Across Latin America, many former presidents have faced criminal prosecutions on corruption charges, with widely varied outcomes. As with an impeachment, law and politics intersect in the prosecution of a president. In this essay, I examine this nexus by mapping the actions of agents who mobilise to influence how the justice system processes presidential prosecutions: first, accountability actors located in state-based institutions and civil society; second, partisan actors in the executive and legislative branches; and third, defendants, and their partisan and civil society supporters. This study argues that variations in the make-up, resources and alignment of these sets of actors fundamentally shape the trajectory of legal cases. Proceedings against three former presidents of Ecuador are analysed: Abdalá Bucaram, Jamil Mahuad and Gustavo Noboa.

This article analyses the variables shaping economic relations between Argentina and Brazil in the 1939–5 5 period, namely changes in the international economy, bilateral trade, the industrial structure and domestic politics. It is argued that although rivalry prevailed in most of the period this was qualified by the interest of Argentina and Brazil in securing the gains from trade and in enhancing their position in the international system. The balance of these contending forces was a pattern of limited or restrained cooperation. If significant trade concessions were offered, their institutional framework remained unstable and fragile. This was reflected in the uncertainty that plagued bilateral trade and in the failure of more ambitious initiatives aimed at economic integration, as those proposed in the Pinedo Plan and in the economic union agreements of 1953–54.

Latin American countries have a long tradition of attempting to diversify their external relations. In this context, since the end of the Cold War East Asia has gained increasing importance. However, despite the rising interest in improved political and economic links, these attempts at diversification showed only modest results, Chile being a noteworthy exception within this overall trend. The following analysis presents an empirical overview of the development of relations between Latin America and East Asia with special emphasis on Chile, demonstrating how domestic transformation has affected the Asia-Pacific policies of Latin American countries. The main conclusion is that while in most countries domestic conflicts over the future course of political and economic development have hampered the creation of a consistent Asia-Pacific policy, the elite settlement in Chile has enabled strategic actors to create a policy network which provides the institutional basis for successfully diversifying external relations to East Asia.

This article considers the ways in which provincial elites in the Peruvian Andes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries addressed the task of dismantling colonial institutions and relations. It draws on material from a municipal archive to trace how the land-for-labour ‘pact of reciprocity’ linking the town of Tarma both to the central state and to the indigenous hinterland was re-worked and eventually brought to an end. The contexts in which a postcolonial discourse of the Indian emerged are explored, and are understood as linked to struggles between local government and central state over the deployment of indigenous labour.

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.

Bringing together diverse scholars such as Arthur Ramos, Édison Carneiro and Gilberto Freyre, Brazil's First Afro-Brazilian Congress of 1934 encapsulated a pivotal transition in the history of the social sciences and race in Brazil. The Congress, organised by Freyre, represented an attempt by many scholars to break with racial determinism and to emphasise the importance of culture rather than race. This approach seemed to offer increased potential for social equality. However, the new focus on culture reproduced the same hierarchies that scholars were trying to escape. As this article demonstrates, scholars at the Congress redeemed the black race through the use of a new cultural framework, but the role ascribed to African culture was still bound by the same concepts of superiority and inferiority.

This article examines the process of militarisation in Honduras in the 1954–1963 period, also the public reaction to it and its political consequences. The extant literature ignores the significant public opposition to an institutionalised military. As an autonomous military institution was first taking shape in the 1954–57 period, the militarisation issue was one of the dominant themes in the national press, and a sophisticated public debate took place between school teachers and military officials over whether the country needed a military at all, or whether the country should follow the Costa Rican example of military proscription. The 1957–59 period witnessed pressures from politicians, students, and labour to curtail military power and excesses. Finally, the platform of the favourite candidate in the 1963 presidential elections called for demilitarisation and again the Costa Rican model was a high-profile alternative. Demilitarisation played well with the masses, and this contributed to the preemptive military coup just days before the elections. Militarisation affected power relations and undermined democratic consolidation.

