This article explores the US contribution to the illegal transatlantic slave trade to Brazil and the tensions generated by this hemispheric connection in the mid-nineteenth century. It combines qualitative and quantitative approaches, based on diplomatic records and Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, in order to assess the size and variety of forms of US participation in the traffic to Brazil. More generally, the article examines the tensions caused by the rise of abolitionism and the limits to the enforcement of anti-slave trade legislation in the free trade international environment that emerged after the Napoleonic Wars. By framing the attitudes of the US government within a broader Atlantic context, this work shows why certain forms of US participation in the contraband slave trade (such as providing US-built ships) became more predominant than others (such as directly financing and organising slave voyages) by the mid-nineteenth century.

This article examines the unusual public security reform process that took place in Panama in the wake of the US military invasion of December 1989. The changes to the Panamanian security forces that ensued were in equal part a ‘demilitarisation’ process, a police reform and an (imposed) transition to democracy where the political domination of the Panamanian security forces came to an abrupt end. Deploying the concepts of demilitarisation, professionalisation and depoliticisation, the article evaluates the political role and activities of police forces and the nature of their relationship with the main Panamanian political actors through to the present Torrijos administration. It then assesses the implications for wider political processes, suggesting that explanations for the success or failure of reform are unlikely to be found in the examination of the design and implementation of the reform itself, but that broader political processes must be analysed in order to understand the dynamic that underpins it.

During its brief tenure of office, the Kennedy Administration introduced several changes in United States policy toward Latin America. One change had to do with recognition of governments (practically speaking, military regimes) that seized power by ousting constitutionally selected governments. The stance taken by the Kennedy Administration was that the United States would not recognize such regimes or extend assistance to them. The intent or objective of the policy was to encourage and protect democratic institutions and processes. President Kennedy regarded a democratic environment as essential for the attainment of the kind of change sought through the Alliance for Progress.

In 1976, the US Congress halted arms sales to Chile. This paper examines the congressional debate over arms sales to Chile and the political and military consequences of the action. Recent scholarship has largely overlooked the embargo and its implications for regional security dynamics in South America. Initially US sanctions increased Chile's diplomatic isolation and military vulnerability, which made regional conflict more likely. However, Chile's ability to surmount the effects of the embargo eventually increased Augusto Pinochet's independence vis-à-vis Washington. When the Reagan administration began pushing for a transition to democracy, it lacked two key instruments for influencing a military government: weapons sales and security assistance.

This article shows how Argentine judges effectively came to make labour law when ruling in occupational accident cases between 1900 and 1915. During this period, in the absence of a specific occupational accident law, a number of Argentine workers who had been victims of occupational accidents sued their employers for damages according to the Civil Code. By reinterpreting the principles of the Civil Code in these cases, Argentine judges attempted to accommodate aspects of a new social and economic reality to an increasingly outdated legal framework. The article argues that, in doing so, these judges articulated their own solution to one of the central issues of the time: the ‘social question’. Furthermore, the article shows how the judiciary's particular solution to the social question effectively defined the kind of citizenship rights workers were able to claim in court.

This article analyses some of the difficulties of institutional modernisation based on a study of Brazilian port reform in the 1990s. It explains how and why Brazilian business managed to organise collective action for dramatic reform of the port structure and labour regime, but was unable to maintain the consensus to ensure full implementation. It emphasises how the formal rigidities and informal outcomes of the corporatist institutional structure hampered an efficient pace of modernisation. The analysis applies two complementary theoretical approaches, institutional analysis and the logic of collective action, to illuminate the evolution of Brazilian corporatism in the context of a more democratic society and open market economy.

This article describes the relationship of the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, Mexico's most important writing centre in the second half of the twentieth century, to the US foundations that funded it. The Centre was founded by a North American writer, Margaret Shedd, with the financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation understood the Centre as a ‘Pan-American’ effort to improve relations between the United States and Mexico by bringing its writers closer together. Later, there were also contributions from two CIA fronts, the Farfield Foundation and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to the Centre and its star graduate, Juan Rulfo. However, this article argues that none of the US foundations realised the ambitions that they had for the Centre. Through a process of ‘Mexicanised Americanisation', a project that had elements of Yankee cultural imperialism produced instead one of the world's finest writing centres, but without any clear political benefit for the United States.

