Armed citizenship and political violence in Colombia and Latin America during the 19th century.

Charles W. Bergquist (1942–2020)

Are all immigrants in the United States willing and able to integrate successfully within a liberal democratic polity? This research question guides the three papers included in the present dissertation. To explore this question I designed and implemented a multi-city survey in the United States (the American Cities Survey) which contains representative immigrant, black, white, Latino and Asian samples drawn independently for each locality. Based on the findings of the American Cities Survey, which include multiple attitudinal, cultural background and political behavior measures at the individual level, along with socioeconomic and demographic measures in six distinct local institutional environments, I argue that all voting eligible immigrants and immigrant communities-regardless of their native origin and their ancestral religious affiliation-- are willing and able to integrate politically so long as political institutions and contexts (especially local ones) provide them with the same exposure to the political system and institutions, and opportunities to participate in politics as the ones provided to all other citizens. I thereby challenge both the academic and popular perceptions that certain immigrant groups have anti-democratic and anti-liberal attitudes due to their shared cultural characteristics (i.e. religious affiliation or political socialization in a non-democratic polity) that persist even after migrating to a liberal democratic polity and are passed on to the second generation. I discover that the notion that Latinos vote less than similarly situated blacks and whites has persisted overtime for two reasons: first, simply because a greater proportion of Latinos have settled in localities where institutions tend to inhibit political competition and depress turnout, biasing representative national samples; second, because the smallest geographical unit one can study with existing survey and Census (CPS) data does not allow for exploration of political behavior at the individual level beyond the state. This is problematic for studying groups like Latinos, because 50 percent of their population is concentrated in three states and less than ten cities. I find that the results found at the national level are not replicable at the local level and Latino political participation varies by city. In localities where institutions provide incentives for political party competition the probability of a citizen of Latino origin voting is equal to that of blacks and whites of similar age, income and education. In other words, the evidence presented here suggests that the correlation found at the national level between Latino immigrant group membership and apolitical attitudes and behavior is of a contingent, perhaps even spurious nature, artifice of geographical concentration of members of this group in local institutional environments that depress political activity. The theoretical framework and findings of this dissertation reveal that immigrant political attitudes and behavior towards the host country's political system is shaped mostly by individual experiences with this system, and not by prior or inherited cultural or religious beliefs from their (or their ancestor's) country of origin.

UNDERSTANDING UNITED STATES FOREIGN POLICY TOWARD LATIN AMERICA: LESSONS FROM A COMPARISON OF NAFTA AND THE COLOMBIAN TRADE PROMOTION AGREEMENT Margaret M. Commins Queens University of Charlotte Ongoing issues with violence and drug trafficking in both Mexico and Colombia invite frequent comparisons between the two countries (Bonnor, 2010; Fukuyama and Colby, 2011). Indeed the parallels are significant . Both Mexico and Colombia are marked by some of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, weak and ineffective judicial institutions , and large swaths of each country considered ungovernable. And, perhaps predictably, United States policy toward both countries is similar