The circumstances of the diverse nations of the Western Hemisphere have been dramatically transformed over the course of the past few years - as has the relationship among them. During the 1980s and early 1990s, a wave of democracy swept over most of Latin America and the Caribbean, placing almost all of the societies in the region under the rule of elected civilian governments. At the same time, the nationalist-statist development models of the past have been virtually abandoned and much more open, market-oriented lines of economic policy have been adopted. Moreover, many previously contentious issues that troubled relationships among the countries of the region and separated them from the United States appear to be in abeyance.

The recent passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico and the United States (US) marks an important step in the movement towards greater regionalism of trade among the countries in the Americas. From the perspective of the United States, the potential benefits to be gained from the anticipated increase in trade, economies of scale in production, increased access to the resources of production, and lower prices for the US market (due to the increased competition for consumer goods) combine to make its involvement in NAFTA desirable despite whatever limitations are posed, in the short and medium term, by Mexican underdevelopment (SerraPuche, 1992;US-ITC, 1991a).

The socioeconomic behavior and belief systems of industrial elites in Latin America have received considerable attention from social scientists, but research on the political ideology and activities of these important groups has been surprisingly limited. The socioeconomic literature has focused on the development or underdevelopment of entrepreneurial attitudes and values among Latin American industrialists. The major conclusions, documented by considerable quantitative research, are that industrial entrepreneurship in Latin America has been inhibited by international and domestic structural factors. It is accepted that national industrial elites in general tend to resist economic change and innovation, prefer the maintenance of traditional values such as family ownership, paternalistic labor relations, and laborintensive, low-technology means of production. National industrial elites are furthermore dominated by "internationalized" entrepreneurs and direct state investment.

The title of my essay, invoking, as it does, the justifiably famous Japanese cinema verité production of Rashomon, might well strike a discordant note. My aim, however, is to clarify, not to confuse. The film describes a variety of eyewitnesses to a murder, each one of whom, infused with different motives, “saw” the event differently from the other eyewitnesses. This is little more than a modern-day version of Walter Lippmann's observations on the ideological, interest-laden nature of the formation of public opinion in modern society, but it serves us well in introducing the topic of this essay.

What I am suggesting with respect to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and what I hope to demonstrate, is that we are now experiencing a similar paradox in the sociology of knowledge.

Peru, in the period 1976-1979, along with half a dozen or so other countries occupied the center stage in the discussion of developing countries, which fact serious difficulties in meeting their external debt service and which face equally if not more serious problems of internal adjustment—especially little if any economic growth—as they try to raise themselves out of their financial crises. The countries which might be on such a problem list1 each have their own specific problems. All of them, in one way or another, have had a major fiscal problem which has absorbed the bulk of domestic credit into the public sector and created strong pressures to borrow abroad. Of course, the individual causes of the public sector problem vary. In several countries, especially those which export copper, adverse export prices since 1974 have contributed significantly to development problems. The "list" of countries will no doubt change and quite probably expand in the next year or two, especially if there is an almost inevitable recession in the United States.

The Reagan administration is sending mixed messages on its policy in Central America, leading some observers to label the policy “schizoid” and influencing yet others to give the president the benefit of the doubt until policy implications become clearer or unavoidable. Commenting in July on White House policy as it has been iterated in the first half of 1983, Senator Christopher Dodd (1983), a leading administration critic, asserted that “there is total confusion in Washington as to what the administration's policies are, and there is a total confusion in Central America as to what U.S. intentions are.” Similar charges have been made from both sides of the aisle in Congress.

Almost sadly, these charges are not part of an opposition's political ploy, but in fact are rooted in speeches, position papers, and actions formulated by the president and his Central America policy team.

This Article Surveys the experiences of four Central American countries in implementing economic policy reform: it analyzes the factors which led to the introduction of new policies, explores various aspects in their implementation, assesses lessons learned in the process, and discusses prospects for the future.

The Four Countries under discussion — Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — are experiencing a move away from import-substitution policies of the past toward increased liberalization of their economies and becoming more competitive in the international marketplace. This shift in policy orientation began in the 1980s, after years of economic decline. At the risk of appearing arbitrary, the policy-shift years are here defined as those which followed an actual, or announced, change to an economic policy with a predominant market orientation.

