Quito was an international trading city in the late sixteenth century. It was one of several commercial centers strung along the Andes that aided in the adaptation of Old World economic techniques to New World resources. By the 1580s, agricultural and manufacturing surpluses had helped Quito emerge as a dominant trading center in western South America, second only to Lima and Potosí.

In May 1917, the United States Navy dispatched a South Atlantic patrol squadron to Brazil under the command of Admiral William B. Caperton, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet. Caperton, who soon saw his mission as more diplomatic than military, became the United States' best-known representative in South America and worked closely with civilian diplomats to maximize United States influence in the area. His two-year tour of duty from 1917 to 1919, therefore, constitutes a little-known case study in the attempted use of naval forces for diplomatic purposes, and in the development of some aspects of United States policy in South America.

This study examines the relationship between labour and nation in nineteenth-century Nicaragua by exploring how the state's institutional efforts to control labour coincided with a prevailing discourse of nation that idealised farmers (agricultores) and wage labourers (jornaleros and operarios) at opposite ends of the spectrum of national citizenship. The article focuses on the towns of the ethnically diverse region of the Prefecture of Granada, an area that included the present-day departments of Granada, Carazo and Masaya, and where coffee production first boomed in Nicaragua. It is argued that labour coercion rested not simply on the building of national, regional and municipal institutions of labour control, but also on defining the political and social role of labourers within the national community. At the same time, subaltern communities, especially indigenous ones, contested these efforts not merely through evasion and subterfuge, but by engaging the discourse of nation-state to claim citizenship as farmers and assert independence from landlords.

Some recent works on the relationship between coffee interests and the State during the Brazilian ‘First Republic’ (1899–1930) have shown that the relationship between the national State and ‘coffee bourgeoisie’ was not quite as simple as earlier studies had made it seem. However, these analyses seem to assume that, at the regional level, the federalism of the First Republic placed regional political structures under class control. The goal of this article is to show that the ‘instrumentalist’ thesis is not even valid for the State apparatus when considered at the regional level. The article focuses on São Paulo state, seat of the most powerful interests linked to the coffee economy.

Venezuela has two types of prisons: a prison regime ruled by a hierarchical organisation of armed inmates and the securitised ‘New Regime’ system under the control of the Ministry of Penitentiary Services. This article uses a comparative approach to examine how legitimacy is constructed in these competing yet co-existing prison regime formations in Venezuela. Both the Venezuelan state and the prisons under ‘carceral self-rule’ legitimate their respective carceral orders through discourses of left-wing emancipation that correspond with different phases of the Bolivarian project. Yet contradictions emerge from these legitimising discourses and neither regime conforms to its respective discourse of participation or socialism. In the state-abandoned, violent and hierarchical prisons under carceral self-rule, prisoners are only partially empowered, while in the New Regime prison types predation at the hands of one's fellow inmates is replaced by the violence of the ‘humanising’ state.

This article reviews Mexican Supreme Court decisions concerning the legal status of juntas de conciliación y arbitraje (state labour boards of conciliation and arbitration) between 1917 and 1924. During this period the Court played an important role in legitimising these administrative boards, which have since become a constituent part of Mexico's state–labour regime. This examination of the Court's decisions shows how judge-made law contributed to the evolution of industrial relations in the country in the early 1920s. Furthermore, the article's discussion of the connection between the Court's evolving case law and its changing membership in this period indicates how its legal decisions were sensitive to political changes. This presents an early instance of the more recent trend toward the judicialisation of politics in Latin America.

The 2003 US-Chile free trade agreement, regarded by many as consistent with Chile's long-held trade liberalisation strategy, nonetheless engendered a surprisingly vigorous debate focused on the proposed elimination of the bandas de precio protecting traditional agricultural crops. Opposition to the agreement, mounted by the conservative Alianza por Chile, offers an intriguing political case study that suggests that populist posturing surrounding free trade agreements may persist long after a trade liberalisation strategy has become well-established. This article argues that agricultural liberalisation will be a significant challenge for Chile's governing coalition if it wishes to pursue trade negotiations while seeking to avoid costly political battles at home over the economic costs of abandoning price supports and the challenges of ‘reconverting’ to an export-oriented sector. Even given the strong elite consensus around trade liberalisation in Chile, the interconnections between sectoral interest groups, domestic politics and trade negotiations remain relevant, and deserving of analytical attention.

