El Salvador continues to struggle with elevated levels of criminal violence perpetrated by street gangs, drug trafficking organizations, members of the security forces, and other criminal groups. The Attorney General's Office and courts have taken some positive steps towards tackling impunity for current and civil war-era crimes. However, a history of corruption and favoritism within those institutions continues to undermine citizens' faith in the legitimacy of their actions. Finally, El Salvador confronts a challenging road ahead characterized by uncertainty over the implications of an overturned amnesty law, low rates of economic growth, and a new U.S. president in the White House.

Following the ends to the civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, the revolutionary coalitions that had led the fight against authoritarian regimes began to fracture. However, none of the splinter parties that broke from the Sandinista National Liberation Front, Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, and Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit has succeeded on their own as political parties. In this article, I argue that there is no single reason to explain the poor performances of the Democratic Party (PD), the Renovating Movement (MR), and the Democratic Front Party (FDR) in El Salvador, the Sandinista Renovation Movement (Renovate-MRS) and the Movement to Rescue Sandinismo (Rescue-MRS) in Nicaragua, and the New Nation Alliance (ANN) in Guatemala. However, their limited financial resources, alliances with non-revolutionary centrist and centre-right parties, and voter tendency to overlook internal ideological and personal debates within the original political parties, especially the FSLN and FMLN, have not helped.

The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit (URNG) fought one of the longest and bloodiest civil wars in recent Latin American history. In 1996, the URNG and the Government of Guatemala signed a Firm and Lasting Agreement ending the country's civil war and initiating the URNG's post-war life as a political party. After finishing third in its initial electoral competition, the URNG has since been unable to capture more than 4% of the vote, on its own or in coalition, leaving it a minor political party. What explains the poor electoral performance of the URNG as a political party? Based upon fieldwork, elite interviews, and analysis of electoral data, I argue that the URNG's minor party performance was caused by both organizational and institutional factors.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsMichael E. AllisonMichael E. Allison is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Scranton. E-mail: michael.allison@scranton.edu

Throughout the 1990s, the US and the European Union (EU) were embroiled in a trade conflict over a product which neither produced natively. In short, due to the creation of the European common market by the Single European Act (SEA), the EU countries extended preferential treatment to their former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP). This facet of the SEA proved to overstep the agreements made previously in the GATT and in the newly formed WTO, which seemed to irk many non-ACP banana-producing states as well as those that had a great interest in this trade, especially US multinationals that operate in the banana-producing countries of Latin America. Several Latin American states and the US government challenged the EU-ACP trade policy in the GATT and the WTO for nearly two decades before an agreement to resolve the dispute was reached in December 2009 (WTO 2009). Among other reasons, this dispute is important because it was one of the longest running trade disputes in recent history, directly or indirectly involved more than half-the world’s countries, and was the first case in which economic sanctions were applied by a developing state on a developed state(s) (Barfield 2010). Prior research in international political economy has tended to explain this lengthy dispute to be the result of a non-reconciliation between the overlapping trade regimes of the WTO and the EU (Alter and Meunier 2006). During the 1990s, while the member states of the EU were forming a common market that would harmonize their trade policies, they miscalculated how this internal harmonization would be interpreted by other members of the newly formed WTO (Borrell 1997). However, legal and political pressures to change the terms of trade between the EU member states and their former colonies also came from the banana-producing states of Latin America, the EU-based companies that marketed those bananas, United States-based multinational corporation Chiquita, and the United States government. For these parties, European preferential treatment of ACP bananas was discriminatory, violated several binding trade agreements, and was bad for business. The study of endogenous protection focuses on interest groups pressuring governments to adopt policies that will defend domestic products in

The Latin AmericanistVolume 57, Issue 3 p. 116-117 Book Review Space of Detention. By Zilberg, Elana. NC: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 360, $24.95. Michael Allison, Department of Political Science, University of ScrantonSearch for more papers by this author Michael Allison, Department of Political Science, University of ScrantonSearch for more papers by this author First published: 24 September 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/tla.12005_10Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume57, Issue3September 2013Pages 116-117 RelatedInformation

Problems of unity can affect an armed opposition group at many stages of its existence-during the war, in peace negotiations, and in its transition to political party. This article assesses how internal divisions affected the performance of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. It finds that while the FMLN suffered significant internal divisions in the early years of the war, it remained remarkably unified from 1983 on. Significant divisions began to appear during the later war years but were not exacerbated until after the war's conclusion, when repeated fracturing occurred. The FMLN began to present itself as a programmatically coherent party only in 2005, and this ideological homogeneity allowed it to establish a series of partnerships with moderate, non-revolutionary sectors of Salvadoran society and to achieve victory in the 2009 presidential elections.

Over the last several decades, numerous civil wars have ended as a consequence of negotiated settlements. Following many of these settlements, rebel groups have made the transition to political party and competed in democratic elections. In this paper, I assess the legacy of civil war on the performance of rebel groups as political parties. I argue that the ability of rebels to capture and control territory and their use of violence against the civilian population are two key factors explaining the performance of rebels as political parties. I test these hypotheses against the case of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador using one-way ANOVA and multivariate regression analyses. In analyzing the FMLN’s performance in the 1994 “elections of the century,” I find that, as a political party, the FMLN benefited both from the state’s violently disproportionate response and its ability to hold territory during the war.

We reconceptualize a territorial integrity norm that has been discussed in recent research, distinguishing between general guarantees of territorial integrity and proscriptions of the forcible acquisition of territory, and we measure the strength of this norm using treaties. Over the past two centuries, the general territorial integrity norm has reduced territorial conflict, but treaties proscribing only violent gains are associated with increased conflict.The norm's strongest effects stem from pressure by other states that have accepted the norm rather than from direct effects of treaties, and territorial integrity treaties have typically followed rather than preceded a reduction in territorial conflict.

