El autor, abogado y consultor independiente, nos da cuenta, de primera mano, de la conflictiva Asamblea Constituyente de Bolivia (AC), donde delegados constituyentes elegidos produjeron una nueva constitución política del Estado en 2006–2007. En la AC, movimientos sociales desafiaron modelos de democracia tradicionales representativos, empujando nuevos modelos participativos los cuales incorporaban reivindicaciones étnicos para la justicia. El artículo examina los principales actores (partidos políticos, movimientos sociales, organizaciones no gubernamentales y grupos opositores) y los obstáculos al proceso como la falta de consenso sobre metas y estrategias, la capacidad institucional limitada y una estructura reglamentaria que facilita el veto minoritario de la decisión mayoritaria. El autor concluye que estos problemas finalmente hicieron posible que los intereses y partidos alrededor de la AC dictaran los resultados en lugar de los delegados elegidos.

The conventional wisdom about contemporary Venezuelan politics is that class voting has become commonplace, with the poor doggedly supporting Hugo Chávez while the rich oppose him. This class voting is considered both a new feature of Venezuelan politics and a puzzle given the multiclass bases of prior populist leaders in Latin America. I clarify the concept of class voting by distinguishing between monotonic and nonmonotonic associations between class and vote choice. Using survey data, I find that only in Chávez's first election in 1998 was class voting monotonic. Since then, class voting in Venezuela has been nonmonotonic, with the very wealthiest Venezuelans disproportionately voting against Chávez. At the same time, Chávez's support appears to have increased most among the middle sectors of the income distribution, not the poorest. Finally, I find that whatever effect Chávez may have had on overall turnout, his efforts have not disproportionately mobilized poor voters.

In both Mexico and Guatemala, indigenous languages are at risk of extinction. Because languages influence people's ways of thinking and help them identify with particular ethnic groups, indigenous language loss can result in severe problems that extend well beyond the demise of these languages. Although current multicultural reforms offer indigenous people unprecedented opportunities, these seemingly positive changes may actually threaten indigenous languages and cultures. Using the latest demographic census data, I present how socioeconomic, demographic, and community factors negatively correlate with indigenous language usage. I contend that indigenous language maintenance will become more difficult because neoliberal multiculturalism endorses indigenous cultural rights without putting forth other necessary changes. Establishing effective language preservation strategies requires us to recognize dangers hidden in the current multicultural agenda, to rigorously ask how we can destigmatize negative images attached to indigenous cultures, and to combat centuries-long oppression and discrimination against indigenous groups.

This article studies how the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and, more generally, neoliberalism rearticulate the opposition between civilization and barbarism, and the vision of the world that underlies it. During a time in which many intellectuals have embraced a relativistic notion of culture that makes judgment problematic, neoliberals embrace this clear-cut value hierarchy with complete abandonment. In fact, one cannot but be surprised by the ease with which Vargas Llosa makes pronouncements based on the identification of individuals, groups, and political movements with either civilization or barbarism. However, the fact is that his reference to this dichotomy differs substantially from its nineteenth-century version and its colonial precedents. The implicitly racial hierarchization proposed by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and other nineteenth-century thinkers has been replaced in Vargas Llosa's writings by one based on cultural and social values.

La idea de que Bolivia vive un proceso de fortalecimiento de la democracia, representada por el ascenso de Evo Morales Ayma, un dirigente sindical campesino de origen aymara, a la presidencia, está escondiendo no solamente el hecho de que su gobierno es la culminación de un largo proceso histórico, sino que también oculta los riesgos del rentismo petrolero, del caudillismo político y del debilitamiento institucional, que podrían estar afectando las perspectivas de la democracia y el desarrollo.

Indigenous peoples have been used and imagined as guardians of the Brazilian frontier since at least the mid-nineteenth century. This association was central to the foundation of the Indian Protection Service (Serviço de Proteção aos Índios, or SPI) during the early 1900s and culminated with the Amazonian Vigilance System (Sistema de Vigelância da Amazônia, or SIVAM) at the turn of the millennium. Throughout the period, the abiding desire to establish defensive dominion over disputed national territory subjected individuals and groups identified as “Indians” to the power of overlapping discourses of scientific progress, national security, and economic development. A trinity of Brazilian modernity, these goals interpellated native peoples primarily through the practice and rhetoric of education, which grounds their historical relationship with dominant national society. Drawing on SPI records, government documents, journalism, personal testimonies, and visual media, this article traces the impact of this modernist trinity on indigenist policy and in the lives of those who have been affected by its tutelary power. By transforming private indigenous spaces into public domain, Brazil's politics of anti-imperialist imperialism propagated a colonialist, metonymic relationship between “our Indians” and “our America” into the twenty-first century.

