This article evaluates the implementation of Mexico's Municipal Reform of 1983 in three states: Chihuahua, Oaxaca and Yucatán. The research focuses on one element of the reform, the transfer of public services from the state to the municipal level. The case studies were selected to examine the impact of two key variables on reform outcomes: fiscal capacity and partisan control of state and municipal governments. Counter to expectations, the reform has not advanced more in municipalities with greater fiscal capacity. Also counter to expectations, there is no evidence that devolution advanced more in municipalities controlled by the opposition. This is due to the fact that state governors have a high degree of discretion that allows them to block implementation for partisan motives rather than rational/technical ones. The Municipal Reform of 1999 attempts to remedy this problem by limiting gubernatorial discretion while increasing the legal recourse municipalities have in soliciting the transfer of services. This recourse includes filing suit before the Mexican Supreme Court.

The crisis of 1889 has long been seen as a turning point in Brazilian history. Because historians have often examined the Second Empire to defend or attack its successor, they have neglected certain aspects of the crisis. Their explanations have stressed that leaders of the minuscule and divided Republican Party took advantage of long standing grievances between senior officers and civilian politicians when they urged an ailing general to depose the monarchy on the 15th of November. They have, therefore, emphasized the role of the army in creating the conditions for a coup d'etat, and its preeminence in the Republic until 1889. In doing so, they have underestimated the powerful economic forces which underpinned the Imperial government. They have also overestimated those which supported the republican leaders of São Paulo, the self-confessed beneficiaries of the coup. Since they have also understated the fluidity of political allegiances in this period, its history has become too narrow and too deterministic, with the army depicted as the engine of ‘a change from Ancien Régime to a bourgeois society’.

This article uses the 1931 strike by the Lima bakery workers' union as an optic through which to study the politicisation of industrial relations in the context of the emergence of populist politics in Peru. Faced with a loss of control over the bakery workforce and a hostile and ineffective system of collective bargaining, the union turned to an alternative strategy in its attempts to gain control over the workforce and the productive process. It presented itself as a bulwark against labour militancy and sought to establish political ties to the Sánchez Cerro government. Although the strategy was largely unsuccessful, this case study illustrates the extent to which Peruvian workers played an active role in the construction of populist politics in the 1930s.

This article contends that Brazil's evangelical Christian networks increasingly function as penal infrastructure. Since the 1990s, the scale and scope of evangelical involvement in the criminal justice system have grown significantly. One clear result is that the capillary relationships that constitute Christian community now mobilise resources to support or even substitute the basic functions of punishment. I draw on fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro to understand this shift and its broader implications for the Brazilian project of incarceration. I also make a general claim for thinking with and through infrastructure as a pathway to understand penal governance.

This article investigates the introduction of educational television in El Salvador in the late 1960s, an Alliance for Progress project, in light of the preoccupations of the Cold War, the application of modernisation theory, the growing influence of a development community grounded in the social sciences and the Salvadorean elite's particular obsession with communism. The top-down approach used by the military regime to introduce a flurry of changes in the education system was facilitated by the extensive resources provided by international aid agencies and the US government. However, the reforms alienated Salvadorean teachers and fuelled teachers' strikes that are still remembered as pivotal moments in the urban mass movements of the 1970s which preceded the civil war of the 1980s.

This article examines the Mexican state's surveillance of Spanish political exiles. As the Mexican government publicly welcomed over 20,000 political refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), its intelligence apparatus characterised anarchist and communist refugees as subversive threats to the Mexican nation. Despite these efforts, the Mexican secret police failed to prevent the emergence of new political bonds between the two countries’ popular classes. This article shows the consequences of the Mexican secret police's campaign against radical exiles while also highlighting instances in which Spaniards evaded the state's purview and contributed to revolutionary projects in Mexico, Latin America and Spain.

On 20 November 2016, residents of Gran Chaco Province in south-east Bolivia voted by popular referendum to approve a statute that established Gran Chaco as Bolivia's first autonomous region. This article examines regional autonomy in the Chaco as an example of how identities, territory and political power are being remapped at the intersection of an extractivist development model and competing visions of a plurinational state. I chart how regional autonomy, an elite-led project centred on demands for a fixed share of departmental gas royalties, has been institutionalised under the framework of plurinationalism and used to bolster central state power in this gas-rich region. The article considers the historical evolution of this regionalist project, its intersection with broader processes of state formation under the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement towards Socialism, MAS) government and its implications for the Chaco's Indigenous peoples, who have achieved significant representation within the regional assembly while seeing their own visions of territorial autonomy sidelined by an extractivist development agenda.

Studies of liberationist Christianity in Argentina have largely explained its emergence with reference to changes or continuities within the Catholic Church. This article instead analyses firstly how Marxist humanism, dependency theory and left nationalism shaped a rapprochement with Christianity in the 1960s, with Peronism often functioning as an intermediary. Moreover, it demonstrates the ways in which the ongoing ambivalent relationship between Marxism and the liberationist Christian movement in Argentina manifested in the fragmentation of the Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo (Movement of Priests for the Third World) in the first half of the 1970s. In doing so, it identifies Marxism not as merely a passive repository of ideas but as an active agent in liberationist Christianity's development, and adds a new layer of understanding of the dynamics and fragmentation of the movement.

