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).

In 1819 José Ignacio do Couto Moreno composed this sentimental poem about his adopted hometown, a small river port in the interior of Minas Gerais. He felt compelled to write it after suffering considerable ribbing by his colleagues during a festive occasion in Rio de Janeiro. Couto Moreno was homesick, and his fellow partygoers could not resist teasing him for demonstrating nostalgia for home and hearth. They challenged him incredulously, “What possible attraction could such distant and brutish backlands hold?”

This article seeks to accomplish four goals. First, it will examine the historical circumstances of the rise of the U.S.-Caribbean garment production circuit from the standpoint of economic restructuring within the U.S. industry and U.S.-Caribbean trade relations and from the perspective of the major political interests involved. It will also examine the impact of this restructuring on local garment sectors and the wider host economies in the Caribbean. The article will then explore the role of the “Big Three” Asian suppliers in the contemporary restructuring as well as their role in the offshore garment sector in the Caribbean. The latter effort constitutes a preliminary investigation of an emerging area of political and scholarly interest, and it will be partly integrated into the treatment of the first two topics. Finally, while I will refer more broadly to the major garment-producing Caribbean islands, Jamaica will provide a case-study focus for my remarks here. The essay will conclude by looking briefly at the “free-zone” or “free-trade-zone” model of industrial relations and its impact on older traditions of trade unionism and labor-management practices, taking the experience of a number of Hong Kongese garment factories in the state-owned Kingston and Garmex Free Zones in Kingston, Jamaica, as an example.

The relationship between capitalism and democracy has been a focal question in political science for years. Compelling arguments have been advanced on all sides of the debate. Democracy promotes capitalism. Capitalism promotes democracy. The two are correlated but are caused by other variables, including everything from a given country's political culture to its position in the world economy. Now the recent turn toward neoliberal economic strategies in Latin America has revitalized the question of whether any one form of capitalism is more compatible with democracy than others.

Local politics in Latin America have been attracting a great deal of scholarly interest as of late (Fox 1994; Nickson 1995; Reilly 1995). This interest can be attributed in part to the simple fact that over the past two decades, the institutional weight of Latin American local governments has continued to grow, spurred as much by the popularity of decentralization policies as by the seminal crisis of the central states in the region. Faced with shrinking resources and painful structural adjustment programs, local governments were often left with no other choice but to divest themselves of responsibilities they could no longer meet.

The containment of communism
was for the United States a
problem of external defense;
for the underdeveloped countries
like Brazil, it was a problem
of internal development.
Roberto Campos, A lanterna na popa

The authoritarian regimes that in recent decades ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, Brazil from 1964 to 1985, Chile from 1973 to 1990, and Uruguay from 1973 to 1984 all used violence to crush dissent and the law to regulate and legitimate that violence. Repression under the Brazilian regime was particularly legalistic in the sense that the number of killings was relatively low but the rate of judicial prosecution high. Available evidence suggests that more individuals were brought into military courts for political crimes in Brazil than in any of the other authoritarian regimes in the region.

Since the late 1980s, peasants throughout Central America have begun to coordinate political and economic strategy. Agriculturalists from the five republics that constituted “la patria grande” of Spanish Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica) as well as representatives from Panama and Belize have founded regional organizations that meet to compare experiences with free-market policies, share new technologies, develop sources of finance, and create channels for marketing their products abroad. They have also established a presence in the increasingly distant arenas where decisions are made that affect their livelihood. Small-farmer organizations now lobby at the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and regional summit meetings. Central American campesinos have attended numerous regional gatherings of agriculture ministers and presidents, as well as events like the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the 1995 Western Hemisphere Presidents' Summit in Miami, the 1995 World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen, and the 1996 Food Security Summit in Rome.

In the early 1960s, the dramatic mobilization of rural wage laborers and small farmers placed the agrarian question at the top of the Brazilian political agenda. The question facing governing elites was how to modernize an archaic agrarian sector that was widely perceived as posing a major bottleneck for development and a breeding ground for agrarian radicalism. Until that time, wage laborers and small farmers in various forms of land tenure had effectively been excluded from existing labor legislation, social security, and coverage by national law in general. Instead, various traditional and clientelist forms of social control regulated rural social relations. The new rural movements were led by relatively moderate urban groups or individuals seeking to create a rural political base. Their appearance soon after the Cuban Revolution however, and in the larger context of the cold war, triggered fears of possible revolution. National debate quickly centered not on whether but on how the Brazilian state should intervene in the countryside. Attempts by the populist government of President João Goulart to address the agrarian question were cut short by the military coup of 1964. In its wake, the fledgling rural movements were brutally repressed in a wave of state-sponsored repression and private landowner violence.

On International Women's Day in March 1958, ten thousand women gathered in the largest stadium in Caracas to celebrate the fall of the dictatorship of Major Marcos Pérez Jiménez and to commemorate the many women who had taken an active role in opposing it. This gathering was the first mass meeting following the demise of authoritarian rule. Despite the array of political views represented in the audience and on the dais, unity was stressed by every speaker. Women had struggled against the dictatorship united, and united they would promote their own rights in the fledgling democracy. But within a year, the women's group that had sponsored the rally disbanded. Women did not hold another nonpartisan meeting for sixteen years, and then only when the United Nations' International Women's Year in 1974 galvanized the two thousand participants. During the first thirty years of democracy in Venezuela, women held no more than 5 percent of congressional seats and few of the decision-making positions in political parties.

