Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay by Kregg Hetherington (review)
Gillingham’s chapter on elections reveals that even though fraud was widespread elsewhere, many municipal primary (intra-PRI) elections were genuinely contested (if slowly undermined) by the spread of “competitive authoritarianism” in the 1950s. While politically expedient, “pregnant” urns, multiple voting, and violent seizure of polling places delegitimized the PRI, relatively honest local elections were sometimes tolerated by the postrevolutionary state. Gillingham gives readers a detailed, technical, yet highly accessible account of throwing elections, making his chapter required reading for scholars of Mexico’s ruling party.