This article investigates the sources of foreign ministries’ policy-making capacity in presidential regimes. Using the concept of family resemblance, we argue that professionalization of the diplomatic corps is a necessary condition, whereas the institutional attributions of the ministry and the degree of presidential delegation are relevant but substitutable elements. The higher the scores on either of the latter dimensions, the stronger is the capacity of the foreign ministry to influence the chief executive and to contest other players’ policy preferences. To empirically validate our concept, we measure the three dimensions in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico between 1946 and 2015 using data on diplomats’ recruitment and career paths, influence of diplomatic schools and doctrines, appointment patterns of foreign ministers, and relevance of presidential diplomacy, with an emphasis on travels abroad. Our analysis indicates that Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico enjoy a high level of professionalization of their diplomatic corps; however, differences—both across countries and over time—remain regarding institutional attributions and presidential delegation.

Numerous recent country studies demonstrate that beneficiaries of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs vote for incumbents at higher rates. It is reasonable to expect that, as a consequence, those incumbents will perform better nationally in the next election. This article warns against such an extrapolation. It analyzes an original cross-national data set with information for eighty-four Latin American presidential elections that took place between 1990 and 2010. My results reveal that CCT programs have not improved incumbents' aggregate electoral performances in the region, contradicting common speculative claims of the literature. They also confirm the classic economic voting hypothesis that incumbents are held accountable in the polls for their economic performance.

En un contexto histórico de expansión educativa, mejora de los rendimientos de la educación y aumento de la participación de la mujer en la actividad económica, este artículo examina y compara las pautas y tendencias en homogamia educativa en México y Brasil entre 1970 y 2000. Concretamente, tratamos en perspectiva temporal y comparada las siguientes cuestiones: grado y alcance de la homogamia educativa y simetría en las relaciones de género. Para ello utilizamos las muestras armonizadas de microdatos de los censos de México 1970, 1990 y 2000, y de Brasil 1970, 1980, 1991 y 2000, puestas a disposición por el proyecto IPUMS-International. Los resultados muestran un aumento de la homogamia entre las capas más instruidas y una disminución de la hipergamia femenina en ambos países. Comparativamente, la homogamia educativa es mayor en Brasil que en México, reflejo de una mayor desigualdad social, mientras que las diferencias de género son mayores en México.

We examine here two Ecuadorian towns and the state's efforts to support their development through competitiveness initiatives. Neoliberal, economic globalization is often equated with the insecurities of market competition. However, economic policy makers do not foment competition as much as competitive advantage. Whereas competition requires individual know-how, competitive advantage often involves cooperating to improve the underlying factors that help whole groups of firms. In Ecuador, policies have sought to engineer competitive advantage by creating industrial clusters. In our study, the town of Atuntaqui embraced the idea of clusters, uniting firms to work with international consultants and the Ministry of Industry. The economy has improved, but wealth shows signs of consolidation. The comparative case is a mechanized indigenous craft economy in Otavalo. Exploring how Otavalo's development has generated a set of shared resources anchored in a market plaza, we argue that its economy is best understood as a cultural commons. The experiences of both places have shown that economic development must take explicit measures to defend such commons if the gains of strategic cooperation are to be sustained in the long run.

The belief survives among us
[Latin Americans] that United States
scholars would write better histories
of Latin America if they studied
less and invented more.
Daniel Cosío VillegasHistory and the Social Sciences in Latin America

This article will analyze the way in which U.S. historians' writing on Latin America, especially on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has been influenced by the changing relationship between the United States and Latin America. It will also trace more briefly the changing approaches of historians from Latin America. In my view, the two groups have taken different routes but have arrived at much the same destination.

This article introduces the topic of pandillas (street gangs) and their implications for security in Central America. There is minimal scholarly literature on pandillas and security. In part this is due to serious challenges in analyzing pandillas. First, pandilla members consider truth to be situational; data derived directly from them is suspect. Second, those who know most about them are involved in NGOs that rely on foreign assistance for their work. The project reports they produce go to funders abroad and are generally not published. Third, to research and write on pandillas is dangerous.

