assumed an inordinately prominent place in Cuban government policies despite the present world economic crisis. Although affected to a lesser extent because of its integration into the Community for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), Cuba has nevertheless been increasing health care expenditures in the face of economic adversity.

This article focuses on three central impediments to police reform in Argentina, each of which has generated an important, yet distinct, paradox. First, although advocates of federalism argue that police reform facilitates innovation, in practice, reform efforts at one level of government in Argentina have been sabotaged by officials at other levels of government. Second, although electoral pressures have pushed police reform onto the policy agenda, these same pressures have also obstructed reform efforts because politicians depend on illicit party-police networks for campaign financing. Third, despite copious evidence of police involvement in criminal acts, Argentina's crime wave has energized conservative civil society groups whose demand for a heavy-handed response to crime has derailed the most promising attempts to restructure the police force.

During the 1980s, the major security themes that Caribbean scholars studied were geopolitics, militarization, intervention, and instability. The interface between domestic and international politics led to linkages among some of these themes and their domestic, regional, and international dimensions. For example, the militarization of Grenada in the 1980s was predicated on the need to defend the Grenadian revolution against foreign intervention and local counterrevolution. Ironically, the same buildup created the climate that led to the self-destruction of the revolution and presented the United States with a golden opportunity to intervene. In doing so, the United States succeeded in fulfilling a preexisting geopolitical aim of its own. Elsewhere in the region, militarization and concerns about stability in Dominica, Barbados, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines raised security concerns within the Eastern Caribbean, where several countries created the Regional Security System (RSS) in 1982 to bolster subregional security and became willing accomplices of intervention when the United States intervened in Grenada a year later.

The article aims to identify the factors behind a series of center-left electoral victories in the 2002 and 2006 state elections, which indicate the decay of state political machines in Brazil's poorest regions. It is argued that vertical competition between the federal and state governments in the provision of public policies works as a constraint on state bosses' strategies of political control. The withering of state political machines may be understood as an indirect consequence of the national political shifts represented by the rise of Brazil's most important left-wing organization—the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores)—to the presidency in 2002 and 2006. Social and economic policies implemented by the federal government under PT rule undermined subnational patron-client networks by improving the life conditions of the poorest sections of the electorate. The article explores the interlinking of national and subnational electoral dynamics by developing statistical models for state- and municipal-level data.

In revisiting Latin America to gather impressions for this essay, I soon convinced myself that the most conspicuous characteristic of the region's recent experience is diversity and that the most interesting stories to be told are about specific, often contrasting experiences of individual countries. So, except for the first and last sections, I shall not deal here with Latin America in overall terms. Rather, I shall present a series of loosely connected and necessarily brief “exercises” in comparative political economy. Not surprisingly, primary attention will be given to the four countries I visited this time: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. My endeavor throughout will be to gain some perspective on current or recent issues by tying them into events and discussions of earlier decades.

The African influence on Latin American Spanish is undisputed, and yet the field of Afro-Hispanic linguistics is hampered by the lack of widespread Hispanic creole dialects, or even areas of widespread Afro-Hispanic language usage. A few tiny dialect pockets continue to exist, however, such as the palenquero dialect of Palenque de San Basilio in northern Colombia, and the special dialect of the negros congos of Panama's Caribbean coast; until the first decades of the twentieth century, a partially creolized Bozal Spanish (spoken by African slaves who had learned Spanish as a second language, and only imperfectly) was still to be found in Cuba as well as vestigially in Puerto Rico and perhaps the Dominican Republic. Given the geographical inaccessibility of many areas of Latin America containing large African populations, it is possible that additional traces of vestigial Afro-Hispanic language may still be found or may have recently disappeared.

