Colombia has long been described as dominated by an oligarchy or elite that tightly controls the principal means of political influence and the avenues of social mobility. For example, in his recent study of Colombian political development, Robert Dix observes that ‘… the posts of leadership, the key decisions, and the principal social, economic, cultural and political resources of the society remain in elite hands’. Harry Kantor argues even more intensely that while Colombia has greatly changed since World War II, the traditional oligarchy clings to its power, illiteracy remains a major problem, transportation is still poor, and the eastern two-thirds of the nation's territory remains undeveloped '. At the same time, the resolution of these development problems, an unavoidable responsibility of contemporary Colombian governments, has illuminated rather than obscured observation of elite dominance over Colombian society.

Nicaragua is often held up as an exception within the Central American panorama of criminal violence, widely presented as the safest country in the region due to its particular revolutionary legacies, the (supposed) absence of transnational gangs and drug-trafficking organisations, and the National Police's representation as an efficient and professional force. This commentary proposes an alternative reading of Nicaragua's contemporary political economy of violence in order to reveal the profoundly misleading nature of this prevalent view. In particular, it highlights how Nicaragua is governed through a particular political ‘settlement’ underpinned by drug trafficking, police and judicial corruption, as well as ‘mafia state’ governance. These factors have coalesced to establish a highly efficient and engrained ‘narco-state’ whose undoing is unlikely in the short term.

A number of interpretations have recently emerged which attempt to explain the nature and sociopolitical implications of Roman Catholic base Christian communities (CEBs) in Brazil. Most studies have tended to describe these small, informal lay groups as a predominantly lower-class phenomenon which is facilitating the self-liberation of the poor from the weight of centuries-old political and economic oppression.

This article examines the relationship between pact-making and democratic transitions in Nicaragua (1988–1997) and El Salvador (1990–1997). We argue that the process of elite bargaining about regime change affects the prospects for the consolidation of democracy. We emphasise three factors: (1) the choices key actors make as they bargain about bargaining, (2) their willingness to ‘under-utilise’ their power and (3) the influence of historical and structural contingencies upon the key choices made. Essential to our discussion of historical and structural contingencies is the interrelation of domestic and international actors and the importance of demilitarisation and institutional reform. We argue that these three factors favoured El Salvador more than Nicaragua, although neither nation has overcome the political polarisation characteristic of transitional regimes.

In Costa Rica, there is a widespread belief among the public and policymakers that the country's ‘exceptional’ universal healthcare system represents a magnet for Nicaraguan immigrants. However, examining immigrants’ actual access to social policy demonstrates the importance of legal and extra-legal mechanisms of exclusion that go hand in hand with official recognition of human rights. This paper critically assesses the relationship between migrants and the state, and public social policy in particular, in both sending and receiving country. We analyse the extent to which Nicaraguan migrant families on both sides of the Costa Rica–Nicaragua migration system incorporate public social protection in their welfare strategies. Drawing on two sets of qualitative data, we find that, on both sides of the border, migrants and their families display very similar commodified practices of welfare strategies, side-stepping the state and purchasing services in the private sector.

It is difficult to state positively whether truly ‘autonomous’ economic thinking has ever existed in Latin America. Nevertheless, even if this reservation is correct, some ‘autonomy’ has existed in such currents as structuralism and the dependency school. In both there are undeniable outside influences. In the first, there is a clear association with the Keynesian school which took over economic thought in the developed countries in the 1930s and led to aggressive state interventionism. In the second, the additional influence of Marxism is also evident. However, these currents in regional thought, together with the external influences mentioned, produced an interpretation of economic and social developments in the region which gave them a very autonomous character. They also demonstrated a great capacity to influence currents of thought outside Latin America. They were, in fact, one of the most important foundations of Third World thought, which developed and spread in the 1960s, and they have had a very noticeable impact on academic ideas in the northern hemisphere, although more especially in social sciences other than economics.

On 31 January 1849 the representative of the Peruvian government, General Osma, and the Committee of Spanish American Bondholders signed an agreement in London on the terms for settling debts to British investors which had been in default since October 1825. More than a year before, the Peruvian president had spoken of his administration's desire ‘to bring this matter at once to a termination, and revive the credit which the Republic lost in Europe almost at the same time as it came into existence’ Peruvian credit was, as hoped, restored by the act of good faith in 1849, and was further boosted by the government's growing income from the guano trade, which had been in operation for almost a decade. Having wiped the slate clean in 1849, Peru went on to expand its overseas debt commitments and become, in the space of a few years, the largest Latin American borrower on the London money market. The year 1849, therefore, marks a notable turning point in Peruvian financial history.

