Peru is a Priority Theater in The US War against drugs in that it produces more coca for export to the United States than any other Latin American country. The Huallaga Valley, a remote area about 200 miles northeast of Lima on the eastern Andean slopes, is one of the world's most fertile coca-growing regions. This article focuses on what is known about Peru's coca industry, and the anti-drug efforts that have been undertaken by the US and Peruvian governments. Under President Alan Garcia, elected in 1985, the Peruvian government has been usually cooperative with US anti-drug programs; some explanations for this collaboration will be suggested.

Despite the Garcia government's cooperative stance, the results of Peru's war against drugs have been similar to results elsewhere: governments have won some battles, but they are losing the war. Perhaps the most important question raised by the ' Peruvian case is whether the United States should give a higher priority to anti-drug efforts or to counterinsurgency; US policy regarding Peru has appeared to do the latter.

When President Reagan Declared his “war on drugs” in the early 1980s, the United States entered a new era of drug diplomacy in its foreign policy toward Latin America.Control of drug trafficking currently ranks higher than immigration, foreign debt, and communist expansion in Central America as a priority issue in US-Latin American relations. In a March 1988 New York Times/CBS News poll, 48% of the respondents indicated that drug trafficking was the most important foreign policy issue facing the nation compared to Central America (22%), arms control (13%),terrorism (9%), and Palestinian unrest (4%). Equally revealing, when asked whether it was more important to stop the drug trafficking of Central American leaders or to support them in the fight against communism, 63% gave top priority to halting the drug traffic, compared to only 21% who felt that stopping communism was more important (Sciolino with Engelberg, 1988: 10y).

In the mid-1990s, for the first time in the history of the Americas, truly hemispherewide collaboration among labor organizations became possible. Yet this new political opportunity structure has not brought actors together in an undisputed new labor internationalism. This article focuses on two key sources of contention among labor organizations in the context of free trade mobilizations between 1990 and 2004: the discussions about coalition building with other civil society actors and the debates about including a social clause in trade agreements. It argues that transnational collective action occurs parallel to the continued relevance of national-level claims and targets, and that this simultaneity represents a real source of challenges, for scholars and labor organizations alike. Based on social network data and qualitative interviews in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and the United States, the article analyzes the actions taken by labor organizations, and how these changed through time.

Reliable data on Protestant and Catholic membership in 18 Latin American nations show that Protestants have recruited a larger percentage of the population in many nations than previously estimated. Analysis of these data shows that, as predicted by the theory of religious economies, the Catholic Church has been invigorated by the Protestant challenge: Catholic mass attendance has risen to unprecedented levels, and is highest in nations where Protestants have made the greatest gains.

This article seeks to determine the main predictors of political participation in a newly democratic regime: Mexico. Compared to other nations, Mexico fills a moderate position in terms of the volume of political participation. Following the literature on participation, this study develops a set of participant modes—voting, communal activity, petitioning, direct action, and political organization membership—and then seeks to determine the socioeconomic, demographic, attitudinal, and social capital factors that best explain participation. Distinct resource inequalities limit the participation of the less educated, the poor, women, and workers, although peasant participation is robust. The strongest determinant of political participation of all kinds is involvement in social capital–generating activities: belonging to nonpolitical organizations and engaging in charitable work, activities typically dominated by the middle class. Building social capital is essential to promoting robust rates of political participation in Mexico.

Brazil has an “African-origin” population that is proportionally more than four times larger that of African Americans in the United States, but white Brazilians mostly dominate electoral politics. How do ordinary citizens explain this phenomenon? Drawing on a large-sample survey of public opinion in the state of Rio de Janeiro, this article explores perceived explanations for nonwhite underrepresentation in the political arena. It also examines attitudes toward a particular black candidate, Benedita da Silva, to discern the state of negro identity politics. Most Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro cite racial prejudice to explain nonwhite exclusion, although whites do this less than nonwhites. Indicators of a racial undercurrent in political preferences suggest the importance of allegiances based on perceived common racial origins. Class is robustly associated with voting preferences, suggesting that, in contrast to the United States, class differences among nonwhites in Brazil could attenuate the success of negro identity politics.

El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, share a common border divided by the channeled and weakly flowing Rio Grande. The twin cities, with a combined population of over a million, are located in a valley between two mountain ranges. They share a common air shed, mutual sources of water supply, and the ever-present threat of disease which, of course, does not recognize the artificial national boundary dividing the two cities.