Public enterprise plays a key role in the economic development process in Latin America, both because of the region's cultural heritage, which has led people to look to central authority for leadership in promoting economic growth, and because of the accelerated pace of recent cataclysmic events to which only governments have had the power to respond.

Currently, Latin America is undergoing its worst economic setback in half a century, in which eight newly-elected democratic governments are struggling to regain control over their destinies. These governments face unprecedented planning and administrative problems as they move from the crisis-management phase of economic austerity programs to one of resumed growth. A central concern of these governments is, and will continue to be, the successful operations of major parastatal enterprises.

The past few decades have seen profound changes in the bilateral relationship between the United States and Mexico. The interests of the two countries, which often diverged during the Cold War years, increasingly began to converge following collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. With this convergence, bilateral relations seemed to enter a more cooperative stage. The signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 was deemed a fitting symbol of the new, mutually beneficial relationship between the two countries.

Robert Putnam extolled the virtue of social capital by arguing that social networks, civil society, and trust contribute to democracy. Subsequent research, however, identified a weakness in the social capital “model” in its underspecification of the mechanisms by which social capital affects political systems. This article proposes the concept of political capital as a likely product of social capital that links civil society participants to the political system. The article tests this two-stage model of social capital and political capital and their effects on democratization using survey data from eight Latin American nations. Results find that civil society engagement in 2004 affected political capital variables, which, in turn, had positive effects on system-level democracy measures in 2010. The article thus shows that political capital serves as an intervening variable between social capital and democracy and democratization.

This article explores the tension between multicultural legal reforms and the liberal state-building project in present-day Mexico. Specifically, it traces the process by which the Mexican state challenged and eventually forced changes to customary restrictions on women in public life in some indigenous communities in the southern state of Oaxaca. The study argues that the act of formalizing autonomy for indigenous communities, in the context of Mexico’s homogenizing neoliberal state, had the unanticipated effect of exposing exclusionary practices to state scrutiny, which eventually forced those communities to recognize women’s political rights. Thus the effort to protect indigenous practices facilitated the territorial and juridical expansion of the Mexican state into formerly autonomous areas of the countryside.

Does the conventional wisdom about the relationships between economic, cultural, and political party variables and democracy stand up in the Latin American experience of the 1990s? This study, utilizing new data sets for the region, finds that some traditional hypotheses are upheld better than others. It sustains the conventional wisdom that economic development, economic growth, democratic values, and (with a two-year lead) education correlate positively with the level of democracy. Surprisingly, however, neither social trust nor the number of political parties is significantly correlated with the level of democracy. The study suggests various possible explanations for the weak or nonexistent relationships for social trust and number of parties, in the hope that these surprising results will stimulate further research.

This article explores competing definitions of equality embedded in contending visions for regional finance in the Americas. The U.S. free market–oriented project envisions extension of a NAFTA-like regulatory framework hemispherewide, promising Latin Americans better financial services, credit, and investment in exchange for strong financial property protections and (implicitly) dramatically reduced financial policy autonomy for their governments. Venezuela's vision of “Bolivarian” finance, exported to the Caribbean and the upper Andes, promotes assertive state management of both foreign and domestic investors, populist redistribution, and increasing reliance on nonmarket financial transactions. Brazil's regional financial project would unite South America through continentwide physical infrastructure and capitalist financial markets while retaining a role for public sector banks responsive to central government priorities. Brazil's approach shares with Venezuela's an emphasis on governments' need for financial policy authority and with the U.S. approach a concern for regulatory predictability and financial deepening.

During 1995, the 50th anniversary year of the United Nations (UN), news of the failure of its peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda dominated the media and political rhetoric. In El Salvador, however, a UN mission with a legitimate claim to success was able to close its doors on 30 April 1995. How is this remarkable achievement to be explained? And, what are the lessons — positive and negative — that can be learned from the 45 months during which the United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador (Misión de Obseruadores de las Naciones Unidas en El Salvador or ONUSAL) oversaw a transition from war to peace and verified a lengthy set of peace accords?

The success of ONUSAL was anything but assured when it began in July 1991, some six months before there was even a cease-fire.