Despite the fact that the election of Vicente Fox to the presidency of Mexico in 2000 saw the arrival of the most socially conservative administration in contemporary Mexican politics, his government launched the country's first nationwide antihomophobia campaign in early 2005. This article attempts to solve this seeming policy puzzle by presenting empirical research evidence that suggests that the formulation and implementation of this policy was largely a result of the ability of several advocates of sexual minority rights to pursue this policy initiative from within government. Because Fox's election also saw a significant opening of the policy process, several “policy entrepreneurs” gained access to the policy-making process. However, given the controversial nature of the policy they pursued, policy entrepreneurs relied on the deployment of two policy frames to implement their policy in the face of fierce opposition: a scientific frame and a legal frame. The research presented here reveals that the successful launch of the campaign was the result of the strategic use of these two frames by an alliance of policy entrepreneurs working from within the state across federal bureaucratic agencies. Given the advantage the two frames afforded their case when confronting arguments based on morality, they ultimately managed to overcome fierce opposition from state and nonstate actors to implement their policy.

El artículo tiene como objeto abordar la singularidad de las trayectorias de mujeres consagradas durante la última dictadura militar en la Argentina. La hipótesis del trabajo es que su doble condición de mujeres y consagradas las situó coyunturalmente en una posición de ventajas comparativas para hacer frente a la represión estatal. Para llevarlo a cabo reconstruimos un derrotero típico a partir de una selección intencionada de historias de vida y entrevistas a profundidad realizadas a religiosas de diversas congregaciones para luego analizar comparativamente el repertorio de estrategias agenciado por las religiosas para enfrentar la represión estatal en distintos contextos, desplegado a partir de dicho derrotero típico. Para concluir exponemos cuatro tipos de estrategias, que combinan visibilidad y agencia, y que resultan eficaces para sortear exitosamente situaciones de represión estatal en las que estas mujeres se ven expuestas.

We examine the extent to which social networks among indigenous peoples in Mexico have a significant effect on a variety of human capital investment and economic activities, such as school attendance and work among teenage boys and girls, and migration, welfare participation, employment status, occupation, and sector of employment among adult males and females. Using data from the 10 percent population sample of the 2000 Population and Housing Census of Mexico and the empirical strategy that Bertrand, Luttmer, and Mullainathan (2000) propose, which allows us to take into account the role of municipality and language group fixed effects, we confirm empirically that social network effects play an important role in the economic decisions of indigenous people, especially in rural areas. Our analysis also provides evidence that better access to basic services such as water and electricity increases the size and strength of network effects in rural areas.

La mayor parte de los esquemas teóricos contemporáneos explicativos de la migración están fuertemente inclinados del lado de la oferta laboral debido a que están focalizados en los lugares de emisión de fuerza de trabajo y en los migrantes originarios de estos espacios. Sin embargo, los factores colocados del lado de la demanda laboral son incluso más importantes. A partir del ejemplo de los trabajadores rurales indocumentados de Tamaulipas empleados en la agricultura en los Estados Unidos argumento que el reclutamiento de mano de obra construye un estímulo importante de la inmigración ilegal.

Muchos ven el gobierno de Evo Morales y el Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) como la vanguardia del “giro a la izquierda” en América Latina. Este artículo argumenta que hay una tension profunda dentro de la administración del MAS: un empuje para la justicia social, por un lado, y un abrazo a las instituciones liberales democráticas (sean elecciones, asambleas constituyentes y referenda directas públicas), por el otro. Una mirada de algunos de los conflictos producidos mientras el gobierno intenta poner en equilibrio estos dos marcos puede iluminar algunas tensiones subyacentes en la democracia realmente existiendo tanto como el liberalismo mismo. Sugiero que cuando Morales y compañía empujen su agenda, no solo están tratando de pasar más allá del neoliberalismo, sino también tratan de perfeccionar o “vernacularizar” el liberalismo para hacerlo más democrático y más relevante a los pueblos indígenas bolivianas. Entonces, en vez de pos-neoliberalismo, tal vez vemos esfuerzos de la transformación del liberalismo por medio de interacciones con culturas y demandas indígenas, con la meta de profundizar la democracia.

