Studies of the Brazilian Landless Movement, particularly the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, Landless Rural Workers' Movement), note two periods of collective action: the time when tactics such as land occupations are deployed to acquire land (luta pela terra) and subsequent mobilizations to develop territory (luta na terra). The latter period, which includes fostering educational opportunities and coordinating economic production, features prolonged interaction with government authorities. Instead of demobilizing during institutionalization, this study argues, postoccupation practices are as contentious as seizing territory. This is apparent in the movement's efforts to influence public policies that lead to the creation of schools where a contentious, movement-centered identity develops. Documenting the movement's efforts in education provides a way to understand how the current moment in rural contention in Brazil—called by some the time to acumular forças (accumulate forces)—remains collective and political instead of indicating movement decline.

In many Latin American countries, social policy preferences among economically vulnerable citizens seem largely unpolarized. However, current studies rarely confront citizens with realistic policy options and often lack the required detail to capture the heterogeneity of economic vulnerability. Drawing on the dualization debate, we expect individuals facing different degrees of vulnerability to show distinct social policy preferences. Using original survey data from Mexico and a conjoint experiment, our findings reveal a complex divide, where the most economically vulnerable are least supportive of public solutions. Sharing the home with a formal labor market participant does not seem to mitigate social policy skepticism among the vulnerable. In contrast, magnified vulnerability via household composition reduces support for welfare policy expansion. Social policy preferences become much less distinct when policy design alternatives are introduced, suggesting reduced expectations about the state’s role and a lack of clarity about the tangible benefits of social policy reform.

The urban labor force in the capital of Guatemala holds a potential strength out of proportion to its numbers. The power of the urban labor force stems from the fact that (1) though a minority of the total population of the republic, it forms a numerical majority in Guatemala City where national decisions are made; (2) it is a compact group which can be more readily and efficiently organized than the sprawling agrarian labor force; and (3) once organized, it is an available and effective political force. Party dialectic aside, these factors are sufficient to make urban labor an attractive instrument for international Communist propaganda and infiltration.

In those days in the French Quarter of New Orleans there were among others men who were giants among the nation's creative great and some who would become giants or nearly so, men like Sherwood Anderson and Oliver LaFarge and the poet John McClure and Lyle Saxon and Roark Bradford whose delightful genius had not yet had its due. And, briefly, William Faulkner. All of them are dead now.

But in those days they were not dead, and some of them kept the Quarter very much alive with their pranks and penchants and their predilection for a sort of Bohemianism that seemed natural and even proper there and then. For the most part they commanded the admiration of the neophytes, we who were very young reporters or hopeless scribblers and others not yet ready to have a try at the one or the other but only students who prowled the Quarter in search of some famed face and maybe an introduction and a word or two.

Since 1941 United States relations with Latin American countries have fluctuated between the ofñcial cordiality of wartime cooperation, which provided the basis for the Organization of American States and the Rio Treaty, and deep-seated hostility and malaise, which erupted in the Nixon visit and in Castro's revolution, as well as in more recent unpleasant incidents. Latin American leaders have contended that the United States violated its wartime commitments, particularly in the economic sphere, by concentrating on the recovery of Europe in the first postwar decade and on Asian upheaval in the second. The history of U.S.-Panamanian relations since 1941 provides an excellent case study in order to test the validity of these contentions.

Estados sociológicos recentes têm procurado salientar que nas economias de modêlo exportador, baseadas no sistema de plantacões tropicais e no trabalho escravo, o grande proprietário rural geralmente se converte em comerciante que vende para os mercados externos os seus próprios produtos. Segundo essa tese, nesse tipo de sociedades não se constituiría urna elite de mercadores individualizada e consciente dos interêsses próprios, distintos dos da aristocracia rural.

Parece-nos que seria interessante analisar comparativamente duas comunidades de mercadores inseridas em sociedades coloniais do tipo “plantation” com o objetivo de verificar a validade dessa tese.

Rio de Janeiro e Charleston, portos de escoamento de produtos tropicais e de entrada e redistribuição de escravos africanos, de importação de produtos manufaturados de origem européia e de trânsito de um próspero comércio de cabotagem de gêneros alimentícios, oferecem urna base para a comparação.

My interest in land reform started very early. In fact, my first executive appointment in the Government of Puerto Rico was in 1941, even before I left academic life, when I became a member of the first Board of Directors of the Land Authority of Puerto Rico, thus participating from the start in the land reform program of Puerto Rico. Back in 1940 when the present Government of Puerto Rico headed by Luis Muñoz Marín, our present Governor but at that time President of the Senate, took over the reins of government one of the first bills approved by our legislature was for a land tenure reform program in Puerto Rico.

The ways in which societies change and adjust to change are determined largely by cultural and historical factors, by long-standing customs and traditions. Cultural values differ widely from one society to another; each solves its problems according to its own values, and value systems, though they may work well for one society, cannot be expected to work as well for another. This is true even of colonies that become independent nations, although the characteristic stamp of the common mother country remains visible. What is unique in the case of Spanish America is the inability of the new nations to shed this stamp, despite determined efforts to do so. To understand the process of change of any country or group of related countries such as those of Spanish America, it is necessary to examine the major cultural characteristics and values, and to consider social and political action in relation to these, rather than to any external standard.

Herman Kahn said recently that Canada is a regional power without a region. Canada is something of a sport, a nuisance to those who like their political geography neat—rather like Australia or Albania. There are arguments for attaching us to various regions or groups of states. If there is one region, however, to which Canada does not naturally belong it is the so-called Western Hemisphere. Although the Rio Treaty somewhat presumptuously included Canada and Greenland in the area to the defence of which Argentina would rush, we are for purposes of election to the Security Council attached to Western Europe. The Western Hemisphere, as I understand it, begins in the east end of London, includes most of England, all of Ireland, and then goes westward into Siberia. The term has acquired a certain geopolitical significance because it has been a handy way to describe the unnatural but historical relationship between the United States and Latin America.

Any time a political system has to induct a formerly excluded group into the political process, there is apt to be some uncertainty about what the consequences will be. This has been true in the United States on several occasions. When the Nineteenth Amendment was under discussion, there was considerable interest in what effect the feminine vote would have. When Southern blacks began to vote in large numbers in the 1960s, politicians and scholars wondered what the consequences would be. In 1971, with the ratification of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, the impact of the youth vote is being debated, even though we have twenty years of sophisticated behavioral research to guide our speculation.

In the United States, the political process is basically stable and institutionalized. But many countries are not so fortunate, particularly those that are moving rapidly from a traditional to a modern style.

In 1968 Henry Kissinger wrote: “A mature conception of our interests in the world … would deal with two fundamental questions: What is it in our interest to prevent? What should we seek to accomplish?” (Kissinger, 1974: 92) Whatever its general relevance, that passage is an apt description of the lens through which American policymakers have contemplated the phenomenon of political change in the Third World. Those are the first questions they tend to ask.

The rationale for this particular concept of foreign policy tasks has its roots (1) in the complexities of an increasingly interdependent world in which world politics have become truly global for the first time in human history, and (2) in the deep antagonisms embedded in the US/Soviet relationship. Because nuclear realities .have placed a cap on the way in which the two superpowers confront and contend with one another, conflict between them tends to get pushed to the periphery and to take place in indirect ways.