Even before Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London in October 1998, the past hung heavily over Chile's distinctive transition to democracy. This was apparent during the previous year in the attention given to its conflictive recent history in television and radio talk shows and in newspaper and magazine articles. Since the return to elected rule in 1990, volumes on the dictatorship and the Popular Unity government were staples in Santiago bookstores. With the approach of the 25th anniversary of the 1973 military coup, what had been a steady stream of publication turned into a torrent of personal and political memoirs, extended essays, political journalism, and scholarly studies evoking the country's divided historical memory.

This paper examines the production of neoliberal multiculturalism in Chile as well as ideas about race, ethnicity and nation mobilised among local elites in the Chilean South. It argues that the process of creating neoliberal multicultural citizens is not only imposed from above, but also informed by local histories, attitudes and social relationships. Official neoliberal multiculturalism is shaped by transnational and national priorities, and involves constructing some Mapuche as terrorists while simultaneously promoting multicultural policies. Local elites contribute to the shape that neoliberal multiculturalism takes on the ground by actively feeding into the terrorist construction but refusing to consent to multicultural values. Altogether, understanding neoliberal multiculturalism depends on examining the transnational, the national and the local, and discerning the ways in which social forces at each level reinforce, interact with and depart from one another.

In the last two decades the comparative analysis of race relations in the U.S.A. and Brazil has been based on a conventional wisdom. It is the corollary of a larger conventional wisdom in the study of comparative race relations. The thesis is that systems of race relations in the Western Hemisphere are primarily of two types: bi-racial and multi-racial. The distinction is normally spelled out as follows. The U.S.A. is a prime example of a bi-racial system. In the prevailing logic of the US legal and social structure, individuals have historically been either black or white. In Brazil, on the other hand, there has been a spectrum of racial distinctions. At a minimum, Brazilian social practice has recognised white, black and mulatto. At a maximum, the phenotypical distinctions have become so refined as to defy analysis, or effective application for those who would discriminate.

The article focuses on the 1910 centennial celebration of Mexico's war of independence in Mexico City in order to examine the notions of modernity, cosmopolitanism and nationalism that were held by the Porfirian elite. The article first maps the celebration and thus identifies an ideal city – of comfort, modernity, style, and patriotism – that the Porfirian elite created from the 1880s to the 1910s within Mexico City. Second, it takes tours around the ideal city in order to examine how ideal views of social order, material and cultural progress, nation-building and cosmopolitanism acquired spatial and graphic expressions in the city.

Our knowledge of Mexican agrarian history has been greatly enhanced by hacienda studies, based on original hacienda archives. Inter alia, these have finished off for good the old notion of ‘feudal’ hacendados who spurned profit for prestige. But if – thanks to their reliance on hacienda accounts – these studies have shed light on hacienda marketing and profit-maximizing, they have told us less about the hacienda's internal workings. The hacienda's relations of exchange are, therefore, better understood than its relations of production. And, from some theoretical perspectives, it is the latter which are primary (which, in grand terms, determine whether the hacienda is to be termed ‘feudal’, ‘capitalist’ or something else again).

During the first half of the nineteenth century, as cholera and yellow fever epidemics ravaged the Old and the New World alike, Brazil seemed to enjoy the reputation of being a remarkably salubrious country. In spite of its geographical position, its climate and the abundance of those elements that prevailing medical wisdom considered conducive to the more aggravated forms of disease, the fact was that Brazil long remained free of the two most visible scourges of the times.

This article offers a new perspective on the history of the maroon state of Palmares in Northeastern Brazil. It adds information and interpretation to R. K. Kent's ground-breaking article ‘Palmares: An African State in Brazil’ published in 1965. The present essay gives an historical narrative summary with commentary on the historiography, describing Afro—razilian aspects of the history of Palmares. The purpose is to review and expand upon the historical, linguistic, and cultural context of Palmares and on the sources for the emerging epic material of Zumbi of Palmares.

This Commentary addresses the issue of ecological perception and ecological politics among poor populations, rural and urban. Some social struggles by poor people (and some national struggles by poor countries) can be understood also as ecological struggles. This approach reveals the ecological content, both hidden and explicit, of social movements from the past or present, which have been geared to defend access to natural resources against the advance of the generalised market system, and that have contributed to the conservation of resources to the extent that the market undervalues externalities. Examples are taken mainly from the history of highland and coastal Peru, but this approach is relevant also for the Amazonian region. Some comparisons are made with other countries in Latin America and also with India.