Through a case study of small-scale Kaqchikel Maya farmers involved in non-traditional export agriculture (NTAX) in the Central Guatemalan highlands, this article examines the tensions between the mostly positive perceptions of farmers and the negative assessments of many who study NTAX production. In a context of severe political-economic structural inequalities and potentially high social and cultural costs, quantitative household survey results demonstrate a modest decrease in concentration of land in favour of Maya smallholders; more gender-egalitarian relations of production than expected; and largely positive local perceptions of economic and social change. Qualitative analysis interprets these findings in light of Maya-affective ties to land, preferences for continuity in traditional labor organization and subsistence maize production, perceptions of risk, and the transfer of traditional marketing skills. We find that Kaqchikeles are shaping alternative modernities as they deal with new sets of political-economic and social constraints.

During the two decades preceding the abolition law of 1880, Cuban sugar planters pursued two parallel goals. The first undertaking was a concerted effort to increase the efficiency of agricultural and industrial production. A sophisticated railroad network was constructed to the interior from the ports of Havana, Matanzas, Cárdenas, and Cienfuegos in the 1840s and 1850s. Railroads opened high-yielding virgin land in frontier regions to production, and in the 1860s and 1870s, planters attempted to further the transportation revolution by developing rail systems within their estates to carry cane from fields to mills. Because the sucrose content of cane begins to drop immediately after the cane is cut, internal railway lines had the potential to revolutionize sugar production by moving cane quickly to the processing phase. Railroads also helped to resolve the recurring problem of roads washed out by heavy rains, which often precluded transporting harvested cane to mills for refining. In addition to revolutionizing transportation, planters also sought to raise industrial yields by installing modern milling equipment with greater processing capacity. The Jamaican trains of the early nineteenth century were replaced by vacuum-pan evaporators and centrifuges on the most modern mills by the 1860s and 1870s, a change that produced higher grades of sugar more efficiently.

Insurgency has largely subsided in Central America, but the academic debate over the causes of the violence in the 1980s waxes hotter than ever. As scholars, we have an obligation to subject our theories to the acid test of reality. As individuals interested in the policy process, we must evaluate the outcomes of those policies, even though they are sometimes based on faulty readings of our theories. The increasingly rich body of literature and data available on Central America compels observers to move away from the speculation that dominated early scholarship on the region and toward serious empirical tests of our theories. In doing so, scholars will be in a position to evaluate the policies pursued by the United States and various Central American governments. My article in this journal on land tenure in El Salvador attempted to address both theory and policy with new data (Seligson 1995). Judging by the reactions of Martin Diskin and Jeffery Paige, the conclusions that I drew have succeeded in stimulating a rich debate.

This article explains why some indigenous communities in Mexico have been able to resist drug cartels’ attempts to take over their local governments, populations, and territories while others have not. While indigenous customary laws and traditions provide communal accountability mechanisms that make it harder for narcos to take control, they are insufficient. Using a paired comparison of two indigenous regions in the highlands of Guerrero and Chihuahua—both ideal zones for drug cultivation and traffic—we show that the communities most able to resist narco conquest are those that have a history of social mobilization, expanding village-level indigenous customary traditions into regional ethnic autonomy regimes. By scaling up local accountability practices regionally and developing translocal networks of cooperation, indigenous movements have been able to construct mechanisms of internal control and external protection that enable communities to deter the narcos from corrupting local authorities, recruiting young men, and establishing criminal governance regimes through force.

This research note discusses an emerging subfield of inquiry in the study of democratization in Latin America: a focus on the relationships between past human rights abuses and democratization processes. It outlines four sets of questions emerging around the themes of “historical memory” and “legacies of authoritarian rule.” The study then examines documentary collections of major human rights nongovernmental organizations (HRNGOs) in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. The purpose of this endeavor is to provide researchers interested in studying the four issues with specific information on documents produced and currently held by the HRNGOs in the Southern Cone. The essay examines seven HRNGOs in Chile, ten in Argentina, and four in Uruguay, and ends with practical hints for researchers who wish to use these resources.

