When I first undertook the task of compiling information on ecological research in Middle America it seemed best to concentrate on one facet of this many-faceted science. After some time and reflection, however, I concluded that a greater service would be performed for the reader by an overview of most of the subject area encompassed by ecology. I have attempted to present this overview in the pages that follow.

The reader is warned that depth has been sacrificed for breadth and that no attempt to review all the literature has been made. To do so would require far more space than is available. Therefore it is certain that some readers will find missing what they may consider to be a specially important or interesting paper. To them I offer apology.

Existing case-study research suggests that the recent increase in human rights violations in Latin America is attributed to the US-funded drug war. This narrative, which is referred to as the collateral damage perspective, stands in contrast to US human rights law, which makes governments' respect for human rights a precondition to receive aid. The apparent endogeneity between aid and human rights introduces bias that casts serious doubts on the validity of the collateral damage narrative. In addressing endogeneity, this article presents a simultaneous instrumental variable analysis of the human rights effects of US counternarcotic aid in the Americas. The results show that while counternarcotic aid to regimes increases overall violations of human rights, this effect is greater among democracies than autocracies. And with the exception of torture, this finding is consistent when disappearances, political imprisonment, and extrajudicial killings are also considered. The implication of this research suggests that policy makers in Washington risk losing regional support for US drug control policies if US laws that govern the allocation of aid are not effectively implemented.

A “Cult of ‘Che’” Has Arisen in the United States and in Latin America since the death of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara in Bolivia on October 9, 1967. The principal followers of the cult are the radical intellectuals, students and workers in the Western Hemisphere. The selection of Che Guevara as a hero by these segments of society, and their subsequent use of his name to champion their causes, has attracted the attention of the general public to this controversial figure. This sudden awareness of Che has created a substantial demand for information about his life and ideas. To meet this demand, publishers in the United States and Latin America have literally flooded the market with literature about him. This body of literature can be divided into two broad categories. The first comprises works containing his spoken or written words. In the second category are those works which have been written about him. These broad categories can be subdivided into books and periodical articles.

The present article analyzes the media produced by the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, especially its national cable TV station and online news agency. We discuss whether these media sources promote accountability and participation. Our findings suggest that although these sources have been employed, according to the logic of audience democracy, to promote the public visibility, credibility, and reputation of Brazil's federal representatives, they do contribute to enhancing the accountability and quality of Brazilian democracy, insofar as they provide access to relevant information about legislative processes.

This essay focuses on the dynamics of (dis)embodiment between national love and the body of the black woman in Cuba. This very discussion lies at the center of Sandra Álvarez Ramírez’s blog Negra cubana tenía que ser, where the black woman’s body becomes an ideal in itself. Álvarez Ramírez’s intellectual interventions impress this body with love and assemble a community whose members share the black feminist goal of a sexual (polyamory) revolution. I propose that Negra cubana’s revolutionary matrix resides in the blog’s networking: a cyberfeminist agenda to connect Cuban black women’s voices with other voices around the world. Contrary to the utopian promise of the Cuban Revolution, Negra cubana’s black feminist promise is that of enactment in the present—in both physical and virtual realms.

Produced along the Río de la Plata during the nineteenth century, shipped to Havana, and consumed by African slaves, the salt-cured beef known as tasajo affected both of those places and, to some degree, the Atlantic world in general. Initial exploration of the tasajo trail that connected Buenos Aires and Cuba employs primary sources such as nineteenth-century descriptions and shipping records to characterize the landscapes, places, routes, and agents of the largely unexplored research territory of that anomalous commodity: one that, unlike others such as sugar, slaves not only produced but also consumed; one that underpinned more prominent, latitudinal transatlantic flows such as the slave trade, yet itself flowed meridionally; one that, like all those flows, had an oceanic component that comprised an actively lived space of flows rather than a dead space of separation; and one that might be mundane, yet helped fuel major transformations of two of the principal nodes of Hispanic Atlantic.

El criollismo ha sido elaborado—desde diversos géneros—como espacio del consenso identitario aún en momentos de graves tensiones simbólicas. Se trata de un lugar construido sobre la capacidad de desplazamiento de la voz letrada, en función de adaptarse a los cambios producidos en la esfera cultural. Con el fin de trazar algunos de los hitos de este proceso de apelación identitaria en el caso específico de Venezuela, revisaré textos, publicados en su mayoría en la prensa, a lo largo del siglo XIX y principios del XX. La lectura de este corpus mostrará la trama de discursividades sobre la cual se asienta la autoridad letrada que emitió el discurso criollista.

