The mutual impact of violence and religious transformation in the recent experience of Latin America has reshaped the public presence of churches (both Catholic and Protestant) and altered their discourse and appeal. Many churches turned to promotion of human rights, protection of victims, and opposition to authoritarian rule. Others allied with repressive regimes in the name of a kind of Christian nationalism. The violence at issue ranges from the massive violence of repression, torture, and revolutionary struggle to the institutionalized violence of poverty, disease, and injustice, which is often accompanied by the violence of daily life and linked with migration, drugs, gangs, and domestic abuse. Religion itself has changed: the Catholic monopoly has been replaced by pluralism, as Protestant and Pentecostal churches reach new populations and offer potential converts a way of opting out of the violence of daily life through rebirth in a new religious community.

The illegal drug trade has become a serious threat for the Americas. Is a multilateral approach to combat it possible? This article proposes that the United States and Latin America are finding ways to use multilateral organisms to confront this threat and examines as an example the role of CICAD in setting a cooperative agenda to develop an antidrug regime. CICAD has established common ground for long-term cooperation in certain areas. But common drug strategies in the Americas require the support of the United States and the cooperation of Latin American states, both of which are still works in progress. Therefore the future of the CICAD-inspired antidrug regime will depend on whether the United States and Latin America will cooperate to define the illegal drug threat in the same way and bestow on CICAD the authority necessary to address it.

Although Ecuadorian presidents tolerate most opposition voices most of the time, they routinely try to restrict the basic political liberties of particular critics. In doing so, they initiate executive assaults. Why do some of these executive assaults succeed while others fail? This article analyzes patterns of support for and opposition to publicly contested assaults in Ecuador between 1979 and 2004. Using a combination of statistical tests and a case study, it develops an argument based on the relative power of different types of organizations and associations to influence the outcomes of assault conflicts. The analysis demonstrates that executive assaults fail only when neither the state security forces nor the business sector supports them. In this situation, particular business organizations are able to force presidents to back down. The analysis provides new insights into the social foundations of democratic practice in Ecuador, and Latin America more broadly.

Focusing on the social movement that resisted the privatization of health care in El Salvador in 2002–3, this article asks how the movement's multisectoral composition influenced news coverage of the health care policy debate. Specifically, it examines whether the diversity of perspectives in the alliance was reflected in the media's source selection and framing of the policy issues. A content analysis of Salvadoran newspapers' coverage shows that the media relied mainly on just two movement actors to represent the antiprivatization position: the striking doctors and the leftist opposition party. It also reveals that a period of elite dissensus on the policy issues opened a temporary opportunity to insert movement messages in the coverage. The study indicates that a multisectoral alliance does not enhance movement influence through the news media, though broad alliances confer strategic advantages for the movement's broader communication work.