This ethnographic article discusses how race emerges between discourses of class and space at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Following a legal decision, this academic institution was required to implement racial quotas to combat social exclusion and raise the number of ‘black’ students in public higher education. A crucial question is whether such racially based policies help redress social inequalities, or whether they actually increase discrimination by reifying ‘racial’ differences in Brazil. I argue that the social diversity promoted by quotas at the university stresses certain urban tensions and unequal dynamics that come to be reflected within the university. However, it also reveals novel and positive paths by which policies can negotiate these contrasts.

Most commentaries on the development of chicle (natural chewing gum) in the Yucatán Peninsula have emphasised the connections that were maintained between the chicle entrepreneurs and the companies, like William Wrigley's, which bought the raw gum for processing. The Mexican state is usually depicted as seeking to protect vulnerable forest workers from exploitation by foreign entrepreneurs and the vicissitudes of the free market. Our research, which uses archive material from Mexico City and Chetumal, interviews with former chicleros and entrepreneurs, as well as field research in Quintana Roo, suggests a slightly different interpretation. The Mexican state, far from contributing to the demise of personalistic relations (coyotaje) actually used these forms of mediation to manage and control the producers. The vulnerability of the chicleros to the full effect of market forces, their lack of physical and financial security, as well as corruption among some of the leaders of the cooperative movement, have all contributed to the continuance of coyotaje, often tacitly supported by state institutions. The article goes on to show that the need to meet demanding product and environmental standards, to achieve ‘certification’ as producers of a natural forest product, have compounded the problems of chicle producers today.

In this article I wish to provide an overview of the changing priorities that successive Mexican governments have given the social development sector since the administration of President Echeverria (1970–6). This will be set against a backcloth of political reform and an opening of the political space in which parties other than the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) have been allowed to function, albeit under certain constraints. In addition I will examine important changes that have been undertaken both in the nature of social policies themselves, but also in the patterns and efficiency with which public agencies have delivered this particular social good. I argue that in Mexico, as in many advanced capitalist countries since Bismarck's Prussia during the late nineteenth century, social welfare provision is an important element in the understanding of political management and 'statecraft'.1 As well as providing a temporary palliative to offset some of the negative outcomes of rapid urbanisation and economic growth based upon low wage rates and trickle-down, social policy provides an arena through which scarce societal resources may be negotiated. As I will describe, those patterns of negotiation change for a variety of reasons: as power relations shift; as economies reflate or turn into recession; as the level of state intervention and control intensifies or slackens; as our diagnosis of specific problems and the policy instruments we develop become more sophisticated and sensitive to local needs; and last, but not least in the context of Mexico, are included changes that arise from human agency as different presidents take executive office.

On January 28, 1808, the ports of Brazil, hitherto restricted to Portuguese vessels, were thrown open to direct trade with all friendly nations. Two months later, the ban on manufacturing in the colony was lifted. In October the Banco do Brasil was authorized as a bank of issue designed to supply the government's credit needs and to foster internal and external trade. The most urgent financial needs of the Portuguese government, which in November 1807 had fled to its American colony in order to escape the invading forces of Napoleon I, were met by negotiating a loan in London, the leading market for capital in the Atlantic economy. Two years later, in 1810, the Portuguese government signed a treaty with Great Britain admitting British goods into Brazil at a standard duty of 17 per cent for the next fifteen years.

The essential explanation of Argentina's 1989 hyperinflations is that the stabilisation programmes immediately preceding them drove the public sector in particular, the central bank – into ‘debt distress.’ These stabilisation programmes sought to anchor prices on an appreciated exchange rate, sustained by tight monetary policies that maintained high interest rates. The problem was that the government and the central bank had heavy domestic-debt burdens, and their combined interest bill far exceeded their non-interest surplus. To finance the interest without creating money, the government and central bank had to add continually to the outstanding debt stock as they capitalised the interest due. The debt swelled, and interest rates were pressured upward. Heavy pressure against the exchange rate, devaluation and hyperinflation then ensued when the public-sector debt stock exceeded what financial markets could be persuaded to hold at reasonable interest rates.

El Salvador has undergone a deep economic transformation over recent decades, from a model based on agro-exports to an open, transnational service-based economy. This transformation has occurred in a context dominated historically by a small group of elite families that formed family-owned diversified business groups (DBGs). This paper studies the leading groups' strategies in confronting transnationalisation. It shows that the DBGs have adapted to the new realities through a combination of sector shifts, internationalisation and the adoption of different kinds of relationships with multinationals. In spite of this, there is little evidence that the DBGs have become less important or subordinate to multinational corporations. Rather, they have, in different ways, exploited their local and regional knowledge and networks to confront competition at home and expand at the regional level.

