Well protected by fortifications of their famed cuadrilátero, Paraguayan soldiers surely exclaimed in wonder as they looked toward Brazilian lines on June 24, 1867. There, rising slowly in a hazy wintry sky, was a captive balloon held by two strong ascension ropes. An observer with a good spyglass could have seen in the basket two men who gazed intently at the Paraguayan positions. The aeronauts were James Allen of Rhode Island and Sergeant Major Roberto Adolfo Chodasiewicz, a Polish military engineer and cartographer. This first ascension by the smaller of two balloons proved that the brothers James and Ezra Allen, with the aid of Chodasiewicz, could succeed where a Frenchman, P. L. D. Doyen, had failed on December 14, 1866.

The methodological problems involved in studying the political role of corruption and inefficiency have long baffled historians of seventeenth-century Spanish America. Complaints by contemporaries about various forms of corruption (fraudes), abuses (abusos), bribery (cohecho), and other forms of corruption (mala administratión), abound in the extant archivai documents of the period. In addition, successive viceroys and royal inspectors (visitadores) frequently charged that colonial officials were too stupid, lazy, or inexperienced to carry out their duties efficiently. One visitador in 1683, for example, described the administrative practices of high-ranking treasury officials in the viceregal capital of Lima as “la más ciega y descuidada que se ha visto en muchos siglos,” and went on to recommend that such officials be “despoblados de sus plazas, poniendo in su lugar personas capazes y inteligentes.”

I. The Evolution of the Law of Recognition until 1913

To state that the United States imperialistically meddled in Mexican internal affairs in 1913 would scarcely surprise the scholarly community. The theme of United States imperialism in Latin America has been the subject of dispassionate scholarship and patriotic diatribes. Regardless of their perspective, writers have generally focused upon the political, social, strategic, and economic aspects of intervention. Considerably less attention has been given the United States' creative use of international law to affect the internal stability of Latin American nations. This article will contribute to bridging this gap by analyzing the manner in which Woodrow Wilson used the law of recognition to unseat Mexico's dictator, Victoriano Huerta; a man Wilson considered unfit to govern.

Let me introduce to you, or rather reintroduce, the two great characters, the dramatis personae about whose dreams and achievements I invite you to a brief reflection.

The action begins in July 1768. The Majorcan Father Serra had spent already twenty years working as a missionary in various places on the Mexican mainland. Of all of his accomplishments, the best known were his achievements in the Sierra Gorda of Querétaro where, accompanied by his former student and always active assistant Francisco Palou, he had established five missions. Serra certainly deserved the reputation he had of being not only a sincere and religious friar but also a distinguished theologian, indeed a scholar, and besides a man who knew how to carry out what he considered ought to be done. Now at the age of fifty five, he had a new and difficult task as president of the California missions, replacing the just-expelled Jesuits. There, at the old mission headquarters of Loreto, he was learning about the demographic collapse of the natives and the general situation of the peninsula. Before him lay the task of reorganizing those missions whose future appeared to him so uncertain.

During the decade beginning in 1910 the economic involvement of the United States in Mexico increased while diplomatic relations deteriorated. Between 1911 and 1920 United States' imports from Mexico increased from $57,000,000 to $179,000,000 and exports from $61,000,000 to $208,000,000. Much of this economic growth related to petroleum and to land where investments in each of these areas increased phenomenally. The new Mexican Constitution of 1917, however, forecast trouble for foreign investors, especially those who depended upon Mexico's unreplenishable subsoil resources. Concessionaires who mined the subsoil appeared to hold their title only at the will of the state. Additionally, the right of foreigners to hold property in Mexico was often restricted. Land on the shores or borders of Mexico, for example, could not be owned by foreigners. Such provisions were designed to limit the economic subservience of Mexico to the United States. Like other Latin Americans, the Mexicans wanted economic self-sufficiency. They resented the fact that their economy was tied to the fluctuating world demand for staple raw materials and that they were caught in an American vise which squeezed both their imports and their exports.

