Latin American States Research Articles

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF EXTERNAL AGGRESSION IN LATIN AMERICA: A COMPARISON BETWEEN COSTA RICA AND ECUADOR

External aggression is an analytic category used by Latin American States regardless the governmental ideology or their political affiliations. A comparative study conducted out between two Latin American Small States enables to understand the regularities in their behavior when facing such kind of threat, in terms of their role identity, objective and subjective interests and consistently their foreign policy actions at the domestic, bilateral, sub-regional and regional level. This article argued that the small states are more vulnerable to the external aggressions because of their lack of material resources and their need of external support, compromising their sovereignty and territorial integrity, and requiring the activation of multilateral mechanisms such as the Organization of American States and other regional and sub-regional institutions.

Latin America and the liberal international order: an agenda for research

Recent debates about challenges to the liberal international order (LIO) have led International Relations (IR) scholars, both those critical and supportive of the concept, to examine its origins and effects. While this work has shed new light on the evolution of international order, there has been a surprising absence: Latin America. I explore the theoretical consequences of this empirical gap for IR's understanding of the liberal international order. After assessing the literature's treatment of Latin American and the LIO, I offer a macro-historical sketch of the region's role in the order's critical junctures. The LIO has shaped Latin America, and Latin America has shaped the LIO—but not always in the ways supporters or critics might expect. The region's sovereignty and statehood evolved alongside the LIO—with international experiences very different from those of areas colonized during the LIO's expansion—and, in turn, Latin American engagement shaped the practices of Great Powers through international law and organization, cooperation and resistance. Despite its participation in the LIO's founding moments, Latin America was often accorded second-class treatment and benefits for the region have often been narrow. The experience of Latin American states over two centuries—independent but often internationally unequal—highlights the consequences of partial inclusion or marginalization from the LIO. Deeper study of Latin America's history with the LIO casts light on the ways in which non-Great Powers outside the order's core shaped, and were shaped by, the elements of the evolving order.

Passed, regulated, or applied? The different stages of emigrant enfranchisement in Latin America and the Caribbean

ABSTRACTWhen are emigrants really enfranchised? Lengthy lags exist between some reforms that de jure introduced external voting and their application. In the blooming literature on emigrant enfranchisement, these lags remain unexplained. We argue that this hampers our understanding of enfranchisement processes as having different legal and political stages. With data on Latin American and Caribbean states since 1965 until the present, we investigate why some states in this region have delayed the regulation and application of external franchise while others have implemented it right after enactment. We propose hypotheses to understand these reforms as episodes marked by different contexts, engineered by different agent coalitions and embedded into larger processes of political change. In particular, we suggest that enfranchisement processes are composed of three stages: enactment, regulation, and first application. Our findings suggest that the process of adoption of external voting is shaped by the legal mechanism of enactment and the stability of political coalitions.

Assessing Howard J. Wiarda’s Contributions to Our Understanding of U.S. Foreign Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean

Howard J. Wiarda’s scholarship advanced our understanding of Latin America and the Caribbean by emphasizing culture and revealing that U.S. foreign policy often failed to understand the cultures of those regions. Through an analysis of Wiarda’s writing on Cuba, this article demonstrates that his formative experience in the Dominican Republic influenced his later analyses of U.S. foreign policy and his comparative research on Latin American and Caribbean states, and also led him to underestimate the uniqueness of the societies in the region.

Prebisch, el Estado y la “debilidad del imprescindible”

<p>Partiendo de reconocer la centralidad del Estado en la propuesta de Raúl Prebisch, pero señalando, al mismo tiempo, los límites que ésta contenía para problematizar<br />la condición periférica de los Estados latinoamericanos, se analizan los cambios manifestados en relación con el rol del Estado para el desarrollo en la producción temprana del autor en la Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (Cepal). Con el objeto de explicar aquellos cambios y de reconocer los fundamentos de esa condición periférica, se introducen elementos teórico-analíticos que reconocen las dinámicas conflictuales que históricamente actuaron sobre –y se retroalimentaban en– los Estados latinoamericanos, conformando determinadas estructuras y formas de implicación que les impidieron dirigir una estrategia de industrialización tal como lo planteó el estructuralismo en general, y Prebisch en particular.</p>

A Brief Historical and Legal Essay on “Economic Constitutions”

