When President Alberto Fujimori suspended constitutional rule in April 1992, he ended Peru's twelve-year experiment in civilian democratic governance. Citing the growing insurgency of Sendero Luminoso, corruption in the political parties, and difficulties with the Peruvian Congress in passing his economic program, Fujimori announced that democracy would have to be “temporarily suspended” in order to build new institutions. This move was backed by the armed forces. Perhaps most surprising to outside observers was the widespread popularity of Fujimori's move, which reflected the growing disenchantment with traditional political parties of the right and the left. Democratic procedures and institutions during the 1980s had been precarious at best. The military's counterinsurgency campaign against Sendero Luminoso had transformed Peru into one of the hemisphere's worst offenders against human rights, with the highest number of forced disappearances in the world. But despite documented cases of torture and other violations of human rights by state authorities, Peruvian military forces acted with the knowledge that they were virtually immune from prosecution.

Este artículo examina el papel constitutivo de los periódicos bolivianos en los inicios del proceso deformación nacional (1825–1855, aproximadamente). Discute su intervención en los debates políticos y legales del momento, sus esfuerzos por definir los elementos que identifican con la nacionalidad, su inserción en un precario mercado, su promoción de los valores patrios y participación en la formación de ciudadanos. El artículo muestra la capacidad incorporadora de elementos heterogéneos que tienen las hojas impresas y, sobre todo, la reconceptualización del tiempo y el espacio que articulan en términos de lo nacional. Finalmente, sin minimizar las contribuciones del proyecto letrado de construcción nacional, destaca también las tensiones y limitaciones que le son inherentes.

In the “fourth wave” of transitions to democracy sweeping the globe over the past twenty years, the Chilean case stands out as an exception. Although most instances of democratization following military rule have tended to yield rightist governments, Chile is one country in which the ruling coalition that emerged was Center-Left in ideological orientation.

Real wages describe changes in the material standard of living of wage earners. This article reviews the national experience of Mexico through the twentieth century, surveying more than thirty studies from the late Porfiriato to the opening of the twenty-first century. The data suggest that real wages follow a long-term cyclical pattern of alternate periods of declining and rising wages. As a consequence, twentieth-century Mexico was not kind to workers because the gains of one period seem to be offset by falls in the next. Wage trends in Mexico and the rest of Latin America seemed to follow similar paths, except during the years following Mexico's revolution, when a new labor regime especially benefited the country's wage earners. Following a significant downturn in the 1940s, workers in Mexico and Latin America experienced a favorable period of income growth during the postwar boom. The debt crisis of the 1980s induced a long decline that continued through the early years of globalization.