After a decade of debt crisis and severe economic decline, countries throughout Latin America are seeking radical new treatments for their economic ills. Under pressure from internal political actors, international lending and aid agencies, or some combination of these, many Latin American countries are turning to outward-looking development strategies to stabilize their balance of payments and revitalize economic growth. Serving as the centerpiece for the new strategies is the promotion of “nontraditional” exports.

Throughout the 1980s one of the Reagan administration's most contested foreign policy initiatives was that toward Central America, where it attempted to defeat the Salvadoran guerrillas and overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Reagan's policy was challenged by civil society organizations, whose efforts to undermine support for Reagan's policy came to be known as the Central American Peace and Solidarity Movement (CAPSM). What were the origins of this movement? I argue that previous explorations of the CAPSM's emergence are inadequate because they neglect the role played by Central Americans as purposive actors in the movement's rise and development. This article documents the ways in which Nicaraguans and Salvadorans, both in Central America and in the United States, played crucial roles in this transnational movement's creation and growth.

In his acclaimed synthesis of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Alan Knight observed that “the social bandit's career in Academe has somewhat paralleled his life under the greenwood tree. Introduced by Professor Hobsbawm, he was initially welcomed, even feted, and he put in many appearances in academic company; but then (inevitably, after such uncritical acceptance) some academics grew leery, and the recent trend-especially among experts—has been to qualify, de-emphasise and even deny his role.”

Democratization studies initially focused on processes at the national level, but in recent years, there has been a growing interest in the spatially uneven nature of democracy at, the subnational level This article draws on examples from Argentina and develops an analytical framework of closed games to analyze the functioning of subnational democracy. It argues that the less democratic provinces or states of nationally democratic countries are not necessarily authoritarian and that the concept of subnational authoritarianism prevents us from seeing political dynamics that may arise in the context of a reasonably well-functioning electoral democracy and may result in subnational closed games. The article takes into account the role of political families, media ownership, control of access to business opportunities, and control of the provincial state.

The purpose of this article is to review recent trends in the process of urbanization in major Latin American cities. Abundant literature on Third World urbanization in the 1960s and 1970s painted a fairly coherent picture of the process during these decades. That image, which has been generally accepted in both academic and policy circles, serves as the backdrop against which contemporary trends will be evaluated here. The population in Latin America was becoming rapidly urbanized, but the process has been frequently described as “distorted” in a number of ways by the common condition of underdevelopment in which these countries found themselves.

This study examines the political and economic determinants of U.S. foreign direct investment (FDI) in Latin America. The analysis focuses on fifteen Latin American and Caribbean countries for the period of 1979 to 1996. Market size, workers' skill levels, and political instability are found to have a statistically significant effect on the investment behavior of U.S. multinational firms. In addition, we find that a poor human rights record and military coups d'etat positively influenced U.S. FDI flows during the time series.

This article proposes a conceptual framework to discuss the left and left turns in Latin American politics. It then proceeds to argue that winning elections—the recurrent criterion for these turns—might generate tremendous enthusiasm but is also a restrictive benchmark. Other indicators I discuss here include the left's agenda-setting capacity, its redefinition of the political and ideological center, and its incipient challenge of the liberal setting of politics as actors experiment with post-liberal arrangements.

Increasing exclusion and inequality in Honduras have posed escalating security risks for women intheir homes and on the streets. In this article, we examine gender-based violence against women,including gender-motivated murders (feminicides), the everyday acts that can result in their deaths,and impunity for these crimes. Rather than analyzing these murders as interpersonal acts or linkingthem to economic deprivation, we examine the actions and inactions of the state that have amplifiedviolence in the lives of Honduran women. We distinguish between the state’s acts of omissionand acts of commission in order to identify the political responsibility and failures that create afertile ground for these killings. A context of multisided violence that facilitates extremeviolence in the lives of women is present in Honduras, especially considering the diminishing powerof civil society groups and increased political repression after the 2009 coup. We identify rootcauses of the wide (and widening) gap between laws on the books—which have been passed mostlyto satisfy international and domestic organizations pushing for change—and laws in action,that is, implementation on the ground. Although we focus on Honduras, we note similar experiences ofextreme violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, and in other countries in the Latin American region.

