The Headlines Had a Tone of sensationalism in Trinidad's Sunday Guardian: “ Drug Barons Taking Over Big Business: 'Dirty’ Money is being laundered into the system” (Guardian, 1988).

Trinidadians, however, were hardly in a mood to accuse the normally staid Trinidad Guardian of sensationalism; the doings of drug barons is the subject of almost every dinner, cocktail party and informal conversation. Visitors are taken on tours of the new multimillion-dollar mansions springing up in formerly placid and genteel neighborhoods. Their massive walls and remote control cameras stand in stark contrast to the gingerbread quaintness of the adjoining structures (Interviews, 1988). But architectural divergency is the least of the contrasts so annoying to Trinidad citizens. What the Guardian calls the “satanic plot,” carried out by men of “prominence and respectability, ” is especially grating as the depressed economy has everyone else tightening belts or, worse, going into receivership. The court system is overwhelmed with drug and drug-related cases, and the main thrust of communityoriented philanthropy is the establishment of drug rehabilitation centers.

The decisive victory of Alberto Fujimori and his congressional list in 1995 did not reflect a delegative view of democracy among the Peruvian electorate. Instead of uncritically supporting their reelected president, as a delegative model would predict, Peruvians have rejected the illiberal and possibly unconstitutional policies of his second administration. Relying on public opinion poll data, this study argues that the same issues that facilitated Fujimori’s 1995 landslide will probably work against him in 2000.

Intermittent cycles of boom and bust based on one product have long characterized the economic history of Brazil. In this respect, the immense tropical rainforest comprising the Amazon Basin has been no exception. Economic activity reached its peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when this region held a virtual monopoly position in the world rubber market. Manaus, strategically located at the confluence of the Negro and Solimões (Amazonas) Rivers, became the hub of the rubber industry and was transformed from an obscure river town of 3,000 inhabitants to a prosperous, cosmopolitan city of 50,000 in less than forty years. Due to an influx of Asian plantation-grown rubber, though, world prices started declining after 1910 and the Brazilian monopoly was broken—between 1910 and 1934, the Amazon's share of the world rubber market fell precipitously from 60 percent to 1 percent (Andrade, 1950: 23).

What is required for sustaining an alliance between union and environmental activists? Applying grounded theory to a case study in the Costa Rican banana sector, this article reveals five historical phases. First, unions and environmentalists identify common opportunity structures for joint action. Second, a preexisting network becomes a resource for mobilization. Third, the new coalition engages in communicative action that leads to shared identity and cultural framing and a foundation for handling exogenous global forces. Market policy changes in the fourth phase stimulate a transnational activist network and framing linkages. Dramatic supply disruptions in the fifth precipitate autonomous organizational approaches that require reframing, identity extension, and flexibility. This study argues that the Costa Rican case can be generalized to other labor-environmental coalitions if such alliances create simple, open structures that agilely adapt to external opportunity structures and expand frames that encourage collaborative autonomy and dualistic collective definitions.

Starting in the 1990s, reforms aimed at addressing the underrepresentation of women have been implemented in Colombia. However, research on the consequences of these reforms has been inconclusive. This article analyzes the influence of institutional variables on the proportion of nominated and elected women in Colombia between 1962 and 2014, at both the national and local levels of government, in three different institutional environments. Results confirm the influence of institutional change, indicating that decentralizing reforms and the introduction of the gender quota have had a positive impact on the proportion of women's candidacies and elections, but that the adoption of the open list negatively affected the percentage of elected women.

Access to quality healthcare varies across the national territory inside Latin American countries, with some subnational units enjoying higher-quality care than others. Such territorial inequality is consequential, as residents of particular regions face shorter life spans and an increased risk of preventable disease. This article analyzes trajectories of territorial healthcare inequality across time in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. The data reveal a large decline in Brazil, a moderate decline in Mexico, and low levels of change followed by a moderate decline in Argentina. The article argues that two factors account for these distinct trajectories: the nature of the coalition that pushed health decentralization forward and the existence of mechanisms for central government oversight and management.

