ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the issues and constraints of public policy in Latin America. The middle position on economic development would call for two major economic policies: industrialization and diversification. To industrialize, foreign machinery was purchased from Eastern Europe, using foreign aid from the Soviet Union. Nearly every country in Latin America is involved in narcotrafficking in some way, either as a producer of drugs or as a transit point between the producing countries and the United States and Europe. In Latin America the state has historically been more important than that envisioned in the classic models. Political theory in Iberia and Latin America, in contrast, has viewed government as good, natural, and necessary for the welfare of society. Virtually all the Latin American constitutions have provided for the historical, three-part division of powers among the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. Federalism in Latin America emerged from a situation that was the exact reverse of that in the United States.
