Um desastroso extermínio de pássaros ocorreu no Brasil durante as primeiras décadas do período republicano, quando o comércio de penas atingiu níveis estrondosos. Os primeiros protestos contra tal situação vieram de naturalistas atuantes nos museus de ciência brasileiros, através do delineamento de dois argumentos principais. Em primeiro lugar, esses cientistas criticavam um liberalismo permissivo do Estado Republicano, responsável pelo abandono dos recursos naturais sem qualquer tipo de proteção. Em segundo lugar, tentavam persuadir os agricultores da utilidade dos pássaros, na maioria insetívoros, e cuja preservação seria absolutamente essencial para manter o equilíbrio natural, um dos pré-requisitos para a continuidade do crescimento econômico e para a construção de uma Nação moderna. Após 1930, com a centralização política promovida por Vargas, o argumento da utilidade dos pássaros foi empregado no reforço de valores morais do regime autoritário, em representações antropomórficas do meio natural.

This article examines the connections between financing, reputation, and industrial development in Argentina. It analyzes five leading merchant finance groups through a newly created data set of 1,282 directors and shareholders of fifty-nine manufacturing companies across ten sectors from 1890 to 1930. Merchant finance groups formed to pool capital for manufacturing investment in the absence of developed domestic banking institutions and equity markets. The leading five groups under study secured access to diverse sources of capital by developing personal connections and by their reputations. Although these five groups successfully adapted to an environment that lacked efficient credit markets, most manufacturers' companies were capital-starved due to the lack of industrial credit. Insufficient industrial credit resulted in dominant firms owned by a few merchant finance groups controlling the noncompetitive manufacturing sector.

Este trabajo analiza la influencia política e ideológica que el grupo de discípulos de Alejandro Bunge tuvo en la definición de la política económica del primer peronismo. Se sostiene que su postura favorable a la industrialización en los debates de la entreguerra y el influjo que el catolicismo social ejerció en sus miembros le permitió al grupo ejercer influencia sobre la dictadura militar de 1943. El artículo estudia el papel del grupo en la Secretaría de Industria, la elaboración del primer régimen de promoción industrial y los debates económicos de la inmediata posguerra. Se argumenta que el grupo Bunge desempeñó un rol decisivo en la orientación de la política industrial peronista, moldeando sus características básicas y brindando al régimen de Perón los argumentos que la justificaban. A propósito de ello, el trabajo discute la interpretación que otorga excesivo énfasis a factores políticos y sociales, como el enfrentamiento de Perón con los Estados Unidos y las demandas del movimiento obrero, en la orientación que tomó la política industrial peronista.

Asking who “really” speaks and acts for indigenous people is an increasingly important political question in Latin America. This article explores how an “unlikely” Evangelical Protestant Indian organization (FEINE, the Ecuadorian Evangelical Indigenous Federation) and a seemingly more “authentic” Bolivian indigenous federation of communities claiming pre-Columbian authority structures (CONAMAQ, the National Council of Markas and Ayllus of Qollasuyo) have grown in representational strength, or the ability to convince others that they speak for specific constituencies. Through this historically and ethnographically based comparative political study, I argue that indigenous representation is produced across scales, both from “below” (as communities and leaders organize and mobilize) as well as from “above” (as elites and opportunity structures favor some groups over others). FEINE and CONAMAQ present mirror images of the ways in which indigenous people negotiate local-global networks and discourses: FEINE Indianized Protestant Evangelicalism while CONAMAQ transnationalized local ayllu authority structures. This multi-scale analysis suggests that how Indians are spoken about transnationally shapes who gets to speak for Indians locally.

This essay explores the impact of new consumer cultures on rural women in Chile's fruit-export sector during the military regime of Augusto Pinochet, 1973–1990. It challenges the longstanding assumption that the “consumerism” associated with Chile's neoliberal makeover was overwhelmingly reactionary in its political consequences and debilitating for working-class communities in particular. It argues that while new consumer cultures emerged within, and sometimes exacerbated, conditions of extraordinary exploitation and want, consumption was also a site through which women fruit workers challenged family patriarchy and created new forms of community with each other. Taking the central valley province of the Aconcagua Valley as its focus, the essay examines women's enthusiasm for the proliferation of imported commodities such as ready-made clothes, makeup, televisions, refrigerators, and electronic music devices, whose availability resulted from employment in the fruit-export sector as well as new sources of consumer debt. It concludes that while such new consumer desires and practices positioned rural women as validating certain aspects of the military's modernization project, it simultaneously encouraged women to resist necessarily linkages between “authoritarian” and “modernity” and to embrace gender ideals that were quite oppositional to those the regime promoted.

