At a general level of neoliberal repudiation or expansion of social policies, most post-neoliberal Latin American governments in the 2000s have exhibited similarities. However, coalitions with popular actors have displayed a lot of variation. In order to compare popular-sector coalitions the article constructs a framework with two central dimensions: electoral and organisational/interest; in post-import substitution industrialisation (ISI) Latin America the latter is composed of both unions and territorial social movements (TSMs). It contends that the region witnessed four types of popular coalitions: electoral (Ecuador and Chile), TSM-based (i.e. made up of informal sector-based organisations, Venezuela and Bolivia), dual (i.e. composed of both unions and TSMs, Argentina and Brazil) and union/party-based (Uruguay). The study argues that government–union coalitions are largely accounted for by the relative size of the formal economy, and by the institutional legacies of labour based-parties. Coalitions with informal sector-based organisations are rooted in the political activation of these TSMs during the anti-neoliberal struggles of the 1990s and early 2000s.

There is much in the literature which laments the condition of the common man in nineteenth-century Mexico. Most of the evidence for this sad interpretation, however, is circumstantial and qualitative in substance and leaves one groping at times for more convincing arguments. This pessimistic view seems inappropriate for the North where historical interpretation in these matters is deeply influenced by generalizations arising from studies of the South and Center. Careful examination demonstrates that for at least one region of the North a distinct and varied natural and human environment produced a different set of living conditions. This study assesses the living standards in low-income hacienda laborers in the State of Zacatecas during the period 1820–80. The results suggest a reconsideration of the notion that all nineteenth-century Mexican peones were oppressed and malnourished step-children of the latifundia system.

Although Belize City has almost always been the centre of population in Belize, few studies have been devoted to its historical geography–or indeed to the urban geography of the country as a whole. The purpose of this paper is to gather together much of the scattered material on Belize City, in the hope that this codification will help the reader to understand the growth and present status of the city, and, perhaps, inspire others to do further research on this, still the major urban centre of Belize.

Between 2014 and 2018, a period marked by major political and economic upheaval, Brazilian politics shifted sharply to the Right. Presenting qualitative research conducted over 2016–17, this article examines this process from the perspectives of residents of a peripheral São Paulo neighbourhood. Analysis is presented of three broad groups of respondents, each of which mobilised a distinct narrative framework for interpreting the crisis. Based on this, I argue that the rightward turn in urban peripheries embodies not a significant ideological shift, but rather long-term transformations of place and the largely contingent ways these articulate with electoral politics.

Since 1964 Brazil has been governed by successive regimes dominated by the armed forces and presided over by army generals. The men in charge of Brazil's destiny are professional officers, and like their counterparts in the neighboring Spanish American states they conceive of their governance as an obligation as much as a privilege, if not more. The professional officer in Latin America today is as far removed from his nineteenth century counterpart as ballistic missile systems are from the ballista.

This paper explores the meanings that youth crime and policing acquire in the context of their mediated representation on the televised news in Nicaragua. In particular, it explores this question by juxtaposing the televised imagery of the apprehended juvenile delinquent with the discursive treatment of his person by both police and reporters on Nicaragua's most watched news shows, Acción 10 and Crónica TN8. The police are presented as heroic protagonists who serve and protect the barrio through ‘communitarian policing’ whilst the juvenile delinquent – the ‘pinta’ – is excluded and stigmatised. This turns such youths into socially expendable and ‘tainted, discounted’ outsiders who can be treated as such. In this way, through the news, pintas are targeted for ‘removal’ from the barrio, and their mediated arrests become ‘spectacular performances’ of community. A discrepancy appears, then, between the police's communitarian discourse and its reactionary practice.

This article considers the cultural adjustment of immigrants to Brazil through an analysis of the role that association football (soccer) played in identity formation in twentieth-century São Paulo. It focuses on the city's large Italian population, in particular the experiences of a leading club, the Società Sportiva Palestra Itália, and of the first generation of Brazilian footballers who migrated abroad in order to play football professionally, many of whom were Paulistas of Italian descent. It demonstrates that through football Italians obtained agency in negotiating the process by which they became Brazilian and found a means by which to preserve a sense of discrete ethnicity within São Paulo's multiethnic community.