This article seeks to explain the breakdown of post-colonial order in the northern Brazilian province of Maranhão that culminated in the Balaiada rebellion (1838–41). Interpretations usually do not take into account the intense political agitation of the previous decades, which already involved lower class participation, and they fail to recognise the major socio-economic differences between the areas touched by the revolt. The main arguments are, first, that the struggle for Independence in Maranhão, more violent than in most other provinces, opened the door to lower class involvement in politics under liberal leadership. Secondly, the struggle between local elites for regional power led to exclusion of peripheral elites within the province and fuelled lower class unrest. Significant moments of rupture between liberal leadership and popular movement occurred as early as 1823–4 and 1831–2. Thirdly, the main structural factor leading to the 1838 outbreak of rebellion was the resistance to military recruitment by the free lower classes, which provided a unifying slogan to otherwise heterogeneous groups of peasants, cowboys, and fishermen. Fourthly, the differences in social structure between the cattle producing South, the cotton plantation belt of the Itapecuru valley and the strong subsistence sector in Eastern Maranhão account for substantial differences in terms of support and leadership during the Balaiada. Whilst fazendeiros lead the struggle in Southern Maranhão, as well as in most of the neighbouring Piauí province, leadership in Eastern Maranhão was almost entirely of lower class origin. Finally, the dynamics of the movement could lead in Eastern Maranhão to a rupture with elite liberalism and envisage the alliance between free rebels and maroons.

Since Nicaragua's endorsement of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the legislative passage of its own Code of Childhood and Adolescence, improvements in the welfare of marginalised youth have depended largely on community-based actions that are sponsored by NGOs and civic groups, many of which function in tangent with municipal government authorities and international aid agencies. In this article we review three community initiatives that have aimed at resolving problems associated with youth alienation and violence in a poor, heavily populated district of Managua. While some modest successes have been achieved, these relatively isolated initiatives have had no evident effect on either the magnitude or the systemic nature of youth marginalisation in Managua. In a context in which the central state is severely constrained by fiscal weakness and corporatist traditions, it is questionable whether in fact the organs of civil society do in fact possess the organisational capacity to generate the structural reforms necessary for the advancement of children's rights at community levels. Nevertheless, despite the amorphous nature of much of civil society in Nicaragua, in the long run children's rights legislation may help to foster growing solidarity among disparate civic forces working to improve the bleak livelihoods of many children.

This article focuses on the political thought and practice of the martyred Jesuit intellectual during the late 1970s. It employs the concept of desencuentros, probing the relationship between linguistic misunderstandings and political division. The article highlights Ignacio Ellacuría's novel analyses of the relationship between the ecclesial and the popular organisations, led by the radical Left. It discusses his political thought in relationship to the author's research on the base communities of northern Morazán. The article also discusses the Jesuit scholar's critical support for the Junta Revolucionario de Gobierno (15 October 1979–2 January 1980). The concluding section discusses Ellacuría's relevance for contemporary Latin American politics.

During 1984 and 1985 there was much discussion of an apparent ‘resurgence’ of democracy in many countries in Latin America. As the military handed over the reins of government to elected civilian rulers in Honduras, El Salvador and Argentina, and steps toward the same end were taken in Uruguay and Brazil, the American media and the Reagan administration – conveniently forgetting its earlier support for military dictatorship – began to speak glowingly of a new ‘Latin spring’.

During the twentieth century, the countries of Central America were characterised by remarkably different political regimes: military-authoritarianism in Guatemala and El Salvador, progressive democracy in Costa Rica and traditional-authoritarianism in Honduras and Nicaragua. This article explains these contrasting regime outcomes by exploring the agrarian and state-building reforms pursued by political leaders during the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberal reform period. Based on differences in the transformation of state and class structures, three types of liberalism are identified: radical liberalism in Guatemala and El Salvador, reformist liberalism in Costa Rica and aborted liberalism in Honduras and Nicaragua. It is argued that these types of liberalism set the Central American countries on contrasting paths of political development, culminating in diverse regime outcomes.

This article draws attention to the importance of institutional structures to the stability opf demoratic regimes through an examination of the failure of democracy in the case of Argentina between 1912 and 1930. The analysis of a single case does not make a theory. but it seems clear that a focus on the Argentine case does force one to look at institutional factors that have largely been neglected in recent research.

In the ‘pre-history’ of Argentina's labour movement lie the mutual-benefit societies. Although these associations embraced almost half of the workers of Buenos Aires at the time of the Centenario (1910) little is known about them. The article explores the main parameters shaping the development of the mutual benefit societies, their relationship to the immigrant communities and their role in relation to social security. It traces, finally, the ambiguous relationship between the mutual benefit societies and the emergence of Peronist trade unionism in the mid-1940s.

