In the “fourth wave” of transitions to democracy sweeping the globe over the past twenty years, the Chilean case stands out as an exception. Although most instances of democratization following military rule have tended to yield rightist governments, Chile is one country in which the ruling coalition that emerged was Center-Left in ideological orientation.

The economic crisis of the 1980s and the shift to outward-looking development strategies ignited interest in promoting agricultural exports throughout Latin America. In the 1990s, export strategies continue to dominate discussion on agricultural development in the region. Especially for smaller developing countries in Latin America, agricultural and natural-resource exports appear likely to lead efforts to stimulate export growth. Extraordinarily rapid agro-export growth has already been achieved in many countries. From the middle to late 1980s, nontraditional agricultural exports grew at rates of 222 percent in Chile, 78 percent in Guatemala, and 348 percent in Costa Rica. In Paraguay, the most agrarian country in Latin America, agricultural exports nearly tripled during the otherwise difficult decade of the 1980s.

Slavery in the interior state of Minas Gerais has been a focal point of the voluminous historiography appearing on Brazilian slavery in the past twenty years. During the mineral boom of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Minas was the key region of the colonial Brazilian economy and the largest slaveholding capitania. The older literature on Brazilian history recognized the centrality of slave labor to the eighteenth-century mining sector but concluded that as the mining boom waned after 1750, slavery began to disintegrate. The history of Minas Gerais after the boom was interpreted as a long period of economic stagnation accompanied by reversion to cattle raising and subsistence agriculture, slow demographic growth, and the transfer of the Mineiro slave population during the nineteenth century to the more dynamic coffee-growing areas in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

In the liberal tradition, democracy is often defined by the holding of open elections and the preservation of a given set of civil rights and liberties. As neoliberal democratic governments emerge around the world, the relationship between democracy and a citizen's democratic rights is rapidly being redefined. In the ensuing debates, access to information has become an important issue. Many of these new governments, in their efforts to project themselves as “democratic,” have moved quickly to declassify a host of documents. This strategy has resulted in a tidal wave of revisionist research. One of the countries following this trend is Brazil.

The region most often associated with Guatemalan history and culture is the western highlands, known locally as Los Altos. Only thirty miles from the hot Pacific coast, the highlands are located where the sierra rises rapidly to an altitude of three thousand meters, an area of painful beauty captured in Jean-Marie Simon's telling phrase, “eternal spring, eternal tyranny.” Amidst volcanoes, lakes, and cloud-covered mountains, Guatemalans struggle to rebuild civil society in the wake of what may have been the worst repression in the hemisphere, eking out a living by farming exhausted corn plots. The majority of Guatemala's twenty-three ethnic groups reside in these western highlands, where anthropologists have catalogued and attempted to interpret Mayan culture. Here also historians of nineteenth-century Guatemala have constructed a national history outlining the commercialization of land and coercion of labor that accompanied the growth of the Guatemalan coffee industry.