This article explores constitutional regulation as it relates to the foundation of economic relations. The proper norms and divisions of the basic laws (constitutions) of states are analyzed from the historical and legal point of view: the authors develop an idea of“economic constitutions.” This conception is based on the ideas of American and European economists and lawyers, including the works of the Nobel-prize winner James Buchanan, the author of the conception of “constitutional economy.” The analysis of the individual, the most obvious norms of “economic constitutions” is made in their evolution. The common regularities of formation, development, and functioning of “economic constitutions” are researched. “Economic constitutions” are considered as the immanent legal expression of material conditions of life of communities. The research is based on the criteria of the correspondence of “economic constitutions” with the demands of social economic development of state organized communities. The genesis of “economic constitutions” of the USA, France, Germany and other states, for example, Latin American states are researched. Special attention is paid to “economic constitutions” of socialist and postsocialist states, especially to the “economic constitution” of the Russian Federation. The peculiarities in the development of the newest “economic constitutions” based on the basic laws of Finland and Switzerland are revealed. The authors develop an idea that “economic constitutions” are not limited to the questions of the influence of a state on an economy and of the determination of the borders of state regulation. Economic rights and freedoms, questions of interrelations of labor and capital, financial system, taxation, etc. are considered as the components of “economic constitutions.” Taken into account is that modern international standards are refused from the secondary role of the social economic rights of mankind. The conclusion is made about the interrelationship of the progress of “economic constitutions” and socialeconomic rights in the information society that are able to ensure the fundamentally new level of a direct democracy in the management of a state.

Authoritarian neoliberal rescaling in Latin America: urban in/security and austerity in Oaxaca

ABSTRACTThere is an increasing consensus that, across the globe, austerity policies have often relegated fiscal pressures from the state to the urban scale. These are sometimes discussed under the label ‘austerity urbanism’. This article explores urban authoritarian neoliberalism through an examination of spatial and scalar manifestations of neoliberal restructuring. It asks how austerity urbanism’s rescaling takes effect in spatially variegated ways in the intermediate city of Oaxaca in Southern Mexico. I argue that Oaxaca’s austerity programmes and its rescaling of security provision are two intertwined, rather than parallel, processes. The paper builds on and aims to advance the authoritarian neoliberalism literature by linking it to literatures on the postcolonial Latin American state and urban studies. The article makes two contributions: first, it identifies and carves out multi-scalar aspects of authoritarian neoliberalism (by speaking to the urban realm); second, it contributes to the authoritarian neoliberalism literature on the ‘South’. Hence, the aim is to reveal the multi-scalar aspects of authoritarian neoliberalism and to illustrate its explanatory power in the global South.

‘Always Returning from It’: Neoliberal Capitalism, Retrospect, and Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings

This article contemplates the question of the afterwardly through a reading of Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014). I argue that in Brief History, anxieties about the inability to summon a future beyond the present – to know a world beyond neoliberal capitalism – are formally generative, providing the literary and cultural material for experimentation. Far from having exhausted the potential of the literary, the novel instead insists on the vitality of counter-hegemonic representation of the rise of the neoliberal world-system, and the capacity to resurrect the ‘not-known’ social totality of an earlier historical event even as it simultaneously struggles to imagine potentialities of collective agency in the present. James constructs a retrospective history of the aftermath of the 1976 attempted assassination of Bob Marley, reinterpreted from the standpoint of the twenty-first century in order to narrate not only the individual traumas incurred by the event, but in order to rematerialise a collective history of the social, systemic, and inter-state violence perpetrated by the neoliberal turn of capitalist accumulation in the Caribbean. In particular, the novel offers a hemispheric view of the complex historical causality of the political destabilisation of Caribbean and Latin American states through CIA-sponsored drug and arms trafficking, the exploitation of extractivist resource regimes, and the economic imposition of structural adjustment programmes.

E-portfolio as an effective tool for self-directed and reflective learning in social pharmacy

In recent years, many Latin-American states have been increasingly involved in the provision of subsidized housing for the urban poor. These housing projects are usually implemented in forms of massive master planned estates located in urban peripheries. The focus on quantity of housing units built, as opposed to the good location, connectivity and functionality of the dwellings, impedes access of the residents to income-generating opportunities and reduces their socio-economic mobility.This paper analyzes how residents in one of such social housing complexes –Villas de San Pablo in Barranquilla, Colombia– adopt and respond to these challenges in their own, informal ways. Building on empirical data obtained from interviews, observation and an enumeration survey, the author explains how the lack of jobs and economic opportunities in the area motivated many of the dwellers to convert their houses to accommodate different income-generating activities. Thus, this paper documents how a master planned project and its land-use transform from a strictly controlled into a diverse and organic urban ecosystem. The author argues for an urgent revision of the planning practices, inflexible zoning bylaws and outdated design principles that shape these “modern” affordable housing projects.

El Acuerdo Escazú: La implementación del Principio 10 de Río en América Latina y el Caribe

Twenty years after the enshrinement of the Aarhus Convention, the Latin American and Caribbean States adopted the Escazu Agreement in order to improve implementation of Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration. This paper thoroughly introduces this novel regional agreement in four main sections. The first one reviews Rio’s Principle 10 and its role within the sustainable development paradigm. The second one focuses on the negotiating process which concluded with the adoption of the agreement. The third one examines the role of the Aarhus Convention as a reference document for the new instrument. Finally, the fourth section assesses in detail the agreement’s text, revising its most relevant provisions and, especially, the four pillars established in it. The remaining pages expose some insights about the relevance of the agreement, the future perspectives and the way forward.

