For 40 years, the United States was so fearful of a thermonuclear bang that it barely noticed the whimper when the Cold War ended. There was not even any agreement on the date of the war’s end. Still, the people of the United States sensed its eagle had completed a great adventure and was returning to its nest, and that’s where they wanted it.

President George Bush was more sensitive to the shift in the balance of power in the Persian Gulf than to the swing in US mood. His quick success in the Persian Gulf lifted his popularity to a zenith, making his reelection defeat the next year all the more painful and seemingly inexplicable.

While the Latin American economies have been undergoing profound economic reforms in a political context marked by multiparty democracy and free elections, the Cuban government has adamantly rejected meaningful change. During the second half of the 1980s, as the majority of countries in the Western Hemisphere liberalized their economies and rolled back government intervention, Cuba moved in the opposite direction. Since mid-1993 and while in the depths of severe economic crisis, the Cuban government has taken some tentative steps towards liberalizing the economy, but has remained firm on the single-party character of the regime.

Economic development under a capitalist market economy is usually not a smooth process. In addition, restructuring the economy with the aim of promoting a freer market economy often entails high economic costs as well. This article has two goals: (1) it will outline the inter-relationship between the restructuring of the economy now taking place in both Bolivia and Peru and how this process is affected by the illicit coca drug sector in each of those countries; and (2) it will discuss the domestic anti-drug policies in each and how, or to what extent, these are affected by the anti-drug policies of the United States. On the one hand, the illegal drug industry may have served to ameliorate the costs of restructuring; at the same time, it may also have made economic adjustment somewhat more difficult.

Widespread malnutrition persists in Guatemala despite substantial economic growth since 1960. Indeed, there was a deterioration in the living standards of many (for example, the Indians in the Western highlands) even prior to the destruction caused by the government's pacification campaigns of the early 1980s. Chronic and widespread malnutrition has not been the result of just “natural causes”; to the contrary, it is the intent of this study to document that Guatemala's extraordinarily high level of malnutrition is the result of structural transformations and public policy, as well as demographics.

This argument has been documented best, in a Central American context, by two excellent works on El Salvador. Durham (1979: 21-51) presented a thorough analysis that demonstrates that land scarcity has not been primarily the result of a high rate of population growth (although that certainly contributes) but, instead, of increasing land concentration.

Mexico is Unique among the tyrannies friendly to the United States. Not only does it share a porous, 2000-mile border with the United States, but it is probably more interdependent with the United States on a host of issues — water resources, pollution, energy supplies, tourism, investment, trade, finances, migrant labor, debt, drugs, agriculture, to say nothing of politics and diplomacy — than any other country in the world. What happens in Mexico has profound implications for the United States and viceversa.

The 1994 New Year's celebration in Mexico started with a bang. A mere hour into the year, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN or Zapatista National Liberation Army) assaulted and captured four cities in the Los Altos region of Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state. The Ejército Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional shocked the Mexican people and most of the world. Although Mexican political and military leaders denied that they were caught off guard, they were, in fact, totally surprised by the magnitude of the attack.

As events unfolded, the reasons behind the seizure of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Las Margaritas, Altamirano, and Ocosingo became increasingly apparent. The Zapatistas called for a nationwide movement for “jobs, land, housing, food, health, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace.”

Central America’s Northern Triangle is infamous for high levels of violent crime and human rights abuses, producing “impunity states” in which violence typically goes unpunished. That violence reflects the broader impunity or “transitional injustice” that has persisted since the peace accords and transitions to democracy of the 1980s and 1990s. Several “posttransitional” trials for past human rights violations in recent years in Guatemala were made possible by institutional strengthening efforts in the prosecutorial agency, led by a unique United Nations commission. Significant progress away from broad impunity may also be seen in the 2015 “Guatemalan Spring,” in which a sitting president was forced to resign and submit to prosecution in connection with a corruption scandal. Comparisons of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras suggest that institutional strengthening is necessary before “posttransitional justice,” or an end to impunity more generally, can be possible.

