On October 21,1983, an ominous two-column news story ran on page A12 of the New York Times. Datelined the previous day from Brasilia, the item off the Associated Press wire, noted that Brazilian President João Baptista Figueiredo had responded to a national congressional defeat of a government-supported austerity package by issuing a decree to replace the rejected legislation. President Figueiredo had also invoked emergency measures just before the vote, calling on police to enforce a ban on public gatherings in the Brazilian capital.

Facing a $90 billion foreign debt and a world financial community insistent on forcing down a 200% inflation rate as a condition for the release of billions of dollars in international loans, the Brazilian government apparently saw little alternative to ruling by decree once again, and backing its decisions by force. Over 19 years of military rule, unpopular policies have often been imposed on Brazilians in just this fashion.

The Coup d'Etat that overthrew General Alfredo Stroessner on the second night of February 1989 signaled the beginning of a new era for Paraguayan politics and the close of another chapter of Latin American caudillismo. He was replaced by General Andrés Rodríguez, Paraguay's second most powerful figure, in what was, in effect, a “palace coup.” General Rodríguez startled the nation by issuing a proclamation that called for (a) democratization of Paraguay, (b) full respect for human rights, and (c) restoration of the badly damaged relations with the Catholic Church. The proclamation ushered in a series of events which amazed the populace even more: opposition leaders — once banned and exiled by the Stroessner regime — were embraced and greeted by longtime adversaries; dozens of prominent exiled figures returned to find an enthusiastic atmosphere; political prisoners were freed; while corruption and torture became the subject of national debate as people sought both to uncover, and to bury, the legacy of the Stroessner years.

One of the principal criticisms of the neoliberal direction that guides most economic policymaking in Latin America today is that the structural adjustments now being imposed will increase the level of social inequity and decrease the already low standard of living of poor citizens. The Comisión Económica para América Latina (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) studied the changes that took place across the region during the 1980s and found that the distribution of wealth became increasingly inequitable while the level of poverty increased, to which Argentina was no exception (CEPAL, 1991b and 1991c). In the latter case, where President Carlos Menem has spearheaded a radical restructuring of his country's economy, the rise of poverty was a prominent domestic issue in the early 1990s, yet there was little electoral response to this issue, nor did political pressure succeed in changing the course of Menem's policies.

This article analyzes the uneven expansion of social policy, using evidence from Chile. It explicates the Chilean case to understand differences between two specific areas of social policy: pensions and healthcare. Most macroexplanatory factors, which the literature proves are crucial for cross-country analysis, are left constant. Instead, it focuses on accounting for differences in the scope of expansion across sectors. It carries out a hypothesis-generating type of case study and relies on inductive process tracing. The goal is to generate hypotheses that may be useful for theory building in the realm of intersectoral dynamics of social policy expansion. The findings suggest that three explanatory factors combine to account for such differences: policymakers’ perceptions of the budgetary constraints and fiscal costs of producing (or failing to produce) a reform; the composition, cohesion, and ideas of technical teams; and the relative power of nongovernmental, prowelfare actors in relation to market stakeholders.

Once Blithely Dismissed as an Ill-Informed, inarticulate, and under-involved president, Dwight D. Eisenhower has come to be regarded with a great deal of admiration, particularly by historians whose ideological proclivities are considerably to Eisenhower's left. He governed in a time of prosperity; he ended one war and entered no other; he resisted pressures to increase dramatically the size of the defense budget and resurrected the summit as an instrument of diplomacy with the Soviet Union. Upon leaving office, he issued an historic warning about the perils of the military-industrial complex.

Brazilian women have never been foreign to work. Prior to the beginning of the industrialization process, women were very active. The activities performed by women vary so much between different societies that it is not possible to assign or categorize any one activity as exclusively feminine. One of the principal characteristics of the development process of a society is the progressive isolation of those activities which are necessary for the production of goods and services from other activities. This is a consequence of the introduction of technological changes which make inevitable a separation in space and time of activities related to special production. The activity identified as work starts to develop more and more at specific places, in specific time intervals, and under specific contractual conditions. As the growing technical specialization made it necessary to make a separation between house and work, women were assigned house activities. In this sense it can be said that the introduction of the machine came to reinforce the concept that women's principal function was the administration of the house and the education of the children.

