Chile has gained a reputation as the Latin American economic success story of the 1990s. Domestic savings rates are high, foreign investment continues to expand, inflation remains single-digit, and economic growth has averaged 6 percent annually from 1984 to 1995. In the seven years of democratic government since 1989, the poor have begun to share some of the benefits of this growth. From 1989 to 1993, unemployment fell from 12.2 percent to 4.9 percent, and social expenditures increased by a third in real terms (Hojman 1995). But Chile's impressive recent record of sustained economic development coupled with improvements in social justice has incurred significant environmental costs that raise doubts about the ecological sustainability of the Chilean model (Meller, O'Ryan, and Solimano 1996).

Mexico as a nation has endowed education with magical meaning. From the moment when twelve Franciscans set foot in the New World in 1524 to evangelize, education assumed a transforming mission in Mexico. If schooling during the colonial period slumped into the less grandiose task of transmitting relatively fixed values and knowledge to new generations, it resumed its transforming role with the Enlightenment. Under the Bourbon kings, the first steps were taken toward introducing free primary education as a means of modernizing society. With independence, liberals and conservatives alike came to perceive primary schooling as critical to citizen formation, political stability, and economic progress. But the obstacles to realizing mass literacy have been multiple and prolonged. In 1910 an estimated 68 percent of all Mexican adults could not read. Yet even this limited proportion of literate adults were active and contributed significantly to the Revolution of 1910.

The present set of Research Notes, which were first presented at a forum on Latin America's market reforms held at the 2003 Latin American Studies Association Congress, investigates the economic and social repercussions of the neoliberal wave that swept across the region during the 1990s. Have market reforms brought greater economic stability and stimulated growth? How have they affected crucial social issues, such as unemployment, poverty, and inequality? After Weyland's introductory explication of these questions, the Research Notes by Evelyne Huber and Fred Solt and by Michael Walton advance divergent assessments of neoliberalism's successes and failures. Huber and Solt argue that overall, Latin America's market reforms have yielded disappointing results in terms of economic stability and growth, social equity, and the quality of democracy. In particular, countries that enacted more radical reforms or that took especially drastic steps towards change performed less well than nations that proceeded more cautiously and gradually. By contrast, Walton argues that market reforms have increased growth while not significantly exacerbating economic instability and social inequality. And to the extent that neoliberalism fell short of expectations, the problem did not emerge from market reforms as such, but from deficiencies in the institutional context in which these reforms were enacted.

In the last decade a unique form of struggle developed in Argentina: the appropriation of bankrupt enterprises by their workers. This article combines several sources of data to explain the emergence and development of this practice and its effects on Argentine labor politics. We argue that the recuperation of enterprises is the result of workers' contingent responses to a deep social crisis, the emergence of organizations that promoted this practice, and the presence of a class culture in which wage work is considered a dignified form of work. Furthermore, we argue that the recuperation of enterprises is now part of the repertoire of contention of Argentine workers.

Most Brazilians believe that racial and socioeconomic inequalities tend to overlap—in other words, blacks are poorer because they have less education and worse jobs. In the past few years, however, several quantitative studies have presented an interesting puzzle: racial inequalities are strongest among those at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy. This article explores the “elitist profile” of racial discrimination through eighty in-depth interviews with black professionals in Rio de Janeiro. The results show that interviewees describe their trajectories of social mobility through mechanisms that involve both socioeconomic and racial exclusion. Their perceptions of injustice, however, are more directly related to experiences of racial discrimination. In narrating incidents of discrimination, interviewees stress the distinction and tensions between what we call generalized prejudice and particularized universalism.

Revolutionary Cuba since 1959 has outpaced most other Latin American countries at raising life expectancy and reducing infant mortality. Pre-revolutionary Cuba from 1900 to 1959 did even better, however, outperforming all other Latin American countries for which data are available. Pre-revolutionary Cuba became Latin America's unlikely champion of mortality decline despite experiencing slow economic growth and high income inequality, a record that is inconsistent with the “wealthier is healthier” interpretation of mortality reduction. It also achieved this distinction despite being ruled by governments that are sometimes portrayed as corrupt, personalistic, patronage-ridden, subordinate to U.S. business interests, and neglectful, at best, of the exploited and downtrodden. We attribute pre-revolutionary Cuba's rapid mortality decline to its health care system's accessibility to a large fraction of the poor and to features of the island's history, geography, labor union movement, and political system that contributed to this accessibility.

