The essential explanation of Argentina's 1989 hyperinflations is that the stabilisation programmes immediately preceding them drove the public sector in particular, the central bank – into ‘debt distress.’ These stabilisation programmes sought to anchor prices on an appreciated exchange rate, sustained by tight monetary policies that maintained high interest rates. The problem was that the government and the central bank had heavy domestic-debt burdens, and their combined interest bill far exceeded their non-interest surplus. To finance the interest without creating money, the government and central bank had to add continually to the outstanding debt stock as they capitalised the interest due. The debt swelled, and interest rates were pressured upward. Heavy pressure against the exchange rate, devaluation and hyperinflation then ensued when the public-sector debt stock exceeded what financial markets could be persuaded to hold at reasonable interest rates.

The Cuban Revolution shattered some of the most important policy formulations by which the United States had traditionally defined its place and defended its interests in the western hemisphere, for which Fidel Castro has been inalterably held responsible. Much of US policy towards Cuba during the past forty years has been driven by a determination to punish Cuba for the transgressions of Fidel Castro and a determination to resist a modus vivendi with Cuba as long as he remains in power.

This article examines the determinants of government strategies towards dominant media actors in the light of increased questioning of the media's role in democratic politics. It compares the first two Kirchnerist presidencies in Argentina with the first two PT-led governments in Brazil. While these governments initially adopted accommodation strategies, political crises subsequently disturbed the coexistence of media and government, triggering divergent responses. The study offers an account of media policy options and shifts based upon (i) constraints stemming from political-structural variables, (ii) governmental perceptions of oppositional media power and of civil society allies' strength and (iii) learning from critical junctures that reshaped policy preferences. In sum, the article provides insights into the ways the media realm has become an arena of political struggle in Latin America.

This paper analyses the role played by US economic assistance during the administrations of Jânio Quadros and João Goulart in Brazil (1961–4). It focuses on the negotiation and implementation of financial agreements associated with the Alliance for Progress, President Kennedy's aid programme for Latin America. It demonstrates that the Alliance had a positive impact during Quadros' administration, providing substantial resources to the country and placing economic growth ahead of economic stabilisation as the principal criterion for aid. Circumstances changed, however, when João Goulart became president, resulting in serious funding constraints. The paper suggests that the main reason for this was political, specifically regarding Washington's perception of Goulart's links with communist groups.

Existing research shows that the ideas of judges shape their behaviour. A natural next question to ask is, where do these ideas come from? Yet, there is little empirical evidence regarding the content and distribution of these ideas and even less evidence regarding the sources of these ideas, especially how ideas transfer or diffuse among judges. In this article, a survey of judges in the Mexican state of Michoacán generates original data on the attitudes and professional ties among these legal elites, and a mixed-methods design examines the diffusion of these attitudes along these ties, sequencing quantitative network analyses and interviews with judges to strengthen causal inferences. The core finding that the social structure of judges influences the attitudes judges hold contributes a valuable analytic complement to scholarship on comparative judicial behaviour, and clarifies our understanding of the role of judicial networks in strengthening democracy and the rule of law.

This article discusses the distinct historical phases in the development of the Nicaraguan Atlantic Coast region as the essential background to an analysis of the process of autonomy currently unfolding there. It identifies three main periods: English colonial rule; enclave economy when US companies were involved in a number of extractive enterprises; and, finally, control by the Sandinistas who came to power in 1979 after the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship.

The Atlantic Coast has been a forgotten area of study. Only recently, because of the Miskito Indian question, has the academic world and the public at large taken more interest. The tendency nevertheless has been to focus on the treatment of the Miskito population (and especially its temporary relocation from its traditional lands) not only as the most important issue, but as the only issue. While the Miskitos have been a proper cause for concern the Miskito question is only a small aspect of a complex set of social, political, economic and ethnic relations existing on the Atlantic Coast. The Miskitos are but one of six ethnic groups living on the Atlantic Coast.

Homicide statistics are a widely accepted metric of security and democracy. This article argues for a focus on how bodies come or do not come to be counted – of what happens before states enumerate. The experience of São Paulo relates that how many people die and how many do not is connected to the governance of an organised crime group known as the PCC. The punishment practices of the PCC and groups like it throughout Latin America reshape the lived paradigm of governance over life and death, albeit in concealed ways. Statistics are produced by and are productive of a de jure state, different from the state de facto. The acceptance of state-made homicide figures, whether for analysis, visualisation or political claims, is consequential for the future of lived security and social science knowledge production.