as well. Plan Colombia, the United States’ response to narco-trafficking and violence in Colombia, and the Merida Initiative, the United States’ response to Mexico’s drug wars, both emphasize military solutions to drug trafficking, combined with varying degrees of emphasis on state-building and socioeconomic development. In terms of United States policy toward Latin America, however, these countries share another commonality, one that is not as well-explored: the United States signed and implemented preferential trade agreements (PTAs) with each. President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico and President George H.W. Bush of the United States endorsed the notion of a bilateral free trade agreement between their countries in June of 1990. In September, 1990, Canada asked to be included in the negotiations, and the resulting “North American Free Trade Agreement” (NAFTA) was passed by the United States Congress in 1993, and implemented on January 1, 1994. The Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement (CTPA) was signed by President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia and President George W. Bush in November, 2006, passed by the United States Congress in October, 2011, and entered into force on May 15, 2012. Though passed by the United States Congress almost twenty years apart, these agreements are quite similar. Both are preferential trade agreements signed between a developed country, the United States, and a developing Latin American country (and, in the case of NAFTA, another developed country, Canada). Both were initiated and negotiated primarily by Republican administrations, but shepherded through the United States Congress by Democratic presidents. At least rhetorically, both were touted by these presidents as demonstrations of major shifts in United States policy toward Latin America. Both agreements were passed in times of C 2013 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 73 The Latin Americanist, December 2013 economic and fiscal difficulty for the United States. Both agreements were passed during periods of strain in the multilateral trading system. And, each agreement faced its most significant opposition not from business interests fearing import competition, but from citizen and labor groups worried about a variety of human rights issues, including the treatment of labor and potential environmental degradation. It is common to explain policymakers’ decisions to pursue trade agreements with reference to the demands of powerful economic interests that will benefit from an agreement’s provisions, particularly the opening of foreign markets and increased protection for foreign direct investment (see, for example, Milner, 1988; Rogowski, 1989; Hiscox, 2002). Though economic interests (capital and labor) that will be hurt by increased importcompetition will lobby against free trade agreements, if an agreement includes liberalization that will benefit a sufficiently broad and powerful coalition of economic interests, we can expect policymakers to pursue it. But, explaining U.S. support for NAFTA and CTPA in these terms is problematic. For one, explanations based on the preferences of interest groups are not always as compelling in the case of PTAs, particularly North-South trade agreements like NAFTA and CTPA. The potential economic benefits are usually much smaller. And, because opposition to these agreements is quite strong in the United States, particularly from non-economic interests like environmental and human rights groups, the interest group politics are more complex than those captured by analyses focusing on economic interests. Indeed, negotiating North-South PTAs is relatively costly for U.S. policymakers. These agreements cover a range of issues – from trade and investment to labor standards and environmental protection – and require significant time and attention to negotiate. And, unlike many foreign policy decisions taken by the United States government , trade agreements must be passed by both houses of the United...

