Acción colectiva rural, reforma agraria y política en El Ecuador, ca. 1920-1965

This thesis studies the rural collective action processes between 1920 and 1965 in Ecuador with a social history and political sociology approach. An approximation is carried out towards the conflicts, mobilizations and protests where indigenous and not indigenous peasants participated. Because of this, they are considered two periods, the first one that last from 1931 to 1947, sealed by the political instability and a constant change of governments; and the second one between 1948 and 1965, in a phase of successive constitutionally governments that ruled between 1948 and 1960. The conflicts and rural mobilizations reached a major visibility since 1958, deeply affecting the public opinion. The importance and magnitude of the rural mobilizations between 1959 and 1963 generated a controversy on their political effects in the agrarian change. Certainly, the rural mobilizations influenced in the outcome that took the political crisis, which concluded in the implantation of a military government in 1963. This government issued an Agrarian Reform Law in 1964, which modified partially the working relations and the land ownership. And, in addition, it defined a new type of military intervention in the policies that combined repression with reforms. The existence of a landowner social segment that backed a reform in the rural highland (sierra) society has been generally identified by Galo Plaza's figure. In his government (1948-1952), transformations were accentuated in the State intervention, mainly orientated towards the economic and political modernization. This was a new moment of coastal agro-exportation development with the leadership of the banana production. There were stimulated measures of promotion of the production and exportation of bananas. So, the road infrastructure was intensively spread and connected the producing zones with the export ports...

On the uniform approximation of Cauchy continuous functions

In the context of real-valued functions defined on metric spaces, it is known that the locally Lipschitz functions are uniformly dense in the continuous functions and that the Lipschitz in the small functions - the locally Lipschitz functions where both the local Lipschitz constant and the size of the neighborhood can be chosen independent of the point - are uniformly dense in the uniformly continuous functions. Between these two basic classes of continuous functions lies the class of Cauchy continuous functions, i.e., the functions that map Cauchy sequences in the domain to Cauchy sequences in the target space. Here, we exhibit an intermediate class of Cauchy continuous locally Lipschitz functions that is uniformly dense in the real-valued Cauchy continuous functions. In fact, our result is valid when our target space is an arbitrary Banach space.

X-ray absorption study of the ferromagnetic Cu moment at the YBa_(2)Cu_(3)O_(7)/La_(2/3)Ca_(1/3)MnO_(3) interface and variation of its exchange interaction with the Mn moment

With x-ray absorption spectroscopy and polarized neutron reflectometry we studied how the magnetic proximity effect at the interface between the cuprate high-TC superconductor YBa_(2)Cu_(3)O_(7) (YBCO) and the ferromagnet La_(2/3)Ca_(1/3)MnO_(3) (LCMO) is related to the electronic and magnetic properties of the LCMO layers. In particular, we explored how the magnitude of the ferromagnetic Cu moment on the YBCO side depends on the strength of the antiferromagnetic (AF) exchange coupling with the Mn moment on the LCMO side. We found that the Cu moment remains sizable if the AF coupling with the Mn moments is strongly reduced or even entirely suppressed. The ferromagnetic order of the Cu moments thus seems to be intrinsic to the interfacial CuO_(2) planes and related to a weakly ferromagnetic intraplanar exchange interaction. The latter is discussed in terms of the partial occupation of the Cu 3d_(3z^(2)−r^(2)) orbitals, which occurs in the context of the so-called orbital reconstruction of the interfacial Cu ions.