El Acuerdo Escazú: La implementación del Principio 10 de Río en América Latina y el Caribe

Twenty years after the enshrinement of the Aarhus Convention, the Latin American and Caribbean States adopted the Escazú Agreement in order to improve implementation of Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration. This paper thoroughly introduces this novel regional agreement in four main sections. The first one reviews Rio’s Principle 10 and its role within the sustainable development paradigm. The second one focuses on the negotiating process which concluded with the adoption of the agreement. The third one examines the role of the Aarhus Convention as a reference document for the new instrument. Finally, the fourth section assesses in detail the agreement’s text, revising its most relevant provisions and, especially, the four pillars established in it. The remaining pages expose some insights about the relevance of the agreement, the future perspectives and the way forward.

States, elites, and inequality in Latin America

AbstractIn this article, I review the literature on elites and inequality in Latin America with a focus on the emergence of uneven state structures and how they came to foster the needs of elites for protection. States in Latin America are traditionally thought of as facilitating processes of top‐down modernization that transformed traditional agrarian economies into complex urban polities, while maintaining extreme inequality. The state is thus central in the genealogy of inequality and elite privilege in Latin America. The synergy between states and elites continues to mark Latin American societies, and it helps us to understand how major economic and political changes occur without significant changes in inequality. For the most part, Latin America's current uneven states emerged as the result of exclusionary projects of citizenship during the first half of the 20th century and were advanced by the advent of repressive regimes during the 1960s and 1970s. After democratic transitions during the 1980s and 1990s, Latin American states came to be characterized, on the one hand, by procedural democratic institutions and on the other, by high levels of state violence, exclusion, and segmented citizenship. The present situation is one of a problematic equilibrium between states, elites, and inequality.

Metarrelatos políticos: los preámbulos constitucionales latinoamericanos

Se analizan los contenidos de los preámbulos de las Constituciones Políticas de los Estados latinoamericanos, con el de fin de comprenderlos, clasificarlos, exponerlos de manera comparada. Con base en ello, se establece su relación con el actual modelo de Estado de derecho y su papel como insumos ideológicos tanto para la producción de normas jurídicas, como para la respectiva hermenéutica constitucional, específicamente, en los juicios de control o de defensa constitucional. Se describe, además, la evolución de su concepto y significado, sus contenidos, funciones y fines, a partir del examen de las proclamas asumidas como metarrelatos que compendian afirmaciones políticas cohesivas de diferente naturaleza (axiológica, filosófica, mítica, histórica y cultural) y que tienen la pretensión de legitimar un nuevo proyecto de orden sociopolítico o de relegitimar uno existente. Estas son tomadas de los textos de las Cartas Políticas de los Estados latinoamericanos mediante una metodología de análisis cuantitativo y cualitativo.

Reasons given for the denunciation of the “pact of bogota”:critical analysis and proposals

The Pact of Bogota has not had the success that was expected at the time of its signing; overtime, more than half of the signatory states did not ratify it, and member states have given different reasons for its effective or possible denunciation. This article addresses these reasons in detail, through cases and secondary sources, in order to determine their plausibility. Finally, an alternative dispute resolution system between Latin American states is proposed, through a scheme in which mediation and arbitration converge to save the Pact’s major goals, and with it, the treaty-based longstanding tradition of peaceful resolution of conflicts in the Latin American region.

Geo-Economic Competition in Latin America: Brazil, Venezuela, and Regional Integration in the 21st Century

The institutional framework of Latin American integration saw a period of intense transformation in the 2000s, with the death of the ambitious project of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), spearheaded by the United States, and the birth of two new institutions, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). This article offers a historical reconstruction of regional integration structures in the 2000s, with emphasis on the fault lines between Brazil, Venezuela and the US, and how they have shaped the institutional order across the hemisphere. I argue that the shaping of UNASUR and CELAC, launched respectively in 2007 and 2010, is the outcome of three complex processes: (1) Brazil’s struggle to strengthen Mercosur by acting more decisively as a regional paymaster; (2) Washington’s selective engagement with some key regional players, notably Colombia, and (3) Venezuela’s construction of an alternative integration model through the Bolivarian Alliance (ALBA) and oil diplomacy. If UNASUR corresponded to Brazil’s strategy to neutralize the growing role of Caracas in South America and to break apart the emerging alliance between Venezuela, Argentina, and Bolivia, CELAC was at the same time a means to keep the US away from regional decisions, and to weaken the Caracas-Havana axis that sustained ALBA.

