British business in Latin America struggled throughout the inter-war period, affected by the First World War, aggressive US trade strategies and a dated British commercial support structure that had turned its attentions to imperial markets. Chamber of Commerce archive material reveals the frustrations of the British business community in Chile as hard-won markets were lost to well-supported US firms and returning German competition, as a consequence of weak political, financial and marketing support. Against a backdrop of British commercial decline worldwide, the Chilean case echoes the experiences of businessmen across Latin America's non-imperial markets. As the British government dallied, US business established an unassailable position.

Latin America's workers perplex historians. Despite chronic political turmoil, revolt and undiluted class conflict, Latin America's mobilised workers have not been the vanguards of social revolution. Rather, variations of authoritarianism, populism and clientilism are said to characterise labour politics more accurately. The absence of independent working-class politics has prompted the search for aetiologies of class-formation in Latin America – the search for the missing ingredient to revolutionary working-class action.

This article examines some characteristics of the Argentine business elite between the end of the nineteenth century and the rise of peronismo in the mid-1940s. To do so, it discusses the ideas relating to this theme proposed by Jorge Sábato in his influential study, La clase dominante en la Argentina moderna. Sábato argued that diversification of assets in a wide range of operations constituted the defining aspect of the economic strategy of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century entrepreneurial elite. This hypothesis requires revision. Simultaneous investment in various economic activities also characterises other entrepreneurial classes in the Americas and in Europe, and for this reason does not offer a convincing account of the peculiarities of the Argentine bourgeoisie. Sábato paid little attention to what in more traditional accounts distinguishes the Argentine proprietor class (and, in addition, the economy as a whole) from its counterparts in other parts of the world: its privileged ties to land and to rural production. However, analysis of probate records confirm this picture, especially for the turn-of-the-century elite.

This article reveals the influence of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) on both the reformers of Guatemala's ‘Revolutionary Spring’ (1944–54) and the reactionaries who overthrew Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. It shows how officials in the Arévalo and Arbenz administrations looked to the defeated Second Spanish Republic as a moral and political example, while local opponents of those administrations treated Spain's Nationalist insurgency and Francisco Franco's dictatorship as models for how to exterminate communism. In so doing, the article argues for the importance of multi-sited transnational Cold War histories that complement existing studies of US intervention.

This article locates the first regime of Alfonso López Pumarejo (the Revolutión en marcha, 1934–8) within the social dynamics of Colombia's polarised party system, rather than the developmentalist and class dynamics that are frequently invoked. López's economic and political thought is shown to be far closer to the partisan and antistatist traditions of Colombian liberalism than is often assumed, and his rise to power is depicted as a victory of political strategy rather than class alliances. After surveying the role of the Acción Liberal group of intellectuals in the radicalisation of Liberal discourse, culminating in the constitutional reform of 1936, the article offers hypotheses about the transitory nature of López-era Liberal radicalism.

Nineteenth-century Peru is customarily taken as a hyperbolic example of how the triumph of economic liberalism in Latin America hindered prospects for sustained economic development. While historians now agree that guano-age liberalism triggered adverse economic and social consequences, the roots of Peruvian free trade policy remain shrouded in mystery. Most recently, dependency writers elevated free trade into a major component of their posited transition to ‘neocolonialism’ after Independence. However, this new periodization is not convincing for it fails to explain how liberal policies actually took hold, symptomatic of the insufficient attention given to internal dynamics of change.

Washington's challenge during George W. Bush's presidency was to define a new relationship with Latin America beyond free trade and neoliberal economics – a relationship responsive to the region's demand for social and economic justice. Preoccupied by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration failed this challenge. The president left his Latin American policy in the hands of conservative cold warriors who reacted with hostility to the election of ‘new left’ socialists and populists. As a result, Washington's reputation and relations in Latin America deteriorated dramatically.

