This article seeks to understand the impressive scale of recent student protests in Chile. It underscores how relative institutional closure to student demands created, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a growing cleavage between the movement and the political establishment, leading to major innovations in movement identity and organisation. These innovations rendered the movement more attractive to non-activists, helping in later years to diffuse contention from traditional hotbeds of student activism to schools and universities with little history of it.

In studies of the international dimensions of women's suffrage, the role of international organisations has been overlooked. This article examines the suffrage activities of the Pan-American Union (PAU), and in particular those of the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW), between 1920 and 1945. Attentive to historical context, the examination suggests that international organisations can be both bearers of state interests and platforms for social movement interests. The article also argues that while not independent bureaucracies, the PAU and IACW nevertheless had some importance for suffrage that cannot be attributed either to their state members or to the suffragist movements.

If Latin America's public universities are considered part of the state, then it seems plausible to characterise them as similar to the state, i.e. as clientelistic. However, this plausible hypothesis has never been examined by the literature on twentieth-century Mexican social sciences. Just like clientelism, science patrons such as US philanthropic foundations have similarly been neglected. In this article I argue that, as an alternative to what the Rockefeller Foundation perceived as clientelism and amateurism at Latin American universities, it claimed to patronise liberal scholarship, practised according to formal rational criteria. While foundations have been frequently considered part of a US imperialistic drive towards cultural hegemony in Latin America, they were not unitary actors and frequently failed to predict the actual impact of their grants. In Mexico in the 1940s, the Rockefeller Foundation boosted the humanities, but missed the opportunity to support a local take on social science teaching and research.

This article traces the historiography of the romantic yet poorly understood mistress, friend and political ally of Simón Bolívar: Manuela Sáenz Aizpuru de Thorne (1797–1856). It highlights two opposing schools of interpretation on Sáenz: the ‘bad girl’ and ‘heroine’ schools. Nationalism and the cult of Bolívar (especially among Venezuelan and Ecuadorean authors), have combined with the later influence of revolutionary socialist and feminist ideas to ensure the predominance of the latter and, thus, of an heroic-mythic view of Sáenz. Yet scholars' efforts to recover the historical woman have challenged this view and, above all, paved the way for a more nuanced, gender-conscious understanding of Sáenz's role and significance.

For twenty years the Soviet Union has had closer relations with Peru than with any other Latin American country apart from Cuba or Nicaragua. In fact, Peru was the first post-Cuban revolution centre of Soviet operations in South America, and perhaps still plays that role today. Now that the Cold War is over the balance sheet of Soviet relations with Peru can be evaluated with more detachment than ever.

The decade of the 1870s began auspiciously in Europe. Germany, rich with French reparations and enlarged by the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, embarked on an era of prosperity, expanding its railroads and industrial base. Investment in industrial and commercial sectors doubled though many of the newly-founded corporations were extremely speculative. The frenetic good times ended in the spring of 1873: a crisis developed in Austria which quickly enveloped its neighbors. Soon German banks and companies, founded in the era of easy money, collapsed. The crisis leapfrogged the Channel to England where interest rates quickly soared and business activity slowed down.

The Carabineros de Chile played an active role in the repression and leadership of the Pinochet regime, yet today, the police force is one of the most respected institutions in Chile. Few post-authoritarian democracies have been able to restore such esteem for their police as quickly. But what does respect mean? This study analyses the narratives of approximately 50 police experts in Chile. It finds that police experts regard the positive image of the Carabineros as having more to do with fear and an effective communications strategy than police reform. It is important to understand how those Chileans most involved in policy discussions on policing interpret the reasons for respect, as their interpretations can shape the types of policing advocated or practised.

This article examines how neoliberal multicultural governance shapes the political imaginaries and practices of rural indigenous Guatemalans in the town of San Pedro Necta. Decades of counter-insurgency warfare have displaced radical politics into sanctioned forms of ethnic empowerment, memory and development, but most indigenous sampedranos have maintained radical investments. Persistent political violence, stalled reforms and clientelist favouritism undermined multicultural inclusion, development and optimism regarding the 1996 peace accords, and weakened community autonomy. The resulting mix of pessimism, unmet needs and divisionism has discouraged progressive politics and normalised political disengagement and, increasingly, self-interested affiliations with multiple conservative parties, including corrupt authoritarian populists implicated in genocide.

The subject of agrarian reform in El Salvador has an importance which extends beyond considerations of that country's immediate crisis. The agrarian problems in many parts of Latin America originate from similar sets of conditions, but nowhere have these conditions reached a more critical point than in El Salvador. Consequently the experience of agrarian reform there is likely to anticipate those problems of agrarian change which eventually will have to be faced by most Latin American countries.

Narratives of memory have received considerable attention in Argentina but rarely have these been examined in relation to the 1982 Malvinas War. This article focuses on national memory narratives of the war manifest in educational resources and explores how and under what conditions local ways of remembering can transform and/or reproduce such narratives, through research within secondary schools in Río Gallegos, a city in the south of Argentina. It shows how the city's connections with the military and the war generated sensitivities that influenced how the Malvinas was engaged in the classroom. The localised framings deviated from predominant national memory narratives by underplaying the broader context of state terror and overlooking histories associated with the Malvinas before 1982.

The Catholic Church in Brazil has undergone a fundamental transformation in its role in state and society during the past decade and a half, making it probably the most progressive Church in Latin America, if not the world. Based on theological innovations since the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) and the CELAM meeting in Medellín, Colombia (1968), the Church in Brazil has made a ‘preferential option for the poor’.

