The process of political transition in Mexico has fostered several institutional transformations in the political system. Such changes do not modify the system's design, but they do reactivate some basic institutions and forgotten powers that affect the operation of the political system as a whole. The state governors have undergone one of the most relevant transformations: they have gained more autonomy and have forged a new relationship with the federal executive. This essay analyzes the different actions governors have taken depending on their partisan origin. While the PAN governors focus on administrative and financial issues, the PRI governors have developed the most important political challenges to the president's authority.

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.

How do Latin America’s poorest citizens participate in politics? This article explores the role that community organizations play in mobilizing individuals into three common modes of political participation: voting, protesting, and contacting government. It argues that community organizations help mobilize poor individuals both through the resources they provide for mobilization and because they serve as sites where political parties target individuals for mobilization. It analyzes survey data from LAPOP surveys for 18 Latin American countries and finds that overall, poor people are just as politically active as more affluent individuals; that involvement in community organizations is a very strong predictor of all types of political participation; and that membership in organizations has an especially strong effect on voting and protesting for poor people. By equalizing levels of political participation across income groups, organizations help erase class-based inequalities in participation that have plagued democracies in the region.

Colombian Politics, by 1982, were characterized by stagnation, increased levels of violence, and diminished regime legitimacy. In the face of an active, though limited, guerrilla insurgency as well as nascent labor unrest and popular protest, the successive governments of the National Front had come to depend on the coercive powers of the state to preserve public order and political stability. Colombia's peace process, initiated during the government of Conservative President Belisario Betancur (1982- 1986), was a recognition of the limits, indeed the failure, of the military solution to the maintenance of public order.

The early relations of Latin America and Japan, representing a distinct chapter in the discovery of East Asia by the West, are attributable to the initial thrust of West European expansion beginning in the late fifteenth century, led by Portugal and Spain. Magellan claimed the Philippines for Spain in 1521, and following the conquest of Mexico, and later Peru, Spain sought to establish a trans-Pacific route for communication and commerce. The conquest of the Philippines, carried on from 1565 to 1571 under the leadership of Miguel López de Legaspi, foreshadowed the beginning of the Manila-Acapulco trade, which was subsequently carried on until 1815. In 1606 there were 3,000 Japanese colonists in Manila, and 15,000 in Dilao, which included Manila. Some Japanese, as well as Chinese, served as crew members on the Spanish galleons, and it is probable that these Japanese were the first in recorded history to reach the Americas (Ishii, 1937: 88; Bradley, 1942: 11; Meskill et al., 1971: 74-86; Schurz, 1939: 99-128).

The financial problems faced by Mexico since late December 1994 are the result of a balance of payments crisis which developed earlier during the year when a number of economic and political developments came together to disrupt its financing plans. A combination of events — an increase in US interest rates, political ferment and presidential elections in Mexico, plus capital flight from Mexico which was prompted, in turn, by lax monetary policy during the last weeks of the Salinas administration — all helped contribute to, and culminated in, a collapse of the peso at the end of 1994. As a result, the incoming administration of President Ernesto Zedillo found itself in the position of having to devalue the peso, a move that sparked severe economic repercussions, including a crisis of confidence that spread beyond Mexico to affect other emerging markets as well.

The February 1990 elections in Nicaragua were hailed by the popular media and the US administration as signaling the country's rejection of authoritarian rule in favor of Western-style democracy. Most commentators interpreted the results in Nicaragua as part of a worldwide trend triggered by events in Eastern Europe. According to the conventional wisdom, as long as the Sandinistas handed over power, including control of the military and security forces, democracy would flourish in Nicaragua.

While competitive elections may be a necessary condition for democracy, they certainly are not a sufficient one. Throughout history, countless elections have been held, yet relatively few have contributed much of anything to the consolidation of democratic rule. Elections can serve a number of functions other than the public contestation of power. For example, they can be used to legitimize an incumbent regime, diffuse political opposition, or respond to foreign pressure.