In the years since Raúl Castro took office as president following Fidel Castro's illness and retirement, Cuba has embarked on four major transitions almost simultaneously: a restructuring of elite decision-making; a transformation of Cuba's centrally-planned economy into a market socialist economy; a relaxation of tight social control, providing greater social autonomy for civil society and even a degree of political decompression; and, a transition from the founding generation of the political elite (los históricos) to a successor generation, when neither Castro will hold power. Each of these processes by itself entails political risk; unfolding together, they constitute the greatest political challenge the Cuban regime has faced since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The article analyses the Brazilian experience in financing economic activity from the 1964–67 reform until the 1990s. Two issues are addressed: first, what conditions explain the development of a model based on public and external credit in Brazil, quite different from the capital market based system conceived in the 1964–67 reform? Second, what are the perspectives for the development of an alternative model in the country, led by the national private sector? Based on international experience, two alternatives are considered: a) the expansion of the capital market, in order to make possible large scale direct financing; b) the formation of a private banking credit system, complementing or replacing both public and external credit. Despite undoubted improvements, tendencies observed up to 1997 suggest the persistence of the ‘short-termist’ profile that typically characterised the Brazilian financial system. Thus, the development of both capital market and banking credit models depends on financial policies devoted to this goal. General guidelines for such policies are suggested in the last section of the paper.

Both before and after the 1959 revolution, the Catholic Church in Cuba deviated from the norm in Latin America. This is in large measure due to the unique historical and social experience of Cuba, as well as to the fact that the church remained until the early 1960s largely a missionary outpost of Spain. When the revolution occurred, the Catholic Church was frozen in a pre-Vatican II mold which was reinforced by an exodus of clergy, religious and laity. The economic and diplomatic embargo of Cuba further isolated the church from progressive trends within the international church. Thus, the ferment unleashed by Vatican II (1962–5) and the Latin American Bishops Conference at Medellín, Colombia (1968) had less impact than changes resulting from the Cuban Revolution. As a consequence, the Catholic Church in Cuba entered the 1970s with limited theological and pastoral resources to meet the challenge of a consolidated Marxist/Leninist revolution. As an institution, the Catholic Church in Cuba is, as it was in 1959, the weakest in all of Latin America.

The 1868 presidential election in Argentina repays attention on a number of counts. It was the first time that the efficacy of the formal constitutional machinery evolved in 1860 had been put to the test. It was unusual in that the result was not, on the one hand, a foregone conclusion, a mere legitimation of a choice that had already been made, nor, on the other, disputed by force of arms. It also marked a change of direction for the political elite, although the consequences of this would not work themselves through the political system until the 1870s. It is unnecessary to labour the manifold changes in Argentina in the early 1870s: massive immigration, the full impact of the railways, the beginning of the “golden age’ of British investment, the integration of Argentina into a world economy were complemented in the political sphere by the end of the Paraguayan war, the death of Urquiza, the last great caudillo, the failure of the last important separatist movement (the rebellion of López Jordán in Entre Ríos during 1870–3) outside the capital and of the porteño separatist revolt under ex—President Bartolomé Mitre in 1874.

The years between the election of Manuel Montt as President of Chile in 1851 and the outbreak of the War of the Pacific in 1879 were years of considerable expansion in the Chilean economy despite occasional setbacks which were generally followed by renewed prosperity. Government activity assisted this growth: Montt's administration, in particular, passed laws and followed policies designed to help commerce and industry and to establish the infrastructure of a modern economy.1 However, the country's increased wealth came from greater production for export in the traditional economy, using largely traditional methods, rather than through technical innovations or the introduction of new industries. The export sector fuelled the republic's growth; not only did export receipts pay for imports, but they provided the guarantee for foreign loans, while the Government secured the bulk of its revenues from duties levied on exports and imports.

In much historiography of the colonial Caribbean, British administrators are portrayed as mediators between domestic elites, foreign capital, and the working class. Such scholarship converges with popular belief in Belize, whose institutions are seen as a legacy of ‘impartial’ British rule. This article examines the relationship between the United Fruit Company and the colonial government of British Honduras. Contrary to claims of administrative impartiality, colonial officials facilitated the company's monopoly over the banana industry and acted as company advocates before the Colonial Office, actions that ultimately undermined the colony's independent banana producers.