Today women in Guatemala are killed at nearly the same rate as they were in the early 1980s when the civil war became genocidal. Yet the current femicide epidemic is less an aberration than a reflection of the way violence against women has become normalized in Guatemala. Used to re-inscribe patriarchy and sustain both dictatorships and democracies, gender-based violence morphed into femicide when peacetime governments became too weak to control extralegal and paramilitary powers. The naturalization of gender-based violence over the course of the twentieth century maintained and promoted the systemic impunity that undergirds femicide today. By accounting for the gendered and historical dimensions of the cultural practices of violence and impunity, we offer a re-conceptualization of the social relations that perpetuate femicide as an expression of post-war violence.

Muchos ven el gobierno de Evo Morales y el Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) como la vanguardia del “giro a la izquierda” en América Latina. Este artículo argumenta que hay una tension profunda dentro de la administración del MAS: un empuje para la justicia social, por un lado, y un abrazo a las instituciones liberales democráticas (sean elecciones, asambleas constituyentes y referenda directas públicas), por el otro. Una mirada de algunos de los conflictos producidos mientras el gobierno intenta poner en equilibrio estos dos marcos puede iluminar algunas tensiones subyacentes en la democracia realmente existiendo tanto como el liberalismo mismo. Sugiero que cuando Morales y compañía empujen su agenda, no solo están tratando de pasar más allá del neoliberalismo, sino también tratan de perfeccionar o “vernacularizar” el liberalismo para hacerlo más democrático y más relevante a los pueblos indígenas bolivianas. Entonces, en vez de pos-neoliberalismo, tal vez vemos esfuerzos de la transformación del liberalismo por medio de interacciones con culturas y demandas indígenas, con la meta de profundizar la democracia.

The electoral implications of conditional cash-transfer programs have been widely debated in recent years. In the particular case of Brazil analysts have argued that the social policies that President Lula da Silva's first government implemented enabled the Workers' Party to broaden its electoral clientele from middle-class and highly educated voters to low-income and poorly educated individuals from the Northeast. The conditional cash-transfer program known as Bolsa Família (BF) is said to have played a key role in this shift of electoral support and to have worked as a powerful clientelistic tool for Lula. Using survey data, this article challenges this view by showing that, despite changes in the profile of Lula's supporters, the BF program cannot account for them. Poor voters vote differently across regions; BF recipients were already Lula voters in 2002 and cast ballots for him during his reelection at the same rate as nonrecipients.

For several years the Círculos Bolivarianos were a key organized component of the movement supporting President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and the question of their democratic qualities a source of considerable controversy, but until recently there was little data to test the competing claims of supporters and opponents. We report the results of a survey of 110 members of Círculos and several interviews carried out in four Venezuelan states during June and July 2004. After providing basic information on the Círculos, we analyze their tendency to contribute to a democratic civil society. We find that respondents had highly democratic goals and methods; however, their organizations embodied a charismatic mode of linkage to Chávez that undermined their ability to become institutionalized. In addition, although the Círculos performed valuable social work, they often reinforced clientelistic relations between Chávez and the voters, and they did not significantly enhance the level of pluralism in the broader civil society.

A heated debate has arisen over U.S. policy toward the large number of Salvadorans and Guatemalans who have come to the United States in recent years. The question is whether the U.S. government should continue to deport these individuals or should offer them some special protection. The key point of debate is the motivation of the émigrés. Officials of the U.S. Department of State and the Department of Justice have maintained that Salvadorans and Guatemalans who come here are merely economic migrants in search of a better life, and that as such, they are ineligible for any special treatment under U.S. immigration law. According to representatives of the Reagan administration, the fact that many Central Americans pass through Mexico on their way to the United States is evidence of their economic motivations.