In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars interested in studying Latin American politics inevitably were drawn to the study of military coups d'etat and their causes. In the 1980s, a number of the countries in Latin America whose civilian political regimes were overthrown by military regimes may undergo or attempt to consolidate processes of democratization or redemocratization. Thus scholarly interest has tended to shift away from seeking to understand the causes for military overthrows of civilian regimes toward the study of prospects and processes of democratization or redemocratization in Latin America. In this context, the reexamination of earlier examples of durable transitions from authoritarian military regimes to civilian regimes may shed light on the relative importance of different factors in determining particular outcomes. This article carries out such a re-examination for the case of Colombia, analyzing the transition from rule by General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953-1957) through the crucial period of the interim military junta (1957-1958) to the consociational National Front political regime.

This research note explores whether the government-opposition dimension that emerges from voting records of Brazilian legislatures also arises in legislative speechmaking. Since the earlier stages of the legislative process are innocuous to policy outcomes, party leaders would have fewer incentives to coerce their copartisans’ behavior in speeches than in roll calls. To test this expectation, this study estimates Brazilian political parties’ policy positions, relying on a sentiment analysis approach to classify 64,000 senators’ speeches. The results suggest that the president and the party leadership exert significant influence not only over how legislators vote but also over how they speak. We speculate that these unforeseen findings are backed by the decisiveness of speeches in passing legislation, the importance leadership gives to party brand, and legislators’ need to signal their positions to leaders and the government.

The policies developed to face the critical housing problems in Chile by the last formally democratic administrations (Alesandri, 1958-1964; Frei, 1964-1970; Allende, 1970-1973), and their relative failures, constitute an important experience to be carefully considered by the underdeveloped world. First, it confirms the existence of the almost insuperable material as well as structural constraints inherent within a conventional treatment of the housing problem in societies of dependentmonopoly capitalism undergoing an intense period of urbanization. Second, the Chilean experience permits us to understand the complexity of social and political actions rooted in the unsatisfied demands for a plot of land or a house in metropolitan areas, with the upwelling of conflictive processes that may be beyond the usual mechanisms of governmental control.

Trade Policy in the Western Hemisphere is undergoing major transformation. Developments during the past few years include entry into force of the Canada-US free trade agreement; the prospect of negotiations among Canada, Mexico, and the United States toward a North American free trade area; efforts to deepen economic integration between Argentina and Brazil; and the initiative of President George Bush for free trade in the Western Hemisphere.

Had the Bush proposal been put forward a decade or so ago, it would have been greeted with suspicion, perhaps even derision, as just another neocolonial US maneuver to keep Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries from developing their industrial capacity. Its reception, however, was generally favorable, even enthusiastic. It is premature to expect the conclusion of free trade agreements between LAC countries, other than Mexico, and the United States, but there is a dynamic moving in this direction.

This article explores the conditions that allow judicial councils and impeachment juries to promote judicial autonomy. In theory, these bodies intervene in the appointment and removal of judges in order to reduce executive control over court composition, thereby promoting judicial independence. Using the case of Argentina at the federal and the subnational levels, this study demonstrates that competitive politics enhances the capacity of judicial councils and impeachment juries to bolster judicial autonomy. Interparty competition provides incentives for the executive to develop a meaningful system of checks and balances, which includes an independent judiciary that can check executive power. In contrast, monolithic party control—defined as a prolonged period of unified government under a highly disciplined party—permits the executive to maintain a monopoly on power and thereby control judicial appointments and removals.

The process of ratifying CAFTA in Costa Rica required traversing a contentious political landscape involving intense legislative battles, massive public demonstrations, and finally a national referendum in October 2007. By employing the mechanism of direct democracy to ratify a free trade agreement, Costa Rica made history. But how did this experiment with direct participation affect Costa Rica's democracy? This article evaluates what the referendum achieved in terms of promoting citizen engagement, equipping voters to make informed choices, resolving the CAFTA conflict in a way viewed as legitimate, and shaping citizens' relationships to representative institutions. While the referendum had positive effects, it had several negative consequences for representative democracy, which raises questions about the limits of democratic control over economic policy in the era of globalization.

Within the international politics of the Caribbean Basin attention is only rarely paid to the position of Belize. This neglect is the more remarkable since Belize epitomizes — more precisely than any other territory of the region — the characteristic geopolitical problem of the Caribbean caught, as it were, uneasily between the United States, Latin America and Europe. Yet, despite being threatened by the Guatemalan claim to sovereignty over its territory, which delayed its independence until 1981, Belize has skillfully taken advantage of its British colonial past to carve out for itself a distinctive geopolitical space in Central America and the Caribbean. This has allowed it not only to remain relatively undisturbed by the conflicts which have riven the other states of the Central American isthmus, but also to display a commitment to democratic change strong enough to sustain the electoral defeat — in December 1984 — of a regime which had held power in the country for more than thirty years, as well as the defeat of its successor — in September 1989 — after just one term in office.

