Journal of Latin American Studies articles from May 1996

Journal of Latin American Studies archives from May 1996

Guerrillas and the state: the role of the state in the Colombian peace process.
May 1, 1996... Violence is a fact of life in Colombia; it has been so throughout the country's 175-year history. The Spanish word violencia is even used to refer to a particularly bloody period in Colombian history in which an estimated 200,000 people lost...

The formation and transformation of political identity: leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968-1990.
May 1, 1996... For the generation of activists who entered politics in the 1960s inspired by a revolutionary project, the events and transformations of the past thirty years have challenged such ambitions at their very core. The once massive movements...

The institutional foundations of democratic cooperation in Costa Rica.
May 1, 1996... Along with Chile and Uruguay, Costa Rica is a country where a nineteenth-century republican system was gradually transformed into a fully-fledged democracy. At different times during the nineteenth century, politicians in these countries began...

Crown colony as Banana Republic: the United Fruit Company in British Honduras, 1900-1920.
May 1, 1996... Belize, formerly the colony of British Honduras, is regarded as a cultural and political anomaly among the states of Central America. The country's history of British colonialism accounts for its cultural affinity for the anglophone West...

Horse thieves to rebels to dogs: political gang violence and the state in Western Segovias, Nicaragua, in the time of Sandino, 1926-1934.
May 1, 1996... In the early 1980s, in the flush of popular enthusiasm for the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, the old-time Sandinista Pedro Antonio Arauz penned a series of brief historical reminiscences about the era (1926-34) of his more famous...

Constructing the limits of state violence in Central America: towards a new research agenda.
May 1, 1996... The scale and intensity of state-sponsored or 'official' violence escalated dramatically after the 1870s in most of Central America. Fundamentally weak states, substituting coercion for the consensus and negotiation that were beyond their...

Prospects for democratization in a post-revolutionary setting: Central America.
May 1, 1996... Issues posed by processes of democratisation vary from one country to another. The specific content of the concept of democracy is forged by the sociocultural history of a country, which suggests that any generalisation about democracy should...

Demography and Empire: A Guide to the Population History of Spanish Central America, 1500-1821.
May 1, 1996... Demography and Empire is a bibliographical guide to recent publications and scholarly theses on the population history of Central America since about the 1960s. It contains about two hundred entries and covers works published in all the major...

De los Emperios a las Naciones: Iberoamerica.
May 1, 1996... Although this book was published in Spain, it clearly was 'made in France'. It originated in Paris, under the auspices of the Forum International des Sciences Humaines and with Francois-Xavier Guerra, of the Universite de Paris I, providing the...

Los precios de alimentos y manufacturas novohispanos.
May 1, 1996... The nine essays in this volume were originally presented at a 1990 conference in Tabasco, Mexico, titled 'Simposio sobre Historia de los precios de alimentos y manufacturas novohispanos'. In the introduction, Virginia Garcia Acosta and Enrique...

Cabildos y Grupos de Poder en Yucatan. Siglo XVII.
May 1, 1996... This book is the result of a thorough documentary investigation into the colonial American cabildo (town council) under the captaincy general of Yucatan. The results of the study were first presented as a PhD thesis and later edited by the...

Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial Mexico.
May 1, 1996... In this work the author sets out to prove that there is a viable avenue for understanding the mores of colonial society in the behaviour of what was legally and canonically a 'crime' and a transgression of the sacrament of marriage. By astutely...

From Chattel Salves to Wage Slaves: The Dynamics of Labor Bargaining in the Americas.
May 1, 1996... This edited collection of essays build upon a body of historical literature which has conceptualised slaves in the Americas as 'proto-peasants' or 'proto-proletarians'. Editor Mary Turner extends this line of analysis, maintaining that,...

13 Chapters of a History of Belize.
May 1, 1996... In the 1970s, revisionist historians of Belize began to challenge a colonial era historiography that had uncritically portrayed the country as an 'island of democracy' in Central America. Beginning with Clegern and Dobson, and culminating in...

Inside the Volcano: The History and Political Economy of Central America.
May 1, 1996... Weaver's synoptic history of Central America aims to provide an historical and comparative framework for the purposes of analysing current developments in the region. His central purpose is to elucidate the relationship between economic growth,...