Brazil and Mexico occupy distinctive positions in the structure of the capitalist world economy. They bear little resemblance to the classic model of a “peripheral” country: they are too industrialized, having many of the modern industries typically found only at the center of the world economy; they supply themselves with too large a share of the finished goods consumed domestically; their exports are too diversified and include too many manufactured items; and they have developed unusually strong states with sophisticated administrative apparatuses capable of promoting and protecting local interests. But neither do Brazil and Mexico possess the characteristics commonly associated with “developed” or “core” nations. Their gross domestic product per capita is far below that of the United States, Japan, or almost any of the countries of Western Europe; their distributions of income are highly skewed compared to those of the developed countries; they are recipient rather than source countries of foreign investment; they are debtor rather than creditor nations; and they are on the receiving rather than the originating end of product innovation and new production techniques.

Looking back over patterns of economic adjustment and structural reform in Latin America since the debt crisis began in 1982, two broad trends stand out. The first is the dramatic fluctuation in macroeconomic policy between the orthodox programs traditionally advocated by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the more interventionist or “heterodox” strategies that marked the policy environment after 1985 (Sheahan 1989). Although the orthodox-heterodox policy cycle is hardly new to the region and in fact has characterized the policy-making experience over the entire postwar era (Kaufman 1990), the 1980s represented the intensification of this cycle, especially in the extremity to which each set of policies was applied. The second trend follows from the first: the inability of states to follow through coherently on any given policy course (Fishlow 1989). While some exceptions to this trend can be cited (Chile, for example), the Latin American pattern has generally been one of failed adjustments and changed courses.

Although the 1970s witnessed a convergence of neoliberal economic policies and authoritarianism in the Southern Cone countries of Latin America, the 1980s gave way to a new combination of economic orthodoxy and democracy in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Neoliberal economic projects emerged in these central Andean countries as they confronted broadly similar economic problems. Plummeting prices in the international market for key exports, decreased investment, and growing financial burdens imposed by the international debt created the parameters of la crisis—the topic that became a central focus of political discourse in these new democracies. At different points in time, each of the three countries responded to the crisis with neoliberal economic experiments. In Peru a turn toward neoliberalism occurred under the administration of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1980-1985), only to be completely reversed by the heterodox policies of Alan García (1985–). In Ecuador basic stabilization measures had already been undertaken by the government of Osvaldo Hurtado (1981-1984). León Febres Cordero (1984-1988) then committed the country to a monetarist and antistatist model. In Bolivia following the enormous instability and hyperinflation during the government of Hernán Siles Zuazo (1982-1985), the country adopted a neoliberal approach under the presidency of Víctor Paz Estenssoro (1985-1988).

This article revisits debates concerning poverty, inequality, and development in Latin America and explores a possible “high road” to globalization capable of achieving both more rapid economic growth and significant and lasting reductions in poverty and inequality. In reconnoitering the contours of this path, the authors probe a partial convergence in theory, concepts, and policies that may offer new opportunities for bridging the yawning chasms that heretofore have divided multilateral financial organizations, local governing elites, and academics as well as Center-Left political parties, organized labor, social movements, and NGOs. The article concludes with an assessment of the capacity of this emerging political agenda and attendant “polycentric development coalitions” to deepen and extend democracy effectively beyond the electoral arena to include basic issues of justice and equity.

The subject of Central American migration encompasses a broad range of experiences that challenge traditional approaches to migration studies. Past interpretations of migration have tended to be based on mutually exclusive typologies or to focus on certain dimensions of migration while excluding others. Thus migration could be internal or international, cyclical, temporary, or permanent, voluntary or involuntary, economically or politically motivated (the latter issue often treated in a separate literature on refugees and exiles), motivated by “push” factors in the country of origin or “pull” factors in the receiving country, or the result of individual decisions or underlying structural conditions.