Cosponsor: Department of Global Labor and Work

Latin America’s “left turn” at the beginning of the twenty-first century was unprecedented in its scope and duration, producing 32 presidential victories by left-of-center parties or leaders in 11 different countries between 1998 and 2015. Despite notable achievements in reducing poverty and extreme inequalities, leftist parties found it difficult to “deepen” democracy by empowering popular majorities, and they suffered a series of agonizing political defeats between 2015 and 2019 that allowed conservative forces to reclaim their customary hold on state power. This project traces the different origins and trajectories in power of “populist” and “social democratic” currents within the Latin American left. Through a comparative analysis of several leftist cases, it also examines how their alternative conceptions of democracy carried the seeds of their own demise, setting the stage for new forms of political polarization in the region.

Santiago Anria is Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Labor and Work at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He is the author of When Movements Become Parties: The Bolivian MAS in Comparative Perspective.

Co-sponsored by Anthropology

The Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) introduced a series of state-led initiatives promising modernity, progress, national grandeur, and stability: state surveyors assessed land for agrarian reform, engineers utilized nationalized oil for industrialization, archaeologists reconstructed pre-Hispanic monuments for tourism, and anthropologists studied and photographed indigenous populations to achieve their acculturation. However, far from their stated goals, these initiatives dissembled violence, permitting land invasions, forced displacement, environmental damage, loss of democratic freedom, and mass killings. Mónica Salas Landa uses the history of northern Veracruz to demonstrate how these state-led efforts reshaped the region's social and material landscapes, affecting what was and is visible. Relying on archival sources and ethnography, she uncovers an aesthetic order of ongoing significance, which was established through post-revolutionary projects and which perpetuates inequality based on imperceptibility.

Mónica Salas Landa is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Lafayette College. She is a historical and political anthropologist with regional expertise in Latin America. Her work examines the processes of state formation, nation-building, and the aesthetic dimension of politics in post-revolutionary and contemporary Mexico. Trained as an anthropologist and archaeologist in Mexico, she obtained an MA in Museum Studies from New York University and a PhD in Anthropology with a concentration in Latin American Studies from Cornell University. Prior to joining Lafayette College, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Her work has been featured in the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of Latin American Studies, Environment and Planning A, among other journals. Her first book, Visible Ruins: The Politics of Perception and the Legacies of Mexico’s Revolution, was recently published by the University of Texas Press.

CANCELLED!!

Co-sponsored by Government

Infrastructure is at the heart of contemporary development strategies. Yet short time horizons are thought to impede infrastructure provision in democracies. Why do elected politicians invest in infrastructure projects that will not be completed during their time in office? The answer depends on understanding what infrastructure is and does in politics. I argue that the political rewards from infrastructure projects come from the associated contracts. Like many goods and services, infrastructure investments are neither fully privatized, in the sense of transferring ownership to the private sector, nor fully public, in that the state directly builds projects. Governments instead contract out to the private sector. In Latin America, politicians use their discretion in the contracting process to secure campaign donations, as well as personal rents. They also manipulate contracts—and particularly the use of public-private partnerships (PPPs)— to hide project costs, shift liabilities to future administrations, and move project decisions away from legislatures. Detailed evidence from 1,000 large infrastructure contracts, judicial investigations and leaked financial documents, and qualitative interviews with politicians and bureaucrats in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru demonstrate why politicians invest in infrastructure and why projects often fail to produce the economic development and social welfare gains promised.

Alisha C. Holland is Professor of Government at Harvard University. Before joining the Harvard faculty, she was an Assistant Professor in the Politics Department at Princeton University. Her first book, Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics), looks at the politics of enforcement against property law violations by the poor, such as squatting, street vending, and electricity theft. She is working on a new book on the politics of mass infrastructure investments in Latin America.