Latin American Perspectives

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• The Negative Impact of Shining Path on Indigenous Mobilization in Peru: An Approach from Political Opportunity and New Social Movements Theories

  The rise of Shining Path in the rural areas of Peru and its revolutionary war between 1980 and 1992 contributed significantly to the weakening of indigenous mobilization in that country. From the perspective of a combination of political opportunity and new social movements theories, Shining Path took advantage of a history of rural isolation and a political vacuum to take control of rural areas and impose extreme repression of counterrevolutionary mobilization. It systematically pressured the indigenous communities to collaborate with it and embrace a materialist-based peasant identity. At the same time, the erratic and disproportionate response of the government negatively affected the indigenous communities. Merging the two theories allows a better understanding of this situation. El ascenso de Sendero Luminoso en las zonas rurales del Perú y su guerra revolucionaria entre 1980 y 1992 contribuyeron significativamente al debilitamiento de la movilización indígena en dicho país. Desde la perspectiva combinada de la teoría oportunidades políticas y nuevas teorías de movimientos sociales, Sendero Luminoso aprovechó una historia de aislamiento rural y un vacío político para tomar el control de las zonas rurales y llevar a cabo una represión extrema de la movilización contrarrevolucionaria. Presionó sistemáticamente a las comunidades indígenas para que colaboraran y adoptaran una identidad campesina de base materialista. Al mismo tiempo, la respuesta errática y desproporcionada del gobierno también afectó negativamente a las comunidades indígenas. La fusión de las dos teorías permite una mejor comprensión de esta situación.

• The Crystallization of Human Rights in Latin American Perspective
• Commentaries
• Social Mobility in Chilean Youth and Their Parents: A Generational Analysis from the Perspective of Social Reproduction

  Recent studies on Chile agree that the country’s youth enjoy greater social mobility than previous generations. This has been attributed either to their greater access to higher education or to life-cycle effects on occupation. A test of these two hypotheses by estimating the socioeconomic positions of four generations of Chileans using a model of analysis based on the social reproduction paradigm shows that younger generations of Chileans have a lower level of social inheritance than the rest of the population only during their initial years in the labor market. Therefore, the greater social mobility observed in them is temporary and is explained by life-cycle effects on occupation. Estudios recientes sobre Chile coinciden en que la actual juventud chilena goza de una mayor movilidad social que las generaciones anteriores. Esto se ha atribuido a su mayor acceso a la educación superior o a los efectos del ciclo de vida en la ocupación. Aquí se examinan estas dos hipótesis a partir de una aproximación en torno a las posiciones socioeconómicas de cuatro generaciones chilenas. Se utiliza un modelo analítico asentado en el paradigma de la reproducción social, el cual nos muestra que las generaciones más jóvenes tienen un grado de herencia social más bajo que el resto de la población tan sólo durante sus primeros años como participantes en el mercado laboral. Por lo tanto, su mayor movilidad social es temporal y se explica a partir de los efectos del ciclo de vida en la ocupación.

• Commentaries
• Film Practices of Testimony and Commitment: Piquetero Cinema during Argentina’s 2001 Crisis
• Reply
• The Pope, the Poor, and the Role of Religion in Argentina’s Public Sphere