In the early 1990s Cuba initiated a new phase of social transformation, driven forward by an economic reform. Some aspects of that reform resembled orthodox structural adjustment, while others differed from it. In agriculture the reform reshaped state farms into multiple cooperatives, subdivided cooperative production, liberalized produce markets, and ceded land to individual parceleros. Through interviews with policy makers and cooperative leaders, and a survey of small farmers in western and eastern Cuba, I examined the reform's impact on small farmers' production. I found that two important patterns characterized the 1990s:first, repeasantization occurred; and second, income disparities between these two regions were maintained, if not expanded. Yet, even in poorer regions, small farmers are modestly better off than the average salary earner, while in other regions they are substantially better off. In sum, Cuba's economic crisis forced the reshaping of agricultural policy in ways that fortified the position of small farmers.

The guinea pig (Cavia porcellus) has been raised and consumed throughout the Andean subregion since before the arrival of Spaniards in America. According to sixteenth-century native chronicler Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala, the Incas and the indigenous peoples who preceded them used the guinea pig, or cuy, for ceremonial purposes (Guarnan Poma de Ayala 1980, 55). Hundreds of years later, on the brink of the twenty-first century, mass production of cuys outside their native habitat is turning these animals into an exchange commodity that is generating many economic activities.

Bolivia was the poster child for economic liberalization policies adopted throughout Latin America since the 1970s. The country is also currently viewed as a place where the neoliberal or market-oriented economic model has been exhausted, as indicated by high levels of societal protest and recent democratic instability. Using available subnational data from Bolivia, we examine the determinants of societal protest across the country's nine provinces for the 1995–2005 period. Consistent with recent literature, we find that provinces with higher levels of political competition have lower levels of societal protest. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, which suggests that neoliberal reforms depoliticize and demobilize collective actors, we find that economic liberalization increases the level of protest activity. Taken together, the article draws attention to the paradoxical effect of neoliberalism to simultaneously debilitate certain types of popular resistance and activate others.

The Dominican Republic has emerged as the world's foremost exporter of organic bananas and cocoa, a top exporter of organic coffee, and an export pioneer in new commodities like organic mangos. Pursuing a contextualized commodity network approach, I explain the rise of organic products within the broader forces fueling nontraditional agro-export growth and identify the key factors configuring organic export networks today. The article analyzes the implications of global organic market trends for Dominican exports and for the thousands of small producers involved. My research finds that despite their historical prominence, rising international competition and buyers' quality expectations are working to displace or disempower small Dominican organic producers. Strong producer associations and transnational movement ties are critical in shoring up the position of small organic producers in the Dominican Republic and may be similarly crucial in other Latin American countries.

For many people throughout much of the world today, the terms “Amazon” and “rain forest” are synonymous—indeed, it seems as if the two must have always intertwined. However, while this much-invoked realm of shimmering, fragile nature, together with its ferocious jungle alter ego, does have deep roots in the past, its present-day incarnation has much to do with the global environmental movement that began emerging in the 1960s and has continued to morph over time. This article examines contemporary representations of the Amazon with an eye to what is now changing, as well as why. It underscores the key role that these depictions play in shaping policy, which gives them an importance far transcending purely narrative concerns.

Historians have long complained that research on the regional and local impact of the Mexican Revolution has been eclipsed by macro-level analysis of national politics, including studies of formal institutions (the army, the Church, political parties) and biographies of “great men.” Very few of the global studies of the Revolution published in English have paid more than token attention to its regional complexity. It is ironic, for example, that until recently the most detailed, if idiosyncratic, treatment of regional politics in the 1920s was provided by Ernest Gruening's Mexico and Its Heritage (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1928). Its devastatingly drawn picture of violence at the local level was richly documented from official archives opened to the author by the Calles government in an effort to discredit its enemies. More recently, Jean Meyer's study of the period 1910–40 has provided historians with an analysis that offers both a general characterization of the revolutionary process and a narrative that is informed throughout by a keen appreciation of the Revolution's regional and local variations. Another particular merit of this and other work by Meyer is its iconoclastic vigor and insistence on viewing the Revolution as an event that deepened Mexico's dependence upon international capitalism, providing revolutionary leaders with abundant opportunities for personal enrichment.

It has been well documented that structural changes in the capitalist world system during the second half of the nineteenth century generated profound consequences for peripheral economies such as those in Latin America and Africa. Improvements in transportation and the increasing demand for tropical consumer goods in the industrializing countries caused unprecedented growth in the production of tropical export crops and a consequent international movement of agricultural commodities. This widespread emergence of export agriculture for Western European and North American markets is the one reason why researchers can still employ a broad concept like the “Third World” to divergent economies and cultures in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Production of such crops as cotton, cocoa, tobacco, and coffee, which had previously been grown in many regions on a limited scale, expanded enormously in the second half of the nineteenth century. The global character of these agrarian changes, however, should not obscure their regional peculiarities. Export agriculture (whether peasant-or plantation-based) arose within existing systems of social and economic relations, which had a decisive influence on the final outcome of this process of change.

