One of the geographical areas most neglected by historians of Latin America is Patagonia. This is particularly true of the second half of the nineteenth century, a period during which the area began to be opened up to European settlement. While it is true that some attention has been given to early European settlement on the one hand, and to the fate of the native Americans during the ‘Conquest of the Desert’ on the other, no one has thus far attempted to outline the nature of the relationships between the two populations. In this article I would like to initiate such an enquiry by focusing upon the relationship between the Welsh settlers in Chubut, who were the first Europen settlers successfully to occupy Argentinian Patagonia, and the nomadic populations which occupied the region at the time of arrival of these settlers. As is the case with most frontier histories, such a study should throw new light upon the ethnohistory of the native American population, especially as it focuses upon their relationship with the Argentine Government. Events such as the ‘Conquest of the Desert‘ are often viewed as a direct confrontation between the central government and the native Americans rather than as a phenomenon which must inevitably involve the frontier settlements as well.

With the downfall of the Somoza regime and coming to power of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) in July 1979, Israeli– Nicaraguan relations declined, to be eventually cut off three years later. An important contributing factor to the deterioration and breach of relations was Israel's involvement with Anastasio (Tachito) Somoza Debayle, in particular the military assistance which his faltering regime received from the Likud government until shortly before the end. By no means Tachito's sole armourer,1 the salience of Israel's role was, nonetheless, noted by many, including Somoza Debayle himself.2 This, however, was justified by Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin as the sole honourable course of action in view of earlier favours to the Zionist cause, going back to the pre-state period, by Tachito's father, Anastasio (Tacho) Somoza García.

One of the most persistent and influential concepts in Andean studies during the last few decades has been that of dualism at different levels of Andean cultural and sociopolitical life. How dualism works and the manner in which it has evolved have been the subject of much debate. Within this context, Jesús de Machaqa in highland Bolivia has been recognised as a region of primary importance for investigation, because of its enduring socio-political structures. However, a study of its ‘traditional’ structure carried out in the 1970s showed that important changes had taken place. New studies of intra-communal structures and recent studies of Aymara spatial organisation, together with information held in colonial documents and oral traditions help to shed more light on the question of dualism. Drawing on all these sources, this article aims to contribute to wider debate by examining key aspects of the ‘traditional’ structure and setting out some of the methodological problems faced by those who seek to reconstruct the past of indigenous communities, in particular problems related to the combined use of colonial documents and oral traditions.

During the 1820s, Colombia's diplomats in London, Washington and Philadelphia worked hard to obtain diplomatic recognition for their nascent republic. Their efforts were also geared towards making Colombia attractive to European and North American settlers whose industry and work ethic would, they hoped, turn it into a civilised and modern Euro-Atlantic nation. The immigration schemes they promoted enable us to understand the type of nations the nation-makers of post-independence Spanish America envisioned and how, by appealing to sentiments of hemispheric solidarity – among other means – they sought to turn their visions into reality. A comparison with similar eighteenth-century schemes promoted by the Bourbons, moreover, reveals the persistence, albeit with some critical modifications, of late-colonial ways of thinking and envisioning society.

If institutions are important for regulating violence, can institutional reforms make societies less violent? This article examines the north-east Brazilian state of Pernambuco primarily between 2007 and 2013, proposing that patterns of declining lethal violence can be explained by changes in both the accountability and effectiveness of formal state institutions and informal social norms. Drawing on two months of qualitative fieldwork, findings suggest that social and political mobilisation enabled a political coalition to initiate substantial changes under the Pacto pela Vida (Pact for Life) public-security programme, which improved the legitimacy and operational effectiveness of the criminal justice system, and coincided with a marked reduction in homicide rates. While showing that these reforms were central in reducing lethal violence in Pernambuco between 2007 and 2013, the article concludes by discussing the challenges of policy continuity in light of increasing rates of lethal violence since 2014.

Participatory democrats argue that citizen engagement at the local level serves an important educational function. Through involvement in participatory mechanisms, citizens develop various skills, become better informed, and cultivate a greater sense of political efficacy. There has been considerable debate in the academic literature over the extent to which participation can produce these benefits, but deliberative and participatory theoretical approaches have been criticised for neglecting power dynamics within participatory mechanisms themselves, and for overlooking structural inequalities between women and men. Numerous critics have charged that participatory mechanisms tend to mask, but not eliminate, gender inequalities, particularly in societies where these remain firmly entrenched. While the theory on the educational function of participatory democracy is well developed, there remains a lack of empirical work on the impact of participation on women in Latin America, a region that has been at the forefront of democratic innovation. Based on extensive fieldwork in Venezuela, Ecuador and Chile, this article identifies the types of skills that women gain through participation, and questions the extent to which these reproduce traditional gender roles.

