Beset by a variety of diseases, numerous public health measures were advocated in late-nineteenth century Chile. Among these was the call for mandatory vaccination. Although the state supported programmes to encourage vaccination, these were voluntary. In the early 1880s, however, some legislators argued that compulsory vaccination would substantially reduce the death rate. Surprisingly, the legislature rejected this proposal. Claiming that the vaccination legislation would enhance the power of the executive branch, the congressmen soundly rejected an apolitical proposal designed to improve public health.

In 1949 Raúl Prebisch, an Argentine economist, published a study for the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), in which he attributed the failure to reach sustained economic growth in Latin America to the international division of labour. Based on research carried out by ECLA on the terms of trade between manufactures and primary goods, he concluded that – contrary to expectations – they moved against primary products. If prices decline as productivity increases (in competitive markets), industrial goods, where the technological improvements had been more significant, should have declined in price more than agricultural goods. The empirical results of the study showed the opposite.1 If the Latin American countries therefore wanted to benefit from technological progress, they should move towards industrialisation. Almost at the same time, based on the same empirical study, Hans Singer not only argued that the gains from trade had not been distributed equally, but also that foreign investments in the export sector were not part of the domestic economy, but represented an enclave belonging to the countries of the centre which received its benefits.2 Singer advanced an argument that became popular later on; he noted the existence in the underdeveloped countries of a dual economy with two sectors each with different productivity and segmented markets: a modern sector linked to the central countries and a traditional sector linked to the rest of the economy. Also, from the critics of the classical theory of trade, another argument was put forward: the different income elasticities of demand for manufactures and agricultural goods (Engels’ law) suggested that expenditure on agricultural goods would decline in relative terms as incomes rose, hurting the terms of trade for primary products.3

This article focuses on census policy-making by analysing the decision-making processes behind the apparent stability of Brazilian racial categories within a context of multiple changes in racial politics and policies over the last four decades (1970–2010). Empirically, we rely on archival material, survey and census data, as well as key informant interviews with senior technocrats from the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics, IBGE). Our findings show the central role of technocratic actors in shaping and giving meaning to these categories in a context of uncertainty about the most valid approach to measurement. Their role is particularly evident in IBGE's early application of the negro category to the non-white population and repeated rejection of the moreno category. Beyond technical expertise, these census officials navigated various professional, political and ideological motivations. We develop the concept of technocratic compromise to capture census officials’ decision-making process and underscore its importance to explaining census policy outcomes.

This article provides a new interpretation of the changes that occur in party-civil society relations when progressive parties of mass-based origin gain state power by looking at the experience of the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) during the Lula administration. The need to preserve what is defined here as ‘social governability’ changes the nature of party-movement relationships when political parties move from opposition to government. The article shows how the PT in national executive public office, to a large extent, managed to secure social governability through reward-based linkages, such as the distribution of jobs in the state apparatus and the allocation of massive state subsidies.

The dynamics of Brazil's transportation sector early in this century reveal much about how and why US industries conquered the Brazilian market and established a sound basis for investment. Especially during the 1920s, US companies responded to the transportation needs of Brazil's rapidly growing economy and won the major share of its automobile and truck markets. This was crucial because of the automobile's central role as a leading sector of the world's economy during this period. Sales and then direct investment by US firms in automobile assembly plants placed US business on a more secure foundation than British investment, prominent in a sector losing the vitality exhibited in the nineteenth century: railroads. Rail systems slowed their extension into the immense Brazilian interior while the automobile flourished, promoted by a powerful Brazilian lobby for automobilismo reinforced by efforts of US business and government. This process illustrates how the Brazilians' interpretation of their economic needs coincided with pressures exerted by US industry to create a permanent US presence within Brazil's economy. How Henry Ford replaced Herbert Spencer as the foremost symbol of industrialism in early twentieth century Brazil sheds light on the personal and political dynamics of international business competition.1

Rapid economic growth in the early twentieth century thrust a host of new local and regional demands upon Brazil's woefully inadequate transportation sector. Capital formation rose without interruption from 1901 onwards and reached very high levels immediately prior to World War I; more than 11,000 industrial firms producing over 67% of the economy's 1920 industrial output came into being between 1900 and 1920.

This paper discusses the ability of Sustainable Development Reserves to embed (in Karl Polanyi's sense) the economy into the environment through the development of protocols for the sustainable management of natural resources. Based on two decades of work in the Mamirauá and Amanã Sustainable Development Reserves, we question whether the results are good, fair and viable by comparing two alternatives: unregulated markets and fully protected reserves. We evaluate the interest in sustainability; discuss who benefits and who pays for it; reflect on its potential to reduce inequalities; and discuss its economic and political viability.