The international tensions produced in our world by the drive of the so-called under-developed societies to catch up economically with the industrialized countries of the West have compelled social scientists to focus their attention increasingly upon the social processes which are necessary if this development is to be achieved with a minimum of inefficiency and strife. That aspect of this very broad area which is of greatest concern to political scientists is usually called “political modernization.” One of the most efficient ways to study the process of political modernization is to view it as it operates at the level of the local community. In fact, it might be postulated that in those societies variously called under-developed, traditional, or primitive, it is, in the final analysis, the community and not the nation that most directly participates in this process.

Obscured amid the headline issues of illegal aliens, drug smuggling, and the Mexican petroleum bonanza, yet another controversy is nascent in U.S.-Mexican relations the dispute over common groundwaters underlying the frontier zone. This dispute, with roots in the recent salinity accords of 1973, emerges as the latest phase in the long history of water resource controversies exacerbating problems between the two nations.

Until recently, the history of U.S.-Mexican water relations had been one of preoccupation with the capture and distribution of shared surface waters. The present dispute thus marks a distinctive evolution in bilateral relations. Moreover, just as the groundwater issue is new, it also points to the complexity of the transboundary ecology and the special problems of interdependence. Only since World War II, for instance, have the full implications of the area's groundwater hydrology been appreciated with respect to such matters as quality, distribution, and movement.

Few events have captured the imagination of progressive countries and parties worldwide as did the July 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Many of these parties became strong supporters of the Ortega government and were thus quite taken by surprise — as were most of those involved and engaged in Central American politics — by the outcome of the Nicaraguan election in February 1991. One such party, one of the most determined in its support of the Sandinistas, was Sweden's Social Democratic Party (Socialdemokratiska Arbetare Partlet or SAP), even though Sweden may not immediately come to mind as a natural participant in Central American politics. How can this intense Swedish Social Democratic involvement and partisanship be explained? How has Swedish support been translated into practical positions? Did the election victory of Violeta Chamorro, who was supported by the United States (a country whose Central American policy came under relendess fire by the SAP), signal the end of Swedish Social Democratic engagement in Nicaraguan politics?

In retrospect John F. Kennedy's foreign policy has become more and more controversial. Recent studies have stressed the dichotomy between Kennedy's idealistic rhetoric and the moves he made in carrying out an interventionist, counter-revolutionary foreign policy. He acted not only to check his two great socialist adversaries but also to stifle nationalistic revolutions in the underdeveloped world (Walton, 1972; Fitzsimmons, 1972). Under Kennedy, the United States launched a great offensive on real and imagined enemies. This offensive led to intervention in Laos, South Vietnam, Cuba, Guyana, and the Congo as well as to international confrontations over Berlin and missiles in Cuba. Idealistic-sounding programs like the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress were launched but they were coupled with counter-insurgency studies and the formation of the Green Berets. All had the same aims: to retrieve the deteriorating economic and worldwide political situation inherited from Eisenhower. Above all, although the United States might have to learn to live with the Soviet Union and China, she could not afford to lose the markets, raw materials, and investment opportunities in the underdeveloped world.

Any history of education in republican Chile, however brief, must of necessity touch first upon the colonial period. Although education, and indeed government, were completely dominated by the Church during the colonial period, in the late eighteenth century Chile grew restless under religious domination and began to free both its educational system and its governmental process from absolute church control.

Prior to the eighteenth century education had been the exclusive prerogative of the church. In the period immediately preceding the Independence the Church and the clergy began to lose some of their unchallenged importance and authority. This loss was reflected in administration and schools. The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 and the not-too-respectful criticism of things religious by Charles III indicated that the Church was no longer directing the government and hence was no longer the dominant element in the educational process.

The well-drained, fluvio-volcanic outwash plain of the Pacific coast of Central America, stretching from the Mexican border to the Gulf of Nicoya, has undergone remarkable change in recent years. Malarial control, highway and port construction, and the initiative of governments and private land-owners, have made this the most active zone of agricultural development in Central America. Large-scale mechanized cotton farms and livestock ranches have been eating rapidly into the dry tropical forest that until recently covered most of this coastal apron at the foot of the 700-mile long Central American volcanic chain, producing important new sources of employment and foreign exchange earnings. Acreage in sugar cane and essential oil grasses (citronella and lemon grass) also has been expanding, and the booming shrimp export trade has added yet another fillup to the economies of these pocket-sized countries so long plagued with coffee or banana monoculture.