This study focuses on the first gated communities in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, which were developed between 1951 and 1964. In an era of democracy and economic growth, the Brazilian government promoted infrastructural improvements and attracted foreign capital. However, there was a concomitant increase in inequality and poverty, and deep-rooted political conflicts. Notwithstanding the varying motivations of those who chose to live in gated communities, this article argues that the attempt by elites to establish a lifestyle of leisure and European-style sophistication in these enclaves had political, ethnic, class and gender implications. Their self-segregation strengthened the patrimonialism and authoritarianism in politics that would prevail during the ensuing military dictatorship.

This article explores how young Brazilian men from poorer areas transcend socio-geographical boundaries by inhabiting the streets of an elite neighbourhood. Drawing on several periods of qualitative fieldwork, the article demonstrates the complex and dynamic character of the relationship between the young men and the formal residents and traders. It reveals temporal patterns of day and night, where the young men's social positions shift from subordinate diurnal (as serving workers) to dominant nocturnal positions (as potential attackers). Analysing the interactional patterns between the two groups regarding sentiments of trust and fear, the multifaceted and sometimes incoherent relations reveal social inclusion and exclusion as well as street protection and crime. The article also dismantles some common dichotomies within research on crime and fear of crime, emphasising that these young men are both victims and offenders, fearful and fearsome.

Studies of electoral fraud tend to focus their analyses only on the pre-electoral or electoral phases. By examining the Brazilian First Republic (1889–1930), this article shifts the focus to a later phase, discussing a particular type of electoral fraud that has been little explored by the literature, namely, that perpetrated by the legislatures themselves during the process of giving final approval to election results. The Brazilian case is interesting because of a practice known as degola (‘beheading’) whereby electoral results were altered when Congress decided on which deputies to certify as duly elected. This has come to be seen as a widespread and standard practice in this period. However, this article shows that this final phase of rubber-stamping or overturning election results was important not because of the number of degolas, which was actually much lower than the literature would have us believe, but chiefly because of their strategic use during moments of political uncertainty. It argues that the congressional certification of electoral results was deployed as a key tool in ensuring the political stability of the Republican regime in the absence of an electoral court.

In 1985, the Pinochet dictatorship reversed radical neoliberal urban development policy in response to economic crisis and political pressure mounted by the urban poor in alliance with the Catholic Church and the Left. The regime's free-market policies conflicted with a popular sector political culture that considered housing a right which the state must uphold. To implement its radical policies, the regime sought to change the understanding that housing was a right and the state a legitimate target of demand. However, it was unsuccessful. In the early 1980s, organised pobladores successfully brought the affordable-housing crisis to the forefront of public attention via the resurrection of pre-coup forms of direct action and pressured the dictatorship to back down from neoliberal dogmatism.

This paper studies the obstacles that hinder the formation of linkages among local firms, multinational corporations and universities in the Costa Rican information and communication technologies cluster. It examines both the social and the economic reasons for forming or participating in linkages, ranging from the capabilities of potential partners to compliance with customs. The research is based on qualitative information collected over four years through more than 150 direct and detailed interviews with different stakeholders in the cluster. Costa Rica is often used as a positive benchmark of cluster policy in Latin America, but it is argued here that linkages among firms in the sector have developed much more slowly than anticipated.