A descriptive analysis of the data from 74 editors and reporters from 62 print-affiliated newspapers sites in Latin America indicate that journalists and print-based sites follow similar broad tendencies observed in different studies inside and outside of the region. The surveyed online editors and reporters -mainly young men with university studies- have a career background in print newspapers, with salaries equals or lower than their print colleagues. They perform weekly activities more related with immediacy than multimedia, and they perceive their primary function as disseminators and interpreters of information. Working in small and integrated newsrooms, online journalists basically interact with their print partner in terms of editing content. Although, advertising is a primary source of revenue, the majority of national, regional and local print-based sites confirm that they depend on the print partner for content and financing their online operations. Furthermore, the online version of papers do not fully take advantage of the Internet technology and capabilities, particularly multimediality and interactivity, or provide too much original new media content. / text

What effects do natural resources, and more specifically the revenues from the extraction and sales of commodities, have on the economies of well-endowed countries in Latin America? How does the political administration of natural resource wealth affect the economic trajectories of these developing countries? Under what conditions do countries successfully use political institutions to administer natural resource windfalls prudently? My dissertation addresses these questions and ultimately explains why natural resource wealth is a blessing for the development of some countries and a curse for others. Specifically, I examine the effectiveness of specific government institutions—called Nonrenewable Resource Stabilization Funds (NRSFs or stabilization funds), which help countries to manage the economic challenges associated with relying upon volatile natural resource revenues—in Chile and Venezuela, two natural resource-rich Latin American countries. Although both of these countries created a NRSF, Chile’s has been very successful while Venezuela’s was extremely weak from the outset. My research suggests that the degree of stabilization fund success—which impacts the severity of the resource curse—depends on these institutions constraining political actors from using rents for venal purposes. In turn, I find that the capacity of NRSFs to restrain the passions of self-interested executives is largely a product of the circumstances accompanying the creation of these institutions; that is, the conditions into which these institutions are born impact stabilization fund performance, but not in the way that the traditional literature predicts. In contrast to extant explanations suggesting that NRSF success is dependent upon clear institutional rules or general state capacity, I find that stabilization funds tend to be unsuccessful when political needs drove their creation while these institutions are likely to function well when economic concerns were the impetus for their adoption. I substantiate the case study evidence of Chile and Venezuela with a broad statistical analysis of 20 other countries that have created NRSFs. / text

While clientelism has been intensively studied in comparative politics from very different theoretical perspectives and angles, scholars typically emphasize the importance of organized networks and long-term relations for sustaining electoral clientelism. However, electoral clientelism continues to be widespread in many countries despite the absence of organized parties or electoral machines. In order to account for this puzzle, I propose an informational approach that stresses the indirect effects that investments in electoral clientelism have on vote intentions. By distributing minor consumer goods, politicians buy the participation of poor voters at rallies and different sorts of campaign events. I argue that this particular subtype of electoral clientelism -- "campaign clientelism" -- helps politicians improvise political organizations, influence indifferent clients, and signal their electoral viability to strategic actors. Thus, by influencing competition and the dynamics of the race, campaign clientelism shapes vote choices and electoral outcomes. Campaign clientelism affects vote choices through two causal mechanisms. First, this subtype of electoral clientelism can help establish candidates' electoral viability, especially where alternative signals provided by well-organized parties are weak. By turning out large numbers of people at rallies, candidates establish and demonstrate their electoral prospects to the media, donors, rent-seeking activists, and voters. In this way, politicians induce more and more voters to support them strategically. Second, campaign clientelism can convince unattached rally participants of the candidates' electoral desirability. While providing different sorts of information at campaign events, politicians help campaign clients make choices. Other things being equal, viable and desirable candidates have better chances of actually achieving office. Qualitative, quantitative, and experimental evidence from Peru, a democracy without parties, supports the informational theory's expectations. / text

Activists, artists, journalists, and intellectuals in the United States, from the 1950s to the present, have supported national liberation movements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, arguing that anti-colonial struggles abroad were related to human and civil rights struggles in the United States. This dissertation builds on these foundations by tracing multi-racial and transnational connections among people and organizations in the United States, and between the United States and Latin America during the 1970s. Uncovering these connections that linked the Third World “within” to the Third World “without” across the Américas reconfigures the narrative of what happened to social movements in the 1970s, and helps us re-imagine the Chicano movement through the lens of an anti-colonial politics. This project bridges the local, national, and international terrains of political struggle by tracing the lives of activists and organizations in the United States and Latin America who defined their politics in relation to the Third World. It interrogates four inter-related themes: the prison rebellions in the United States, third world political activity in major U.S. urban centers, guerrilla theatre on both sides of the U.S-Mexican (and by extension Latin American) international border, and social movement connections between Texas and Mexico. My primary focus is on localized strategies for grassroots mobilizations rooted in working class cultural practices, multi-ethnic solidarities, and transnational political formations that were comprised of Chicano, Black, Asian, Puerto Rican, Mexican, American Indian, and white activists and artists. I also emphasize the local elements involved in the political alliances, coalitions, and solidarity efforts across geopolitical borders and different political perspectives. Overall, this project explores connections across, underneath, and outside the political, economic, and cultural construction of the nation state, and the hemispheric construction of the Americas with the United States as the primary political, economic and cultural power. These intertwined perspectives simultaneously step back to interrogate the larger international connections while focusing in on local manifestations of national issues refracted through a hemispheric lens. It is in the 1970s - a decade characterized by a shift in the policies of the crisis-ridden political economy of the Keynesian welfare state in response to these very struggles - that we should locate the early elements of what is currently referred to the anti-globalization movements. / text