Major social and economic changes in Latin America brought about by adoption of the neoliberal model of development have been documented in the recent research literature. We ask to what extent such changes have affected the character of popular collective mobilizations in major cities of the region. We present data from six recent field studies in major Latin American cities that identify goals pursued by contemporary popular movements and organizations and the strategies they adopt to achieve them. These studies provide an overview of how urban society has reacted to the constraints, crises, and opportunities brought about by the new model of development and cast light on what has changed and what remains the same in determinants of popular collective demand-making in major metropolitan areas. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

Scholarship on the decade-long rule of Alberto Fujimori emphasizes the surprising popularity and support for Fujimori's rule. This essay, which analyzes the politics of fear in Fujimori's Peru, suggests that this presents a partial view of the nature of Fujimori's authority. Drawing on a Gramscian conceptualization of power, it explains how coercion achieved a consensual façade by manipulating fear and creating a semblance of order in a context of extreme individual and collective insecurity. It traces the roots of this insecurity in the economic crisis and political violence of the 1980s and 1990s, and explains how the Fujimori regime manipulated fear and insecurity to buttress its authoritarian rule. This essay also complements existing studies on Peruvian civil society, which point to economic factors, such as the economic crisis of the 1980s and neoliberal reforms, to explain civil society weakness. This paper explores the political factors that contributed to this process, particularly the deployment of state power to penetrate, control and intimidate civil society.

This paper seeks to explain the effect of different economic reforms for attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) in Latin America. Controlling for macroeconomic and good governance factors, we find that governments that implement economic reforms are not always more likely to attract FDI inflows. Instead, attempts to minimize expropriation risk complement domestic financial and trade reforms, which enhances foreign investor interest. Elements of both good governance and reform are important. The results provide reasons for optimism—the fact that most economic reforms are not essential for attracting FDI suggests that countries seeking FDI will encounter fewer obstacles.

Women make upadisproportionate shareoftheworld's poor, andLatin America is noexception to this trend. Nevertheless, veryfew studiesofsocial policy intheregion haveinvestigated whythegendered character ofwelfare provisionvariesacrosscountries. Thisarticleaddresses thatquestion throughacomparativehistoricalanalysisofChileandUruguayandconcludes thatvariation in thegendered natureofeach state's social policy regime resultedfromatwo-step process. Inthefirst stage,female laborforce participation, themobilizing capacityofwomen, andpolicy legacies differentiated thet7.UO countries, placing Chile onaless equitable trajectory thanUruguay. These differences were thenmagnifiedduringeach state's experience underauthoritarian rule.

This study relies on Brazilian census data from 1960–2000 to analyze long-term trends in racial and gender wage disparities in the urban labor market of São Paulo, one of Latin America's most dynamic economies. Afro-Brazilians and women have made remarkable progress over the past four decades in securing hard-won legal rights and in gaining access to the highest levels of schooling, entrance into higher paying occupations, and narrowing the intraethnic gender wage gap. Despite such progress, Afro-Brazilians and women are paid less than similarly qualified white men, and wage discrimination is increasing. Placing the interplay of race and gender at the center of this analysis shows how the workplace barriers people confront on the basis of skin color and sex play a fundamental role in shaping social and economic inequality in contemporary Brazil.

The Honduran Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve has become a place of struggle over natural resources. This paper examines a land contest between the Miskito Indians and the Garifuna, an indigenous group and Afro-indigenous group respectively. The area in question is Lasa Pulan, a one square kilometer of forest and farmland, historically shared by both Miskito and Garifuna collectives. Through discursive analysis, this paper traces contemporary discourse and practice that these actors employ to justify exclusive claims to Lasa Pulan. Such contemporary claims are structured by longstanding colonial and postcolonial racial ideologies that stereotypically label blacks as “immoral” and “violent” and Indians as “ignorant” and “backward. ” This paper argues, through analysis of Miskito and Garifuna claims to Lasa Pulan, that natural resource struggles are simultaneously racial struggles, and it acquaints policy makers with the multiple tenure arrangements in pluricultural Honduras.

In this paper I move beyond binary conceptions of the Colombian state as either strong or weak, failed or successful. Instead, I analyze particular sublime and gross qualities of the state as they are expressed through contestations over the space of el pueblo. I argue that this space—el pueblo—has been constructed around an internal contradiction. On one hand, it is figured as distant and in opposition to the city-state. On the other hand, it occupies the center of the nation. Marginalized by the official state, competing actors have incorporated el pueblo into “shadow states” that subvert the sublime image of the state. Lacking legitimacy within el pueblo, both the official and shadow states employ institutionalized violences in order to assert symbolic, discursive, and physical control over it. The result is the creation of a “culture of terror” that marks the real and imaginary space of el pueblo. The “spatialized vocabularies of citizenship” articulated by each actor—the state, shadow states, and el pueblo itself—from these margins mutually constitute Colombia's competing and intertwining “languages of stateness.”