I argue here that economic activity fell considerably in the first three decades of Paraguay's early national period, below levels it had attained in the late colonial period and would attain again only after the mid-nineteenth century. I attribute this economic depression primarily to regional political fragmentation and the institutional regression it triggered. In the 1810s, the United Provinces of the River Plate sought to keep the former Viceroyalty of the River Plate under a single federal government, but failed to prevent Paraguay's early secession. Their subsequent trade blockades and military threats had profound economic and political effects on Paraguay: revenues from foreign trade taxation fell, scale economies in defence and justice provision vanished, a standing army emerged, government budget deficits worsened, mercantilist regulations heightened, the fiscal burden increased, and transactions costs generally rose. Proponents of federation, more representative governments, and freer trade progressively declined, while supporters of secession, political absolutism, and government regulation became ever more prominent. In the 1820s, blockade relaxations exacerbated economic intervention by the state, which substantially redistributed property rights in land towards itself. In the 1830s, renewed blockading had more than proportional negative effects on economic activity, which remained below late colonial levels at least until international waterways became freely navigable shortly after mid-century. Colonial absolutism and mercantilism may be said to have been restored with a vengeance. Long-run economic performance worsened.

This paper analyses the role played by US economic assistance during the administrations of Jânio Quadros and João Goulart in Brazil (1961–4). It focuses on the negotiation and implementation of financial agreements associated with the Alliance for Progress, President Kennedy's aid programme for Latin America. It demonstrates that the Alliance had a positive impact during Quadros' administration, providing substantial resources to the country and placing economic growth ahead of economic stabilisation as the principal criterion for aid. Circumstances changed, however, when João Goulart became president, resulting in serious funding constraints. The paper suggests that the main reason for this was political, specifically regarding Washington's perception of Goulart's links with communist groups.

This article discusses the distinct historical phases in the development of the Nicaraguan Atlantic Coast region as the essential background to an analysis of the process of autonomy currently unfolding there. It identifies three main periods: English colonial rule; enclave economy when US companies were involved in a number of extractive enterprises; and, finally, control by the Sandinistas who came to power in 1979 after the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship.

The Atlantic Coast has been a forgotten area of study. Only recently, because of the Miskito Indian question, has the academic world and the public at large taken more interest. The tendency nevertheless has been to focus on the treatment of the Miskito population (and especially its temporary relocation from its traditional lands) not only as the most important issue, but as the only issue. While the Miskitos have been a proper cause for concern the Miskito question is only a small aspect of a complex set of social, political, economic and ethnic relations existing on the Atlantic Coast. The Miskitos are but one of six ethnic groups living on the Atlantic Coast.

Existing research shows that the ideas of judges shape their behaviour. A natural next question to ask is, where do these ideas come from? Yet, there is little empirical evidence regarding the content and distribution of these ideas and even less evidence regarding the sources of these ideas, especially how ideas transfer or diffuse among judges. In this article, a survey of judges in the Mexican state of Michoacán generates original data on the attitudes and professional ties among these legal elites, and a mixed-methods design examines the diffusion of these attitudes along these ties, sequencing quantitative network analyses and interviews with judges to strengthen causal inferences. The core finding that the social structure of judges influences the attitudes judges hold contributes a valuable analytic complement to scholarship on comparative judicial behaviour, and clarifies our understanding of the role of judicial networks in strengthening democracy and the rule of law.

Scholarly studies that consider the relationship between economic dependence and foreign policy reveal a wide variety of dependent foreign policy behaviour. As a body, the dependent foreign policy literature lacks the theoretical continuity needed to understand and organise this empirical diversity. Such foreign policy diversity is particularly observable in capitalist Latin America. Despite the entire region's significant economic weakness and dependence on the USA, leaders implement foreign policies as defiant as Oscar Arias's peace plan for Central America and as apparently acquiescent as Carlos Salinas de Gortari's agreeing to a Free Trade Agreement between Mexico and the USA. Progress in theory building in the area of dependent foreign policy, therefore, has particular implications for the study of Latin American foreign policy, which has been dominated by individual case studies that too rarely place their findings in a theoretical context.

Homicide statistics are a widely accepted metric of security and democracy. This article argues for a focus on how bodies come or do not come to be counted – of what happens before states enumerate. The experience of São Paulo relates that how many people die and how many do not is connected to the governance of an organised crime group known as the PCC. The punishment practices of the PCC and groups like it throughout Latin America reshape the lived paradigm of governance over life and death, albeit in concealed ways. Statistics are produced by and are productive of a de jure state, different from the state de facto. The acceptance of state-made homicide figures, whether for analysis, visualisation or political claims, is consequential for the future of lived security and social science knowledge production.

This article is the first of its kind to offer a quantitative estimation of the evolution of Latin American agricultural production and productivity between 1950 and 2008. It also uncovers the extent to which the increases in production were due to increases in factors of production or to efficiency gains. Our findings reveal that efficiency gains made a rather modest contribution to the substantial increase in production, although their role became increasingly large over time and were highly significant between 1994 and 2008. Capital was the most important productive factor in explaining increases in output.

