The Brazilian democratization took place between 1985 and 1988. In 1985, the authoritarian power holders transferred political power to civilians, and in 1988, a new democratic constitution was enacted, thus finalizing the transition. The end of the transition triggered processes of participation in different Brazilian cities, such as São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro. However, only in Porto Alegre could the political context in the postdemocratization period generate a process of reverting priorities, that is to say, of inverting the pattern of democratic participation and the pattern of public investment at the urban level. In this article, I show the social conditions of the poor in the city of Porto Alegre in 1985, explain the emergence of participatory budgeting in the city, and show how democracy made a difference in the living conditions of the urban poor in the city of Porto Alegre. In the second part of the article, I analyze the recent expansion of participatory budgeting in Brazil and its recent expansion to midsize cities. In the final part of the article, I show how new participatory institutions are being introduced at the federal level of government. Participation at the local and national levels is making a difference in the living conditions of the Brazilian poor.

Much of the literature on political economy expects complementarities between (universal) welfare regimes and production regimes. This article draws from Costa Rica's showcase of human development and universalistic social policies to address how the production regime supports and constrains the welfare regime. We show that there were some positive relations between the two regimes at various points but that they were neither fully nor mostly complementary. At the heart of our interpretation of Costa Rica's performance—and Latin America's pervasive lack of complementarities—lies the dominance of structural heterogeneity in the production regime. Our analysis has significant implications for current theoretical and policy debates in Costa Rica and elsewhere. At the theoretical level, we highlight key features of production in Latin America and the need to consider such material bases as part of robust welfare policies. At the policy level, our argument stresses the importance of promoting both leading and low-productivity sectors simultaneously and of securing stable funding mechanisms for the welfare regime. Our article thus offers a cautionary note to Latin American countries slowly moving toward the creation or re-creation of universal social programs in the context of relatively unchanged production regimes. Since tensions between production and welfare regimes may also be appearing in a growing number of postindustrialized developed countries, theoretical and policy implications can easily travel beyond Latin America.

In many Latin American countries, indigenous populations have recently exhibited rapid growth. Many scholars recognize that this indigenous population resurgence is due to a combination of demographic processes, such as births, deaths, and migration, as well as changing racial-ethnic identities. However, there is little quantitative data verifying the relative importance of these two types of processes for indigenous population growth. We seek to fill this gap by quantifying the relative contribution of both mechanisms in Brazil's indigenous population resurgence. Our findings indicate that during the 1990s, race-ethnic reclassification was more important than demographic processes. This varied regionally, in that identity change was most important in northeastern and southeastern Brazil. These findings bear implications regarding indigenous movements, identity politics, and prospective indigenous population growth in Brazil and elsewhere.

This article addresses the paradox of unpopular corruption and popular corrupt politicians. It explores why corrupt politicians are reelected, paying particular attention to incumbent provision of public goods and voter information on incumbent misconduct. Using a new data set on mayoral elections (2000 and 2004) in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, we specify econometric models to test the hypothesis that incumbents' performance in delivering public goods might mitigate reputational losses. Our main empirical analysis suggests that (1) corruption decreases the probability of incumbent reelection, (2) public expenditure increases the probability of reelection, and (3) the negative marginal effect of corruption on reelection disappears as public expenditure increases.

Over the past three decades, tourism has become integral to the Mexican economy. Mexico easily leads Latin America in tourism exports, the provision of tourist-related services to foreigners visiting the country. Today tourism also serves as the second-largest employer in Mexico and ranks consistently among the top three earners of foreign exchange. This study traces the origin of Mexico's tourism boom by examining state policies and private-sector activity during the last thirty years. It also presents data on distributional patterns associated with tourism in an effort to evaluate Mexico's tourism record within the larger context of development.

In recent years, a body of literature analyzing development and modernization since the world wars has emphasized the diverse tasks women perform in premodern agrarian societies as compared to incipient industrial economies. The greater input of women in many nonmechanized societies, compared to their role thereafter, has been seen as the key to understanding why the introduction of machine technology has often resulted in the subsequent general unemployment or underemployment of working-class women.

