This article examines the recent trends in extending the global garment production process to the rural areas of the Laguna region and the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. As these remote regions are incorporated into global markets, several similar patterns and rationale are found behind the policies followed by state governments to attract these types of enterprises. The implications for regional economic development are also discussed.

The Chávez government introduced a ‘Bolivarian’ national curriculum to promote radically different understandings of Venezuelan history and identity. We place the fate of this reform initiative within the broader study of state formation and nationalism. Scholars have long identified mass schooling as the key institution for socialising citizens and cultivating national loyalties, and many states have attempted to alter the nationalist content of schooling with these ends in mind. Venezuela constitutes an ideal case for identifying the specific conditions under which transformations of official national ideologies do and do not gain broader resonance. Using evidence derived from textbook analysis and semi-structured interviews with educational officials and teachers in Caracas, we highlight a new argument, showing that intrastate tensions between the central government and teachers, heightened by a well-established cultural machinery and by teachers’ increasing exclusion from the Chavista political coalition, explain the limited success in government efforts to implement Bolivarian nationalism through the school curriculum.

After the Chilean junta abolished party democracy in September 1973, it announced plans for a new constitution modeled on corporatist lines. Although, to date, few concrete expressions of these proposals have emerged, there is enough evidence since 1973 to suggest the lines along which the junta is thinking, and this indicates that not only international factors but also two sources of native historical inspiration are at work. First, and most important, Chile's military dictators were considering elevating an existing infrastructure of government-certified functional interest groups to replace the outlawed parties as intermediaries between the State and the individual. These gremios (private economic sctoral organizations, such as the National Society of Agriculture) had traditionally shaped public decisions both as representatives of their occupational fields and as permanent, often official, participants in state agencies concerned with their production sectors.

In searching for the roots of Chile's persistent economic frustrations, numerous investigators have turned their attention to the period between the War of the Pacific and the Great Depression. During that half century Chile's elites enjoyed the bounty of the nitrate age but, perhaps lulled by the glowing trade statistics, generous fiscal revenues and general aura of prosperity which nitrates provided, neglected to develop alternative sources of national income for the future.

This paper studies the obstacles that hinder the formation of linkages among local firms, multinational corporations and universities in the Costa Rican information and communication technologies cluster. It examines both the social and the economic reasons for forming or participating in linkages, ranging from the capabilities of potential partners to compliance with customs. The research is based on qualitative information collected over four years through more than 150 direct and detailed interviews with different stakeholders in the cluster. Costa Rica is often used as a positive benchmark of cluster policy in Latin America, but it is argued here that linkages among firms in the sector have developed much more slowly than anticipated.

For the past decade and a half, Latin American Catholicism has been a focal point of extraordinary religious change and political activism. Although the first visible signs of religious renewal in the traditionally conservative Latin American church did not appear until the early 1960s, a mere decade later, in 1972, Christians for Socialism had held an international meeting of radical Christians in Santiago, Chile. Today, Latin American bishops and Christian base communities throughout the continent are deeply involved in the struggle to preserve human rights against the encroachments of authoritarian regimes. One of the most controversial aspects of the changing Latin American church has been the emergence of organized movements of Christian radicals who sought to use religion as a base from which to transform society through political action. Sizeable priest movements of the left appeared in such countries as Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru, where they had a notable impact on national politics. Acting from the premise that Christian faith must be linked to social action to be meaningful, radicalized Christians joined a dialogue with Marxism, denounced social injustices, provided leadership to politically marginal groups and struggled to change the very nature of the Latin American Catholic Church. The rationale and justification of such action was provided in the collection of writings known as the theology of liberation.