This article explores the example of Cuba in order to understand how a contentious politics has evolved since the 2000s and especially after the semi-liberalisation of internet access in 2008. My aim is to analyse how use of new technologies impact the fragmented arenas of contention that already existed in Cuba. My argument is that they have reinforced existing dynamics, while creating new channels of expression and linkage, between contentious spaces within Cuba and with specific segments of the Cuban diaspora. Those dynamics have in turn allowed for the emergence of a transnational Cuban public arena and a more intricate contentious space in Cuba itself.

This text is a preliminary assessment of the potential for comparative and ‘trans-systemic’ study of the current role of the Roman Catholic Church in Central and East Europe. For observers of Vatican policy in world affairs, there is every reason to believe that the Church, now engaged in rapidly rebuilding its own institutions in Central and East Europe, will play a decisive part in shaping the future societies of the region in the coming decade, just as it did in Brazil and the rest of Latin America in the immediate post-war era. In fact, the recent history of the Church in Latin America, but above all Brazil, provides a timely and useful paradigm for helping fathom the current course of Vatican policy in Central and East Europe. In turn, the results of comparative inquiry may even serve to stimulate an entirely fresh discussion of the Brazilian and Latin American experience.

In the 1980s more and more Latin American countries attempted to address daunting economic problems with variations on the so-called neoliberal theme. While one should have expected governments to implement some form of short-term fiscal and monetary adjustments to address the region's generalised fiscal crisis, it was less inevitable that this neoclassical formula should coincide with a more long-term structural adjustment formula, including such neoliberal (or neo-orthodox) policies as privatisation of State-owned companies, liberalization of tariffs, and reduction of the public sector workforce. As a result of this policy mix, the normal recessionary impact of adjustment intensified. The clamour for protection from that impact, and/or for putting an end to the policies themselves, has also intensified not only from the popular sector (that perennial target of all adjustments), but from the ranks of economic elites as well.

Even though a vast literature has addressed perceptions and beliefs on taxes, progressivity and redistribution, few studies have specifically studied the perceptions of economic elites in this regard. This group is relevant for its affluence and influence, and therefore elites’ ideas and preferences have a major impact on tax-policy configuration. This study analyses the perceptions of the economic elite on redistribution and progressivity in Chile. Based on in-depth interviews and historical documents, such notions are examined by mixing concrete evaluations of income tax and value-added tax (VAT) and more general attitudes towards the role of the tax system in economic development. Results show that redistribution is negatively evaluated, which coexists with a strong willingness to contribute to poverty relief through social initiatives outside the state. Additionally, progressivity is sidelined while highlighting growth, tax neutrality, and incentives to entrepreneurship as the main priorities of tax design. The historical analysis shows that although the Chilean tax regime has always been based on indirect taxes and levies on natural resources, neoliberal reforms and ideological renovation during the Pinochet dictatorship narrowed the general framework of tax ideas among business and political sectors and reversed progressive advances in inequality reduction and direct taxation that had been made during the previous decades.

This article analyses the forgery and discovery of the purported tomb of Cuauhtémoc, the last Mexica emperor. An eclectic collection of contemporary sources outlines a subtle interplay between elites, cultural managers and peasants, who alternately collaborated and competed in manipulating the would-be invention. Groups traditionally undervalued in studies of nationalism, namely villagers and petty bureaucrats, went far beyond the mimesis of elites to significantly reshape parts of the national narrative. Their entrepreneurial success in manipulating nationalist symbols demonstrates that the instrumentalist use of the past is a cross-class activity.

During the Second World War, Bolivia became the single most important source of tin for the Allies. As with other Latin American countries who were placed in the position of supplying essential raw materials,1 Bolivia confronted a situation where the operation of normal market forces was suspended. Access to Axis markets was denied, and prices were set through government intervention, often at widely divergent levels in different markets. As a result, the impression was created that the poor producers were prevented from enjoying a wartime bonanza by exploitative collusion on the part of the rich consumers.

In December 1938 an alliance of the Radical, Communist and Socialist parties took office in Chile, the first Popular Front to come to power in Latin America. A few months later, in Spain, the Nationalist forces under Generalísimo Franco occupied Madrid, bringing an end to the civil war. Shortly after, a serious diplomatic conflict developed between Spain and Chile, in which most of Latin America gradually became embroiled. It concerned the fate of 17 Spanish republicans who had sought asylum in the Chilean embassy in the last days of the seige of Madrid, and culminated in July 1940 when the Nationalist government broke off relations with Chile. Initially, the issue at the heart of the episode was the right to political asylum and the established practice of Latin American diplomatic legations of offering protection to individuals seeking asylum (asilados). The causes of the conflict, however, became increasingly obscured as time went on. The principles at stake became confused by mutual Spanish– Chilean distrust, the Nationalists' ideological crusade both within Spain and outside and the Chilean government's deep hostility to the Franco regime, which it saw as a manifestation of fascism. The ideological gulf widened with the onset of the Second World War. This article concentrates primarily, although not exclusively, on the first part of the dispute, April 1939–January 1940. In this period asylum, which is our main interest, was uppermost in Spanish–Chilean diplomatic correspondence.