The concept of sumak kawsay, buen vivir or “good life”—in Bolivia, suma qamaña, or vivir bien—has been widely diffused on an international level since the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly in 2007–2008 and the Bolivian one in 2006–2009. Good life has been understood as an alternative to capitalist modernizing development that is based on the indigenous ideal of harmony between individual, society, and nature. Nevertheless, in the usage of the indigenous movement, which initiated the diffusion of this concept, good life is a local and territorial conception of a lifestyle. While this notion of locality is largely ignored or invisibilized by the Ecuadorian government and by nonindigenous intellectuals, and to some degree even by national indigenous organizations, local indigenous organizations integrated good life into their discourse of territorial autonomy in a pluralist state. Good life allows for local decolonialization, a concrete and local fight against the structures of “the coloniality of power” framed within a discursive panorama that includes concepts of plurality and autonomy. This text analyzes sumak kawsay as a key concept of local decolonialization, emphasizing its relation to similar concepts and the differences in its usage by different actors.

This article will examine the efforts made by Argentina and Brazil to attain a measure of technological autonomy in the fields of computers and nuclear energy. Grieco's study of the Indian computer industry and separate studies of the Brazilian computer industry by Evans and Adler have shown the inadequacy of the arguments raised by the dependency literature, namely, that in areas of highly sophisticated technology, owned mainly by multinational corporations, the developing country will fail in any attempt to achieve domestic technological development.

Por primera en vez Chile una mujer triunfó en las elecciones presidenciales. Sugerimos que la victoria de Michelle Bachelet se explicó, en primer lugar, por sus atributos personales. Los chilenos la evaluaron como la candidata más confiable y con mayor cercanía, valorando además sus condiciones como posible gobernante. En segundo lugar, se vio favorecida por un ambiente político y económico derivado de la reconocida gestión del ex presidente Ricardo Lagos. Un tema crucial que atraviesa todo el escrito corresponde a la solidaridad de género. Se sostiene que el apoyo de las mujeres fue determinante para el triunfo de Bachelet, cuestión que se corrobora tanto a nivel de encuestas en términos de intención de voto como de resultados electorales finales por comuna.

There is a forceful new impetus toward mega-hydraulic projects in Latin America, which are booming but also highly controversial. They bring benefits to some social groups while many others are negatively affected. Technocratic discourses are dominant in the region; they strategically mobilize institutions, infrastructure, money, and knowledge to present particular hydrosocial territorial imaginaries—such as multipurpose dams—as natural, universal, and politically neutral. Meanwhile, affected local communities commonly envision and practice different discourses, values, and worldviews, based on contextualized notions of well-being and territoriality. Using a political ecology perspective, this article examines how the Daule-Peripa mega-hydraulic scheme—Ecuador’s “hydraulic heart”—has de- and repatterned the territory, producing new hierarchical relations and unequal distribution of socioenvironmental impacts. Though political discourses have changed throughout state-centralist and neoliberal époques, governmental policies and practices have continued and renewed their defense of mega-hydraulism. In turn, affected communities and families, through everyday territorial politics, respond and aim to rearrange the hydrosocial network in order to regain control over water, land, and territorial services.

Considerable research has been conducted on the relationship between socioeconomic inequality and political engagement. However, there is little consensus on the exact nature of the relationship, and considerable variation in the relationship exists even among countries with similar levels of inequality. This lack of clarity in the literature exists because the impact of inequality on engagement is not constant, but changes depending on the strategic choices of political leaders. Populist leaders; who tend to explicitly connect political and socioeconomic exclusion, can activate latent grievances around inequality. Using data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project, we show that inequality leads to disengagement among the poor in most contexts but increases engagement under populist rule. In other words, a primarily structural relationship is mediated by political variables. Even though the severity of inequality is outside the control of any political actor, leaders' reaction to inequality can dramatically alter its impact on mass political behavior.

How many Mayas are there? That deceptively simple question has seldom met with an unqualified answer, especially in Guatemala, where both question and answer invariably trigger ideological positions that are not easily reconciled. The Columbus Quincentenary in 1992, the year a Maya woman, Rigoberta Menchú, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, offered a timely juncture for reflecting on the matter. In this research note, we chart from the eve of conquest to the present the collapse and eventual recovery of an Indian population that today numbers more than twice as many as it did at European contact, a trajectory of survival experienced by few other Native American populations. The figures we examine are the best we could find, although none of them should be considered definitive. Moreover, they all indicate an Indian presence without ever being clear or consistent as to whom the definition applies. These figures are displayed in table 1. Any figure contemplated must also be appreciated in relation to the sources and methodology of its calculation. Discussion of this issue, however, we have kept to a minimum. Our aim is to summarize the salient features of a complex demographic situation in the hope of shedding light on an enduring Maya presence, one that increasingly challenges traditional notions of what a Guatemalan nation-state should be and on what terms Maya peoples contained within it should live (Cojtí Cuxil 1991; Smith 1990, 1991).