The city where trouble began in 1891, Valparaíso, Chile, was a memorable place. Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, the nineteenth-century Chilean historian and political leader, has rightly written that the history of Valparaíso has been the history of the sea. An old port, once a more important city than it is now, built around and especially on top of steep hills reached by rickety lifts, Valparaíso still has a grace and character unlike that of most other ports—its landscape resembles an untamed San Francisco. At one time it was a thriving commercial center and hub of naval activity, important not only for the direction of Chilean history but for that of much of South America as well. In the nineteenth century, with Chilean independence and the later decay of the Peruvian port of Callao, Valparaíso rapidly became the maritime capital of the Pacific and an important focus of naval enterprises for continental defense. Then, after decades of prosperity, its importance declined and the fortunes of other coastal cities arose.

Two dominant features of agricultural history in the English West Indies are the formation of the plantation system and the importation of large numbers of servile labourers from diverse parts of the world—Africa, Europe and Asia. In Barbados and the Leeward Islands, the backbone of early English colonisation of the New World, large plantations developed within the first decade of settlement. The effective colonisation of these islands, St. Christopher (St. Kitts) in 1624, Barbados 1627, Nevis 1628, Montserrat and Antigua 1632, was possible because of the early emergence of large plantations which were clearly designed for large scale production, and the distribution of commodities upon the world market; they were instrumental in forging an effective and profitable agrarian culture out of the unstable frontier environment of the seventeenth century Caribbean. These plantations, therefore, preceded the emergence of the sugar industry and the general use of African slave labour; they developed during the formative years when the production of tobacco, cotton and indigo dominated land use, and utilised predominatly European indentured labour. The structure of land distribution and the nature of land tenure Systems in the pre-sugar era illustrate this. Most planters who accelerated the pace of economic growth in the late 1640's and early 1650's by the production of sugar and black slave labour, already owned substantial plantations stocked with large numbers of indentured servants.

In the second half of 1793, slavery was abolished in the French colony of Saint Domingue or present-day Haiti. This was one of the most radical events of the French Revolution and one of the great moments in Caribbean history. Saint Domingue became the first land in the New World to outlaw slavery and to offer full rights to non-whites, yet there has been much confusion over how and when abolition occurred. Historians of the French Revolution have generally ignored abolition altogether, apparently as irrelevant to the “real” revolution, while Caribbeanists have frequently been guilty of publishing incorrect or at least incomplete versions. Even specialists in Haitian history have failed to distinguish between the various abolition proclamations which were issued between June 21 and October 31, 1793. It is the purpose of this paper to give a correct chronology to abolition and to show that it was due primarily to the efforts of one man, Léger Félicité Sonthonax, aided somewhat reluctantly by Etienne Polverel.

One of the dominant themes stressed in the literature on development and underdevelopment in Latin America, is that the landowners in this region have historically played a negative role. They are portrayed as having been politically reactionary, economically passive, lacking in entrepreneurial drive, and generally unconcerned with promoting the development of the productive forces in their respective countries. Further, their attitudes have been branded as “traditional,” and the policies which they pursued are seen to have been “defective.” As a consequence, the general economic underdevelopment of the area has to be understood as a product of this class' inaction and its “conscious willingness” to be subordinated to foreign capital.

Regional separatism in Mexico, especially in the north, has been one of the most persistent and difficult to explain problems in the historiography of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920. It is well known that men of the north (norteños) made the Revolution, in large part, and finally succeeded in winning political power. But norteños, even those who followed Francisco I. Madero and after his fall, continued the struggle under the Constitutionalist banner, failed to agree among themselves either on their aims or their leaders. Leaving aside the questions of motive and ultimate objectives of the major separatists—Pascual Orozco and Francisco “Pancho” Villa in Chihuahua, Esteban Cantú Jiménez in Baja California Norte, and the triumvirate of Alvaro Obregón, Plutarco Elías Calles and Adolfo de la Huerta in Sonora—the question of how they financed their independent courses during and after the Constitutionalist victory remains. The following pages represent a preliminary inquiry into the role of illicit drug trafficking between Mexico and the United States in the era of the Mexican Revolution and its contribution to regional autonomy. Patterns and practice of medical and personal usage, as well as supply and demand in both countries are considered for opium, its derivatives, cocaine and alcoholic beverages, along with the gambling and prostitution associated with this trade. The interaction of all these activities and the governmental revenue derived from them, are treated in detail for Baja California Norte. The combined evidence clearly shows the potential governmental income from this clandestine traffic and strongly suggests the hypothesis that illicit trafficking provided a financial base for regional autonomy and separatism during the Revolution.

