This paper examines the origins of amendatory vetoes in Latin America and shows why presidents' ability to present a redrafted bill after congressional passage gives them considerable power to affect legislation. The paper begins with a historical account that illustrates the workings of amendatory observations in nineteenth-century Latin America—the passage of the Electoral Law of 1874 in Chile. Next, it specifies the degree to which different constitutional procedures allow presidents to redraft legislation and shows why the power to introduce amendatory observations provides greater discretion than the power of the better-known block veto, regardless of override thresholds. Lastly, the paper traces the origins of amendatory observations back to the first wave of constitution writing that followed the wars of independence. Our findings challenge prior classifications of veto powers in Latin America and highlight the positive agenda-setting power afforded to the president at the last stage of the lawmaking process.

William H. Riker, “Lincoln at Freeport”

In contrast to the rich scholarship documenting the traumatic post-contact destruction of indigenous populations in the Latin American tropics, little is known about their contemporary population dynamics. What accounts for the “demographic turnaround” reported for some groups? How widespread is population recovery, and what are its implications for indigenous political resurgence? We address these questions by compiling recent (post-1980) demographic indicators for over one hundred lowland indigenous populations. Despite remarkable socioeconomic and cultural diversity among these groups, we find compelling evidence that they nevertheless share a common trajectory of very rapid growth over the past two decades, especially in contrast to non-indigenous populations. We briefly review the implications of their dramatic physical resurgence and show how closer attention to this phenomenon is overdue. We discuss the relevance of indigenous societies' recovery to scholarship and praxis in the areas of health and education, cultural and political gains, and demographic theory.

This article analyzes the persistence of an official discourse of mestizo nationalism in Nicaragua in spite of the adoption of multicultural citizenship rights for black and indigenous costeños in 1986. These reforms appeared to directly contradict key premises of previously dominant nationalist ideologies, particularly the idea that Nicaragua was a uniformly mestizo nation. Instead of a radical break with the past, however, what we find in contemporary Nicaragua is a continuous process of negotiation and contestation among three variants of official mestizo nationalism: vanguardismo, Sandinismo, and “mestizo multiculturalism” that emerged in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s respectively. This article traces the continuities among these disparate but intimately related accounts of national history and identity and the way they all operate to limit the political inclusion of black and indigenous costeños as such.

In an era when development processes seem best characterized by a continuing cycle of macroeconomic crisis and recovery, a critical question for students of the political economy of development concerns identifying the factors that facilitate recovery from economic shock. Recent work on this question has moved beyond a focus on specific macroeconomic policy adjustments toward analysis of the role political institutions play in shaping recovery processes. Applying this research to the experiences of Mexico's thirty-one states following the country's 1995 economic crisis, I identify significant variations in states' abilities to recover from crisis and link those variations in part to the country's uneven electoral transition to a multiparty democracy that coincided with the crisis. With more and more governmental activities increasingly being decentralized to lower levels of government, these findings provide an indication of the important role subnational variations in political environments can play in shaping the broader political and economic outcomes of Latin America's “dual transition.”

Several Latin American countries have experienced the emergence of neopopulist politicians who eschew ties to traditional parties and orient their campaigns toward the atomized poor. This article examines the role of television in the electoral success of these politicians. Using survey data, I assess the impact of television exposure on vote choice in the 1989 election of Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil, the 2000 election of Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and the 2001 election of Alejandro Toledo in Peru. These cases achieve variation on two predictors of media effects: the presence of a neopopulist outsider and biased television coverage of the campaign. Statistical analysis confirms our theoretical expectations of media effects in the first two elections (where coverage was biased) but not in the third. These findings suggest that bias is the more reliable predictor of television's impact on Latin American presidential elections, rather than the presence of a neopopulist candidate.

