Them good ol' boys...

0.5 hours writing, 5.5 hours reading/researching, 0.5 hours emailing/administrivia

This week's blog monitor is Rafael Mazer in San Francisco. Rafael is a former colleague of mine at Hispanics in Philanthropy, and an unapologetic blog-o-phile, loving all types of internet ramblings, from intelligent political discourse to celebrity gossip and arguments over old rap records. He has an academic background in Latin American politics, and has lived abroad in Chile, Argentina and Guatemala. He's headed to graduate school at Duke in the fall. Welcome, Rafael!

I've been thinking about The Dukes of Hazzard and Veronica Mars today, as I picked up a book at the Strand over the weekend about rural and small-town police in the U.S. Thought it would be a useful point of comparison with the Colombian rural police who are central actors in the story I'm telling in my dissertation. One of the most interesting points to emerge from it was the contrast between a sheriff and a local police chief. I can't believe I hadn't thought of this before, given that one of my favorite TV shows, Veronica Mars, features a main character who runs for the elected office of sheriff. An elected police officer. Given my interest in politicized police, my head just about exploded when I finally made the connection. However, it's not something that's directly relevant for Latin America (far as I can tell), because I believe the sheriff is a distinctly Anglo-American institution. As in so many areas, the difference between common-law (British) and Napoleonic legal systems inherited from colonial times makes a big difference in how U.S. vs. Latin American law enforcement evolved. So you don't have sheriffs in Latin America. It may be an interesting thought experiment to wonder what difference it would have made if there were sheriffs.... In a similar pop-culture vein, reading about small-town sheriffs, the image of Boss Hogg from The Dukes of Hazzard kept popping into my head, the all-white-clad political boss who controlled the local sheriff. And that's because on his new CD, which I got last week, the stand-up Patton Oswalt (who's the voice of the lead character in Ratatouille) has a great riff about Bush and Cheney being like the Duke brothers, somehow managing to get themselves out of impossible situations. It's all connected....

Also finished going through Kirk Bowman's great book on militarization and development in Latin America. One key notion from there is that the military never acts alone in staging a coup, it's always allied with other actors. Given that a key distinction I make is between two types of armed challenge - a coup, led by actors within the state, i.e., the army, and an insurrection, led by actors in society (and therefore not the state) - I'll need to give this some thought. The idea of who leads the challenge is probably enough to make the distinction valid, but I'll have to work on whether it makes a difference whether the army is trying to get power for itself or whether it's just knocking aside one civilian government in favor of another, with no intent to rule itself.