Book Review, Investigating an Epidemic among Indigenous Children in Venezuela

:::::: Book Review ::::::

Investigating an Epidemic among Indigenous Children in Venezuela
by Ian Read

Una enfermedad monstruo: Indígenas derribando el cerco de la discriminación en salud

Briggs Charles L.,Gómez Norbelys,Gómez Tirso & Mantini-Briggs Clara Una enfermedad monstruo: Indígenas derribando el cerco de la discriminación en salud. Buenos Aires: Lugar Editorial, 2015.

Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice

Briggs Charles L. & Mantini-Briggs Clara Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

In 2007, indigenous children in the rain forest of eastern Venezuela began dying from a mysterious disease. The local physician, healers, and epidemiologists could not determine the cause. When a second and third wave of deaths occurred in 2008, Conrado Moraleda, the president of the local health committee, gathered a team to carry out an investigation that state officials seemed unwilling to do. The team included Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, and her husband, Charles L. Briggs, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. They and three others visited 30 communities spread out across a large portion of the Amacuro Delta, where the Warao people distinguish their settlements from the tierra firma of the criollos (nonindigenous). Moving from town to town by motorboat, the group stumbled upon an important clue: some communities reported unusual behavior of and bites by Desmodus rotundus, the common vampire bat that can carry rabies. More evidence of this disease was presented by agonizing and telltale symptoms and a frightening mortality rate. The team halted its investigation early to notify state and national authorities. Despite extraordinary efforts, it was ultimately unsuccessful in convincing the Venezuelan government even that an epidemic had occurred, let alone one caused by rabid bats.

Abstract, Small Groups Don’t Win Revolutions: Armed Struggle in the Memory of Maoist Militants of Política Popular

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Small Groups Don’t Win Revolutions: Armed Struggle in the Memory of Maoist Militants of Política Popular
by Jorge Ivan Puma Crespo


Política Popular, an unarmed Maoist group operating from 1968 to 1979 in northern Mexico, developed as it did because of the attraction of the “mass line” in its interpretation as a direct-democratic model for political participation. This is why activists from the student movement of 1968 adopted Maoist ideas as an ideological guide. Maoism as a simple organizational catechism easily captured their imagination and persuaded squatters and workers to join them in challenging the authoritarian Mexican regime.

Abstract, The Transition to Entrepreneurial Governance in a Middle-Sized Ecuadorian City

:::::: Abstract ::::::

The Transition to Entrepreneurial Governance in a Middle-Sized Ecuadorian City
by José Prada-Trigo


A key issue in territorial studies in recent years has been the transition in urban governance from managerialism to entrepreneurialism. North American and European cities were pioneers in this transition, and Latin American metropolises adapted their postulates to a different reality. Middle-sized cities in the region seem to have copied the intervention models of the nearest metropolis, uncritically applying them to a context characterized by important urban and social deficiencies and low standards of urban governance. The result has been a transition from no management to urban entrepreneurialism. In the case of one middle-sized city, this model has generated “islands of investment” attractive to foreign capital without resolving such long-standing problems as poverty, inequality, underemployment, and scarcity.

Abstract, Argentine Gramscians between Culture and Politics: The Case of Pasado y Presente

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Argentine Gramscians between Culture and Politics: The Case of Pasado y Presente
by Anna Popovitch


The Argentine cultural journal Pasado y Presente (1963–1965; 1973), founded in the city of Córdoba by a group of New Left thinkers including José Aricó, positioned itself at the intersection between the cultural sphere and the field of political action. The members of the collective adopted a critical attitude toward European social theories imported to Latin America and envisioned an alliance between Marxism and Peronism. They also debated the viability of armed struggle, advocated workers’ councils, and identified a new political imaginary for the Argentine New Left, a “third way.” The journal’s intellectual trajectory reveals a tension between the cultural and the political spheres that prevented it from becoming a strictly political entity.

Abstract, Reification and the Human Commodity: Theorizing Modern Slavery in Brazil

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Reification and the Human Commodity: Theorizing Modern Slavery in Brazil

by Daniela Issa


Modern slavery in Brazil exemplifies the culmination of reification as theorized by György Lukács, characterized by the commodification and dehumanization of labor and the extreme objectification of workers, who become “human commodities” in the capitalist system—“commodities” that produce other commodities. The concept of reification was incorporated into the 2003 Brazilian law on slave labor, where equating a human being with a thing in the performance of labor is a crime regardless of whether a worker is confined.