The inflow of Spanish investment in Latin America after 1989 was the result of a strategy by the managers of seven leading firms to gain access to new markets and to become world leaders in their industry, by applying the know-how that they had developed in Spain during the period of rapid economic modernisation in the 1980s. This article examines the context for these investments in Spain and in Latin America and provides a constructivist theoretical framework to explain them. It analyses seven firms in four industries (BBVA and SCH in banking, Repsol-YPF in oil and natural gas, Endesa, Iberdrola and Unión Fenosa in public utilities, and Telefónica in telecommunications). The knowledge and techniques that developed in Spain in the 1980s, it is argued, gave them significant advantages in Latin American markets during the period of liberalisation and privatisation in the 1990s. The Spanish government played a significant role in this process, by promoting the growth of large firms in the service industries through mergers and acquisition, protecting their domestic market, and encouraging their investments overseas.

Non-governmental organisations operate as nodes in networks of ‘managerialism’ – bundles of often Northern, corporate-inspired knowledge and practices that promote ‘good governance’ under neoliberalism. Managerialism is double-sided: it can guard against corruption and help ensure accountability, but it can also be culturally disjunctive, reinforcing North–South power imbalances while diffusing the political potential of NGOs. In this paper we present a framework for studying managerialism's global circulation and discuss a series of empirical findings from a multi-year study of NGOs in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. We conclude by commenting on managerialism's influence on NGOs during the social upheavals of 2006, highlighting its differential and contingent impact on social and political change in Oaxaca.

Costa Rica's long-term standing as one of the few countries in Latin America with a stable democracy has prompted many to view its polity as an inevitable outcome of a racially homogeneous and relatively egalitarian society. Without ignoring the importance of sociological factors, this article contends that institutional arrangements played an equally important – if not more central – role in the development of a stable democratic regime in this country. The structure of Costa Rican presidentialism encouraged incumbents to maintain control of the state while it, as a consequence, incited the opposition to rebel against central state authorities. Political competition became more peaceful as parties that failed to hold or to capture the presidency were nevertheless compensated by being allowed to occupy legislative seats.

The recent experiences of transition to democracy in Latin America have taken place in circumstances which suggest a need to rethink the political and social dimensions of inflation. The experience of the 1980s reveals that the once familiar road which led from an inflationary spiral and a rising foreign debt to the collapse of democracy can also be travelled by other types of regime. The crisis of the bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes, Chile apart, reflected an inability to deal with those same focal points of political and economic uncertainty. The sequence which runs from high (or hyper) inflation to political regime change may be neutral, in the sense that it is indifferent to whether the regimes affected are democratic or authoritarian.

This article examines the relationship between elections and political participation in nineteenth-century Peru. Focusing on the elections of 1871–72, I argue that for a better understanding of the way elections facilitated political participation, we should consider not only the vote itself but also analyse the extensive electoral campaign. Generally, voting was irregular, as the different political factions attempted to impede the participation of their opponents through violence. To win the violent clashes on election day it was necessary to mobilise the popular classes. Especially in the cities, corruption and patron–client ties alone proved to be insufficient to gain support. To build powerful political factions, candidates had to win public opinion through massive campaigning and they had to respond to the claims of the urban middle and lower classes. All factions engaged in electoral fraud and neither the government nor any other political actor could determine the electoral outcome. Strong political factions were able to counterbalance governmental interference. That is why, in 1872, a government-opposed candidate, Manuel Pardo, was able to win the presidential election.

Among the many consequences of globalisation is the creation of new political spaces. As these emerge, new or redefined power relationships accompany the process. In the course of creating transnational relationships, citizenship, representation and the role of the stakeholders may be redefined. This article focuses on the case of Argentina and on the role of civil society orgnisations (CSOs) in the process of political integration. The relationship between the state and civil society has sparked a debate about the core status of the political system as the third sector assumes roles traditionally belonging exclusively to the state. This raises issues regarding the difference between rights and services, the sources of legitimacy and efforts to enhance accountability, among others. The existing and potential channels of regional cooperation in the context of Mercosur illustrate the interplay between domestic, regional and global norms and institutions. This article emphasises the role of organised civil society in providing sense and meaning in the formation and awareness of supranational concerns, but is sceptical about its possibilities of providing and guaranteeing rights, tasks that still remain in the sphere of the state.

This article analyses the protracted process by which democratised Uruguay has come to terms with its legacy of human rights violations. Central to this process has been the nature of Uruguayan transitional policies and their more recent partial unravelling. Due to the negotiated transition to electoral democracy, civilian political elites approached the transitional dilemma of balancing normative expectations and political contingency by promulgating legal immunity, for years avoiding initiatives to pursue trials or launch an official truth commission, unlike neighbouring Argentina. A constellation of national and transnational factors (including recurrent initiatives by social and political forces) eventually opened up new institutional ground for belated truth-telling and accountability for some historical wrongs – and yet, attempts to challenge the blanket legal impunity failed twice through popular consultation and in a recent parliamentary vote. Each time, the government officially projected a narrative that sacralised national consensus and reconciliation, now enshrined in two sovereign popular votes, and the adoption of a forward-looking democratic perspective.