The Enlightenment in Spain defies definition. In certain respects it was a viable force opening up new vistas of knowledge and understanding, while in others it was a mild breeze rustling some leaves of insight into the possibility of human equality. For certain of Spain's royal officials, the ideas of the eighteenth century philosophes were refreshing and undeniably sound; for others even the gathering of knowledge in the new encyclopedias was a dangerously democratic trend. In some areas of national life, reforms gained immediate acceptance, in others the old ways remained entrenched.

Spain has always been a country of extremes, of absolute alternatives. Spaniards strive to achieve impossible goals or they remain incredibly inert. With the discovery of America their ambitious undertakings excelled those of England or France, but subsequent neglect brought about failures of equal magnitude. In the sixteenth century they thought to conquer the world; in the next their weakened Hapsburg monarchs squandered the wealth of the New World while the country fell into economic ruin.

The evolution of the historical literature on land tenure in northern New Spain has closely paralleled general historiographical trends of New Spain's far northern frontier. For many years, “borderlands” history focused almost exclusively upon the study of those institutions which have been stereotyped as peculiar to the frontier, the mission and the presidio; upon political and administrative history; or upon biographies of notable figures. These studies laid important foundations, but, in general, borderlands historians were slow to adopt the social science methodologies of the new social and economic history which became popular in the 1960s in most fields of historical inquiry. Well after both its Anglo and Hispanic progenitors began to be studied from a perspective which emphasized social and economic structures and relationships, did the geographical area which corresponds to the Provincias Internas (all of today's border states plus Sinaloa, Durango and Baja California) begin to receive similar attention. Thus, our understanding of the social and economic history of the region is still rudimentary, and this is nowhere more evident than in the area of landholding patterns and agrarian development.

When King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofía of Spain completed a 1978 tour of Mexico, the occasion was naturally marked by sentimental rhetoric. President José Lóopez Portillo launched an official reconciliation when he visited Madrid the year before. Underlying the whole exercise, however, was a deep psychological resistance on the part of most Mexicans. The King attempted to emphasize to Mexicans the Spanish aspect of their heritage, but the history of Mexican-Spanish relations during the Revolution underlines the history of ethnic hostility between both groups during the first decades of the twentieth century. As in 1917, the Mexican government in 1978 decided that economic gains far outweighed whipping up popular resentment against the Spaniards.

From 1810, when the cabildo of Buenos Aires declared itself free from Spain, through the civil and parochial wars of the post independence period Argentina struggled for constitutional order and political unity. The tyranny of Rosas, the promulgation of the Federal Constitution in 1853, and its ultimate acceptance by the Province of Buenos Aires in 1862 highlighted the drama. Hampered by vast distances, primitive transportation facilities, and the presence of nomadic hostile Indians, the drive for national unity seemed to have reached a significant milestone in 1880. That year saw the creation of the Federal District on the heels of the suppression of a serious revolt against the national government by the Province of Buenos Aires. When the port city of Buenos Aires became the capital of the Republic, and the government of the province moved to the new city of La Plata, it must have appeared to casual observers that Argentina had arrived as a modern nation-state.

