Why should one publish in LARR? How does one publish in LARR? These questions are asked by graduate students, foreign colleagues, and researchers moving into Latin American studies. For the benefit of such prospective authors, it may be worth reviewing the pros and cons of publishing in this journal.

If one is to believe what a good number of commentators on the Venezuelan political scene have written over the years, democracy in that country has been in perpetual crisis. By at least the mid-1970s, the view that the democratic system established in 1958 was deteriorating rapidly had become widely accepted in the Venezuelan press and among Venezuelan academic analysts. It was not always clear, however, exactly what was meant by “the crisis” (Peña 1978; Stempel-Paris 1981; Romero 1986). This perception of crisis intensified some years later, to the point that one outsider observed in 1984 that according to the prevailing view of democracy in Venezuela, the political system must be totally bankrupt and its survival could be explained only as the result “of an unprecedented act of political will or of the imbecility of the population” (Baloyra n.d., 2).

The new democracy in Chile provides an interesting test case for two influential lines of thinking on Latin American political economy. Both these perspectives have claimed that the recently installed civilian regimes would find it exceedingly difficult to effect equity-enhancing change. One hypothesis has stressed the impediments posed by a capitalist free-market system to measures favoring the poor. The other has emphasized the obstacles presented by a transition to democracy that avoids a rupture with the preceding conservative dictatorship. Because the democratic government led by Patricio Aylwin (1990–1994) faced both types of constraints, it should have been particularly unlikely to achieve greater social fairness.

The Provincias Unidas del Centro de América (later called the Federación de la América Central) lasted from 1824 to 1838. Despite the various reasons for the union's disintegration in 1838, the dream of reunification has resurfaced at least twenty-five times. Geography, three hundred years of colonial union, and what Thomas Karnes has termed “more bonds of similarity than any other small group of nations” have all made the region of Central America an obvious candidate for unification.

Scholars have long recognized that the final quarter of the eighteenth century in Brazil witnessed an agricultural renaissance in which traditional exports expanded and new tropical products began to find their way overseas (Prado Júnior 1967; Novais 1979; Arruda 1980, 1986; Alden 1984). In recent years, more attention has been paid to the diversified productive activities supplying an increasingly consolidated domestic market during this period (Brown 1986; Barickman 1991; Fragoso 1992). Although most of those activities were agricultural, artisan trades also flourished and domestic industry appears to have been growing, particularly the cottage textile industry. My examination of an unexplored and unusual primary source has revealed grounds for assuming that cloth and thread were being made throughout much of late colonial Brazil. The primary evidence also suggests that this cottage industry resembled the incipient stages of so-called European proto-industrialization to a remarkable degree, although important differences cannot be ignored. Nor does the regionalized nature of the source allow for generalizing about the colony as a whole. This research is thus a preliminary investigation that calls for further research. It nevertheless points out the potential importance of domestic industry within the overall Brazilian colonial economy and stimulates awareness of its complexities.