The theoretical literature presents conflicting expectations about the effects of trade openness on the ability of states to interdict drug trafficking. One view expects that trade openness will undermine drug interdiction; a second argues the opposite; a third argues that trade openness does not necessarily affect drug interdiction. This article assesses empirically the effects of trade openness on drug interdiction for countries in the Americas using a pooled time-series cross-sectional statistical model. It finds that trade openness decreases the interdiction capabilities of states in drug-consuming countries while increasing those of states in drug-producing countries. Greater openness to trade does not have a consistently significant effect on the interdiction capabilities of states in drug transit countries.

Legitimation is a fraught process for private security companies operating in Mexico and other countries in the Global South where the police have a poor reputation. Mexican private security companies have an ambivalent relationship with the police, which causes firms to engage in two seemingly contradictory practices. Companies attempt to gain legitimacy by aligning with the image of the police to earn a sense of “symbolic stateness” while simultaneously distancing themselves from Mexico's actual police forces so as to disassociate from the institution's poor reputation. Consequently, collaboration between public and private security is limited, despite official attempts by the Mexican state to foster positive contact between them. Overall, this study contributes to the growing literature on private security by providing novel insights into the strategies private security firms utilize to navigate within states possessing delegitimated security forces, and the resulting lucrative political economy landscape.

Restrospective Consideration of United States relations with Latin America during the decade of the 1960s has centered on the Alliance for Progress and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The second of these has been analyzed and re-analyzed as a case study in decision making and as a critical point in the nuclear confrontation between the United States and the USSR. Recently, a series of meetings, both political and scholarly, was conducted with what amounts to a nostalgic atmosphere to reevaluate the crisis. All of the participants recalled the episode within the context of East-West relations. The fact that Cuba was a part of Latin America scarcely entered into their reconstructions of events. The scholars who took part in these meetings were specialists in national security issues, in Soviet affairs or in military affairs.

The Lauca River dispute between Chile and Bolivia may seem insignificant when compared to many of the major controversies of the postwar period. The Lauca is a 140-mile long narrow river that has its origin in the Andes of northern Chile and then meanders across the border into the Bolivian altiplano, where, after serving as a water supply to small Bolivian towns, it disappears in salty Lake Coipasa. The potential of the river is minor when compared to that of the Nile, Jordan, Indus, Mekong, Colorado, and many other rivers. Yet, Chile's action in April 1962, of diverting some of the waters to irrigate the small Sobraya and Azapa valleys of her northern desert, which provide food for the port of Arica, has proved to be of serious import.

The dispute has not yet been resolved and has gravely strained relations between Chile and Bolivia. The effectiveness of the Organization of American States has been brought into question, for while the Organization has settled many other disputes since 1948, it has been unsuccessful in this one, and Bolivia has shown its dissatisfaction by withdrawing from the Council several times.

This Study will explore the extent to which state-owned enterprises (SOEs) were responsible for creating the Latin American debt problem and, more importantly, the extent to which the present privatization of those enterprises may help to resolve that problem. In some quarters, privatization has been viewed as an essential reform needed to restore creditworthiness and growth in the region after the “lost decade” of the 1980s. Other quarters have been more skeptical, viewing it more as the latest fad to strike the region. The conclusion that will be expressed here falls somewhere in between: privatization can indeed play a part in solving the debt crisis and restoring growth, but, like all solutions, it may also create unintended problems down the road if not used carefully.

It should come as no surprise that Panama is experiencing difficult times in the attempt to recast its political system, long under military control (1968-1989), into a functioning democracy. The military came to power in 1968 by ousting President Arnulfo Arias from his elected office — and not for the first time: they had also deposed him on two previous occasions, in 1941 and again in 1951. Following the 1968 coup, the military regime allowed no more presidential elections until the 1980s when, presumably, it felt its position sufficiently secure. However, those elections were neither honest, open, nor democratic. In May 1984, when Arnulfo Arias won the election, he was — again — deprived of the presidency when the military altered the results of the vote. When the next presidential elections were held, in 1989, General Manuel Antonio Noriega once more cancelled the results after his efforts to falsify the voting count failed.

