This article analyses the history of the military clergy and contrasts its role in the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships on the basis of new, previously inaccessible sources. It is argued here that, in addition to its ideological orientation, two further factors explain differences in the influence of the military clergy on the two regimes: first, the structural position that the Military Vicariates occupied between the Church and the armed forces, and, second, the two dictatorships’ different needs for legitimisation. The analysis provides information relevant to understanding the public role of the Catholic Church and the dimensions of violence during the regimes.

The history of the transition to civilian rule in Chile largely overlooks or marginalizes the role of the armed and confrontational forms of resistance to the dictatorship. This article traces the pre and post-coup history of the Left's engagement with armed forms of struggle and evaluates the effects their incorporation into the struggle against the dictatorship had upon the regime and the Reagan administration. It concludes that armed resistance was a major factor in determining US policy to Chile during the 1980s, and therefore played an important role in the transition as a whole.

Based on extensive and long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2002 and 2009, and by analysing the presence, use and struggles over public space of cartoneros and vecinos in middle-class and central neighbourhoods of the city of Buenos Aires, this article examines practices, moralities and narratives operating in the production and maintenance of social inequalities. Concentrating on spatialised interactions, it shows how class inequalities are reproduced and social distances are generated in the struggle over public space. For this, two social situations are addressed. First, we explore the way in which cartoneros build routes in middle-class neighbourhoods in order to carry out their task. Second, we present an analysis of the eviction process of a cartonero settlement in the city.

This article explores the worship of La Santa Muerte through a geo-mapping of street altars in Mexico City followed by an ethnographic analysis of the devotees' relationships with the saint. I find that this saint has gained momentum among the fast-growing prison population over the last two decades. In contrast to studies that emphasise the desertification of mass incarceration elsewhere, this study finds that La Santa Muerte connects families across the social abyss of imprisonment. I suggest that the family-like relationships that devotees maintain with this saint are crucial to understanding her success. Rather than a one-dimensional sacred defender of criminals and police she is adopted by prisoners, prison officers, police and their families as a capricious ‘family member’, embracing the same ambivalence as the forces she helps to navigate.

This article provides a new interpretation of the changes that occur in party-civil society relations when progressive parties of mass-based origin gain state power by looking at the experience of the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) during the Lula administration. The need to preserve what is defined here as ‘social governability’ changes the nature of party-movement relationships when political parties move from opposition to government. The article shows how the PT in national executive public office, to a large extent, managed to secure social governability through reward-based linkages, such as the distribution of jobs in the state apparatus and the allocation of massive state subsidies.