For several years the Círculos Bolivarianos were a key organized component of the movement supporting President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and the question of their democratic qualities a source of considerable controversy, but until recently there was little data to test the competing claims of supporters and opponents. We report the results of a survey of 110 members of Círculos and several interviews carried out in four Venezuelan states during June and July 2004. After providing basic information on the Círculos, we analyze their tendency to contribute to a democratic civil society. We find that respondents had highly democratic goals and methods; however, their organizations embodied a charismatic mode of linkage to Chávez that undermined their ability to become institutionalized. In addition, although the Círculos performed valuable social work, they often reinforced clientelistic relations between Chávez and the voters, and they did not significantly enhance the level of pluralism in the broader civil society.

Real wages describe changes in the material standard of living of wage earners. This article reviews the national experience of Mexico through the twentieth century, surveying more than thirty studies from the late Porfiriato to the opening of the twenty-first century. The data suggest that real wages follow a long-term cyclical pattern of alternate periods of declining and rising wages. As a consequence, twentieth-century Mexico was not kind to workers because the gains of one period seem to be offset by falls in the next. Wage trends in Mexico and the rest of Latin America seemed to follow similar paths, except during the years following Mexico's revolution, when a new labor regime especially benefited the country's wage earners. Following a significant downturn in the 1940s, workers in Mexico and Latin America experienced a favorable period of income growth during the postwar boom. The debt crisis of the 1980s induced a long decline that continued through the early years of globalization.

In the 1960s, the Cuban Revolution sparked great interest in Latin America throughout the United States. Not coincidentally, the promotion and translation of literature from Latin America increased dramatically during this period. This essay explores the interplay of market and political forces in the promotion of Latin American literature in the United States through an examination of two programs funded by Rockefeller family philanthropies during the 1960s and 1970s: a translation subsidy program supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and administered by the Association of American University Presses; and the Translation Program of the Center for Inter-American Relations, which was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. I trace both programs' efforts at working the U.S. market to promote works and authors. I also study the political motivations fostering these efforts, exploring the extent to which these programs both sought to promote cross-cultural understanding and tried to further U.S. foreign policy interests.

The Argentine workfare program known as the “Trabajar” program shared many characteristics with other targeted social welfare programs implemented in Latin America in the 1990s, including being subject to accusations that program funds were misused for political gain. This paper tests existing hypotheses concerning the political manipulation of public spending using data from two phases of the program and a measure of fund allocation that improves on that employed in previous analyses of the program. It finds that partisan criteria most often cited in the literature affected distribution under one administration only. It further demonstrates that political protest had a differential impact on the distribution of program funds across time and suggests some reasons for this.

This research note contributes to the comparative studies on legislative careers. It sheds light on the scarcely researched members of four Latin American upper houses, the Senates of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. It examines both the basic social features of the parliamentary elite—age, gender, level of education, and university careers—and the legislators' political careers. The goal is to find out whether the upper houses are composed of a larger proportion of senior members than the respective lower chambers, that is, of members who not only are older, wealthier, and more educated, but that also have greater political experience. As a result of this research, the Senates of Chile and Uruguay stood out for having the largest share of senior members. The Brazilian Senate followed them with a considerable level of seniority. As a consequence of a series of institutional reforms based on the 1994 constitution, the Argentine Senate differed from the other three cases as being a much junior chamber.

La reforma del servicio civil de 1991/92 creó en Argentina una burocracia profesional (en el clásico sentido “weberiano”) a escala relativamente masiva para países de América Latina. En la presente nota se exponen resultados de una investigación empírica que conciernen a la situación del servicio público federal argentino, diez años después de la reforma. Basada en entrevistas con informantes claves, así como también en estadísticas y documentos oficiales, esta nota de investigación describe, en primer lugar, la muy baja influencia de los nuevos funcionarios de carrera sobre decisiones de política pública. En segundo lugar, se examinan las dificultades que tienen los designados políticos de alto nivel para trabajar con funcionarios profesionales permanentes, y se incluye una breve retrospectiva de la problemática relación entre los dos grupos desde la democratización de 1983. Se presenta, finalmente, un análisis estadístico de la burocracia federal argentina, con el propósito de medir el impacto numérico del nuevo servicio civil de carrera sobre la estructura burocrática general, esto es, el nivel de profesionalismo global alcanzado mediante la reforma de 1991/92.