This article draws on participant observation research in a Civil Police station (delegacia) in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, to disentangle existing notions of police resistance to democratic change. Through processes such as “talk of castigation,” the Civil Police reproduce three kinds of authority—public, institutional, and criminal—that influence how police work is done. These authorities are antagonistic, battling over different normative worldviews and notions of acceptable police practice, and these antagonisms result in police work that is often a conflicted amalgam of democratic, institutional, and criminal pressures. The slow pace of democratic change at this police station emerges from not one but multiple modes of resistance that complicate how police can do their work.

Since the late 1980s, peasants throughout Central America have begun to coordinate political and economic strategy. Agriculturalists from the five republics that constituted “la patria grande” of Spanish Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica) as well as representatives from Panama and Belize have founded regional organizations that meet to compare experiences with free-market policies, share new technologies, develop sources of finance, and create channels for marketing their products abroad. They have also established a presence in the increasingly distant arenas where decisions are made that affect their livelihood. Small-farmer organizations now lobby at the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and regional summit meetings. Central American campesinos have attended numerous regional gatherings of agriculture ministers and presidents, as well as events like the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the 1995 Western Hemisphere Presidents' Summit in Miami, the 1995 World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, and the 1996 Food Security Summit in Rome.

The twelve years of military rule in Peru between 1968 and 1980 witnessed few abuses of human rights, in marked contrast to the activities of military governments in Southern Cone countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Yet paradoxically, the return to democracy in Peru, with the election of Fernando Belaúnde in 1980 and Alan García in 1985, has brought sharp escalations in political violence and terror. Guerrilla activity by the Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”) in the highlands, urban terrorism, and a severe economic crisis have combined to pose a serious challenge to the authority of the state. Thus it is problematic to speak of a “return to democracy” while Peruvians are being subjected to expanding military control and repression.

This article brings new evidence and a revisionary argument to the debate over Mexico's exceptional relations with Cuba in the decade after the Cuban Revolution. It uses recently declassified Mexican intelligence records to show that Mexican leaders defended Castro primarily because they were afraid of domestic leftist groups and individuals. The first part of the article examines the intelligence information that Mexican decision makers received about internal threats, drawing out the connections that they perceived between Cuba and the Mexican left and the reasons they designed their foreign policy for domestic ends. The second section shifts to the international level, challenging the traditional arguments that foreign or ideological factors determined Mexico's policy toward Cuba. It examines the ways that Mexican leaders defused and negotiated against possible repercussions from Cuba or the United States as a result of their decision to maintain relations with Castro's government.

Through a case study of small-scale Kaqchikel Maya farmers involved in non-traditional export agriculture (NTAX) in the Central Guatemalan highlands, this article examines the tensions between the mostly positive perceptions of farmers and the negative assessments of many who study NTAX production. In a context of severe political-economic structural inequalities and potentially high social and cultural costs, quantitative household survey results demonstrate a modest decrease in concentration of land in favour of Maya smallholders; more gender-egalitarian relations of production than expected; and largely positive local perceptions of economic and social change. Qualitative analysis interprets these findings in light of Maya-affective ties to land, preferences for continuity in traditional labor organization and subsistence maize production, perceptions of risk, and the transfer of traditional marketing skills. We find that Kaqchikeles are shaping alternative modernities as they deal with new sets of political-economic and social constraints.

In revisiting Latin America to gather impressions for this essay, I soon convinced myself that the most conspicuous characteristic of the region's recent experience is diversity and that the most interesting stories to be told are about specific, often contrasting experiences of individual countries. So, except for the first and last sections, I shall not deal here with Latin America in overall terms. Rather, I shall present a series of loosely connected and necessarily brief “exercises” in comparative political economy. Not surprisingly, primary attention will be given to the four countries I visited this time: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. My endeavor throughout will be to gain some perspective on current or recent issues by tying them into events and discussions of earlier decades.

The phenomenon of peasant revolt in the Andean area of South America has been both sustained and violent from Spanish colonial times to the present. The revolt of Túpac Amaru II, who led a rebellion against Spanish colonialism near Cuzco in 1780, has been the best-known incidence of this phenomenon, although the southern highlands region, sometimes known as the mancha india (“Indian stain”), was the center of numerous local revolts during the period 1860–1920, and the focus of several peasant land invasions during the two decades 1950–70.

