The formation of a “united front of all workers” has been a strategic goal for most labor leaders, but in reality, such coalitions have been more the exception than the rule. This kind of alliance requires workers in different sectors of the economy, who usually have dissimilar interests, to merge into a coordinating body, generally a new labor confederation. Therefore, regardless of whether they emerge in the core or on the periphery, confederations that aggregate the interests of the majority of organized workers have necessarily been preceded by fascinating processes of negotiations and mergers among unions. This study focuses on the formation of one such coalition in the Colombian labor movement.

The Paraguayan War, or War of the Triple Alliance, fought by Paraguay against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay (1864–1870), remains unique in the Latin American context in several respects. Dire in its duration and human toll, the war's underlying conflict was not directly related to specific boundary disagreements. Unlike other Latin American conflicts, the War of the Triple Alliance has stirred a passionate controversy involving heavy ideological connotations, with some analysts viewing it as a struggle between civilization (the Alliance) and barbarism (Paraguay) and others depicting it as a confrontation between British imperialism (the Alliance) and Latin American nationalism (Paraguay).

Since the mid-1970s, tens of thousands of persons in three out of the five Central American countries have revolted against their governments or fought to repress such rebellions. These conflicts have cost more than a quarter of a million lives and created more than two million internal and external refugees. In 1979 a bloody insurrection toppled Nicaragua's Somoza regime. El Salvador's crippling civil war has escalated and reescalated but remains stalemated. In Guatemala since 1980, brutal counterinsurgency warfare, pro-regime terror, and political reform have failed to eliminate a resurgent guerrilla rebellion. Yet while these countries have rent themselves with political violence, their neighbors Honduras and Costa Rica have in general remained politically peaceful.

During the two decades preceding the abolition law of 1880, Cuban sugar planters pursued two parallel goals. The first undertaking was a concerted effort to increase the efficiency of agricultural and industrial production. A sophisticated railroad network was constructed to the interior from the ports of Havana, Matanzas, Cárdenas, and Cienfuegos in the 1840s and 1850s. Railroads opened high-yielding virgin land in frontier regions to production, and in the 1860s and 1870s, planters attempted to further the transportation revolution by developing rail systems within their estates to carry cane from fields to mills. Because the sucrose content of cane begins to drop immediately after the cane is cut, internal railway lines had the potential to revolutionize sugar production by moving cane quickly to the processing phase. Railroads also helped to resolve the recurring problem of roads washed out by heavy rains, which often precluded transporting harvested cane to mills for refining. In addition to revolutionizing transportation, planters also sought to raise industrial yields by installing modern milling equipment with greater processing capacity. The Jamaican trains of the early nineteenth century were replaced by vacuum-pan evaporators and centrifuges on the most modern mills by the 1860s and 1870s, a change that produced higher grades of sugar more efficiently.