In the 1990s, trade liberalization eroded the competitiveness of Caribbean economies as manufacturing export platforms. Proposed new economic strategies favored a shift from vertically integrated, transnationally based segment manufacturing to segments of knowledge-intensive industries and services. This strategy, however, reproduces the economic asymmetries associated with the core-periphery relation (low wages, value-added rates). Postindustrial technologies and economic strategies provide the opportunity to formulate alternative policies to overcome the shortcomings of peripheral postindustrialization and foster sustainable postindustrial development.

This essay extends the discussion on the politics of reform by identifying specific political strategies that allow policymakers to implement difficult economic reforms in the context of an increasingly democratic and contentious policymaking environment. Analyzing the policymaking strategy of Mexican president Carlos Salinas (1988-94) in his efforts to reorganize the Port of Veracruz, it identifies the element of political entrepreneurship as essential to the long-term success of Salinas's port policy. When compared with the mixed record of many of Salinas's other reforms and the authoritarian manner in which they were implemented, the port policy stands out both for its successful outcome and for Salinas's concerted political efforts to implement it. Even in the context of an authoritarian policymaking regime, an effective political strategy is an important element in achieving the long-term goals of market-based reforms.

Democracy affords citizens the ability to influence policy through participation in elections and through direct political action. Though previous scholarship evaluates the impact each strategy has on outcomes, little if any work exists that examines how one strategy, direct action, affects success in the other, elections. This study analyzes the relationship between land occupations and the electoral success of the Workers' Party in Brazil between 1996 and 2006. It finds that the relationship varies in presidential and mayoral elections depending on income inequality and incumbency. Once the PT captures the presidential office in 2002, these effects disappear, suggesting that the effect of political protest also depends on who is in office.

The Guatemalan military dominated the country's politics for nearly half a century, but its political power declined during the 1990s. Democratically elected presidents Alvaro Arzú (1996–2000) and Alfonso Portillo (2000–2004) subordinated the armed forces to their authority and thereby gained an unprecedented opportunity to reduce the role of the military and institutionalize democratic civil-military relations. Unfortunately, neither of these tasks was accomplished. An analysis of the level of democratic control, combining Alfred Stepan's military prerogatives indicators with a newer system of measurement and classification designed by Samuel Fitch, shows that the armed forces retained substantial institutional autonomy and de facto legal immunity when Portillo left office in 2004. The role of the military in Guatemalan society, moreover, expanded again under Portillo after declining under Arzú. This study finds that the lack of sufficient civilian commitment to reform, rather than resistance from the armed forces, was the principal cause of these disappointing outcomes.

This study analyzes the causes of executive-legislative deadlocks in the Dominican Republic in the period 1978–2005. Deadlocks are considered a pernicious element in (presidential) democracies. The study applies a combination of simple statistical techniques and process tracing to test four institutional hypotheses, which argue that certain institutional and party system constellations increase the probability of deadlocks. The hypotheses point to necessary causes of deadlocks, but their predictions are imprecise. Presidents' persuasive powers and coalition building have helped alleviate the deadlock problem. Analysis of the deadlock periods shows that the additional triggering or sufficient causes for deadlocks are either exogenous to the political institutions or related to the instability of coalitions in the nation's nonideological party system, which consists of three almost equal-sized parties.

An important issue for many US citizens, particularly those who live in the inner city and in major urban areas, is the level of administration concern regarding the impact of drugs on US society and the relative priority the administration assigns to drugs as a policy issue.

In mid-October 1993, the Clinton administration released an interim policy statement setting forth its proposed strategy for national drug control. Consisting of both domestic and international components, this strategy seeks to downplay the drug issue as a priority driving the new administration's policy agenda. Within the United States, the drug policy is linked to other important domestic goals and is envisioned as just one of the elements in efforts to spur economic growth, reform health care, curb violence among the nation's youth, and “empower communities.”

It is not surprising that the academic community should be interested in probing the diplomatic role of U.S. business abroad. The business corporation, which has aptly been called the characteristic institution of American society, has been a prime force for change and economic progress, not only in industrialized nations but in the most remote and backward areas as well. As a leader in building a new society, U.S. business has had thrust upon it a diplomatic function (and one which is not merely an appendage of political diplomacy) that we are only beginning to discern in all of its implications.

Because of the magnitude and rate of growth of our economic involvement abroad, a few statistics may provide an adequate if hurried perspective of the issues and problems which I believe will necessitate rethinking the diplomatic stance of U.S. business. Over the two decades between 1940 and 1961, total U.S. foreign assets and investments rose from $12 billion to $80 billion. In Latin America, with which most of this paper will be concerned, U.S. direct investments now exceed $10 billion, U.S. companies pay one-fifth of all taxes, and employ a million and a half people. U.S. citizens living and working in Latin America number in the tens of thousands; there are about 17,000 in Venezuela alone.

In 1991, Ecuador's foreign policy had to deal with the revival of its old border conflict with Peru. Nevertheless, this time the situation offered some hope — in contrast to previous occasions, the most recent being the Paquisha incident in 1982 — that the longstanding impasse between the two countries, which had hindered closer cooperation and greater integration for decades, might be nearing some sort of resolution at last.