The pursuit of economic and political progress engaged many of the Salvadoran elite during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The intellectuals were no less energetic in the chase. Travelers to El Salvador at the turn of the century commented favorably on the progress they perceived. Marie Robinson Wright, who visited the country in 1893, wrote euphorically of “modern improvement,” “progress,” and “development.” “Salvador flourishes,” she rhapsodized, “a glorious example of good discipline and government.” Percy F. Martin wrote in 1911 a long, sober account of his visit. He concluded, “The present condition of her civilization, of her arts and her commerce is eminently encouraging.” He also characterized the Salvadorans as “the most developed and most intellectual” of the Central Americans. These assessments inferred that the progress El Salvador demonstrated drew on North Atlantic models, and to the degree the Salvadorans adopted those models they were judged favorably by foreigners.

We Americans cannot complain: Our civilization is European. We have been copying from Europe from the French Revolution on, even to importing the Cafe chantant. So far, we have lacked the application of chemistry to our social order, the end-of-the century use of explosives. Now, even this is on the way here; at least the seed of the tree is among us. It would seem that the corner bootblack, and the sweeper down the street have not yet realized that all the capital of Pereira's is really their capital. The hungry of Europe bring us the contagion of rage stored up for centuries, to our blessed lands, where only the man who doesn't want to, fails to put in his pot the chicken which the goodhearted Henri IV2 wished for the soup pots of his subjects.

As the novels of Machado de Assis make clear, for most Brazilians the War of Triple Alliance against Paraguay in the 1860s was a remote affair which scarcely impinged on their lives. In this respect the impact of the Paraguayan war on Brazil may be compared with that of the Napoleonic wars on the world of Jane Austen. In Argentina it was a different story. The war with Paraguay produced a sense of national trauma and crisis that makes it not hyperbolic to regard it as Argentina's Vietnam. This article seeks to trace the effect of the bloody conflict with Francisco Solano López on Argentine society. To simplify the analysis, the consequences of the war have been considered below under four headings which do not purport to be exhaustive or mutually exclusive: military, political (i.e., relating to the internal politics of Argentina), economic and international (concerned with Argentina's external relations).

The process of Spanish colonization in Northwestern New Spain, here roughly defined as Sonora and the Californias, set into motion a complex set of factors that contributed to demographic change; absolute population decline among the Indian groups involved, the growth of a largely mestizo settler population, and a number of different types of social and economic interactions between the two populations. Scholars in recent years have debated the causes and the nature of change. Alfred Crosby established a framework for the debate in his provocative book entitled The Columbian Exchange, which discusses, as the sub-title implies, the consequences of interaction between the Old and New Worlds after 1492. In a recent study Henry Dobyns elaborated on one of Crosby's principal themes, the introduction and impact of Euro-Asiatic diseases, and prepared a chronology of epidemics between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries that affected Native American populations. Dobyns applied his “epidemic mortality” model to Florida and calculated both a high contact population and the rate of population loss due to each of the major epidemics. The model when applied to all of North America has major implications for our understanding of the course of Native American history. In a recent bibliographic article historical demographer Shelia Johansson cast doubt on the high contact population estimates and the degree of demographic collapse.

The oil business has developed in waves; as new fields are discovered, individuals and companies rush to that area to seek their fortunes. In the United States just after the turn of the century, the wave headed for Texas and Oklahoma, and shortly thereafter, turned farther south toward the Mexican Gulf Coast. Despite the fact that between 1910 and 1920 Mexico was going through a major revolution, entrepreneurs, engineers, geologists, and skilled workers from the American Southwest poured into the area and participated in bringing Mexican oil production up to 25.2 percent of total world production in 1921, at the same time raising United States participation in the Mexican oil industry from 38.5 percent of a total investment of $51,900,000 U.S. in 1911 to 61 percent of $819,600,000 U.S. ten years later. This effort was both dangerous and romantic for the participants, and for many of them the profits were substantial. Needless to say, the relationship between the United States and Mexico was considerably affected by this influx of capital and personnel, and was made particularly crucial by the advent of the First World War in Europe. By the end of the decade, it had become clear that oil had paid a significant part of the cost of the Mexican Revolution and that future institutionalization by the Mexican government would depend greatly on oil revenues. Further, North American companies had gained preeminence in the industry, in large part because of the men who went to Mexico from the American Southwest.