Centred around a May 1970 shooting at the Israeli embassy in Asunción, this article traces a chain of actions and reactions that began with Israel's victory in the Six-Day War in June 1967 and ended after the June 1972 verdict of a Paraguayan court regarding two Palestinians. Situated among Israeli officials, Palestinian refugees and Syrian-Lebanese elites, authoritarian Paraguay was not only encompassed by but also accommodated the post-1967 Arab–Israeli conflict, revealing the connection between the ‘areas’ of South America and the Middle East through ideas about relocating Palestinians as well as their actual displacement.

This study focuses on the first gated communities in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, which were developed between 1951 and 1964. In an era of democracy and economic growth, the Brazilian government promoted infrastructural improvements and attracted foreign capital. However, there was a concomitant increase in inequality and poverty, and deep-rooted political conflicts. Notwithstanding the varying motivations of those who chose to live in gated communities, this article argues that the attempt by elites to establish a lifestyle of leisure and European-style sophistication in these enclaves had political, ethnic, class and gender implications. Their self-segregation strengthened the patrimonialism and authoritarianism in politics that would prevail during the ensuing military dictatorship.

We explore how formal mandates associated with Guatemala's 2008 ‘Law against Femicide and Other Forms of Violence against Women’ and with specialised violence against women (VAW) courts have encountered significant challenges due to state-imposed constraints. Drawing on courtroom observations, analyses of case files, and interviews, we find that while formal mandates incorporated feminist understandings of violence against women, which were often internalised among court officials, in daily practice specialised courts reproduced tendencies to depict violence as interpersonal, fragment people's experiences and enact narrow forms of justice that do not incorporate the full intent of the 2008 VAW Law and institutions intended to support it. This case study thus illuminates how and why legal solutions alone are not sufficient to reduce gender-based violence and feminicide, particularly in the face of uneven and openly hostile challenges posed by governments.

The Hotel Nacional battle occurred during the decisive 1933 revolution, when the siege of the deposed military reached its bloody finale. Overall, historians have downplayed the incident or disagreed about the details and its significance. Such neglect and disagreement can be explained by contemporary confusion and the urge of those subsequently seeking to legitimise the revolution to hide the unpalatable and rewrite history. However, the siege may in fact have decisively changed moderate left political opinion, thus shaping the character of post-1934 politics by contributing to Batista's subsequent rise to power.

Historians of U.S.-Mexican relations are confronted by a conundrum in the Punitive Expedition of 1916–1917. Ostensibly motivated by the attack of General Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa upon Columbus, New Mexico on March 9, 1916, the expedition traditionally has been evaluated in terms of its supposed mission. The puzzle lies in the fact that President Woodrow Wilson publicly told the American and Mexican people one thing and privately told his field commander, John J. Pershing, quite another. Wilson's press release on the morning of March 10, 1916 announced: ‘An adequate force will be sent at once in pursuit of Villa with the single object of capturing him and putting a stop to his forays’.

This article seeks to expand our understanding of the dynamics of the Gómez regime and of its treatment of foreign investment by examining its relationship with a large British enterprise engaged in ranching and frozen meat exports. The company and the regime established mutually beneficial relationships during the First World War, but when the tighter market conditions of the post-war period obliged the company to restrict its purchases of cattle from Gómez, he forced the company to end its exports. The regime's treatment of the Vestey enterprise thus offers a vivid contrast to its treatment of foreign oil companies.

This article chronicles the fifteen-month border conflict between the military regimes of Brazil and Paraguay that occurred between March of 1965 and June of 1966 – a stand-off that paved the way for the Itaipu project that would become the largest dam in the world. In the context of the 1960s Cold War, both governments saw a large-scale dam on the Paraná River as a means to catalyse industrialisation and strengthen the political legitimacy of their respective authoritarian regimes. Yet the border crisis was not a stand-off between equal powers. Brazil was the much stronger force, and, with the backing of the United States, the Brazilian dictatorship brought Paraguay firmly under its sphere of influence while also marginalising neighbouring Argentina. The border question at Guaíra served as a springboard for Brazil's rising power, and subsequently transformed the geopolitical landscape of the Southern Cone.