Based on primary research and fifty interviews, this article analyzes the history, institutions, and politics of agricultural policy formulation in Brazil from 1964 to 1992. It focuses on how trade, credit, and support-price policy evolved in response to economic crisis and democratization in the 1980s. Although the economic crisis caused policy to be redesigned, the change in political regime and in the institutions of interest-group representation significantly influenced the direction of policy reform. The return to a democratic regime permitted the Congress and the Brazilian judiciary to play more significant roles in shaping agricultural policy. Simultaneously, democratization led to the questioning of corporatist institutions and the emergence of more participatory organizations in the agricultural sector. These changes have caused policy making to become increasingly subject to explicit rules, which should lead to more predictable policies and a long-term reduction in discrimination against Brazilian agriculture.

Fair-trade networks have been working to temper the inequities and uncertainties facing small-scale artisans and farmers and to provide them with more secure and livable incomes. Drawing on earlier research in 1991–1993 and a brief pilot study in 2006, this research note examines farmers' perceptions of the benefits and drawbacks of production for fair trade in three coffee-producing regions in Costa Rica. While the fair-trade movement has made significant headway in bringing social and environmental concerns to the marketplace and in providing farmers with guaranteed minimum prices for their coffee, farmers' reactions to production for fair trade indicate a number of problems that farmers and fair-trade cooperatives are facing in their efforts to reap the potential benefits of fair trade. As currently structured, fair-trade markets alone do not adequately address the needs of small farming families in Latin America.

This article highlights an important paradox: in Argentina between 2003 and 2013 the center-left Peronist government's approach to governance mirrors that of the center-right Peronist administration of the 1990s. While the latter centralized authority to pursue neoliberal reforms, the former have centralized authority in the name of expanding government intervention in the economy. In both cases, corruption has tended to go unchecked due to insufficient government accountability. Therefore, although economic policies and political rhetoric have changed dramatically, government corruption remains a constant of the Argentine political system due to the executive branch's ability to emasculate constitutional checks and balances.

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.

Cocoliche, that curious dramatic character improvised under the circus tent during the last decades of the nineteenth century, is no longer a vital aspect of Argentine life today. Yet his caricatured presence over a period of fifty years proved critical in the creolization of Italians and natives as well as in the sociocultural redefinition of Argentina's “national character.” Creolization (the cultural redefinition negotiated by two or more diverse groups coming into contact—in this case, Italians and Argentines) yields a new ethic and aesthetic order wherein the presence of each group becomes integral to the national whole. As will be shown, Cocoliche became a key vehicle for this process of creolization.

The purpose of this paper is to review the evolution of public policy toward the favelas of Rio de Janeiro since 1972–73. I choose these years because they are the ones at which available published accounts on the topic cease. One of my objectives is to re-actualize existing information on that subject. At the same time, I wish to bring forth some considerations on the relationships between civil society, especially its most deprived classes, and the particular form of authoritarian state now dominant in Brazil.

The distinctive blend of authoritarian and technocratic rule in Brazil since 1964 has been well explored in its implications for industrial policy, but the consequences of two decades of military rule for agriculture are only now being studied. This article will analyze state policy in the single agricultural sector of sugar in light of major changes in sociopolitical and economic structures and in view of the particular relations between the state and civil society that have characterized Brazil after 1964. Although debate continues over the precise nature of these relations, it is widely held that the state played the dominant role in the policy process, subordinating elites, excluding popular classes from the decision-making arena, and incorporating international capital as a critical element in economic growth.

In the national consciousness, Ecuador is a mestizo nation. However, it is also an ethnically diverse nation with sizable minorities of indigenous and Afro-descended peoples. In national surveys, there is also a considerable minority who self-identify as blanco (white). Although there is strong evidence of continuing discrimination and prejudice toward both indigenous and Afro-descended peoples, there is little public discussion or political action addressing such issues. The emergence of a powerful and resilient indigenous movement in the late 1980s gained international interest and acclaim in the 1990s, in part because of the peaceful mobilization efforts and effective bargaining tactics of the movement. However, indigenous leaders usually have not engaged in a discourse of racismo and/or discriminación. There has been much less social movement solidarity and activism among Afro-Ecuadorians, but their leaders commonly employ a discourse of racismo and discriminación. In August and September 2004, a survey of more than eight thousand adult Ecuadorians was conducted in regard to racism and related topics. In this research, we use several measures from this survey that focus on awareness of and sensitivity to issues of racism, prejudice, and discrimination. Self-identification of respondents enables us to contrast the responses of whites, mestizos, Indians, and Afro-Ecuadorians to the measures. Other independent variables of interest are level of education, the region in which the respondent resides, and whether the respondent lives in an urban or rural area. Regression results show differences among the ethnic groups in levels of awareness of racism, but more powerful predictors are level of education and rural residence.