A longstanding scholarly debate asks what lasting changes revolution makes in political attitudes and behaviors. Scholars generally regard revolution as transformative, but research on revolution's behavioral and cultural legacies after transfers of state power has been limited. This study explores revolution's residual impact on individuals' electoral participation, civil society engagement, and social capital by comparing postrevolutionary Nicaraguans to their Central American neighbors. Using survey data on comparable samples of urban Central Americans, the research found higher electoral engagement in Nicaragua than in the other nations in the region that experienced major insurgencies but not revolution. It also found among Nicaraguans greater support for civil disobedience, greater school and union activism, and more frequent leftist political identification. Although revolution did leave residual effects in Nicaragua, more significant influence appears to have decayed rapidly.

Brazil's conditional cash transfer program Bolsa Família (Family Allowance) has gained a worldwide reputation as an effective antipoverty program. However, studies applying the dominant headcount poverty measure, which counts the percentage of households falling below a given poverty line, only credit the program with a first-order reduction in poverty (and extreme poverty) of 0.15 to 1.88 percentage points. This raises the puzzle of how such a modest impact could lead to Bolsa Família's political popularity. This article argues that Bolsa Família does dramatically reduce poverty, but measuring this impact requires thinking of poverty as how far a household is from meeting its basic human needs; choosing a continuous variable; and using income gap, intensity, and ordinal measures that reflect this conceptualization. The more substantial reduction of poverty intensity helps explain the program's reputation.

This analysis addresses two interrelated questions: what were labor conditions like under Hugo Chávez? and what do those conditions suggest about the relationship between populism and leftism in Latin America? The answer to the first question is unequivocal. Despite its socialist rhetoric, the Chávez regime fragmented and weakened organized labor, undermined collective bargaining, and exploited vulnerable workers in cooperatives. Thus the regime's primary foible was not its radical leftism but its pursuit of populist control at the expense of the leftist goals of diminishing the domination of marginalized groups and expanding their autonomous participation in civil society. This appraisal of labor politics under Chávez indicates substantial tension between the realization of these leftist goals and populist governance. It further suggests the need to distinguish more clearly between leftism and populism and their respective impacts on democracy.

Rural sociology had its origin and growth as an academic discipline in the United States. The other social sciences—including general sociology, economics, political science, anthropology and historiography—were mainly imported from Europe and the British Isles. Rural sociology, however, was a United States “export” both to Europe and to Latin America.

This inverse process of diffusion deserves a brief explanation. Why did Rural sociology not originate in Europe? And, conversely, why did it take root in the United States? To answer the first question we may cite the following factors:

1. 1. During the latter part of the nineteenth century when the social conditions of rural people in the United States were critical, Europe was relatively stable. The peasant revolts of the earlier centuries had faded into history, feudalism, in its worst features at least, was no more. There were still agrarian problems, of course, including land fragmentation, but they were not serious enough to cause widespread unrest. Moreover, the restless ones were free to migrate to the New World. Europe, in short, was in the happy condition of being able to export its “problem” mainly to the United States.

Es un hecho conocido que durante el siglo XIX la revolución armada llegó a ser, se podría decir, una tradición dentro de la política latinoamericana. Pero en la mayoría de los casos estos golpes generalmente no muy sangrientos, en caso de tener éxito no han significado sino un mero cambio de carácter personal en cuanto a los puestos políticos principales. Pero para efectuar semejantes cambios más o menos rutinarios — realizados en países más tranquilos a través de votaciones parlamentarias o consultas dentro del mismo círculo de gobierno — exige la misma técnica revolucionaria. Esto quiere decir que existen entidades militares cuyos oficiales pueden tener suficiente interés personal en un cambio político para tomar la iniciativa. Lógicamente es un hecho que generales y coroneles siempre han ocupado un porcentaje significativamente importante de los puestos más elevados como el de Presidente o el de Ministro dentro de la vida política de las naciones latinoamericanas.

The long-drawn-out military conflicts in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala have finally ended. Following the demobilization of the Nicaraguan resistance in 1990, the Salvadoran and Guatemalan guerrilla forces signed peace accords in 1992 (El Salvador) and 1996 (Guatemala) with their respective governments. In the wake of these agreements, Central America presents a new reality. The focus has shifted from war strategies to the consolidation of emerging democratic structures. The revolutionary Left, one of the main protagonists in the conflict that ravaged the region during the 1980s, now confronts a new challenge: it must demonstrate to its supporters and the general public that it indeed presents a viable political alternative.

