Numerous studies on the determinants of foreign direct investment flows in Latin America underscore the importance of risk- and cost-mitigating institutions that support good governance, political and economic freedom, and demonstrate a credible commitment to economic reform by regional governments. This study tests these variables against market size, macroeconomic policy, and factor controls to assess which combinations of variables explain the distribution of foreign inflows. Using a time-series cross-sectional data set of fifteen Latin American economies from 1985 to 2003, the study concludes that past performance on the current account provides sufficient commitment by regional governments and that regime, good governance, and reform variables are, by comparison, inconsistent predictors of foreign direct investment.

For many who thought of Venezuela as a consolidated democracy, the 1992 coup attempts came as a complete surprise. Those familiar with the deterioration of its democratic regime, in contrast, were more surprised that the coups did not succeed. This article provides an institution-centered explanation of the puzzle of why the 1992 coup attempts occurred, why they failed, and why the Venezuelan military has remained quiescent in the years that followed. Institutions of civilian control created during the post-1958 “Punto Fijo” period, particularly those based on fragmenting the officer corps, prevented the collapse of the democratic regime in 1992. These same institutions allowed civilians to regain authority over the armed forces during the Rafael Caldera administration and have ensured the subordination of the armed forces to elected authorities to the present. It is also argued that the institutional basis for civilian control has been dismantled during the Fifth Republic, heightening the likelihood of future civil-military conflict and threatening regime stability.

Latin American elites authored and disseminated ideologies of mestizaje or race mixture, but does the general population value them today? Using the 2010 Americas Barometer, we examined public opinion about mestizaje in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru using survey questions that modeled mestizaje both as a principle of national development and as tolerance for intermarriage with black or indigenous people. We found that most Latin Americans support mestizaje, although support varies by country and ethnicity. Across countries, we find partial evidence that the strength of earlier nation-making mestizaje ideas is related to support for mestizaje today, and that strong multicultural policies may have actually strengthened such support. Ethnoracial minorities showed particular support for the national principle of mestizaje. Finally, we discovered that the national principle of mestizaje is associated with more tolerant attitudes about intermarriage, especially in countries with large Afro-descendant populations.

The conventional wisdom about contemporary Venezuelan politics is that class voting has become commonplace, with the poor doggedly supporting Hugo Chávez while the rich oppose him. This class voting is considered both a new feature of Venezuelan politics and a puzzle given the multiclass bases of prior populist leaders in Latin America. I clarify the concept of class voting by distinguishing between monotonic and nonmonotonic associations between class and vote choice. Using survey data, I find that only in Chávez's first election in 1998 was class voting monotonic. Since then, class voting in Venezuela has been nonmonotonic, with the very wealthiest Venezuelans disproportionately voting against Chávez. At the same time, Chávez's support appears to have increased most among the middle sectors of the income distribution, not the poorest. Finally, I find that whatever effect Chávez may have had on overall turnout, his efforts have not disproportionately mobilized poor voters.

The political tensions surrounding economic stabilization in revolutionary Nicaragua between 1979 and 1988 will be examined in this article. A review of the Nicaraguan case reveals that the Sandinista model of a mixed economy (presupposing at least simple reproduction of the capitalist, small producer, and state sectors) with multiclass “national unity” created a series of demands that were increasingly difficult to reconcile with defense priorities and longer-term goals for socioeconomic transformation. After 1981, access to external finance became more restrictive, the payoff horizon for investment projects began to lengthen, and destabilization intensified. Failure to assess these internal and external tensions realistically contributed to inflationary pressures and de facto shifts in income distribution, which at times undermined the consolidation of revolutionary hegemony and required reconsidering alliance strategies.

