The 1994 New Year's celebration in Mexico started with a bang. A mere hour into the year, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN or Zapatista National Liberation Army) assaulted and captured four cities in the Los Altos region of Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state. The Ejército Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional shocked the Mexican people and most of the world. Although Mexican political and military leaders denied that they were caught off guard, they were, in fact, totally surprised by the magnitude of the attack.

As events unfolded, the reasons behind the seizure of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Las Margaritas, Altamirano, and Ocosingo became increasingly apparent. The Zapatistas called for a nationwide movement for “jobs, land, housing, food, health, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace.”

As the Miami Summit of Western Hemisphere heads of state concluded on 11 December 1994, excessive optimism — even euphoria — seemed to be everywhere in the air. For once, the United States and Latin America seemed to be in agreement on basic policy, rather than, as so often in the past, in each other's hair/face or at each other's throats. There was general agreement about the goals of democracy, free trade, and open markets; the vexatious Cuba issue had been skillfully shunted aside.

However, more than that, the Miami Summit appeared to augur a new era in US-Latin American relations based on consensus and a common agenda of human rights, democracy, transparency, the environment, government reform, social equity, and a free market environment.

The purpose of this article is to provide, for specialists as well as those who do not follow Panamanian politics, an account of the 1994 election and an assessment of its significance in terms of the consolidation of democracy in Panama. Panama held its first post-transition national election on 8 May 1994, in which not only presidential and legislative, but also local, offices were contested.

This analysis addresses both the electoral process and its product, i.e., which parties and candidates won. These two aspects are assessed separately because they (1) reflect different political dynamics and (2) have different implications for democratic consolidation. As a process, Panama's 1994 election reflected the substantial progress made toward institutionalizing an independent, nonpartisan Electoral Tribunal and building the public's confidence that their votes cast will determine who wins.

The objective of this article is to offer a brief commentary, within a theoretical and conceptual framework, on the drug traffic (which could equally apply, for that matter, to any issue of worldwide import, such as the environment or human rights) that could serve as a point of reference in the relationship between the countries of Latin America (like Colombia) or the Third World and those of the industrialized North, such as the United States.

This article will argue that, in dealing with global issues, like that of the narcotraffic, it is necessary to take into account two components with close links to one another. The first of these arises from the fact that global issues require global politics to deal with them.

This paper analyzes the achievements and failures of the new democratic governments in Argentina (1983-), Uruguay (1985-), Brazil (1985-), and Chile (1990-). My comparisons focus on four fundamental issues: economic performance, the ability of governments to address the pressing problems of poverty and inequality, the quality of democratic practice, and the degree to which these governments and the democratic regimes have won popular support and legitimacy. Focusing on these questions is not to deny the significance of others, nor to suggest that citizens of these countries would see these four as the most pressing. The focus here will be on government; civil society will not be discussed in any detail.

This article develops four principal arguments. First, it argues that the performance of democracy has varied considerably in the four countries under discussion. Democracy in Chile, at least in its early phases, has been a success both politically and economically.