This article offers an interpretation of the crisis of the Bolivian Left in the mid-1980s, perhaps the most spectacular of all those suffered by the Latin American Left over the course of the decade. The author shows that the main distinguishing feature of the Bolivian case was the exceptional political power of the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB). It was this that enabled the union federation first to impose a highly expansive wage policy on the Unión Democrática y Popular (UDP) government, and then to veto its attempts to move towards a more realistic financial policy. The author goes on to argue that, in this second period, when the undesired consequences of the government's economic policy were sufficiently obvious to persuade the union to change its original strategies, the institutional structure that the COB had inherited from the past restricted and ultimately eliminated the union's strategic capacity. In this interpretation, the power of the union vis-à-vis a weak government, coupled with the union's own weakness as a corporate actor, gave rise to an accelerated process of institutional decline under the UDP government. This process was marked by the increasing prevalence of particularist and partial rationalities over the collective rationality, taking Bolivia to a Hobbesian situation, in which any actor capable of imposing a new order – however authoritarian or exclusive – would enjoy widespread support and legitimacy.

This article presents a portrait of New Granada's colonial lawyers. Though it focuses primarily on individuals qualified to practise law before the Audiencia, it deals not just with practising lawyers as such but also with those who, despite being qualified to practise law, ended up choosing other occupations; in particular, joining the bureaucracy. It examines the social characteristics, family strategies, and bureaucratic careers of these professionals to demonstrate how, as chief competitors for state jobs, lawyers complemented their clans' power in important ways. By providing a vital component of the colonial elite's survival kit – bureaucratic power – they increased their families' overall influence, honour, and social status. In doing so, some lawyers came to build true family-bureaucratic networks which proved resistant to the late colonial Bourbon reforms that sought to undo them.

In recent years, the military institutions of societies both past and present have become an increasingly active field of study and research. Brazil, where the professional military play so commanding a role in the national life today, has received a substantial share of attention. But studies on the Brazilian, military have hitherto been principally concerned with the period since the fall of the Empire (1889). This is understandable.

This article analyses the impact at a local level of the changes that have been introduced within the framework of the Plan Nacional del Buen Vivir (National Plan for Good Living, PNBV) in Ecuador since 2007. It assesses the extent to which there has been real change in local administration and governance and, if so, the impact in areas such as economic development, innovation and quality of life. Fieldwork was carried out across three towns and cantons – Zaruma, Piñas and Portovelo – in the province of El Oro. Historically, these have been characterised by their dependence on the primary export model that the government of Rafael Correa has sought to move beyond. The progress and limitations of this process are assessed within the context of the National Plan for Good Living.

Bolivia is one of the poorest countries of the hemisphere and its rural people have among the lowest life expectancy, health-care standards and educational levels of all Latin Americans. It is the only country in South America with a ranking of ‘low’ on the Human Development Index for 1991 compiled by the United Nations, a measure combining the per capita product with such factors as longevity and access to education. At the same time, the most valuable export of the country, cocaine, depends on the coca supplied by peasant cultivators in the regions where it grows. The explosion of the international cocaine trade has had profound repercussions, both positive and negative, on the lives of the campesinos of the Bolivian Yungas, who happened to supply, since colonial times and before, the coca destined for traditional consumption within the country; it was their most reliable cash crop. The conversion of their ancient crop to an illicit commodity of high, concentrated value has created the opportunity for some to experience a marginally enhanced standard of living (at a time when other rural Bolivians were seeing their own abysmal standard depressed even further), but at the same time has increased the risks they would run if they entered the lucrative but illegal cocaine trade.

During the second half of the eighteenth century the Spanish Crown monopolised the tobacco industry in its American colonies, creating vertically integrated organisations which included factories for the production of cigars and cigarettes. A detailed analysis of the regulations, organisation and policies applied during the Peruvian viceroyalty suggests that Bourbon officials were effective managers. The monopoly was successful at curbing contraband and extracting rents. The evolution of monopoly policies, however, reflected political constraints on the Crown's efforts to raise revenues. The archival evidence suggests that Bourbon officials closed the tobacco factories in Peru in 1791 as a result of public opposition.

