The Commonwealth of the Bahama Islands entered the international system as a sovereign state on July 10, 1973. It did so by sponsorship, which is to say that as far as relations between the Bahamas and the imperial country (United Kingdom) are concerned, independence has been granted, rather than taken or seized, with a minimal amount of difficulty. The identification of various issue-areas related to the entry of the Commonwealth into the international system is one way of indicating the various components that have gone into making up the “national interest” of that country, at least in the perspective of the state's policy makers. More concretely, the peculiar problems arising from its character as an archipelago state with a relatively open economy, make the questions to be resolved before and immediately after independence perhaps more complex than those faced by the other independent states of the Commonwealth Caribbean that have acceded to full sovereignty in the last decade.

Does electoral campaigning in Latin America make a difference, and does it merit the attention of scholars? This was at the core of an extensive bibliographic analysis, published nearly two decades ago, which noted the paucity of literature on the subject, extending throughout the Third World and even including Western Europe (Martz, 1971). However, the rising tide of military authoritarianism dramatically reduced the relevance of the question in the region, and students of Latin American politics turned away, understandably, from concerted attention to campaigns, elections, and parties. Only with the reemergence of democratic regimes in recent years has interest turned back toward older emphases (Martz, 1990). Once again, theoretical developments have been colored by the events of the day, reorienting scholarly attention “from the military overthrow of civilian regimes and Latin American authoritarianism toward the prospects and processes of redemocratization” (Malloy, 1987).

Over the last thirteen years the United States has provided almost five hundred million dollars in military aid to Latin America. This program has continued undaunted despite the fact that the justification for the undertaking — as shown by testimony of U. S. congressional hearings — has undergone such a wide fluctuation that today's purposes are quite different from yesterday's. To understand the present program it is helpful to explore the peculiar evolution of this program of aid.

During World War II there was cooperation between the United States and Latin-American military forces. Two states, Mexico and Brazil, donated forces which saw combat. The chief contribution of Latin America to the war effort, however, was in the realm of economic assistance to the United States war machine.

In the period following Brazil's 1964 military coup, many historians turned their attention to the Vargas years, especially the 1930s. For one thing, the period had not been thoroughly examined. For another, factors common to both “revolutions” intrigued them: interplay among civilians and military officers in the respective golpes; repression of dissent and the use of nationalistic propaganda; concern over Brazil's place in the international order; social mobilization to neutralize class conflict and promote growth; tension between liberalism and corporatism; and efforts to promote national integration. Many of the historical actors, as well, were the same.

I was invited to prepare an interpretative essay on this subject. That, and nothing more, is what this paper aspires to be. It is not a monograph and any resemblance it may bear to historiography or bibliography is purely coincidental.

Any essay on economic factors in the Latin American independence movement labors under a heavy heuristic handicap. The difficulty begins with the paucity of basic economic studies of the period. This deficiency was noted by Charles Griffin ten years ago in a related paper; little progress towards filling the gap has been made since.

In so far as it is possible to identify and evaluate the economic factors in the independence movement, they appear less important than the political and perhaps other factors. This is almost certainly so if the question is one of conscious motivation, and probably so whatever the terms of the question.

Latin-American education today bears more resemblance to its ineffective past than to the great and good plans which its educators have regularly got incorporated into law. For two generations all the southern republics have passed constitutional provisions guaranteeing free and compulsory education. Haiti has carried such a provision in its legal code since 1871, yet today 92 per cent of its people are illiterate.

The percentage figure ranges somewhat lower for the other countries, but the basic situation remains the same. As H. W. Spiegel reported in The Brazilian Economy: “At present no more than one-third of Brazil's child population attends school. Schools, including the elementary, are overcrowded. Teachers are scarce. Education opportunities for higher training are poor and expensive. During 1940 to 1944, seventyeight per cent of the immigrants were literate; in 1940 only thirty-two per cent of the native Brazilians were literate.”