Generalmente suele señalarse la dictación del Reglamento del libre comercio entre España e Indias de 1778, como la decisión de mayor importancia que tomó la corona española en el siglo XVIII en materias de comercio, relegándose a un segundo término medidas anteriores como el establecimiento de los navios de registro y otras posteriores que ampliaron el horizonte de los comerciantes españoles y criollos. Nuestro propósito es referirnos a estas últimas, que dieron nueva fisonomía a la actividad mercantil y que en conjunto representan, además, la apertura del mercado americano a una influencia directa del comercio extranjero, lo que significó, en último término, la virtual quiebra del monopolio español con mucha anterioridad a los sucesos de 1810. No sería arriesgado afirmar que en los últimos años del régimen español, las colonias eran proveídas con gran holgura y dentro de los términos legales — para excluir el contrabando — desde los más variados centros fabriles del extranjero y que sus productos encontraban colocación en mercados foráneos.

The establishment of a republican form of government in Brazil in 1889—to replace the Empire—has long been considered an important turning point in Brazilian history. Historians once saw it as important in itself, for they thought of history as past-politics and were content to debate such issues as the relative importance of civilians and military officers within the republican movement. More recently, as scholars have turned their attention to social and economic aspects of the past, that event has been seen as a symptom of deeper change, a product of altering class relationships, a sign of shifting centers of economic power, or a reflection of tfre growth of new interest groups.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, a number of South American nations have undergone the transition from military to civilian/electoral forms of government. From any viewpoint, the magnitude of this transition has been impressive. By early 1987, several countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and Uruguay) had successfully weathered the change, leaving only Chile and Paraguay under dictatorships, while Colombia and Venezuela had been able to maintain civilian rule throughout the period. Nevertheless, such a changeover has not been easy in any of the nations where it has taken place. The reasons for both the transition and the problems incurred have been idiosyncratic in each instance.

It should come as no surprise that the environmentalist community in the Americas, whose expectations were raised by the bold, global “Agenda 21” of the 1992 Earth Summit, the informal title accorded the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), would be concerned that the forces of free market capitalism and the urgency for economic development have proven to be more powerful than the regional movement towards sustainable development. By virtue of the region's large share of the planet's environmental resources, the global environmental agenda, which includes, inter alia, such complex and daunting problems as biodiversity, global warming, and ozone depletion, should logically place the Western Hemisphere in the center of policy action. On the eve of the December 1994 Summit of the Americas in Miami, however, the general principles outlined in the “Agenda 21” and related initiatives, have not been translated into concrete or coherent intergovernmental policy actions.

During the years 1917-1918 Mexico stood at the crossroads between revolutionary nationalism and foreign control. Nevertheless, much of the diplomacy of this wartime period and the variety of foreign threats to the regime of Venustiano Carranza remain obscure. Only very recently have scholars (Glaser, 1971; Machado and Judge, 1971; Trow, 1971; Tulchin, 1971; Smith, 1972; Meyer, 1968) realized the extent of the American movement for armed intervention in Mexico in 1919. But the more subtle strategy to guide the Mexican government's policy through economic pressure has received little attention. Likewise, the anti-Carrancista policy of the British Foreign Office has been ignored (see Fabela, 1958-1959; López de Roux, 1965; Zorrilla, 1965; Smith, 1969, 1972; Meyer, 1968). If one focuses less on the possibilities of overt military intervention and more on the economic issues of monetary exchange, food, loans, and oil, the years 1917-1918 (usually quickly sandwiched between the Pershing incursion and the 1919 interventionist movement) acquire major significance.

Although powerful states have the ability to dominate the international system to achieve their policy preferences, such dominance has limits in the Organization of American States. Even though the United States, its most powerful member state, has considerable influence over OAS actions, institutional factors also affect decisionmaking and produce more varied outcomes than one might anticipate. Adapting three different perspectives from organizational sociology, this study constructs an analytical framework to explore the impact of structural, normative, internal relational, and environmental factors on the level of U.S. influence in the OAS. Four hypotheses are tested on 30 cases of regional conflict management from 1948 to 2002. The organizational variables also reveal incentives for the United States to act multilaterally rather than unilaterally in most instances in the post-Cold War era.