The Argentine workfare program known as the “Trabajar” program shared many characteristics with other targeted social welfare programs implemented in Latin America in the 1990s, including being subject to accusations that program funds were misused for political gain. This paper tests existing hypotheses concerning the political manipulation of public spending using data from two phases of the program and a measure of fund allocation that improves on that employed in previous analyses of the program. It finds that partisan criteria most often cited in the literature affected distribution under one administration only. It further demonstrates that political protest had a differential impact on the distribution of program funds across time and suggests some reasons for this.

This research note seeks to explain why a large number of Latin American countries have privatized their pension systems in recent years. It argues that the privatization schemes are a response to the severe capital shortages that have plagued their countries intermittently in recent years rather than to the financial problems facing some of the pension systems. The likelihood of pension privatization, I argue, is determined in large part by the vulnerability of countries to capital shortages as well as the influence wielded by international financial institutions, especially the World Bank. Whether such reforms are politically feasible, however, depends largely on the strength of organized labor and the president's degree of control over the legislature. A statistical examination of recent pension policy in Latin America provides support for most of these arguments.

For more than a century, the Dominican sugar industry has hosted seasonal immigrations of neighboring Caribbean islanders as harvest laborers (most recently, Haitians). This migrant labor system is fully comparable to systems of labor control after slavery in other parts of the Caribbean. But the regional historical trend toward more liberal labor relations in commercial agriculture seems largely to have been reversed in the case of Dominican sugar. Between the 1930s and 1960s, the recruitment and employment of harvest labor changed from something resembling free wage labor into a government-managed system of semicoerced exploitation. Processes of state formation in Haiti and the Dominican Republic are crucial in explaining this transformation. Fuller understanding of historical change in the case at hand is afforded by broadening the scope of inquiry beyond the direct confrontation between labor and estate owners and by recognizing that governments and their agents have not always acted in accordance with private agro-industrial interests.

This paper examines the origins of amendatory vetoes in Latin America and shows why presidents' ability to present a redrafted bill after congressional passage gives them considerable power to affect legislation. The paper begins with a historical account that illustrates the workings of amendatory observations in nineteenth-century Latin America—the passage of the Electoral Law of 1874 in Chile. Next, it specifies the degree to which different constitutional procedures allow presidents to redraft legislation and shows why the power to introduce amendatory observations provides greater discretion than the power of the better-known block veto, regardless of override thresholds. Lastly, the paper traces the origins of amendatory observations back to the first wave of constitution writing that followed the wars of independence. Our findings challenge prior classifications of veto powers in Latin America and highlight the positive agenda-setting power afforded to the president at the last stage of the lawmaking process.

William H. Riker, “Lincoln at Freeport”

Latin America has long provided most of the world's coffee. At the same time, dependence on coffee exports has profoundly affected many Latin American countries. This research note will analyze the relationship between primary-commodity exporting and development by means of a case study of attempts by Latin American countries to industrialize their exports by exporting instant coffee rather than green coffee beans. A commodity-chain approach will be used to explain how the initiatives of Latin American states and private firms have responded to and changed the structure of the global system of producing instant coffee. Three Latin American countries—Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador—have become significant exporters of instant coffee, but the benefits they have realized from this effort have been limited by the control exercised by transnational corporations over the global production system.

In the twentieth century, big business in Mexico invested much more in voluntary encompassing associations than business did elsewhere in Latin America. Multisectoral associations like the CCE, the CMNH, Coparmex, and COECE are rare in the other large countries of the region. Three primary factors gave Mexican business stronger incentives to invest in these associations. First, Mexican business was excluded from elections, PRI politics, and appointments to top government positions and therefore relied more on associations to channel business's organized participation in politics and policy making. Second, in some periods, government actions were threatening to business interests and prompted defensive organization. Third, in other periods of closer cooperation between business and government, government officials relied heavily on these associations to mediate relations with business, giving big business further incentives to invest in associations.

This article explores one of the earliest large-scale uses of biocidal agro-chemicals in Latin America, the United Fruit Company's hand-spraying of its banana plantations to control sigitoka disease from 1938 to 1962. After discussing the environmental context of sigatoka and the early development and implications of the spray technology, the essay focuses on the thousands of workers who applied the chemicals. Using Costa Rica as a case study, it explores workers' sense of the personal costs of their work as well as their ambiguous relationship to the larger banana workers' union movement. Because of differences in ethnicity, age, and masculine status, pesticide workers were not part of the labor movement's militant core, but their participation in strikes gave unions great power for a time. This power, along with workers' individual job actions, forced fundamental changes in the pesticide program, demonstrating the importance of integrating labor into the study of environmental change in agricultural capitalism.