This article examines medico-legal and popular interpretations of suicide in early twentieth-century Lima. In this period, often referred to as the Aristocratic Republic, physicians and lawyers interpreted suicide through the lens of modern scientific and legal thought and came to challenge the traditional interpretations of the Church, which insisted that suicide was a voluntary act. For these groups, suicide, almost invariably an act of madness, was essentially a modern phenomenon, both product and evidence of Lima's growing “modernity,” as well as a social disease that could be combated by adopting adequate policies. However, though they opposed the Church's insistence on the responsibility of the suicide, physicians and lawyers viewed the propensity to suicide as evidence of the moral and racial degeneration of Lima's population and shared the Church's condemnation of suicide as a shameful and immoral act. For ordinary people, medico-legal discourse on suicide provided an additional explanation for self-death. In particular, the idea that suicide was caused by forces over which no one had any real control, especially forces that were a product of the perceived “modernization” of Lima, such as neurasthenia (a nervous condition that became a widespread explanation for suicide at the time) helped in the need to dilute blame and guilt. But, although medico-legal and popular understandings of suicide cross-fertilized, attempts by ordinary people to apportion certain meanings to suicide, particularly those that constructed suicide as a voluntary act, were perceived by the medico-legal community, and, indeed, more broadly, as threats to society.

In contrast to the rest of Latin America, where most forests belong to the state, in Mexico, village communities legally possess most of the country's remaining forests. Despite this, Mexican forest-management policies frequently empowered business interests and the state at the expense of rural communities. These policies marginalized campesinos and squandered opportunities for environmentally sound development. Nevertheless, following a fitful process of land reform, sporadic support for village communities from reformers in the agrarian reform and forestry departments, and the organized demands of villagers, Mexico now has the most advanced community forestry sector in Latin America. Today, hundreds of villages own and operate their own forest management businesses. They generate rural economic benefits while conserving forests, and they represent an important model for sustainable development in Latin America. In the 1990s, neoliberalism brought changes to agrarian and forestry law that initially benefited business interests while abandoning the forest communities best situated to integrate forest conservation and rural development. Campesino groups and their supporters, however, struggled to maintain and extend community forestry in Mexico, with some recent policy victories. Community forestry remains an important part of Mexican forest policy. Mexican forest conservation and the well-being of the ampesinos who inhabit those forests depend on strengthening and extending the model, which has implications for forest policy elsewhere in Latin America.

The following three articles, together with this brief introduction, review the consequences of the paradigm shift in Latin American economic historiography from structuralism to the New Institutional Economics (NIE). Joseph Love analyzes the basic tenets of structuralism, their connection to dependency, the influence of CEPAL on policymaking, and how a generation of historians utilized the methodologies of structuralism to research historical problems in Latin American development. John H. Coatsworth's contribution correlates the decline of the structuralist model to the rise of research interests in the role of institutions in economic history and examines the latest long-range comparisons of productivity between the Latin American and U.S. economies. Commenting on the recent research utilizing the NIE, Coatsworth agrees with Love that the relative economic stagnation of the past quarter century may not render structuralism entirely irrelevant. Sandra Kuntz Ficker summarizes the basic positions held by the structuralist and dependentista schools with respect to commercial policy and concludes with a discussion of how the NIE contributes to innovative research on Latin American foreign trade. These articles resulted from the authors' participation in a LARR- sponsored panel at the 2004 Latin American Studies Association Congress.

In an era when development processes seem best characterized by a continuing cycle of macroeconomic crisis and recovery, a critical question for students of the political economy of development concerns identifying the factors that facilitate recovery from economic shock. Recent work on this question has moved beyond a focus on specific macroeconomic policy adjustments toward analysis of the role political institutions play in shaping recovery processes. Applying this research to the experiences of Mexico's thirty-one states following the country's 1995 economic crisis, I identify significant variations in states' abilities to recover from crisis and link those variations in part to the country's uneven electoral transition to a multiparty democracy that coincided with the crisis. With more and more governmental activities increasingly being decentralized to lower levels of government, these findings provide an indication of the important role subnational variations in political environments can play in shaping the broader political and economic outcomes of Latin America's “dual transition.”