Infamous for its political violence, Colombia has weathered a distinctive period of turmoil from roughly 1977 to 2005. This wave of political violence, defined by guerrilla and paramilitary strife, is already being studied by a range of interdisciplinary scholars and non-academics, especially within Colombia. Their work provides a welcoming base for an increased engagement by historians. This article introduces the topic of political violence in Colombia in the late 20th century, along with the broad nature of publications already in place, while providing a narrative framework that makes the topic accessible to undergraduate students and relative newcomers.

Michael Jiménez was passionate about many things: the coffee lands and, above them, the high sabana of Colombia where he grew up; issues of social justice; the liberating potential of radical Catholicism; and his students’ capacity for critical understanding and engagement in social action. He was a gifted teacher, a spellbinding orator, a loving father and husband, and a lively, compassionate friend who left a lasting imprint on all who knew him. As a vivid storyteller, Michael communicated his love of history to his university students and his own children: at age five his son David insisted on delivering history lectures to his kindergarten class. Michael created and participated joyfully in all sorts of communities; one of the last, a moving testimony to the warmth Michael generated, was the website his brother created through which Michael and his wife communicated with those they cared about in the difficult months from February 2001, when Michael’s renal cell cancer recurred, until 1 September 2001, when he died all too soon at the age of 53.Michael was born in California in 1948, the eldest of three children, son of an Irish-American mother and a father of Spanish descent. When he was very young, the family moved to Bogotá where his father worked as a labor negotiator for the Texas Petroleum Company (Texaco). During his childhood in the high Andes, Michael became heart and soul Colombian. In Bogotá he studied at the Colegio Nueva Granada, the American school, where he began his life-long friendship with Herbert “Tico” Braun, son of a hardware store-owner who had migrated to Colombia from Germany. They would later become two of the leading historians of Colombia working in the United States. Michael returned to the U.S. for high school, and, as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Connecticut, he joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to oppose the war in Vietnam, which he saw as a peasant war. He did an M.A. in Latin American studies at Stanford where he studied with John J. Johnson, and then travelled through Latin America for a year, studying rural politics and society on a Thomas F. Watson fellowship, which was awarded to unusually creative undergraduates.In 1972 Michael began doctoral work at Harvard University, with John Womack. Before beginning his influential work on Zapata, Womack had intended to investigate the agrarian origins of violence in Colombia: his students Michael Jiménez and Mary Roldán were to do so in their own distinct, equally path-breaking ways. As Michael was completing his doctoral coursework his young wife Pamela Trigg died of cancer, leaving Michael to raise their infant daughter Christina on his own. (Gloria Emerson wrote about this period in Michael’s life in Some American Men [1985], reprinted in Vogue Magazine, which focused on how some progressive men were pioneering new lives and forging new values.)Michael’s Stanford M.A. thesis focused on the Colombian agrarian reform law of 1936; at Harvard he began what was to become a life-long inquiry, Braudelian in its depth, richness and scope, into the history of Viotá, an area of large coffee haciendas to the west of Bogotá that gave rise to an unusually creative, successful peasant movement in the 1920s and 1930s. The birth of agrarian radicalism in Viotá came to be expressed through peasant alliances with the nascent Colombian Communist party. Michael’s Harvard dissertation, on the origins of the Red Peasant Republic of Viotá, was the first in-depth study of a Colombian coffee municipio and all the actors there, landlords, peasants, politicians, tax collectors, lawyers, local merchants and chicha makers, their interactions, conflicts, and agreements.In 1982, before his thesis was done, Michael moved to Princeton, where he joined Stanley Stein who soon retired. Michael took up the post of instructor and then assistant professor of Latin American history. During his eleven years at Princeton, he was an immensely popular teacher, introducing courses on “Twentieth-Century Latin America,” “Tropical Commodities in the Modern World,” “Countrysides of the Atlantic World in the Long Nineteenth Century,” and winning the President’s Teaching Award. “I consider myself a leftist, a socialist, a marxist . . . a radical Christian,” Michael told an interviewer in 1994 (see Victoria Peralta and Michael La Rosa, eds., Los colombianistas [Santa Fé de Bogotá: Planeta Colombiana Ed., 1997], 196–208). His classes, with their 80-page syllabi, were serious and wide-ranging, combining political economy and the history of social classes with a vigorous sense of lived experience. Students from the Princeton years remember with respect and affection his decency, his humane spirit, his integrity, and his insistence that history matters for the present and the future. He also chaired the Princeton Borough Civil Rights Commission, and, in 1991, was an adjunct professor at the New School for Social Research.At Princeton, Michael began the long process of rewriting the dissertation to make it the book he envisaged. He intended to produce a masterwork, ranging