This study addresses the provincial origins and role of the reactionary party that legislated the reconstruction of the Brazilian monarchy, perhaps Latin America's most stable nineteenth-century political regime. The study locates the party in terms of regional power, taking into account social, economic, and political factors. It analyzes the party's ideology in the historical context of the Regency (1831–1840) and its immediate aftermath, an era of destabilization, social war, and secessionism. The study also demonstrates how the party mobilized partisan support nationally to consolidate party and state power, the unexpected impact of patronage, and the increasingly autonomous quality of state power over time.

This paper seeks to explain the effect of different economic reforms for attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) in Latin America. Controlling for macroeconomic and good governance factors, we find that governments that implement economic reforms are not always more likely to attract FDI inflows. Instead, attempts to minimize expropriation risk complement domestic financial and trade reforms, which enhances foreign investor interest. Elements of both good governance and reform are important. The results provide reasons for optimism—the fact that most economic reforms are not essential for attracting FDI suggests that countries seeking FDI will encounter fewer obstacles.

The containment of communism
was for the United States a
problem of external defense;
for the underdeveloped countries
like Brazil, it was a problem
of internal development.
Roberto Campos, A lanterna na popa

The authoritarian regimes that in recent decades ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, Brazil from 1964 to 1985, Chile from 1973 to 1990, and Uruguay from 1973 to 1984 all used violence to crush dissent and the law to regulate and legitimate that violence. Repression under the Brazilian regime was particularly legalistic in the sense that the number of killings was relatively low but the rate of judicial prosecution high. Available evidence suggests that more individuals were brought into military courts for political crimes in Brazil than in any of the other authoritarian regimes in the region.

Inequality in the distribution of land has long been viewed as the social dynamite that has set off many peasant uprisings in the twentieth century. The most extensive study to date of modern guerrilla wars in Latin America, by Timothy Wickham-Crowley, found land tenure and the overall agrarian structure to be a common element in upheaval in Cuba, Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Nicaragua, and El Salvador (Wickham-Crowley 1992, 306–7). Samuel Huntington's classic book on development and stability articulated the explanation for these agrarian insurrections: “Where the conditions of landownership are equitable and provide a viable living for the peasant, revolution is unlikely. Where they are inequitable and where the peasant lives in poverty and suffering, revolution is likely, if not inevitable, unless the government takes prompt measures to remedy these conditions” (Huntington 1968, 375).

In June of 1990, the mountains of the Ecuadorian Sierra provided the setting for a spectacular display of protest. For an entire week, tens of thousands of Indian peasants stopped delivering farm produce to the towns and blocked the main highways, picketed on the roadsides and marched en masse in regional capitals. In some places, demonstrators seized the offices of government agencies, and in others, localized skirmishes reportedly broke out where landowners and Indian communities had been embroiled in unresolved land disputes.

The recent release of over four hundred telephone conversations recorded in the Lyndon Baines Johnson White House from April to December 1965 provide historians with exciting new evidence on the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic. The role of the president in that civil conflict has been up to now mysterious since Johnson rarely committed himself to paper. Critics and scholars since have somewhat exonerated him as simply another decision maker misled by a panicky country team spreading rumors of an imminent communist takeover. The tapes suggest, however, that Johnson was both aware that evidence of a takeover was insufficient and perhaps more concerned with domestic politics than with the situation in Santo Domingo. Repeatedly, close advisors attempted to dissuade him from overplaying an anti-communist rationale. But everywhere he looked in Washington Johnson saw enemies who would exploit any hesitation on his part. Soon after committing 23,000 troops, he admitted his lapses in judgment while he simultaneously sought scapegoats for them. The tapes place Johnson once and for all at the center of one of the most serious crises in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations and reveal the darker side of his foreign policy instincts.