The three responses to “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse” raise significant questions for studying such discourse but with significant similarities and differences. Hernán Vidal and Walter Mignolo embark on commentaries that endeavor in part to define a new position of engagement for intellectuals, while Rolena Adorno retains traditional academic distance. Yet all three responses provide colonial and postcolonial discourse with a historic trajectory. Showing that a trend has roots in the past, even if accounts of those roots differ, is a grudging way of acknowledging its legitimacy in the present. Although such a process is an interesting phenomenon of academic life, in this instance it leaves me, a historian by training, in the unusual position of arguing for the tangible difference between the contemporary world and our understandings of it. Perhaps that in itself is symptomatic of how the current trend toward interdisciplinary inquiry differs from those of the past. Our traditional disciplinary practices are much more at risk in the present.

The history of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 has suffered from the emphasis placed upon personalities and, as a result, critical political, economic, and social issues have been incompletely studied. In examining the causes of the 1910 Revolution in the state of Chihuahua, historians have concentrated their efforts on exposing the political oppression and, to some extent, the economic exploitation exercised by the Terrazas-Creel family. Perhaps more than any other figures of the Díaz era, Luis Terrazas and his son-in-law, Enrique C. Creel, have come to represent in Mexican revolutionary historiography the system of economic and social privilege against which the revolutionaries fought.

Latin America’s largest federations have significantly reduced their levels of income inequality in recent years, perhaps reflecting a structural change toward egalitarianism. However, we argue that the political geography of federalism in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico strongly shapes preferences against centralized redistribution likely to promote equity in the long term. While federalism does not necessary lead to lower redistribution in theory, the geographic spread of income and malapportioned political institutions limit egalitarianism in these nations. These dynamics help explain why fiscal structures are distinct in Latin American federations as compared to federations in high-income countries. First, we show that the territorial structure of inequality and malapportionment are associated with lower redistributive effort in the global context and that the Latin American federations have extreme values for both variables. Second, using a new data set of income distributions within and across Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico over time, we demonstrate that the conditions that favor fiscal transfers from the national to subnational governments are consistently strong, but conditions are rarely favorable for centralized policies to equilibrate national income. Unequal income patterns are reinforced by legislative malapportionment, which encourages interregional transfers to regions and limits the political voice of more populated and unequal regions that would benefit from centralized redistribution.

Both developed and developing countries have experienced increasing state intervention in the social welfare arena. In most countries of the world, the state has sponsored some social welfare programs, especially programs of social security. Despite their prevalence, little is known about their political nature, especially in the developing countries. Yet, the study of the political aspects of social security, especially the who, the what, and the how, would at once reveal important patterns of state-society relations.

This essay examines the ambivalent interaction between liberation theology and notions of ‘respect’ among Quichua speakers in highland Ecuador. It focuses on three ways that notions of respect rooted in local history inform and transform current Catholic practice and ethnic politics. First, indigenous Catholic activists and mestizo priests appeal to respect for elders to argue for ethnic and religious loyalty. Second, the memory of hacienda-era discipline partly underpins current models of community authority and “indigenous law.” Finally, many villagers bring expectations shaped by hacienda prayer meetings to the Bible reflection that liberation theology promotes. This complex interaction contributes to local redefinitions of modernity.

Latin American women's accession to executive and legislative office has been accompanied by the widespread expectation that their participation will change policies in ways that benefit women's lives. This article uses an in-depth case study of sexual health reform in Argentina to explore the leadership and coalition-building activities of key political actors. As a case study, the article moves beyond critical mass theories, which argue that women's greater presence will result in gender policy reform. Rather, the article demonstrates that women's inclusion, even at high percentages, generates statutory change only when specific leaders build momentum for reform through issue networks and diverse coalitions. More important, leaders must mobilize resources within civil society and across government branches to ensure that successful policies are enacted. Whether Latin American women enjoy material changes thus depends on whether their leaders are committed to passing and implementing gender reforms.