Why have the Washington authorities under both Democrat and Republican administrations chosen to devote so much time, money, and political capital to the pursuit of a policy in Central America that most international opinion, and a substantial proportion of domestic US opinion, considers to be unwarranted interference? The standard answers to this question fall into two main groups, each with strong ideological connotations. The official American position, most forcefully expressed in speeches by such prominent figures as ex-Secretary of State Alexander Haig, UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and President Ronald Reagan himself, judge events in Central America as yet another example of worldwide Soviet expansionism, in this case channelled through Cuba. On this view, it is not possible for America to stand back from the struggles of this small and apparently unimportant region, for unless the Russian cause is decisively rebuffed there is a real risk of ‘falling dominoes’, to the Panama Canal and beyond in one direction, and even northward into Mexico.

As the quincentennial of what we do not dare to call the discovery of the New World approaches, Spanish America remains impervious to the festive mood reigning in Spain. The reasons are painfully obvious: a region facing an at best uncertain future, while trying to close the wounds opened by a quarter-century of acute sociopolitical confrontation, and still reeling under the blows inflicted to its economy during the unlamented ‘lost decade’ just closed, has good reason to wonder whether it has anything to celebrate.

Justified as it may be, the despondency caused by recent misfortunes does not offer the best inspiration to achieve a fair and balanced view of a five-centuries long historical experience. It is enough to compare the assessments inspired by the current centennial milestone with those of one century ago to discover how dangerous it is to pass judgement on such an experience by projecting onto it the dominant features of the immediate present.

Yet in 1892 the times were not much more brilliant than today; several among the largest neo-hispanic countries were suffering the devastating impact of the worst economic crisis in their history: these circumstances did not, however, seriously undermine the optimism with which they looked at their future, an optimism that encouraged the founding fathers of their national historiographies to take in their stride the sombre aspects of the national past. If today a very different approach seems in order, it is not only because the atrocious history of our century has all but killed the faith nineteenth-century historians deposited in all kinds of manifest destinies, but perhaps also because of the justified suspicion that what Latin America faces today is different in kind from the streaks of bad luck all too frequent in its short history, that the world-wide transformations that reached spectacular culmination in the breakdown of the ‘really existing socialism’ are full of menace for the region, and the practical wisdom distilled from the experience of the past five centuries cannot offer any valid guidance for the challenges of the ‘new world order’ that is currently striving to be born.

Every institution rests upon a philosophical base that both supports it and lends a certain character to its functions. As the philosophical support changes, one can expect institutional change to follow. Responding to the philosophical environment, an institution may be modified or, if support is withdrawn, fade into history. Institutions, however, do not react in a uniform fashion. The degree of change depends on the social consequences, as well as upon the possibility of achieving reform without an unacceptable amount of disorder.

This article analyses the role of the public sector in providing social insurance and assistance to the elderly in Argentina between the late nineteenth century and the present day. It assesses the extent to which this involvement embodied clear-cut development paradigms or was driven by political pressures. Between the 1940s and 1970s the public sector enjoyed a monopoly of insurance and assistance provision, with the private and voluntary sectors largely excluded. These monopolies failed to provide satisfactory levels of a welfare and proved financially unsustainable. By the 1980s a gradual process of pluralisation had begun, which culminated with the partial privatisation of social insurance in 1994.

Since the dramatic widening of the international economy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century foreign capital and enterprise have played a prominent role in the export trades of the primary producing countries. That so much initiative should have come from outside is not surprising since the timing of the entry of these countries into world markets was determined by the demands of the industrial nations rather than by their own level of commercial preparation. The establishment of foreign businesses inevitably brought mixed reactions in the host countries, stemming from the recognition that, while local capital and enterprise could not cope with the sudden commercial expansion, foreign interests were in a position to exploit that very fact. Primary producing countries, therefore, sought to impose statutory regulations on export companies designed to safeguard the producers and, more generally, to harmonize business operations with the government's conception of the national interest.