A crucial feature of political life in twentieth-century Brazil has been the growing role of the state as the central regulator of social, economic, and political life. One aspect of the expansion of the public sector in Brazil, as elsewhere, has been the accumulation by the state of a number of important social and economic functions previously exercised outside the public domain. One important function adopted by the state in Brazil is that of social protection, in the form of an elaborate and complex social insurance system. Presently some form of social protection reaches almost the entire rural population and some 78 percent of the urban population. The main social protection organization—Instituto Nacional da Previdência Social (INPS)— boasts the second largest budget in the nation (in 1975 CR $43 billion in contrast to the federal budget of Cr $113 billion) and a bureaucracy of over 102,700 employees.

Pension policy is a highly political issue across Latin America. Since the mid-2000s, several countries have re-reformed their pension systems with a general trend toward more state involvement, yet with significant variation. This article contends that policy legacies and the institutional political setting are key to understanding such variation. Analyzing the cases of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, this article shows that where a weak legacy, characterized by low coverage and savings rates, a weakly organized pension industry, and strong societal groups that oppose the private system, combines with a strong institutional setting, characterized by a government with large support in Congress and where the president concentrates decisionmaking, re-reform outcomes may lead to the outright elimination of the private pillar. Conversely, where a strong legacy combines with a weak institutional setting, re-reform outcomes will tend to maintain the private pillar and expand only the role of the public one.

Eleven years after the start of an insurgent war, Peru's military appears no closer to defeating the two insurgencies that have plagued the country since 1980. The promise of greater political stability and a reduced role for the military in politics, which the the return to civilian rule held out, have largely been dashed. The war has meant a new active role for the military in politics which, under emergency decrees, directly rules over half of the country and maintains an influential voice in national policymaking. Under the previous two elected governments and the current Fujimori administration, the military institution has largely designed and implemented counter-insurgency strategy, leaving civilian policymakers aside in the decision-making process. What is more important, military officials have remained largely unaccountable for their decisions due to the lack of any civilian oversight capacity or alternative strategies. More than a decade after the start of the war, civilians have yet to devise methods that can increase military accountability.

After 8 Years of United States unilateralism in Central America and ideological confrontation on Capitol Hill, by 1989, newly-elected leaders in Latin America and Democrats in Congress yearned for a US president who would listen to their concerns, not just lecture them on the contras. George Bush's pragmatic style was therefore a welcome departure from the ideological intensity of his predecessor. With the democratic and pragmatic leaders of Latin America, Bush grappled with debt, democratic transitions, and drug trafficking, and together they sought new ways to relate the Hemisphere to a rapidly changing world.

This paper examines the nature of the U.S. Military Assistance Program (MAP) to Latin America and the historical development of the Military Assistance Program in the hemisphere. It further analyzes this program with regard to the two major criticisms levelled at it:

1. (1) that Military Assistance Programs have perpetuated “militarism” in the form of military coups and strong-man military regimes; and

2. (2) that Military Assistance Programs have encouraged large military forces where they are not needed.

Changes in U.S. policy toward Latin America are noted as they affect MAP—i.e., the shift in U.S. policy from one of fostering hemispheric defense to one of promoting internal security and economic development. Finally, an assessment of the impact of this change in U.S. military assistance policy forms the conclusion of this paper.

In Latin America, international rivalry over aviation followed World War I. In its early form, it consisted of a commercial scramble among several Western European nations and the United States to sell airplanes and aviation products and to establish airlines in Latin America. Somewhat later, expanding European aviation activities posed an implicit threat to the Panama Canal.

Before World War I, certain aerophiles had sought to advance the airplane as the panacea for the transportation problem in Latin America. The aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont of Brazil and the Aero Club of America, an influential private United States association, were in the van. In 1916, efforts by these enthusiasts led to the formation of the Pan American Aviation Federation, which they envisioned as the means of promoting and publicizing aviation throughout the Western Hemisphere.

During the Cuban revolution's first decade, Fidel Castro's charismatic authority and predominant position eclipsed the significance of the new institutions created to replace the prerevolutionary political order. The “institutionalization” under way in Cuba since 1970, however, has strengthened and formalized the political structure to the extent that the island's institutions can no longer be regarded as peripheral to the dynamics of Cuban politics. This is particularly true of the Communist party of Cuba, which has emerged from the 1970s as the central political institution. The way in which the party has developed not only highlights some of the problems inherent in the process of creating a new political order, but is also essential for understanding contemporary Cuban politics.

One of the most difficult and frustrating challenges to US foreign policy in the post-World War II period has been coping with third world revolutions, particularly those in the Caribbean Basin. Whether the revolution has been in Cuba, Nicaragua, or Grenada, relations with the US have always deteriorated, and the revolutionary governments have moved closer to the Soviet bloc and toward a Communist political model. Both the deteriorating relationship and the increasingly belligerent posture of the US have conformed to a regular pattern; so too have the interpretations of the causes and consequences of the confrontation.

US government officials and a few policy analysts tend to view the hostile attitudes and policies of the revolutionary governments as the cause of the problem.

This article draws on a new dataset to depict the scope, objectives, and methods of research in the field of U.S.-Latin American relations over the past quarter-century. The key findings are that the study of U.S.-Latin American relations focuses largely on foreign policy analysis, is mainly descriptive, relies overwhelmingly on qualitative methods, and is fairly detached from the main research trends in international relations. In light of this assessment, the article emphasizes the need to pay more attention to issues of theory development and explanation in this subfield of international relations.