‘The liberation of South America’, wrote Castlereagh in 1807, ‘must be accomplished through the wishes and exertions of the inhabitants; but the change can only be operated…under the protection and with the support of an auxiliary British force’. The argument, familiar in political debate, was rare in official policy. Britain, it is true, had long regarded Spanish America as a source of strength for her rivals and a potential market for her manufactures. After the Peace of 1783 interest became more intense as British observers, impressed by the vulnerability of empires, claimed to see signs of rapid decline in the empire of Spain. Intelligence reports on Spanish America accumulated in government departments; plans for British attacks flowed from official and private sources; and a section of merchant opinion increased its agitation for military intervention in the area. Yet, apart from the conquest of Trinidad in 1797 and the attempted conquest of the Río de la Plata in 1806–7, British policy towards Spanish America was diffident in its approach and vague in its intent. There were, indeed, compelling reasons why Spanish America should remain on the margin of British policy. Britain's existing European and imperial interests necessarily dominated her policy and absorbed her resources. Until 1806, moreover, existing channels of trade in Europe and the rest of the world were sufficient to take the bulk of British industrial production. And military resources were usually insufficient to release troops either from Europe or the West Indies for major operations in a new theatre of war.

An analysis of the seven daily newspapers with the widest circulation in Argentina, including the Peronist La Epoca, shows the humanisation of capitalism and social justice as the main topics of discussion in Argentine society between 1930 and 1946. Newspapers and parties debated the foundations of a much desired democratic revival and depicted the government of F. D. Roosevelt as a model to be followed. By 1946 most Argentines supported the implementation of policies similar to those of Roosevelt. In the light of this, Perón and the Unión Democrática competed to present themselves as the Argentine version of the US president. The deciding factor in the 1946 elections was not the defence of national sovereignty but rather the impression of which candidate would be capable of developing a democratic system which included economic and social concerns.

This article examines the Brazilian banking system from 1906 to 1930, and analyses two potential constraints to dynamic banking: government economic policy and concepts of ownership, as expressed through property rights. It finds that the banking system was quite dynamic in supporting economic change. The problems of, and constraints to, banking development are typically declared, or assumed, to result from the exigencies of government monetary policy. The results of monetary policy for private-sector development emerge as significantly less than existing historiography would suggest. However, concepts and protection of property rights constrained the ability of banks to expand their activities.

This article explores the effects of changing exposure to world trade and relative factor abundance on the institutional and economic development of a paradigmatic Spanish-American frontier colony, Paraguay. The problem is conceptualized within a neoinstitutionalist staples model in which – during the long sixteenth-century trade expansion – the colonial state delegated the provision of defence onto individuals who financed it by restricting indigenous labour mobility and extracting the resulting monopsony rents. Despite the encomienda's stated intentions, its inefficient incentive system actually contributed to the decline in indigenous population and provincial security shortcomings. As trade contracted and defence needs rose during the seventeenth-century crisis the crown commuted the labour services of Jesuit mission Indians for contributions to defence and payments in kind and money. The mestizo peasantry remained free, but was increasingly burdened with military obligations as well.

Men and women in Chile register and vote at separate polling booths. Election results are also tabulated separately for each sex by the Ministry of Interior, down to commune level. A survey of national elections from 1952 to 1970 shows that women and men have different voting preferences. Moreover, results from the four congressional elections held since democracy was restored in 1989 demonstrate that those preferences persist to the present. By focusing on elections in the capital city of Santiago, which is divided into 52 communes (barrios) whose residents differ in their economic and educational levels, it is possible to see to what extent class and gender affect voting preferences. On the basis of an analysis of this data, this article concludes that women are consistently more likely than men to vote for conservative parties, and that this is true in every social class. Support for the left does rise among both sexes in the lower middle class, proletarian and peasant communes – but less among women than among men. The ‘gender gap’ is not usually very large (although it increases at both ends of the political spectrum), but it is persistent.

This article examines the ways in which Cuba's revolution shaped the changing politics of the Left in the United States. Using critical strategies of transnationalism, it illustrates how a dialogue developed between US activists and Cuban cultural producers, and reveals how Cuba's revolutionary discourse inflected the radical shift towards Third World nationalism. As the post-Bandung global moment brought a network of new political and cultural affiliations, Cuba's state apparatus invested in the manufacture and dissemination of tricontinental politics worldwide. This alternative moral and political imaginary lent authority to Havana's status as leader of the Third World and drew global attention to Cuba's revolutionary model in new thinking on post-colonial identity and culture. This new thinking imbibed the US Left's humanistic turn which challenged standard boundaries of race, class and nation. The dialectical nature of Cuban political discourse and social activism in the United States changed Cuban exigencies while it enticed US dissidents to experience the exception in the western hemisphere that fought for the greater moral good.

