The international debt crisis has received a great deal of attention at the macroeconomic and the political levels, but there have been few analyses of its impact upon individual sectors. Thus this article will consider the consequences of the Latin American debt crisis for manufacturing industry, particularly the adjustments that this sector has made in its response to the crisis.

The adjustment process which the manufacturing sector has undergone has produced implications which depend partly upon factors exogenous to the sector and partly upon the nature, and degree of competitiveness, of the manufacturing activity in each of the countries. In turn, the latter factors have been influenced by those very macroeconomic and exogenous variables. Some variables, such as the exchange rate, play major roles in determining the competitiveness of industry, as has frequently been emphasized in recent years. This is true of a number of variables at the industry and enterprise level as well.

Central America has always seemed to me a particularly fruitful object of study, of economic and particularly monetary affairs, because of the existence of six countries of not too different size and economic structure. This situation provides an opportunity for assessing the workings of certain economic principles.

In economic terms, the countries of Central America are very small units. For such units, economics can provide a few analytical propositions that seem prima facie plausible. One is that such economies need not indefinitely specialize in exports of primary products, but if they diversity and industrialize their economies, it must be for export. Industrialization for the domestic market is unlikely to permit sufficient economies of scale. In this regard, the Central American countries have industrialized much less than the small republics in the Far East, and accordingly have not enjoyed as rapid a rate of economic growth.

Current experience in international relations reveals not only an increase in the number of international organizations but also a proportionately greater number of associated problems. One of these problems is the ascertainment of legal status and the assessment of the nature and significance of nonmembership.

As long as there are international organizations that embrace less than a universal membership, there will be nonmembers. The problems of nonmembers become particularly acute when one or more of the “great powers” (or states sponsored by them) are involved; the absence of the United States from the League of Nations and the absence of continental China and the divided nations of Germany, Korea, Vietnam, and others from the United Nations attest to this fact.

Negotiating a treaty between two sovereign nations is no simple matter. Even when there is consensus that a new accord is long overdue, a solution acceptable to both governments and their most vocal constituencies is most elusive and often difficult to conclude within a reasonable period of time. This is especially true when there is strong popular opinion aroused on both sides. Discussions usually drag on, and while diplomats publicly agree that “progress is being made,” there are significant political and economic benefits unrealized by either or both countries involved in the negotiation proceedings (Lopez Guevara, 1976).

The present treaty negotiations between the Republic of Panama and the United States of America is a case in point. That Panamanian public opinion is aroused on the Canal issue is indicated by the 1964 Canal Zone border incidents in which twenty-one Panamanians and three Americans died and by subsequent demonstrations.

While Peru's economic development is highly influenced by its resource endowment and the price structure of its exports, the style of industrialization will be determined in large part by the type and amount of social mobility its class structure permits. Although similar ethnically to Guatemala and Bolivia, Peru so far has managed to forestall a basic social revolution and has developed under one of the most private “free enterprise” regimes in Latin America. It should therefore be interesting to examine the type of class structure and social mobility that underlies this stage of development.

In terms of a model of the process of industrialization, I shall emphasize the distinctive features of the transitional stage. It seems that a folk-urban, traditional-modern dichotomy—or even a transitional type that is merely halfway between these extremes—is not adequate.

In the past decade or so the international relations of Latin America—for many years the subject of legalistic, institutional, polemical, or purely descriptive analyses—has been investigated on a much more sophisticated basis. Dependencia has emerged as a major organizing concept in much of the literature, and “bureaucratic politics” has provided a focus for some of the work emanating from North American scholars on U.S. Latin American policies. There are a number of other frameworks as well. Welcome as the wealth of new studies is, they nevertheless present us for the first time with a problem of assessing the utility of various theoretical approaches or at least with the challenge of relating them to one another in a meaningful fashion.

Estudiando esta época que en la historia americana se llama “crucismo”, es rare que algún boliviano después de leer los documentos históricos sobre el Mariscal don Andrés Santa Cruz no se apasione. Investigando esta época que se llama “crucismo” se logra sin dificultad comprender lo que fue Bolivia, lo que quiso ser y lo que es ahora. Nuestras desgracias nos vienen desde esa etapa, por haber querido ser grandes y abatido las alas del cóndor andino, por no haber comprendido con cerebro la “Confederatión”, como no la comprendieron los adversaries del Mariscal Santa Cruz. Y no es temerario decir que nuestra expiatión como bolivianos nace desde la batalla de Yungay. Es curioso, por otra parte, que la mayoría de los bolivianos no conocen su propia historia y no se reconcilian espiritualmente, pensando que todas las cosas son transitorias y que los pueblos siguen a sus caudillos y se encarnan en ellos.