Consensus is growing about the fundamental principles underlying economic policy reforms. In addition, a series of recent comparative studies have increased scholarly understanding of the political conditions necessary for launching such reforms. Yet understanding of the factors that make reforms sustainable over the longer term is far less developed. A wide-ranging and unresolved debate continues over the roles played by institutions, politicians, interest groups, and the popular sectors. The influence of such groups tends to be marginal during the initial implementation of policies, a process involving an insulated group of technocrats. As the reforms proceed, the opposition of different societal groups to specific policies may have some impact but is less critical to the success or failure of the adjustment program than overall economic performance (see Geddes 1995). The primary strength of these groups is retrospective and collective: they can vote reforming governments out of office. Elections—and therefore voter behavior—are critical in sustaining economic reforms over the long term. Voters can reverse economic reform programs, and at times they do. Yet they also can play a major role in making programs more sustainable by legitimating their continuation at the ballot box.

In 1930 the first successful military coup in Argentina in the twentieth century interrupted the normal functioning of the political and electoral institutions consolidated by the Sáenz Peña Law of 1912. This statute required secret balloting by all Argentine men eighteen and older. The coup of 1930, followed by a failed attempt to achieve legitimatization at the ballot box in 1931, reversed the development of electoral politics in Argentina by reverting to open fraud and provoking the abstention of the main national political party up to that time, the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR).

The belief survives among us
[Latin Americans] that United States
scholars would write better histories
of Latin America if they studied
less and invented more.
Daniel Cosío VillegasHistory and the Social Sciences in Latin America

This article will analyze the way in which U.S. historians' writing on Latin America, especially on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has been influenced by the changing relationship between the United States and Latin America. It will also trace more briefly the changing approaches of historians from Latin America. In my view, the two groups have taken different routes but have arrived at much the same destination.

During the dramatic wave of democratization in the 1980s, Venezuela stood out as South America's wise elder. While neighboring militaries had shifted in and out of power, sometimes ruling for decades, Venezuela had maintained a stable democracy since 1959. After a relatively brief period of adjustment, the country settled into a political system in which two dominant political parties alternated in power and the armed forces remained peacefully in the barracks. Yet twice in 1992, important sectors of the armed forces took up arms to displace what they and many other Venezuelans viewed as a decrepit and corrupt political system. The coups failed, but they left the political system shaken and the military's political subordination seriously in doubt. The coup attempts also raised doubts about Venezuelan strategies for military control that had been a model for the rest of Latin America.

This essay will report the results of research on the Río de la Plata clergy during the transition to Argentine nationhood, between 1806 and 1827. It will examine a database compiled from manuscripts, printed primary sources, and biographical dictionaries on 204 clerics residing in the Río de la Plata during those years (about 40 percent of the estimated 560 individuals). The database is analyzed according to descriptive and correlation procedures. The statistical analyses were undertaken to relate the demographic characteristics of the churchmen to their attitudes toward independence from Spain and the religious reforms initiated in the ensuing years by Bernardino Rivadavia, chief minister under Martín Rodríguez, governor of the Province of Buenos Aires. The quantification complements the secondary literature (mostly narratives) on the nineteenth-century Catholic Church in the Río de la Plata region.

In fact, for the chimas, the defense of their patrimony is a fundamental part of their history.... What is new is the growing interest of different branches of government and of national and international groups, which have realized the importance of the Chimalapas. Voces en la selva

Although often individually weak and marginalized in Mexico, environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and indigenous communities coalesced in the early 1990s around the issue of preserving the Chimalapas rain forest in southeastern Mexico. They then brought the problem to national and international attention and eventually helped force the redrawing of a proposed highway route. This research note will analyze the formation and activities of the Comité Nacional para la Defensa de los Chimalapas (CNDCHIM), a network of environmental NGOs, artists and intellectuals, activists and researchers, and representatives of forty-five indigenous communities in the Chimalapas. CNDCHIM formed in 1991 in response to a proposed highway that was to run through La Reserva El Ocote in the Chimalapas, one of Mexico's last two rain forests. The Chimalapas issue is extremely complex, entailing social justice, land tenure, megaprojects, federal and state politics, and environmental policy. This study will focus mostly on CNDCHIM and its relationship with the Mexican government, placing the organization within the context of agrarian conflict and the political and ecological issues surrounding the potential destruction of the Chimalapas.

During the 1820s, the works of English utilitarian philosopher and jurisconsult Jeremy Bentham attained a remarkable diffusion throughout Spanish America, enjoying a high reputation among the leaders of the revolt against Spanish rule. Colombian Francisco de Paula Santander professed himself to be Bentham's admirer, while Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda took his advice on freedom of the press. Simón Bolívar, el Gran Libertador, went so far as to assure Bentham that his name was never pronounced “even in these savage regions of America, without veneration nor without gratitude.”

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.