from the late eighteenth century to the present, connecting the coffee region of western Cundinamarca to the nation and the Atlantic world. This was to be a work of comparative history that would bring together political economy, culture, politics, gender analysis, and that would help us make sense of twentieth-century Colombia, the breakdown of social bargaining, the possibilities for peace and the advent of war. Over the years, elaborating and reelaborating the manuscript became an immense burden that weighed on him—by 1993 it was not done and so he moved to the University of Pittsburgh with its large Latin American studies program. At the same time, reworking the book with new analytical perspectives and new sources was his joy; it was an essential dimension of the world he inhabited and he wrote beautifully with great insight, verve and care in a prose that is a delight to read. Michael submitted the book to Duke University Press in September 2000, just as he came up for tenure at Pittsburgh, hardly a month before the cancer was diagnosed.Over the years, Michael published many substantive articles, some directly related to his Viotá investigation and some think-pieces that went off in new directions. Taken together these writings make a major contribution to Colombian and Latin American history. Three articles deal with coffee: one, a fascinating investigation of the development of coffee consumer markets and advertising practices in North America; and the others, subtle studies of the multiple problems faced by the businessmen who founded coffee haciendas in western Cundinamarca. This revisionist analysis of landlords provides an insider’s view of their ongoing struggles with unstable markets, unresponsive government and contestatory labor, lending new insights into the difficulties of establishing profitable export enterprises in Latin America. Michael delved into the gendered cultural tensions that informed landlord-tenant relations: he wrote an influential article, published in Spanish and English, on landlords’ sexual coercion of peasant women and peasant responses, and, in his book, explored the taxing of home-brew liquor produced by women as a major element in peasant unrest.Michael was highly respected in Colombia, especially among the new generation of Colombian social historians. Arturo Alape was the mentor who introduced him to fieldwork in Viotá; and he counted among his good friends Mauricio Archila, Colombia’s most prominent labor historian who always thanked Michael in his acknowledgements, and Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, the economic historian of Colombian elites who dedicated his most recent book to Michael. Michael also maintained warm academic relations with Bernardo Tovar, Medófilo Medina, Alberto Flórez, Ana María Bidegain, and Fernán González. Michael was the only foreigner invited to contribute to a volume on the history of everyday life (he wrote on the countryside), and his commentary on approaches to the study of social movements at the important conference on Colombian historiography held in Bogotá in 1993 rendered Michael’s wide theoretical knowledge and deep understanding of Colombia accessible to university students there. He also frequently exchanged ideas with investigators at the progressive Jesuit Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular (CINEP) whose socially engaged research he admired.In the early 1990s, his first daughter nearly grown, Michael married Lynn Sanborne with whom he had two children, David Manuel and Eliza Rose. At Pittsburgh as at Princeton, Michael attracted hundreds of enthusiastic undergraduates; he participated actively in training graduate students, several of whom, including James Sanders and Gary Long, worked on Colombia with him, and he often contributed to the Latin American Labor History Conference. At Pittsburgh, Michael became involved in national debates on history teaching: in 1995 he served as a panelist to review the National History Standards for the Council on Basic Education in Washington, D.C.As the violence in Colombia intensified, he began publishing on agrarian radicalism and the guerrilla movements. Michael’s study of the divergences of official liberalism and popular liberalism in Colombia and of how popular liberalism, associated with small property and peasant autonomy, evolved into agrarian communism is an original argument that helps explain the origins of the FARC guerrilla movement. His article with his close friend Marc Chernick on the logic of the Left in Colombia is perhaps the best interpretation in English of why and how guerrilla groups emerged in Colombia in the 1960s and 1970s; and at Lehigh University in 1999 he explained the causes of the present crisis in Colombia in a sophisticated, vigorously argued conference paper that deserves publication.Beyond Colombia, Michael wrote two pathbreaking essays on major issues in twentieth-century Latin American history—Liberation Theology and the role of the middle classes. In both, Michael expressed deep concern with prospects for radical democratic projects, and he challenged Latin American historians to grapple with how to “address the political and moral questions of power, authority and resistance in the contemporary world.”In one of the two laudatory reports that led Duke University Press to accept his long-awaited book manuscript, a reader wrote, “Michael Jimenez has long been viewed as one of the most promising Latin American historians of his generation.” It is a great loss for his family, the many students he inspired, and the profession that he died so prematurely.(I highly recommend John Womack Jr.’s excellent “Eulogy for Michael F. Jiménez” on the Internet at www.geocities.com/michael_f_jimenez/womack.htm)

