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The broad diversity in the current state of democracy in Latin America is illustrated in Figure 1. Figure 1 provides the average Freedom Score for the Latin American countries as of January of 2007 (Freedom House, 2007). While the Freedom House scores can be problematic when used for cross-temporal analysis, they are the most valid and reliable measures we have of the quality of democracy in a country at a particular juncture in time. Figure 1 about here The Freedom Score (the average of a Political Rights score and a Civil Liberties score) ranges from 1 (most free/democratic) to 7 (least free/undemocratic). Virtually all Western European countries have a Freedom Score of 1 (as do Canada and the United States, among others), while scores of 7 are possessed by the world's most brutal and oppressive dictatorships (e.g., Cuba, North Korea, Sudan). Figure 1 underscores the wide variance in the level of democracy in Latin America, and suggests that the extent and nature of the challenges to democracy in these countries also vary considerably in nature, breadth, and intensity. Latin America has several countries whose democracies are directly comparable in terms of their political rights and civil liberties to those found in Western Europe. Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay all possess Freedom Scores of 1, and Panama (1.5) is not far behind. A second group of countries have Freedom Scores of 2 and 2.5 (still classified as "Free" by Freedom House), which while indicative of a reasonably well functioning democracy, reveal that compared to the Western European countries, as well as their more democratic counterparts listed above, the functioning of these countries' democracies is deficient in many important respects. The countries that fall in this