With the collapse of the Soviet Union, restrictions on archives in Russia have diminished markedly. Some of the repositories have potential interest for Latin Americanists, including the Comintern Archive. This research note discusses the objectives of the archive and the types of material it contains. A list of the major collections relevant to Latin America is followed by comments on how to use the archive and websites that will facilitate research in Russia. Also provided are bibliographic references to academic studies on Latin America based on Comintern materials.

In the liberal tradition, democracy is often defined by the holding of open elections and the preservation of a given set of civil rights and liberties. As neoliberal democratic governments emerge around the world, the relationship between democracy and a citizen's democratic rights is rapidly being redefined. In the ensuing debates, access to information has become an important issue. Many of these new governments, in their efforts to project themselves as “democratic,” have moved quickly to declassify a host of documents. This strategy has resulted in a tidal wave of revisionist research. One of the countries following this trend is Brazil.

In the 1530s, a handful of Spaniards conquered an immense Andean empire. Thirty years later, some Andean subjects of what was by then an immense Spanish empire resolved not to worship the Spaniards' God. Their resistance was associated with a Quechua ritual phrase, “Taki Onqoy,” usually translated literally as “disease of the dance.” This movement was suppressed rapidly by Spanish authority and left no traces except in a few Spanish documents.

This article analyzes the persistence of an official discourse of mestizo nationalism in Nicaragua in spite of the adoption of multicultural citizenship rights for black and indigenous costeños in 1986. These reforms appeared to directly contradict key premises of previously dominant nationalist ideologies, particularly the idea that Nicaragua was a uniformly mestizo nation. Instead of a radical break with the past, however, what we find in contemporary Nicaragua is a continuous process of negotiation and contestation among three variants of official mestizo nationalism: vanguardismo, Sandinismo, and “mestizo multiculturalism” that emerged in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s respectively. This article traces the continuities among these disparate but intimately related accounts of national history and identity and the way they all operate to limit the political inclusion of black and indigenous costeños as such.

In response to the growing salience of re-centralization in several Latin American countries that decentralized in the 1980s and 1990s, this paper examines presidential efforts to re-centralize fiscal power in the 1990s. In our study of re-centralization in Argentina and Brazil, we assess the utility of four common political economy explanations: the presence of economic crisis; the partisan powers of the president; the division of formal powers between the branches; and the extent of intra-bureaucratic conflict. We find that the success of economic stabilization measures facilitated re-centralization in both countries, though the pathways connecting the two phenomena were partially distinct. In Argentina, key re-centralization measures were rapidly achieved after stabilization as the result of the president's strong partisan powers and in the form of political deals within the Peronist party. Subsequently, the dissipation of President Carlos Menem's powers over the course of his second term facilitated the “return of the governors.” In Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso re-centralized despite weak partisan powers, largely by using his reputation as a successful stabilizer to build a broad reform coalition. In Cardoso's Brazil, strong partisan cohesion in important cabinet posts also served as a partial substitute for the lack of partisan power in the legislature. These findings suggest the need for a closer examination of re-centralization efforts, particularly in the wake of macroeconomic stabilization and economic reform.