We conclude these essays with a perplexing example, where political violence as a form of exchange itself comes to be normal. An aspect of political life regarded as underground in most countries (even in Italy where the Mafia has penetrated the highest places), political violence in Colombia is open, visible, accepted, and persistent. With Sendero words are things, reified, and symbolically dense. With La Violencia words are vacant. Events are the real thing — they are what they are. At this point discourse, and discourse analysis, simply fade into irrelevance.

The political violence that haunts much of modern Latin America has long preoccupied scholars of the region. Yet few works provide a perspective as wide-ranging as A Century of Revolution. This important collection — with its careful attention to causes, processes, and outcomes — goes a long way toward debunking the widespread view that political violence is “natural” to Latin America. It also shows just how restrained revolutionary violence has often been in face of pervasive counterrevolutionary terror.In his extensive introduction, Greg Grandin forcefully argues that political violence should be taken as a category of historical analysis. He criticizes historians of Latin America for having ceded to other disciplines “the task of assessing and defining the larger historical meaning of twentieth-century Latin American political violence” (p. 11). As overstated as this claim may be, Grandin is right to call for more historical analysis of Latin American political violence. Drawing heavily on Arno Mayer’s study of violence in the French and Russian revolutions, Grandin proposes that historians view political violence as a contingent historical process; pay closer attention to the interplay between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence as well as between domestic and international forces; and consider Latin America’s revolutionary twentieth century as a distinct historical period (“revolutionary” is defined quite broadly here and includes populist regimes).Ten deeply researched case studies reinforce but also expand on Grandin’s framework. Friedrich Katz examines why Mexico’s revolutionary reforms of the 1930s did not engender the mass terror marking similar changes elsewhere in the world. Katz masterfully contrasts Mexico with the Soviet Union to highlight the differing roles played by international powers, counterrevolutionary forces, and revolutionary leaders. Yet his analysis also stresses distinct traditions of state repression, levels of state power, and memories of earlier revolutionary violence. Memory and the “spectacle” of revolution ary violence stand at the center of Jocelyn Olcott’s study of a 1930 demonstration in Matamoros, Mexico, that cost the lives of 20 communists. Olcott uses an understudied issue — revolutionary state violence against radical revolutionaries — to show how competing representations of political violence can shape intra-revolutionary struggles for power and legitimacy. Jeffrey Gould’s essay stands out for illuminating how passion and memory shaped revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence in El Salvador’s insurrection of 1932 and Nicaragua’s Sandinista Revolution. The juxtaposition of the two events also allows Gould to highlight the political costs of the revolutionaries’ own symbolic violence. Moving to Chile’s southern frontier, Thomas Klubock’s essay details how the 1934 rural uprising in Ránquil was structurally rooted in the violent colonization process of the late nineteenth century. His contribution neatly reveals that antipeasant/counterrevolutionary violence can, at times, reflect weak elite authority in a quasi-stateless countryside.The next six case studies cover the Cold War era. Michelle Chase examines the 1959 trials and executions carried out by Cuba’s revolutionary regime against Batista officials accused of human rights violations. Focusing on the debate over legitimate/illegitimate violence, Chase convincingly argues that the executions reflected not “some ahistorical Marxist propensity toward violence” but the regime’s success in restraining revolutionary violence from below. Lillian Guerra in turn explores how the Cuban counterrevolution shaped the repression of the revolutionary state. That this repression took a less overtly violent and more disciplinary form is evident in her analysis of the regime’s use of “weapons of intimidation” against distinct sectors of Cuban society. Peter Winn’s comprehensive study of the origins of Chile’s 1973 coup and its violent aftermath reveals the very different role that ideology can play in shaping revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence. Like Gould, Winn underscores the high political cost that the Left can incur for its own symbolic violence. Carlota McAllister challenges recent accounts of the Guatemalan civil war by showing how Mayans were willing participants in the guerrilla struggle of the 1970s and ’80s — not its hapless victims. Her ethnographic work reveals that although ladino racism and state repression pushed poor Mayans to take up arms, revolutionary ideals and a sense of historical necessity were just as important. Rather than emphasizing ideology, Gerardo Rénique stresses structural factors in his essay on Peru’s civil war of 1980 – 92. He thus focuses less on the war itself than on its historical roots, especially the 1960s changes affecting rural society, the Left, and the military. This emphasis on structure also marks Forrest Hylton’s study of why a Colombian city (Medellín) that had been largely untouched by La Violencia of the 1940s – 50s became, in the 1980s, a center of narco-paramilitary violence. He suggests that Medellín’s brazen narco-paramilitary violence stemmed mainly from the efforts of narco-entrepreneurs to create a “parastate.” For Hylton, this violent process “epitomizes the refeudalization of power” (p. 357). To quote Charles Tilly, we might also see it as “state making as organized crime.”The book closes with four conceptual essays. Corey Robin provides a sweeping reflection on US support for counterrevolutions, while Neil Larsen stresses the histori cal contingency of Latin American political violence and its structural roots in capitalist modernization. Gilbert Joseph similarly links Latin America’s political violence with modernity and blasts revisionist efforts to render revolutionary violence as senseless. Above all, he argues that the region’s Cold War began with the Mexican Revolution, due to its profound effects on US-Latin American relations. Arno Mayer, in an interview with Grandin, reiterates the benefits of a comparative approach that not only stresses historical contingency but situates political violence in its social, economic, and cultural contexts.Overall, this stimulating volume sheds important light on the history of twentieth-century Latin America. It presents innovative ways of studying political violence, thanks especially to its careful attention to dialectical relationships such as revolutionary/counterrevolutionary violence, local/international forces, and agency/structure (though there is little discussion of the interplay between everyday forms of violence and political violence). A Century of Revolution powerfully shows why Latin American historians of all eras should consider political violence a key category of historical analysis.