Abstract, Slavery in Today’s Brazil: Law and Public Policy

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Slavery in Today’s Brazil: Law and Public Policy
by Ricardo Rezoned Figueira and Neide Esterci


The abolition of slavery in 1888 failed to eliminate the repressive and compulsory use of labor in Brazil. When pressure to reduce slave trafficking made African labor scarce, coffee producers in São Paulo recruited European migrants to replace it. Through indebtedness and compulsory work, migrants became captive to the landowners who hired them. As the occupation of the Amazon frontier became state policy in the 1960s, debt bondage was used against the thousands of migrant workers hired to clear the areas for agribusiness projects. Slavery had been prohibited since 1940, and in 1965 the Congress entered into two international agreements on slavery that included debt bondage. With the end of the military government in 1985, the category “slave labor” was incorporated into the regulatory framework for employment practices, and since then it has been broadened to include labor forced by violence, debt bondage, exhausting labor, and degrading working conditions. Tensions around the definition remain, however, and prosecutions under the law and guilty verdicts have so far been few.

Abstract, Migration and Trafficking of Persons for Labor Exploitation in the Textile Workshops of Buenos Aires under Neoliberalism

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Migration and Trafficking of Persons for Labor Exploitation in the Textile Workshops of Buenos Aires under Neoliberalism
by Debora Betrisey


The practices and political representations of the Argentine state with regard to trafficking in persons for purposes of labor exploitation, currently dominated by legal logic, treat immigrant workers as vulnerable victims. This robs them of any autonomy and ignores other aspects of their subjectivity, hindering the establishment of connections and solidarity with other social sectors in the national context that would allow them to contest the exploitation and domination to which they are subject.

Abstract, The Tip of the Iceberg: Media Coverage of “Slave Labor” in Argentina

:::::: Abstract ::::::

The Tip of the Iceberg: Media Coverage of “Slave Labor” in Argentina
by Marina Kabat, Agustina Desalvo, Julia Egan


The Argentina media often report “slave labor” conditions in clothing production and seed nurseries. A critical assessment of the types of coercion (economic and noneconomic) that hold workers under these brutal conditions indicates that instances of extraeconomic coercion are merely the extreme manifestation of a general situation in which economic coercion predominates. The determinants of the deterioration of working conditions in these two sectors include relative overpopulation and technological backwardness.

Abstract, Prostitution and Migrant Smuggling Networks Operating between Central America, Mexico, and the United States

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Prostitution and Migrant Smuggling Networks Operating between Central America, Mexico, and the United States
by Simón Pedro Izcara Palacios


During the past five years, a process of specialization has taken place in migrant smuggling networks that has led to the strengthening of those focused on transporting women. The reasons are that migrant women have been less affected than men by the violence in Mexico and that the adult entertainment industry pays the highest prices for irregular migrants. In-depth interviews with procurers, smugglers, and women from Central America describe the operation of the networks for the smuggling of women for prostitution operating between Central America, Mexico, and the United States and indicate that the recruitment of women is usually not coercive and that the employment of minors is more frequent in the United States than in Mexico.

Abstract, Migrant Smuggling on Mexico’s Gulf Route: The Actors Involved

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Migrant Smuggling on Mexico’s Gulf Route: The Actors Involved
by Simón Pedro Izcara Palacios


Migrant flows crossing Mexican territory into the United States along the Gulf route are mainly driven by a demand for cheap labor. The decrease in the number of migrants wishing to cross the border to escape the violence in Mexico has turned undocumented migrants into a rare and valuable commodity. The increasing costs of migrant smuggling as a result of organized crime and the activities of the immigration authorities have prompted employers to finance this activity to ensure that they receive enough workers. In-depth interviews with 70 migrant smugglers shed light on the function and participation of the different actors involved in migrant smuggling.

