Mexico achieved independence in 1821. With the definitive cutting of the imperial ties with Spain, already weakened by the impact of the Napoleonic Wars, the country began to play an individual role in the world economy. The end of Spanish rule and the departure of many Spaniards opened up new positions and new opportunities for Mexicans. Some they seized immediately as in government and the army; others they lacked in some measure the skills, inclination or capital to exploit. One of the more difficult areas was overseas trade, which had been largely the preserve of peninsulares. Their departure provided the occasion for the arrival of numbers of foreigners, who established merchant houses in trading centres, and assumed the role of middlemen in Mexico's foreign trade.

The transcripts of the television programme Aló Presidente, the centrepiece of President Hugo Chávez's media strategy, provide insight into the different ways in which his movement promoted the image of its leader and sought to solidify his emotionally charged connection with the Venezuelan masses. The study outlines the dynamics behind the changing format and content of Aló Presidente and places it within the context of earlier research on populist media use in Latin America. Although similar to its predecessors, the programme was a unique creation of Chavismo, designed to balance Chávez's knack for improvisation with a structure designed to curb his excesses and keep him on message. This led to occasional tension between Chávez and the media professionals charged with the programme's production. The article provides a corrective to inaccurate treatments in the media and scholarly literature, and offers new information on Aló Presidente to facilitate future comparative studies.

In view of the inconclusive statistical results associated with democracy's impact on economic performance, this article unpacks the dependent variable (economic development) by examining democratisation's impact on education policy. To determine whether democracy compels politicians to provide higher levels of educational opportunity, it traces the process of repression and democratisation in Brazil along with government spending on education. It finds that democratisation has observable effects on education spending on three different levels: 1) the percentage of government spending allocated to education; 2) the distribution of federal funding among different levels of education; and 3) the distribution of funds within primary education among state and local actors.

Since the colonial era Cuba has been the paradigmatic case of a monocultural export economy, dependent upon the production of one primary commodity – sugar – for sale to one principal trade partner. Overcoming dependency was a high priority for Fidel Castro in 1959, yet despite a promising start, his efforts proved ultimately unsuccessful. Only the collapse of communism in Europe freed Cuba from dependent trade relations with the Soviet Union – albeit at the cost of enormous economic disruption. This article examines Cuba's post-1959 pursuit of economic independence, first to explain why the government's initial successes proved unsustainable in the 1980s, and then to examine Cuba's attempt to reinsert its economy into the global market in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Regional economic integration schemes abound in Latin America, yet very little is known about the degree of popular support for such programmes. Now that democratic regimes rule in almost all of Latin America, public opinion can have an important impact on national policies. This paper examines the attitudes toward economic integration in 17 mainland Latin American countries with interview data from over 18,000 people. Bi-variate and multivariate analyses are conducted on the factors related to support for regional integration. Perceived benefits of integration and perceptions of personal and national economic situation prove to be important factors, as are higher levels of education, support for democracy and gender (males favour integration more than females). Two novel findings are that a positive opinion of the European Union along with satisfaction with the functioning of democracy are both linked to greater support for integration.

Latin America is one of the world's only regions to have witnessed a fall in income inequality during the 2000s. This paper evaluates the role fiscal policy played in this change. Recent scholarship has examined this in individual countries; lacking is a regional perspective. We examine the effects of nine fiscal instruments on income inequality in 17 countries between 1990 and 2014. Fiscal policy had a positive – albeit small – effect in reducing income inequality, especially from 2003, working best at the urban level. Public spending on education, personal income taxes and social contributions were especially instrumental in reducing income inequality.

The tenuous organisational structure of the Venezuelan neighbourhood movement explains its failure to live up to the lofty expectations which social movements created in Latin America in the 1980s. To understand why structural looseness prevails, it is necessary to examine social cleavages as well as the disparity between the theoretical model which underpins much discourse and legislation, on the one hand, and the daily practice of neighbourhood associations, on the other. An additional area of enquiry is the division in the national leadership between an apolitical current and one that views electoral politics as a natural avenue for the movement to pursue. Scholars, even those who have recently emphasized the importance of links between social movements and political structures, overlook the importance of organisational unity at the national level.

