The modern US defense role in the Western Hemisphere is framed by the terms of the 1947 Rio Treaty, the 1948 Charter of the Organization of America States (OAS), and subsequent bilateral and multilateral protocols like that creating the 1982 Regional Security System (RSS) in the Eastern Caribbean. As components of a collective security system that was explicitly anti-communist in design and intention, the Rio Treaty and its successor documents were established to combat threats posed either by direct aggression on the part of the Soviet Union and/or of Soviet-sponsored, Marxist-Leninist infiltration in the region. These represented the mainstay of the US-Latin American strategic alliance for over 40 years. Most importantly, the orientation of the Inter-American Defense System (IADS) fostered the notion that, within the embrace of the US strategic nuclear and conventional umbrella, military threats to the Western Hemisphere would originate primarily from within, aided and abetted from abroad by the communist alliance. This belief in, and fear of, internal enemies became an enduring theme in modern Latin American geopolitical thought, even when sharing space with traditional external defense concerns (Child, 1985).

Chile’s return to democratic rule with sustained economic growth provided the opportunity for some much-welcomed political space that, it was hoped, would permit the country to attend, at long last, to a number of pressing issues which had been long deferred, if not ignored, by the previous military government. Some of those issues, such as the consolidation of democracy, poverty, and human rights, had been the subject of considerable study by scholars. Much less studied, however, although also on the agenda, was the promise to address Chile’s environmental problems, which had become much exacerbated under the laissez-faire economic model favored by the military regime. Because the new democratic administrations have followed through on that promise, the Chilean example lends support to that hypothesis which holds that environmental concerns in developing countries can be addressed more effectively under economically stable democratic regimes than by authoritarian political systems.

In December 1942, the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina announced, in a radio address, that the Netherlands was revising its relationship with its colonies, employing the famous words: “Relying on one’s own strength, with the will to support each other” [Steunend op eigen kracht, metde wil elkander bij te staan] (Schenk and spaan, 1945: 56). Some 52 years later, her granddaughter, Queen Beatrix, returned to this theme in a televised speech delivered to mark the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Charter of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, when she referred to relations betweenThe Netherlands and its Caribbean partners as one of “a genuine relationship and mutual commitment” (een echte verwantschap en onderlinge betrokkenheid). This Charter, signed in 1954, had been drawn up to establish that henceforth the Kingdom of the Netherlands would be comprised of three equal partners: the Netherlands itself, Suriname, and the Netherlands Antilles. Back in 1954, when it was signed, the Charter was widely viewed as constituting a first, major step towards eventual independence for the Dutch partners in the Caribbean. Nor could anyone have foreseen that, 40 years later, only Suriname would have achieved independence, while the islands of the Netherlands Antilles were renouncing that option and expressing a desire to remain Dutch.

During the last two decades, military rulers have been replaced by democratically elected civilian governments throughout Latin America. Nevertheless, scholars (Mainwaring et al., 1992:3,8) contend that nearly all contemporary Latin American polities remain unconsolidated democratic regimes principally because civilian control over the armed forces has not yet been established. Although the armed forces have returned to their barracks, they have retained considerable political and institutional autonomy. A number of scholars (Loveman, 1994; Agüero, 1992; and others) emphasize that most Latin American constitutions still recognize the military's right to intervene when the constitutional order is threatened. The armed forces are also generally granted broad jurisdiction over internal security, as well as the freedom to organize their institution without civilian interference. There is a considerable body of opinion which maintains that fears of military intervention continue to constrain the behavior of civilian politicians and social groups (Valenzuela, 1992; O'Donnell and Schmitter, 1986; Rouquié, 1986; and Rial, 1990).

It is by now conventional wisdom to say that, while the countries of Latin America have improved their economic performance over the past few years, the majority of their populations have suffered a reversal in their standards of living compared to, let us say, 1980. After the protracted recession and acute macroeconomic disequilibria which was experienced by almost all the countries during the first half of the 1980s, many are staging a recovery in the 1990s. On the positive side, some of the indicators most frequently cited include the resumption of growth (albeit at moderate rates), greater financial stability, an increasingly diversified export sector, and political democratization. On the negative side, one finds inevitable mention of the following: inequitable distribution of income, a high incidence of absolute poverty, and the social tensions that tend to accompany them.

This paper considers the deep-seated roots of income inequality in the structure of Latin American economics. These include unequal distribution of land ownership, the “Kuznets effect” of rapid industrialization, regressive tax systems, and failure of governments to pursue aggressively income equalization policies. While examples are drawn from the experience of Brazil and Mexico, similar conclusions hold for other countries of the region.