This article promotes the idea that multinational corporations have independent agency in the process of economic reform in Latin American host countries. Through a number of pooled cross-sectional time series analyses, it shows that accumulated foreign direct investment can affect policy reform in ways unanticipated by earlier theories predicated on the obsolescence of firms' influence after initial investment. The influence of firms varies across different reform areas, and competitive pressures lead firms to press alternately for liberal and illiberal reform measures. The study also considers sectoral issues, and argues that a preponderance of natural resource–oriented FDI can alter the impact of multinational investment on policy reform. Indexes of economic reform are measured against stocks of FDI and a number of political and economic control variables. Evidence shows that the dramatic increase in FDI in the region in recent years has bolstered firms' bargaining power and concomitant policy leverage.

This article studies the development of informal bargaining tables to mitigate postelectoral conflicts in some 15 percent of Mexico's local elections between 1989 and 2000, even as formally autonomous electoral commissions and courts were being constituted. By documenting the dual institutions that resulted, the study qualifies theories of institutional design that take actor consent for granted. It argues that in the Mexican case and perhaps others, elections, particularly subnational elections, are focal points for informal bargaining over rules that are the true motors of protracted transitions. It finds electoral institutions to be critical to democratization, but for reasons beyond those given by most institutionalists.

The problems associated with drug abuse in the United States have received considerable attention in recent years. By the mid-1970s, approximately 500,000 Americans were addicted to heroin, while at least 15 million were regular or casual users of marijuana. None of this heroin originates domestically, and only a small percentage of the marijuana, and this of low potency, is home-grown. Consequently, the question of source has become cardinal to most analyses of drug use and abuse in the United States.

Mexico has long been the primary source of high potency marijuana for the American market. Despite the recent influx from Jamaica and Colombia, Mexico still supplies an estimated 70% of the annual American consumption, or some 10 million pounds. More importantly, Mexico is currently the source of 70% to 80% of the heroin on the U.S. market, an alarming 6-8 ton annual figure. Furthermore, Mexico is both a primary transshipment route for cocaine, an increasingly popular drug originating in South America, and the source of vast quantities of psychotropic substances.

Chile today is experiencing a new sociopolitical compromise no less significant than the so-called “compromise state” of the 1930s and 1940s. A central feature of the new arrangement has been the performance of Chile’s party system. This role should be understood in terms of how it reflects, and helps to mitigate or aggravate, the tension between capital accumulation and the struggles over sociopolitical inclusion and distribution.

Prior to the mid-1960s, there was little concern in Brazil for the relative size of different ownership sectors—state, domestic private and multinational (Baer et al., 1973; Baer et al., 1977). The main policy objective had been the promotion of import-substitution-industrialization (ISI). Because the Brazilian domestic private sector did not have the technological and financial means to create new industries with a high technology content or to help expand public utilities, multinational firms and state enterprises were relied upon to carry out those tasks. The National Bank for Economic Development (BNDE) was created in order to finance the state's direct participation in Brazil's economy.

This article examines candidate favorability among Colombian expatriates and Colombians in the home country in the 2010 Colombian presidential elections. It analyzes the influence of several socioeconomic, migratory, mobilizing, and contextual factors on candidate appraisal using a large exit poll conducted at Colombian consulates in five cities in the United States and Europe and five cities with high emigration rates in Colombia. Aside from differences in candidate favorability stemming from socioeconomic variables (education, income, and religious affiliation), Colombians living abroad largely evaluate candidates in ways similar to Colombians living in the country.

This article proposes a research agenda for the organization of the executive branch in Latin America by reviewing the literature on the U.S. and Latin American presidencies and outlining the research gap between them. The study finds that while strong, regionwide patterns have been established about cabinets in Latin America, research is lagging behind on the presidential center, presidential advisory networks, and their effects in policymaking. The article sets forth a series of research questions and suggests a combination of quantitative, social network, and case study strategies to address them.

Using an innovative survey of protest participants and nonparticipants from five major street demonstrations in Mexico City in 2011 and 2012, this study tests the assumption that influences on protest participation vary across different types of events; namely, ritual demonstrations and reactive protests. The comparison is based on two assumptions: that these are two of the dominant forms of protest in contemporary Latin America, and that specifying the context for different types of social movement participation provides a better understanding of the individual mobilization process for groups seeking to defend their rights or gain new benefits. The comparative analyses reveal some crucial differences. Political interest and previous political experience are more influential in the decision to take part in reactive demonstrations. For ritual demonstrations, the decision to participate tends to be driven more by personal and organizational connections.