This study models the sub-national pattern of coca cultivation in Colombia following the implementation of Plan Colombia (2001–2005). The results suggest that aerial eradication reduces coca cultivation primarily through creation of significant displacement and that coca cultivation is less intense in areas with a significant state presence. Further, coca cultivation appears to be more common in less developed, agricultural regions where access to legal markets precludes other forms of agriculture. Poverty has a significant, non-linear effect on coca cultivation; cultivation is most intense in regions of moderate poverty. Based on the findings, efforts to reduce coca cultivation should emphasise developing local public infrastructure and market access in conjunction with poverty reduction efforts and investment in alternative development.

In the field of modern political regimes, Spanish America holds a very special and, in some respects, paradoxical place. Indeed, even today, actual political life is very far from reflecting not only the constitutional clauses but even certain rules generally accepted in Western democracies. Political regimes are often ephemeral and dictatorships frequently interrupt institutional continuity. Pronunciamientos, coups d'état, rebellions and revolutions have been common means of coming to power, at least as common as elections. The political stage has often been occupied by particular human types: caudillos, caciques, charismatic leaders, guerrillas, revolutionaries…

This commentary article focuses on a crucial moment in the formation of Peruvian Creole nationalism: the 1836–9 Peruvian–Bolivian Confederation. Nationalist sentiments expressed through the anti-confederationist press, satiric poetry and pamphlets, glorified the Inca past while spurning the Indian present. During this period, a nationalist, essentially racist, rhetoric whose roots can be traced to the late eighteenth century, took shape. This rhetoric would provide the foundations of an ideology which has prevailed in Peruvian history. This rhetoric reached its peak in the twentieth century, while evolving into a historiographical discourse instrumental to the exercise of power and which is now in crisis.

This article reports a fact that has not been well appreciated: tariffs in Latin America were the world's highest long before the Great Depression. This is a surprising fact, given that Latin America is believed to have exploited globalisation forces better than most regions before the 1920s, and given that the 1930s have always been viewed as the critical decade when Latin American policy became so anti-global. The explanation does not lie with imagined output gains from protection in these young republics, but rather with state revenue needs, strategic responses to trading partner tariffs and a need to compensate globalisation's losers.

The severe economic crisis facing several countries in the region over the last couple of years has led many observers to predict a backlash against market policies and even against democracy in the region. An economic crisis of such proportions should also, in theory, have negative effects on subjective well being. Our analysis, based on the Latinobarómetro surveys from 2000–2002, finds some unexpected positive trends, as well as notable differences between those countries that suffered from crises and those that did not. Satisfaction with market policies and with the way democracy is working has decreased among all groups except the very wealthy. In contrast, support for democracy as a system of government has increased, suggesting that respondents are increasingly distinguishing between democracy as a system of government, and the manner in which particular governments are performing. We also find evidence of changing attitudes towards redistributive taxation among the wealthy.

JEL Codes. D63 (welfare economics, equity, justice, inequality); D84 (information and uncertainty, expectations); I31 (general welfare; basic needs; quality of life); J62 (mobility, unemployment, intergenerational mobility)

The distinction between ethnic and racial categories in social analysis is finely drawn, and rarely clear. In the case of Latin American societies, ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are sometimes synonymous, and far more often deployed as if they were. Researchers are familiar with the ways in which processes of deracination, acculturation and miscegenation iron out the cultural edges that demarcate social groups, one from another; perhaps the classic example is the gradual loss of indigenous characteristics attendant upon native American migration to cities. Yet, even in the complete absence of rural-to-urban migration, such processes have been at work moulding present-day indigenous communities, which once recognised numerous ethnic distinctions within ‘Indian’ society, distinctions that were progressively diluted – though not wholly extinguished – during some three centuries of colonial rule. To draw attention to the protean nature of ethnicity in Latin American societies, however, is not to say that researchers are necessarily unaware of the problem, but rather that they often follow research agendas that may be inconvenienced by attention to such nuances. Thus, for example, a number of broad-brush racial cum ethnic classifications provided the basis for the fiscal demands of Crown and Church alike during the colonial period, and as such provide the essential pillars for much of the quantitative fiscal and demographic database that we possess.

