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This paper describes and analyzes the psychiatric reform process in three Latin American countries (Brazil, Chile and Colombia) based on the Caracas Declaration of 1990. It compares the psychiatric reform processes in these three countries and highlights the role of national mental health laws in these processes. Our goal when investigating the experiences in other countries of Latin America is to draw conclusions for the Argentine psychiatric reform and for the future of such reforms in the region.

Homicides occur the world over, but they are not homogeneously distributed by geographical areas (continents, countries, regions), either over long or short periods of time, or in social groups, namely age, gender, social class or ethnicity. Why are there more homicides in some countries than in others? Why do killings increase in some countries, while they decrease in others? There are two fundamental schools of thought for social explanations of crime and violence: those attributing its origins to poverty and inequality and those blaming institutionalization or social norms. To discuss these theories, this paper analyzes and compares the changes in Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil in the first decade of the twenty-first century, where the homicide rate has decreased, increased and remained the same, respectively. Using the measurement of six variables (poverty, inequality, unemployment, national wealth, human development and the rule of law) and the technique of trajectory analysis, the results revealed that institutionalization is more to blame for the change than poverty and inequality. The text concludes that poverty and inequality affect crime and homicides, although not directly, but mediated by the institutions instead.

"A procedure is described to obtain an age distribution of emigrant surviving children from the reports of such children obtained from women by a census or survey. A simple form of the procedure, requiring a minimum of calculation, is shown to work almost as well as the more elaborate form, and is recommended for most uses. "These new procedures, explicitly introducing an age model of migration, yield age distributions which are substantially different from, and probably more realistic than those obtained through the use of model fertility and mortality schedules alone.... The age distributions of migrant children [in Colombia] as obtained in this paper are compared with those obtained by Somoza.... The procedure described here produces a total almost 10 percent higher because it shifts the age distribution of the migrant children towards higher ages with lower proportions of surviving mothers." (summary in ENG), (excerpt)