For a long period, the consensus in development studies argued that the unemployed in urban areas were not part of the poverty problem. It was argued in the 1970s that open unemployment in developing countries was not, in general, a serious social problem. This was not because rates of open unemployment were low in urban areas – Turnham cited open unemployment rates in urban areas of over ten per cent for countries as diverse as Ghana, Guyana, Panama, Puerto Rico, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Korea and the Philippines. Rather, it was argued that the unemployed were not poor. They were predominantly the relatively well-educated young, who were waiting to find good jobs, or migrants ‘queuing’ for work in the formal sector, or people temporarily out of work as they moved from one job to another. The urban informal sector or agriculture would provide jobs for those really needing work. Therefore, the ‘needy’ would not remain in open unemployment for long. Long periods of open unemployment would be luxury, available only to the better-off.

The five nations of the Central American Common Market (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua) have all the characteristics generally associated with less developed countries—largely agrarian economies, great dependence on agricultural exports for foreign exchange earnings, rapid population growth, widespread illiteracy, and low per capita incomes.

On 13 July 1992, the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) scored an important victory in the northern state of Chihuahua, winning not only the gubernatorial election, but also the most important cities of the state and a majority in the local Congress. As in the previous elections of 1986, one of the characteristics of this electoral process was the overt participation of entrepreneurs in the opposition, particularly small and medium-size entrepreneurs.

At the time of the Spanish conquest Nicaragua was inhabited by tribes and chiefdoms whose total population ran into hundreds of thousands: today only 4 per cent of the population is classified as Indian. With the exception of a short period in the eighteenth century, the Indian population has declined continuously since the sixteenth century, with the greatest losses being sustained during the first few decades of Spanish rule. Reconstructing the demographic history of Nicaragua is not an easy task since much of the documentary record has been lost as the result of natural disasters and political upheavals.

Genomic research in Latin America has looked into the African, Amerindian and European ancestry of local populations. This article explores how indigeneity and blackness figure in genomic science in the light of previous and current representations of indigenous and Afro-descendent people. These categories have been cast as ‘other’ in Latin America, but they have occupied different locations in ‘structures of alterity’. I look briefly at these similarities and differences in the colonial and republican periods and in recent multiculturalist reforms. I look at the gendered sexual imagery surrounding each concept, before examining in detail how blackness and indigeneity figure in gendered ways in genomic science research on admixture and ancestry in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. I conclude that, in the context of multiculturalism, genomics works to re-centre imaginaries of the nation around the mestizo and mixture, while casting blackness and indigeneity, in sexualised and gendered ways, as different kinds of others.

Based largely on research completed in the North American context, scholars of prisons detail the multiple ways in which carceral practices extend beyond prison walls to transform a wide variety of spaces, ultimately assessing how carceral imaginaries inhabit the most intimate aspects of everyday life. In Latin America, this division between the inside and the outside of prison breaks down even further when read from the perspective of survival. Drawing on ethnographic research across Guatemala's penitentiary system, this article explores how the deep interdependencies that develop between male prisoners and female visitors sustain not just these prisoners and their visitors but also the prison system itself.

This article looks at the beginnings and early development of the modern copper smelting industry in Chile. It analyses the factors which led to its occurrence, contrasting it with other countries where no smelting industry developed. It argues that the development of the Chilean smelting industry stimulated copper mining and reinforced the expansion of coal mining. Furthermore, it permitted the retention in the country of a larger part of the rent generated by copper mining than would have been the case had all the copper ore been exported, and was therefore an important factor in the development of the Chilean economy as a whole.

Until 1879 tne Chilean copper industry was the most dynamic sector of the economy of the Republic. During the period 1844—79 it generated exports of 341 million pesos (around £64 million), or 42.3 % of the total value of the exports of the country, and contributed 29 million pesos, or almost 10% of the ordinary fiscal income, through the export duty levied.1 Most of this copper left Chile in the shape of ingots of over 99% fine (that is pure) copper, bar copper of c. 96 % fine or regulus, a semi-processed form of copper of around 50% fine; only 12.1 % left in the shape of copper ores of different types.2 The smelting and, to an even greater extent, the refining of the copper ore in Chile permitted the miners to develop a wider variety of potential markets. It also facilitated the Luis Valenzuela is a Lecturer at the Centre for Development Studies, University College of Swansea.

This article analyses, first, the principal features of Spain's commercial policies towards Spanish America in 1797–1820, and, second, the value, nature and distribution of the trade that survived in this period, despite prolonged international warfare, the admission of neutral shipping, and internal strife from 1808 in both Spain and America. Like the author's earlier studies of ‘free trade’ in the period 1778–96, its principal sources are shipping registers and associated inter-ministerial correspondence in the Archivo General de Indias of Sevilla. Its main conclusions are that: (1) despite ambivalence and uncertainty in Spain about commercial policy, trade with Spanish America was more buoyant in 1797–1820 than previously realised; (2) nevertheless, by the first decade of the nineteenth century most parts of Spanish America were enjoying de facto, if not de jure, free trade with foreigners; (3) consequently, commercial discontent was not a key factor in the process of emancipation from Spain, particularly in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru which received some 70% of exports from Spain in this period.

The gains and difficulties Latin American countries face from financial market development and liberalisation have received much attention in current economic literature. Nevertheless, significant issues have received little or no attention, even though the success of these efforts depends upon them. The purpose of this article is to explore the benefits from open and developed – two words that are not necessarily synonymous – financial and capital markets in Latin America and possible important obstacles which will be faced in the remainder of the 1990s.