This article examines the creation of an Indian ideal within Indigenismo in the years 1920–40. While scholars argue that Indigenismo described a degenerate Indian ‘other’, this article shows that it often represented the Indian as a model for revolutionary politics and culture. This is evident first in Indigenista celebrations of Indian cultures during the 1920s, and in their valorisation of Indians as rational political actors with modern sensibilities during the 1930s. In validating this ‘modern’ Indian, Indigenistas created a limited framework for legitimate ‘Indian politics’ which took place within the national culture. However, they also labelled Indians who challenged revolutionary programs as ‘primitive’ and ‘pre-political’.

In this article the author compares recent efforts in Bolivia and Colombia to implement constitutionally mandated regimes of legal pluralism, and identifies the most important factors affecting the practical realisation of legal pluralism: the capacity of the political system, the legal tradition and society to tolerate normative diversity; the geographic isolation and cultural alienation of indigenous communities; the degree of internal division within indigenous communities and movements regarding legal pluralism in general, and in specific cases, that have arisen, and the availability of effective legal mechanisms to indigenous communities seeking to protect this right.

This article examines the history and ideology of the Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso). The rebels claim to embody a distinctively Peruvian Marxism. However, a close examination of the party betrays a conspicuous indifference to Peruvian culture and traditions. The distinctiveness of this largest and most diverse of the Andean nations disappears in the orthodoxy of a universal Marxism, in this respect placing the Shining Path within the long legacy of the imperial inscription of Latin American history into the preconceived categories and linear narratives of Western philosophy and science.

This essay, written in September 2006, considers the first months of the MAS government headed by Evo Morales in the light of the virtually constant political crisis in Bolivia since 2000. The first part asks why the turbulent course of public life in Bolivia has proved so difficult to explain. It seeks to show that the recent period has been depicted in rather narrow interpretations that stress institutional failings, poverty and oppression, or civic heroism, but do not try to find the linkages between these phenomena. The second section proposes an alternative approach, treating the recent experience of conflict as a revolutionary episode in which the idea of ‘Two Bolivias’ needs to be qualified by appreciation of past revolutionary experiences. The final sections suggest that the ardour and complexities of the current conflict might seem more comprehensible if the MAS and its supporters are viewed as essentially plebeian in both condition and ideological disposition. Such a classical and early modern allusion provides a fuller analytical palate for understanding the current conjuncture and the socio-political propositions being made in a ‘semi-modern’ environment.

This article examines how President Alejandro Toledo's self-professed Andean identity and efforts to establish a state-led indigenous rights framework conflicted with a growing eco-ethno alliance of Andean and Amazonian representatives in Peru. Existing scholarly accounts declare the indigenous movement to be unimportant or, indeed, entirely absent in Peru. Yet, they do so by emphasising the centrality of the historical dynamic between the Andean region, where until recently local peoples have desisted from making explicit indigenous claims, and the urbanised coastal region, where the elite's power is most clearly concentrated. This obscures the Amazon as a site of historical events and eco-ethno-politics of national and global scope. The recent emergence of a debate on indigenous issues shows that the Amazonians' longer engagement in the global sphere of indigenous and environmental politics now places them in the position of exemplifying indigeneity for the Andeans and Peruvians at large. This shift challenges in fundamental ways the historical image of Peru the nation as inextricably implicated in the post-colonial fantasies of what I term the ‘Inca slot’.

This essay addresses the changing trajectory of grassroots political activity in Latin America, with special reference to Chile and Brazil, and assesses its impact on the policy and practices of social development. It traces this trajectory through the transitions from authoritarian to democratic rule, and focuses on the responses of grassroots organisations to democratic governance and the rise of neo-liberalism. In particular, it shows that social movements have declined or been transformed (or both), while non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have multiplied and become more visible. It appears that where grassroots organisations interact with the state they may be subordinated to state policy, and where they fail to interact they may be ineffective. Their influence on social development mainly occurs piecemeal through social service delivery, not through the shaping of social policy itself.