Real wages describe changes in the material standard of living of wage earners. This article reviews the national experience of Mexico through the twentieth century, surveying more than thirty studies from the late Porfiriato to the opening of the twenty-first century. The data suggest that real wages follow a long-term cyclical pattern of alternate periods of declining and rising wages. As a consequence, twentieth-century Mexico was not kind to workers because the gains of one period seem to be offset by falls in the next. Wage trends in Mexico and the rest of Latin America seemed to follow similar paths, except during the years following Mexico's revolution, when a new labor regime especially benefited the country's wage earners. Following a significant downturn in the 1940s, workers in Mexico and Latin America experienced a favorable period of income growth during the postwar boom. The debt crisis of the 1980s induced a long decline that continued through the early years of globalization.

This article analyzes the conservative narratives underlying current changes in Brazilian rural development public policies. It first presents an overview of the recognition and institutionalization of family farming and the main policies created in support of this segment. Subsequently, it discusses how a conservative narrative started to question the ability of these policies to integrate family farmers into modern agricultural markets. Focusing on how this narrative tries to legitimate a new “referential” for public action, the article analyzes the discourse on newly occurring segregation between agricultural policies for productive farmers and social policies for unproductive ones. It demonstrates how this discourse excludes family farmers from the social pact that prevailed over the past three decades and depended on the state as an actor to mediate the contradictions in the unstable coexistence of agribusiness and family-farming logics. Finally, it analyzes how rural social movements are reacting to this process.

Conservation-development interactions intensified as a consequence of environmental and land-use changes in Latin America during the 1985–2008 period. This study examines predominant changes in five countries (Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia). Multifold increase of protected areas for environmental conservation occurred together with agricultural growth and intensification. Conservation and agricultural trends were fraught with conflicts and contradictions, yet they also showed partial compatibility in the search for sustainability. Conservation, indigenous, and social movement organizations operating at multiple scales (local, national, and international) contributed to distinctly configured national conservation “booms” and sustainability discourses in the five countries. Neoliberal governments and global organizations sanctioned protected-area conservation via increased state institutions, national and subnational administrative mechanisms, widely publicized sustainability rationales, expanded territorial management and a property rights focus, spatial devolution, and official multiculturalism—the 1990s were a heyday of these activities. Subsequently Latin American conservation and sustainability efforts have evolved both as a global center of governance through payment for environmental services and under increased and diverse social agendas.

Geopolitics as an approach to politico-military matters was of considerable significance up to the end of World War II, when it declined in respectability and prestige due to its association with Nazi theories of world conquest. As a result, very few strategic or military writings in the United States or Western Europe since World War II have been called “geopolitical,” even though they might include many of the concepts subsumed under the pre-1945 term. But, interestingly enough, the concept is alive and well in Latin America, especially in those Southern Cone countries (Brazil, Argentina, and Chile) where the most prolific thinking and writing on geopolitics has taken place in the last thirty years.

The questions of whether inflation is harmful or helpful or indifferent to economic growth, whether the elimination of inflation should come before or after a high rate of economic growth has been achieved, and the whole issue of what are the roots of the Latin American inflations, have preoccupied at one time or another almost every economist who has worked in the region. More than any other economic problem, inflation has aroused strong passions in otherwise reflective and technocratically inclined economists, and has compelled many to partake in what almost amounted to an ideological controversy. This experience has, on the one hand, had the effect of forcing economists to reexamine some of the basic value judgments that have been implicit in their analytical work, while, on the other hand, it has often obscured the basic analytical strand that each was following.

This article explores the relationship among trade liberalization, deindustrialization, and income inequality in the more industrially advanced Latin American countries. It argues that, among the most important liberal reforms implemented during the 1980s and 1990s, trade reform was especially detrimental to equality because it accelerated deindustrialization. The analysis provides evidence to support this mechanism. Therefore, as the liberalization of trade increased, the deindustrialization process produced an increase in inequality. In short, evidence shows how the process of economic integration to the global market, as it took place, produced an increase in inequality through the destruction of formal employment.