Studies of executive-legislative relations are usually based only on the analysis of formal institutions, although informal institutions also shape interbranch behavior. This omission leads to questionable results when scholars examine the capacity of state institutions to audit other public agencies and branches of government. This article explores how the protocols, an informal institution that shapes the Chilean budgetary negotiations, have increasingly allowed the congress to have a more relevant budgetary role than what the constitution permits. It argues that protocols accommodate some of the undesired consequences of a charter that is strongly biased toward the central government, and describes how this institution has departed from its stringent budgetary focus to encompass broader executive-legislative agreements that enhance the legislature's capacity to oversee the executive.

This article draws on longitudinal, ethnographic data gathered in rural Nicaragua over a two-decade period to examine the ideological and political implications of neoliberalism in the prefigurative, grassroots stages of social mobilization. It contrasts divergent path-dependent processes of accommodation and resistance to neoliberalism as Nicaraguan peasants have moved from collectivism to individual farming, with an emphasis on interpretive processes. This study explores how market processes both serve as an external grievance and operate internally in rural communities to reconfigure rural social relations and individual and collective identities. It also seeks to develop concepts and interpretations that may be applied more broadly to analyze links between deepening market processes and the forms and content of social movement responses to deteriorating economic conditions.

This article analyzes novel patterns of interaction between right-wing parties and protest movements during major contentious cycles in Argentina (2012–13) and Brazil (2013–16), which preceded the advent of the Cambiemos coalition in the former and the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in the latter. Drawing on a dual process-tracing strategy and a wide range of data sources, this study shows that these interactions are central to understanding why and how right-wing parties leverage novel repertoires and resources from digital activists during contemporary protest cycles, a dynamic conceptualized as a new party linkage strategy through digital intermediation. The study traces its three-phase development in both countries, revealing how differences in institutional contexts and the strength of activist groups contributed to divergent trajectories of partisan opposition toward the end of the cycles, regarding both the subsequent reconfiguration of the right and the entry of digital activists into institutional arenas.

Current approaches to voting behavior in clientelist contexts either predict that clients leave their preferences aside for fear of having their benefits cut off or voluntarily support politicians they perceive to be reliable patrons. These two approaches cannot account for clients’ vote choices in the Sertão of Bahia, Brazil, where voters were free to choose among competing candidates but supported patrons they knew were unreliable. This article argues that clients voluntarily voted for bad patrons as a strategy to gain symbolic power in their negotiations with politicians. By explaining clients’ paradoxical choices in the Sertão, this article reveals how clientelism can persist without monitoring mechanisms or positive attitudes toward patrons. In addition, this study shows the importance of incorporating voters’ perspectives and their everyday survival strategies to better account for clients’ political behavior.

It seems that regionalism is making a comeback nowadays (Rostow, 1990). Not so much in the real world where different types of regional arrangements never ceased to be a functional part of the workings of the international system since the 1950s, but more so in the scientific production of international relations scholars.

Those old enough to recollect the 1960s will remember how such journals as International Organization and the Journal of Common Market Studies, to name only two, were filled with articles largely dominated by theoretical and methodological considerations concerning the study of regionalism.

On April 11, 1997, the European Commission, represented by its vice president and UK commissioner, Leon Brittan, responsible for foreign trade and relations with North-America; and the government of the United States, represented by Under Secretary of State for Foreign Trade Stuart Eizenstat, agreed on a compromise that in effect would temporarily neutralize the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996, better known as the Helms-Burton law, just a year after its approval. In the event that all the portions of the agreement are implemented, this accommodation will represent the end of one of the most serious episodes of disagreement between Washington and Brussels since the end of the Cold War, as well as between the United States and its partners in NAFTA.

During the early 1990s, many Latin American countries enjoyed exceptionally strong economic growth, which has been credited with making possible substantial reductions in their rates of poverty. However, the collapse of capital flows to Latin America that began in 1995 portends a decline in the region's economic growth. If these countries now register growth rates that are only modestly positive (on the order of 1-3%), the question then arises as to whether this progress in overcoming poverty is bound to stall.

Despite new rhetoric to the contrary, Latin Americans have relied on growth almost exclusively as the way to overcome poverty. The distribution of income has changed very little over the past decade and, where change did occur, in many cases it has been for the worse.

In November 1992, Panama held its first nationwide election since the United States invaded the country to remove General Manuel Noriega in December 1989. Many experts, applying the strictest standards, view this referendum as the first credible national election to be held in Panama in 60 years. Others dispute this verdict, citing 1960 as the most “clean” election to held in recent memory. Whatever the benchmark, the 1992 referendum was acclaimed by participants and international observers alike as one that was transparent, free, and fair. As such, the referendum marked a small, but significant, step in the institutionalization of democratic procedures under a civilian regime.

This referendum was especially important for Panama's democratic transition and, consequently, for our understanding of the democratization process in general.

On the evening of 14 May 1989, hours after Argentina had held its first elections for a presidential succession in 60 years, the atmosphere at the Buenos Aires headquarters of the Unión del Centro Democrático(UCEDE) was lugubrious. The electoral news flowing into the computer terminals harbingered a resounding victoiy for Carlos Menem, the Peronist presidential candidate, and a remote third place showing of 6% for Alvaro Alsogaray, the presidential candidate of the young conservative party. Even in the capital city of Buenos Aires, where the UCEDE had led in the polls for congressional elections right up to election day, it trailed in third place. Would-be congressmen wandered the headquarters floor bewildered.