While there is much disagreement concerning the political effects of Chile's two-member district binominal election system, most agree that it provides strong incentives for the formation and maintenance of coalitions. This article takes on these assumptions, contending that the electoral system's coalition-inducing tendencies are actually quite context dependent. Focusing primarily on the governing Concertación coalition and relying on analyses of relative levels of electoral support among parties, a “reward” insurance policy for electoral losers, and the timing and sequencing of elections, this article outlines the conditions under which the coalition-enhancing tendencies of the electoral system are at their strongest and their weakest. It finds that these variables align to provide a less than propitious environment for the maintenance of the Concertación coalition in the lead up to the 2005 elections. In theoretical terms, the article challenges direct and mechanistic connections between electoral formulae and party outcomes, arguing that we should not be surprised when subtle contextual variations cause theorized outcomes not to occur. These findings contribute to an emerging consensus that many of the theorized rules on the connection between electoral and party systems are more complex and context dependent than is usually supposed and should be applied with greater caution.

Female participation in the Latin American paid labor force is increasing dramatically. Building upon Portes and Hoffman's (2003) model, we use occupational data to measure gendered changes in Latin America's class structure over the last two decades of economic restructuring and adjustment and to investigate the causes and consequences of these regional patterns. Our results suggest two important conclusions. First, economic adjustment and restructuring is increasing women's parity with men in terms of class position largely as a consequence of the deterioration of men's once-privileged location in the class structure. Second, recent economic adjustment and restructuring has altered power relations between social classes in Latin America in part because it has inspired both qualitative and quantitative changes in the gendered composition of Latin American labor. The number of women entering the work force, and the labor conditions suffered particularly by women workers, has resulted in both the literal and figurative “emasculation” of the Formal Proletariat. These preliminary findings make clear the explanatory benefits of including gender in analyses of changes in the Latin American class structure.

This article explores the sources of Ecuador's boom in flower exports since the late 1980s. In that boom, fresh cut flower exports rose from almost nothing to 9 percent of the country's nonpetroleum export earnings. This research addresses whether trade liberalization and macroeconomic reforms played a decisive role in stimulating the export boom or whether changes in the global flower market created Ecuador's comparative advantage in flower exports independent of the policy regime. The article surveys the many changes in economic policy toward agriculture in general, flower cultivation, nontraditional exports, international trade, and macroeconomic stability. Growth rates in traditional and non-traditional exports are examined to see if they correlate with changes in key policies. The article also examines how the restructuring of the global flower market affected Ecuador's floriculture industry.

Researchers studying migration and development have argued over the potential that migration and associated remittances have to improve the economic and social conditions in origin communities. Past research on migration from indigenous communities in Oaxaca has similarly questioned the compatibility of traditional governance systems with high migration rates. We argue, using evidence from four Zapotec communities in rural Oaxaca, that communities can use the organizational capacity of traditional governance systems to access remittances from migrants for the benefit of the community as a whole. Communities can require payment from migrants in lieu of communal labor requirements (tequio) and may directly solicit remittances from migrants for community projects. The extent to which they enforce these requests depends on the existing organizational strength in the community. These findings imply that strong forms of community organization can make the difference between migration contributing to underdevelopment and migration contributing to development.

Gabriela Mistral's uncharacteristic short stories, which she began writing at the age of fourteen, demonstrate the Chilean poet's need to express violence through the brief narrative genre. Mistral wrote six short stories and in all of them she blurs the boundaries between gender and violence. For the sexes to be defined, Mistral seems to use violence as a means to distinguish them. When women suffer through men's actions, both gender performances become more pronounced and defined: women and men exist precisely because of men's harmful actions. A shift of perspective and agency occurs when men fail to recognize their own behavior and blame women for their fate. Both sexes lose their subjectivity (or sexuality) and become so intertwined that their differences are no longer perceptible. The two stories analyzed in this essay are the first story Mistral wrote, “El perdón de una víctima” and her last, “El rival.” In both, Mistral demonstrates her wariness to define a norm for heterosexual relationships, while at the same time, she attempts to discern female difference.

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.