This paper attempts to investigate the main factors behind Argentina's relative economic decline by comparing its evolution with that of Australia and Canada. For this purpose a ‘reduced index of economic freedom’ has been constructed in order to capture and summarise the principal macroeconomic trends in Argentina compared with the other regions of recent settlement during the period between 1875 and 2000. The results, obtained using cointegration and causality techniques, show how the macroeconomic policies that were implemented are able to explain the relative evolution of Argentina's economy, in terms of GDP per capita, over the long term. The results revise some of the interpretations prevalent in Argentine historiography.

Those natures which, when they meet, quickly lay hold on and mutually affect one another we call affined. This affinity is sufficiently striking in the case of alkalis and acids which, although they are mutually antithetical … most decidedly seek and embrace one another, modify one another, and together form a new substance … It is in just this way that truly meaningful friendships can arise among human beings: for antithetical qualities make possible a closer and more intimate union.

Goethe, Elective affinities (1809)

A linear mode of historical understanding relegated alchemy to a ‘pre-scientific’ era, with the enlightenment's New Chemistry creating a break between ‘empirical’ and ‘scientific’ metallurgies. Similarly, Bolivia's early Republican silver-production has been regarded as ‘stagnant’ and ‘colonial’ from the ‘modern’ perspective of late nineteenth century liberalism. This article questions both periodisations by documenting an ‘alchemical renaissance’ in Bolivian silver-refining methods during the first part of the 19th century. The relaunch of Alonso Barba's ‘hot method’ of amalgamation in copper cauldrons (1609), and its associated technical discourses, expressed a creole desire for an independent ‘modernity’. This rediscovery of a seventeenth century technology, carried out shortly before the Independence War in the Potosí provinces (Chichas), and slightly later in Oruro and Carangas, is distinguished from the version reinvented in Central Europe by Ignaz von Born (1786), as well as from two pre-Bornian experiments in Potosí and New Spain. Its nineteenth century consolidation was, in part, a little-known reaction to Nordenflicht's failure to introduce the new European method of rotating barrels to the Andes during the 1790s. The article shows that this ‘alchemy of modernity’ held its ground for several decades, suggesting a fresh approach to America's postcolonial ambiguities from the perspective of a comparative history of technology.

This article examines political ideology, cultural nationalism and the contesting of identity in early twentieth-century Chile. It does so by tracing the emergence of a unique cultural construct – the huaso cowboy – in the literary sphere and by exploring a ‘rural idealist’ discourse employed by middle-class, reformist intellectuals who hoped for the mitigation of the ‘social question’ and the displacement of traditional oligarchs from cultural and political centrality. It also seeks to explain how the fiction genre known as criollismo challenged elitist conceptions of ‘nation’ and ‘culture’ in the context of dramatic socio-political, economic and demographic change.

In a recent article in this journal, Dr Bergad argues that the production of coffee for the export economy in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico was accompanied by the emergence of a rural proletariat, and suggests that the latter process in fact predated the development of a sugar plantation economy in the twentieth century, with which capitalist free wage labour is commonly associated. This characterization of the coffee hacienda workforce raises definitional problems on which I would like to comment. This characterization of the coffee hacienda workforce raises definitional problems on which I would like to comment. Illustrating with examples from coffee-producing areas in Latin America and sugar-producing areas in the Caribbean, I shall argue that the increased demand for labour-power arising from the expansion of an export-oriented yet labour-intensive capitalist agriculture in a location where labour is scarce is met not by free wage labour but rather by recourse to unfree labour. In these circumstances, competition for labour-power results paradoxically in the attempt by capitalists to restrict the free movement of labour and the consequent formation of a free labour market.

When and why did Brazilian cotton become important to the Industrial Revolution in Britain? Between 1791 and 1801, Brazilian cotton represented 40 per cent of raw cotton imports in Liverpool, rivalling those from the West Indies. Using archival data between 1760 and 1808, this paper shows that Brazil benefitted from increasing British demand for a new variety of cotton staple that emerged with mechanised textile production. Previous explanations for the rise of Brazilian cotton trade attributed it to the revolutions in the Caribbean in the 1790s, and the American War of Independence, which ended in 1783. Evidence, however, suggests that these explanations are incomplete or incorrect. The United States did not export cotton to Britain before 1790, and British imports from the West Indies did not fall after the revolutions.