The period immediately following Castro's overthrow of Batista on New Year's Day 1959 was followed by a series of revolutionary trials that attempted to weed out and punish supporters of the fallen dictatorship and “enemies of the revolution.” One of the most unusual of these political trials became a cause célèbre that called into question the general nature of law and justice in Castro's Cuba. The analysis of this case allows us to see clearly the relationship that has traditionally existed between the ideas of law and justice in Latin American culture. This study also touches incidentally upon the ever present judicial problem of defining the responsibility of soldiers for their actions during warfare.

La última conferencia económica de Ginebra, de tan magros resultados, y los “planes” de distintos países han puesto al orden del día el tema del desarrollo económico. Se habla y se escribe, mucho más que antes, en todos los tonos, de importantes objetivos a alcanzar: de creación de riquezas, de reactivación de las economías nacionales, de tecnificación de la agricultura, de modernización de las comunicaciones, de reabsorción de la mano de obra ociosa, en fin, de revitalizar la producción general, elevar el consumo y asegurar en los países, ahora llamados “subdesarrollados”, un más alto nivel de vida.

Tales objetivos pueden ser fácilmente enunciados pero no concretamente alcanzados. Si “la naturaleza no camina a saltos”, tampoco pueden alterarse por decreto las etapas del lógico desarrollo económico sin tener en cuenta las reales posibilidades materiales, técnicas, financieras y culturales de cada país.

Earlier empirical research on party list proportional representation systems shows that women spend less on campaigns than men, particularly when quotas are applied. An analysis of the candidate campaign expenses for the 2014 and 2018 Colombian Lower Chamber elections provides a novel test of this gender gap and its underlying causes. The research design leverages Colombia’s unique context of electoral institutions, with interdistrict variation in terms of quota rules, and the availability of detailed information on campaign spending and funding. The regression models show that the gender gap in campaign spending is limited to districts with quota rules and disappears among incumbents and candidates listed first on the ballot. As for funding, women candidates are most disadvantaged with regard to personal funds and corporate donations but attract as many individual donations as men do.

What is the relationship between clientelism and political participation in popular urban neighborhoods? This article addresses the question based on qualitative research in two popular neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, drawing on participant observation and interviews with residents, activists, and party brokers. Adding to a growing literature on “participatory clientelism,” we argue for greater attention to the urban context through which this unfolds. To date, research into participatory clientelism has predominantly considered specific practices—participatory innovations or contentious politics—and been limited to the survival of the urban poor and the demand for political support by party brokers. While these are crucial practices, they are not exhaustive of the relations that sustain participatory clientelism, particularly in contexts of territorialized politics. Based on the socio-spatial approach of Henri Lefebvre, influential in urban studies, we define three interconnected dimensions of participatory clientelism and identify them in the cases under study.

This study examines the relationship between personal experience with intimate partner violence (IPV) and political attitudes. I argue that by adopting salient legislation on violence against women, the state enables survivors to evaluate government performance on the basis of their ability to access resources for victims. As such, when survivors are unable to reach specialized public services, they might downgrade their evaluations of government performance. Focusing on Brazil and using survey data and qualitative interviews, this study finds that IPV survivors who have not used specialized services hold more negative views of government performance compared to nonvictims. Further analysis, including a series of placebo tests, lends additional support to the main results. This study has an intersectional component, as it also examines the relationship between race and access to services. These findings have implications for victims’ democratic rights and access to justice.

Uruguay's stable, institutionalized party system has undergone substantial changes in recent years, both from the increasing electoral strength of the left and from changes made to the electoral system in 1996. Analyzing the debut of that new system in the 1999 national and 2000 municipal elections, this article concludes that Uruguay is moving from what was a fairly evenly divided three-party system to one in which the longstanding traditional parties will confront, as a bloc, the stronger left. The electoral analysis shows that the bloc dynamic took over whenever elections were close between the left and one of the traditional parties.

This research note takes advantage of a novel dataset to analyze legislators’ behavior in Uruguay’s Parliament. Comparing the positions of legislators based on floor speeches and roll-call voting, it discusses the relationship between discourse and voting among individual legislators and parties. The dataset contains more than 57,000 speeches from more than 1,000 Uruguayan legislators between 1985 and 2015 and its related R package. The study estimates the parties’ policy positions on the basis of two data sources, roll-call votes and floor speeches, and then compares both results. Contrary to expectations, no clear association appears between the two scaling methods, demonstrating that vote and legislative speech may reflect the behavior of individual legislators with potentially conflicting goals. Strategic calculations or party discipline may be plausible explanations for the divergent results obtained from text and roll-call scaling methods.

