Current Debates over North American free trade focus almost exclusively on economic issues. Advocates claim that a trilateral agreement will provide impetus for sustained, long-term economic growth in Canada, Mexico, and the United States — and that it will provide a regional counterweight to the European Community (EC) and to Japan. Critics in the United States claim that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will encourage the export of US investment and employment to Mexico. Canadians fear accelerated debilitation of vulnerable sectors of the national economy, from natural gas to automobile parts. Skeptics in Mexico predict that NAFTA will perpetuate low wages for the Mexican working class and transform the entire country into a massive maquiladora.

Despite the Mexican regime's track record of adaptiveness, the 1980s seemingly altered the nature of political reform there. Secular, conjunctural, and policy trends attenuated traditional reformist mechanisms (i.e. the regime's capacity to co-opt, or corruption's “lubricating” potential), exposing a series of wrenching political dilemmas and potentially zero-sum equations. The watershed presidential election of July 1988 and the continuing challenge posed by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solórzano's PRD (Parttdo de la Revolutión Democrática) both reflected and crystallized these quandaries, magnifying the need and inherent dangers of reforming the one-party system. Yet during the ensuing years, and contrary to unwieldy predictions and scenarios, the regime neither unraveled (see Wiarda 1988/89), capitulated before a Cárdenas-led electoral or revolutionary front, nor stagnated. Instead it rebounded, raising new questions about Mexico's political future.

Although Poland and Mexico differ in many important respects, certain notable similarities in their historical patterns of development and in their geopolitical contexts have invited several attempts to compare the two systems (Hughes, 1986; Croan, 1970; Gentleman and Zubek, 1992 forthcoming). Despite the substantial economic potential of each country, each has had only uneven success in economic development. Each has undergone repeated economic setbacks in spite of having undertaken epic initiatives, particularly in the area of industrialization. In the political realm, although both countries have manifested a passionate nationalist ethos in the past, neither society has proved able to develop a modern democratic system.

The Sandinistas celebrated their first party congress on 19 July 1991, the eleventh anniversary of the day of the “Triumph,” but this time the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) had little to celebrate and a lot to worry about. The party that once claimed so surely to be

was now struggling to reconstitute itself as an effective political organization after being ousted from power in 1990 by the population it claimed to represent and lead.

Brazil Entered the 1990s with its transition from authoritarian rule incomplete. The gradual withdrawal of the armed forces from power brought an end to over two decades of direct military rule in 1985, paving the way for a new constitution and the first presidential election in nearly 30 years. These formal democratizing changes were erected, however, on a foundation of socio-economic structures and political institutions with some decidedly non-democratic features. As a result, Brazilian politics retains some important vestiges of authoritarianism. Pre-existing centers of power in society remain extraordinarily influential within the emerging system, frequently operating beyond the reach of even nominal democratic control or oversight.

If events of the 1980s did not completely transform Brazilian politics, they did redefine the main challenge of the political transition. The initial problem of replacing the military government with a civilian regime has given way to a second, less tangible, task of consolidating democratic institutions and procedures (O'Donnell, 1988).

This Article Surveys the experiences of four Central American countries in implementing economic policy reform: it analyzes the factors which led to the introduction of new policies, explores various aspects in their implementation, assesses lessons learned in the process, and discusses prospects for the future.

The Four Countries under discussion — Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — are experiencing a move away from import-substitution policies of the past toward increased liberalization of their economies and becoming more competitive in the international marketplace. This shift in policy orientation began in the 1980s, after years of economic decline. At the risk of appearing arbitrary, the policy-shift years are here defined as those which followed an actual, or announced, change to an economic policy with a predominant market orientation.