Against the backdrop of ethnic political mobilisation in Latin America, this article examines how, as Quetzaltenango's first Mayan mayor, Rigoberto Quemé Chay transformed two interrelated dimensions of citizenship: political culture and the politics of belonging. It analyses the way in which citizenship is constituted at three levels. The first is within Xel-jú as an indigenous political organisation whose practices contrast with ladino ways of doing politics. The second is in relation to internal divisions between the militant indigenous line and the intercultural group. The third is within Xel-jú as a city-centred, middle-class-oriented indigenous organisation rather than a rural, indigenous community organisation. This article argues that transformations in citizenship are limited by the political, economic and ethnic context, and that overlapping systems of repression still prevent the participation of marginalised groups in Quetzaltenango.

This article focuses on the months before the Spanish-American war began in April 1898 and addresses two related questions: first, why was the opposition to the war so strong in the United States; second, why did it not prevail? To explore these questions, the papers of the McKinley administration are examined, along with the Congressional Record and forty-one US newspapers, as well as twelve major European newspapers (British, French, German and Spanish) and the relevant documents from the British and Spanish archives. It is only in the press that one can find a coherent, well-articulated and explicit explanation of the antiwar position.

In 1879, for the first time, Argentina exported more wheat than it imported. A generation later the Republic figured among the top five exporters of wheat in the world and wheat had become its premier earner of foreign exchange. The expansion was by any account remarkable.1

With the expulsion of the Indians from the Pampa Húmeda in the late 1870s, hundreds of thousands of hectares of arable and highly fertile land were suddenly made available to agriculturalists. Railways, built largely with British capital, provided the means to ship new agricultural produce out of the region to the newly constructed ports. Immigrants flocked from Europe to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the vacant land, either as new property owners, as tenants or as wage-earners. The surge in the supply of land, labour and capital initiated a period of growth in Argentina, a growth which was shared by other regions of recent settlement which responded to similar opportunities.2

Prosperity and increasing inequality may well be the most suitable terms to describe at first glance the evolution of the Central American economies from the post-war period until the beginning of the eighties. Prosperity based on a very favourable external economic situation was characteristic of the fifties, with promotion of technological modernization and some diversification in the export sector. Sustained economic growth continued during the following decade, thanks to structural change brought about by industrialization and by the process of Central American integration. This upward trend began to break up in the seventies, and the whole region was plunged into crisis and instability. Although the gloomy side of the new international situation cannot be denied, twenty or thirty years of prosperity seem to have created internal conditions sufficient to nurture a social conflict of vast proportions, which embraces since at least 1978 not only the economic sector but all aspects of Central American life.

In the second half of the 1930s, confidential information from and concerning Latin America reaching Washington promoted the suspicion, and ultimately the conviction, that the security of much of Latin America, and by extension that of the United States, was imperiled by the Axis powers. Officials in Washington were convinced that the Axis menace to the Western Hemisphere was not in the form of a direct military threat, but rather through the use of propaganda and subversion. Such concern – based in part on fascism's appeal to Latin America's elites – was aroused particularly by the efforts of the Axis powers to organise their own national communities in Latin America into instruments of their foreign policy and by the simultaneous mounting of a propaganda campaign intended to win over public opinion in the Americas and to weaken the support for democracy.1

The Depression in tin began in 1929 as the price fell towards £200 per ton. By the beginning of 1931 a cartel was organised which was able to reduce production to the point where by 1934 real prices and incomes had been restored to levels comparable with those enjoyed during the boom of the mid-1920s. The tin cartel has received extensive attention, which has tended to be rather critical and has focused on the impact on the largest producer, Malaya.1 Although Bolivia was the major beneficiary of cartelisation, there has been comparatively little analysis of her relationship with the cartel.2

Any attempt to define the changes in the Peruvian political economy that have taken place since 1968 1 must be made in terms of the relationship between the state and domestic capital on the one hand and foreign capital on the other, and must offer an explanation of the way in which this military- controlled state has tended to replace the former and establish a new relationship with the latter. In particular, the confrontation between the government and foreign capital, and the significance of internal ownership reforms cannot be understood without reference to the development of Peruvian capitalism before 1968.