Boom and collapse characterized the history of the Brazilian rubber industry. Its rise and fall followed a pattern well established by dyewood, sugar, gold, diamonds, tobacco, cotton, and cacao. The story of these industries points out one of the major themes in Brazilian history: the recurrence of economic cycles during which one product of the soil dominates the development of the entire country or a large part of it. This cyclical development prompted the Brazilian economist J. F. Normano to conclude: “The history of Brazilian economy is a sensational record with amazing fluctuations. It is a history of the appearance and disappearance of entire industries.” A team of American economists sent to study the economy in the late forties concurred.

Religion and politics have depended on and influenced one another since the origins of what we know as Latin America. Their relation is both mutual and multifaceted; mutual because religion and politics have evolved together over the years, taking material and symbolic support from one another, and multifaceted because it embraces interinstitutional conflict and accommodation (e.g., the “church-state” relations which dominated earlier scholarship) as well as more subtle and elusive exchanges whereby religious and political orders gave legitimacy and moral authority to one another. In this process, religious notions of hierarchy, authority, and obedience reflected and reinforced the pattern of existing social and political arrangements to such an extent that the two orders often seemed indistinguishable.

The early 1950s mark a turning-point in the history of religious movements among the Japanese minority in Brazil. Various religious groups, particularly certain Buddhist sects and the so-called “new religions” of Japan for the first time undertook active proselytization through organized propaganda and missionary activities. The following are representative types of these religious groups:

1. (1) those which had been transplanted from Japan to Brazil by Japanese immigrants in the period before World War II and immediately after: Honmon Butsuryü Shü (a Buddhist sect), Tenri-kyō, Ōmoto, and ō-no-Ie (all three new religions), and the like;

2. (2) Buddhist sects which began to try to organize their “potential adherents” among the Japanese on the basis of household religious affiliation, regardless of how tenuous or how thoroughly lapsed;

3. (3) those which had grown rapidly in postwar Japan and extended their propagation activities overseas: new religions like Sekai Kyūsei Kyō, P.L. Kyōdan, and so on;

4. (4) those which originated with the Japanese minority in Brazil on the basis of traditional Japanese folk beliefs: Nossa Senhora de Kannon (Our Lady of Kannon, or Sei Kannon Shū HakkokuKannon Dō), Kaminoya Yaoyorozu-kyō, Fudō Myōō, Shinreikyō, and the like;

5. (5) Umbanda, a syncretic fusion of African cults, Catholicism, and ‘ spiritism.

Throughout the 1960s, all these religious movements became increasingly active and gained more and more followers.

In democratic, integrated political systems characterized by a sharing of fundamental social values and “primitive beliefs” among the population, elections serve a salutary purpose. They not only reaffirm the commitment and involvement of the citizen to the prevailing political system by the ritual act of voting participation, but simultaneously legitimize the means and processes by which political values are authoritatively allocated (Milnor, 1969: 1-2). Elections and voting “draw attention to common social ties and to the importance and apparent reasonableness of accepting the public policies that are adopted (Edelman, 1964: 3). For these reasons, elections serve to integrate the citizen into the polity.

This article examines the World Bank's role in the market policy reform experiences of Mexico and Argentina. It argues that while reform was driven by domestic elites, the bank played an important role, providing technical advice and financial support and helping to spread market reform ideas. The nature of the bank's involvement, however, differed substantially in the two countries because of their distinct political arrangements, histories, and geopolitical positions in regard to the United States. In the recent era of second-generation reforms, the World Bank's involvement in compensatory policy development has become more focused, although still more intense in Argentina than in Mexico. This involvement has important implications for the quality of democracy, insofar as the 1990s market reforms were formulated by insulated international policy networks unaccountable to the public. Recently, the bank has declared its commitment to involve civil society in its lending policies, a move that may have important implications for democratic development.