Israel’s historical relationships with Argentina, Nicaragua, and Guatemala during the Cold War in the 1980s provides one context for understanding the parameters of Israeli foreign policy in the region. These relationships allied Israel with right-wing military regimes suppressing a variety of subversive others in Argentina and Guatemala, and also a right-wing counterinsurgency in Nicaragua. In the post–Cold War era, the Colombian case is distinctive because conflict is shaped by a number of different armed actors, including the state, right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing insurgents, and the narcotics industries. Israel’s role in the complex Colombian milieu involves relationships with both the state and the parastate, both the military and the paramilitaries. The Israeli and Colombian states are substantively and conceptually intertwined around a common obsession with national security and armed conflict with subversive others of many types. I ask whether a special relationship sutures Israel to Colombia linked to the expanding interventions of paramilitaries and parastate apparatuses. This article provides historical and analytic contexts to elaborate the Colombia-Israel relationship, toward a future in which “peace” may play an important role.

This article reevaluates often-made assumptions of retrospective voting and voter irrationality in studies of voting behavior in political contexts colored by haphazard, apolitical events. To do so, it leverages the quasi-random 2015–2016 Zika epidemic in Brazil and the accompanying priming of “women’s issues” relating to infant health to empirically assess whether exposure to the virus increased political support for female candidates in the 2016 Brazilian local elections. Results of difference-in-difference analyses suggest that high incidences of the virus in the months immediately preceding the election increased female candidates’ vote shares. Conflicting with theories of irrational retrospective voting, the results are consistent with an understudied theory of rational prospective voting. Robustness and falsification tests and dubious support for alternative explanations lend additional support to the argument. The research contributes to an elucidation of both the complex calculations underlying voting behavior and the conditions favorable to female candidates’ electoral prospects.

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The study of the distribution of income summarizes a nation's social organization and the outcome of the forces of social change. The measurement of income distribution itself yields a type of social scorecard, the resolution of claims by competing groups for the economy's output. As an indication of social justice, income distribution measures as well the extent to which different groups share in a nation's economic progress.

Political economy theory expects that changes in macroeconomic governance are often catalyzed by institutional factors, such as partisanship, elections, or International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionality. I challenge and contextualize this view by incorporating the role of technocratic advisors into a domestic policy-making framework. I contend that presidents from countries with crisis legacies are more likely to appoint mainstream economists that pursue budget discipline. Employing an originally constructed dataset, the Index of Economic Advisors, I conduct an econometric test of sixteen Latin American countries from 1961 to 2011. I find that politicians are most likely to appoint mainstream economists who embrace fiscal rectitude in countries with inflation-crisis legacies. Furthermore, these crisis legacies are enduring given the severity of inflationary trauma relative to other types of domestic economic volatility in Latin America. In fact, these effects hold when controlling for both historical and contemporaneous shocks to unemployment.

Postcolonial criticism and theory have been instrumental not only in showing how Western texts have constructed non-Western peoples and cultures, but also in analyzing discourse on the racialized Other in travel writings by members of formerly colonized societies and cultures who may reinscribe—consciously or unconsciously—the structural values of cultural domination. As privileged members of comparable societies that had assimilated and been assimilated into dominant ideologies of European cultural and biological superiority, Spanish American visitors to the United States during the segregation era uniquely exemplify such discourse and thus merit scholarly attention. Examining—within their respective cultural and historical contexts—selected texts by six Spanish American writers who visited or lived in the United States during the period 1880-1947, this paper analyzes their observations of, experiences with, and reactions to the realities of racial separation and the attendant violence against African Americans in order to determine the extent to which the writers resisted or participated in the “othering” process that represented African Americans as different and inferior.

In 1961 twenty latin american countries signed a document which committed them “to reform tax laws, demanding more from those who have most, to punish tax evasion severely, and to redistribute the national income in order to benefit those who are most in need while, at the same time, promoting savings and investment and reinvestment of capital.” Both before and since this declaration a great deal of research on taxation has been carried out in Latin America, and even more has been said about the “need” for tax “reform.”