How have the sister cities and their respective governments at the local, state, and federal levels attempted to solve their common health and environmental problems? This paper will briefly review the efforts to resolve and to solve common health and environmental problems between the two cities. What is necessary at the outset is some type of analytical framework to better understand the relations between the two cities.

The article analyzes executive-legislative relations in Uruguay between 1985 and 2005. It demonstrates that even after controlling for ideological affinity and acknowledging that ideology affects presence in the cabinet, legislators whose factions hold ministerial positions behave in a more progovernment way than their ideology would predict. This result not only shows that coalitions “work” but suggests that they work because the presidents use resources under their control to attract support from legislators. This article presents a systematic analysis of executive-legislative relations in multiparty settings that builds on the finding that nonideologically contiguous coalitions often form to separate the ideological from the strategic determinants of legislative behavior. It also contributes to the literature by presenting a new set of roll call data and, more generally, highlights the risks of attempting to infer ideology directly from legislative behavior in presidential multiparty settings.

This article presents an analysis of the use of populist framing mechanisms by grassroots right-wing organizations. It brings together the social movement literature on framing and the populist literature to understand how actors build an emergent field of activism in a highly contentious context. Based on the analysis of a sample of 4,574 Facebook posts published by 5 civil society organizations during the campaign to oust Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, it argues that two mechanisms, reductionism and antagonism, enabled actors to focus on similar targets and diagnostics while maintaining relevant differences when seeking to motivate followers and present prognostic frames. These were key mechanisms used by all the actors, albeit with different contents, depending on the frame task. This article contributes to filling gaps in the framing and populist literatures and sheds light on the relevance of populist communication in the rise of right-wing activism.

When Alberto Fujimori campaigned for president of Peru W i n 1990, he ran on a platform in which he promised to institute a moderate program of gradual economic stabilization, including the privatization of certain state-owned enterprises. These promises were instrumental in his scoring an upset victory over writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who had been the odds-on favorite to win just three months earlier — and, thus, to become Peru's third popularly elected president in his country's ten years of continuous democracy.

Nevertheless, soon after Alán García relinquished the presidential office, in July 1990, to the newly-elected president, those election promises underwent a dramatic reversal. On the grounds that he had inherited a bankrupt country which left him no alternative (no habia otra cosa que hacef), the new president moved quickly to establish a stabilization program of classic orthodoxy in August 1990 (Fujimori, 1990).

The 1980s Witnessed a series of halting, tenuous but, nonetheless, widely—hailed transitions from military regimes to constitutional democracies throughout South America. Yet, despite the initial optimism, the political newcomers faced formidable tasks. Not only had memories of democratic rule and practices grown dim in the years of disuse, but, with few exceptions, new governments found themselves threatened by a deteriorating economy with bleak prospects for the future. Equally — perhaps even more — threatening was the fact that though the military regimes may have relinquished their position, they had not necessarily relinquished their power, which raised the possibility that their civilian successors might not be able to stay in office long enough to confront their multifarious problems.

In Argentina, the risk of a return to military rule was perhaps even greater than in some of its neighbors as the country had experienced a mosaic of alternating military and civilian governments ever since 1930.

This study focuses on Nicaragua's transition from a revolutionary state to one oriented toward democracy and the market, through the political lens of agricultural property rights. The national agenda on property rights after 1990 was dominated by elaborate arrangements to accommodate kinship-based factions of the agroindustrial elite, core Sandinista constituents, rural labor groups, and demobilized peasant combatants. Bargains, legislative initiatives, and constitutional reforms failed to clarify legal ambiguity over coveted assets. Persistent conflict thereby became embedded in official efforts to design a robust property regime. The case of Nicaragua suggests comparisons with other countries where protracted confrontation and social violence over property rights pose serious threats to unconsolidated democratic institutions.

Honduras Has Emerged as a cocaine transshipment point between Colombia and the United States. One informed source suggests that as much as fifty tons of cocaine have moved through the country during the last fifteen months. This paper examines the politics of drug trafficking in Honduras. Special attention is given to the relations between drug trafficking and the Honduran political environment, the emergence of a new “powder elite, ” and the manner in which US and Honduran authorities are addressing these problems.