Based on 30 months of collaborative fieldwork in a poor neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this paper scrutinises the multiple uses of violence among residents and the concatenations between private and public forms of physical aggression. Much of the violence reported here resembles that which has been dissected by students of street violence in the United States – that is, it is the product of interpersonal retaliation and remains encapsulated in dyadic exchanges. However, by casting a wider net to include other forms of aggression (not only criminal but also sexual, domestic and intimate) that take place inside and outside the home, and that intensely shape the course of poor people's daily lives, the paper argues that diverse forms of violence among the urban poor (a) serve more than just retaliatory purposes, and (b) link with one another beyond dyadic relationships.

This article examines how Syrian immigrants in Argentina responded to the intersection of transnational politics and nascent nationalisms between 1900 and 1922. In particular, it studies the role of Syrian intellectuals in Argentina in advocating a variety of political allegiances that changed over time as their homelands suffered a series of intense political transformations during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The emergence of Syrian and Lebanese ethnic identities as well as an Arab racialised identity was the product of distinct political programmes circulating in the Levant and among the Syrian émigré communities in the Americas, threatening to undermine the immigrant colony's sense of community.

This article explores the performance of Mexico's exports in the early twentieth century, and particularly the so-called ‘export boom’ that took place during the Mexican Revolution (1910–17). By compiling the official trade figures from major trading partners, the article overcomes the deficiency of Mexican statistics that previously limited detailed analysis. Armed with more reliable data, this article defines the extent of the export boom and identifies its main contributing factors in terms of price, quantity and structure.

Explanations of the Abolitionist movement's success in Brazil (1888) have, since the 1960s and 1970s, emphasised the movement's material context, its class nature, and the agency of the captives. These analyses have misunderstood and gradually ignored the movement's formal political history. Even the central role of urban political mobilisation is generally neglected; when it is addressed, it is crippled by lack of informed analysis of its articulation with formal politics and political history. It is time to recover the relationship between Afro-Brazilian agency and the politics of the elite. In this article this is illustrated by analysing two conjunctures critical to the Abolitionist movement: the rise and fall of the reformist Dantas cabinet in 1884–85, and the relationship between the reactionary Cotegipe cabinet (1885–88), the radicalisation of the movement, and the desperate reformism that led to the Golden Law of 13 May 1888.

The way in which ruling elites originally responded to pressures for increasing mass participation in the polity is one of the most crucial variables in the path to democracy. In the case of Uruguay, the first two decades of the century – a period dominated by the historical figure of José Batlle y Ordoñez, – were crucial in the setting up of democratic institutions. During this period, because of its late consolidation as much as its early modernisation, the institutionalisation of the political order coincided with its phase of democratic incorporation. This article argues that it was Batlle's strategy for advancing his political project, as much as the substantive aspects of the policies themselves, that would crystallise the working of Uruguay's democratic politics. While the article focuses mainly on Uruguay, a comparative analysis with similar historical developments in Argentina is used to illustrate some specific aspects of the Uruguayan case.

The most widely-accepted views of the origins of the South Atlantic War contend that it arose either out of the Argentine junta's need to divert attention away from a worsening economy or from misperceptions in both London and Buenos Aires. This article argues that the ‘demobilisation’ of Argentine civil society removed the need for a diversionary war; and that the lengthy crisis bargaining that followed in the wake of the ‘grab’ of the Falklands/Malvinas Islands substantially mitigated the impact of any misperceptions. This article advances an alternative to existing theories that explains the outbreak of this war by reference to both structural and organisational factors. A fast decreasing gap in relative power between Argentina and Britain may have encouraged the junta more seriously to consider the possibility of initiating a war between the two. Thereafter, however, the organisational pathologies of the Argentine military led to a suboptimally timed preemptive invasion, intransigent diplomacy and a ‘hedged’ approach to deployments that severely undermined Argentina's military effectiveness, allowing Britain to undertake reconquest of the islands with a very reasonable chance of success.

When Andrés Molina Enríquez wrote his polemical attack on the Mexican hacienda, published on the eve of the Revolution, he was particularly scathing about the cereal estates of the mesa central. According to his arguments, these were the properties most typically ‘feudal’, and thus he characterized them as vast tracts of land, under-used and undercapitalized, serving only to legitimize the seigneurial status of an elite class of rentier landowners. The proprietors were similarly castigated for preferring the low-risk security of irrigated crops, and for their withdrawal from the uncertainties of maize production on the temporal lands. As a result of these policies the routine supply of maize, the food grain of the nation, was, or so he argued, left to the efforts and tenacity of a multitude of smallholders and Indian villagers with access to a mere tenth of the cultivable of smallholders and Indian villagers with access to a mere tenth of the cultivable terrain.

