The Argentine (Peronist) Justicialista Party (PJ) underwent a far-reaching coalitional transformation during the 1980s and 1990s. Party reformers dismantled Peronism's traditional mechanisms of labor participation, and clientelist networks replaced unions as the primary linkage to the working and lower classes. By the early 1990s, the PJ had transformed from a labor-dominated party into a machine party in which unions were relatively marginal actors. This process of de-unionization was critical to the PJ's electoral and policy success during the presidency of Carlos Menem (1989–99). The erosion of union influence facilitated efforts to attract middle-class votes and eliminated a key source of internal opposition to the government's economic reforms. At the same time, the consolidation of clientelist networks helped the PJ maintain its traditional working- and lower-class base in a context of economic crisis and neoliberal reform. This article argues that Peronism's radical de-unionization was facilitated by the weakly institutionalized nature of its traditional party-union linkage. Although unions dominated the PJ in the early 1980s, the rules of the game governing their participation were always informal, fluid, and contested, leaving them vulnerable to internal changes in the distribution of power. Such a change occurred during the 1980s, when office-holding politicians used patronage resources to challenge labor's privileged position in the party. When these politicians gained control of the party in 1987, Peronism's weakly institutionalized mechanisms of union participation collapsed, paving the way for the consolidation of machine politics—and a steep decline in union influence—during the 1990s.

The Provincias Unidas del Centro de América (later called the Federación de la América Central) lasted from 1824 to 1838. Despite the various reasons for the union's disintegration in 1838, the dream of reunification has resurfaced at least twenty-five times. Geography, three hundred years of colonial union, and what Thomas Karnes has termed “more bonds of similarity than any other small group of nations” have all made the region of Central America an obvious candidate for unification.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Bolivian intellectuals and politicians debated how the country's Indian population should be incorporated into social and political life as the nation became increasingly integrated internally and forged stronger links to the world market. Public health was central to this discussion because of elite fears of contagion due to greater contact between Indians and non-Indians and the realization that if Indians were to be productive members of society, then their physical well-being had to be considered. This study examines the proposals of two Bolivian doctors, Jaime Mendoza and Nestor Morales, for improving the health of the native population in the context of the larger national debate about ethnicity and citizenship.

This article analyzes the effects on employment, wages, and labor standards of the growth of non-traditional, export-oriented, high-value crops in the PetrolinaJuazeiro region in Northeast Brazil. It focuses on understanding why these crops were accompanied by job creation, upskilling of labor, and improvements in wages and labor standards among rural wage workers. These labor effects can be explained by: (1) the type of crops involved and their high demand for skilled workers to meet high quality demands from consumers; (2) the limited supply of skilled workers in the region involved; (3) the consumer concerns for the labor conditions of production; (4) the characteristics of labor institutions, including laws and regulations, government agencies, and rural workers' unions; and (5) how labor institutions, crop and technology characteristics, and consumer concerns affected the balance of power between growers and rural wage workers and their respective organizations.

Carolina Maria de Jess was a fiercely proud black Brazilian woman who lived in a So Paulo favela with her three illegitimate children (each with a different father). She had learned to read and write by continuing to study on her own after only two years of primary school. In 1958 fragments of her diary came to the attention of an enterprising journalist, Audlio Dantas, who helped her get it published. For a brief period, Carolina Maria de Jess became an international celebrity as the author of the best-selling book in Brazilian publishing history. For many reasons, however, Carolina fell from favor: the rise of a military dictatorship in 1964, which led to an accompanying reaction against social criticism, and especially the ways in which she handled her fame and related to the press and the literary elite. Within a few years, she was forced to move back into the favela and scavenge for a living. A brief flurry of publicity in 1969 about her fallen condition prompted a slight improvement in her circumstances, but she was soon forgotten again. Carolina died in 1977, on the verge of indigence. Her complete life story has never been told, and most Brazilians today are unaware that a black favelada in the 1960s became the symbol (to foreigners, at least) of the struggle to rise above poverty. Most Brazilians neither read her books nor consider them noteworthy. Evidently, the author of what The New York Times called a rarely matched essay on the meaning and the feeling of hunger, degradation, and want touched no nerve in the Brazilian sensibility.

This article seeks to accomplish four goals. First, it will examine the historical circumstances of the rise of the U.S.-Caribbean garment production circuit from the standpoint of economic restructuring within the U.S. industry and U.S.-Caribbean trade relations and from the perspective of the major political interests involved. It will also examine the impact of this restructuring on local garment sectors and the wider host economies in the Caribbean. The article will then explore the role of the “Big Three” Asian suppliers in the contemporary restructuring as well as their role in the offshore garment sector in the Caribbean. The latter effort constitutes a preliminary investigation of an emerging area of political and scholarly interest, and it will be partly integrated into the treatment of the first two topics. Finally, while I will refer more broadly to the major garment-producing Caribbean islands, Jamaica will provide a case-study focus for my remarks here. The essay will conclude by looking briefly at the “free-zone” or “free-trade-zone” model of industrial relations and its impact on older traditions of trade unionism and labor-management practices, taking the experience of a number of Hong Kongese garment factories in the state-owned Kingston and Garmex Free Zones in Kingston, Jamaica, as an example.