Why should one publish in LARR? How does one publish in LARR? These questions are asked by graduate students, foreign colleagues, and researchers moving into Latin American studies. For the benefit of such prospective authors, it may be worth reviewing the pros and cons of publishing in this journal.

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.

Programs of economic liberalization have many common features all over the world, but they do not necessarily have the same consequences. Differences in their effects reflect differences in the countries themselves along with accidental factors of timing and external events, and they can also embody systematic consequences of alternatives within the programs. The starting point in this discussion is that different versions of liberalization—alternatives consistent with the basic strategy—can have significantly different effects on poverty and inequality.

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?

If one is to believe what a good number of commentators on the Venezuelan political scene have written over the years, democracy in that country has been in perpetual crisis. By at least the mid-1970s, the view that the democratic system established in 1958 was deteriorating rapidly had become widely accepted in the Venezuelan press and among Venezuelan academic analysts. It was not always clear, however, exactly what was meant by “the crisis” (Peña 1978; Stempel-Paris 1981; Romero 1986). This perception of crisis intensified some years later, to the point that one outsider observed in 1984 that according to the prevailing view of democracy in Venezuela, the political system must be totally bankrupt and its survival could be explained only as the result “of an unprecedented act of political will or of the imbecility of the population” (Baloyra n.d., 2).

An enduring paradox lies at the heart of Brazilian politics. The Brazilian Army has long suffered from corruption at the highest levels so extreme as to create disquiet throughout the institution. Yet the Brazilian military, like other armed forces in Latin America, has justified its involvement in politics and society by accusing civilians of corruption. Despite repeated revelations of military corruption, soldiers and civilians as well have sometimes accepted the armed forces' use of this moral discourse. For example, an anonymous businessman wrote General Pedro Aurélio de Góes Monteiro on 30 November 1954: “The country is on the brink of financial and economic ruin. This state of things is the result of the abuses of past governments and of the deceased President Vargas and the generalized corruption. … The only solution for the reestablishment of confidence in the exterior would be the delivery of the government to a military dictatorship” (emphasis in the original).2 Thirty years later, at the close of authoritarian rule in Brazil, a daring journalist named Carlos Alberto de Carli exposed rampant corruption within the military's intelligence services. Yet Carli himself dedicated his book in part to “the armed forces—the moral reserves of our people” (cover page, Carli 1985).

The new democracy in Chile provides an interesting test case for two influential lines of thinking on Latin American political economy. Both these perspectives have claimed that the recently installed civilian regimes would find it exceedingly difficult to effect equity-enhancing change. One hypothesis has stressed the impediments posed by a capitalist free-market system to measures favoring the poor. The other has emphasized the obstacles presented by a transition to democracy that avoids a rupture with the preceding conservative dictatorship. Because the democratic government led by Patricio Aylwin (1990–1994) faced both types of constraints, it should have been particularly unlikely to achieve greater social fairness.

In the 1980s, students and practitioners of the political economy of development in Latin America became enthralled with East Asia's spectacular economic performance. Researchers wrote cross-regional comparisons trying to discover where Latin America had gone wrong and how it could catch up to the “four dragons,” meaning South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong (see Deyo 1987; Gereffi and Wyman 1990; Haggard 1990). This quest to determine the key ingredients of East Asia's growth held particular policy relevance as many Latin American countries sought to escape from the “lost decade.” The best-known attempts to describe the political basis for East Asia's successful turn toward policies stressing export-led growth have emphasized two factors: initiative of state leadership and highly capable technocracies insulated from societal interference (Haggard 1990; Wade 1990). Among Latin America countries, Chile, the region's premier exporter, seemed to confirm these ideas.

The Provincias Unidas del Centro de América (later called the Federación de la América Central) lasted from 1824 to 1838. Despite the various reasons for the union's disintegration in 1838, the dream of reunification has resurfaced at least twenty-five times. Geography, three hundred years of colonial union, and what Thomas Karnes has termed “more bonds of similarity than any other small group of nations” have all made the region of Central America an obvious candidate for unification.

