Chapter One. Ethnicity And Diaspora In Twentieth-Century Latin America: The Jewish Case

Author(s):  
Paul D. Kenny

Case studies of Indonesia and Japan illustrate that party-system stability in patronage democracies is deeply affected by the relative autonomy of political brokers. Over the course of a decade, a series of decentralizing reforms in Indonesia weakened patronage-based parties hold on power, with the 2014 election ultimately being a contest between two rival populists: Joko Widodo and Subianto Prabowo. Although Japan was a patronage democracy throughout the twentieth century, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) remained robust to outsider appeals even in the context of economic and corruption crises. However, reforms in the 1990s weakened the hold of central factional leaders over individual members of the LDP and their patronage machines. This was instrumental to populist Junichiro Koizumi’s winning of the presidency of the LDP and ultimately the prime ministership of Japan. This chapter also reexamines canonical cases of populism in Latin America.


1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 543-574
Author(s):  
Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley

Social revolutions as well as revolutionary movements have recently held great interest for both sociopolitical theorists and scholars of Latin American politics. Before we can proceed with any useful analysis, however, we must distinguish between these two related but not identical phenomena. Adapting Theda Skocpol’s approach, we can define social revolutions as “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by” mass-based revolts from below, sometimes in cross-class coalitions (Skocpol 1979: 4; Wickham-Crowley 1991:152). In the absence of such basic sociopolitical transformations, I will not speak of (social) revolution or of a revolutionary outcome, only about revolutionary movements, exertions, projects, and so forth. Studies of the failures and successes of twentieth-century Latin American revolutions have now joined the ongoing theoretical debate as to whether such outcomes occur due to society- or movement-centered processes or instead due to state- or regime-centered events (Wickham-Crowley 1992).


Author(s):  
Paul Gillingham

Unrevolutionary Mexico addresses how the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940) turned into a capitalist dictatorship of exceptional resilience. While soldiers seized power across the rest of Latin America, in modern Mexico the civilians of a single party moved punctiliously in and out of office for seventy-one years. The book uses the histories of the states of Guerrero and Veracruz as entry points to explore the origins and consolidation of this unique authoritarian state on both provincial and national levels. An empirically rich reconstruction of over sixty years of modernization and revolution (1880-1945) revises prevailing ideas of a pacified Mexico and establishes the 1940s as a decade of faltering governments and enduring violence. The book then assesses the pivotal changes of the mid-twentieth century, when a new generation of lawyers, bureaucrats and businessmen joined with surviving revolutionaries to form the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which held uninterrupted power until 2000. Thematic chapters analyse elections, development, corruption and high and low culture in the period. The central role of military and private violence is explored in two further chapters that measure the weight of hidden coercion in keeping the party in power. In conclusion, the combination of provincial and national histories reveals Mexico as a place where soldiers prevented coups, a single party lost its own rigged elections, corruption fostered legitimacy, violence was concealed but decisive, and ambitious cultural control co-existed with a critical press and a disbelieving public. In conclusion, the book demonstrates how this strange dictatorship thrived not despite but because of its contradictions.


2017 ◽  
pp. 26-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Knobel ◽  
Andrés Bernasconi

The higher education sector in Latin America has fallen short of its promise of spearheading cultural, social, and economic progress for the region. As higher education changes to meet the challenges on the new century, the few flagship universities of Latin America are called upon to lead. However, these universities face both internal and external obstacles that hinder their full modernization, threatening their leadership.


1965 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 527-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel S. Wionczek

Increased state participation in the economy has been a basic trend in twentieth-century Latin America. In the process, however, once-protected private interests may fall—as in this case-study from Mexico.


REVISTA PLURI ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
Yvone Dias Avelino

Este artigo formula algumas reflexões sobre a associação da história com a literatura. Estabelecemos alguns nexos com trabalhos literários de autores latino-americanos do século XX. Nas páginas desses romances latino-americanos desfilam os expoentes de toda uma estrutura de dominação: políticos, velhos aristocratas, oportunistas recém-chegados, fazendeiros truculentos, funcionários públicos subservientes, advogados venais, representantes do capitalismo local, dominados e dominantes. Mostram-nos os vários escritores latino-americanos as ditaduras na sua insanidade grotesca, as repressões cruentas que fazem emergir os movimentos sociais populares. Estão presentes as turbulências do real e imaginário, utilitário e mágico, da dúvida e perplexidade, memória e esperança, do esquecimento e da desesperança, do espelho e labirinto.Palavras-chave: História, Literatura, Espelho, Labirinto, América Latina.AbstractThis article proposes some reflections about the association between history and literature. We have established some links with literary works written by Latin American authors of the twentieth century. In the pages of these Latin American novels the exponents of a whole structure of domination are paraded: politicians, old aristocrats, opportunist newcomers, truculent farmers, subservient civil servants, venal lawyers, representatives of local capitalism, dominated and dominant ones. The various Latin American writers show us dictatorships in their grotesque insanity, the bloody repressions that allow popular social movements to emerge. They outline the turbulences of the real and imaginary, utilitarian and magical, doubt and perplexity, memory and hope, forgetfulness and hopelessness, mirror and labyrinth.Keywords: History, Literature, Mirror, Labyrinth, Latin America.


Hispania ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 86 (1) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez ◽  
Rebecca E. Biron

Author(s):  
Ralph Wilde

This article examines the Trusteeship Council, a principal organ whose work was essential to the settlement arising from World War II. It involved establishing procedures for the independence of the defeated powers' colonies. This article details the pioneering efforts of the UN at facilitating the decolonization of trust territories. This is part of the world organization's contribution to the processes of self-determination for peoples in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. It also reveals that the work of the Trusteeship Council was linked to what may have been the most important political change of the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Fred Coelho

This article presents the contrasting views and theories formulated by European intellectuals such as Claude Lévis-Strauss and Max Bense on the situation of Brazil and Latin America in relation to the main centers of twentieth century criticism. It analyzes improvisation as a fundamental reflection index on the possibilities that third world countries have for negotiating the European Cartesian paradigm. If for some thinkers improvisation and its corollaries are proof that these countries and their people would live forever on the margins or in negative dialectics within the heritage of Enlightenment reason, for others it is precisely there--in the possibility of reinventing reason from hybridisms, strategic appropriations, and re-readings--that the creative and autonomous potentials in the post-colonial world lie. This article is situated precisely in the conflict between reason and the tropics, and looks to bring the debate up to date.


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