Este ensayo explica la evolución del debate en torno a la legalización de drogas psicoactivas ilícitas en Colombia. Este debate tuvo un protagonista central: el Presidente Ernesto Samper Pizano (1994–1998). En los años setenta fue un activo participante en la polémica a favor de una actitud más liberal y menos prohibicionista sobre la marihuana. Desde el poder dos décadas después, fue el que impulsó la major criminalización del fenómeno de las drogas. Este trabajo traza ese recorrido histórico y analiza los motivos pragmáticos para que Samper se movieira entre la legalización generosa y la prohibición categórica. Su pensamiento y su comportamiento reflejan en buena medida una actitud relativamente extendida en Colombia frente a los narcóticos: la oscilación entre convivir y combatir las drogas. En uno y otro escenario, el papel de Estados Unidos ha sido fundamental. El peso de Washington y su cruzada anti-drogas resultaron notoriamente influyentes en las discusiones colombianas sobre qué hacer con el narcotráfico y los narcotraficantes. Al inicio de un nuevo milenio, Colombia está frente a un abismo, un abismo en parte originado por la prohibición de drogas.

This article analyzes Salvadoran newspaper coverage of a social movement struggle that emerged in 2002 to prevent the privatization of the health-care system. Movement groups pursued their policy goals through both extrainstitutional protest and formal legislative channels. Through an analysis of news content, this article examines whether these different components of the movement's claims-making repertoire influenced the portrayal of the movement's goals, actors, and actions by one of the major Salvadoran news dailies. The analysis reveals that, compared to protest events, legislative processes that the movement set in motion generated coverage that was more sympathetic to the movement and that presented greater interrogation of government and elite plans for health-care reform.

Most of the critical commentary on Nicaraguan poet Rubén Dario has been called forth and shaped by his being a seminal pan-Latin American and an international literary figure. Less known is the fact that for more than a century, Darío has been the focus of a much contested discourse concerning national cultural identity within Nicaragua itself. Comprehending this more limited and focused discourse requires carefully analyzing the changing cultural-political constructions that Darío's fellow Nicaraguans have placed upon his life and work, and especially the role of ideology in those constructs. Such analysis can also offer insight into the role of focal Latin American cultural figures in the negotiation of national cultural identity, especially during periods of dramatic political transformation, crisis, and reconstruction like the Somoza era (1936–1979) and the Sandinista Revolution (1961–1989).

The lively exchange in the Latin American Research Review between D. C. M. Platt and Stanley J. and Barbara H. Stein over dependency and autonomy in nineteenth-century Latin America raises a number of significant questions in the field of historical interpretation. It illustrates once more how difficult it is to support sweeping generalizations about so large and complex a region as Latin America, especially in a time period so filled with changes (in at least parts of the region) as the nineteenth century. The controversy over sources of action and their motivation, which characterizes dependency analysis, is unresolved. The argument is flavored with attributions of moral blame for events that may turn out, in a broader historical view, to have been highly fortuitous. The present comment is an attempt to insert and assess the force and direction of a vector usually passed by in the controversy. The case will be confined to Argentina, the country most often cited by Platt, and certainly the Latin American country most affected in its emerging pattern of economic development by marked shifts from Spanish to criollo to British influence over the century.

During the National Conference on Education, Science, and Technology, held in June 1976 as part of the political campaign just prior to the change of administrations, the spokesman for the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) stated, in the presence of the incoming president of Mexico, that:

It is presently impossible to doubt the need for a policy on science and technology in Mexico. Such a policy should not base the country's scientific and technological development upon the never-ceasing imitation of the research lines and technological solutions of the advanced countries. It is necessary for us to look for our own model of scientific and technological development.

The history of the Pizarros, conquerors of Peru, is inseparably bound with images of swine. If we are to believe the chronicler Gómara, the Pizarro-pig association began when the illegitimate infant Francisco was abandoned at a church door, where he survived by suckling a sow for several days. Later, according to Gómara, the young Francisco's father recognized his offspring, but only to make him his swineherd. Though the former of these two stories is probably fantasy, the latter should not be rejected out of hand, as will become clear later. But whether true or not, the legend of the swineherd-turned-conquistador has sparked the historian's imagination for centuries.