In Latin America, indigenous identity claims among people not previously recognized as such by the state have become a key topic of anthropological and sociological research. Scholars have analyzed the motivations and political implications of this trend and the impacts of indigenous population's growth on national demographic indicators. However, little is known about how people claiming indigenous status constructs the meaning of their indigenous ethnicity. Drawing from sixty-four in-depth interviews, focus-group analyses, and participant observation, this article explores the double process of identity construction: the reconstruction of the Arapium indigenous identity and the creation of the Jaraqui indigenous identity in Brazil's Lower Amazon. The findings reveal six themes that contribute to the embodiment of a definition of indigenous identity and the establishment of a discursive basis to claim recognition: sense of rootedness, historical memory, historical transformation, consciousness, social exclusion, and identity politics.

How does corruption interact with inequality? To answer this question, we employ a field experiment that examines the manner in which police officers in a major Latin American city respond to socioeconomic distinctions when requiring a bribe. In this experiment, four automobile drivers commit identical traffic violations across a randomized sequence of crossroads, which are monitored by transit police. We identify the effect of citizens' perceived wealth on officers' propensity to solicit bribes and on the size of the bribes that they solicit. We complement our experimental results with qualitative findings from interviews with police officers. Our core finding is that officers are more likely to target lower class individuals and let more affluent drivers off with warnings. The qualitative results suggest that officers associate wealth with the capacity to exact retribution and therefore are more likely to demand bribes from poorer individuals. We conclude that a multimethod approach provides a richer account of corrupt behavior than that found in most contemporary research.

Over the past few years, a burgeoning literature on Latin American politics has developed, focusing on explanations for the renewed success of the left in the region. Building on electoral trends and public opinion analysis, we argue that the region is experiencing the normalization of democratic politics rather than a backlash or a revolution. Furthermore, we believe that electoral support for the left reflects the disenchantment of voters with underperforming right-wing governments. Using a unique data set covering eighteen countries in the region, our statistical analyses demonstrate that retrospective voting provides a powerful explanation of the recent electoral success of the left in Latin America. Thus, the central implication of our argument is that electoral accountability is still the primary mechanism of controlling the executive in the region's young democracies.

The Mexican transition to democracy has not been completed in terms of either the destitution of the authoritarian regime or the establishment of a democratic regime, a situation that explains the continuity of authoritarian practices and culture in public life. Not only did the Partido Revolucionario Institucional preserve impressive veto power over constitutional reforms and even small changes in matters of public policy, but also the other two main political parties (Partido Acción Nacional and Partido de la Revolución Democrática) had no alternative democratic projects and reproduced the clientelistic and particularistic political culture of the past; civil society was (and is) both socially and politically weak, and its popular sectors suffered important strategic defeats along the process. Not surprisingly, democratic innovations have been scarce, and the few interesting ones are at risk. The emergence of new social and political actors, as well as new public spaces, is urgent and necessary to counter the paradoxical combination of depoliticization of public life and overpoliticization of democratic institutions the country suffers nowadays, a situation that explains the current simultaneous crisis of representation and governability.

O presente artigo tem como objetivo analisar a reação da organização indígena na região do norte do Cauca, na Côlombia, em face do confronto armado em seu território no período 2000–2005, tentando explicar como esta organização consegue realizar um tipo de resistência ativa ao conflito. O estudo é essencialmente do tipo etnográfico e trabalha com uma perspectiva que privilegia o estudo dos elementos culturais e identitários para a compreensão das ações coletivas, aos moldes de Sonia Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino e Arturo Escobar (2001) em seu livro “Política Cultural e Cultura Política nos Movimentos Sociais Latino-Americanos”.

O artigo apresenta as interpretações e definições de conflito armado e paz encontradas nos discursos dos membros do movimento indígena nortecaucano. Argumenta-se que, no caso indígena, a cultura e seu processo identitário no âmbito da organização são fontes importantes de elementos simbólicos que sustentam os processos de resistência e ao mesmo tempo criam um espaço alternativo importante sobre o tema do conflito armado e da paz no país a partir da sociedade civil, em contraponto às visões tanto do Estado quanto dos atores armados e suas propostas sobre este tema.