One of the most characteristic features of a society is the way in which it organizes its time, designating special days and hours for work, religion, rest, recreation and commerce. Socially accepted patterns of temporal organization are essential to the development of communal activities such as festivals, sports, religious ceremonies, market-place trade and industrial production. Once introduced, patterns of temporal organization tend to establish themselves more and more firmly through time as they become rooted in the customs and traditions of the local population. They are only likely to be changed as a result of wide-ranging social, economic and demographic changes affecting the whole fabric of society. Any possible changes in established temporal patterns usually have both advocates and opponents, and actual changes often result from temporary or permanent shifts in the balance of power between different socio-economic groups, or from shifts in opinion promoted by external factors.

This article assesses competing explanations of the independence from political and economic elites achieved by Brazil's Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econömico (BNDE) during the 1950s. Whereas others have stressed the actions taken by Presidents Getúlio Vargas and Juscelino Kubitschek, I attribute the Bank's remarkable independence to a cadre of innovative civil servants. In this account, independence is measured by control over personnel recruitment, loan allocation, and generation of funds. The considerable control BNDE bureaucrats exercised over personnel recruitment and loan allocation countered their limited control over funding, permitting the Bank to become an independent and effective development institution.

In 1985, the Pinochet dictatorship reversed radical neoliberal urban development policy in response to economic crisis and political pressure mounted by the urban poor in alliance with the Catholic Church and the Left. The regime's free-market policies conflicted with a popular sector political culture that considered housing a right which the state must uphold. To implement its radical policies, the regime sought to change the understanding that housing was a right and the state a legitimate target of demand. However, it was unsuccessful. In the early 1980s, organised pobladores successfully brought the affordable-housing crisis to the forefront of public attention via the resurrection of pre-coup forms of direct action and pressured the dictatorship to back down from neoliberal dogmatism.

Cycles of bureaucratic corruption in nineteenth-century Cuba evolved according to institutional conditions shaped by interest groups, financial needs, imperatives of colonial governance, and internal conflicts and war. Corrupt gain inimical to general public interest was not a consequence of cultural constants, but of unreconstructed institutional flaws and weaknesses. The risks of engaging in bureaucratic corruption diminished under the systematic condoning of administrative faults, collusive allowance of illegal slave trafficking, and a code of illegal rewards expected by loyalist officials opposing colonial reform. Despite some few anti-corruption initiatives, the prosecution and punishment of corrupt officials was lax. The implicit, yet significant, financial, institutional and political costs of corruption contributed to the demise of Spanish imperial dominion over Cuba and left a damaging burden and legacy for Cuban civil society.

This article employs previously unused data sources and techniques in order to estimate labour productivity and total factor productivity in the Mexican cotton textile industry over the period 1850–1933. Our findings indicate: (1) substantial productivity growth prior to the Porfiriato; (2) rapid productivity growth throughout the Porfiriato; (3) a swift, though incomplete, recovery from the Revolution during the 1920s; and, (4) an insignificant impact on productivity from the Great Depression. We also find evidence that the large, joint stock, limited liability firms that were founded during the Porfiriato had higher levels of total factor productivity than privately owned firms, but only for a short period of time, which suggests that these firms might have been sub-optimally large. Our results also indicate that labour markets in Porfirian Mexico were efficient. This suggests that manufacturers may not have had the monopsony power in labour markets that the literature indicates.

When Cuban MiGs blasted two civilian planes out of the sky over the Straits of Florida on February 24 1996, they also destroyed any chance of improved relations between Cuba and the United States as long as Fidel Castro remains in power. In Washington, outrage over the shoot-down resurrected the Helms-Burton bill, the most punitive legislation on Cuba since the early 1960s. On 12 March, President Bill Clinton signed the bill into law as the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996. In addition to assorted sanctions aimed at foreigners doing business in Cuba, the most consequential provision incorporates the US economic embargo into law. Heretofore, the embargo was based on presidential executive orders; it could be tightened or loosened at the president's discretion as conditions warranted. Under Helms-Burton, no president can lift or even relax the embargo until Fidel Castro and the existing Cuban regime fall from power. At a time when Cuba's domestic social and economic system is changing at break-neck speed, Washington's 35-year-old policy of hostility has just been chiselled in stone.