This article examines how neoliberal multicultural governance shapes the political imaginaries and practices of rural indigenous Guatemalans in the town of San Pedro Necta. Decades of counter-insurgency warfare have displaced radical politics into sanctioned forms of ethnic empowerment, memory and development, but most indigenous sampedranos have maintained radical investments. Persistent political violence, stalled reforms and clientelist favouritism undermined multicultural inclusion, development and optimism regarding the 1996 peace accords, and weakened community autonomy. The resulting mix of pessimism, unmet needs and divisionism has discouraged progressive politics and normalised political disengagement and, increasingly, self-interested affiliations with multiple conservative parties, including corrupt authoritarian populists implicated in genocide.

This article utilises an ethnographic case study from Nicaragua to analyse people's everyday experiences of wartime violence and postwar privation. A great deal of literature dealing with political instability in war-torn countries has approached this issue by examining the societal manifestations of violence, while relatively less attention has been paid to people's everyday experiences of conflict and pain. This study focuses on the several waves of violence, displacement, and distress Nicaraguan people have suffered in recent years, beginning with their traumatic experiences of the civil war in the 1980s to the current postwar era characterised by political instability and socio-economic insecurity.

This article critically examines reasons for the persistent use of states of emergency (SOEs) as a tool of crime control in Jamaica and risks associated with normalising these measures in small, low-capacity, competitive democracies in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). We attend to the question of permanent SOEs as an issue of law and certain policing methods becoming normalised. This differs from scholars who think about the use of permanent SOEs as suspension of law or executive rule and make a clear distinction between law and violence and normalcy and emergency. Our findings show that persistent usage of SOEs in Jamaica reflects the incapacity of the state to control violent crime as well as its effort to strengthen its coercive capabilities and compensate for the ineffectiveness of the police. It is also a response to public demand for SOE policing. State strengthening is a necessary condition for a more peaceful and law-abiding society but is also a carrier of risks of democratic degeneration via rights-disregarding policing. Nonetheless, we have seen authoritarian management of crime without descent into authoritarianism, in general, and strong boundary-marking and patrolling by some state-oversight institutions that enjoy the support of civil society.

This article assesses the impact, if any, of Spanish and British Court rulings on the Pinochet case on human rights progress in Chilean courts. Chilean judges chafe at the notion that foreign courts exerted any influence on them, arguing that, based solely on Chilean law and the evidence already before them, they were empowered to strip Pinochet of his immunity, and proceeded to do so. Human rights critics allege that the courts had been thoroughly immobilised by the authoritarian legacy to which they were enjoined. No progress at all would have occurred were it not for the dramatic verdicts handed down in British courts. The author contends that change was underfoot in Chile prior to Pinochet's arrest in London, but that Europe set Chile on a faster and steeper trajectory toward justice than would have been possible otherwise. It did so by shaming the Chilean Government into pressuring its own high courts to deliver a modicum of justice to the victims of Pinochet.

This article examines the role of the Protestant Moravian Church in the politicisation of Miskitu ethnic identity, and on the mobilisation of the Miskitu against the Sandinistas during the 1980s. It argues that changes in the institution of the Church during the 1960s and 70s, as a result of state policy, socio-economic context and internal conflicts within Miskitu society, led to Moravianism becoming a cultural marker of Miskitu ethnicity. At the same time, the encounter with and appropriation of the pastoral tactics of a Catholic priest resulted in a radicalisation of Miskitu Moravian pastors on indigenous issues. When the Miskitu came to mobilise against the Sandinistas, the Moravian Church was the expressive vehicle and the institutional means through which the mobilisation took place. The article reveals how politicised ethnic identities find their expression in religious institutions.

The 1989–1990 Colombian student movement played a key role in bringing about a constituent assembly to draft a new national constitution. This article utilises contemporary social movement theory, secondary sources and interviews with student activists to examine the trajectory of this movement. Key explanatory variables of social movement theory – political opportunity structure, organisational form, the framing process and the repertoire of collective action – provide useful insights into the origins, impact and ultimate demise of the Colombian student movement. Judicious use of such variables could benefit research on other social movements in Latin America.

This study examines an episode in the social history of state planning by focusing on the 1951 Peronist letter writing campaign. Perón's request for popular suggestions to the Second Five-Year Plan was met with enthusiasm from men and women across Argentina. As with other cases of state planning in the postwar world, the Peronist model of planned progress inspired many popular sector individuals and organisations, in part by offering them an intimate mode of political participation within an increasingly restrictive order. This appeal cannot be attributed to Peronist mass politics alone; rather, the regime's ideal of macro-level national planning also reinforced pre-existing practices of social activism in Argentine local communities.