Recent research on Costa Rican social and economic history has made notable advances regarding the classic coffee economy of the 1850–1950 period. Major works by Hall and Stone, and essays by Cardoso, Pérez, Vega, and Samper have offered suggestive new materials and perspectives on the basic dynamics of coffee culture and the social antagonisms which developed within it. Nevertheless, the differences in opinion in this literature on the coffee economy, in particular the degree of land concentration and proletarianization within the Central Valley region, tend to obscure an even more basic agreement of the pre-coffee starting point: the predominance of dispersed, self-sufficient smallholders on privately owned plots, with a very weak elite structure and minimal social division of labor in artisanry or agriculture.

Following the ends to the civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, the revolutionary coalitions that had led the fight against authoritarian regimes began to fracture. However, none of the splinter parties that broke from the Sandinista National Liberation Front, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, and Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit has succeeded on their own as political parties. In this article, I argue that there is no single reason to explain the poor performances of the Democratic Party (PD), the Renovating Movement (MR), and the Democratic Front Party (FDR) in El Salvador, the Sandinista Renovation Movement (Renovate-MRS) and the Movement to Rescue Sandinismo (Rescue-MRS) in Nicaragua, and the New Nation Alliance (ANN) in Guatemala. However, their limited financial resources, alliances with non-revolutionary centrist and centre-right parties, and voter tendency to overlook internal ideological and personal debates within the original political parties, especially the FSLN and FMLN, have not helped.

On a hot day in early 1890, American steam dredgers lowered their scoops into the mud of the San Juan River in Nicaragua, and so began the job of connecting the seas.

This article examines the political imbroglios surrounding the tenure of José García de León y Pizarro (1778–84) as visitador and president-regent of the Audiencia or Kingdom of Quito, in order to demonstrate the deep political divisions that emerged in Spain's Atlantic empire over the Bourbon Reforms. García Pizarro's policies strengthened the colonial state and produced a dramatic increase in crown revenues, but they also led to a groundswell of protest from local elites and even provoked the condemnation of his successors. These political struggles in Quito reveal the many competing viewpoints about the reform and renovation of Spanish Empire. The Bourbon Reforms emerged from a series of hotly contested political struggles on both sides of the Atlantic, leading to patchy and even distinctive outcomes in different regions of the empire. This political contestation also helps to explain why no coherent, commonly accepted plan for the reform of Spain's Atlantic empire ever emerged during the century.

The Mayan Indians of Guatemala share the burdens of local government by taking on a set of public duties, thereby maintaining community cohesion as well as political autonomy. This article analyses recent changes in this cargo system in a context defined by development, new representations of ‘Mayanness’, and multicultural politics. It shows how sovereignty – grounded in a distinct philosophy of leadership that generates meaningful self-rule – is crucial in facilitating political transformation towards more democratic arrangements at the cost of rule by the elders.

Three main political parties regularly contested elections in Argentina in the late nineteenth century: the Partido Autonomista Nacional (PAN), the Unión Cívica Nacional (UCN), and the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR). However, little is known about the nature of party competition, the contesting parties' electoral performances or the characteristics of their electoral support. Discussion of the electoral politics prior to 1912, when the vote became secret and compulsory for all Argentine males over 18 years of age, has been dominated by notions of corruption, repression and lack of opportunity for popular participation. While in other countries such assessments have been revised in recent years after unreformed elections were analysed in more detail, accounts of electoral repression are still dominant in discussions of the pre-1912 Argintine electoral system.

After the world food crisis of the early 1970s, food policies became a ‘national priority’ for Colombian development. Colombia was the first country to implement the multi-sectoral approach proposed by international organisations. However, in the past 30 years Colombian governments have presented nutrition as a minor health issue. During the recent world food crisis, the government insisted that Colombia was one of the most food-secure countries in the world. In seemingly similar circumstances, why was food policy made a priority in the 1970s and not in the new millennium? We address this question with the help of securitisation theory. We argue that in the 1970s, the government successfully securitised the food issue in the context of a reduction of external food aid and a failed land reform. Recent national governments (as opposed to some local governments) have had little interest in a securitising move since the related food sovereignty discourses threaten their free market policies.