For more than 40 years Mexico has experienced sustained and rapid economic growth. Until the recession of 1976–7, GNP grew at an annual rate of 6%. By 1977 there were some four and a half million industrial workers in Mexico and the growth of modern industry was proceeding apace. The Mexican economy began to experience serious problems in the second half of the 1970s and, by 1982, despite (or because of) an attempt to use oil exports to promote recovery, had plunged into a severe crisis. Together with the development of this economic crisis, the 1970s also witnessed the emergence of a sustained increase in industrial conflict and in working-class militancy in general. This upsurge of militancy involved the formation of ‘independent’ unions not affiliated with the official party, and the development of militant factions within some of the larger national industrial unions, affiliated with the official party. It has been suggested that the development of union militancy has been connected with the growth of modern industrial establishments. While this claim cannot be accepted without serious reservations, it is certainly the case that there have been upsurges of union militancy in modern industrial sectors. This article will examine the nature of union militancy in two industries which can be regarded as modern in the context of Mexican development: steel production and automobile assembly.

This article takes existing histories of Chilean transnational anti-communist activity in the 1970s beyond Operation Condor (the Latin American military states’ covert transnational anti-communist intelligence and operations system) by asking how the Pinochet dictatorship responded to two key changes in the international system towards the end of that decade: the Carter presidency and introduction of the human rights policy, and the shift of the epicentre of the Cold War in Latin America to Central America. It shows how both Salvadoreans and Chileans understood the Pinochet dictatorship as a distinct model of anti-communist governance, applicable far beyond Chile's own borders. This study of Chilean foreign policy in El Salvador contributes to new histories of the Latin American Extreme Right and to new understandings of the inter-American system and the international history of the conflicts in Central America in the late 1970s and the 1980s.

The 1948 Costa Rican civil war stands as the most significant breakdown of emerging democratic practices in what many believe is a country with a democratic destiny. No other political conflict has so polarised the country and cost so many lives. Nor has any other civil war so influenced the way analysts view and understand the development of democratic institutions in Costa Rica. Why political actors in Costa Rica settled their disputes on the battlefield, however, is a question that has yet to generate a satisfactory response.

Creation of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776 and the subsequent Edict of Free Commerce in 1778 fostered a flourishing export trade from that region, mainly of hides and silver. Merchants of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, both criollos and recently arrived peninsulares, prospered during the 1780s and early 1790s, an era of international peace. While a few of these merchants owned and operated ships out of the Río de la Plata, most were content to export to the Peninsula in craft of metropolí registry. Indeed, given the traditional and strong ties of commercial obligations to the Peninsula and the enforcement of imperial trade laws, any other course of action, if not unthinkable, would have been difficult.

The problem of how institutions have affected economic and social development has occupied much of the attention of social scientists. An area now beginning to attract the attention of students of development is the role of interest groups. However, little work has been done on the influence of interest groups during the nineteenth century, a period in which the developmental progress of nations now considered to be economically and socially ‘mature’ began to differ markedly from those still struggling to achieve such maturity. This paper will examine the ways in which interest groups, principally business interest groups, affected the development of Brazil during the nineteenth century.

This article explores the changing meaning of Indianness during the long independence era. Focusing on six towns around Santa Marta, it discusses why these were considered Indian in the late colonial period, why they supported the royalist cause during the Independence struggles and how their inhabitants ceased to be identified as Indians within a few decades of republican rule. While recent subaltern studies have emphasised Indian resistance against the liberal, republican states formed in early nineteenth-century Latin America, here it is argued that some former Indian communities opted for inclusion into the republic as non-Indian citizens.

Focusing on the last decades before abolition (1888), this study examines slave labour and sugar production in the Bahian Recôncavo in Northeastern Brazil, one of the oldest slaveholding regions in the Americas. It demonstrates the marked contrast between the Recôncavo and the other main sugar-producing areas of Northeastern Brazil. In Bahia, the years 1850–88 did not witness an increase in sugar exports; on the contrary, exports stagnated and then, with abolition, suffered a nearly complete collapse. Furthermore, sugar planters in the Recôncavo, unlike other Northeastern planters, relied overwhelmingly on slave labour until the very eve of abolition. The study suggests that the explanation for the contrast between the Recôncavo and other Northeastern sugar regions lies in alternatives to sugar production for a significant segment of the planter class and in alternatives to work on sugar plantations for a substantial part of the poor free population in the Recôncavo.

