Postneoliberal regionalism in Latin America has failed to live up to the expectations of its proponents and analysts in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Several causes explain its disappointing result, but a relatively understudied cause may be found in the US policy of competitive liberalization. This policy not only aimed at securing US economic and trade interests but also served as a counterweight against emerging postneoliberalism and as a tool for reaffirming US hegemony. This article presents a case study of one example of competitive liberalization in action, the US-Peru FTA, in order to assess how the policy functioned and contributed to curbing the posthegemonic moment in Latin America. It observes a combination of coercion and the political influence of beneficiaries of free trade, and it considers how these dynamics worked to strengthen US influence, both in Peru and in the wider regional political economy.

La obra más popular de Sarmiento es la que dedicó a Facundo y publicó con este nombre y el agregado de Civilización y barbarie en 1845. Este libro es, también, el que más ha sido leído, entre sus cincuenta y dos volúmenes de obras completas, y el que más comentarios, buenos y malos, ha suscitado. Sobre él han llovido los elogios y han caído los ataques. Lo mejor que se ha dicho es que constituye la obra maestra más extraordinaria de las letras americanas; lo peor, que todas sus páginas son una calumnia y un monumento de ignorancia. Entre los escritores modernos, Manuel Gálvez lo ha atacado con independencia y valentía, más movido por un raro odio que por una sabia comprensión.

En los últimos días de julio de 1963, el que escribe estas líneas, durante una breve visita al Perú, tuvo ocasión, una vez más, de presenciar un cabildo abierto. Por cierto que el entonces recién inaugurado, ahora ya depuesto, Presidente Belaúnde Terry, se suponía iba a asistir al acto. Pero una avería en el helicóptero que le conducía le impidió llegar más allá del Cuzco. La ocasión de aquella asamblea, verdaderamente popular, era el elegir al alcalde y regidores de la pequeña villa de Chinchero, situada en plena Sierra peruana. Reuniones semejantes se estaban celebrando aquel mismo día, último domingo de julio, en los demás pueblos, cabezas de partido. Dato interesante es que las discusiones se condujeron en la lengua quechua, única que comprendían los asistentes al acto, en su totalidad indígenas.

In the United States in recent years in almost every state there has been a strong move toward more centralized coordination and control of higher education, a movement growing out of the rapidly rising costs of higher education as well as, perhaps, some public disillusion with the universities. This move toward centralized control means, of course, a shift of power away from individual universities.

A group in the Institute of Higher Education at Berkeley (Glenny et al., 1971) strongly favors coordination of universities; Lewis Mayhew (1972) of Stanford predicts that many states will opt for centralized control rather than coordination. The long tradition in the United States of nonacademic control of individual universities through boards of trustees made up of business and professional people rather than academic leaders probably has made the shift to centralized control by the nonacademic boards of entire state systems of colleges and universities more acceptable within and without the universities than has been true in most other countries where the legal decision-making power, the administrative and academic autonomy of the university, has been in the hands of members of the academic community.

El campo ha sido y es el centro de interés de la narrativa uruguaya y seguirá siéndolo mientras la capital no complete su absorción y la narrativa se circunscriba al tema urbano, fenómeno difícil de predecir, dada la importancia geopolítica del campo en la vida uruguaya. En esta área importante de genuina creación cabe colocar desde las novelas de Acevedo Díaz, con excepción de Brenda de tema urbano, algunas novelas de Carlos Reyles: Beba, El terruño, y El gaucho florido, porque Reyles fue escritor urbano en La raza de Caín, hasta las novelas y cuentos de nuestros últimos narradores.

La celebración del cincuentenario del descubrimiento de las ruinas maravillosas de Machu Picchu — en julio de 1961 — ha tenido una resonancia literaria de importancia singular, pues aparte de los estudios de orden histórico y antropológico, y de la nutrida colaboración periodística que ha llenado muchas páginas de periódicos de toda América, ha brindado los frutos de inesperados volúmenes poéticos o de prosa literaria sin ribetes de erudición o información, en el plano de la creación pura, estimulada por el hechizo de la naturaleza que bordea las ruinas conmemoradas o el mensaje cósmico de la piedra milenaria.

Comparative examples of “good government” at the subnational level may underanalyze the “public goods” problem facing politicians. Delegating authority and resources to policymaking agencies is possible when political conflict is low. The benefits can be maintained only if public agencies establish ties of “horizontal embeddedness” with industrial clients. This case study of innovative industrial policymaking in Minas Gerais, which is compared with one from Rio de Janeiro, finds that horizontal, interagency ties were critical to policy success. The contrast leads to an examination of the mineiro system's efficacy in promoting externalities, attracting foreign investment, and planning infrastructure in the state's automotive industry.