The 1870s were a decade of crisis and change in the Peruvian economy. Guano, the bulk of Peru's exports, no longer dominated the republic's trade and finance as it had for thirty years. Quantity, quality and markets persistently declined from the peaks of the 1850s and 1860s. Two new growth sectors, however, increasingly diversified Peru's commercial pattern. On plantations in the north sugar production quadrupled between 1873 and 1876, overhauling cotton and wool among exports. At the same time, in the southernmost province of Tarapacá nitrate extraction and manufacture steadily increased.

This article examines the tensions between the Gran Colombian republican constitution of 1821 and Simón Bolívar's fear of a mulatto takeover. It focuses on Cartagena in the 1820s, where the mulatto general José Padilla challenged the socio-racial hierarchy and accepted notions of equality of the city, heading a three-day coup in 1828 against Bolívar's attempt to impose a new authoritarian constitution. Padilla failed to rally the mostly African-derived population of Cartagena behind the republican views of Francisco de Paula Santander and was promptly executed. Using the protagonists' correspondence, manifestos, criminal investigations, consular reports and censuses, the article analyses the factors in the city's demography, political leadership and culture, and in the composition of its military forces, that explain Padilla's failure. It highlights the role played by race and by Bolívar's views of mulattos in the process.

This article analyses the intellectual and political activities of the newly-created consulados and Economic Societies in Spanish America between 1780 and 1810. It argues that these institutions decisively shaped both the formulation and implementation of metropolitan policy. Colonial elites used the consulados and Economic Societies as a vehicle to pursue licensed privilege and moderate, incremental reform in the context of a revivified, socio-economically stable Old Regime. They embraced the Bourbon reforms and used them to their advantage. Judging from consulado documents, the prevailing relationship between civil society and the state in Spanish America, at least until the late 1790s, was amicable and mutually supportive. After that time, mainly due to the disruption of Atlantic commerce, close co-operation gave way to conflict, but always within the framework of a cohesive empire. Drawing on archives in Argentina, Chile, Cuba and Spain, this essay traces the coalescence of numerous local intelligentsias that collaborated, to varying degrees, in the renovation of imperial governance and, simultaneously, incubated a robust public sphere in the nascent polities which gradually emerged after the collapse of Spanish royal authority in 1808.

When on an Advent Sunday morning in 1511 Fray Antonio Montesinos uttered the phrase ‘Are these [Indians] not also men?’ he ignited a political controversy that would rage in Spain for the next four decades. And the continuing fall-out of that fiery speech still has the potential to inflame scholarly tempers and spark heated contests nearly five hundred years later. At stake for Spaniards of the sixteenth century was the way the inhabitants of the New World were to be treated. At issue for subsequent historians has been how that Spanish civilisation's treatment of the natives in the New World is to be assessed.

Despite the recent development of a broad literature on urbanization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America, the topics of public order and crime have eluded careful study.1 The historiography of Argentine urbanization evokes questions about social control, but we know little more about changing patterns of crime and policing than did contemporary observers. Immigration, labor organization, class struggle, and political violence have all been the subjects of scholarly inquiries that suggest both high levels of disorder and the necessity of official responses.2

The objective of this article is to attempt to explain why free market open economy policies (FMOEP) have become so popular in Latin America in the 1990s. There are six possible major explanatory factors: (i) lessons learnt from the debt crisis and its immediate aftermath, (ii) more highly qualified technocrats, (iii) development of an entrepreneurial middle class, (iv) exhaustion of import substituting industrialisation, (v) a combination of tax reform, financial modernisation and export diversification, and (vi) a favourable public opinion. Yet none of these factors by itself was a sufficient condition for FMOEP; necessary factors were different from country to country, and the nature of the interaction between two or more factors was different in each country.