‘Judicial independence is a means to a strong judicial institution, which is a means to personal liberty and prosperity.’ United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer.

Starting in the 1980s, and accelerating through the 1990s, international financial institutions (IFIs), non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and development agencies funnelled considerable resources into judicial reform and rule of law programmes in virtually every Latin American and Caribbean country. The assumption was that reformed court systems would foster free market economic development strategies. This article examines the impact of two frequently advocated aspects of judicial reform, judicial access and judicial independence, on economic policy making in Costa Rica. We argue that there is a potentially significant disjuncture between the sponsors' expectations of the judicial reforms' economic impact and the observed outcomes.

Only in the last century has the territory of the Enxet Indians of Paraguay been colonised by non-Indians, led initially by Anglican missionaries. This article examines the Enxet in the contemporary political context of Paraguay giving special attention to their claim for 160,000 hectares of their traditional territory. It also considers the development of a mythically expressed autochthonous political discourse and the relationship of the Indians to professional politicians. Despite significant legal backing, the Enxet land claims are strongly opposed by powerful landowners and their best chance for success will be to gain international support.

In Argentina during World War II the US stepped outside the limits of the Good Neighbor policy proclaimed by the Roosevelt administration in 1933 and attempted to overthrow the government of a major Latin American power.1 Between 1941 and 1945 Argentina was not only treated differently from the rest of Latin America by the United States, but was also singled out for harsher treatment than other neutrals, despite its large material contribution to the Allied cause. In 1944 Washington was readier to compromise with Franco's Spain, a country whose Axis connections were notorious, than it was to seek a settlement with the government in Buenos Aires.2 The purpose of this paper is to examine the development of US interference in Argentine affairs after Pearl Harbor and the reasons for US hostility to the rise of Perón following the military coup of June 1943.

In Chile and Argentina, indigenous Mapuche intellectuals contend that there is a single Mapuche nation that spans the Chile–Argentina border. When Mapuche people talk about the Mapuche nation and create symbols to represent it, however, they can mean both the Mapuche nation within the Chilean and Argentine state borders and the cross-border Mapuche nation. The dual nature of this project raises important theoretical questions about the nation-building process. In this article, I argue that Mapuche activists are engaging in a multi-scalar geopolitical imagination. They are imagining the geographic, political and cultural elements of the Mapuche nation at two scales simultaneously: within nation-state borders and across them. The overlapping and contested nature of this process means that the nation-building project is full of new tensions and constraints. However, it is also an example of ‘thinking otherwise’ and imagining an alternative sense of national belonging.

This study challenges the widely held belief that the peasant rebellion of 1932, and the massive military response to it, marked the demise of Indian ethnic identity. Working from documents that have become available only recently, we demonstrate that the Indian population was not decimated by the military repression. The percentage of Indians in the population remained steady and in some regions even increased. We show that the bedrock of Indian identity, the cofradías and the communities, survived the repression as well. We propose that these survivals are due, ironically, in part to the military. Despite their willingness to employ violence on a colossal level, military leaders believed that order in the countryside was to be achieved through reform as well as repression. The military's reformist ideology and reform programme worked to defend individual Indians and Indian communities from ladinos anxious to avenge their losses in the uprising.

This article seeks to demonstrate the need to incorporate the international component of political strategy into analysis of the behaviour of democratising elites, a standpoint that too often has been neglected in democratisation theory. It explores a little-known aspect of Argentina's foreign policy that took place under the stewardship of the transitional democratic administration of President Raúl Alfonsín (1983-1989). Specifically, it reveals that the first-freely elected administration that followed the Procesco military dictatorship articulated and implemented a strategy that aimed at defending and promoting democratic values in relation to Argentina's Southern Cone and Andean neighbours. Argentine bilateral relations with Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Chile are analysed through this analytical standpoint. It is argued that the Alfonsín government pursued such a policy out of a blend of fear for its own perpetuation and principled beliefs about the value of democracy as a mode of governance.