Although most government leaders espouse the principle of “health for all,” few pay more than lip service to the ideal by allocating adequate resources for its development. In Cuba, however, health care is a basic human right and the responsibility of the state. Cuban leaders consider health indicators to be measures of government efficacy, and as a result, health care has assumed an inordinately prominent place in Cuban government policies despite the present world economic crisis. Although affected to a lesser extent because of its integration into the Community for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), Cuba has nevertheless been increasing health care expenditures in the face of economic adversity.

This article focuses on three central impediments to police reform in Argentina, each of which has generated an important, yet distinct, paradox. First, although advocates of federalism argue that police reform facilitates innovation, in practice, reform efforts at one level of government in Argentina have been sabotaged by officials at other levels of government. Second, although electoral pressures have pushed police reform onto the policy agenda, these same pressures have also obstructed reform efforts because politicians depend on illicit party-police networks for campaign financing. Third, despite copious evidence of police involvement in criminal acts, Argentina's crime wave has energized conservative civil society groups whose demand for a heavy-handed response to crime has derailed the most promising attempts to restructure the police force.

During the 1980s, the major security themes that Caribbean scholars studied were geopolitics, militarization, intervention, and instability. The interface between domestic and international politics led to linkages among some of these themes and their domestic, regional, and international dimensions. For example, the militarization of Grenada in the 1980s was predicated on the need to defend the Grenadian revolution against foreign intervention and local counterrevolution. Ironically, the same buildup created the climate that led to the self-destruction of the revolution and presented the United States with a golden opportunity to intervene. In doing so, the United States succeeded in fulfilling a preexisting geopolitical aim of its own. Elsewhere in the region, militarization and concerns about stability in Dominica, Barbados, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines raised security concerns within the Eastern Caribbean, where several countries created the Regional Security System (RSS) in 1982 to bolster subregional security and became willing accomplices of intervention when the United States intervened in Grenada a year later.

Insurgency has largely subsided in Central America, but the academic debate over the causes of the violence in the 1980s waxes hotter than ever. As scholars, we have an obligation to subject our theories to the acid test of reality. As individuals interested in the policy process, we must evaluate the outcomes of those policies, even though they are sometimes based on faulty readings of our theories. The increasingly rich body of literature and data available on Central America compels observers to move away from the speculation that dominated early scholarship on the region and toward serious empirical tests of our theories. In doing so, scholars will be in a position to evaluate the policies pursued by the United States and various Central American governments. My article in this journal on land tenure in El Salvador attempted to address both theory and policy with new data (Seligson 1995). Judging by the reactions of Martin Diskin and Jeffery Paige, the conclusions that I drew have succeeded in stimulating a rich debate.

The African influence on Latin American Spanish is undisputed, and yet the field of Afro-Hispanic linguistics is hampered by the lack of widespread Hispanic creole dialects, or even areas of widespread Afro-Hispanic language usage. A few tiny dialect pockets continue to exist, however, such as the palenquero dialect of Palenque de San Basilio in northern Colombia, and the special dialect of the negros congos of Panama's Caribbean coast; until the first decades of the twentieth century, a partially creolized Bozal Spanish (spoken by African slaves who had learned Spanish as a second language, and only imperfectly) was still to be found in Cuba as well as vestigially in Puerto Rico and perhaps the Dominican Republic. Given the geographical inaccessibility of many areas of Latin America containing large African populations, it is possible that additional traces of vestigial Afro-Hispanic language may still be found or may have recently disappeared.

In a recent article published in the Latin American Research Review, Simone Bohn analyzed electoral results and survey data from Brazil to contest several theses concerning the reelection of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2006. In particular, Bohn asserted that beneficiaries of Bolsa Família, a conditional cash transfer program that was reaching eleven million families at the time of the 2006 election, were already supporters of Lula in 2002, and therefore the program could not have contributed to the change in Lula's constituency between his election in 2002 and his reelection in 2006. We show that these claims are based on voter recall data collected between nine and fifty-seven months after the elections, and that these data grossly overestimate actual electoral support for Lula—probably as a result of well-known reporting biases. Reanalysis of Bohn's data as well as analysis of more reliable surveys suggest that there were indeed significant changes in voting patterns between 2002 and 2006, and that Bolsa Família did play an important role in the 2006 elections.