During the first half of the seventeenth century the Spanish crown framed a series of administrative reforms for the Indies aimed at raising additional revenue for the overextended royal treasury. Military defeats in Flanders, Italy, and Germany between 1625 and 1650 undermined Spanish power and forced authorities in Madrid to look for new sources of revenue in their American empire. The deteriorating economic, political, and military position of Spain did not produce an attitude of ‘benign neglect’ towards the empire, but induced an intense level of government activity in Madrid to force greater financial contributions from the Indies to the beleaguered metropolis. The most successful of die new tax levies imposed in the viceroyalty of Peru was the sale of juros or state-supported annuities.

Following Tulio Halperín Donghi's pioneering work, historians have tried to explain why Argentina experienced a dramatic export-led expansion in the first half of the nineteenth century despite a lack of price incentives. This paradox is resolved by a new estimate of Argentina's terms of trade. It suggests that they probably improved by at least 2,000 per cent from the 1780s to the first decade of the twentieth century, so there were considerable price incentives for export-led growth. Labour and capital moved into the export sector, bringing into production the country's Pampean land – a previously under-utilised resource. This suggests that Argentina's expansion in the long nineteenth century was less a result of internal factors than a response to globalisation.

Land reform efforts during the armed phase of the Mexican revolution (1910–20) remain largely overshadowed by the more dramatic events of the period. Based on records held in the Archivo General Agrario in Mexico City, this article shows how villagers in different parts of Mexico negotiated their claims to land with various revolutionary regimes during the armed struggle, with particular attention to the local committees created to measure land boundaries, conduct village censuses and distribute land. These negotiations between agrarian officials and villagers laid the foundations for the first post-revolutionary national administration. The emergent federal agrarian offices doubled as a legislative branch of government, assumed quasi-judicial functions and restricted the role of municipal and state governments – qualities that would characterise Mexico's agrarian reform for the next 70 years. In highlighting the ways that early land reform efforts contributed to state formation, this article questions the current social science inclination to ‘decentre’ Mexico's post-revolutionary regime.

This article assumes a balanced position between two contrasting views regarding the accessibility, quality, efficiency and financial sustainability of the Cuban healthcare system. It evaluates those issues in the 2006–20 period by identifying strengths and weaknesses based on a comprehensive statistical compilation of health indicators, physical infrastructure trends, availability of physicians and other elements to assess the system's long-term financial sustainability. Finally, it examines the likely consequences of population ageing on healthcare, including potential policies.

This article examines direct appeals to Portuguese monarchs and how this extrajudicial option was invoked by slaves and free persons of African descent in colonial Brazil. It also addresses the production and content of appeals and what these reflect of the lives of Afro-Brazilians, relations between slave and owner, manumissions, judicial and individual abuse of women and popular perceptions and expectations of a monarch. The pros and cons of this appellate recourse are discussed in the context of colonial governance and of how royal acts of private justice reinforced the moral authority of monarchs, the sacred quality of monarchy and those personal qualities of magnanimity and compassion associated with the ideal of kingship.

During the Cold War, Havana symbolised the struggle for national liberation in Latin America. Yet in few other places on the island of Cuba did the Revolution's visions of development materialise as they did in the southern city of Cienfuegos. This article examines why two half-finished nuclear reactors and a decaying ‘nuclear city’ still remain in Cienfuegos. Through a comprehensive spatial and infrastructural transformation of Cuba, the revolutionary government sought to remedy the evils of dependency and unequal exchange. Cienfuegos, and its shifting place in the Cold War political economy, demonstrates how a radical critique of urbanisation merged with the spatiality of centralised energy infrastructure in the pursuit of ultimately-failed nuclear modernity. The history of Cienfuegos draws the academic gaze away from Latin America's major cities to broaden the ‘geographies of theory’ in urban, energy and Latin American studies.

Studies of the emergence of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement, which burst onto the national political scene in 1990, have not paid enough attention to indigenous historical consciousness. Using historical and ethnographic evidence, this study examines the emergence of historical consciousness among indigenous peasants involved in the land struggle for the Quinchuquí hacienda, in Otavalo, Ecuador. The research demonstrates that it was only during the struggle for the land that the peasants became aware of the colonial dispossession of indigenous lands. Legitimating their politics in terms of history, they articulated a political identity that increasingly emphasised ethnicity over class.