In recent years Latin American countries have become a principal source of narcotic drugs for the United States market. Mexico, once the fount of 85% of the heroin consumed by American addicts, still supplies approximately 30% of the drug. Peru and Bolivia grow a combined total of 60 million kilos of coca leaf annually, more than twice the amount needed for legitimate use. The remainder is either processed into cocaine for direct shipment abroad or smuggled in base form through Ecuador into Colombia, where chemists distill tons of the prized white powder that sells for $100 gram in diluted form on the streets of Chicago, Montreal, and Frankfurt. Colombia also surpassed Mexico in the late 1970s in marijuana production and currently holds the dubious honor of being the world's leading manufacturer of illicit methaqualone. Methaqualone base, originally smuggled in from Hungary, is currently believed to originate in mainland China.

The United States occupation of Haiti — despite benevolent intentions — was a thinly-disguised military dictatorship. The official view of the Department of State that the numerous U. S. officials there were merely advisers to the legitimate Haitian government, acting in accordance with limitations prescribed by treaty, was a polite fiction. It deceived no one, particularly the large number of Haitians who resented foreign experiments in benevolent despotism in their land.

The real ruler of Haiti, as the system had evolved by the pivotal year of 1928 — the last “normal” year before the political crisis which precipitated withdrawal — was General John H. Russell, United States Marine Corps, the U. S. High Commissioner. The nominal ruler, President Louis Borno, generally relied upon his U. S. advisers. In Russell's own words “[Borno] has never taken a step without first consulting me.” When differences arose, usually as a result of pressures exerted on Borno by local politicians, General Russell was free to make appropriate concessions. But his will prevailed in any showdown conflict. The General was noted for his fairness, however, and his relations with Haitian officials were usually harmonious. Yet his military background, combined with his devotion to efficiency and economy, was not well-suited to preparing a dependent people for enlightened self-rule.

Until 1968, state enterprises played a minor role in the Peruvian economy. The list of public sector enterprises was relatively small. It included the Central and sectoral banks, a merchant fleet, railways, a minor petroleum producer, hyroelectric power companies, a steel mill, monopolies over salt, tobacco, and guano, a few tourism projects, and a set of regional development corporations. From 1968 to 1974 the state moved swiftly to expand its role in order to direct and control the course of the country's economic evolution. The public sector increased both in size and scope to include most banking, basic industries, and most international and some domestic trade.

It is logical to assume that small states focus more attention on the regional, subsystemic or “contiguous” environment (Reid, 1974: 31) than on the broader international system. Given their financial limitations, small states are circumscribed in their ability to influence the international environment but can be effective in the regional context. Even if some small states, by virtue of comparative wealth or ideological commitment, have the capability and inclination to exploit the international environment rather than confine their focus to the region around them, they still find their attention directed, to a large extent, to the immediacy of regional problems and to regional activities that are grounded in social, cultural, political, and economic linkages to the countries nearby. More often than not, economic ties have been formalized in regional integration movements patterned along the lines of the European Community (EC).

As a frequent concern both of governments and of the public at large in Western Hemisphere nations, international migration is now more prominent than at any time since 1980. The episodic flow of seaborne refugees from Haiti since 1991 has been a key factor in spurring the inter-American community to oppose Haiti's military rulers. The flotilla of rafts leaving Cuba since early August 1994 has engendered high-profile negotiations on migration between Washington and Havana. The stream of undocumented labor migrants from Mexico to the United States has regained momentum since the late 1980s and is encountering increased public criticism, especially in the western United States.

Underlying these instances of political tension is a strong, and only partially-met, demand for migration to the United States from parts of Latin America and the Caribbean on the one hand, and a growing anxiety in the US to “control the nation's borders” on the other.

The year of 1972 brought the marked aggravation of a series of political-economic conflicts in Brazil's relations with developing countries outside the Western Hemisphere, calling into serious question the continued viability of its efforts of several years to maintain good relations with both Portugal and the nonaligned states (particularly those of Africa). Following successful tours of Latin American countries in 1971, Foreign Minister Mário Gibson Barboza termed 1972 the “Year of Africa” and visited Zaire and eight countries of West Africa to advance Brazil's ambitions as a leader of the LDCs by offering technical assistance, development financing, and increased trade, cooperation in commodity agreements, and cultural exchange based on the African component of Brazilian culture. This tour was intended to promote the image of Brazil as a peacefully multiracial, rapidly developing tropical civilization eager to share with others the solutions to economic growth which it had found.