Judicial reform presents a paradox: why would a ruling party agree to judicial reforms that limit its own political power? In the Argentine case, I argue that although the ruling Peronist party could be induced in 1994 to initiate reforms (introduce constitutional revisions to strengthen the judiciary), the party then proved unwilling to accept the costs of an independent judiciary and failed to implement these changes (via enactment of congressional legislation). Only once the Peronists believed that they were unlikely to maintain political power did they implement the revised constitution's judicial advancements. Implementation of judicial reform in such a situation may serve the ruling party as an “insurance policy” in which a stronger judicial branch reduces the risks the ruling party faces should it become the opposition. My research suggests that the likelihood of implementation, the crucial determinant of judicial reform, increases as the ruling party's probability of reelection declines.

Women make upadisproportionate shareoftheworld's poor, andLatin America is noexception to this trend. Nevertheless, veryfew studiesofsocial policy intheregion haveinvestigated whythegendered character ofwelfare provisionvariesacrosscountries. Thisarticleaddresses thatquestion throughacomparativehistoricalanalysisofChileandUruguayandconcludes thatvariation in thegendered natureofeach state's social policy regime resultedfromatwo-step process. Inthefirst stage,female laborforce participation, themobilizing capacityofwomen, andpolicy legacies differentiated thet7.UO countries, placing Chile onaless equitable trajectory thanUruguay. These differences were thenmagnifiedduringeach state's experience underauthoritarian rule.

This article examines the relationship between entrepreneurial activity and a set of economic variables including gross domestic product, economic growth, unemployment, informality, corruption perceptions, macroeconomic stability, and labor regulations. We use panel data from nine Latin American countries covered by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor from 2000 to 2010. We focus on necessity-based entrepreneurship, as the rates of this type of activity are relatively high in Latin America. The results show that economic growth is positively related to opportunity-based entrepreneurship. Other factors such as inflation, informality, and transparency (versus corruption) are positively associated with higher rates of necessity-based entrepreneurship. Lines of future research and policy implications are discussed.

In the 1530s, a handful of Spaniards conquered an immense Andean empire. Thirty years later, some Andean subjects of what was by then an immense Spanish empire resolved not to worship the Spaniards' God. Their resistance was associated with a Quechua ritual phrase, “Taki Onqoy,” usually translated literally as “disease of the dance.” This movement was suppressed rapidly by Spanish authority and left no traces except in a few Spanish documents.

This research note seeks to explain why a large number of Latin American countries have privatized their pension systems in recent years. It argues that the privatization schemes are a response to the severe capital shortages that have plagued their countries intermittently in recent years rather than to the financial problems facing some of the pension systems. The likelihood of pension privatization, I argue, is determined in large part by the vulnerability of countries to capital shortages as well as the influence wielded by international financial institutions, especially the World Bank. Whether such reforms are politically feasible, however, depends largely on the strength of organized labor and the president's degree of control over the legislature. A statistical examination of recent pension policy in Latin America provides support for most of these arguments.

The politics of inflation typically have been cast as reflecting an underlying “collective-action problem,” in which actions that would benefit the entire group are irrational from the viewpoint of each individual. Everyone would be better off without inflation. But in the absence of a mechanism that would permit social groups such as workers and owners to construct a lasting bargain, each group finds itself structurally obliged to push for higher money incomes, even if each one knows that any temporary gains in real income will be inflated away. Brazilian inflation has been described in these terms (Franco 1989). This article will suggest instead that the attitudes of one key Brazilian social group may be better understood as a case of “rent seeking.” In other countries, financial capital as a net-creditor sector opposes inflation. But because of Brazil's unique set of financial regulations, Brazilian bankers and upper-income investors have reaped substantial economic benefits from inflation in recent decades. Although they might prefer as citizens to have lower inflation, their rational economic interests give them few strong reasons to make sacrifices in the interest of solving society's “collective-action problem.” Because not all important actors desire stabilization, bringing prices down becomes intrinsically more difficult than if the problem were simply one of finding a means of overcoming mutual distrust to reach a cooperative solution.