The aim of this work is to analyze the situation of disabled people in the labor market in Mexico, taking into account socioeconomic variables and the spatial dimension. The results of our analysis provide guidelines for actions geared at improving the inclusion of disabled people in the labor market, and, as a consequence, in society. We apply cluster analysis to thirty-two Mexican federal states using data of the XII Censo de Población y Vivienda 2000; this allows us to identify spatial correlation processes and therefore spatial clusters. A dual structure emerges in the distribution of disabled people in the Mexican labor market, showing that effective economic policies to encourage the inclusion of disabled people into the labor market must take into account the socioeconomic diversity of different geographical areas.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto's now-classic analysis of Latin American dependent development is perhaps the most important synthesis of the shifting alliances between classes and interest groups that have been cause and consequence of nation-building, state formation, and capital accumulation in Latin America. The book is admirable in many ways, but especially in the scale of its focus across time and space. Rather than telling us every detail of a particular country or period it uses an analytical perspective based on class analysis to compare “situations of dependency” across Latin America from the period of decolonization in the early nineteenth century to the 1970s. I am not a Latin Americanist and so I cannot evaluate the many interpretations of political events in the book. Rather my comments will focus on its theoretical implications, its special strengths, and its possible limitations from the point of view of the capitalist world system as a whole.

In Brazil, perhaps more than in any other Latin American nation, popular music has traditionally been a potent cultural force. It is probable, as P. M. Bardi, director of São Paulo's Museum of Art, has suggested, that “of all the arts, [music] is closest to the Brazilians' modes of feeling and expression.” Even such erudite composers as Carlos Gomes (1836–96), Alberto Nepomuceno (1864–1920), Camargo Guarnieri (1907–), Gilberto Mendes (1922–) and, above all, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959), often found their inspiration in Brazilian folklore and the everyday lives of common people.

Interest in the Cristero insurrection against the Mexican Revolution has continued unabated since the 1960s. Until now all the major published studies have viewed the rebellion as the climactic outcome of the long-standing conflict between church and state in Mexico. By adopting this perspective, these works have deepened knowledge of church-state relations and sharply delineated the composition and development of Catholic and revolutionary factions. At the same time, these studies have offered a wide range of interpretations of the Cristero movement, interpretations that are incompatible with one another.

This paper originated with Jonathan Brown's invitation to participate in a LARR-sponsored panel at the 2004 LASA Congress, commenting on the lectures offered by John Coatsworth and Joseph Love. The discussants' task was to relate the general ideas presented by these scholars to our own field of specialization, which in my case happens to be the history of foreign trade. Therefore, this article summarizes the evolution of economic ideas with respect to Latin America, with special emphasis on foreign trade and commercial policy. It explains the basic positions held by the structuralist and dependentista schools, the shift brought about by the return of neoclassical economics, and the partial departure from orthodoxy made by the New Institutional Economics (NIE). This article concludes with a discussion of how these changes in paradigms were generated and how the evolution in ideas contributes fresh approaches to the historical interpretation of the role of foreign trade in Latin America.

The study developed by Stock and Watson (1991) has served as a catalyst for the construction of monthly indicators of economic activity. However, its application has been focused on national statistics. In this article we develop a new empirical strategy of three steps to build regional economic indicators on a monthly basis that can be replicated in provinces or municipalities in Latin America. We apply this empirical strategy to develop the Monthly Indicator of Economic Activity (in Spanish, IMAE) for one of the main regions of Colombia: Valle del Cauca.

The unusually rapid pace of economic growth in Brazil's second major cyclical upswing in the postwar era (1968–74) has given rise to extensive comment and analysis. Much has been written about this experience and a “model” of Brazilian development that invariably emerges from these analyses emphasizes the following features: (1) rapid industrial growth; (2) the remarkable growth of exports; (3) an income concentrating wage policy; (4) institutional change creating a more effective and income elastic tax system; (5) reformed capital markets indexed for inflation and a semifloating exchange rate; (6) increased savings and investment; and (7) a rise in the foreign debt.

Aunque suele plantearse que la relación migración-desarrollo es un fenómeno complejo y multifacético, al final de cuentas el debate ha estado hegemonizado por la visión que los países receptores y organismos internacionales tienen de ella. Según esta perspectiva, la migración adquiere un sentido y significado político diferente según se trate de los países emisores o receptores de migrantes. En el primer caso, la migración es vista como una oportunidad para potenciar sus procesos de desarrollo económico y social. En el caso de los países de destino, en cambio, se habla más bien de una cuestión migratoria, enfocándose el análisis en los problemas sociales, económicos o políticos que plantea la inmigración masiva, máxime cuando se considera la alta proporción de migrantes indocumentados. En este contexto, nos interesa aportar elementos analíticos e información empírica que contribuyan a visibilizar diversos aspectos de la relación migración-desarrollo que han sido invisibilizados en este debate. Para ello, nos centraremos en el análisis de la inmigración latinoamericana a los Estados Unidos en las últimas décadas. En concreto, presentamos datos estadísticos en torno a tres aspectos que nos parecen de particular relevancia. Por un lado, en cuanto a las causas y factores desencadenantes de la migración internacional; por otro lado, en relación a las contribuciones de la inmigración latinoamericana a la economía y demografía de los Estados Unidos; y finalmente, sobre los costos e impactos de la emigración en los países de origen en América Latina.

