I have tried to make this edition more instructive than its predecessors. I rewrote the “president's report” in the first chapter so that it better addresses current issues. There is also new material in Part I on the foreign debt issue, the Roman Catholic Church, and the armed forces. But, as might be expected, most of the revising was done in Part II. All of the national cases have been brought up to date, with special attention given to the restoration of constitutional democracies in countries that were previously governed by their armed forces. I have also added more information and analysis on Cuba and Nicaragua.

Anyone familiar with the second edition will notice that I have reorganized Part II. In this edition I begin with Mexico because in my own teaching I have found it to be a provocative starting point for students, all the more so after the 1988 elections and the questions they raised about political change. I have also joined previous chapters on populism with those on military authoritarianism in Brazil and Argentina, to facilitate more systematic comparisons of those nations' movement to authoritarian government and from it, recently, to democracy.