The beginning of the so-called Nova República was inauspicious for both Brazil and Brazilian cinema. The events surrounding the illness and death of President-elect Tancredo Neves and the subsequent inauguration of former government-party leader José Sarney are well-known. Perhaps less known is the fact that one of the first pieces of legislation Sarney signed into law while Acting President during Neves's illness sent shock waves through the national film industry, which was already suffering one of the worst economic crises of its recent history.

It was inevitable that after the demise of the series of military dictatorships that ruled Argentina so violently between 1976 and 1983, the return to democratic institutions would occasion an outpouring of the kinds of writing and cultural activities banned or censored by the generals. Movie distributors in Argentina today cannot keep up with the demand for films that could not be seen during these years (or were seen only with extensive and capricious cuts). Theaters are competing with each other to present works dealing with human rights violations and related themes. Television programming, which the military assiduously controlled, has now begun to evince some social consciousness. Meanwhile, the print media have filled bookstores and kiosks with myriad publications bearing witness to the attempt to recover a cultural tradition altered and fragmented by the so-called Proceso de Reorganización Nacional.

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.