The pivotal role energy plays in national economics not only converts the access to sources of supply into a vivid issue of foreign policy concern, but also causes an understandable preoccupation with investment capabilities and self-sufficiency. A report prepared by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1974 predicted a bright future for nuclear energy in the i developing countries and encouraged use of this form of energy after numerous field studies.

A nation that commits itself to nuclear energy by purchasing nuclear power-generating technology but not fuel cycle facilities incurs the risk of becoming dependent upon the supplier country because a quick switch to alternative sources of supply is difficult in cases of curtailment of fuel.

A striking feature of Spanish-American colonial rule is the contrasting loyalty of cabildos to Hapsburg rulers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and their restiveness and finally their role in fomenting the emancipation movements against Bourbon kings. The following article will attempt to explain the shift in cabildo attitudes.

Difficulties are at the outset encountered by the fact that, on the surface, there were at least two factors which might have been expected to lessen, rather than to nourish, the loyalty of local chambers to Hapsburg rulers. First, there was the indifference and apathy of council members in attending to the official business with which cabildos were theoretically concerned. This attitude suggests that councilmen realized they were, in spite of certain guarantees and legal prescriptions, a relatively impotent agency on the actual level of day-by-day administration.

Export-import merchants played a central role in the industrialization of Brazil. Many of the Brazilian Empire's noted entrepreneurs began as merchants, including the Barão de Mauá, perhaps the most famous of all, and the noted Bahian industrialist-philanthropist, Luís Tarquínio. Individual merchants served as cadres and furnished capital for early industrialization in both Bahia (Almeida, 1951: 14) and São Paulo (Dean, 1969: 19-33). That export-import merchants would play a prominent role in Brazilian development, particularly during the Empire, was logical. As intermediaries in an economy largely devoted to exporting and importing, merchants occupied a central position in the Empire's economic structure. Brazil's merchant elite was also a natural vehicle for modernizing influences from abroad because of its international trade connections and its cosmopolitan membership. For new enterprises, merchants were one of the few sources of capital and virtually the only source of business expertise.

This essay discusses the Central America policies of the Reagan administration, focusing on the evolution of what has been described as a “two-track” approach to the region. The essay disputes this characterization, describing the emergence of an unstable equilibrium between different policy objectives and their proponents, underlining important differences between official rhetoric and specific initiatives, and evaluating the outcomes of those initiatives. The discussion emphasizes the complexity of the domestic and international context of the crisis and of the policy arena, underlining the failure of the administration's attempt to impose its own unilateral solution.

The most controversial newspaper in Brazil last year was not the Tribuna da Imprensa, the mouthpiece of Carlos Lacerda, the governor of Guanabara who was so closely identified with the revolution of March 31,1964, but the now-defunct Brasil Urgente, a weekly tabloid published in São Paulo with the approval of the Cardinal Archbishop by the Dominican Carlos Josaphat and a militant group of laymen determined to give Brazilians a Catholic Left beyond the promises of Christian Democracy and virtually as radical as the Communist Party. Although the revolution has put a stop to the politics of the Left, and movements of leftist tinge are momentarily as defunct as Brasil Urgente, it is still important for the background of the revolution to know what the Catholic Left was doing, and to realize once more that in a country like Brazil, where Christian Democracy was never a force, as in Chile and Venezuela, and where political nuances, until a few months ago, were not considered important, a Catholic Left, of the kind envisaged by the editors of Brasil Urgente, was not beyond the realm of possibility.

A sample of Bogotá entrepreneurs suggests that their social origins and backgrounds differ markedly from those of the general Colombian population. The entrepreneur is well-educated, urban, and comes from a predominantly middle class background, in a society that is mainly rural, has a low educational level, and an overwhelmingly large lower class.

As Weber and Tawney have pointed out, the emergence of the entrepreneur is inevitably affected by his cultural milieu. Motivations and goals making profit desirable are derived from the society which socializes him; he makes decisions which are influenced by the residues, values, and restraints which society places upon risk, risk-taking, and freedom of economic choice. The entrepreneurial role, with its behavioral expectations, occupies a status granted it by a society—a status not fully derived from the power of wealth or capital manipulation, but from traditional prestige values and traditional concepts of the “good life” and the definition of the individual's proper relationship to his society. Some societies appear to breed entrepreneurs more readily than others, and encourage their appearance through offering differential rewards and incentives.