Drawing on minutes, publications, diplomatic documents and the written press, I explore the transnational networks of the Chilean right wing within Latin America in the 1950s, especially around the four Congresses against Soviet Intervention in Latin America held in Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Lima and Antigua between 1954 and 1958. I argue that the Chilean right wing's participation in those networks alongside other Latin American like-minded actors was based on both its long local experience in fighting communism and its attachment to Cold War anti-communism. In these transnational spaces, some Chilean right-wingers gained recognition and prestige, as was the case with the conservative leader Sergio Fernández Larraín, largely thanks to his systematic denunciation of supposed Soviet penetration in the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), then the ruling party in Bolivia.

On 16 October 1962, President John F. Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union was building bases in Cuba for ballistic missiles that could destroy major US cities. In the days that followed, US officials focused nearly all their attention on strategies for removing the Soviet missiles, on Soviet motives, and on the Soviet Union's reaction to the naval quarantine. Cuba was the locus of this most dramatic superpower confrontation, but Cuban perceptions, motives, and reactions were largely ignored.

This article analyses the ethno-politics of water in Argentina at the high point of European immigration, the first three decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on the drying of the Guanacache wetlands, located in the wine-producing region of Cuyo, we show how national and provincial ideologies based on ‘whitening’ and ‘civilisation’ shaped policies that favoured European immigrants at the expense of autochthonous populations in the geographic and social struggle for irrigation water. A large-scale redistribution of water resources drove the indigenisation of indigenous and criollo populations and the desertification of their land.

This article maps the contentious forms of political life that emerge when multicultural rights and non-formal gold extraction coincide. Specifically, it shows how, in the Colombian department of Chocó, Afro-descendant community councils have produced a unique form of mining governance that, while depending for its legitimacy on everyday uses of Afro-Colombian legislation, consists of the organisation, taxation and policing of mining activities that are in tension with official notions of extractive and multicultural law. In exploring such ‘underground’ cultural politics, the article highlights the limits of state-centric analyses of ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ and, accordingly, underscores the instrumental role that governed subjects play in the on-the-ground unfolding of multicultural governance regimes.

Among historians of the US Marine Corps, Major-General Merritt A. (‘Red Mike’) Edson's Río Coco Patrol is well known.1 His expedition up Nicaragua's Coco River in 1928 represented a significant step forward in what the US military would later call ‘riverine’ operations. The mission also made the career of a young officer who would lead one of the Raider Battalions in the Second World War and receive the Medal of Honor for his participation in the campaign to capture Guadalcanal.

This article offers a critical analysis of scholarship produced about Brazil's Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (BNDES) since its founding, in 1952, to 2013. BNDES has performed an important, if changing and sometimes controversial, role in Brazil's economic development over the past 60 years, especially as provider of long-term finance. This analysis of almost 1,000 texts highlights discussions about its initial organisation and mission and how the role and activities of the bank changed over time, guided by turbulent national political and economic contexts. In spite of the bank's institutional importance, however, the literature is more narrative than analytical and of limited scholarly impact, dominated as it is by the bank's authorship. We argue for independent, evidence-driven, critical analyses of the effectiveness of this important institution in promoting Brazil's economic and social development.

Many Latin American countries are moving towards increased accountability for past human rights violations, and there is a growing global consensus that international law does not allow some crimes simply to be exempted from prosecution. Uruguay has had a deeply split response to these developments. While the Supreme Court and the political elite increasingly pushed to end impunity, the public actually ratified the 1985 amnesty law protecting the military from prosecution in a 2009 plebiscite. The amnesty law was finally abolished by Parliament in 2011. This article traces the winding road from impunity to accountability in Uruguay in the context of substantial public support for impunity. It argues that, while the lack of judicial independence obstructed the quest for justice for many years, the combination of continued civil society demands for justice met by increasingly human-rights-friendly executives and liberal-minded judges (and lately also prosecutors) explains the recent advance in retributive justice.