One of the hemisphere's poorest countries by almost all standards of development, Honduras has a population of about 4.5 million people and an area the size of Tennessee. Unlike neighboring Guatemala and El Salvador where a national oligarchy has enhanced its wealth through an extensive coffee industry, Honduras first emerged in the international economy through its foreign-owned banana enterprises which still are a leading source of foreign exchange.

For the past twenty years the South American republic of Colombia has suffered from a social phenomenon of such magnitude that it has defied not only the contemporary jargon of sociologists and political scientists but even the time-honored terminology of insurrection, rebellion, riot and revolution. Perhaps because the only element of this phenomenon that all observers can agree upon is the fact that it is and has been eminently violent, it has come to be called simply “la violencia,” or “The Violence.”

The phenomenon known as la violencia never has been completely absent from Colombia since 1946, but it has had two periods of particular virulence, the first between 1948 and 1953 affecting the departments of Tolima, Boyacá, Cundinamarca, Antioquia, Valle, Caldas, Cauca, Santander del Sur, Arauca, Huila, Chocó, Caquetá, Meta, Casanare, Vichada and Bolívar, that is, the entire country with the exception of parts of the Atlantic coast and the southernmost department of Nariño.

The victory of the FMLN in El Salvador's presidential elections of March 2009 has been considered remarkable, given the dominance of ARENA in four consecutive presidential races from 1989 to 2004. Using individual-level data, this article examines the determinants of electoral support for both parties over the past 15 years. Several statistical models illuminate some of the factors that led to ARENA's dominance and ultimate defeat. A combination of variables associated with different theoretical models of voting helps explain the choices made by Salvadoran voters over the years. The most consistent predictors of vote have been voters' self-reported ideology and their evaluation of the incumbent government's performance. The 2009 turnaround relates to fundamental changes in the national and international context, and also to the selection of candidates.

It is estimated that approximately 40 percent of the Colombian population now lives in cities of 100,000 or more. Although the pattern of urbanization in Colombia is more dispersed than in most Latin American countries, the proportion of the urban population living in the four largest cities has steadily increased. Over the last 13 year period, this rate of growth ranged between 4.4 and 7.0 percent (Agency for International Development, n.d.: 17). For example, Bogotá had a population in 1950 of approximately 500,000, but estimates indicate that by 1975 it will have a population of 3,605,000.

What explains mayors’ collaboration with nongovernmental organizations in delivering public goods and services? While some successful collaborations are established, in other cases the call for NGOs to coordinate with governments goes unheeded. Collaboration minimizes the duplication of effort, maximizes information sharing, and builds capacity. Given the scholarly consensus on the importance of collaboration, we know little about it at local levels, where it may matter most. This article focuses on Bolivia, a country with deep decentralization reforms and an active NGO sector. It utilizes survey data on mayors from 2007 to provide insight into the variation in NGO–local government collaboration across a country. It argues that political context is important: mayoral turnover, greater community group engagement, and more municipal resources deter collaboration. The findings illustrate the strategic interplay between state and nonstate actors and explain the uneven geographies of partnerships in governance.

Criminal groups often avoid the limelight, shunning publicity. However, in some instances, they overtly communicate, such as with banners or signs. This article explains the competition dynamics behind public criminal communication and provides theory and evidence of the conditions under which it emerges. Relying on a new dataset of approximately 1,800 banners publicly deployed by Mexican criminal groups from 2007 to 2010, the study identifies the conditions behind such messaging. The findings suggest that criminal groups “go public” in the presence of interorganizational contestation, violence from authorities, antagonism toward the local media, local demand for drugs, and local drug production. Some of these factors are associated only with communication toward particular audiences: rivals, the state, or the public. An interesting finding is that the correlates of criminal propaganda are sometimes distinct from those of criminal violence, suggesting that these phenomena are explained by separate dynamics.

Developing a line of thought from an earlier essay (Morse, 1973: II, 11-55), this paper examines some points of departure for a comparative analysis of urbanization in Latin America and the United States during the nineteenth century. Two assumptions guide the inquiry: first, that the “external dependency” thesis so frequently invoked to explain Latin American urban development easily leads to dogmatism; second, that geoeconomic factors must be perceived as interacting with those of the sociopolitical order.

To set broad guidelines for our effort we might construe the economic and institutional development of the United States and Latin America along the lines of two tensions or counterpoints.

United States. Here the North and West with their commercial agriculture, trading energies, and industrialization faced the commercially and financially dependent South, its socioeconomic organization conditioned by the plantation system, slavery, and export agriculture.