The United Nations describes aquaculture as the fastest-growing method of food production, and some industry boosters have heralded the coming of a sustainable blue revolution. This article interprets the meteoric rise and sudden collapse of Atlantic salmon aquaculture in southern Chile (1980–2010) by integrating concepts from commodity studies and comparative environmental history. I juxtapose salmon aquaculture to twentieth-century export banana production to reveal the similar dynamics that give rise to “commodity diseases”—events caused by the entanglement of biological, social, and political-economic processes that operate on local, regional, and transoceanic geographical scales. Unsurprisingly, the risks and burdens associated with commodity diseases are borne disproportionately by production workers and residents in localities where commodity disease events occur. Chile's blue revolution suggests that evaluating the sustainability of aquaculture in Latin America cannot be divorced from processes of accumulation.

On the Colombian Left during the 1940s, little differentiated the rank and file of the Communist party from the left wing of the Liberal party. Individuals commonly moved back and forth between the two groups. Animosity was rampant among leaders, however, as shown by the clashes between the principal compañeros and Jorge Eliécer Gaitán's left-Liberal populist mobilization. As this rivalry played out in the Communist strongholds of the union movement, it became apparent that a large portion of the organized working class (perhaps a majority) supported Gaitán even though their leaders dismissed him as a fascist. Workers, organized and unorganized, clearly demonstrated their belief that Gaitanismo was a radical movement of change despite the fact that it arose within the traditional party system.

On International Women's Day in March 1958, ten thousand women gathered in the largest stadium in Caracas to celebrate the fall of the dictatorship of Major Marcos Pérez Jiménez and to commemorate the many women who had taken an active role in opposing it. This gathering was the first mass meeting following the demise of authoritarian rule. Despite the array of political views represented in the audience and on the dais, unity was stressed by every speaker. Women had struggled against the dictatorship united, and united they would promote their own rights in the fledgling democracy. But within a year, the women's group that had sponsored the rally disbanded. Women did not hold another nonpartisan meeting for sixteen years, and then only when the United Nations' International Women's Year in 1974 galvanized the two thousand participants. During the first thirty years of democracy in Venezuela, women held no more than 5 percent of congressional seats and few of the decision-making positions in political parties.

Despite certain early efforts to interpret Mexico as a pluralist constitutional democracy, or democracy-in-the-making (Scott 1959; Tucker 1957), scholars today almost universally agree that the political system of Mexico is authoritarian. The trappings of Mexico's liberal constitution and elections notwithstanding, Mexico's Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) serves to integrate the polity under the highly centralized control of a single institution that dominates access to all public office. At the apex of the PRI is the Mexican president, who not only chooses his own successor but controls access to the PRI's candidate lists for all other public offices and therefore dominates both the party and the congress. In sum, as Coleman and Davis argue, Mexico fits the ideal type of authoritarian political organization because “decisions are made almost exclusively by the ruling elite rather than by democratic, pluralist processes” and because “there are severe restrictions placed upon political mobilization” (1976, 195).

1970s Latin America was a hotbed of theoretical and methodological innovation in the social sciences and the arts, developing novel approaches to studying social reality to support social movements. This article uses Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda’s field notes and his four-volume work Historia doble de la Costa to analyze how he and his colleagues, working in collaboration with the Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos on the Caribbean coast, developed the methodology of participatory action research, which attempted to erase the distinction between researchers and researched, and to rewrite the history of the peasantry from below using novel formats.

The Mexican automobile manufacturing industry experienced rapid sociopolitical change in the 1960s and 1970s as workers in several firms overthrew entrenched labor leaders and instituted democratic forms of union governance. These reform movements sought increased participation by the rank and file in union affairs and heightened worker control over different aspects of the production process. For many workers, democratic unionism promised increased leadership responsiveness in resolving workplace conflicts and more effective representation of worker interests in a changing industrial environment. Specific measures of democratic unionism included the election of key union officers and their accountability to members, regularly held general assemblies, an enhanced role for the general assembly in internal decision making, procedural safeguards of workers' union rights, and opportunities for the emergence of identifiable and relatively stable internal opposition factions. By 1975 workers in five of the seven major terminal firms (those manufacturing vehicles) had won control over the selection of union leaders and other phases of internal union decision making.

