Democratic Resilience, Strategic Autonomy, and State–Society Dynamics in Contemporary Latin America

Abstract

We are delighted to introduce the latest issue of Latin American Policy. The research articles and opinion essays in this volume address the complex, overlapping crises, institutional transformations, and evolving geopolitical realities across Latin America. Through rigorous empirical investigations and critical normative reflections, this issue offers a comprehensive examination of how states, markets, and civil society navigate security imperatives, regional integration, public administration, and digital rights in a rapidly changing world.

Opening the volume, Jonathan D. Rosen, Mary Fran T. Malone, Sebastian A. Cutrona, and Lucia Dammert examine the widespread appeal of President Nayib Bukele's hardline security model in their article The Appeal of the Bukele Regime in Latin America: The Scope and Limits of Citizen Support. Using evidence from 32 focus groups across Ecuador, Costa Rica, Chile, and Uruguay, the authors explore how acute public insecurity conditions citizens' willingness to embrace authoritarian measures, highlighting the varied thresholds across the region where democratic norms and human rights are traded for public safety.

Turning to questions of regional integration and popular attachment, Natalia Melgar and María Eugenia Pereira present Building regional citizenship in Mercosur: Normative advances and public perceptions. By connecting institutional legal developments from 1995 to 2023 with public opinion data, their study reveals a persistent disconnect between formal integration agreements—such as the Residence Agreement and Citizenship Statute—and societal internalization, pointing to institutional weaknesses that hinder a shared regional identity.

Expanding on South American geopolitical strategies, Oguz Dilek offers a critical historical assessment in Brazil's Brand of Regionalization: The Rise and the Demise of the South American Alliance. Employing process-tracing and Hirschmanian frameworks, Dilek analyzes how Brazil engineered Mercosur and Unasur to foster an autonomous, peaceful regional order conducive to its economic development and details how this state strategy ultimately collided with the systemic constraints facing latecomer capitalist powers.

Focusing on domestic fiscal governance and constitutional mandates, Regina Lemos de Andradem, Caio Castelliano, Peter Grajzl, and Eduardo Watanabe contribute Balancing Brazilian Regional Inequalities? Reassessing the Union's Voluntary Transfers to Municipalities. Leveraging machine-learning methods for causal inference on data from 2012 to 2019, the authors uncover significant constitutional noncompliance at the extensive margin, demonstrating that less-developed Brazilian municipalities are systematically less likely to receive federal transfer appropriations.

In the realm of state capacity and administrative reform, Daniela Maag explores the mechanics of public sector clientelism in Cleanup Time: Patronage and Education Reform in Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador, 1990–2019. Through comparative qualitative analysis, Maag demonstrates how party system institutionalization, teacher union politicization, and civil society strength interact to explain why patronage practices in public education decay in some national contexts while remaining deeply entrenched in others.

Analyzing recent political realignments in the Southern Cone, Giada Pasquettaz and Franco Bastias present Cutting through the State: Examining Voter Alignment with Milei's Agenda and his Chainsaw Plan. Drawing on survey data following Argentina's latest presidential election, the authors use regression analysis to assess public backing for Javier Milei's radical state retrenchment, proving that voter alignment is primarily anchored in economic preferences and ideological stances regarding the role of the state.

Addressing governance in times of emergency, Ana Bizberge, María Soledad Segura, Verónica Longo, and Clarisa Fernández author Communication, Cultural, and Digital Rights in Pandemic Argentina: Government and Civil Society's Role. Examining the period 2019–2023, their qualitative evaluation shows how state interventions often proved insufficient during the COVID-19 pandemic, while grassroots and socio-community organizations actively developed self-managed initiatives to guarantee access to connectivity, culture, and communication.

Examining the frontier of technological regulation, John W. Vasquez-Capacho and Rene Alvarez investigate data ethics in Balancing AI Data and Consumer Rights: The Colombian Context. Combining computational simulations with policy analysis, the study quantifies privacy risks and algorithmic vulnerabilities under surveillance capitalism in Colombia, critically evaluating policy frameworks such as CONPES 4144 de 2025 to propose stronger consumer protections.

Closing the research section, Oscar Vidarte and Meloddy Saldarriaga analyze diplomatic decision-making in The Frustrated Visit of the British Frigate HMS Montrose to Peru in 2012: An Explanation From the Decision-making Process. Applying Organizational and Bureaucratic decision-making models to official sources, the authors reveal how institutional fragmentation, sectoral dynamics, and inter-agency power asymmetries shaped Peru's cancellation of the frigate visit in alignment with its historic stance on the Malvinas issue.

This issue concludes with two thought-provoking opinion pieces that challenge prevailing geopolitical narratives. In the first essay, Raúl Castro's Strategic Calculation: Why the US–Cuba Normalization Had to Fail, Adrian Łukasz Chrobot draws on participant observation during a diplomatic posting in Havana (2015–2021) to argue that the breakdown of the US–Cuba thaw was not merely an outcome of Trump-era policy shifts but rather the result of a deliberate, preemptively structured regime strategy led by Raúl Castro to extract economic concessions without granting structural political openings.

Finally, in the closing opinion essay, Pressure Without Partnership: Latin America and the Limits of US Hemispheric Strategy, Brice Tseen Fu Lee and Juan Pablo Sims reevaluate Washington's strategic posture in the Western Hemisphere. The essay contends that US policymakers frequently mistake temporary, tactical political shifts in Latin America for durable strategic alignment, arguing instead that governments across the region are engaging in selective hedging amid US security pressure and Chinese economic integration and calling for a hemispheric strategy anchored in genuine developmental partnership.

We invite our readers to immerse in this varied selection of articles, confident that these analytical perspectives will enrich scholarly and policy debates on the present and future of Latin America.