The armed conflict that wracked El Salvador from 1980 to the signing of the Peace Accords in January 1992 began and ended in a still unresolved struggle over civil society: over what expression civil society would be allowed to take, over its influence in public debate, over who would control it, and how. If the Right fought to protect its own economic power, it fought first of all on the ground of civil society, attempting by all means available to subordinate, or subdue, the forces unleashed via the wave of organizing by church groups, unions, and the Left in the 1960s (Baloyra, 1982; Lungo U., 1987; Montgomery, 1995). The targets of the famous “death squads,” which emerged well before the eruption of civil war in 1981, were preponderantly representatives of organized civil society: union leaders, teachers, community organizers, health workers, catechists. While political militants have been the most prominent among recent victims of the violence carried out by resurgent death squads, the struggle going on in El Salvador today is essentially a struggle over the character and direction of the new civil society that has arisen in the wake of the war and the Peace Accords.

A few weeks before the April 1995 elections, President Alberto Fujimori paid yet another visit to Puno, the southernmost department in Peru’s highlands. On the agenda of this visit, the 20th trip that the president had scheduled to this region in less than a year, was a series of events designed to remind skeptical Puneños of the tremendous scope and variety of public works and infrastructural projects which the Presidential Ministry was coordinating throughout the department. By this time, every comer of the department had witnessed the construction of a new school or clinic, the repair of some strip of highway, or the renovation of some municipal park. Evidence of new construction was everywhere, along with the black-and-orange signs announcing each project as another initiative sponsored by the main social development agencies linked to the Presidential Ministry. During the visit, the president would inaugurate a few large-scale projects for good measure: a hydroelectric dam, a social security hospital, an ambitious scheme to pipe drinking water from Lake Titicaca, and a project, in partnership with Russian investors, for extracting the region’s untapped oil reserves.

For 40 years, the United States was so fearful of a thermonuclear bang that it barely noticed the whimper when the Cold War ended. There was not even any agreement on the date of the war’s end. Still, the people of the United States sensed its eagle had completed a great adventure and was returning to its nest, and that’s where they wanted it.

President George Bush was more sensitive to the shift in the balance of power in the Persian Gulf than to the swing in US mood. His quick success in the Persian Gulf lifted his popularity to a zenith, making his reelection defeat the next year all the more painful and seemingly inexplicable.

From one of the poorest countries in Europe in the late 1950s, Spain emerged as a middle industrial power by the time of the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975. Subsequently, under the leadership of King Juan Carlos I, Franco's successor as chief of state, Spain negotiated a smooth transition from authoritarianism to a parliamentary-monarchy. On the first of January 1986, the Iberian nation acceded to full membership in the European Community (EC). However, prior to this date and independently of the EC (now the European Union), the Spanish state had already set in motion, in 1981, two great undertakings related to Latin America: (1) the commemoration of Columbus' fateful voyage to the New World in 1492 and (2) the formation of an “Iberoamerican Community of Nations.”

Although the different phases of each country's development are far from being synchronous, in general Latin America's growth in the postwar period began to change pace and pattern around the mid- 1960s, then again following the oil crisis of 1973, which ushered in a slowdown of the world economy, only to plunge into crisis anew early in the 1980s.

As discussed in Altimir (1994a), during the 1950s and 1960s, growth — i.e., at substantial rates, greater than 2%per capita — was either unequal (as in Brazil or Chile in the 1960s) or else involved an increase in inequality in the 1950s that was followed by a phase of inequality that remained essentially unchanged throughout the 1960s (as in Argentina, Colombia or Mexico).

This article examines whether the free-market, open-economy model adopted by Chile's civilian, democratically elected administrations — of Patricio Aylwin (after March 1990) and Eduardo Frei (after March 1994) — has affected the country's distribution of income and degree of poverty and, if so, how. The free-market model was inherited from the military regime headed by General Pinochet (1973-1990) and adopted by his civilian successors almost without modification despite the fact that the post-1990 administrations were explicitly committed to making alleviation of poverty and reduction of inequalities in income a top priority. The article examines the extent to which the determinants of poverty and inequality have changed (if, indeed, they have changed at all) since the end of the military regime in 1990 — and if so, why.

On 20 December 1994, the newly inaugurated government of President Ernesto Zedillo shattered Mexico’s façade of modernity by finding itself, first, forced to devalue the currency by 14% (in real terms), and then, only a few days later and under intense pressure from speculators (sacadolares), to allow the peso to float freely against the dollar. By the end of December, the value of the peso vis-à-vis the dollar had dropped by more than 30%, and the country had lost between $7 and $8 billion in foreign exchange reserves.

This paper briefly discusses the economic reforms that have taken place in Jamaica for the past 15 years and argues that the reforms, at least so far, are mixed, particularly with regard to the elimination of poverty. The basic problems are (1) a slow response of exports to large, frequent adjustments in the exchange rate, which prohibits low-wage labor, in the informal sector, from being absorbed into the formal sector; and (2) the large budget deficit, with the associated demands for large cuts in expenditures, which primarily affects the rural poor. It is suggested that the principal reason that reforms have been slow is because of the political price to be paid for unpopular measures in a competitive democracy