Introduction, Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking in Latin America

:::::: Introduction ::::::

Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking in Latin America
by Daniela Issa

Very few scholars in Latin America deny the existence of modern slavery today, but when the literature began denouncing and analyzing it in the late 1990s1 as a practice very much present in the world the phenomenon was met with astonishment. Because of slavery’s being a historical practice, “vestiges” of it seemed a more plausible explanation than the purported reality of “modern slavery”—a construction seemingly leading to an oxymoron in the social imaginary. For one thing, this astonishment presupposed the incompatibility of slavery in any form with the promises of Post-Enlightenment modernity associated with emancipation and individual liberties. Further, modernity’s scientific and technical progress is invariably associated with the moral and ethical progress of humanity and the implication of a better world, a different stage of historical development. In the past couple of decades, however, the literature has come to be quite homogeneous in its acceptance of the phenomenon in spite of the apparent paradox of the modern, neoliberal world order: assurances of more freedom, in particular individual liberties, on the one hand and extreme exploitation of labor on the other.

Abstract, Small Groups Don’t Win Revolutions: Armed Struggle in the Memory of Maoist Militants of Política Popular

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Small Groups Don’t Win Revolutions: Armed Struggle in the Memory of Maoist Militants of Política Popular
by Jorge Ivan Puma Crespo


Política Popular, an unarmed Maoist group operating from 1968 to 1979 in northern Mexico, developed as it did because of the attraction of the “mass line” in its interpretation as a direct-democratic model for political participation. This is why activists from the student movement of 1968 adopted Maoist ideas as an ideological guide. Maoism as a simple organizational catechism easily captured their imagination and persuaded squatters and workers to join them in challenging the authoritarian Mexican regime.

Book Review, Investigating an Epidemic among Indigenous Children in Venezuela

:::::: Book Review ::::::

Investigating an Epidemic among Indigenous Children in Venezuela
by Ian Read

Una enfermedad monstruo: Indígenas derribando el cerco de la discriminación en salud

Briggs Charles L.,Gómez Norbelys,Gómez Tirso & Mantini-Briggs Clara Una enfermedad monstruo: Indígenas derribando el cerco de la discriminación en salud. Buenos Aires: Lugar Editorial, 2015.

Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice

Briggs Charles L. & Mantini-Briggs Clara Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge, and Communicative Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

In 2007, indigenous children in the rain forest of eastern Venezuela began dying from a mysterious disease. The local physician, healers, and epidemiologists could not determine the cause. When a second and third wave of deaths occurred in 2008, Conrado Moraleda, the president of the local health committee, gathered a team to carry out an investigation that state officials seemed unwilling to do. The team included Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, and her husband, Charles L. Briggs, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. They and three others visited 30 communities spread out across a large portion of the Amacuro Delta, where the Warao people distinguish their settlements from the tierra firma of the criollos (nonindigenous). Moving from town to town by motorboat, the group stumbled upon an important clue: some communities reported unusual behavior of and bites by Desmodus rotundus, the common vampire bat that can carry rabies. More evidence of this disease was presented by agonizing and telltale symptoms and a frightening mortality rate. The team halted its investigation early to notify state and national authorities. Despite extraordinary efforts, it was ultimately unsuccessful in convincing the Venezuelan government even that an epidemic had occurred, let alone one caused by rabid bats.

Abstract, The Transition to Entrepreneurial Governance in a Middle-Sized Ecuadorian City

:::::: Abstract ::::::

The Transition to Entrepreneurial Governance in a Middle-Sized Ecuadorian City
by José Prada-Trigo


A key issue in territorial studies in recent years has been the transition in urban governance from managerialism to entrepreneurialism. North American and European cities were pioneers in this transition, and Latin American metropolises adapted their postulates to a different reality. Middle-sized cities in the region seem to have copied the intervention models of the nearest metropolis, uncritically applying them to a context characterized by important urban and social deficiencies and low standards of urban governance. The result has been a transition from no management to urban entrepreneurialism. In the case of one middle-sized city, this model has generated “islands of investment” attractive to foreign capital without resolving such long-standing problems as poverty, inequality, underemployment, and scarcity.