Environmental issues have very obviously come to occupy a prominent place on the political agenda, both domestically and internationally. This process has been driven by grass-roots concern for the future consequences of environmental degradation, assisted in many cases by the adoption of the green movement and of green issues as a platform for protest on a broader range of social and political issues. National governments have increasingly taken up the cause of environmental protection, either out of genuine conviction or out of fear of the electoral consequences of not doing so. Internationally the emergence of green issues has been further encouraged by broader shifts in the international system and the declining salience of old issues, above all the changing nature of East/West rivalry.

Drawing on interviews, published sources and archival documents, this article examines Cuba's policy towards Latin America after Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara's death. It argues that as a result of this event and other setbacks in the region, Cuba reconceptualised its priorities, de-emphasised armed revolution and embraced new revolutionary processes. The results were mixed. By the mid-1970s, Havana was more disillusioned about revolutionary prospects in Latin America than ever before. However, it had also rejoined the inter-American system after more than a decade of isolation. This article asks how, why and with what consequences for Fidel Castro's stated pledge to ‘make revolution’ these shifts in Cuba's Latin American relations took place.

This review essay critically examines the evolution of scholarly literature on Brazil's Partido dos Trabalhadores since the PT's founding in 1980. We periodise the relevant literature into four phases, examining the foundation of the PT, the party's early experience in subnational government, its transformation and moderation in the late 1990s, and finally its experiences in national government since capturing the presidency in 2002. After detailing strengths and weaknesses of this research, we also examine the trajectory of the PT in light of recent comparative work on the so-called ‘left turn’ in Latin America. We conclude by offering an agenda for future research on the PT.

Adjustment in Latin America has largely been analysed in terms of macroeconomic policy. However, for reforms to be sustainable in the long term, there needs to be accompanying change in the social sectors. Such reform is difficult and costly. It is necessary, however, not simply to sustain the economic reforms, but also for an effective long-term strategy of poverty alleviation and for the consolidation of democracy. There are lessons to be learnt from successful and unsuccessful social sector reform.

This paper focuses on congressional politics in Chile before and after the 1973 coup. It challenges a common perspective that sees the congressional decay of the early 1970s as being caused by stringent limits on particularistic bills and by presidents with wide-ranging formal prerogatives. It presents an alternative argument that focuses on electoral competition and ideological radicalisation, derives testable implications, and provides the first empirical comparison of legislative behaviour before and after the 1973 coup. The evidence, which centres on the analysis of policy networks derived from the joint sponsorship of legislation, appears incompatible with the implications of the conventional argument.

The persistent instability and disorder of Spanish American polities in the post-Independence period was undoubtedly one of the most perplexing concerns of Spanish American elites in the nineteenth century. It has remained a subject of interpretive debate by twentieth-century students of the area. The following article sketches several general approaches to the problem among twentieth-century interpreters, compares contemporary nineteenth-century analyses with the salient twentieth-century interpretations, and offers a critical commentary on the various sorts of twentieth-century analytical frameworks.

The three salient twentieth-century interpretations of political disorder in the nineteenth century are: (1) those that emphasise deeply embedded characteristics of Spanish American culture as underlying causes of political instability; (2) those that attribute political disorder to structural problems, particularly to weaknesses in the economic structure or shifts in the social structure; (3) those that see political instability as a reflection of conflicting ideologies, economic interests, and/or the aspirations or fears of identifiable social groups.

The distinctive feature of cultural interpretations of Latin American politics is their common belief that cultural characteristics are indelible and more-or-less unchangeable. And, since such cultural interpretations emphasise what might be considered ‘negative’ aspects of Spanish or Spanish American culture in order to explain defects in Spanish American politics, their assumption that cultures do not change over time tends to imbue such interpretations with a certain pessimism about the future of Spanish American politics.

An early twentieth-century exponent of cultural approaches to understanding Spanish-American political disorder was Francisco García Calderón, who, thinking particularly of the phenomenon of caudillismo, emphasised Spanish authoritarian individualism.

Through an analysis of the debates in 1871 on the Law of the ‘Free Womb’ in the Brazilian Empire, this article tries to understand the role of the slave mother and her freed children in the process of abolition. In addition, it discusses the possible obstacles and dangers the ‘Free Womb’ would present for the perpetuation of slaveowners' dominance.