  Pope Francis’s public statements about and criticisms of the global economic system and local politics present an opportunity to explore how ordinary people react to the presence of a religious voice in the public sphere. Data on people’s perceptions of the pope’s interventions collected from semistructured nonrandom interviews with 41 low-income Argentines of various religious orientations reveal that they identified and regulated the boundaries of religion in the public sphere with different criteria from those that secularists would expect. Respondents assumed that religion and politics shared the space of power and therefore accepted the pope as a political actor. However, they considered it legitimate for him to intervene only when he stood for the poor, promoted human brotherhood, and exemplified God’s love. Religion was welcome where modernity had failed. Las declaraciones públicas del Papa Francisco y las críticas al sistema económico global y la política local presentan una oportunidad para explorar cómo la gente común reacciona ante la presencia de una voz religiosa en la esfera pública. Los datos sobre las percepciones de las personas sobre las intervenciones del Papa recopiladas de entrevistas semiestructuradas no aleatorias con 41 argentinos de bajos ingresos de diversas orientaciones religiosas revelan que identificaron y regularon los límites de la religión en la esfera pública con criterios diferentes de los que los laicistas esperarían. Los encuestados asumieron que la religión y la política compartían el espacio de poder y, por lo tanto, aceptaron al Papa como actor político. Sin embargo, consideraron legítimo para él intervenir solo cuando defendió a los pobres, promovió la hermandad humana y ejemplificó el amor de Dios. La religión era bienvenida donde la modernidad había fallado.

• Commentaries
• Commentaries

Featured documents

• China and Venezuela: South-South Cooperation or Rearticulated Dependency?

  China’s increased participation in the world market and its consequent demand for energy has contributed to exacerbating the vulnerability of many externally oriented resource-rich countries. As a consequence, since the early 2000s the relationship between China and Venezuela has gone far beyond...

• The Road Back to Serfdom: Solidarity Economies on the Periphery of Fortaleza, Brazil, 1970–2016

  A case study of the Palmas Bank project, on the periphery of Fortaleza, Brazil, explores the contradictions inherent in the country’s solidarity economy project. The solidarity economy, rooted in the local practices of the liberation theology movement, can hardly be seen as a human or alternative...

• Beyond Pluralism and Media Rights: Indigenous Communication for a Decolonizing Transformation of Latin America and Abya Yala

  In resisting genocidal projects of modernity since the Conquest and their most recent phase, neoliberalism, indigenous peoples have provided leadership in maintaining pluralist societies and protecting the rights of all living beings. This role is little known even to many on the left because of...

• Ecuador’s Buen vivir

  The concept of buen vivir (good living) has attracted interest far beyond its source in the Andean ethnic tradition. It is being debated internationally as a contribution to development theory and has become the fundamental purpose of Ecuador’s policy since the adoption of the new constitution in...

• Drug War as Neoliberal Trojan Horse

  Examination of the U.S.-backed wars on drugs in Colombia and Mexico reveals that, apart from the hegemonic discourse about narcotics control, these wars reinforce the power of transnational corporations over resource-rich areas owned and used by indigenous people, peasants, and the urban poor. Case ...

• ¿La minería para el buen vivir? Large-scale Mining, Citizenship, and Development in Correa’s Ecuador

  Through a persuasive discourse on well-being and citizen “participation,” Ecuador Estratégico, a government agency tasked with implementing buen vivir (good living) in regions of resource extraction, plays a pivotal role in justifying and legitimizing resource extraction locally. An examination of...

• Social Mobility in Chilean Youth and Their Parents: A Generational Analysis from the Perspective of Social Reproduction

  Recent studies on Chile agree that the country’s youth enjoy greater social mobility than previous generations. This has been attributed either to their greater access to higher education or to life-cycle effects on occupation. A test of these two hypotheses by estimating the socioeconomic...

• Transnational Ethnic Processes

  The experience of migration to the United States of indigenous peoples is producing a change in ethno-racial systems of classification that is not simply reactive but reflects the history of each indigenous people and is expressed both at the institutional level and in the formation of a...

• Neoliberal Urbanization and Synergistic Violence in Postearthquake Concepción

  The Chilean neoliberal state’s institutional strategy for displacing a historical population from Aurora de Chile, a centrally located area with real estate value in the city of Concepción, combined three types of violence: shock urbanization, which used the 2010 earthquake as an opportunity to...

• China in Latin America: South-South Cooperation with Chinese Characteristics

  The central questions for a critical analysis of the economic relations between China and Latin America and the Caribbean countries since the beginning of the twenty-first century are how to interpret the changes in them since the end of the commodities boom and whether they have resulted in the...