Comparative examples of “good government” at the subnational level may underanalyze the “public goods” problem facing politicians. Delegating authority and resources to policymaking agencies is possible when political conflict is low. The benefits can be maintained only if public agencies establish ties of “horizontal embeddedness” with industrial clients. This case study of innovative industrial policymaking in Minas Gerais, which is compared with one from Rio de Janeiro, finds that horizontal, interagency ties were critical to policy success. The contrast leads to an examination of the mineiro system's efficacy in promoting externalities, attracting foreign investment, and planning infrastructure in the state's automotive industry.

Literature on the Guatemalan Civil War has debated whether or not state violence was triggered by rebel activities. Did the government respond to each insurrection caused by the rebels, or did it blindly target regions where antigovernment antipathy and movements had historically prevailed? Because state violence was extensive during the civil war period, the dynamism of the war could have been the reason for its occurrence. Relying on the threat-response model of state violence, this article argues that human rights violations occurred when the government perceived a rebel threat that would have seriously degraded its capability in future counterinsurgencies. The article employs propensity score matching to address the problem of confounding in empirical analysis, and reveals that rebel attacks, particularly those targeting security apparatus and resulting in human injury, increased the likelihood of state violence in the Guatemalan Civil War.

In contemporary Latin America, deep-seated social discontent with political elites and institutions has been, paradoxically, the counterpart of democratic stability and resilience. This paradox suggests that scholarly assessments of democracy are, at least partially, at odds with citizens’ own views of democracy. This article thus develops a framework to describe citizens’ everyday experience with civil, political, and social entitlements associated with democracy. It introduces the framework by analyzing the structural underpinnings of democratic discontent in Chile and then applying it to the analysis of perceived citizenship entitlements in 18 countries, using the AmericasBarometer data. Significant variance is observed across time and both across and within countries. The descriptive findings also imply that only a (declining) minority of Latin American citizens feel fully entitled to civil, political, and social citizenship rights. We advocate the need to bring the demand side of democracy back to the analysis of democratic shortcomings and crises.

This article examines the dynamics of collective behavior in Santiago, Chile every September 11, the date of the 1973 coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. It uses a multiple-method strategy that includes participant observation, personal interviews, and content analysis of three major newspapers during the period 2003–8. The theoretical approach emphasizes time and space coordinates of specified social actors, sociocultural emergence, a limited range of dominant emotions, and dramaturgy to describe the complexity of ritualized commemorations. It shows that incidents occurring on this date are not primarily caused by the actions of social movement organizations. Moreover, the dichotomy of “day and night” used to understand the peaceful and violent commemorations is an oversimplification of a complex network of events, actors, and scenarios that has the effect of denying any legitimacy to actions that fall outside the state-approved practices.

The use of veto points to block policy change has received significant attention in Latin America, but the different institutional venues have not been analyzed in a unified framework. Uruguay is exceptional in that political actors use both referendums and judicial review as effective ways to oppose public policies. While the activation of direct democracy mechanisms in Uruguay has been widely studied, the surge in the use of the judicial venue remains underexplored. This article argues that veto point use responds to the ideological content of policies adopted by different coalitions and the type of interest organization affected. It shows that policy opponents predominantly activate referendums when center-right coalitions rule and judicial review when center-left coalitions govern. It illustrates the causal argument by tracing the politics of court and referendum activation. This approach helps to bridge the gap between research on direct democracy and judicial politics, providing a unified framework.

Earlier empirical research on party list proportional representation systems shows that women spend less on campaigns than men, particularly when quotas are applied. An analysis of the candidate campaign expenses for the 2014 and 2018 Colombian Lower Chamber elections provides a novel test of this gender gap and its underlying causes. The research design leverages Colombia’s unique context of electoral institutions, with interdistrict variation in terms of quota rules, and the availability of detailed information on campaign spending and funding. The regression models show that the gender gap in campaign spending is limited to districts with quota rules and disappears among incumbents and candidates listed first on the ballot. As for funding, women candidates are most disadvantaged with regard to personal funds and corporate donations but attract as many individual donations as men do.