Scholarly studies that consider the relationship between economic dependence and foreign policy reveal a wide variety of dependent foreign policy behaviour. As a body, the dependent foreign policy literature lacks the theoretical continuity needed to understand and organise this empirical diversity. Such foreign policy diversity is particularly observable in capitalist Latin America. Despite the entire region's significant economic weakness and dependence on the USA, leaders implement foreign policies as defiant as Oscar Arias's peace plan for Central America and as apparently acquiescent as Carlos Salinas de Gortari's agreeing to a Free Trade Agreement between Mexico and the USA. Progress in theory building in the area of dependent foreign policy, therefore, has particular implications for the study of Latin American foreign policy, which has been dominated by individual case studies that too rarely place their findings in a theoretical context.

This article utilises an ethnographic case study from Nicaragua to analyse people's everyday experiences of wartime violence and postwar privation. A great deal of literature dealing with political instability in war-torn countries has approached this issue by examining the societal manifestations of violence, while relatively less attention has been paid to people's everyday experiences of conflict and pain. This study focuses on the several waves of violence, displacement, and distress Nicaraguan people have suffered in recent years, beginning with their traumatic experiences of the civil war in the 1980s to the current postwar era characterised by political instability and socio-economic insecurity.

This article is the first of its kind to offer a quantitative estimation of the evolution of Latin American agricultural production and productivity between 1950 and 2008. It also uncovers the extent to which the increases in production were due to increases in factors of production or to efficiency gains. Our findings reveal that efficiency gains made a rather modest contribution to the substantial increase in production, although their role became increasingly large over time and were highly significant between 1994 and 2008. Capital was the most important productive factor in explaining increases in output.

This article examines the role of the Protestant Moravian Church in the politicisation of Miskitu ethnic identity, and on the mobilisation of the Miskitu against the Sandinistas during the 1980s. It argues that changes in the institution of the Church during the 1960s and 70s, as a result of state policy, socio-economic context and internal conflicts within Miskitu society, led to Moravianism becoming a cultural marker of Miskitu ethnicity. At the same time, the encounter with and appropriation of the pastoral tactics of a Catholic priest resulted in a radicalisation of Miskitu Moravian pastors on indigenous issues. When the Miskitu came to mobilise against the Sandinistas, the Moravian Church was the expressive vehicle and the institutional means through which the mobilisation took place. The article reveals how politicised ethnic identities find their expression in religious institutions.

International conventions and domestic laws have been enacted to prevent, punish and eradicate violence against women worldwide. However, these progressive policy initiatives have faced opposition in contentious contexts where policy rivals have contested their creation and implementation. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on progressive networks that have led to policy advances, such as violence against women (VAW) policies, while emerging literature has noted their limited impact and implementation. However, there is scant attention paid to one major underlying cause of limited impact and problematic implementation: that there is sustained opposition to these policies by policy rivals that resist and undermine progressive policies. We identify opponents and entrenched opposition to VAW laws in Mexico and Nicaragua in the 1990s and 2010s. We also identify how these opponents leverage ties with the state and utilise ‘family discourse’, framing progressives as anti-family, as strategies and mechanisms for stunting and even reversing VAW laws.

The 1989–1990 Colombian student movement played a key role in bringing about a constituent assembly to draft a new national constitution. This article utilises contemporary social movement theory, secondary sources and interviews with student activists to examine the trajectory of this movement. Key explanatory variables of social movement theory – political opportunity structure, organisational form, the framing process and the repertoire of collective action – provide useful insights into the origins, impact and ultimate demise of the Colombian student movement. Judicious use of such variables could benefit research on other social movements in Latin America.

This study examines an episode in the social history of state planning by focusing on the 1951 Peronist letter writing campaign. Perón's request for popular suggestions to the Second Five-Year Plan was met with enthusiasm from men and women across Argentina. As with other cases of state planning in the postwar world, the Peronist model of planned progress inspired many popular sector individuals and organisations, in part by offering them an intimate mode of political participation within an increasingly restrictive order. This appeal cannot be attributed to Peronist mass politics alone; rather, the regime's ideal of macro-level national planning also reinforced pre-existing practices of social activism in Argentine local communities.

