Suchergebnisse

This book details how contentious politics - everyday as well as exceptional, local as well as national - that took place in three communal villages of Mexico alternately reproduced and reshaped inequality. Narrated and analyzed as instances of the general process of contention, these events took place during three key periods of Mexico's history: the 1910–20 revolution, the Cold War period from the 1950s to the 1970s, and from the 1980s to the present. Together, these episodes of contention build and test a theory of the making and unmaking of inequality in theoretically ideal conditions, illustrating the dynamics of this all-pervasive facet of social organization

En el presente artículo presento algunos elementos clave que marcan mi trayectoria en relación con el estudio sociológico del Estado desde la década de los 70s. Parto por describir la atmósfera político-intelectual de donde vienen mis motivaciones para estudiar este fenómeno estatal en México, así como doy cuenta de los desafíos, las herramientas y las reflexiones surgidas a partir del estudio de su cambiante fisonomía. En este contexto, sitúo mis esfuerzos por conceptualizar la formación del Estado en América Latina como un proceso dinámico y agencial que reproduce y transforma las relaciones entre Estado y sociedad, tanto desde arriba como desde abajo.

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Since Mexico declared its independence from Spanish rule, the country has experienced two extended periods of political stability that are atypical of Latin American societies. The first, known as the Porfiriato, extended from 1875 to 1910. The second, which was heralded by the Revolution of 1910 and consolidated in the 1920s, still holds sway in the last decade of the twentieth century. The weaknesses of the Porfiriato have been analyzed amply, thanks in great part to the hindsight provided by the revolution that ended the era. Until recently, however, most works on twentieth-century Mexico have focused on the exceptional stability of the postrevolutionary regime. This approach has left largely unresearched (Knight 1989) or merely labeled as "crises" (Needier 1987) the recurrent episodes of union insurgency, popular protest, electoral opposition, and other signs of pressure for political change that have punctuated Mexican history since the Revolution. Consequently, analysts who have recently undertaken the arduous task of diagnosing at what points this imposing edifice might "give" have been unable to benefit from insights of work carried out in previous decades.

Resistencia y represión : la violencia política en Oaxaca / Marco Estrada Saavedra -- Contiendas, trans-acciones y decisiones : políticas de salud en México y Colombia / Mónica Uribe Gómez -- Contienda política y pacto de dominación : el Partido dos Trabalhadores y el cambio político en Brasil / Tania Rodríguez Mora -- La dimensión cotidiana de formación del Estado en el Pacífico colombiano / Marta Domínguez -- Territorio, formación del Estado y soberanías fragmentadas en Guatemala / Matilde González-Izás -- La formación del Estado y de la sociedad en América Latina : un acercamiento relacional / Viviane Brachet-Márquez -- Representantes del Estado : la formación histórica de las clases medias en Colombia, 1958-1965 / Ricardo López

Since Robert Dahl's seminal writings on democracy more than two decades ago, interest in the topic has emerged again, especially among scholars analyzing democratic transitions. Great strides have been made in revealing the uncertain nature of these transitions (O'Donnell et al. 1986; Malloy and Seligson 1987; Diamond, Linz, and Lipset 1989; Hakim and Lowenthal 1991; O'Donnell 1994), in methodologically analyzing them as contested and "crafted" rather than spontaneous (Di Palma 1990), and in documenting the class and social forces that make democratic outcomes more likely (Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992; see also Moore 1966). Despite these advances, there has been little change in our theoretical understanding of democracy. As Bruce Cumings has perceptively noted, recent studies of democratic transition have "given way to atheoretical and idiosyncratic explanations of more or less successful democratic 'openings'" in which little time is spent elaborating "the decision rule for saying this person is hard-line or soft-line, that system is 'liberalized autocracy' instead of 'limited democracy,'" or for defining democracy itself. If scholars do bring theory into their writings "through the back door of the obscure but telling footnote," he observes, "rather than advancing their own conception of democracy, [they] uniformly define democracy by reference to Robert Dahl's Polyarchy, a classic pluralist account of the North American system" (Cumings 1989:15–17).

One revealing test for gauging the extent to which pluralist democracy has advanced in the recently (re)democratized countries of Latin America is to determine the extent to which interest groups have come to participate in policy making in formal, open, extensive, and accepted ways as they mostly do in advanced liberal democracies. In other words, is this a new era or more of the same? To provide insights into this question, using six hypotheses, this article compares social insurance reform in Argentina and Mexico, and public health reform in Colombia.It appears that the political processes through which the reforms were adopted were fairly democratic, although aspects of the old regimes in all three countries, particularly corporatist relationships, were indispensable backups. The weaknesses that were apparent, however, stem less from the old ways of doing political business and more from the immaturity of the democratic process. Plus, pressures were felt by the executive branches and their allies to show to the international community that their country was a safe place in which to invest. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Objective. To identify the changes brought about by various national and international factors in an intercultural hospital of the municipality of Cuetzalán, Puebla. Material and Methods. A case study was conducted during 2000 and 2001 in two Intercultural Hospitals of Mexico; the Cuetzalán Hospital in Puebla and the Jesús María Hospital in Nayarit State. Data were collected by means of 72 semistructured interviews with allopathic therapists, indigenous therapists, and authorities of the different health care levels. Moreover, documental research was carried out on national policies for indigenous peoples as well as on indigenist policies. These policies were related with the five organizational stages of the hospital. State authorities gave their permission and interviewees signed informed consent. Results. The hospital was created in 1958 by the Ministry of Health as a biomedical institution, in agreement with the integrationist indigenist policies going on at the time. It remained so during the beginning of the administration by the National Indigenist Institute. In 1990, the new participative indigenist policy trends and the creativity and sensitivity of some authorities, under the influence of international strategies, helped to transform the hospital into an Intercultural Hospital (offering both types of medicine, indigenous and allopathic) with regional coverage. In 2000, the devolution of the hospital to the State Ministry of Health, based on financial rather than socio-cultural considerations, caused the temporary loss of its intercultural character. The last stage as an Integral Hospital with Traditional Medicine (from 2003 onwards) was due to a combination of state official initiatives and the new political stance acquired by the Mexican indigenous movement. The hospital is now part of a regional project of five such hospitals officially denominated Integral Hospitals with Traditional Medicine, to be financed by the Puebla - Panama Plan of regional development. Conclusions. Our results confirmed that ...