How do individuals’ fairness judgments affect their political evaluations? This article argues that when citizens perceive high levels of distributive unfairness in society, they will be less satisfied with the way democracy functions. Yet good governance—that is, impartiality in the exercise of political authority—should mitigate the negative influence of perceived distributive unfairness on satisfaction. Using a cross-national analysis of 18 Latin American countries from 2011 to 2015, this study demonstrates that individuals are significantly less satisfied with democracy when they perceive their country’s income distribution as unfair. Yet good governance significantly offsets this negative relationship, even in a region with the highest level of inequality in the world. These findings imply that policymakers can bolster democratic satisfaction, even in places where citizens perceive the income distribution as fundamentally unfair, by committing to good governance and fair democratic procedures.

The role of the Colombian military in politics is a recent development in that republic's history. It is also basically ephemeral, with few historical or traditional antecedents, such as those, for example, of Mexico or Venezuela.

Most of the successful battles which freed Colombia from Spanish domination were fought by non-Colombian armies led by Venezuelans. The end of the independence period (1830), found Colombia throwing off a Venezuelan army officers’ government (that of General Rafael Urdaneta) imposed by force, and destined to be short-lived because it violated the unwritten Colombian constitution, as well as its written charter.

During the second half of the last decade, the three countries of the Southern Cone of Latin America—Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay—were subject to radical economic reforms that completely changed the structure upon which economic development took place in the past. While the new policies were in effect, their implementation was closely scrutinized by observers holding very different ideological convictions. As the region plunged into economic turmoil, the same policies became the subject of heated debate and have been analyzed and interpreted in many different ways.

In 1872, it was estimated that there were 378 foreign language journals published in the United States. Of these, only one was in the Portuguese language. O Novo Mundo, published in New York from 1870 to 1879, was singular among the foreign language press publications in that it was designed not for an immigrant audience but rather for readers in another country. Its purpose was to interpret the United States primarily to Brazilians and secondarily to other Latin Americans. Faithful until its last issue to this end, it also commented on the Brazilian political and social scene.

José Carlos Rodrigues, O Novo Mundo's original owner and only editor, was a remarkable Brazilian in an era when the Empire and the First Republic produced a galaxy of extraordinary public figures. Born in the city of Cantagallo, province of Rio de Janeiro, on July 19, 1844, be was the son of fazendeiros, and attended the Colégio Dom Pedro II in Rio de Janeiro.

The low-profile foreign policy of the Fernando Collor de Mello government remained faithful to the major outlines which had guided Brazilian diplomacy for the last thirty years. In fact, during the 1990-91 period, the administration reaffirmed — in both actions and words —its commitment to such basic principles of Brazilian policy as national sovereignty, socio-economic development, international cooperation, multilateralism, universalism, and devotion to peace.

In addition the government continued to pursue the twin goals of technological progress and regional integration, both tenets of Brazilian foreign policy since the 1950s which continued to rank high on the executive agenda in 1990-91.

In fact, some of the above-named principles had become so established as national articles of faith that they were incorporated into the Federal Constitution of October 1988.

The year 2010 saw five gubernatorial elections in Mexico in which the PAN and the left built electoral alliances. These alliances were made in states with authoritarian features, where the PRI had never lost the governor’s office. In Oaxaca, Puebla, and Sinaloa the PRI lost, while in Durango and Hidalgo it did not. Why did the electoral outcome differ in similar cases? This article argues that the outcome of each election, turnover or no turnover, depended on the behavior of the elites, both authoritarian and opposition. The PRI lost when the authoritarian elite fractured while the opposition was unified, including the groups that had defected from the established elite.

Most literature on drugs and conflict focuses on how the drug trade affects insurgent behavior, paying little attention to its effect on state behavior in conflict settings. This article begins to address this gap by analyzing the impact of drugs on state violence during the internal conflict in Peru (1980–2000), which, in the 1980s, was the world’s major producer of coca for the international drug trade. Drawing on literature on criminal violence and on drug policy, this study theorizes militarization as the main channel by which drug production affects how state forces treat the civilian population during internal conflicts, though it also explores a second channel associated with corruption. The analysis finds that, all else equal, drug-producing localities saw increased state violence in ways consistent with the militarization channel.

Colombia and Peru made significant progress in reducing the institutional prerogatives of their respective militaries in the 1990s and 2000s while reforming their economies in a neoliberal direction. They accomplished this despite internal armed threats to state authority and stability. The end of the Cold War, U.S. promotion of “market democracies,” and the international centrality of free markets and formal democratic governance coincided with the rise to power in Peru and Colombia of “neoliberal policy coalitions.” The internal insurgency mitigated the emergence of antiglobalization or antidemocratic reform factions in the military and civil society. The armed forces unified behind their counterinsurgency mission, and opposition in civil society was weakened, creating greater space for neoliberal elites to reform their economies and reduce military prerogatives.

Research on executive-legislative relations in Latin America has focused on the impact of minority presidents and multiparty legislatures on legislative productivity. But an additional deadlock scenario, the blocking of a majority president by a minority through filibustering, has been understudied. This article analyzes filibustering in Costa Rica and explains the legislative paralysis in the wake of the nation's transition to a multiparty system in 2002. Legislative paralysis is seen as a product of the interaction between increased legislative fragmentation and polarization and the legislature's preexisting rules of procedure, which enable legislators easily to block bills they oppose, even when those bills are supported by supermajorities. This argument is tested through a comparison of major economic reforms in the 2000s to the reforms tackled in the 1990s. The role of filibustering, well acknowledged in U.S. politics, should also be studied in comparative politics.