This study seeks to determine the impact of remittances and nonlabor income on the duration of unemployment, and therefore on the hysteresis phenomenon in Colombia for the period between January 2010 and January 2021. The long-term unemployment rate in Colombia (LAPU) is calculated, and a vector autoregressive (VAR) model is subsequently estimated to evaluate the impact of remittances and nonlabor income on the LAPU. The results suggest that the increase in nonlabor income significantly affected LAPU in Colombia in the period analyzed. The growth of remittances instead turned out to positively and significantly impact LAPU only during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. This suggests that remittances have become a fundamental income in times of crisis that allow for financing the search for work for a longer period of time, thus increasing the duration of unemployment and generating a hysteresis effect.

How does the presence of a large group of remittance recipients in the electorate affect the way political parties in Latin America plan their vote-buying operations during electoral campaigns? Existing research claims that remittances bolster the political autonomy of recipients, allowing them to escape clientelistic networks and making them less attractive targets from the point of view of party machines. Although in the long run remittances may undermine the effectiveness of clientelistic inducements, parties still have strong incentives to distribute gifts and favors among these voters. Cross-national survey evidence and an original list experiment fielded in the aftermath of El Salvador’s 2014 presidential race support the view that remittances alter key attitudes and patterns of political behavior among recipients in ways that are relevant for the electoral strategies of party machines. In particular, remittance recipients are appealing targets for clientelistic exchanges due to the uncertainty of their turnout propensity and their distributive preferences.

En los primeros códigos civiles, las mujeres fueron definidas como sujetos de incapacidad de hecho relativa, limitación que venía asociada a la potestad del varón dentro del matrimonio. Este artículo aborda el reconocimiento de la capacidad civil plena de las mujeres en Uruguay (1946), Brasil (1962), Argentina (1968) y Chile (1989) como parte de un proceso complejo hacia la erosión (pero no disolución) del patriarcado. Para ello pone en práctica una metodología específica para el análisis del fenómeno legal que permite revelar los mecanismos discriminatorios. Asimismo, asume una perspectiva sociológico-histórica comparativa que muestra los diferentes recorridos hacia la reforma de la ley civil y los elementos que le son comunes. Se explicitan las distintas trayectorias, asumiendo que las dinámicas internas son únicas, pero mostrando que es posible identificar un mismo patrón de cambio: la modernización conservadora. En efecto, las mujeres casadas quedaron fijadas como sujetos de inferioridad jurídica, incluso cuando se les otorgó formalmente la capacidad civil plena. La modernización trajo cambios, pero el proceso estuvo dominado por las fuerzas de la tradición.

This article is concerned with the problem of reading and interpreting the Argentine literary magazine Sur, which was published regularly between 1931 and 1970 (and irregularly thereafter) as an elegant fusion of fiction, poetry, philosophy, plastic arts, and social commentary. That a magazine should be chosen as a research topic reflects the reality of Argentine literary life in the twentieth century. Such publications offered many writers their main opportunity to put forward ideas in the forms of works of literature and critical or general essays. Most magazines lasted for very few years, but Sur, thanks to the quality of its contributors and the sound financial base of its founder, Victoria Ocampo, was to have an important influence on several generations.

Scholarly literature has often characterized the popular bandit Chucho el Roto (1835?–1885) in terms of his legend as Mexico's urban Robin Hood, yet no study has attempted to discern how this legend took root and changed over time. This investigation brings together historical documents and literary texts about Chucho el Roto from the 1880s to the 1920s to analyze changing cultural perceptions of social class tensions in Mexico. It finds that Chucho provided a vehicle for both lower and upper classes to critically reflect on the morality of dominant society and to unite behind the resiliency and dignity of the oppressed working class. While the earliest literary text from 1889 criticizes Chucho for refusing to submit to dominant social norms and accept his place in the socioeconomic hierarchy, two post-1910 novels celebrate Chucho's banditry as a socialist-inspired political rebellion that resists assimilation into dominant political paradigms, including that of revolution.

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.

Indigenous peoples have been used and imagined as guardians of the Brazilian frontier since at least the mid-nineteenth century. This association was central to the foundation of the Indian Protection Service (Serviço de Proteção aos Índios, or SPI) during the early 1900s and culminated with the Amazonian Vigilance System (Sistema de Vigelância da Amazônia, or SIVAM) at the turn of the millennium. Throughout the period, the abiding desire to establish defensive dominion over disputed national territory subjected individuals and groups identified as “Indians” to the power of overlapping discourses of scientific progress, national security, and economic development. A trinity of Brazilian modernity, these goals interpellated native peoples primarily through the practice and rhetoric of education, which grounds their historical relationship with dominant national society. Drawing on SPI records, government documents, journalism, personal testimonies, and visual media, this article traces the impact of this modernist trinity on indigenist policy and in the lives of those who have been affected by its tutelary power. By transforming private indigenous spaces into public domain, Brazil's politics of anti-imperialist imperialism propagated a colonialist, metonymic relationship between “our Indians” and “our America” into the twenty-first century.