In Argentina, the unsolved murder of a teenager triggered social protests that eventually led to the trial and indictment of her assailants and the resignation of a provincial governor. In Brazil, press reports of governmental corruption and public demands for due process led to the 1992 impeachment of President Fernando Collor de Mello. In Colombia, the introduction of a constitutional mechanism for the protection of fundamental rights resulted in more than 200,000 legal actions, including indictments for malfeasance in office and for violations of due process. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like Alianza Cívica in Mexico and Poder Ciudadano in Argentina organized campaigns to monitor elections and the financial assets of elective officials. These cases show new ways in which citizens are exercising control of government in many of Latin America's democracies.Citizen action aimed at overseeing political authorities is becoming a fact of life and is redefining the traditional concept of the relationship between citizens and their elected representatives. The emergence of rights-oriented discourse and politics, media exposés of government scandals, and social movements organized around demands for due process are only some of the examples of this new politics of societal accountability. We contend that the nature of the new democratic regimes and the scope of citizens' rights are being shaped by this set of conflicts and struggles.

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The mobilization against the establishment of two paper mill plants in the Rio Uruguay in recent years has been a turning point in the historical trajectory of environmental movements in Argentina. Certainly, it is not the first time that citizens have organized to express discontent over political and economic decisions that affect the environment. However, the magnitude and the sustainability of the protest is a novel development that has single-handedly changed the media visibility of environmental issues. The social and political significance of the movement is multidimensional. It raises questions about the linkages between social movements and mainstream politics, shows a worrisome weakness of Mercosur institutional arrangements to settle disputes among its members, and serves to pinpoint to the relevance of national politics in regional development (Palermo and Reboratti, 2007). 1 The establishment of the citizens' assembly of Gualeguaychú, the city that has been the center of continuous protests against the pulp mills, represents an unusual instance of 'reflexive modernization' (Beck, 1992) in a domestic landscape in which environmental issues have been largely absent in the mainstream media and the discourses of the domestic political elite. Ulrich Beck, Manuel Castells and others have stressed the growing awareness concerning environmental and other risks in contemporary societies. Although such increased consciousness

The global ascendancy that populism has gained in recent years resulted in two major developments: (a) the geographical spread of populism to an increasing number of countries, to the extent that in regions such as the Americas and Europe populism appears as the main contender of mainstream politics; (b) populism shifting from the margins to the center stage of politics, a development that resulted in the passage of populism as a movement to populism as government. A central hypothesis guiding this article is that populism in government is likely to promote a specific path to regime change: one consisting of the gradual hybridization of the structure of liberal democracy through the selective removal of some of the latter's defining features. The contemporary proliferation of populist administrations in Europe and the Americas should consequently not be taken lightly: they might be announcing political processes that can ultimately result in a drastic redefinition of the landscape of current democratic politics in an illiberal direction.