The following three articles, together with this brief introduction, review the consequences of the paradigm shift in Latin American economic historiography from structuralism to the New Institutional Economics (NIE). Joseph Love analyzes the basic tenets of structuralism, their connection to dependency, the influence of CEPAL on policymaking, and how a generation of historians utilized the methodologies of structuralism to research historical problems in Latin American development. John H. Coatsworth's contribution correlates the decline of the structuralist model to the rise of research interests in the role of institutions in economic history and examines the latest long-range comparisons of productivity between the Latin American and U.S. economies. Commenting on the recent research utilizing the NIE, Coatsworth agrees with Love that the relative economic stagnation of the past quarter century may not render structuralism entirely irrelevant. Sandra Kuntz Ficker summarizes the basic positions held by the structuralist and dependentista schools with respect to commercial policy and concludes with a discussion of how the NIE contributes to innovative research on Latin American foreign trade. These articles resulted from the authors' participation in a LARR- sponsored panel at the 2004 Latin American Studies Association Congress.

This article uses an interdisciplinary approach to present and analyze information on the smallest manifestations of popular culture in Latin American countries: postage stamps. The disciplines involved are semiotics (the linguistic study of signs), history, politics (internal and international), and popular culture. The project studies how these postage stamps carry significant messages, including expressions of nationalism, politics (national and international), propaganda, and cultural identity. The article begins with an overview of Latin American postage stamps, with an emphasis on internal and international politics. The latter category focuses on several cases of inter-country tension in which postage stamps have played a role.

This article studies the evolution of literacy in Latin America and the Caribbean from 1900 to 1950. A methodology is developed to overcome the lack of census data for half of the countries in the region for 1900, as well as the lack of comparability of the existing census data. Combining census data and literacy data gathered from marriage registrations, military recruits, crime statistics, and urban censuses, adult literacy estimates for twenty-two countries of the region are provided for 1900, which offer a new and more complete portrait of human capital formation from 1900 to 1950. There are wide variations across the region in literacy rates in 1900, as well as in the increase of literacy from 1900 to 1950, the latter being associated with variations in the expansion of primary education enrollment in different Latin American countries. However, countries also differ in their success in transforming school enrollment into adult literacy, which is partly associated with the prevalence of Amerindian populations.

The relative success of the Southern Common Market (MERCOSUR) is a puzzle for most theories of regional integration. This is due to its having achieved remarkable progress in spite of lacking features such as significant levels of previous interdependence (demand factor) or major regional institutions (supply factor). To account for this puzzle, it has been claimed that the operation of MERCOSUR rests on presidential diplomacy. Such a mechanism is understood as the resort to direct negotiations between the national presidents whenever a crucial decision has to be made or a critical conflict solved. This article argues that presidential diplomacy—understood as political, summit diplomacy as opposed to institutionalized, professional diplomacy—is insufficient to account for the performance of MERCOSUR. Through the empirical analysis of three critical episodes, the article shows how institutional structures, shaped by the system of government of the member countries, have sustained presidential intervention and, hence, the process of regional integration.

More than half a century has passed since structuralism appeared as an “indigenous” program of economic development in Latin America. Given the poor performance of the region's economies largely under the guidance of neoliberal doctrines since 1980, the question of whether structuralism—associated with the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, or CEPAL—still has any relevance is a legitimate one. In any event, structuralism's influence during the third quarter of the last century is admitted by friend and foe alike. My intent is not to determine whether structural analysis was “correct,” but to examine some of the forms it took and show why they were important. These were structuralist approaches to import substitution, informality, and economic historiography. I further consider structuralism as a movement, and the reasons for its success and subsequent decline. The essay closes with a brief consideration of how structuralism survives today, given the vast changes in economic development theory over the last half century.

N. M. Rothschild & Sons (NMR), the banking house which the Frankfurt-born Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836) began operating from New Court in London in 1809 and which is continued to this day by his descendants, has a long history of involvement in Brazil. Extensive documentation of this history is preserved in The Rothschild Archive in London, where material up to 1930 is available for consultation. The firm's initial business with Brazil was in merchant banking activities and bullion dealing, but in 1855 it became the Brazilian government's financial agent in London and went on to handle the government's borrowing in the London capital markets and to be closely concerned with the country's fiscal, commercial, and exchange rate policy. With the bank at the heart of the development of Brazilian public finance, The Rothschild Archive is an important resource for an understanding of this aspect of Brazilian economic and political history, as well as the history of British informal imperialism and emerging patterns of globalization.