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Copyright of Canadian Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (Taylor & Francis Ltd) is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

According to international relations scholars, an important change taking place in the post-Cold War context concerns the lethality of non-state armed groups (NSAGs). Underlying this observation is the conventional assumption that non-state violence is intrinsically illegitimate. This article shifts the analysis of violence away from the terrain of legitimacy, which tends to moralise the difference between state and non-state forces, and towards the terrain of work, where their violence features as part and not separate from a shared political economy. I propose the notion of violence work as a resourceful analytic into the dialectics of everyday violence and the complex processes of value production in social life. Against the background of the extreme cruelty attributed to transnational gangs in Central America, I argue that their violence work is expressive of prevailing modes of accumulating wealth in the region. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico, I show how gang violence work animates a system of economic cooperation that engages a wide array of subjects who traverse state/non-state and legal/illegal divides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the author comments on the articles in this issue, which focus on collective memory of civil wars in Central America in the latter half of the 20th century.

Copyright of Revista de Historia is the property of Universidad de Costa Rica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Historia is the property of Universidad de Costa Rica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A crisis of urban violence has emerged in northern Central America during the past two decades. Although youth gangs are responsible for only a portion of this violence, punitive approaches to dealing with gang violence have sharpened public hostility toward gang members and created a context conducive to the practice of "social cleansing" aimed at reducing gang violence by eliminating gang-affiliated youth through extrajudicial executions. Against this backdrop of public anger and resentment aimed at gang youth, a sizeable number of Evangelical-Pentecostal pastors and lay workers have developed ministries aimed at rescuing gang members and restoring them to society, often making considerable sacrifices and taking personal risks in the process. After describing the difficulties and risks associated with leaving the gang, this article takes a sociological approach to gang member conversions to discover the resources that Evangelical-Pentecostal congregations and gang ministries offer to former gang members facing the crisis of spoiled identity. I draw on semistructured intervieivs conducted in 2007 and 2008 with former gang members and gang ministry coordinators in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and a handful of follow-up interviews conducted in 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, intellectual property rights protections have increased in Central America. Transnational access to medicines campaigns focused particular attention on the public health implications of these protections in the context of debates around the ratification of the US-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), but these efforts did not lead to long-term engagement with intellectual property and access questions by local health activists. This paper explores differences in priority focus between global access to medicines movement and local health activists in Central America, arguing that transnational access advocates' core arguments rely on assumptions that mesh poorly with on-the-ground realities in Central America. I examine differences in drug markets and political alliances, suggesting that these factors help explain the imperfect connection between global access to medicines frames and the needs of patients and advocates in Central America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the causes of undocumented migration from Central America. Particular focus is given to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. According to the author, increases in undocumented migrants seeking refuge from violence can be traced to institutional failures which undermined the democratic reforms of the 1990s. According to the author, governments returned to authoritarian practices when faced with crime, poor economic performance, and social discontent.

This article examines the state of scientific research and development in Central America, highlighting the potential contribution of international partners. It separates Central America from the larger region of Latin America and the Caribbean to underscore its differences and how these affect scientific and technological capacities, priorities and possibilities. Using primarily data from the Ibero-American Network of Science and Technology Indicators and the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization Institute for Statistics, current research and development trends in the region are explored, as defined by international Frascati norms, and juxtaposed against broader scientific and technological parameters. Challenges within this environment include educational quality and completion rates; low public and private funding of scientific research; lack of institutionalization; limited understanding of the potential returns associated with research; and the fact that the region operates almost entirely in Spanish, limiting opportunities for global publication and exchange. In addition to national efforts, collaborative international initiatives that appear to be yielding dividends against these obstacles are multinational and intergovernmental supported research training and monitoring partnerships; cross-border university- and research institute-led programs; and international joint publishing projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses security policy in Central American countries in light of increasing violence in the early 21st century. The author addresses the role of poor economic conditions, energy costs, and political challenges in the deterioration of security measures in countries such as Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. He focuses on several crucial challenges to security, including gangs in Guatemala, murder in Honduras, and the rule of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Other topics include organized crime and common crime, relations between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and drug cartels.

Understanding the economic impact of surface temperatures is an important question for both economic development and climate change policy. This study shows that in 28 Caribbean-basin countries, the response of economic output to increased temperatures is structurally similar to the response of labor productivity to high temperatures, a mechanism omitted from economic models of future climate change. This similarity is demonstrated by isolating the direct influence of temperature from that of tropical cyclones, an important correlate. Notably, output losses occurring in nonagricultural production (-2.4%/+1 °C) substantially exceed losses occurring in agricultural production (-0.1%/+1 °C). Thus, these results suggest that current models of future climate change that focus on agricultural impacts but omit the response of workers to thermal stress may underestimate the global economic costs of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En el presente estudio se analizan los efectos de las remesas familiares en el crecimiento económico de México y los países que integran la región de Centroamérica, utilizando el enfoque monetario de la balanza de pagos y un modelo macroeconómico del tipo Mundell-Fleming. La metodología empleada se basa en la aplicación de un modelo de datos de panel a las series de la balanza de pagos del período 1990-2005, en un horizonte de tiempo de corte trimestral. Los resultados del estudio sugieren que las repercusiones del ingreso de remesas son diferentes en cada país y que dependen de la política monetaria. De las estimaciones econométricas también se desprende que, dado un auge expansivo en el nivel de remesas, el aporte de este al crecimiento económico es menor en los países en que las remesas contribuyen a la sobrevaluación cambiaria, favoreciendo la estabilidad macroeconómica en un contexto de apertura económica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En las dos últimas décadas, en América Latina se han reformado los regímenes comerciales para facilitar el crecimiento centrado en las exportaciones, con la esperanza de que este tendría un "efecto de derrame" en favor de los más pobres. Este objetivo se ha logrado en distinta medida y su consecución ha dependido no solo de la eficacia de las reformas de la política comercial, sino también de la política cambiaria, de las perturbaciones externas y de las remesas de los trabajadores migrantes. El cambio tecnológico también ha sido fundamental para capitalizar los beneficios de las reformas. Estas afirmaciones se basan en los resultados de las simulaciones de un modelo de equilibrio general computable que se resolvió con datos de Costa Rica, El Salvador y Honduras. El modelo se combinó con una metodología de microsimulación de modo de captar plenamente las consecuencias distributivas de las políticas y de las crisis externas simuladas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author used the regulation theory to understand the origins of the 2008 year end's credit crisis and economic slump, in industrialized countries, and to analyze the effects in Latin American and particularly, Central America's countries. This way, the author identifies important areas of the domestic process of capital accumulation, affected by those events, and it allows to elaborate some recommendations to brake the vicious cycle of transnationalized capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes three forms of low-income housing finance implemented in Central America: up-front and targeted state subsidies for mortgage finance to access new housing; small, repeated loans for incremental housing improvements; and co-financing methods for the introduction of infrastructure and basic services. It shows that technical assistance for self-help construction, when combined with sound inclusive financial methods, can open new opportunities to make land, shelter and services affordable to different urban poor sub-groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]