The Dominican Republic retroactively stripped thousands of Dominico-Haitians of their Dominican citizenship yet managed to defuse international opprobrium over time. After a direct assault on people’s citizenship status in 2013 provoked the human rights community’s ire, the DR employed administrative obstructionism to maneuver around human rights activism and institutions. Policies instituted in 2014 appeared to offer a pathway for Dominico-Haitians to reinstate their citizenship yet were so administratively onerous that most of the affected population remains effectively stateless. Administrative obstructionism makes for an elusive target of attack because it unfolds across a series of decisions over time, transfers responsibility from a highly visible leader to dispersed and faceless bureaucrats, and is exceedingly difficult to monitor. Administrative obstructionism drags out proceedings, causing media attention to wither. Because international forces face special challenges in countering this strategy, a strong domestic opposition movement is necessary to sustain pressure on a rights-violating government.

The striking racial heterogeneity of contemporary latin america has obviously evolved in the course of a historical process that started in 1492. There would perhaps be a temptation to interpret the whole of Latin American history in terms of race relations. Though we believe that such an approach would be absurd, race relations have admittedly colored many aspects of Latin American history. Their role is by no means easily defined.

This study assesses the deployment of blackface in a performance of the Danza de Caporales at La Fiesta de la Virgen de la Candelaria in Puno, Peru, by the performance troupe Sambos Illimani con Sentimiento y Devoción. Since blackface is so widely associated with the nineteenth-century US blackface minstrel tradition, this article develops the concept of “hemispheric blackface” to expand common understandings of the form. It historicizes Sambos’ deployment of blackface within an Andean performance tradition known as the Tundique, and then traces the way multiple hemispheric performance traditions can converge in a single blackface act. It underscores the amorphous nature of blackface itself and critically assesses its role in producing anti-blackness in the performance.

Since the late 1960s TV Globo, Brazil’s largest and most commercially successful broadcast network, has been producing long-form serial narratives known as telenovelas. Followed by millions of domestic viewers and exported to more than 130 countries worldwide, these melorealist serials have served as a primary source for what it means to be Brazilian in both the domestic and global social imaginaries. A number of excellent studies, however, have shown that the country’s most important fictional television genre has historically underrepresented Brazilians of color while at the same time producing a symbolic good that emphasizes whiteness as the ideal social marker. This article shifts the focus from the telenovela to an examination of the series, an emerging and understudied area of Brazilian television fiction. By analyzing representations of blackness in two contemporary Brazilian serial comedies: Mister Brau (TV Globo, 2015–) and The Great Gonzalez (O Grande Gonzalez, Fox Brasil and Porta dos Fundos, 2015), the article reveals the initial stages of recent developments that have the potential to significantly alter both the field of television production and the way Brazil is portrayed on the small screen.

Sustainable energy economics in Latin America has become relevant due to the region’s dependence on the oil market and the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. A systematic review of the ten major economies in the region based on gross domestic product is conducted. We primarily analyze production performance of hydro, wind, and solar energies, in terms of total gigawatt hours produced, current participation levels in energy matrices, and total installed capacity. Current and future trends and legal frameworks for each technology and country are discussed. Our analyses indicate that Latin America and the Caribbean can potentially increase the usage of renewable energy sources given a plethora of natural resources, favorable geographical and climatic conditions, and existing large-scale hydro installations to counteract the inconsistency of wind and solar projects. Therefore, governments in the region must overhaul sustainable policies to increase awareness and reduce energy dependence on foreign powers.

El tema de la vinculación de los productores y la producción agraria con los mercados es hoy un tema bastante bien explorado en la historiografía colonialista americana. De estos estudios surge como una visión más o menos generalizada la progresiva tendencia al control sobre los mercados de productos agropecuarios de parte de las grandes haciendas españolas. Sin embargo, últimamente esto ha sido matizado destacando el alto grado de participación mercantil del campesinado y de las comunidades indígenas, por lo menos en ciertas regiones y períodos, incluso tardíos.

The issue to be addressed in this article is the limited exploration thus far of how rural women in Latin America themselves define and interpret the world around them and what meaning, if any, they attach to key terms employed by researchers concerned with development issues. A review of the literature reveals that despite the great strides made in the last two decades in understanding Latin American women as rural producers, research to date has dealt with the questions of gender ideology and identity in an extremely limited way. Two potential directions for future research will be suggested here: a critical reassessment of some of the analytical categories that have been taken as givens, and a focus on the social-political construction of gender identity and experience from the point of view of rural women. To explore the possibilities of these suggestions, the phrase “division of labor by sex” will be analyzed in light of recent anthropological and feminist contributions to other (primarily non-Latin American) areas of the literature. A second point that will be discussed is how life stories, when collected self-critically, can reveal the potential tension between the active negotiation of meaning by analysts and by the rural women they interview. I will argue that these new directions in research are essential if scholars are to appreciate varying interpretations of development.