The U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898 radically altered patterns of social and economic development. Examination of census and archival data on land tenure reveals that contrary to generally accepted conclusions, land tenure did not become more concentrated in fewer hands in the years from 1898 to 1915. Instead, and despite massive agro-industrial investments by U.S. sugar corporations, more small farmers owned land in 1915 than at the end of the Spanish colonial period in 1898. This surprising revelation contradicts the findings of all previous studies, and it prompts us to research further the social and economic impact of U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Interest in defense issues among Latin American politicians has faded with the advent of widespread democratization in the region and the retreat of the armed forces to their barracks. Defense policy is rarely subject to the same level of public scrutiny and debate as other major policy issues faced by the region, such as health, education, and public safety. This is puzzling because by ignoring defense policy, civilian leaders in the region risk ceding authority to their militaries, allowing them a degree of self-management and undermining the consolidation of democratic civilian control of the armed forces. This article explains civilian politicians' inattention to defense as a function of three factors: a historical path that has produced armed forces with limited capabilities that are more often a threat to their own governments than their neighbors; a relatively benign international threat environment in Latin America that makes neglect of defense policy a low-risk proposition; and the low importance that voters assign to the provision of the national defense as either a public or a private good. Under these circumstances, it is rational for most civilian politicians to ignore defense policy and focus their attention instead on coup avoidance.

This article reviews the state of Brazilian democracy at the close of the Cardoso-Lula era. Brazil has now completed a quarter century of competitive politics, the longest democratic period in the country's history. Although evaluations of the regime's prospects were often pessimistic in the 1985–1993 period, the performance of democracy improved markedly after the Plano Real stabilization plan in the mid-1990s, which was followed by significant policy achievements under presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Party of Brazilian Social Democracy, or PSDB) and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers' Party, or PT). Since 1995, the axis of national politics has turned on the competition between the PSDB and allies versus the PT and allies. Under this emerging bicoalitional architecture, several key policy domains have been objects of consensus between the two camps, which has led to major policy advances; however, certain policy areas remain outside the zone of consensus and pose enduring challenges. Despite the improving quality of democracy, the mass public continues to display a surprisingly high level of indifference to the regime type.

This paper examines the origins of amendatory vetoes in Latin America and shows why presidents' ability to present a redrafted bill after congressional passage gives them considerable power to affect legislation. The paper begins with a historical account that illustrates the workings of amendatory observations in nineteenth-century Latin America—the passage of the Electoral Law of 1874 in Chile. Next, it specifies the degree to which different constitutional procedures allow presidents to redraft legislation and shows why the power to introduce amendatory observations provides greater discretion than the power of the better-known block veto, regardless of override thresholds. Lastly, the paper traces the origins of amendatory observations back to the first wave of constitution writing that followed the wars of independence. Our findings challenge prior classifications of veto powers in Latin America and highlight the positive agenda-setting power afforded to the president at the last stage of the lawmaking process.

William H. Riker, “Lincoln at Freeport”

In this article, I outline a framework to examine women's lives in eastern Guatemala, how multiple forms of violence coalesce in their everyday lives, and how these become normalized so as to become invisible and “natural.” Women in western Guatemala, mostly indigenous, have received the attention of scholars who are interested in unearthing the brutality of state terror and its gendered expressions in Guatemala. My discussion builds on previous research conducted among indigenous groups in Guatemala and renders a depiction of the broad reach of violence, including expressions that are so commonplace as to become invisible. I argue that an examination of multiple forms of violence in the lives of women in eastern Guatemala, who are nonindigenous, exposes the deep and broad manifestations of living in a society engulfed in violence, thus depicting the long arm of violence.