This article describes the process of legal contention between civil society, political parties, and state institutions for the baldíos lands in the Colombian Altillanura region in the last two decades, a region considered the country’s “last agricultural frontier.” The article focuses on the dual and sometimes contradictory roles of the state institutions, both as facilitators of baldíos grabbing and as guarantors of the peasants’ legal land rights. It analyzes the different attempts by the Colombian government to remove the legal limitations to land accumulation and the resistance put up by civil society and the political parties, which resorted to the existing legal mechanisms to deactivate those attempts. The results reveal the two-sided role of the state: while the government introduces legal changes to facilitate baldíos grabbing, state bodies are actively denouncing and sanctioning illegalities or ruling in favor of peasants deprived of their lands.

How do bureaucrats implement public policy when faced with political intermediation? This article examines this issue in the distribution of land rights to informal settlements in the municipality of São Paulo, Brazil. Land regularization is a policy established over three decades, where politicians’ requests for land titles to their constituencies play a relevant role. Based on interviews and documents, this study finds that bureaucrats adopt a twofold approach to regulate distribution: they document informal settlements, enacting eligibility criteria; then, they manage and prioritize beneficiaries, accommodating qualifying political demands. In this process, they enforce eligibility rules consistently across cases, constraining political intermediation to a rational scheme. Therefore, bureaucrats reconcile nonprogrammatic politics and policy rules by separating eligibility assessment from beneficiary selection. This paper bridges urban distributive politics and street-level bureaucracy literature by revealing that policy implementers may use technical expertise to curb political influence and negotiate conflicting interests and constraints.

This article examines, through a two-level game model, the case of the first investment dispute under NAFTA between a private U.S. firm and the Mexican government. It argues that the clue to understanding why the Mexican president could not cooperate with the U.S. president lies in Mexico's domestic “ratification” process. The analysis yields two theoretical propositions. First, federalism represents an important variable in explaining foreign economic policy. Second, two-level game logic should not be applied only to formal international negotiation situations; instead, by specifying the dependent variable as cooperation or noncooperation, these models connecting domestic and international politics can be productively applied to study foreign economic policy.

This article analyzes the relationship between ideas, interests, and institutions in the 1996 reform of the civil service in Uruguay. Beneath the appearance of a process led by technocratic principles, the reform's agenda and content were shaped by legitimating principles, strongly institutionalized interests, and the political legacy of earlier failed reform attempts. Reformers sought a strategy of a reform “without losers,” which, instead of gathering support for adoption and implementation, sought to minimize opposition. This deliberately low-profile strategy left people unaware of the reform's achievements and thereby reinforced a political culture that has made resistance to change both a political virtue and an inescapable condition.

Although sociological research has examined the reproduction of Chile’s elites, there is little empirical evidence of how different forms of capital operate among them. Using datasets for members of the Chilean political elite from 1990 to 2010, this country note examines and measures the effect of political, social, and cultural capital on the access of certain individuals to strategic positions in the political field, comparing the legislative and executive branches as represented by deputies and ministers. The empirical analysis includes logit models.

How does international migration affect political parties’ electoral strategies in the sending countries? This article argues that remittances help political parties decide whom to target during elections. Drawing from theories of vote targeting and those on the effects of remittances, this study addresses how political parties’ electoral strategies follow the specific characteristics of remittance recipients. Using individual-level data from Mexico’s 2006 presidential elections, the results show that receiving remittances had a significant impact on experiencing electoral targeting, especially by the then-incumbent PAN. This study reveals the importance of remittances in shaping the strategies of Mexican political parties.

This essay examines how the inhabitants of Putumayo, a department of Colombia both divided and held together by licit and illicit authority structures and markets, engage with varied political orders as they advance individual and collective economic and political projects. Putumayo’s inhabitants adopt four basic strategies to maintain their often illicit livelihoods amid state repression. The first is intellectual resistance, wherein they develop explanations for their involvement in illicit markets that they can use to alter local and national state behavior. The second is protest, through which groups of peasants mobilize to support their illicit but socially normalized economic endeavors. A third is evasion or malicia, in which peasants seek to strategically adhere to state policy to misdirect the state as they continue to grow coca. Fourth, some peasants pursue a strategy of exit, going deeper into the jungle in search of land where they can peacefully grow coca.