During the first two years of his administration, President Rodrigo Borja and his Foreign Minister Diego Cordovez were primarily concerned with incorporating Ecuador into some of the Latin American efforts at international cooperation — political, economic, and commercial — which had emerged during the 1980s, such as the Rio Group, or which had been redefined and advanced in new, more creative forms, such as those exemplified by the Cartagena Group, the Asociación Latinoamericana de Integratión (ALADI), the proposed Andean Free Trade Zone, and the like.

Virtually no one in the United States raised objections to the 1964 military takeover of the Brazilian civilian government. In the early 1970s, however, the Brazilian regime had become associated with torture and the arbitrary rule of law. By the end of that decade, compliance with human rights standards had developed into a yardstick for measuring U.S. foreign policy initiatives in Latin America. This paper argues that between 1969 and 1974, a small group of dedicated church activists, exiled Brazilians, and academics introduced the issue of human rights in Latin America into the U.S. national body politic. A network of concerned activists fashioned a systematic campaign to educate journalists, government officials, and the public about the abuses taking place under the generals' rule. Their activities helped isolate the military regime and laid the groundwork for a broader solidarity movement with Latin American popular struggles in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Chile's 1980 Constitution embodied the political aspirations of the nation's military regime. Before democratization, the constitution underwent a process of reform that did away with some of its most blatantly authoritarian provisions but preserved a set of institutions that would characterize and constrain the regained Chilean democracy. This article presents an account of that process. It juxtaposes two theoretical perspectives: one that sees the results as determined primarily by the power relationship of the participants, and one that stresses contextual factors, such as institutional traditions. This study argues that while the Chilean case largely confirms the importance of the existing constitution for the outcome, the final outcome depended nonetheless on the participants' assessment of the relations of power, and therefore might have been open to different results.

The armed forces in nearly all of the developing countries have frequently played a significant role in the political process. Because civilian groups—such as political parties, interest associations, bureaucracies—tend to be weak, fluid, and amorphous during the transition from a “traditional” to a “modern” society, the military is liable to be the strongest and best organized actor in the system. The roles may vary, from performing minimal governmental functions to exercising exclusive governing power, but in general the armed forces in the developing countries have a deeper domestic involvement in government and politics than their counterparts in the more “developed” nations.

From an historical point of view, Latin America is often considered the home of political militarism. The caudillo, or “man on horseback,” has traditionally galloped in and out of the presidential palace with frequent regularity.

The strengthening of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) during the 1990s was an unintended consequence of a series of tactical successes in U.S. antidrug policies. These included dismantling the Medellín and Cali drug cartels, interdicting coca coming into Colombian processing facilities, and using drug certification requirements to pressure the Colombian government to attack drug cartels and allow aerial fumigation of coca crops. These successes, however, merely pushed coca cultivation increasingly to FARC-dominated areas while weakening many of the FARC's political-military opponents. This provided the FARC with unprecedented opportunities to extract resources from the cocaine industry to deepen its long insurgency against the Colombian state. The Colombian experience demonstrates the importance of creating a more sophisticated understanding of how lootable wealth can exacerbate civil wars.

In Enrique Bunster's satirical novel Un ángel para Chile, set in the year 2015, Turcos” hold sway in the Club de la Unión, traditionally the exclusive redoubt of Chile's upper class. In 2015, high and mighty Turcos place orders for wines carrying the names of present-day Arab-Chilean textile millionaires with waiters descended from presentday aristocratic wine-making families. Bunster's fanciful vision of future Chilean society takes what basis of credibility it has from the remarkable economic and political progress achieved by Arab-Chileans in recent years. This progress was accelerated during the 1952-1958 government of Carlos Ibáñez and became a focus for political controversy.

Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research carried out over two-and-a-half decades in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighborhood in Managua, Nicaragua, this article explores how legal and illegal economic activities are socially legitimized, and more specifically, how certain illegal economic activities can end up being seen as legitimate, and certain legal ones perceived as illegitimate. The first part of the article explores the variable morality surrounding different types of criminal activities that local gang members engaged in during the 1990s and 2000s. The second part considers my experiences running a local market stall, describing the contrasting reactions I faced when I resorted to first legal, and then illegal, strategies to boost my revenue levels. Taken together, these examples showcase how the social legitimization of an economic activity has less to do with whether it is legal or illegal, but rather the future aspirations it embodies.

Nicaragua has been, and will undoubtedly continue to be, primarily an agricultural country. Of the country's exports, agricultural and forestry products have consistently represented over 88% of the total value. One notable characteristic of Nicaraguan agriculture is its diversification, at least in respect to its other Central American neighbors. The expanded cotton and cottonseed exports since 1951, and the normally consistent exports of coffee are by far the most important agricultural products in terms of foreign exchange. In addition, four other commodities (sesame, cattle and meat, timber, and sugar) each yielded over a million dollars in foreign exchange during the years 1957 and 1958.