This article analyzes the impact of Augusto Pinochet’s autocracy on the Chilean economy. The study compares outcomes under Pinochet’s leadership with those in a synthetic counterfactual made of a weighted average of countries with similar characteristics. It finds that, relative to the control, Chilean income per capita greatly underperformed for at least the first fifteen years after Pinochet’s coup. The results are robust to extending the pool of donor countries and expanding the pretreatment period by switching data sets to capture potential heterogeneity of effects. The evidence suggests that Chile’s remarkable economic growth during the period 1985–1997 did not depend on Pinochet’s autocracy. These results further bring into question the effectiveness of the regime to enhance economic growth and the narrative of the Chilean miracle.

El clientelismo en Paraguay es generalizado y socialmente aceptado tanto por los políticos como por la ciudadanía, pero relativamente poco estudiado por la literatura comparada. Este artículo ofrece una descripción cualitativa de los principales actores y lógicas del funcionamiento en los vínculos clientelares entre políticos y la ciudadanía en Paraguay, enfocándose tanto en las relaciones de largo plazo como en las prácticas durante los períodos electorales. El artículo argumenta que el clientelismo en Paraguay está anclado en las estructuras partidarias territoriales, la identificación ciudadana con los principales partidos políticos y en las redes de brokers con vínculos con los vecinos. Durante los períodos electorales los intercambios particularistas se intensifican y culminan con la compra de participación electoral durante el día de las elecciones. El artículo muestra que la parte relacional y electoral del clientelismo en el caso paraguayo son inseparables, condicionando la primera a la segunda. La compra de participación electoral es una práctica que se deriva de relaciones cultivadas a lo largo del tiempo. La investigación está basada en entrevistas a profundidad y trabajo de campo en cuatro ciudades de la zona metropolitana de Asunción.

This article envisions the Caracas Metro as infrastructure that forms and is formed by political subjectivity and urban space. The first section provides a brief history of the metro as conceived by modernization-minded politicians in the twentieth century. Here the Metro is seen as playing a pedagogical function in accordance with a larger tradition of Venezuelan positivism. The second section examines a shift in the social and political composition of Caracas after El Caracazo of 1989. In response to neoliberalization, social movements reshaped the terrain of politics and the city in a way that can be usefully conceptualized as demands for the right to the city—that subjects have the right to access, shape, and themselves be shaped by the urban environment. I conclude with an analysis of 2014’s violent antigovernment protests. The tactics and targets of these protests—barricades and direct attacks on public infrastructure such as the Metro—illustrate the perceived threat democratized urban space poses to traditional elites in the context of social change.

During the last decade, the term Establishment has gained currency among Colombian opinion makers—be they newspaper columnists, politicians, or even academics. After surveying the ambiguities of the concept in the United Kingdom and the United States—the countries where it was first popularized in the 1950s and 1960s—this paper focuses on the usages of the expression in the Colombian public debate. Based on a variety of sources—including op-eds and newspaper reports, interviews with leading public figures, and other political and academic documents—I show how generalized the term has become. I examine how the prevailing language gives the “Establishment” a central role in shaping political developments in the past decades. It blames the Establishment for the country's most fundamental problems while conferring on this same Establishment the power to solve them. However, any attempt to identify what is meant by the Establishment soon reveals an extremely confusing picture. In the final part of the paper, I highlight some of the implications of the general usage of such a vague and contradictory concept for the quality of democratic debate, the legitimacy of the political system, and the possible solution of the armed conflict in Colombia.

The majority of the working classes are divided into various factions that display a host of views and attitudes. As E. P. Thompson has portrayed the concept of class, it is at best not a permanent structure or category but something that emerges from time to time when workers band together for one reason or another. The complexity of this phenomenon has been compounded by the growth of various sectors of the working class, adding to its heterogeneity and amorphousness. Marx himself perceived that capitalism had “converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage labourers.”

This essay reviews the following works:

Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, 1944–1969. By Mónica Amor. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. Pp. x + 309. $65.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780520286627.

Brazil through French Eyes: A Nineteenth-Century Artist in the Tropics. By Ana Lucia Araujo. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015. Pp. xxvi + 238. $55.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780826337450.

Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil. By Stephanie D’Alessandro and Luis Pérez-Oramas. New Haven: Yale University Press; Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2017. Pp. 192. $50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780300228618.

Cultural Exchanges between Brazil and France. Edited by Regina R. Félix and Scott D. Juall. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Pp. 225. $45.00 paperback. ISBN: 9781557537461.

Proust’s Latin Americans. By Rubén Gallo. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. 280. $45.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781421413457.

Transatlantic Encounters: Latin American Artists in Paris between the Wars. By Michele Greet. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. viii + 288. $27.50 hardcover. ISBN: 9780415933048.

Tropical Travels: Brazilian Popular Performance, Transnational Encounters, and the Construction of Race. By Lisa Shaw. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Pp. 231. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477314791.

Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s. By Elena Shtromberg. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. 210. $29.95. ISBN: 9781477308585.

Making the Americas Modern: Hemispheric Art, 1910–1960. By Edward J. Sullivan. London: Lawrence King Publishing, 2018. Pp. 336. $50.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781786271556.

It has been almost two decades since trends in research on Latin American politics were measured in any systematic way. The early profile of the state of Latin American research in political science developed by Peter Ranis showed that Mexico, Brazil, and Chile “receive about one-third of all political science research attention.” Less than 1 percent of political science research was devoted to Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, and Nicaragua. The subjects that received the most attention in the 1960s were interest groups (the military, students, and the church), the history of political institutions, and the nature of political, economic, and social change.

Aunque Nicaragua sea el país más pobre de Centroamérica, no cuenta con la tasa de mortalidad infantil más alta de la región. La más igualitaria distribución del ingreso en Nicaragua, en comparación con otros países centroamericanos, es un factor que favorece la relativamente baja mortalidad. Empero, la población indígena nicaragüense afronta grandes desventajas en casi todos los aspectos, aunque esto no se refleja en la desigualdad nacional por ser una población minoritaria. Aprovechando el censo de 2005 y la regresión binomial negativa, modelamos la mortalidad infantil. Mostramos cómo los niños indígenas tienen 33 por ciento más riesgo de muerte, e incluso controlando otros factores, la diferencia del riego es casi del 5 por ciento. Hasta ahora no existían investigaciones cuantitativas que compararan la mortalidad entre grupos étnicos en Nicaragua. En nuestro estudio mostramos que los indígenas nicaragüenses están en desventaja a pesar de la baja desigualdad a nivel nacional.