Emiliano Zapata could well be named “man of the decade” for the 1990s in Mexico, despite the fact that he has been dead for more than seventy years. His legacy, along with the revolution he represents, has been writ large in Mexican political culture. But whose version of Zapata has been enshrined? Is he the figure inspiring the agrarian reforms introduced by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to end the government's obligation to redistribute land to the rural poor? Or is he the sacred symbol of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional's armed rebellion calling for elimination of those same reforms? How can Zapata be all these things to all these groups simultaneously? Conversely, how can any single person or group endorse both sets of cultural-political meanings that have attached to Zapata when they appear to contradict one another directly?

Mexican politics has long been regarded as a closed system, with policy-making dominated by the reigning president and his circle and presidential succession (with all its possibilities for change of course) managed by an only slightly larger “Revolutionary Family” of top figures in the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). So intertwined are the Mexican state and the dominant party that scholars and opposition leaders alike have begun to speak of the “PRI state.” E. E. Schattschneider observed that in the U.S. system, 90 percent of the population never has access to the “pressure system” that directs policy choice. The percentage of the excluded is undoubtedly even larger in Mexico because the system is more decidedly “closed.” Yet in both countries, policy innovation is not uncommon. Marked changes of course have occurred at times, and opposition forces external to the system have occasionally managed to block presidential decisions and force reevaluation and sometimes painful adjustments. This article will examine the “agrarian question” in Mexico and will argue that its persistence and the ways in which it has been framed have constrained policymakers while encouraging and sustaining the development of an independent peasant movement during the 1970s and 1980s.

Most of the Latin American countries that have introduced market-friendly economic reforms during the course of the last two decades have also suffered serious increases in inequality. The systematic coincidence in timing of the two events suggests that the reforms have been one cause of the worsening distribution. The generalization that major increases in inequality have occurred in many Latin American countries over the last two decades is now widely accepted (Altimir 1994; Morley 1995). This article will add new information for a few countries (Colombia, Costa Rica, and Ecuador). Its main focus, however, is the possible causes of those increases, a complicated question because so many different currents have affected the region over this period—the economic crisis, the policy reforms, technological change, shifts in terms of trade, and still others. Samuel Morley (1995) and others have argued that much of the observed increase in inequality was related to the economic crises suffered by nearly every country in the region. This interpretation might suggest that the optimists who predicted positive distributional outcomes from the reforms (such as Krueger 1988) will eventually be vindicated, once the negative effects of the crises have played themselves out. Although I agree that this factor played a significant role, the fact that inequality appears to be significantly higher after the crisis than before (Altimir 1994) implies that other contributing factors were also at work. Of these, the reforms are suspect because of their content and implicated by the coincidences in timing with the increases.

Attempts have been made at Latin American regional integration since the late 1950s, but on each occasion, high expectations have met with disappointing failures. In July 1986, however, a new phase began in the history of Latin American integration as Presidents Raúl Alfonsín of Argentina and José Sarney of Brazil signed the Argentina-Brazil Economic Integration Pact (ABEIP).

Studies on the Argentine public administration have usually underlined the weakness of Argentine state bureaucracies. On the basis of these assertions, scholars have tended to equate the number of state jobs with cases of patronage. By doing so, they have neglected the crucial issue of the scope of appointments effectively controlled by political parties. This article applies an innovative empirical inquiry to measure the extent of party patronage, assessing where, how deeply, and to what extent parties reach into the Argentine federal state structures. While the results by and large confirm the widespread notion of the broad scope of political appointments in Argentina, they refute the conventional hypothesis of a state thoroughly colonized by parties. Overall, the results suggest that parties' distribution of public jobs in the Argentine federal state is oriented less to mass-style patronage than to gaining effective and broad control over state institutions.

From mid-1980 to the present, Uruguay has experienced greater political change than during the previous seven years. This essay examines the salient political event that separates the two periods: the national plebiscite of November 1980. Its relevance, the causal conditions that might account for its unexpected results, and its probable short-range consequences will be explored. The argument assumes a general familiarity with Uruguayan politics of the last two decades, and particularly during the period 1974-80. It is also assumed that the Uruguayan political system of the last two decades fits O'Donnell's bureaucratic-authoritarian model, with the caveat that because of specific economic conditions, a feature of that model known as the “deepening” of the economy is not applicable to Uruguay, as has also been argued with respect to the case of Chile.