This thesis contributes to the growing literature on low-income renting and affordable housing in Latin America. Through a case study of Independencia – a consolidated community in Lima’s northern cone – I examine the socio-economic foundations and potential implications of self-help renting in lives of participants. Low-income renting has a long history in Lima, but has largely operated outside of State intervention. While these policy decisions were the result of contextually specific political and economic pressures, they seem also to be a symptom of the changes in influential social and economic theories informing academic thinking on the region and their contributions to bias in the housing policies of many Latin American countries. In addition to several policy considerations based on research in Lima, some general considerations for future renting research are offered. / text

The English language is taught for a variety of professional purposes, including business and medicine, yet to date there is no scholarly research investigating the potential necessity of teaching English for environmental purposes. Given that tourism constitutes one of the largest global industries, that ecotourism is the fasting growing segment of the field, that English is the lingua franca of tourism worldwide, that the majority of ecotourism operations are located in the developing world, and that significant levels of unemployment persist within many of these areas, the relationship between knowledge of the English language and employment opportunities within the field of ecotourism warrants consideration. Consequently, the present exploratory study of the relationship between English and ecotourism in Latin America is a first attempt to determine whether or not English language training programs for ecotourism guides in Latin America are a relevant endeavor worthy of further investigation and whether or not the field of teaching English for Professional Purposes (EPP) should consider this area a new sub-discipline. / text

This thesis analyzes the consequences of property confiscations and redistribution under the Sandinista (FSLN) government in Nicaragua of the 1980s. It covers the period from the overthrow of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979 to the February 1990 FSLN electoral defeat and the following two months of the Piñata, when the outgoing Sandinista government quickly formalized possession of property by new owners, both formerly landless peasants and the elite. It also examines subsequent efforts to resolve outstanding property claims, with the focus on the Chamorro and later presidential administrations to 2007, when Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega and the FSLN returned to power. The main argument is that Sandinista leaders, largely from the same families that have dominated Nicaragua since the Colonial period, followed Nicaraguan traditions of using influence to distort the legal and political system to gain title to valuable properties. In contrast to partisan arguments in favor of one regime or another, here the methods of property transfer are analyzed by investigating in detail documentary evidence of illustrative cases that show the steps and individuals involved in these transactions, as well as more generally surveying other cases and the overall situation with property. The argument is tested by examining how the selected claimants’ properties were taken and who obtained them. The results indicate that Sandinista elites did obtain properties for their personal benefit, often in violation of their own legislation, but that this was largely consistent with the practice of other, non- Sandinista governments. After their electoral defeat, ongoing Sandinista influence in the organs of government influenced the restitution process, with claimants typically settling for compensation at a fraction of the market value, with the Nicaraguan state and people bearing the cost of paying for compensation bonds over the coming decades. Political influence undermined the restitution mechanism.

This thesis engages with representations of social crisis in Argentine fictional cinema during 1998-2005, a period when Argentina experienced a deep economic crisis that brought about significant changes in politics, culture, society and the arts. My emphasis is upon the ways in which cinema interpreted both present and long-established dialogues with national and social discourse, while re-assessing notions of national identity, culture and social class. The study contributes to a growing body of scholarship on Argentine film which has no precedent in history. In particular, works published in English over the last five years have offered fresh reflections upon a field that has remained dominated by narrative and aesthetic, rather than analytical, approaches By combining close textual analysis of films to the study of their cultural context my research argues that cinema addressed predominantly middle-class Argentine audiences with critical questions concerning the transformations they were experiencing over those years of crisis. As works of fiction, the films also offered ordinary people the possibility to identify with their own lives and values, stimulating critical reflection and emotional engagement, as well as enjoyment and laughter. The modes through which these films addressed Argentine audiences are themselves as rich and complex as their narrative representations of crisis. Amongst the most compelling achievements of recent Argentine cinema are the diversity of its modes of address, its strong themes, interesting styles and captivating narrative strategies. These films offered domestic audiences both reflective and divergent views on social reality that, without any doubt, enriched the cultural arena in which Argentineans could reflect on their past, their daily life, their values and their relationship with social minorities. In this sense cinema helped Argentine people to learn to live in democracy.

Conceptual practices developed in Colombia towards the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s. Even a cursory look at surveys of Colombian conceptual art shows that the collective El Sindicato, active between 1976 and 1979, secured its space in these accounts with its 1978 work Alacena con zapatos, which won the top prize at the XXVII Salón Nacional. However, Alacena con zapatos was neither the only, nor the most significant, contribution of El Sindicato to the development of conceptual practices. The collective’s rich oeuvre, while concise, was nonetheless remarkable in its interventions on public spaces as a means for social change. A number of factors have led to the critical misunderstanding and, ultimately, the historiographical neglect of these interventions. This thesis problematizes these factors in order to reframe and expand El Sindicato’s role within the narrative of Colombian art. To elucidate El Sindicato’s contributions, and taking into account that much of Colombian conceptual art remains unknown in the United States, this thesis also registers Colombia’s artistic field as it stood in the 1970s. In all, my project situates El Sindicato’s practices within the broader narrative of Conceptualism as a means to both enrich our understanding of contemporary art in Colombia and help expand the familiar boundaries of the map of conceptual art. / text

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