This book is a study of politics and the changing configuration of power in a developing country in which political domination during the past 155 years has almost without exception coincided with economic hegemony.

In 1972 Ecuador began to produce and export petroleum in the Amazon interior, and the formulation and execution of the petroleum policy became central to the political life of the nation. The nation's armed forces seized political power that same year and continued to rule until the reestablishment of democratic pluralist government in 1979. In this book, John D. Martz probes the differences and similarities between military authoritarianism and democratic pluralism through an analysis of the politics of petroleum in Ecuador. The Ecuadorian experience provides an ideal laboratory to test the policymaking characteristics and the overall performances of the two regimes ideal-types. Martz uses a textured and detailed analysis of global oil companies and nationalist politics to trace the growth and evolution of Ecuador's petroleum industry. The course of partisan and sectoral politics and the internal workings of military politics are also examined. Against this interplay of politics and the nationalistic struggle against multinational pressures, Martz compares policymaking under military and civilian government. John D. Martz is a professor of political science at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author and editor of more than a dozen books on Latin American politics and was the editor of the Latin American Research Review from 1975 to 1980.

This book carries out a comparative analysis of the power struggles over the post-neoliberal social security reforms in Venezuela and Ecuador. The research breaks down why the social security system reform initiated by Hugo Chávez’ government in Venezuela has come down since its passing in 2002, whereas the social security system reform initiated by Rafael Correa’s government in Ecuador has come along in spite of the obstacles since 2007. All in all, the analysis determined that the struggles over the social security system reforms in both countries remarkably corresponded to each other with regard to their structural conditions, points of contention, and contending actors. In contrast, the analysis established substantial divergences regarding the ways in which the struggles over both reforms came about, due to the divergent development of the struggles for hegemony between government and opposition. These divergences finally brought about the indefinite stagnation of the reform in Venezuela and the advancement of subsequent partial reforms aimed at the universalization of social security in Ecuador.

From 1984 to 1988 Ecuador underwent an experiment in "Andean Thatcherism," conducted by its authoritarian president, Leon Febres Cordero. This work examines the historical forces behind the Febres Cordero regime and the country's traditions of populism and military intervention.

The troubled history of democracy in Latin America has been the subject of much scholarly commentary. This volume breaks new ground by systematically exploring the linkages among the historical legacies of large landholding patterns, agrarian class relations, and authoritarian versus democratic trajectories in Latin American countries. The essays address questions about the importance of large landownders for the national economy, the labor needs and labor relations of these landowners, attempts of landowners to enlist the support of the state to control labor, and the democratic forms of rule in the twentieth century.

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its “free market” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country’s poor, including women’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and “unfinished” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist “issue networks” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.