Most of the Latin American countries that have introduced market-friendly economic reforms during the course of the last two decades have also suffered serious increases in inequality. The systematic coincidence in timing of the two events suggests that the reforms have been one cause of the worsening distribution. The generalization that major increases in inequality have occurred in many Latin American countries over the last two decades is now widely accepted (Altimir 1994; Morley 1995). This article will add new information for a few countries (Colombia, Costa Rica, and Ecuador). Its main focus, however, is the possible causes of those increases, a complicated question because so many different currents have affected the region over this period—the economic crisis, the policy reforms, technological change, shifts in terms of trade, and still others. Samuel Morley (1995) and others have argued that much of the observed increase in inequality was related to the economic crises suffered by nearly every country in the region. This interpretation might suggest that the optimists who predicted positive distributional outcomes from the reforms (such as Krueger 1988) will eventually be vindicated, once the negative effects of the crises have played themselves out. Although I agree that this factor played a significant role, the fact that inequality appears to be significantly higher after the crisis than before (Altimir 1994) implies that other contributing factors were also at work. Of these, the reforms are suspect because of their content and implicated by the coincidences in timing with the increases.

Emiliano Zapata could well be named “man of the decade” for the 1990s in Mexico, despite the fact that he has been dead for more than seventy years. His legacy, along with the revolution he represents, has been writ large in Mexican political culture. But whose version of Zapata has been enshrined? Is he the figure inspiring the agrarian reforms introduced by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to end the government's obligation to redistribute land to the rural poor? Or is he the sacred symbol of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional's armed rebellion calling for elimination of those same reforms? How can Zapata be all these things to all these groups simultaneously? Conversely, how can any single person or group endorse both sets of cultural-political meanings that have attached to Zapata when they appear to contradict one another directly?

In the 1980s, students and practitioners of the political economy of development in Latin America became enthralled with East Asia's spectacular economic performance. Researchers wrote cross-regional comparisons trying to discover where Latin America had gone wrong and how it could catch up to the “four dragons,” meaning South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong (see Deyo 1987; Gereffi and Wyman 1990; Haggard 1990). This quest to determine the key ingredients of East Asia's growth held particular policy relevance as many Latin American countries sought to escape from the “lost decade.” The best-known attempts to describe the political basis for East Asia's successful turn toward policies stressing export-led growth have emphasized two factors: initiative of state leadership and highly capable technocracies insulated from societal interference (Haggard 1990; Wade 1990). Among Latin America countries, Chile, the region's premier exporter, seemed to confirm these ideas.

Environmentalism in Guatemala has emerged in conjunction with trends toward regional democratization and international economic globalization. These origins have helped form and continue to shape the organizational structure, membership, and policy orientation of the movement as well as its strategies and tactics for policy implementation. The ecology movement became closely associated with party politics during the democratization of the 1980s and eventually established an almost symbiotic relationship with the administration of the Partido Democracia Cristiana under Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo (1986-1990). But this early alliance with the Democracia Cristiana eventually weakened the movement's ability to make independent policy decisions and to protect itself from attacks by opposing parties. The relationship between the environmental movement and the state also reinforced the movement's dependence on international financing. These party and international connections have limited the organizational scope of the movement, with the result being that the ecological movement in Guatemala today remains small and urban-based and lacks a strong grassroots foundation.

Latin America has long provided most of the world's coffee. At the same time, dependence on coffee exports has profoundly affected many Latin American countries. This research note will analyze the relationship between primary-commodity exporting and development by means of a case study of attempts by Latin American countries to industrialize their exports by exporting instant coffee rather than green coffee beans. A commodity-chain approach will be used to explain how the initiatives of Latin American states and private firms have responded to and changed the structure of the global system of producing instant coffee. Three Latin American countries—Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador—have become significant exporters of instant coffee, but the benefits they have realized from this effort have been limited by the control exercised by transnational corporations over the global production system.