Unequal income distribution in Latin America and the Caribbean is linked to unequal distributions of human and physical assets and differential access to markets and services. These circumstances, and the accompanying social tensions, need to be understood in terms of traditional fragmenting forces; the sectors of the population that experience unfavorable outcomes are also recognized by characteristics such as ethnicity, race, gender, and physical disability. In addition to reviewing the general literature on social exclusion, this article surveys several more specific topics: relative deprivation (in land and housing, physical infrastructure, health and income); labor market issues, including access to labor markets in general, as well as informality, segregation, and discrimination; the transaction points of political representation, social protection, and violence; and areas in which analysis remains weak and avenues for further research in the region.

The US military presence in Latin America has declined significantly over the last two decades, particularly in the major countries of the region. Despite the determined efforts of the Reagan administration to reverse that trend, with few exceptions the present ability of the United States to influence the Latin American militaries is far removed from the dominant role it played in the 1950s and 1960s. Given the pressures in Washington for further cuts in military aid programs, the trend toward declining US influence and increasingly divergent US-Latin American military interests is likely to continue in the 1990s. Although the United States will continue to be a major force in the region, the primary instruments of US influence are likely to be economic, rather than military-to-military relations.

Between 1933 and the end of World War II, Argentina became the home of some 43,000 Jewish refugees from Nazism, almost all of them of German, Austrian, or West European origin. Measured against the country's total population, 13 million in 1931, 16 million according to the 1947 census, Argentina received more Jewish refugees per capita than any other country in the world except Palestine (Wasserstein, 1979: 7,45). This did not occur by design of the Argentine government; on the contrary, its immigration policies became interestingly restrictive as the years of the world crisis wore on.

In practice, however, Argentina was unable to patrol effectively its long borders with the neighboring republics of Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, and Uruguay. The overseas consuls of these nations, especially the first three, did a brisk and lucrative trade in visas and entry permits for persons desperate to escape the Nazi terror.

In 1880, the famous Chilean politician and historian, Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna, wrote:

In the 1760's, the commerce of the British West Indies followed four general channels: (1) the trade with the Mother Country; (2) the exchange of goods and money with continental sister colonies to the north; (3) the African slave trade; and (4) the illegal intercourse with Spain's New World possessions. So extensive was the last that Josiah Tucker referred to it as “that prodigious clandestine trade.” This paper will explore one facet of that traffic: its eclipse in Jamaica in the years immediately after the 1763 Peace of Paris.

Throughout most of the eighteenth century, only Bridgetown in Barbados and Kingston in Jamaica were markets of “conspicuous size and wide commercial connections.” The unloading of only a few cargoes would glut the capital towns of the lesser islands. Notwithstanding this fact, these islands held a coveted position in the Empire. London's high esteem for these possessions rested on their agricultural value, their importance in the crucial bullion exchange, and their utility as naval bases.

On May 7, 1532, the Consejo de Indias wrote to the King-Emperor Charles, the First of Spain, and Fifth of the Holy Roman Empire:

Gonzalo Hernández de Oviedo, resident of Hispaniola, has had the care and inclination to write of affairs of the Indies; he offers to carry forward his work if he is given some salary towards the expense of collecting material and maintaining a clerk. It appears appropriate that it be included in the Chronicle of Spain. He displays more ability than anyone over there. It would be well to order him to examine all those lands where he has not been and to send the reports to this Council in order that here they may be edited and incorporated in the Chronicle and he should be given an annual subsidy.

The Western Hemisphere summit, which has been called by President Bill Clinton and is scheduled to be held in Miami (FL) in December 1994, will no doubt prove to be yet another major milestone along the evolving path of inter-American relations. Nevertheless, the significance of this meeting has been muted by the scanty information and limited signals given out by the host country regarding the meeting's purpose and agenda. In some ways, the upcoming summit projects a double image: of an event that is both transcendental and superficial at one and the same time. At least two elements point in this direction. On the one hand, much like similar previous conferences in history, not all members of the Hemisphere will attend, since some nations - like Cuba - have not been invited, an aspect that will affect the nature, spirit, and scope of this long-awaited assemblage of the Americas.

The Cauca Valley in southwest Colombia offers a good closeup view of social change, the power struggle at the grass roots, and rural and urban problems in a country whose size and strategic location make her future a matter of special concern to those who seek to avoid violent solutions to Latin America's social problems.

Colombia would seem to have better prospects for evolutionary development than several Latin American countries with less enlightened leadership and fewer democratic traditions. But Colombia's ruling groups face formidable, sometimes seemingly insoluble economic and social problems. The economy has been wobbly for years, buffeted by fiscal crises, foreign exchange shortages, quickening inflation, and urban unemployment. Also, Colombia has suffered more than any other country in this hemisphere from a species of internal war referred to locally as the violencia.

Focusing on the social movement that resisted the privatization of health care in El Salvador in 2002–3, this article asks how the movement's multisectoral composition influenced news coverage of the health care policy debate. Specifically, it examines whether the diversity of perspectives in the alliance was reflected in the media's source selection and framing of the policy issues. A content analysis of Salvadoran newspapers' coverage shows that the media relied mainly on just two movement actors to represent the antiprivatization position: the striking doctors and the leftist opposition party. It also reveals that a period of elite dissensus on the policy issues opened a temporary opportunity to insert movement messages in the coverage. The study indicates that a multisectoral alliance does not enhance movement influence through the news media, though broad alliances confer strategic advantages for the movement's broader communication work.