ABSTRACT
Mexico and Colombia are far from the only countries in which parties have changed. In this chapter, the authors review the parties in the various nations, describing the past when necessary but focusing most of their attention on conditions in the first years of the twenty-first century. Latin American political parties have traditionally been only one of the groups involved in choosing the chief executive—probably no more important than the army or the economic oligarchy. Since the 1980 Constituent Assembly elections restored electoral politics, Honduras has held five consecutive general elections. Uruguay began its history of party politics with a similar two-part division; like Liberals and Conservatives elsewhere, Colorado's and Blanco's fought numerous civil wars in the nineteenth century. Many of Democratic Action's programs have been advocated by numerous other parties of this type, including the Party of National Liberation in Costa Rica, the National Revolutionary Movement in Bolivia, also parties in Paraguay, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, and Argentina.
