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.”

This research note discusses an emerging subfield of inquiry in the study of democratization in Latin America: a focus on the relationships between past human rights abuses and democratization processes. It outlines four sets of questions emerging around the themes of “historical memory” and “legacies of authoritarian rule.” The study then examines documentary collections of major human rights nongovernmental organizations (HRNGOs) in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. The purpose of this endeavor is to provide researchers interested in studying the four issues with specific information on documents produced and currently held by the HRNGOs in the Southern Cone. The essay examines seven HRNGOs in Chile, ten in Argentina, and four in Uruguay, and ends with practical hints for researchers who wish to use these resources.

This article is based on research conducted in the archives of the Auditoria Militar do Estado de Pernambuco. It substantiates the violation of the basic principle of equality before the law resulting from the existence in Brazil of two different court systems—one civil and the other military—with varying legal proceedings and sentences for similar crimes committed by civilian police and military police. The article reviews how the authoritarian regime enlarged the scope of military jurisdiction, a situation little changed more than a decade after the authoritarian regime ended. The article also shows that the Justiça Militar do Estado de Pernambuco functions in a hybrid manner. It is an agency of the civil judicial branch, but most of the judges are military, while the lawyers are civilians and the trials are conducted by the Ministério Público. Thus the military police can influence the outcome of judgments without having to assume the burden of rendering decisions because the final responsibility rests with the civil judicial branch. Finally, the article highlights the incompatibility between the continuation of this kind of military justice and a democracy seeking consolidation.

This article examines relations between the Mexican state and transmigrants through an analysis of migrant- and state-led transnational practices and policies. It addresses discussions of the strength and extent of Mexican state control and hegemony as well as debates in the transnationalism literature on the potential autonomy of transmigrant groups and the role of subnational linkages. The analysis is based on information on transmigrant organizations and Mexican political authorities in Los Angeles and Mexico and focuses on Zacatecas. Mexican transmigrant organizations predate current state initiatives aimed at Mexicans in the United States, but state involvement has been crucial to the institutionalizing of transnational social spaces. The state's hegemonic project involves the largely symbolic reincorporation of paisanos living abroad back into to the nation but depends on provincial and municipal authorities and transmigrant organizations for implementation. Because these vary, the project has been implemented unevenly. The complexity of these processes can be captured only by examining transnational social spaces at a subnational level. The case of Zacatecas shows how a corporatist and semi-clientelist transmigrant organization has managed to gain concessions that broaden opportunities for participation. It remains to be seen whether and how promises of political representation will be fulfilled.