This article focuses on three central impediments to police reform in Argentina, each of which has generated an important, yet distinct, paradox. First, although advocates of federalism argue that police reform facilitates innovation, in practice, reform efforts at one level of government in Argentina have been sabotaged by officials at other levels of government. Second, although electoral pressures have pushed police reform onto the policy agenda, these same pressures have also obstructed reform efforts because politicians depend on illicit party-police networks for campaign financing. Third, despite copious evidence of police involvement in criminal acts, Argentina's crime wave has energized conservative civil society groups whose demand for a heavy-handed response to crime has derailed the most promising attempts to restructure the police force.

Despite its important role in the construction of imagined communities throughout the region, the study of silent cinema in Latin America has barely gone beyond an initial stage of unearthing national and regional cinemas to a more comparative and critical study of trends and ideologies from a transnational perspective. This essay outlines such a comparative history by using the spatiotemporal metaphor of triangulation as a framework for theorizing the politics of criollo aesthetics, and by combining a diachronic examination of major trends with synchronic close readings of paradigmatic films. The periodization and selection of films respond, in turn, to a broader consideration of how ideology, aesthetics, and economics intersect in the evolution of filmic practices in Latin America during the silent era. Finally, in the conclusion, I argue that the most important legacy of this period of Latin American cinema on subsequent filmmaking in the region is not so much the elaboration of a criollo aesthetics, which would not survive beyond the silent period, but rather the development of the strategy of triangulation, whereby Latin American filmmakers navigated a global cinematic landscape from a position of marginality.

This article proposes a conceptual framework to discuss the left and left turns in Latin American politics. It then proceeds to argue that winning elections—the recurrent criterion for these turns—might generate tremendous enthusiasm but is also a restrictive benchmark. Other indicators I discuss here include the left's agenda-setting capacity, its redefinition of the political and ideological center, and its incipient challenge of the liberal setting of politics as actors experiment with post-liberal arrangements.

Brazil's constitution (1988) granted municipalities the responsibility of providing social services. Many observers anticipated that this newfound authority would produce policy diversity, as local governments would tailor programs to constituents' needs. Instead, many municipalities chose to replicate programs made famous elsewhere. What explains this diffusion of social policies across Brazil? In particular, what motivates policy makers to emulate “innovative” policies? This study compares three approaches that seek to explain political behavior: political self-interest, ideology, and socialized norms. It draws on two policies, Bolsa Escola, an education program, and Programa Saúde da Família, a family health program, in four exemplary cities, to uncover the mechanisms that led to diffusion. Surprisingly, political incentives, such as electoral competition, cannot explain diffusion. Rather, ideology and socialized norms, transmitted through social networks, drive policy emulation. Diffusion occurs when politicians are ideologically compelled to replicate these programs and when policy specialists seek to demonstrate that they follow professional norms.

In this article, I outline a framework to examine women's lives in eastern Guatemala, how multiple forms of violence coalesce in their everyday lives, and how these become normalized so as to become invisible and “natural.” Women in western Guatemala, mostly indigenous, have received the attention of scholars who are interested in unearthing the brutality of state terror and its gendered expressions in Guatemala. My discussion builds on previous research conducted among indigenous groups in Guatemala and renders a depiction of the broad reach of violence, including expressions that are so commonplace as to become invisible. I argue that an examination of multiple forms of violence in the lives of women in eastern Guatemala, who are nonindigenous, exposes the deep and broad manifestations of living in a society engulfed in violence, thus depicting the long arm of violence.

El estudio examina un conjunto de eventos ocurridos en La Plata, sede de la audiencia de Charcas, en 1781 a raíz de la difusión de rumores acerca de una presunta revuelta popular. En ellos podemos apreciar la incipiente conformación de una cultura política urbana que, aunque enraizada en tradiciones ideológicas pluriseculares, se erigió en abierta contraposición al orden vigente. Los alegatos colectivos de los vecinos patricios y plebeyos, las iniciativas del ayuntamiento y una serie de ceremonias públicas revelan significativas mutaciones en los modos de concebir las relaciones de los grupos urbanos, así como vigorosos cuestionamientos a los principios del absolutismo borbónico. Veremos aflorar marcados sentimientos de antagonismo entre los vecinos y los sectores peninsulares, formas de interpelación al “pueblo” que expusieron la repentina relevancia adquirida por las opiniones de la población local y la construcción de la ciudad como sujeto de la historia y actor político colectivo.

This article argues that the national political context of Colombia in the 1970s and 1980s led the Colombian indigenous movement to elaborate an ethnic citizenship. The failures of the left and the decline in effectiveness of partisan citizenship played a large role in the representation and political practices of the premier indigenous grassroots organization Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca; CRIC). This article focuses on the formative moments of the 1970s and early 1980s when CRIC began to represent its movement as a primarily indigenous, ethnic one, minimizing the importance of nonindigenous actors. The nation-state, at each stage of the movement's development, fostered the “ethnicization” of the indigenous movement of Colombia in hopes of weakening the southwestern insurgency and legitimizing its institutions:

Fair-trade networks have been working to temper the inequities and uncertainties facing small-scale artisans and farmers and to provide them with more secure and livable incomes. Drawing on earlier research in 1991–1993 and a brief pilot study in 2006, this research note examines farmers' perceptions of the benefits and drawbacks of production for fair trade in three coffee-producing regions in Costa Rica. While the fair-trade movement has made significant headway in bringing social and environmental concerns to the marketplace and in providing farmers with guaranteed minimum prices for their coffee, farmers' reactions to production for fair trade indicate a number of problems that farmers and fair-trade cooperatives are facing in their efforts to reap the potential benefits of fair trade. As currently structured, fair-trade markets alone do not adequately address the needs of small farming families in Latin America.