Tiburcio Carias: Portrait of a Honduran Political Leader (review)
To be sure, Oikion Solano has produced a political history of a fairly traditional sort. Each of the nine chapters addresses a single gubernatorial term, and many are further punctuated by descriptions of local and national elections, the passage of critical laws, and other such trappings of formal politics. Oikion Solano recognizes that such an approach runs the risk of becoming a mere chronicle of parliamentary debate, yet she avoids this pitfall and correctly argues that political history naturally divides between administrations. Moreover, Los hombres del poder describes not pnly the propagation of institutionalized political power in a key Mexican state: it also describes the moment at which la cosa publico, in Michoacan and elsewhere ceased to be the exclusive domain of landowners and investors with ties to the nineteenth-century Diaz machine and expanded to include many of the political groups that still are recognizable in Mexican politics today.