A recent article suggests that a norm of territorial integrity spread rapidly across the globe during the twentieth century. While the successful acquisition of territory by force has become much less frequent, though, there have been numerous attempts to acquire territory by force during this time, and there appear to be several different types of obligations in territorial integrity treaties. Drawing from the content of treaties with territorial integrity provisions, we reconceptualize the norm to distinguish between treaties guaranteeing territorial integrity in a general sense and those that only proscribe the acquisition of territory by force, and we examine an important precursor in the nineteenth-century Latin American norm of uti possidetis juris. We find that both norms seem to have been associated with generally increased low-level conflict over territory but (at least for general territorial integrity obligations and for the Latin American states that developed uti possidetis) less of the more intense forms of conflict. In a recent article, Zacher (2001) discusses a territorial integrity norm that spread across the globe in the twentieth century. He describes this norm, encapsulated first in the League of Nations Covenant and more recently in the United Nations Charter and numerous regional treaties, as rejecting attempts to change the territorial status quo through the threat or use of force. Zacher's evidence suggests that once the norm became widespread, there were relatively few cases of successful territorial aggrandizement in the first three decades since World War II, and none since the mid-1970s. Although Zacher's evidence initially seems persuasive, this norm appears to involve more than just the avoidance of successful challenges to the territorial status quo; any attempt to acquire territory forcibly -whether ultimately successful or not -would seem to violate the norm. While there have been relatively few cases of successful territorial aggrandizement since World War II, Zacher notes forty such attempts during this peaceful period. Furthermore, many of the international treaties that include territorial integrity provisions offer blanket guarantees of signatories' territorial integrity, not just condemnation of the forcible acquisition of territory. We thus reconceptualize the territorial integrity norm to distinguish between general guarantees of territorial integrity and the rejection of force for acquiring territory, each of which appears in numerous multilateral treaties. Another important consideration in the study of territorial integrity norms is the early development of this norm before the twentieth-century period that Zacher emphasizes. After Spain's former Latin American colonies achieved their independence in the early nineteenth century, they adopted the legal doctrine of uti possidetis de jure or uti possidetis juris, under which the region's colonial-era administrative borders would be elevated to international borders separating the newly independent states. This doctrine was an important precursor to the territorial integrity norm that Zacher describes as taking root worldwide a century later. Some scholars credit uti possidetis with the reduction of territorial conflict in Latin America, although others argue that it either failed to

AbstractAfter the third wave of democratization swept much of the world during the late twentieth century, many armed opposition groups disarmed and transformed themselves into political parties. This paper explores the electoral performance of four Central American parties that have roots in armed opposition movements. It finds that the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador, which achieved the greatest success during their revolutionary periods, have also had the most success in electoral competition. The Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit and the Democratic Unification Party of Honduras, which trace their roots to relatively less successful armed opposition groups, have struggled in elections. Organizational factors, especially the number of combatants and popular support during the conflict, tend to provide a better explanation than institutional factors for the initial success of these groups as political parties.

The majority of nation-states experienced colonial rule at some point during the last two centuries, with well-studied economic, political, and social consequences after decolonization. This study examines a different form of the colonial legacy, involving the stability of the territorial status quo after independence. We present and test three competing expectations about the colonial legacy, focused around the legitimacy of the international norm of uti possidetis juris, postcolonial solidarity, and dependency. We find the most support for the dependency-based argument that colonial legacies have worsened the prospects for former colonies after independence, as territorial claims between former colonies appear to be longer and more militarized than claims that lack such a colonial history, although such claims are no more likely to produce changes in the territorial status quo. We conclude by discussing how these findings contribute to our understanding of territorial claims and of colonial legacies, as well as by discussing promising directions for future research.

its social, familial, and generational dimensions, discussing, for instance, the students’ day-to-day living arrangements and relations with peers and outsiders (futricds>, their development of antipatriarchal attitudes, and the dynamics of their relations with older males (in particular, teachers and other patrons). It also occasionally touches on sexuality and gender issues, particularly the future lawyers’ process of male socialization and passage into manhood, this probably being the reason for the work’s inclusion in a book series on “engendering Latin America.” Kirkendall’s work joins an important body of literature on the relations between state and society in nineteenth-century Brazil, especially the works on political patronage by Richard Graham, on family and politics by Linda Lewin, and on imperial politics and state formation more generally by Roderick Barman and Raymundo Fauro. It also has affities with, and builds on influential monographs and essays on nineteenth-century Brazilian elites by, such authors as Jean and Roderick Barman, Jose Murilo de Carvalho, Thomas Flory, Eul-Soo Pang, Ronald S. Seckinger, and Fernando Uricoechea. Unlike most of these works, however, C l m Mates examines the significance of the law school experience itself (including extracurricular activities) for understanding students’ evolving mentality, ideology, and sense of autonomy, identity, and community. It claims, for instance, that to understand the extent to which law students eventually became a national “political class,” which is to say, agents of the state as opposed to representatives of their regional and familial interests, one ought to pay closer attention to their school experiences and their struggles to forge common identities with each other. The book is generally well crafted, clearly written, and ably documented. Probably more than an addition to the growing literature on the history of gender and sexuality, however, it adds to intellectual and political history, especially the social history of Latin American politics. It also sheds light on the emergence of a public sphere of civil society and the processes of state formation and nation building in the region. Finally, it helps us to understand the intriguing character and evolution of Latin American liberalism. Victor M. Uribe-Uran Florida International University