The study shows that the new privately managed pension system in Chile has increased gender inequalities. Women are worse off than they were under the old pay-as-you-go system of social security, in which the calculation of benefits for men and women did not differ and women could obtain pensions with fewer requirements than men. Currently, benefits are calculated according to individuals’ contributions and levels of risk. Such factors as women's longer life expectancy, earlier retirement age, lower rates of labor-force participation, lower salaries, and other disadvantages in the labor market are directly affecting their accumulation of funds in individual retirement accounts, leading to lower pensions, especially for poorer women. Lessons from the Chilean reform should encourage scholars, policy makers, and the general public to engage in debates that more adequately incorporate gender variables in designing and implementing policy changes.

During the two decades preceding the abolition law of 1880, Cuban sugar planters pursued two parallel goals. The first undertaking was a concerted effort to increase the efficiency of agricultural and industrial production. A sophisticated railroad network was constructed to the interior from the ports of Havana, Matanzas, Cárdenas, and Cienfuegos in the 1840s and 1850s. Railroads opened high-yielding virgin land in frontier regions to production, and in the 1860s and 1870s, planters attempted to further the transportation revolution by developing rail systems within their estates to carry cane from fields to mills. Because the sucrose content of cane begins to drop immediately after the cane is cut, internal railway lines had the potential to revolutionize sugar production by moving cane quickly to the processing phase. Railroads also helped to resolve the recurring problem of roads washed out by heavy rains, which often precluded transporting harvested cane to mills for refining. In addition to revolutionizing transportation, planters also sought to raise industrial yields by installing modern milling equipment with greater processing capacity. The Jamaican trains of the early nineteenth century were replaced by vacuum-pan evaporators and centrifuges on the most modern mills by the 1860s and 1870s, a change that produced higher grades of sugar more efficiently.

This research note discusses an emerging subfield of inquiry in the study of democratization in Latin America: a focus on the relationships between past human rights abuses and democratization processes. It outlines four sets of questions emerging around the themes of “historical memory” and “legacies of authoritarian rule.” The study then examines documentary collections of major human rights nongovernmental organizations (HRNGOs) in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. The purpose of this endeavor is to provide researchers interested in studying the four issues with specific information on documents produced and currently held by the HRNGOs in the Southern Cone. The essay examines seven HRNGOs in Chile, ten in Argentina, and four in Uruguay, and ends with practical hints for researchers who wish to use these resources.

Natural-resource-based export-oriented growth strategies have resurfaced as the dominant development approach in Latin America. While a growing literature exists on the economic, equity, gender, and environmental impacts of this development strategy, insufficient attention has been paid to its significance for labor. This article seeks to help fill this gap by analyzing its effects on Chilean workers. Based on a study of the fruit, forestry, and fishing sectors, my work shows that this type of development strategy can be very labor-absorbing and can offer significant benefits for labor when it leads to “agro-industrialization.” Nonetheless, although working conditions clearly improved after the late 1980s, it is likely that the first decade of the twenty-first century will not be a repeat of the 1990s. The hypercompetition that now characterizes these sectors is putting tremendous pressure on firms to reduce costs, including that of labor. Stripped of basic state protections and left with little social power, Chilean workers are much more vulnerable than they were before.

The fight against ecological degradation “has become a generalized policy demand of the whole society,” declared Marcelo Javelly Girard, Mexico's Secretary of Urban Development and Ecology. Addressing the Mexican Cabinet and hundreds of dignitaries attending Mexico's Primera Reunión Nacional de Ecología in June of 1984, Javelly Girard thus placed environmental concerns on President Miguel de la Madrid's official policy agenda. Appropriately convened in Mexico City (the world's fifth-most-polluted city by the Mexican government's own reckoning), the congress climaxed two years of effort by the de la Madrid administration to promote public environmental awareness as part of its national development program.