This article assesses the impact, if any, of Spanish and British Court rulings on the Pinochet case on human rights progress in Chilean courts. Chilean judges chafe at the notion that foreign courts exerted any influence on them, arguing that, based solely on Chilean law and the evidence already before them, they were empowered to strip Pinochet of his immunity, and proceeded to do so. Human rights critics allege that the courts had been thoroughly immobilised by the authoritarian legacy to which they were enjoined. No progress at all would have occurred were it not for the dramatic verdicts handed down in British courts. The author contends that change was underfoot in Chile prior to Pinochet's arrest in London, but that Europe set Chile on a faster and steeper trajectory toward justice than would have been possible otherwise. It did so by shaming the Chilean Government into pressuring its own high courts to deliver a modicum of justice to the victims of Pinochet.

In 1859 the district attorney of Montes Claros, in a long dispatch to the provincial chief of police, enumerating the many evils prevailing in his jurisdiction, included ‘craven traffickers who abduct little free children of colour whom they trick and seduce with fruits and presents, to sell as if they were slaves, trading them for livestock or mere trinkets’. This complaint was not an isolated incident; it reflected a larger trade in free people of colour which took place in the sertão of northern Minas Gerais after the closing of the transatlantic slave trade in 1851 and before the passage of the law of the free womb in 1871. The internal trade in free persons ceased in the early 1870s, when mandatory slave matriculation made illicit transactions more detectable.

This commentary examines the challenge of sustainable development in the Amazon, arguing that global efforts to mitigate climate change and current Amazonian policies are clearly inadequate to prevent global warming and deforestation from tipping the forest into a savanna. It analyses the growing climate pressures jeopardising the Amazon's resilience; the erratic Brazilian, Bolivian, Colombian, Ecuadorian and Peruvian governance of the forest; and the failure of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) to establish long-term forest conservation policies in the region. The research demonstrates that the ‘savannisation hypothesis’ is potentially closer to reality than most debates in the social sciences assume and should be considered seriously. The commentary concludes by suggesting possible pathways for preventing the dieback of the Amazon. These are based on three strategic axes: the strengthening of the ACTO, the promotion of a technological revolution in the forest, and a progressive environmental diplomacy by the Amazonian countries.

In May 2016, an Argentine federal court concluded a momentous trial, convicting 15 defendants of illegal kidnappings and torture committed against over 100 victims of Operation Condor, and of asociación ilícita (‘illicit association’: conspiracy to commit a criminal offence) to perpetrate these violations. Operation Condor was the codename given to a continent-wide covert operation devised in the 1970s by South American regimes to eliminate hundreds of left-wing activists across the region. The Operation Condor verdict of 2016 broke new ground in human rights and transitional justice, for its innovative focus on transnational crimes and for holding state agents accountable for extraterritorial human rights violations. By analysing this pioneering case, the article brings the question of cross-border crimes into academic debate. As borders become more porous, scholars and practitioners can no longer afford to side-line the topic of accountability for transnational crimes.

On 15 March 1945 Juan José Arévalo became president of Guatemala. His inauguration marked the beginning of an unprecedented democratic parenthesis – ‘spring in the land of eternal tyranny ’1 – a spring that ended abruptly with the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954.

Arévalo was an anti-communist, a nationalist, and a reformer. He was an anti-communist who believed that individual communists should not be persecuted unless they violated the law. He was a nationalist who accepted that Guatemala was in the US sphere of influence. He was a reformer who eschewed radical change.

For the foreign scholar, especially, an understanding of Peruvian politics between 1895 and 1919, the period of the so-called Repôblica Aristocràtica, is difficult to obtain. This quarter-century is considered an era of rapid social and economic change: in the words of one scholar, it completed ‘the disappearance of colonial Peru’. An important element in this transition was the growth on the coast of the ruling group connected with the expanding export economy, known in the literature variously as the ‘oligarchy’, ‘bourgeoisie’, or the ‘plutocracy’, which supposedly obtained control over the meagre resources of the state and directed them to its own ends.