Environmentalism in Guatemala has emerged in conjunction with trends toward regional democratization and international economic globalization. These origins have helped form and continue to shape the organizational structure, membership, and policy orientation of the movement as well as its strategies and tactics for policy implementation. The ecology movement became closely associated with party politics during the democratization of the 1980s and eventually established an almost symbiotic relationship with the administration of the Partido Democracia Cristiana under Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo (1986-1990). But this early alliance with the Democracia Cristiana eventually weakened the movement's ability to make independent policy decisions and to protect itself from attacks by opposing parties. The relationship between the environmental movement and the state also reinforced the movement's dependence on international financing. These party and international connections have limited the organizational scope of the movement, with the result being that the ecological movement in Guatemala today remains small and urban-based and lacks a strong grassroots foundation.

In the history of human migration, rarely has a situation arisen in which simultaneous voluntary immigration and emigration flows have dramatically transformed the ethnic composition of an independent country. Belize since its independence in 1981 provides an example of such an unusual combination of circumstances. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, anecdotal evidence began to accumulate suggesting that the country's population was undergoing profound structural changes that included realignment of its settlement patterns and alteration of its ethnic mix.

Latin America has long provided most of the world's coffee. At the same time, dependence on coffee exports has profoundly affected many Latin American countries. This research note will analyze the relationship between primary-commodity exporting and development by means of a case study of attempts by Latin American countries to industrialize their exports by exporting instant coffee rather than green coffee beans. A commodity-chain approach will be used to explain how the initiatives of Latin American states and private firms have responded to and changed the structure of the global system of producing instant coffee. Three Latin American countries—Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador—have become significant exporters of instant coffee, but the benefits they have realized from this effort have been limited by the control exercised by transnational corporations over the global production system.

In the age of corporate empires and free trade, little attention has been paid to those who live and work on the margins of the mainstream capitalist economies. In Ecuador, these workers constitute a vast sector of the national population. Some 60 percent of urban dwellers and probably a much larger proportion of rural families exist below the poverty line, eking their living out of family plots of land or micro-enterprises (World Bank, cited in Larrea and North n.d.). Many of these belong to indigenous ethnic groups and nationalities. What is the effect of capitalist expansion on these workers and the way in which they organize their economy? Are they destined for Marx's “dustbins of history,” or have they been able to adapt to and even take advantage of capitalism without losing their historical specificity as noncapitalist producers?

Scholars have long recognized that the final quarter of the eighteenth century in Brazil witnessed an agricultural renaissance in which traditional exports expanded and new tropical products began to find their way overseas (Prado Júnior 1967; Novais 1979; Arruda 1980, 1986; Alden 1984). In recent years, more attention has been paid to the diversified productive activities supplying an increasingly consolidated domestic market during this period (Brown 1986; Barickman 1991; Fragoso 1992). Although most of those activities were agricultural, artisan trades also flourished and domestic industry appears to have been growing, particularly the cottage textile industry. My examination of an unexplored and unusual primary source has revealed grounds for assuming that cloth and thread were being made throughout much of late colonial Brazil. The primary evidence also suggests that this cottage industry resembled the incipient stages of so-called European proto-industrialization to a remarkable degree, although important differences cannot be ignored. Nor does the regionalized nature of the source allow for generalizing about the colony as a whole. This research is thus a preliminary investigation that calls for further research. It nevertheless points out the potential importance of domestic industry within the overall Brazilian colonial economy and stimulates awareness of its complexities.

The favelas of Rio de Janeiro, with their teeming masses trapped in misery, constitute the perfect site for investigating how social inequality is reproduced in Brazil. The latest survey of the shantytowns, conducted by the Instituto de Planejamento in Rio de Janeiro (IPLAN-Rio) reported that as of 1991, the city contained 661 favelas housing 962,793 persons in 239,678 shacks. The squatter settlements recreate in miniature but distorted form the entire history of modern Rio de Janeiro. The first squatter settlement was built in 1898 in Rio by Bahian veterans of the military campaign against mystic rebel Antonio Conselheiro. Yet only when the housing crisis of the 1940s forced the urban poor to erect hundreds of shantytowns in the suburbs did favelas replace tenements as the main type of residence for destitute Cariocas (residents of Rio). The explosive era of favela growth dates from 1940, when Getúlio Vargas's industrialization drive pulled hundreds of thousands of migrants into the Federal District, until 1970, when shantytowns expanded beyond urban Rio and into the metropolitan periphery. Even today, the favelas remain an officially unrecognized and illegal part of city. For this reason, many researchers assume that the shantytowns have no written history and that historians must rely on anecdotal evidence from residents for information on squatter life.