 In light of the armed conflict and political violence in Colombia, the contribution of nursing professionals is fundamental in caring for individuals, families, and communities, whose experience because of these types of events has been devastating, not only for their physical health, but for their psychic and emotional stability. Due to this, we give way to some brief considerations on the armed conflict and political violence in Colombia. Thereafter, the notion of social suffering is included as a perspective that broadens the horizon of care within this context, then we review the elements that characterize the perspectives and domains of nursing and the possibilities offered by the new epistemological tendencies to reflect on life, as a central focus of care, from the proposals by Afaif Meleis; and, finally we discuss the role of nursing professionals in the restitution of the dignity of those who have experienced the consequences of the armed conflict.

Introduction to<i>Visual Arts Research</i>Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

As the country approaches this year’s presidential elections, both Liberal andConservative parties find themselves severely weakened. Nevertheless, it appears that they will continue to dominate the electoral landscape.

In the aftermath of war and large-scale violence, how can nations function as societies? How can people learn to live together again? Or, have the foundations of trust, civility, and predictability upon which fully functioning societies depend been irrevocably damaged? If we want to understand why reconciliation does or does not take root, we must begin by understanding the perspectives and interests of individuals. In this article, I develop such a model of individual attitudes towards reconciliation. In particular, I analyse the determinants of individual beliefs about reconciliation, with a particular emphasis on the impact of violence in Colombia. I combine survey data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project survey on individual attitudes regarding reconciliation with data on political violence to measure the extent to which individuals live in environments characterised by violence and how this shapes their opinions about reconciliation.

Editors’ Summary Raquel Bernal, Ugo Panizza, Roberto Rigobón, and Rodrigo Soares The four papers in this issue of Economía cover both macro-and microeconomic topics of extreme relevance to the policy debate in Latin America. In “A Comparison of Product Price Targeting and Other Monetary Anchor Options for Commodity Exporters in Latin America,” Jeffrey Frankel discusses the advantages and drawbacks of seven alternative nominal variables that could become anchors or targets of monetary policy. Also with respect to monetary policy, Marc Hofstetter notes in “Inflation Targeting in Latin America: Toward a Monetary Union?” that five of the main economies in Latin America have moved toward inflationtargeting regimes (Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru) and asks whether, under those circumstances, it might not be better for these economies to adopt a common currency. Switching to the microeconomic perspective, in “Is Violence against Union Members in Colombia Systematic and Targeted?” Daniel Mejía and María José Uribe investigate the claim that union leaders are targets of political violence in Colombia, finding no empirical support for this commonly held belief. Finally, “The Dynamics of Income Inequality in Mexico since NAFTA,” by Gerardo Esquivel, analyzes the reduction in inequality in Mexico since 1994, showing that labor income, social programs, and remittances played a major role in that process and arguing that the observed pattern resulted from the interaction of market forces and state interventions. In the first paper, Jeffrey Frankel considers the relative strengths of alternative anchors or targets of monetary policy, focusing on Latin America and the Caribbean. Economies in this region tend to be price takers on world markets, to export commodities subject to volatile terms of trade, and to experience procyclical international finance. Of the seven anchors and targets considered, three are exchange rate pegs (dollar, euro, and special drawing rights), one is orthodox inflation targeting, and three represent new proposals for inflation targeting, with particular emphasis on the price of export commodities: PEP (peg the export price), PEPI (peg [End Page vii] an export price index), and PPT (product price targeting). The paper presents counterfactual exercises to analyze the performance of these different regimes in response to various types of shocks. Frankel argues that the advantage of the new proposals in relation to traditional CPI inflation targeting is that they can serve as nominal anchors and, at the same time, accommodate shocks to the terms of trade. CPI-based inflation targeting typically leads to tighter monetary policy as a response, for example, to increases in the world price of imported oil, generating currency appreciation. The author argues that a product price target would perform better in stabilizing the real domestic prices of tradable goods, since it would lead to appreciation in response to increases in the world prices of commodity exports, not in response to increases in the prices of imports. The recently increased volatility of commodity prices resurrected the debate on the desirability of currency regimes that are able to accommodate terms of trade shocks, highlighting the timeliness of the discussion raised in Frankel’s paper. In the following paper, Marc Hofstetter keeps the focus on monetary policy but turns his attention to the potential costs and benefits of a monetary union in Latin America and its weaknesses and strengths relative to those of dollarization. Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru have adopted inflation targeting since the 1990s, and inflation has been kept at one digit in all of them since 2000. Hoffstetter concentrates on these five countries, noting that converging monetary strategies lead naturally to the question of whether welfare gains might result from adopting a common currency. In trying to answer this question, the paper presents a simple policy model, along with results from the vast literature on monetary unions, to obtain estimates of the benefits and costs associated with a monetary union and with unilateral dollarization. The results suggest that the five countries considered would indeed benefit from a monetary union. With the exception of Brazil, they would also benefit from dollarization, but only in Mexico would the benefits from dollarization be clearly higher than those from a monetary union. Dollarization has obvious advantages only in countries that have strong trade links with...