This article contributes to a growing body of literature that questions state-centred approaches to analysing politics, adopting a more de-centred and cultural perspective. It does so by presenting a situational analysis and detailed ethnography of a local election rally in Western Mexico. The analysis of this event as a cultural performance highlights the dramatic enactment of culturally significant acts as a central part of electoral behaviour and shows how everyday organisational life, resource flows, public ritual and passion play a part in politics. That such acts are not merely symbolic is demonstrated by what occurs behind the scenes of political ritual: a local political group appropriates a Water Users' Association and draws on its staff, facilities, resources and wider power relations for its political campaign. Such practices also indicate the unanticipated outcomes of recent administrative decentralisation reforms. New producer organisations created by these reforms to administer former government tasks more efficiently are appropriated politically, not simply in an instrumental, but also in a culturally specific manner.

Attempts to find social explanations for Peruvian economic backwardness have focused on the role of the elite's economic leadership between 1884 and 1930. Some of these studies consider the leading social class as an obstacle to economic growth. According to these interpretations the elite had, first of all, traditional ‘aristocratic’ or irrational economic behaviour.1 Secondly, the native elite's collaboration with international capital permitted foreign penetration adverse to national interests.2 Thirdly, in the 1884–1930 period, which was dominated by the export recovery after the War of the Pacific, an over-specialisation in export interests limited the elite's economic diversification, industrial capacity and financial decisions.3

This article examines the ideas of Mexican elites about the international market during the porfiriato (1876–1910), an age marked by imperialism and monopoly capitalism. It focuses specifically on their thoughts about foreign trade, investment and workers. They viewed the international economy as a Darwinian battle for survival, but were not isolationists. In keeping with opinions articulated by US imperialists, they maintained that foreign blood, money and goods were essential to Mexico's economic progress. But they also feared that foreign economic penetration would undermine sovereignty. To resolve this dilemma, they championed state regulation of foreign economic interests. Thus, rather than extol the virtues of laissez-faire, members of the Porfirian intelligentsia were ambivalent internationalists.

In his comment on my article ‘Coffee and Rural Proletarianization in Puerto Rico, 1840–1898’ (Journal of Latin American Studies, XV, no. 1, May 1983, pp. 83–100), Tom Brass is to be lauded for the comparative observations used to contest my conclusions on proletarianization in the coffee-producing regions of 19th-century Puerto Rico. By examining some of the literature on coffee expansion in Brazill and Colombia, and comparing these cases with Puerto Rico, Dr Brass concludes that the development of capitalist agriculture, when accompanied by labour scarcity, results in ‘unfree labour’ rather than the development of free wage labour as I have indicated to be the case for Puerto Rico' coffee sector.

Many Guatemalan parents migrate to the United States with the intention of returning earned income to improve the human capital prospects of their left-behind children. This laudable goal is achieved by many – arguably benefiting girls more than boys. However, negative international migration externalities including migration failure, familial abandonment, psychosocial harms and a culture of migration that disproportionally limits the educational prospects of boys need to be considered. Based on qualitative field interviews in western Guatemala with parents and educators, this article presents a nuanced view of economic migration and left-behind children's education, capturing both its remittance-related benefits and parental absence harms.

This article examines the Colombian peace process since 1982, arguing that the government must strengthen the state and expand its presence into the remote areas in which the leftist guerrillas have established para-statal organisations. The traditionally weak Colombian state has allowed rebel groups to flourish in isolated areas. However, President Ernesto Samper has announced a new initiative that features an ambitious plan to strengthen the state. The plan includes judicial and social reforms that address many of the guerrilla demands, but also threaten to undermine their para-statal organisations. Massive oil discoveries and tax reforms could provide the necessary funding.

Within the neocolonial context of ‘Plan Colombia’ in the early 2000s, agents of the US Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) took up position in the heart of the Colombian penitentiary administration to lead a reform based on the United States’ ultra-punitive penal regime. This paper analyses how the reform was set up on the ground, shedding light on the partially divergent expectations of the two governments. Drawing on recent literature on the mobility of policies and built forms, the paper argues that the introduction of US-inspired prisons in Colombia is a striking case where a mobile policy and a travelling architectural type coincided and complemented each other.