José Carlos Mariátegui devoted the most productive years of his short life (1894–1930) to analyzing contemporary Peru. Because of this emphasis, a substantial portion of the research conducted in the past thirty years has addressed his political and social thought. More recent investigations, however, have sought to document the significance of his aesthetic ideas, an appropriate development in light of Mariátegui's extensive writings on literature and the visual arts. For example, the periodical Amauta, which appeared under his editorship twenty-nine times between September 1926 and March 1930, was primarily a magazine of the arts and intellectual life, notwithstanding its political agenda and indigenista orientation. Also, Mariátegui's detailed essay on Peruvian literature, “El proceso de la literatura,” is the most extensive of the Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928). In addition, between 1924 and 1930, the widely read Lima weeklies Variedades and Mundial regularly published his critical articles on national and international topics, including a large number of pieces on literature and the arts. Recent inquiries into Mariátegui's literary thought have addressed such issues as his modern concept of literary realism, the relationship between his artistic concerns and a Marxism that has been repeatedly characterized as “open,” and the role of aesthetic issues in his social agenda for Peru. This research has established Mariátegui's importance in the arts, not as a creative writer (although he did write poetry, plays, and short stories in his youth) but as one of Latin America's first practicing literary critics.

Now that racism has been officially recognized in Brazil, and some universities have adopted affirmative-action admission policies, measures of the magnitude of racial inequality and analyses that identify the factors associated with changes in racial disparities over time assume particular relevance to the conduct of public debate. This study uses census data from 1950 to 2000 to estimate the probability of death in the early years of life, a robust indicator of the standard of living among the white and Afro-Brazilian populations. Associated estimates of the average number of years of life expectancy at birth show that the 6.6-year advantage that the white population enjoyed in the 1950s remained virtually unchanged throughout the second half of the twentieth century, despite the significant improvements that accrued to both racial groups. The application of multivariate techniques to samples selected from the 1960, 1980, and 2000 census enumerations further shows that, controlling for key determinants of child survival, the white mortality advantage persisted and even increased somewhat in 2000. The article discusses evidence of continued racial inequality during an era of deep transformation in social structure, with reference to the challenges of skin color classification in a multiracial society and the evolution of debates about color, class, and discrimination in Brazil.

This article is based on research conducted in the archives of the Auditoria Militar do Estado de Pernambuco. It substantiates the violation of the basic principle of equality before the law resulting from the existence in Brazil of two different court systems—one civil and the other military—with varying legal proceedings and sentences for similar crimes committed by civilian police and military police. The article reviews how the authoritarian regime enlarged the scope of military jurisdiction, a situation little changed more than a decade after the authoritarian regime ended. The article also shows that the Justiça Militar do Estado de Pernambuco functions in a hybrid manner. It is an agency of the civil judicial branch, but most of the judges are military, while the lawyers are civilians and the trials are conducted by the Ministério Público. Thus the military police can influence the outcome of judgments without having to assume the burden of rendering decisions because the final responsibility rests with the civil judicial branch. Finally, the article highlights the incompatibility between the continuation of this kind of military justice and a democracy seeking consolidation.

“Para el camino” Canto a la angustia y a las alegrias. Canto porque es necesario can tar para ir dejando una huella en los dias, para ir diciendo cosas prohibidas.

“For the Road” I sing of anguish and joy. I sing because it's necessary to sing to leave my mark on time, to say forbidden things.

Latin American New Song is distinct from the usual stereotypes of Latin American popular music. Songs such as “Para el camino” do not fit into the common categories of salsa, ballads, Spanish-language versions of U.S. hit songs or popularized traditional styles such as the ranchera and cumbia. Although New Song is not as well known as the more typical styles, its greater social significance has achieved an impact in Latin America far beyond the musical realm.