Did Latin American privatisation policies fail because of flawed implementation of fundamentally sound policies or because privatisation policies were themselves seriously flawed? Using the Brazilian electric power reforms as a narrative tool, this paper examines the causal chain assumed by large-scale privatisation policies that were implemented as part of structural reform and adjustment programmes. The paper concludes that many privatisation policies and the economic stabilisation programmes within which they were embedded were not mutually reinforcing in the way that policymakers had expected, and that in their application much of what privatisation theories had claimed was lost in translation.

In this article, I discuss São Paulo's legal apparatus in respect of environmental noise. I begin by situating my analysis within broader citizenship issues. I then focus on three debates on noise control in the city. The first two debates involve noise ordinances created in the 1990s and enforced by São Paulo's Programa de Silêncio Urbano (Urban Silence Programme, PSIU). The first revolves around the evangelical lawmakers’ attempts to exclude, minimize or hinder the impact of a noise ordinance on religious services. The second debate focuses on an ordinance that required bars without acoustic insulation to close at 1 am – a demand that faced strong opposition from businesses involved in the night-time economy. The third debate describes the recent attempt of a group of acoustic engineers to lobby the city administration for the systematic mapping of traffic noise. I contend that environmental noise is a fruitful point of entry to investigate how the state mediates universal equality and individual freedom, welfare principles and economic gain.

The movement of many vessels up and down the coasts of the Viceroyalty of Peru in the seventeenth century marked the existence of a lively commercial system within the Spanish Empire. In many respects, this maritime economy evolved quite apart and under different influences from the Atlantic world. The nature and dynamics of this trade and navigation within the viceroyalty's domain in this century are the subject of this brief exploration. The primary goal is to outline the major aspects of trade and navigation and describe some meaningful trends. Secondarily, a consideration of the subject seems to reveal die existence of an economy, lively, robust and expansive diat stands in sharp contrast to die ardiridc, decaying state of Spain's general economy in die seventeentii century.

The Paraguayan liberal republic, spanning from the end of the War of the Triple Alliance until the end of the Chaco War, is one of the most under-researched and probably one of the most undervalued periods of Paraguayan history and has only recently elicited some scholarly interest.1 During this period capital accumulation developed exclusively in the private domain, economic policies were informed by laissez–faire doctrines, and the political arena embodied, if mostly theoretically, the liberal principles of public contestation and elite competition. Those basic and distinctive traits, and in that particular combination, are found in no other period of Paraguayan history. It therefore makes conceptual sense to speak of the liberal republic as a distinct period in Paraguayan history.

Latin Americanists have become increasingly intrigued with questions concerning rural labour and oppression. In recent publications, traditional interpretations of peonage, labour contracting, wage labour and other topics have been questioned by historians with access to new documentary materials. Peru has been the setting for much of this discussion because of the important changes which occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the unusual opportunity to understand them since the creation of the Archivo del Fuero Agrario.1

Scholars interested in labour in Latin America have traditionally paid little attention to trade unions’ legal mobilisation. However, the increasing number of legal complaints filed by workers with labour ministries and/or the courts in countries like Argentina, Brazil and Chile calls for a more serious debate on the role that trade unions play in this process. This article focuses on the Chilean case. Drawing on various sources, it shows that Chilean unions have turned legal complaints into a weapon to gain more rights and curb employers’ power. This process has involved the strongest and most combative unions, and is due to two historical conditions: (1) the obstacles placed in the way of successful resort to more disruptive tactics; (2) the increase in institutional opportunities to report infringements of the law. Overall, the article challenges the current image of the Chilean unions by foregrounding their agency and their achievements over the last decade.