The possible correlation between religious affiliation and economic status and development has long interested social scientists. The purpose of this study is to analyze the potential contribution of Protestantism to the agricultural and economic development of Latin American agrarian communities.

The effects of religious affiliation on economic behavior have been studied most extensively in Western Europe and the United States. Max Weber (1958: 35) concluded in his pioneering study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that in nations of mixed Catholic-Protestant religious composition the business leaders, owners of capital, and higher grades of skilled labor were “overwhelmingly Protestant.” Weber's initial intent was not to compare Protestant and Catholic economic achievement in Germany but, rather, to provide a non-Marxist interpretation of the rise of industrial capitalism and the attendant expansion of urbanization.

It is the most common presumption that the relative priority accorded to education in an economy is significantly determined by economic conditions, particularly by the national income per capita and the budget. However, under normal conditions of economic well-being, allocation of resources to education is generally found to be least influenced by economic factors in any important way. Economic ability factors like GNP per capita and public spending on education are not significantly related. Neither are criteria for efficiency, like the rate of return to education, found to influence policies which allocate resources to education (see Tilak, 1982).

During a conference on “Democracy under Pressure” that took place in November 1992 under the aegis of the North-South Center, a Venezuelan political scientist observed that, when all is said and done, the much-touted changes in the Venezuelan political system will probably not amount to much. The two major parties, which have exercised a near monopoly over electoral politics for the past 20 years, would doubtless pull in 80% of the vote in December (1992), only this time with strong local and regional leaders running as candidates.

Some politicians, government officials, and political analysts in Venezuela would agree that electoral reform, decentralization, and the growth of neighborhood associations — features of Venezuelan political life which have become increasingly marked over the last 15 years — do not alter or challenge the status quo in any fundamental way. On the other hand, there are also a number of political activists and commentators who, despite some disagreement as to the future direction of these changes, would argue that these developments are extremely significant.

This article uses empirical evidence from Nicaragua to examine Guillermo O'Donnell's argument that new democracies often become undemocratic delegative democracies and that vertical accountability is not enough to stop such encroaching authoritarianism. While events in the last five years have focused attention on illegal executive behavior by former president Alemán, Nicaragua's democracy actually has experienced authoritarian presidencies under all the major parties. Elections and popular mobilization have strengthened the independence of the legislature, however. Mechanisms of vertical accountability thereby have proven more effective than expected in restraining executive authoritarianism and fostering institutions of horizontal accountability. The case of Nicaragua shows that citizens can use the power balance and separate institutional mandate of presidential democracy to limit authoritarianism.

How valuable is a cabinet position? While the current literature does not ignore the reality that ministries differ from one another, it does not offer either theoretical or methodological procedures to assess such differences. This article introduces a refined measure of coalescence degree that considers several characteristics ministries may have, as well as politicians’ preferences about cabinet appointments. We estimate the effect of this alternative measure of coalescence on the president’s legislative success using large Brazilian datasets from 1995 to 2014 and an elite survey conducted with 62 Brazilian legislators. Controlling for other coalition management variables (coalition size and ideological heterogeneity), our refined coalescence metric turns out to be a more appropriate tool to assess the president’s performance in Congress.

By the 1990s, to the astonishment of many observers, most Latin American countries had reformed their systems of national economic governance along market lines. Many analysts of this shift have assumed that it circumvented normal political processes, presuming that such reforms could not be popular. Explanations emphasizing economic crisis, external assistance, and politically insulated executives illustrate this approach. Through a qualitative investigation of the reform process in the region's four most industrialized countries, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, this study argues, to the contrary, that reforming governments found or created both elite and mass political support for their policies.

Economically vulnerable voters are expected to hold politicians accountable for their management of the economy because these voters are more likely to be personally affected by economic shocks and less able to cope with the resulting dislocation. Evidence from the informal sector in Argentina, where the lack of formal registration increases income volatility and denies unemployment benefits, is consistent with this hypothesis. Data from Argentina from 2005 to 2006 show that the association between evaluations of the economy and evaluations of President Néstor Kirchner was stronger among those working without formal employment guarantees. The implication is that the electoral support of Latin America's many informal workers may very well be fickle and dependent on economic performance.