Previous research suggests that Mexican female migrants face more barriers than their male counterparts. However, few studies examine how the educational characteristics of female migrants differ from those of male migrants and how selectivity may have changed in the context of evolving gender dynamics in both countries. This study uses U.S. and Mexican census data from 1960 to 2000 to compare the educational attainments of recent Mexican immigrants to Mexican nonmigrants. Both male and female immigrants are positively selected—that is, more educated than nonmigrants in Mexico—and that selectivity increased from 1960 to 2000. Women are more highly selected than men throughout the past four decades, but earlier female migrants tended to have more education than more recent female migrants, who tend to come from the middle of the educational distribution.

Using the 2006 Mexican Social Mobility Survey, this article evaluates the influence of parental wealth on several outcomes of adult children, including educational attainment, consumption level, asset holdings, home ownership, and home value. Three main findings emerge from the analysis. First, parental wealth is a strong determinant of educational attainment, net of the standard indicators of socioeconomic advantage. Furthermore, the influence of parental wealth appears to be stronger among the most disadvantaged children—those with low cultural capital residing in rural areas. Second, the mechanism of parental influence on adult children's economic well-being differs depending on the outcome: in the case of consumption level, the influence is largely indirect, mediated by offspring's human capital, while the opposite is true for children's asset holdings, where a direct transfer of resources predominates. Third, access to homeownership is only weakly stratified by economic resources, but parental wealth significantly affects home value. The findings here highlight the critical but largely neglected impact of wealth on inequality and mobility in Latin America.

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.

This research note seeks to offer some resolution to the theoretical disagreements over how democratization affects civil society, specifically in a transition toward democracy that occurs through pacted settlements of an armed internal conflict. Using a comparative study over time of the labor movement in El Salvador, the authors demonstrate that while unions of the political center and left have weakened since the signing of the Salvadoran Peace Accords, independent labor groups show higher levels of organizing and right-leaning unions have maintained nearly constant levels of organizing. But the labor movement has become atomized because unions have been unable to redefine their once-common political goals to adopt other unified stances in the postwar period. The data show that the unions that have relinquished excessively politicized stances or never claimed them are the ones that survive and sometimes grow in the postwar environment. These findings have implications for the nature of the emerging Salvadoran democracy and the economic well-being of its citizens.

In the last ten years, the rural history of the colonial Río de la Plata and to a lesser extent that of the first half of the nineteenth century have witnessed an unprecedented boom. Research projects, new sets of questions, and the utilization of new sources and methodologies have all proliferated. Today we have undoubtedly come a long way in our understanding of these issues from where we were only a decade ago.

The Maya of Guatemala are today, as they have been in the past, a dominated and beleaguered group. Few have expressed this enduring reality more poignantly than the late Oliver La Farge. Commenting forty years ago on why Kanjobal Indians take to drink, La Farge observed that “while these people undoubtedly suffer from drunkenness, one would hesitate to remove the bottle from them until the entire pattern of their lives is changed. They are an introverted people, consumed by internal fires which they cannot or dare not express, eternally chafing under the yoke of conquest, and never for a moment forgetting that they are a conquered people.”

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Latin America experienced a so-called left turn that sought either to reform or eliminate the neoliberal institutions established during the 1980s and 1990s. However, although Peru has electoral, economic, and social processes similar to those of its neighbors, the neoliberal institutions established in Peru by the 1993 Constitution remain firmly in place. This article aims to understand the mechanisms sustaining Peru's neoliberal regime since its creation. Why have these institutions survived and grown in strength in a regional environment that has been hostile to neoliberal legacies? The article answers that question, emphasizing the evolution of the balance of power between the precarious Peruvian political class and the empowered technocrats and bureaucrats within the state. The reformist politicians are too weak and amateurish to challenge the technobureaucrats within the state. Moreover, the article analyzes the different strategies deployed by technocrats and bureaucrats in order to ensure the continuity and stability of the neoliberal regime and its policies. Theoretically, the article suggests that institutional stability can arise from a daily process gradually shaped by actors and their strategies.