This article documents a U.S. Cuban foreign policy cycle that operated in tandem with the presidential electoral cycle between 1992 and 2004. During these post–Cold War years, when Cuba posed no threat to U.S. national security, influential, well-organized Cuban Americans leveraged political contributions and votes to tighten the embargo on travel and trade, especially at the personal level. U.S. presidential candidates, most notably incumbent presidents seeking re-election, responded to their demands with discretionary powers of office. When presidential candidates supported policies that made good electoral sense but conflicted with concerns of state, they subsequently reversed or left unimplemented Cuba initiatives. After describing the logic behind an ethnic electoral policy cycle and U.S. personal embargo policy between 1992 and 2004, this article examines Cuban American voter participation, political and policy preferences, lobbying, political contributions, and the relationship between the ethnic policy and presidential election cycles.

The formulation of policy alternatives for shaping the future of Guatemala is inextricably interwoven with the Indian and his relation to the land. Available figures indicate that the majority of the population of Guatemala is culturally designated as Indian and has retained a marked dependence on the land. Guatemalan problems and prospects, therefore, cannot be fully grasped without a clear understanding of the historic role of land within the surviving Indian cultures and the prevailing Indian attitude toward land tenure. Although the traditional pattern of “communal ownership” has been subjected periodically to pressures designed to convert the Indian to an apprehension and acceptance of “private property” as a prerequisite for socioeconomic advance, the nature and extent of the conversion are not really known. Basic though such an understanding would seem to be, the matter has not been fully explored and definite conclusions are therefore lacking.

In December of 1951, the Cornell Peru Project, created under an agreement signed by Cornell University and the government of Peru, undertook a systematic program of research and development in the depressed highland Indian hacienda of Vicos, located in the Callejón de Huaylas, an intermontane valley some 270 miles north of Lima. In subsequent years Project personnel, in co-operation with functionaries of the Peruvian government, carried out a comprehensive program of development that significantly transformed the economic, educational, medical, and political institutions of the community. This program has included the introduction of innovations in farming techniques, the construction of an educational system, the building of a medical facility, and the transfer of local political power into the hands of the Indians.

This paper considers some of the ways in which the activities of the Project have affected population structure and change in the community and, in turn, how some of these population changes have affected, and are likely to affect, the efforts of the Project in the development of the community.

It is hardly necessary to assert that the armed forces have been important factors in the historical development of the nations of Latin America. By bringing into association men from all parts of the national territory, by posing as the incarnation of the national spirit, and by teaching patriotism and exalting national virtues, they have been a significant influence in overcoming regionalism and localism. By providing an avenue for advancement for members of lower social strata, they have encouraged social mobility. In many countries they have contributed to the transition from traditional to modern societies through their work in constructing communications systems, their emphasis on general and technical education within their ranks, and by their demands for industrialization.

Mexico's present political organization bears the imprint of regional fragmentation, which has strong pre-Revolutionary antecedents. Early Revolutionary governments reduced the weight of regional loyalties and divisions in the political equation without totally removing them. By attacking latifundia, caudillos, infrastructural deficiencies, and other underpinnings of regionalism, they advanced toward national integration. Nevertheless, the political pattern set by ancient conditions persisted in a new context. When President Miguel Alemán (1946-1952) institutionalized the Revolution, he also sanctioned a form of institutionalized regionalism. The ruling party (Partido Revolucionario Institutional or PRI) adapted the traditional mode of political participation to a new governing style. As a result, the regional recruitment of national leaders still depends more on the historical status of the states from which they come than on such modern criteria as the state's economic power or population size.

There is no area of investigation in the field of Latin American studies which has attracted more research in recent years than has the dependency theory. Countless words have been written and much academic “blood” has been spilled in the debate over the strengths and weaknesses of interpreting Latin American society, polity, economy, and culture within the framework of the dependency theory. While there is still much heat generated by those who hold differing opinions on the dependency perspective, serious research is proceeding in a number of areas in an attempt to document the ways in which and the extent to which Latin American nations are dependent on forces beyond their control. This paper attempts to further that research by focusing on agrarian public policy in Costa Rica.

In Brazil, an era of military confusion and dissatisfaction that followed the end of the Cold War has largely dissipated since the mid-1990s. Despite scarce federal resources under current economic policies, the Cardoso government has managed to eliminate the most immediate budgetary causes of military unrest. Military authoritarian influence remains, moreover, in areas such as Amazônia. The military’s own efforts, the president’s moral and economic support, and the legislature’s traditional apathy toward relevant issues have fostered a new form of military influence in the Brazilian democracy.