What motivated right-wing and conservative parties to endorse a policy of land expropriation and redistribution in Brazil? I argue that urban-dominated right-wing parties endorsed agrarian reform in order to: (i) reduce crime in wealthier metropolises by reversing rural–urban migration; and (ii) gain competitive advantage against left-wing challengers. To test this argument I conduct process tracing, analysing over 500 elite statements about agrarian reform, drawn from archival, interview and survey data. In addition, I model land expropriations at the municipal level and show how right-wing administrations disproportionately expropriated land in the states of origin of migrants and, within those, in localities where the Left was more competitive. My results portray how two externalities of inequality – crime and competition with the Left – motivated conservative support for agrarian reform in Brazil.

Cuban emigration in the post-Soviet period has largely been attributed to economic motivations, but without significant racial analysis. Moreover, little is known about how black Cubans on the island think about emigration. It is therefore imperative to re-examine how blacks, once cited as the Cuban Revolution's loyalists, make decisions today about remaining in Cuba and/or pursuing economic security outside of its borders. Using original survey data of black Cubans on the island, I find that economic motivations are prominent among black Cubans, but that these motivations can be multifaceted. In a study of black Cubans and emigration, the issue of increasing racial inequality and racial exclusion has significant influence on economic opportunity, which in turn influences the desire to leave Cuba to achieve economic and professional success. The results have implications for the ways in which we analyse migration throughout the Latin American region, where race has not been factored into why people migrate.

Costa Rica has won praise for its democratic traditions and social stability. Social scientists have attributed this to many factors: the country's benign colonial past, its small and relatively homogeneous population, the existence of a land owning peasantry, and the development, beginning in the 1930s, of a social welfare state. As it did elsewhere, the Great Depression marked a crossroads in Costa Rica's development. In response to the collapse of its international markets and the ensuing labour unrest, the state jettisoned its economic liberalism, and assumed an interventionist role in the management of the economy and labour–capital relations. This fundamentally reformist role developed through the 1930s and culminated in 1943 with the passage of a package of Christian-based social reforms including a comprehensive labour code under the administration of Rafael Calderón Guardia (1940–4).

The final decades of the nineteenth century were marked by diplomatic confrontations between Chile and the United States. In 1891 the killing of US Navy sailors in a riot in Valparaíso threatened to provoke armed conflict, an event known as the Baltimore Crisis. This article investigates how William Russell Grace, the head of a merchant firm based in New York, played a central role in negotiating between Chile and the United States. By placing his activities in a transnational framework, Grace responded to the demands of multiple nation-states in the Americas. Observing changes in Grace's transnational economic infrastructure can help to identify larger long-term shifts in diplomacy and power on South America's Pacific coast in the late nineteenth century, especially Chile's emergence as a regional hegemon. The actions of Grace also raise larger questions regarding the power of business in the Americas in the late nineteenth century, especially with regard to growing US interests in the region.

Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres in Guatemala City are informal responses to drug use, with these all-male institutions attempting to save drug users from what some Christians call ‘the devil’. Of ethnographic interest is that the mothers, sisters and wives not only pay for the capture and captivity of their loved ones but also volunteer their labour to support these centres. This article, in response, assesses not only the Christian impulse to domesticate sinners but also the extent to which a cult of domesticity organises Guatemala's war on drugs.

This article proposes a framework for evaluating the development and evolution of economic instruments for environmental conservation through the examination of their design and the interactional and structural aspects of their implementation. The framework is applied to comparatively describe the historical evolution of the world's longest-running ecological fiscal transfer (EFT) scheme in two Brazilian sites. Results show that while legislative aspects of programme design, such as linkages and flexibility, are crucial for performance, interactional and structural characteristics during implementation, such as capacity, knowledge-sharing and transparency, can be determining factors in how the programme functions at the municipal level. Policy recommendations are provided for the development of this type of programme elsewhere. Results contribute towards the conceptual understanding of EFTs, an under-utilised mechanism with great potential for a role in conservation policy mixes.

With the passage of the Jones Act (1917), the United States expanded Puerto Rican autonomy, made Puerto Ricans citizens of the USA, and gave the island prohibition of alcohol. The Puerto Rican people overwhelmingly ratified prohibition in a referendum in July 1917. Prohibition won because it was emotionally linked to patriotism and morality. Prohibition enforcement was almost impossible, compounded by the colonial status of the island. It was that status which brought an immediate end to prohibition in Puerto Rico with the demise of prohibition in the United States in 1933.