Scholars have paid considerable attention to the connection between Washington's withdrawal from intervention and the emergence of dictatorship in Central America during the 1930s. The current article seeks to enhance our understanding of those interconnected developments through the investigation of the US Foreign Service and its role in the early 1930s presidential campaigns in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. It shows that the dynamic interaction between actors in both Washington and Central America set in motion a process that would produce decades of authoritarian rule in the isthmus.

In the second half of the twentieth century, Latin American countries lost a substantial part of their importance in worldwide exports of agricultural and food products. Given this context, the objective of this article is to analyse the determinants of the evolution of agricultural exports from Latin America, paying special attention to the influence of regional processes of economic integration on exports and to their degree of participation in intra-industrial trade. We propose a gravity model with a data panel of total exports and product groups for six Latin American countries towards 39 destinations between 1963 and 2000.

Narratives of memory have received considerable attention in Argentina but rarely have these been examined in relation to the 1982 Malvinas War. This article focuses on national memory narratives of the war manifest in educational resources and explores how and under what conditions local ways of remembering can transform and/or reproduce such narratives, through research within secondary schools in Río Gallegos, a city in the south of Argentina. It shows how the city's connections with the military and the war generated sensitivities that influenced how the Malvinas was engaged in the classroom. The localised framings deviated from predominant national memory narratives by underplaying the broader context of state terror and overlooking histories associated with the Malvinas before 1982.

Revisionist historians have convincingly argued that Spanish American independence was not the result of simmering grievances that galvanised a national or Creole identity against Spain. Instead, this scholarship insists that Spanish American national identities did not exist at the time and that independence was an unforeseen process that must be understood in the context of the Napoleonic invasion of Iberia. But, if independence was undesirable before 1808 and if national identities arose at a latter period, how do we explain the early independence projects of ‘precursors’ like Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán? By contextually reconstructing the logic behind Viscardo's projects, this article offers a new perspective on the intellectual conditions of possibility for Spanish American independence. It argues that though he certainly identified as a Creole from Peru, Viscardo actually deployed an Enlightenment global science of commerce, not Creole patriotism or nationalism, to legitimate Spanish American independence.

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.

Addressing the case of a community from rural Urabá, Colombia, this article focuses on the temporality of population displacement and asks: when does the ‘clock’ of displacement start? Drawing upon an in-depth ethnographic fieldwork it challenges the state driven narrative that displacement can be understood from the moment one leaves their residence and advances the argument that displacement is more than just physical relocation. By engaging with the broader social, political and economic context in which displacement occurred and bringing local voices to the fore, this article demonstrates how the experience of violence engendered a sense of displacement before residents actually left.

This review essay critically examines the evolution of scholarly literature on Brazil's Partido dos Trabalhadores since the PT's founding in 1980. We periodise the relevant literature into four phases, examining the foundation of the PT, the party's early experience in subnational government, its transformation and moderation in the late 1990s, and finally its experiences in national government since capturing the presidency in 2002. After detailing strengths and weaknesses of this research, we also examine the trajectory of the PT in light of recent comparative work on the so-called ‘left turn’ in Latin America. We conclude by offering an agenda for future research on the PT.