Natural-resource-based export-oriented growth strategies have resurfaced as the dominant development approach in Latin America. While a growing literature exists on the economic, equity, gender, and environmental impacts of this development strategy, insufficient attention has been paid to its significance for labor. This article seeks to help fill this gap by analyzing its effects on Chilean workers. Based on a study of the fruit, forestry, and fishing sectors, my work shows that this type of development strategy can be very labor-absorbing and can offer significant benefits for labor when it leads to “agro-industrialization.” Nonetheless, although working conditions clearly improved after the late 1980s, it is likely that the first decade of the twenty-first century will not be a repeat of the 1990s. The hypercompetition that now characterizes these sectors is putting tremendous pressure on firms to reduce costs, including that of labor. Stripped of basic state protections and left with little social power, Chilean workers are much more vulnerable than they were before.

The fight against ecological degradation “has become a generalized policy demand of the whole society,” declared Marcelo Javelly Girard, Mexico's Secretary of Urban Development and Ecology. Addressing the Mexican Cabinet and hundreds of dignitaries attending Mexico's Primera Reunión Nacional de Ecología in June of 1984, Javelly Girard thus placed environmental concerns on President Miguel de la Madrid's official policy agenda. Appropriately convened in Mexico City (the world's fifth-most-polluted city by the Mexican government's own reckoning), the congress climaxed two years of effort by the de la Madrid administration to promote public environmental awareness as part of its national development program.

In a recent article published in the Latin American Research Review, Simone Bohn analyzed electoral results and survey data from Brazil to contest several theses concerning the reelection of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2006. In particular, Bohn asserted that beneficiaries of Bolsa Família, a conditional cash transfer program that was reaching eleven million families at the time of the 2006 election, were already supporters of Lula in 2002, and therefore the program could not have contributed to the change in Lula's constituency between his election in 2002 and his reelection in 2006. We show that these claims are based on voter recall data collected between nine and fifty-seven months after the elections, and that these data grossly overestimate actual electoral support for Lula—probably as a result of well-known reporting biases. Reanalysis of Bohn's data as well as analysis of more reliable surveys suggest that there were indeed significant changes in voting patterns between 2002 and 2006, and that Bolsa Família did play an important role in the 2006 elections.

Following a sharp increase in the number of border arrivals from the violence-torn countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras in the spring and summer of 2014, the United States quickly implemented a strategy designed to prevent such surges by enhancing its detention and deportation efforts. In this article, we examine the emigration decision for citizens living in the high-crime contexts of northern Central America. First, through analysis of survey data across Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, we explore the role crime victimization plays in leading residents of these countries to consider emigration. Next, using survey data collected across twelve municipalities in Honduras, we evaluate the extent to which knowledge of heightened US immigration deterrence efforts influenced respondents’ emigration decision. Though a vast majority of these respondents were aware of the stricter US immigration policy regime, this awareness had no effect on their consideration of emigration as a viable strategy.

Este trabajo estudia la generificación (la asignación de un género sexual) de los elementos del debate sobre la novela nacional en el siglo XIX en Chile. Analizando el caso de Alberto Blest Gana, sostengo que la novela nacional se propuso como una intermediación entre dos polos. Por un lado, la lectura por placer era socialmente percibida como femenina. La lectura de los textos clásicos era, por otro, masculina porque suponía un trabajo y una dificultad que hacía que el retorno recibido de la inversión de tiempo y dinero en la actividad fuera productivo, es decir, legítimo. En este contexto, la novela nacional y su lectura se construían como formas de mediación de estas polaridades que organizaban y constituían la cultura nacional. La hipótesis general es que la lectura de periódicos y las lecturas hechas en periódicos (como folletines y artículos) ocuparía un lugar intermedio que terminaría por mediar la distancia entre aquellas formas de lectura socialmente construidas.

Almost without exception, Latin American countries have experienced rapid urbanization during recent decades. The population living in urban areas, mainly that in large cities, has been growing much faster than the rural population. There is, of course, a wide range of variation between different countries. Venezuela's urban population grew during the fifties at a rate ten times that of the rural population while Costa Rica's rates of urban and rural growth were approximately equal. Internal migration accounts for a large part of the increase in the urban population and especially for the difference between urban and rural rates of growth.