On this page, you will find links relevant to Latin American politics listed in four major groupings: Latin American studies, country background information, contemporary online news, and country-specific quick links.
This comprehensive site is maintained by the Latin American studies program at the University of Texas at Austin. It is considered by many to be the best online resource for Latin American studies. The material is organized by subject; there is also a search engine.
This brief links page is maintained by the Latin American Studies Association, the international professional association for the study of Latin America. This site itself is not nearly as useful as LANIC, but it does provide a list of links to major Latin American studies centers, as well as a short list of data sources on the region.
This site maintained by the Latin American Studies program at Georgetown University contains a wide variety of political data and information. Topics covered include constitutions, electoral procedures and results, and political parties. A keyword search engine is available on a separate page.
This site for the Western Hemisphere's primary international organization contains information and analysis on a variety of major regional issues. Perhaps the most impressive section is the one regarding the treatment of trade agreements and trade statistics.
This site for the region's intergovernmental financial institution also contains a wide variety of economic data and analysis.
This online version of the multi-volume handbook (maintained by the U.S. Library of Congress) is a fully searchable, multi-year bibliography of many books and articles published on the region. You can browse by subject or conduct more complex searches as you would in an online library catalog.
This page contains links to online access of public domain CIA reporting. The CIA Factbook provides thumbnail physical, economic, and political geographies of every nation-state in the world. This page also contains links to CIA publications that provide international economic statistics, lists of current political leaders, high quality maps, and a variety of historical information on the CIA itself. This site is very useful as a preliminary introduction to countries, but is not very useful beyond that purpose.
This page provides access to the online version of the country studies series conducted by the U.S. Library of Congress. Just under 100 countries are currently treated in the site. Each country study has a detailed, hyperlinked table of contents; most of the study is organized chronologically. This is a good site for finding a fairly comprehensive online history of many different countries, but is cumbersome to read an entire history and even more burdensome (not to mention wasteful) to print one out. If you want to read the entire country study, go to the library and check it out!
Back in the hazy past of, say, 1992, people interested in reading foreign news waited one or two weeks to read foreign daily newspapers -- that is, if the newspapers were available at all either in a nearby library or via a (costly) personal subscription. Now, literally hundreds of daily newspapers around the world are available online before they hit the streets in newsprint. Increasing numbers of online papers provide 24-hour updating of major stories. This site, maintained by Yahoo!, provides a comprehensive list of foreign domestic newspapers available online. Please take advantage of this resource in following contemporary events in the countries of special interest to you. Many newspapers have internal search engines and/or archives with past online editions.
This is the online site for what many people consider the best international weekly news magazine in the world, the London-based The Economist. Currently this site provides very limited services to those who are not subscribers, but it does have a very useful full-text search engine for issues published in the last few years. You can use this search engine to identify issues about which you can read in printed copies available in the library. If you have a keen interest in world affairs, you should consider going to current periodicals every week and spending some time with The Economist.
This site, maintained by CNN, provides coverage of major news stories from around the world. If you have a single PC that you use for browsing, you can set up a personal, customized page with CNN in which you set filters based on countries and/or topics of interest. CNN will occasionally publish background reports on major breaking stories.
This site contains a variety of news coverage across the region as well as sections dedicated to every country in the hemisphere. In its current configuration, you need to click on the news button on the left menu, then click on the Americas button to get to the Latin American section of the online paper. It is arguably the most comprehensive source of major news stories available in English on the region.
http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/argentina/
http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=38
http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/sa/bolivia/
http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=42http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/brazil/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=43
http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/chile/
http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=45http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/colombia/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=10http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/ca/cr/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=11http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=12http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/dr/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=14http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/ecuador/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=15http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/ca/salvador/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=16http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/ca/guatemala/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=18http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/ca/honduras/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=21http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/mexico/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=23http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/ca/nicaragua/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=24http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/ca/panama/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=25http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/sa/paraguay/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=26http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/peru/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=27http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/uruguay/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=33http://info.lanic.utexas.edu/la/venezuela/http://cfdev.georgetown.edu/pdba/Countries/countries.cfm?ID=35