This article examines the dynamics of collective behavior in Santiago, Chile every September 11, the date of the 1973 coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. It uses a multiple-method strategy that includes participant observation, personal interviews, and content analysis of three major newspapers during the period 2003–8. The theoretical approach emphasizes time and space coordinates of specified social actors, sociocultural emergence, a limited range of dominant emotions, and dramaturgy to describe the complexity of ritualized commemorations. It shows that incidents occurring on this date are not primarily caused by the actions of social movement organizations. Moreover, the dichotomy of “day and night” used to understand the peaceful and violent commemorations is an oversimplification of a complex network of events, actors, and scenarios that has the effect of denying any legitimacy to actions that fall outside the state-approved practices.

The use of veto points to block policy change has received significant attention in Latin America, but the different institutional venues have not been analyzed in a unified framework. Uruguay is exceptional in that political actors use both referendums and judicial review as effective ways to oppose public policies. While the activation of direct democracy mechanisms in Uruguay has been widely studied, the surge in the use of the judicial venue remains underexplored. This article argues that veto point use responds to the ideological content of policies adopted by different coalitions and the type of interest organization affected. It shows that policy opponents predominantly activate referendums when center-right coalitions rule and judicial review when center-left coalitions govern. It illustrates the causal argument by tracing the politics of court and referendum activation. This approach helps to bridge the gap between research on direct democracy and judicial politics, providing a unified framework.

Geopolitical competition between the United States and China has led to an increased reliance on economic statecraft. In this context, understanding the conditions that trigger trade, aid, or investment weaponization becomes crucial. This article examines how the United States has employed economic statecraft in response to Latin American countries’ engagement with China. The study revisits the theoretical debate on positive and negative economic statecraft and proposes a mechanism that identifies the conditions under which “carrots” or “sticks” are more likely to be employed. We argue that the US response towards Latin American countries’ engagement with China tends to prioritize economic engagement over economic coercion, particularly when dealing with countries that are politically and economically aligned with Washington policies. To test our argument, we adopt a mixed-methods approach. First, we conduct a case study analysis on the United States-Panama relationship. Second, we perform a statistical analysis to assess the impact of economic engagement with China on the allocation of American foreign assistance in the region.

Conventional wisdom among scholars of Latin American politics holds that informal workers are less participatory and less left-leaning than formal workers. Relevant empirical findings, however, are mixed and in need of synthesis. This article provides that synthesis by conducting meta-analyses on the universe of previous quantitative studies of informality and the vote. It finds that informal workers are indeed less likely to vote than formal workers, but the effect of informality is small—just four to seven percentage points. It further finds that informal workers are more likely to vote for the left, not the right, but here the effect size is even smaller. Meta-regression analyses reveal that in countries where organized professional activity among informal workers is high, gaps in turnout between the two sectors are minimal. The article concludes that the conventional wisdom over-states the individual-level political consequences of labor informality in Latin America.

The Commonwealth of the Bahama Islands entered the international system as a sovereign state on July 10, 1973. It did so by sponsorship, which is to say that as far as relations between the Bahamas and the imperial country (United Kingdom) are concerned, independence has been granted, rather than taken or seized, with a minimal amount of difficulty. The identification of various issue-areas related to the entry of the Commonwealth into the international system is one way of indicating the various components that have gone into making up the “national interest” of that country, at least in the perspective of the state's policy makers. More concretely, the peculiar problems arising from its character as an archipelago state with a relatively open economy, make the questions to be resolved before and immediately after independence perhaps more complex than those faced by the other independent states of the Commonwealth Caribbean that have acceded to full sovereignty in the last decade.

Does electoral campaigning in Latin America make a difference, and does it merit the attention of scholars? This was at the core of an extensive bibliographic analysis, published nearly two decades ago, which noted the paucity of literature on the subject, extending throughout the Third World and even including Western Europe (Martz, 1971). However, the rising tide of military authoritarianism dramatically reduced the relevance of the question in the region, and students of Latin American politics turned away, understandably, from concerted attention to campaigns, elections, and parties. Only with the reemergence of democratic regimes in recent years has interest turned back toward older emphases (Martz, 1990). Once again, theoretical developments have been colored by the events of the day, reorienting scholarly attention “from the military overthrow of civilian regimes and Latin American authoritarianism toward the prospects and processes of redemocratization” (Malloy, 1987).