Abstract, Argentine Gramscians between Culture and Politics: The Case of Pasado y Presente

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Argentine Gramscians between Culture and Politics: The Case of Pasado y Presente
by Anna Popovitch


The Argentine cultural journal Pasado y Presente (1963–1965; 1973), founded in the city of Córdoba by a group of New Left thinkers including José Aricó, positioned itself at the intersection between the cultural sphere and the field of political action. The members of the collective adopted a critical attitude toward European social theories imported to Latin America and envisioned an alliance between Marxism and Peronism. They also debated the viability of armed struggle, advocated workers’ councils, and identified a new political imaginary for the Argentine New Left, a “third way.” The journal’s intellectual trajectory reveals a tension between the cultural and the political spheres that prevented it from becoming a strictly political entity.

Abstract, Small Groups Don’t Win Revolutions: Armed Struggle in the Memory of Maoist Militants of Política Popular

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Small Groups Don’t Win Revolutions: Armed Struggle in the Memory of Maoist Militants of Política Popular
by Jorge Ivan Puma Crespo


Política Popular, an unarmed Maoist group operating from 1968 to 1979 in northern Mexico, developed as it did because of the attraction of the “mass line” in its interpretation as a direct-democratic model for political participation. This is why activists from the student movement of 1968 adopted Maoist ideas as an ideological guide. Maoism as a simple organizational catechism easily captured their imagination and persuaded squatters and workers to join them in challenging the authoritarian Mexican regime.

Abstract, Reification and the Human Commodity: Theorizing Modern Slavery in Brazil

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Reification and the Human Commodity: Theorizing Modern Slavery in Brazil

by Daniela Issa


Modern slavery in Brazil exemplifies the culmination of reification as theorized by György Lukács, characterized by the commodification and dehumanization of labor and the extreme objectification of workers, who become “human commodities” in the capitalist system—“commodities” that produce other commodities. The concept of reification was incorporated into the 2003 Brazilian law on slave labor, where equating a human being with a thing in the performance of labor is a crime regardless of whether a worker is confined.

Abstract, Slavery in Today’s Brazil: Law and Public Policy

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Slavery in Today’s Brazil: Law and Public Policy
by Ricardo Rezoned Figueira and Neide Esterci


The abolition of slavery in 1888 failed to eliminate the repressive and compulsory use of labor in Brazil. When pressure to reduce slave trafficking made African labor scarce, coffee producers in São Paulo recruited European migrants to replace it. Through indebtedness and compulsory work, migrants became captive to the landowners who hired them. As the occupation of the Amazon frontier became state policy in the 1960s, debt bondage was used against the thousands of migrant workers hired to clear the areas for agribusiness projects. Slavery had been prohibited since 1940, and in 1965 the Congress entered into two international agreements on slavery that included debt bondage. With the end of the military government in 1985, the category “slave labor” was incorporated into the regulatory framework for employment practices, and since then it has been broadened to include labor forced by violence, debt bondage, exhausting labor, and degrading working conditions. Tensions around the definition remain, however, and prosecutions under the law and guilty verdicts have so far been few.

Abstract, Migration and Trafficking of Persons for Labor Exploitation in the Textile Workshops of Buenos Aires under Neoliberalism

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Migration and Trafficking of Persons for Labor Exploitation in the Textile Workshops of Buenos Aires under Neoliberalism
by Debora Betrisey


The practices and political representations of the Argentine state with regard to trafficking in persons for purposes of labor exploitation, currently dominated by legal logic, treat immigrant workers as vulnerable victims. This robs them of any autonomy and ignores other aspects of their subjectivity, hindering the establishment of connections and solidarity with other social sectors in the national context that would allow them to contest the exploitation and domination to which they are subject.

Abstract, The Tip of the Iceberg: Media Coverage of “Slave Labor” in Argentina

:::::: Abstract ::::::

The Tip of the Iceberg: Media Coverage of “Slave Labor” in Argentina
by Marina Kabat, Agustina Desalvo, Julia Egan


The Argentina media often report “slave labor” conditions in clothing production and seed nurseries. A critical assessment of the types of coercion (economic and noneconomic) that hold workers under these brutal conditions indicates that instances of extraeconomic coercion are merely the extreme manifestation of a general situation in which economic coercion predominates. The determinants of the deterioration of working conditions in these two sectors include relative overpopulation and technological backwardness.