Forum Shopping and Fairness in Mexico–United States Trade Disputes

Of all the countries in Latin America, Mexico has the strongest economic ties to the United States, formalized by the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, but this Agreement does not preclude Mexico from targeting the United States in the World Trade Organization's Dispute Settlement Mechanism. In fact, the Agreement's dispute‐settlement system encourages it to do so if the complaint at hand is to have a fair consideration. The North American Free Trade Agreement's dispute‐resolution system goes to a board containing representatives from the three‐member countries, which includes by default the complainant state and the defendant state. Therefore, even though Mexico has the closest economic relationship with the United States of the Latin American states considered in this project, it is also the most likely to target the United States in the World Trade Organization. This article focuses on how trade ties constrain Mexico's use of the Dispute Settlement Mechanism against its largest trade partner.

El movimiento eugenésico estadounidense como clave del éxito de la eugenesia en el siglo XX y la posibilidad de su retorno en el siglo XXI

Fundamentada en la milenaria idea del perfeccionamiento humano, la ideología eugenésica británica emergente a finales del siglo XIX tuvo en el movimiento eugenésico norteamericano el apoyo necesario para materializar una serie de políticas de carácter racial con el objetivo de perfeccionar la especie humana. El movimiento eugenésico estadounidense se constituyó como un paso clave en la extensión de una ideología que triunfó en numerosos Estados latinoamericanos y europeos, y que perdió todo su apoyo científico, político y social debido a su radicalización en Alemania durante el Holocausto nazi. En la actualidad, el debate en torno al pensamiento eugenésico y la posibilidad de su retorno ha crecido de forma exponencial con motivo del desarrollo biotecnológico, y de la posibilidad de una mejora humana biotecnológica que provoque graves daños al ser humano.

SUBNATIONAL AUTOCRATIC GOVERNMENTS IN LATIN AMERICA: THE IMPACT OF ECONOMIC DIVERSIFICATION

In Latin American democracies, many provinces and states display autocratic characteristics that are at odds with the national democratic context. The literature on subnational authoritarianism has cope with this puzzle, but the explanations rely mostly on the political and economic role of the national government. In order to explain the emergence and resilience of autocratic subnational governments, I present a theory that looks into the internal dynamics. I argue that subnational autocracies are possible in a context of low economic diversification. Undiversified economies with a dominant economic sector create a network of interests aligned with the incumbent and reduce the support for the opposition parties. In more diversified economies the inter-capitalist competition transfers economic actors’ demands to the political arena, financing opposition parties whenever they feel they are being unheard. I find evidence to support my argument and flesh out the mechanisms at work in a “most similar case” comparison of two neighboring states in Brazil: Bahia and Minas Gerais.

The Unlikely Friends: Iranian–Latin American Relations and Washington’s Anxiety

Although Iran and the Latin American states appear to be unlikely allies when considering the vast distances and the religious, cultural and demographic differences between these regions, their shared experience of Washington’s hegemonistic designs have brought them closer. Washington’s failure to isolate Tehran has meant that the Islamic Republic, and Hezbollah, have prioritised relationship-building with states that are at the doorstep of the US. Although this has antagonised the US, Washington has only offered a weak reaction to the economic and geopolitical advances made by Iran. Why Tehran has targeted Latin America will be analysed and explored in the article.

Historiografía y Relaciones Internacionales en América Latina: Entre la Rebeldía Autonomista y la Sumisión Occidentalista

Durante una buena parte del tiempo, el conocimiento práctico de las Relaciones Internacionales estuvo ligado casi exclusivamente a los registros generados por la Historia, de tal manera que ésta ha cumplido una función importante tanto en el desarrollo teórico como práctico de la disciplina. Por ello, es muy frecuente entre los internacionalistas la alusión al historiador Tucídides, a las crónicas de reyes, a las justificaciones del estado y sus comportamientos basados en análisis históricos del mundo occidental. En esta investigación se intentará analizar la utilización de la historia en América Latina, en la reafirmación de la identidad de sus estados y en el abordaje de su inserción en el sistema internacional. En tal sentido se buscará: 1) Determinar si existe una historiografía latinoamericana y cuál ha sido su influencia en las relaciones internacionales de la región; 2) Analizar el papel de la historia en la configuración de las identidades de la región y su impacto en el comportamiento internacional, mediante imaginarios sociales y conciencia colectiva; 3) Analizar cómo desde la perspectiva histórica se pueden comprender las políticas exteriores de los estados latinoamericanos. Para ello se recurrirá a la metodología cualitativa, multidisciplinaria, enfatizando en el método histórico, revisando y analizando fuentes primarias y secundarias que permitan una aproximación al desarrollo de los objetivos planteados y tratando muy bien de delimitar lo mejor posible el objeto de estudio, evitando caer en generalizaciones inconvenientes y respetando las especificidades cuando sea necesario.