Health Consequences of War and Political Violence

DOES CRIME UNDERMINE PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR DEMOCRACY? FINDINGS FROM THE CASE OF MEXICO Mary Fran T. Malone University of New Hampshire “What is at stake today is not just the result of an election, but rather the future of democracy, of representative institutions,” announced Mexican President Felipe Calderón shortly before midterm elections in July of 2009.1 Declaring that Mexico was at an historical crossroads, President Calderón cautioned that the future of democracy depended quite heavily on the outcome of his government’s fight against organized crime and corruption. Calderón’s concerns have spilled beyond Mexico’s borders. In the United States, officials have expressed alarm over the increasing tide of violence with a series of controversial statements that have angered Mexican officials. For example, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair charged that Mexican drug cartels “impede Mexico City’s ability to govern parts of its territory and build effective democratic institutions” (Blair 2009: 30).2 The media have prominently featured such statements, as the outbreak of violent crime in Mexico has dominated headlines in newspapers around the world. Such reports warn that the current crime wave is “the most serious crisis . . . faced since the 1910 Mexican Revolution and its immediate aftermath” (Krauze 2009). Indeed, since Calderón assumed office in December of 2006, over 47,000 people have died from violence related to the drug trade and organized crime.3 In Mexico, crime now shares the national limelight with economic issues . While the global economic crisis has exacerbated historic problems of poverty and inequality, national attention has increasingly focused on crime. When Mexicans were asked to name the most pressing problem facing their country in a recent national survey, crime ranked at the top of the list, together with unemployment and the economic crisis.4 In the week that Calderón gave his warning, the Mexican media coverage of crime dwarfed that of the economy, as reports on crime more than doubled those devoted to economic issues.5 Official statements warning that crime could completely destroy Mexico ’s democratic institutions are clearly exaggerated, but the current crime wave does highlight a question of growing importance throughout the developing world – what impact does crime have on democracy? To answer this question, this study examines the effects of crime on Mexican democracy , but from a different perspective than those of the headlines. The focus here is on the micro level political consequences of crime in Mexico, as this C 2012 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 17 The Latin Americanist, June 2013 paper aims to determine whether crime can jeopardize Mexicans’ support for democracy and its norms. To this end, this paper utilizes data gathered by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) in national surveys of Mexico in 2008.6 These surveys contain numerous questions regarding political attitudes and behavior, as well as items measuring experiences with and perceptions of crime. Thus, these data are a particularly valuable resource for examining the linkages between crime and political attitudes and behavior. To examine the micro level consequences of crime for Mexican democracy , this study proceeds in four parts. The first section provides an overview of crime trends in Mexico during the period of democratization , culminating in an examination of the current crime crisis and the responses of the Mexican government. Following this background on the Mexican case, the second portion of the paper turns to examine the literature on crime and democracy. With this theoretical framework, the third section relies upon statistical analysis to gauge the impact of crime on citizens ’ political attitudes (support for democracy and the rule of law) and political behavior (voting behavior and protest participation). The concluding section of the paper discusses the implications of the analysis for political attitudes and behavior in Mexico. Crime and Democratization: The Case of Mexican Exceptionalism Throughout the Latin American region, democratization has coincided with skyrocketing crime rates (Lafree and Tseloni 2006). As most Latin American nations made the twin transitions to neoliberal economies and democratic forms of governance throughout the 1980s and 1990s, they were plagued with rising crime rates, particularly violent crimes like homicides. Cruz (2008) finds that during this time frame...

Latin America has experienced a rise in the prevalence and incidence of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Differences in IBD phenotype between Hispanics in Latin America and those in the USA...