This article examines the symbolic transformations and material consequences of an irrigation development project designed to empower indigenous peoples in Cañar, Ecuador. It argues that the project deepened market society and reproduced colonialism more than it empowered indigenous peoples, but indigenous people found ways to appropriate project resources and embed the market in alternative principles of social life. Market society deepened through the neoliberal hegemony of international development policy and through the indigenous movement's incorporation of market rationalities. Colonialism recurred through hierarchical representations of knowledge and skills reminiscent of long-standing stereotypes of natives, which local indigenous leaders internalized. Both processes unfolded through constructions of value and acts of evaluation. The gap between the market ideal communicated in the irrigation development project and the conditions of actually existing markets that local indigenous people engaged after project closure limited the concrete empowerment of indigenous peoples.

A large historiographic tradition has studied the Brazilian state, yet we know relatively little about its internal dynamics and particularities. The role of informal, personal, and unintentional ties has remained underexplored in most policy network studies, mainly because of the pluralist origin of that tradition. It is possible to use network analysis to expand this knowledge by developing mesolevel analysis of those processes. This article proposes an analytical framework for studying networks inside policy communities. This framework considers the stable and resilient patterns that characterize state institutions, especially in contexts of low institutionalization, particularly those found in Latin America and Brazil. The article builds on research on urban policies in Brazil to suggest that networks made of institutional and personal ties structure state organizations internally and insert them into broader political scenarios. These networks, which I call state fabric, frame politics, influence public policies, and introduce more stability and predictability than the majority of the literature usually considers. They also form a specific power resource—positional power, associated with the positions that political actors occupy—that influences politics inside and around the state.

Why is Colombia, a country with fertile arable lands, increasingly importing its food supply as a consequence of shrinking lands dedicated to crop production, whereas land inappropriate for pasture and livestock has been expanding exponentially? The answer lies in the land laws approved since the 1930s, coupled with the state's economic policies, which have reduced the opportunity costs of investing in this sector. Both have provided an institutional matrix to transform parts of the rural economy from food production to a rentier political economy spearheaded by cattle ranching. This article explains why cattle ranching has become increasingly prominent since the 1950s for a segment of the dominant classes that is predisposed to invest in this endeavor despite the risks and low economic returns. More important, the article explains how the institutional matrix (laws and policies) and precarious property rights in rural areas provided the incipient narco-bourgeoisie, since the mid-1970s, with a pivotal incentive to choose cattle ranching as a favorite means to launder money, speculate, and exercise political power, consequently cementing rentier capitalism.

In Latin America's young democracies, actors in the private sector may influence military security work through resource transfers, with implications for state accountability and democracy in the region. This analysis finds that in Ecuador and Peru local army commanders—who frequently decide when and where army operations are conducted—make decisions not according to technical evaluations of security requirements but rather on the basis of how much local clients pay. The article's local political economy perspective enables us to identify client influence, even in cases in which client and national security interests overlap. The study also helps bridge two literatures: research on Latin American civil-military relations, which has devoted a great amount of attention to military autonomy vis-à-vis the government without systematically analyzing third-party influence on armed forces, and scholarship on security privatization, which has examined such third-party financing but without underscoring the fact that clients can engage with the military directly, bypassing the national government.

This article brings new evidence and a revisionary argument to the debate over Mexico's exceptional relations with Cuba in the decade after the Cuban Revolution. It uses recently declassified Mexican intelligence records to show that Mexican leaders defended Castro primarily because they were afraid of domestic leftist groups and individuals. The first part of the article examines the intelligence information that Mexican decision makers received about internal threats, drawing out the connections that they perceived between Cuba and the Mexican left and the reasons they designed their foreign policy for domestic ends. The second section shifts to the international level, challenging the traditional arguments that foreign or ideological factors determined Mexico's policy toward Cuba. It examines the ways that Mexican leaders defused and negotiated against possible repercussions from Cuba or the United States as a result of their decision to maintain relations with Castro's government.

To understand the momentous transformation in Argentine-Brazilian relations from rivalry to Mercosur, scholars need to analyze negative cases, when rapprochement was attempted unsuccessfully. This article examines the failed 1972 summit between Presidents Alejandro Agustín Lanusse and Emílio Garrastazú Médici, which is poorly explained by existing theories of international relations and overlooked or misinterpreted in many regional histories. I argue, based on research in the Argentine Foreign Ministry Archives, newly declassified US government documents, and a reexamination of published primary sources, that rapprochement failed in 1972 primarily because bureaucratic interests in the armed forces and foreign ministries of both states depended on the continuation of rivalry. Organizational politics, not popular nationalism or presidential diplomatic errors, best explains the persistence of Argentine-Brazilian conflict in the early 1970s. Successful cooperation between rivals therefore may require not only agreement between national leaders but also the support of the state apparatus on both sides.

This article looks into the factors that explain foreign direct investment (FDI) in Brazil by country of origin. We collected a sample of 180 countries with and without FDI in Brazil. We use multiple estimation techniques and controls to isolate the effect of country political risk on outward foreign direct investment and show that countries with lower levels of political risk undertake more FDI in Brazil, and that features of the policy environment of home countries drive the negative relationship between risk and FDI. Furthermore, we show that the aspect of the political and institutional environment that is most likely to drive this negative relation between risk and investment into Brazil is related to the effectiveness of national governments. Our findings broaden the understanding of the puzzling influence of political risk on FDI observed in previous studies, correct for sampling and selection biases, and have substantive implications for policy design to attract FDI.

Esta nota estudia la territorialidad de las maras en Honduras contribuyendo así a los estudios y debates existentes sobre territorio, espacio y pandillas. La territorialidad se percibe según la noción de Robert Sack (1986) definida como estrategias geográficas de poder con las cuales se pueden influenciar, afectar y controlar relaciones sociales, personas u objetos dentro de un área delimitada. Centrándose en el caso de miembros encarcelados de la Dieciocho en Honduras, este trabajo demuestra que las maras desarrollan estrategias territoriales que desafían el orden territorial de la cárcel y, por otro lado, producen un nuevo espacio social llamado el barrio el cual surge como un centro de reclusión dentro de otro centro de reclusión.

La territorialidad de las maras encarceladas indica la habilidad de desarrollar reacciones y respuestas en distintas situaciones, incluso las políticas represivas de seguridad del estado hondureño; asimismo, es indicador de los altos niveles de violencia y exclusión que viven estos jóvenes marginados.

This research note provides a preliminary discussion of changing agricultural and food procurement strategies in a smallholder farming community in Piribebuy District, Paraguay. Although considerable attention has been paid to the contemporary problems of soy agriculture in Paraguay, it is also important to engage with the experiences of smallholders who are not involved in or affected by soy cultivation, as this highlights farmers' diverse everyday experiences and their agricultural priorities. We consider three issues that have emerged as key to farmer agricultural decision making in this community: farmer perceptions of environmental changes, processes of dietary delocalization via the movement of food from urban centers to rural communities, and the intersection of labor issues and aging farmers.