Like the reports of Mark Twain's death, the claims of a wave of democratization sweeping Latin America may be exaggerated. Yet the resurgence of electoral politics and the receding of military rule since the 1980s are trends that hold significance both for the future of Latin America and for inter-American relations. The transitions from bureaucratic-authoritarian rule in South America, and from the oligarchy-military alliances in Central America, have been a major focus of recent US policy attention. From the human rights approach of the Carter administration to the Reagan rollback doctrine, US policy became more actively engaged in controversial attempts to define and impose “democracy” in the region. After the end of the Cold War, US action or inaction remained key factors in the events surrounding the 1989 elections in Panama and the 1990 elections in Haiti and Nicaragua.

Despite its manifest heterogeneity—linguistic, ethnic and political—and the significant imbalances between nations, the Caribbean Basin has gradually come to be viewed as a distinctive subregion within the Western Hemisphere. This process began during the Cold War when a number of extraregional actors with interests in the region considered it of strategic importance. As in previous phases of its history, the Caribbean found itself defined geopolitically, not only in terms of its potential for conflict but for its significance to external (North American or European) actors as well (Serbín, 1989 and 1991a).

More recently, changes on the international scene (the end of the Cold War and recognition of the increasing interdependence of the world economy) have begun to alter these old perceptions and ways of dealing with the region.

For only the fifth time since 1978, the Dominican Republic held concurrent elections in 1994 for candidates at every level of government — presidential, congressional and municipal. The most important of these contests, for the presidency, saw the incumbent, Joaquίn Balaguer, returned to the post he has held for so long, defeating his principal challenger, José Francisco Peña Gόmez, by a margin of 22,281 votes. The most recent election, on 16 May 1994, proved to be just as traumatic and incident-prone as those that preceded it, dating back to the first democratic election in 1978. Unlike the last election (in 1990), however, in which Balaguer also won a narrow victory, this time the charges of electoral fraud were well-documented and the accuracy of the tally widely disbelieved, not just domestically but internationally as well.