Catholicism and Politics in Argentina: 1810-1960.
May 1, 1996... Forever seeking solutions to the Argentine obsession ('What went wrong?') cultural factors have, once again, become the subject of academic enquiry. Most analyists tend to coincide, with differing degrees of enthusiasm, that 'political culture'...

Sectores populares, cultura y politica: Buenos Aires en la entreguerra.
May 1, 1996... For some time now, Luis Alberto Romero and the late Leandro Gutierrez have been chipping away at received views of the historical development of Argentine workers, their families and their communities. They would prefer to dispense, at least...

Broken Promises: Agrarian Reform and the Latin American Campesino.
May 1, 1996... This is a fine and most valuable textbook which will be useful to all those students, teachers and practitioners interested in Latin America's rural development and particularly in the plight of the campesinos. It is a book which delivers more...

Pinochet's Economists: The Chicago School in Chile.
May 1, 1996... This is a revised version of a book first published in Spanish as La escuela de Chicago: Operacion Chile (Buenos Aires, 1989). It explores the origins of the so-called Chicago Boys, a group of economists who provided General Pinochet with a...

The State and Domestic Agricultural Markets in Nicaragua: From Intervention to Neo-Liberalism.
May 1, 1996... This is an extraordinary meticulous researcher's study of a messy case. Resisting the easy generalisations of both interventionist and laissez-faire economists, Spoor demonstrates convincingly that markets cannot be replaced by a wave of the...

Lessons of the Venezuelan Experience.
May 1, 1996... Students of Latin American politics are well aware of the impact of events on scholarly output. When things seem to be happening in a particular country then, at least momentarily, academic attention is turned towards it. Successively, Cuba,...

Organizing Civil Society: The Poplar Sectors and the Struggle for Democracy in Chile.
May 1, 1996... Philip Oxhorn's investigation of the popular classes in Chile makes a valuable contribution to the study of that country, of civil society, and of democratisation. He places his case in an illuminating theoretical framework. And he presents his...

The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics.
May 1, 1996... What kind of society is it that can generate the implacable violence and political extremism of a movement like Peru's Sendero Luminoso? The literature on this subject is already quite extensive, but the two books under review both add...

Las pradojas del Peru oficial. Indigenismo, democracia y crisis estructural.
May 1, 1996... What kind of society is it that can generate the implacable violence and political extremism of a movement like Peru's Sendero Luminoso? The literature on this subject is already quite extensive, but the two books under review both add...

Dance of the Dolphins.
May 1, 1996... The author is professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley, but her writings draw from disciplines such as literary criticism, history, folklore, and cultural anthropology. Candace Slater is a superb writer and...

Prophets of Agroforestry: Guarani Communities and Commercial Gathering.
May 1, 1996... Although Paraguay has seventeen different indigenous peoples, quality ethnographies about them are rare. Consequently, this book is a welcome addition. Reed is an anthropologist who, between 1981 and 1984, spent 16 months living among the...

United States Policy in Latin America: A Decade of Crisis and Challenge.
May 1, 1996... John Martz's earlier volume on inter-American relations, United States Policy in Latin America: A Quarter Century of Crisis and Challenge 1961-1986, was well received, encouraging him and his publisher to do a follow-up book. Rather than simply...

European Union, Foreign Policy and Central America.
May 1, 1996... Why, asks Hazel Smith did the European Community (EC) 'intervene' in Central America in the 1980s, even though this area was accepted by the Western powers as part of the 'US sphere of interest' and regarded by the US as of 'primary security...

Politics and Deveopment in the Caribbean Basin: Central America and the Caribbean in the New World Order.
May 1, 1996... Jean Grugel's book presents a broad overview of the Caribbean Basin, through specific cases that focus on the broader issue of development. It considers historical, social, economic, ethnical and class factors in an area that includes Central...

La invasion a Panama: Estrategia y tacticas para el nuevo orden munidal.
May 1, 1996... For Panama the US invasion of December 1989 was an agonising turning-point in its history. This book gives one Panamanian's reaction to the trauma. Coming from an author bearing his name, it is no surprise that Omar Torrijos is the hero of...

Haitian Frustrations: Dilemmas for U.S. Policy.
May 1, 1996... This report is produced by a group of 13 (including the editor) distinguished foreign policy practitioners and scholars, at least one of whom was directly involved in formulating US policy toward Haiti between 1991 and 1994, the year of the...