This article analyses how religious orientations and ideological preferences have coevolved in Chilean society between 1998 and 2014. On the basis of the premise that people experience religion heterogeneously, we develop four hypotheses that describe possible changes in the association between these two variables. Using data from yearly national probability surveys and multinomial regression models, we obtain two general results. First, we observe a general process of political “dealignment,” whereby the proportion of the population, religious and irreligious, that ceases to identify with ideological positions strongly increases. Second, the magnitude of this dealignment is moderated by religious denomination and frequency of church attendance. Irreligious people have ceased to identify with ideological positions at higher rates than Evangelicals and Catholics, whereas frequently attending Catholics have become more reluctant than nonattending Catholics to abandon their traditional right-wing preferences. These results imply that as Catholics have reduced their size in the population, they have also become more politically heterogeneous.

Este artículo estudia la percepción que tienen los individuos sobre el color de su piel como una dimensión ideológica del blanqueamiento. Usando modelos de regresión logística binaria en una muestra nacional representativa del Barómetro de las Américas en Colombia, preguntamos: ¿Existe alguna asociación entre las categorías étnico-raciales, el color de la piel, el estatus social y el deseo individual de tener un color de piel más claro? ¿Qué explica el deseo de tener un color de piel más claro en el seno de una sociedad racializada? Este estudio encuentra que las personas que se autoidentifican como blancas tienen una mayor probabilidad de desear tener un color de piel más claro que las personas negras, después de controlar por el color de la piel. Además, aquellos con un tono de piel intermedio también tienen un mayor deseo de blanqueamiento. Los resultados muestran que, para las personas que se autoidentifican como negras en Colombia, el blanqueamiento parece no constituirse en una ventana de escape de procesos históricos y estructurales de marginación social, ni en una estrategia de evasión de prácticas de discriminación racial.

Drawing on the literature on the social construction of public policy, this article pinpoints the emergence of the trope of the “temporary Mexican,” that is, the migrant farm laborer, to the 1920 congressional hearings on the “admission of illiterate Mexican laborers.” I argue that this construction was the brainchild of southwestern agriculture and its congressional supporters who sought to conceive of the Mexican laborer in terms consistent with the eugenic, liberal, and socially conservative sensibilities of the time. What resulted from this strategic creative process was the temporary Mexican, a new breed of peon who had free will and was biologically destined to return to Mexico. This temporariness, which was what made this social construction most palatable in the 1920s, has stayed with Mexicans (and Latinos generally) to the modern day, turning them into an in-between group whose membership is always suspect.

Northern Veracruz has experienced dramatic transformations in its landscape over the longue durée. Geological forces shaped it into the northernmost tropical rain forest in the Americas. Paleolithic humans appeared as early as 7600 BCE and tinkered with it, exploiting it for their own survival for thousands of years. Their ecological footprint was light enough until the communities grew and adopted agriculture. At that point, around 2500 BCE, the landscape of the Huasteca Veracruzana became more humanized, but the survival of the rainforest was not at risk, even when the first towns formed in the first centuries of the Common Era. Urbanization and civilization were highly localized, collapsing for reasons not well understood. The rainforest thus endured to confront Spanish colonialism in the 1500s. Changes in the land were uneven under the Spanish, however, and the rainforest outlasted colonial rule as well as the turmoil of nineteenth-century national politics. Transformation came in the twentieth century, as a result of oil extraction. Under the oil barons, the Huasteca experienced the full impact of capitalism and industrialization. Between 1900 and 1940, the oil industry eliminated the rainforest, leaving the Huasteca open to further environmental change. In the aftermath of oil, the landscape shifted to grasslands and monocrop agriculture. Oil remained present but largely in disguise: as petrochemical inputs to force poor soils to sustain citrus production and cattle ranching.