Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This paper examines the results of the implementation of the Programa de Apoyo Alimentario (Food Support Program) between 2010 and 2012 in Mexico, taking into account its basic operational rules, which had the goal of improving the food intake and nourishment of target families (particularly with children under 5 and with pregnant or breastfeeding women). Utilizing non-parametric techniques and poverty intensity curves, results show that the program is supplementary while also lacking total coverage to reach all potential recipients in the country. In the context of the Crusade against Hunger presented by the government of Enrique Peña Nieto, the Programa de Apoyo Alimentario achieved coverage of a little over a quarter (25.6%) of potential recipients in 2012. Thus it concludes that the program by itself contributes to the wellbeing of a percentage of the population, but it does not attain a decrease in food poverty. Lastly, a series of recommendations are put forth.

Artículo editorial del número.

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A cultural trauma is produced when the members of a community feel they have gone through a dreadful event that has left indelible scars on their collective consciousness, branding forever their memories and changing their future identity in an essential and irrevocable way. Although this scientific concept suggests there are empiric/causal links among occurrences, structures, perceptions, and actions that were not previously connected, it also illuminates anew a significant domain of moral responsibility and political action. By elaborating cultural traumas, social groups, national societies and sometimes even entire civilizations may not only cognitively identify the existence and sources of human suffering, but also take certain moral responsibility for it. As groups identify the roots of trauma and assume a moral responsibility, the members of communities establish supportive relationships that may allow them -and even force them- to partake of the suffering of the others. Is the others’ suffering also our suffering? Insofar as it is deemed plausible, societies broaden the circle of the “us” and will endeavor to prevent the trauma from happening again by means of their healing process. This article considers empirically the working-through of a trauma in the case of the Holocaust -the massive extermination of Jews by the Nazis and its foundational status in the elaboration and re/signifying of the trauma-, and discusses the experiences of the Afro-Americans, the indigenous peoples, the colonial victims of Western and Japanese imperialism, the Nanking Massacre, and the victims of communist regimes of the Soviet Union and the Maoist China.

Although the quantitative effects of the Shoá (a term usually translated as Holocaust), have been abundantly addressed and speculated over, few studies have been based on rigorous demographic methods to explore them. The first part of this article evaluates the main factors that should be thoroughly examined to establish the short and long term impact on the Jewish population. The second section presents demographic global projections of what the Jewish population would be nowadays if the Holocaust had not occurred. The obviously speculative analysis is based on numerous assumptions, beyond those suggested by the author. The findings of these hypothetical projections reveal that, due to the number of unborn generations, a high rate of infant mortality during the war, and the current aging of the Jewish population, the demographic losses extend way beyond the officially acknowledged six million direct victims of the war.