Not since the heyday of foreign tax missions in the 1960s has tax reform been discussed as intensively in Latin America. During the 1980s, major tax reforms took place in Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, and Colombia, and somewhat similar reforms occurred in the previous decade in Chile and Uruguay. Moreover, tax reform seems to be climbing higher on the policy agenda in countries as diverse as Guatemala, Venezuela, Paraguay, and Peru.

Several aspects of presidential politics in Mexico have become well-established traditions. The president of Mexico is constitutionally limited to a single term of six years. Also, the president is always a member of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Although the details of the selection process are not well known, the PRI presidential candidate for the next election is hand-picked by the sitting president. Despite an assured victory for the PRI candidate, the nominee always mounts a barnstorming campaign covering all of Mexico, a procedure that helps to legitimize the domination of the PRI. All of these factors are the “givens” in the equation explaining presidential successions in Mexico. But at least one phenomenon—that of policy changes associated with presidential successions—has been much discussed but never critically tested. Briefly stated, various hypotheses suggest that new presidents significantly alter the policies of their predecessor, that predictable shifts from one side of the ideological spectrum to the other occur as presidents succeed one another, and that even certain patterns in policy innovation are evident within six-year presidential terms in Mexico. All of these hypotheses assume that policy decisions and outcomes are greatly affected by the politics of presidential transitions. The purpose of this article is to initiate a process of examining more rigorously the various propositions relating to policy cycles in Mexican politics.

The Braga Brothers Collection is a recent addition to the University of Florida's Latin American Library and is one of the principal sources for the study of late colonial Cuba and Republican Cuba before Castro. It is by far the best single source available in the United States for the study of the Cuban sugar industry in the twentieth century. The collection was donated to the University of Florida on 24 November 1981 as a gift from B. Rionda Braga and the late George A. Braga, and it occupies some seven hundred linear feet of shelf space. The essential arrangement of the collection was completed in the summer of 1985, and the collection is now open to qualified researchers. A finding guide will be published by the University of Florida Library in 1986.

The field of international relations and foreign policy in Latin America is presently experiencing tremendous institutional and intellectual growth. These developments are increasingly emphasizing economic and political determinants at the national and international levels over the traditional focus on diplomacy and international law. This article will address one of the major theoretical issues in the study of international relations: can structural theories provide anything more than very general predictions of international politics? In addition, because most work using this perspective focuses on great powers, I ask whether structural theories can explain the behavior of lesser powers.

A review of the literature on migrant regional and village associations in Latin American cities reveals an emphasis on the forms and functions of such groups (Doughty 1970; Orellana 1973; Jongkind 1974; Skeldon 1976, 1977; Altamirano 1984a). Far less has been written about why such associations are formed (Kerri 1976, 34). The paucity of explanations appears to be the result of two analytic extremes.

The problem of squatter settlements in Latin American cities has received far greater attention than any other theme in Latin American urban studies in the last fifteen years. The issues and debates at the heart of the field—the definition of the culture of poverty, the question of the marginality of the poor, and the concept of the urban informal sector—all have evolved out of and centered on discussing the plight of urban squatters. The sheer magnitude of the phenomenon of squatting in urban Latin America no doubt justifies this degree of attention. In addition, pursuit of the topic has provided a rich source of data for theorists interested in reinterpreting Latin American urban development from a Marxist perspective. The emphasis on squatting has also had some negative consequences, however. One result is that other important themes and other areas outside the urban periphery have received only superficial treatment; another is that the general applicability of the insights derived from the analysis of squatting has remained in doubt.