Beyond competitive elections, democratisation should include a transformation of the institutions of state and civil society into spaces that recognise the rights of citizens and allow for their participation. This study explores the question of how Mexican labour unions are transformed into institutions with a commitment to the rights and participation of women workers. Drawing on evidence from five unions, the paper shows that compared to their corporatist counterparts, unions with a ‘democratic ethos’ provide a context within which gender equity rights are more readily recognised. However, recognition of gender equity is primarily dependent on feminist activism and union leadership. The paper argues that women's efforts to transform their unions into spaces that reflect and advocate for gender equity rights are critical to strengthening democratic citizenship in Mexico.

This article studies the growth and decline of Argentine exports of manufactured goods during the 1940s and 1950s. In a context that was favourable due to the global scarcity of manufactured goods, Argentine industry managed to sell its products in several foreign markets, especially in Latin America, during the Second World War. In the post-war period, however, exports declined and returned to the levels of the 1930s. After 1950 the Peronist administration again tried to stimulate exports through the use of various incentives, but they did not revive. The article examines the reasons for this decline, the role played by the economic, commercial and industrial policies of the Peronist era, and the problems that Argentine industry faced in remaining competitive. Based on this analysis, the paper questions the interpretation that argues that exporting manufactured goods was a viable path for development for import substitution industrialisation countries in the post-war world. In this respect the paper contributes to the discussion of different paths towards economic development in Latin America.

Although the Dominican Republic had one of the highest economic growth rates in the world between 1969 and 1973, its growth performance and external position deteriorated sharply in the 1970s. By 1985 it had an external debt/GDP ratio of 76.6%, well above the average of 62.3% for the Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole.1 The Dominican debt crisis that emerged in the 1980s, like the crisis in many other debtridden Less Developed Countries (LDCs), was in part caused by adverse external conditions; in part, however, it was the result of domestic policy choices. Among the latter, large fiscal imbalances are arguably the most important.2

For the vast majority of people around the world, Central America is a small group of countries bridging the gap between the Mayan ruins of Guatemala and the Panama Canal. The names of those countries are only recognized when the major contending ideologies of capitalism and communism clash in one of them, or when an international figure of ill or good repute establishes some sort of link with them. A football game that leads to war also catches the eye of the media. An example of the first situation would be the ousting of the communist regime of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala by Honduran troops backed by the United Fruit Company and the CIA in 1954; another would be the rise of the marxist regime in Nicaragua in 1979. The second is evident in the establishment in Costa Rica of the international fugitive Robert Vesco around 1970, as well as in the visit of Pope John Paul II to each of the five nations in 1983. The last refers to the ‘soccer war’ between El Salvador and Honduras in 1967. In each instance the countries concerned made headlines around the world for a short time and people learned their approximate geographical location even if in a passing fashion.

When Dwight Morrow's appointment as Ambassador to Mexico was announced in September 1927, a Mexican newspaper commented: ‘After Morrow come the marines.’ To some contemporary observers this may have seemed to present a logical progression of events, but in reality the Morrow appointment was a distinct move in the opposite direction. Top level Mexican officials knew this since they had been involved for several years in negotiations with Thomas W. Lamont of the International Committee of Bankers on Mexico. Lamont and Morrow were colleagues in J. P. Morgan & Co. and close friends. Lamont regularly supplied Morrow with information about the activities of the International Committee, and during 1926 Morrow began to work closely with Lamont on the Mexican question.

Brazilian specialists have long recognised the importance of the 1960 presidential elections, which set in motion a process that culminated in a 21—year military dictatorship. Only in 1989 did Brazilians witness once again the direct election of a president. Nonetheless, scholarly literature on this event is sparse and often tends toward the ahistorical view that the election of Jânio Quadros in 1960 was part of an inexorable process. Almost entirely ignored are the reasons why Brazil's largest political party, the Partido Social Democrático or PSD, nominated for president a weak candidate, Marshal of the Brazilian Army Henrique Teixeira Lott.1

Clearly, Lott himself was not part of a praetorian guard that imposed his candidacy. Indeed, the Marshal was a reluctant candidate, who offered to withdraw in October 1959 in favour of a ‘national unity candidate’.2 In my view Lott's nomination had much more to do with a complex series of manoeuvres carried out by Brazil's president Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–61) than with his own actions. For Kubitschek, the political parties and presidential aspirants in 1960 were merely pawns in his highly personalistic vision of the political process. Constitutionally barred from seeking immediate re—election, Kubitschek initially manoeuvred to induce his party, the PSD, not to run its own presidential candidate. When this effort failed, he displayed, at the very least, ambivalence regarding the fate of the party's candidate.

An analysis of Kubitschek's actions and motivations presents methodological challenges to the historian. Historians traditionally rely heavily on written documentation to support their analysis of actions and motivations.

This commentary argues that heavy-handed regulation and onerous implicit taxation of financial intermediaries in Latin America in the 1980s was softened by governments' assumption of responsibility for bank failures. This in turn induced governments to avoid dealing with bank distress, with disastrous subsequent consequences. In effect, mismanaged bank regulations were propped up by mismanaged bank exit procedures. The disincentives induced by such financial policies on bankers, depositors, creditors and regulators were pervasive. Illustrations are drawn from the experiences of four Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela) in the 1980s.

The collapse of Cuba's import-intensive sugar economy in the 1990s is analysed in the context of the disintegration of COMECON and of the USSR. Salient features of post-revolutionary cane farming are contrasted with those of the 1950s. Falling production in the 1990s, and the main institutional responses to it, are compared with those of the Great Depression of the 1930s. The analysis is illustrated with primary data collected in fieldwork carried out in 1994 and before. The complexities of current ‘technical regression’ from more to less import-intensive agricultural practices are outlined and the impact of acute national investment constraints upon the recovery prospects of the sugar economy are appraised.