Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States and Chile competed for dominance in the Pacific, and their maritime rivalry reemerged in the race to Antarctica during the 1940s. The US Navy was able to circumnavigate the white continent, for the first time ever, while Chile's once great navy no longer posed a threat even to its neighbours. The Chilean government expressed concern about the scope of US exploration since the Antarctic always had been an essential component of its maritime policy with national security ramifications. President Gabriel González Videla seized upon Washington's unsuccessful attempts to determine the legal fate of the Antarctic to gain acceptance for a Chilean proposal that avoided the need to renounce sovereignty claims. In doing so, he secured essentially maritime objectives by diplomatic means. This success was more profound than widely appreciated since it came at a time when US intervention in Chile's domestic affairs had reached an unprecedented level.

This article examines attempts to modernise navigation of the Doce River in Brazil during the early nineteenth century. It focuses primarily on the development of a joint Anglo-Brazilian business venture, The Rio Doce Company (1832–49). The failure of the Rio Doce Company cannot be attributed to a single overarching cause, but reflects numerous barriers to economic development including a cumbersome regulatory bureaucracy, capital scarcity, poor technological integration, challenging topography, and Brazilian political resistance to British investment and corporate oversight. This article contributes to the field of business history in the immediate post-independence era, a topic that has received relatively little scholarly attention.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Brazilian federal government embarked upon an ambitious plan of fast-paced industrialisation aimed at responding to the growing needs of the country's ever more urbanised population. While the plan achieved rapid economic growth, rising levels of discontent defined much of the political behaviour of urban labour in the period. By critically examining some of the main events affecting industrial unions during the so-called ‘developmental decade’ of the 1950s, this article argues that amidst pervasive top-down economic transformations Brazilian workers consistently advanced an alternative position on national development. By investigating how metalworkers in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro understood and responded to the main developmental trends and difficulties of the period, the paper reveals some of the creative strategies articulated by urban workers to promote a more socially inclusive path for the country. By becoming actively involved in ever more assertive cross-professional mobilisations, particularly those aimed at curbing the rising cost of living (a problem known as carestia), industrial workers not only protected their own economic interests but also significantly challenged the very bases of the populist political arrangements that defined post-war Brazilian society.

The historical attachment of the organized labor movement of Chile to revolutionary ideologies has been unique in Latin America. Anarchosyndicalists controlled most labor unions in Santiago and Valparaíso, and the Communists those of the nitrate and coal mining zones during the 1920s. From the late 1930S to the fall of Allende, a majority of Chilean labor unionists manifested their desire for socio-economic change by supporting the Communist and Socialist Parties at the polls and in the streets.

This article studies the relationship between electoral processes, popular mobilisation, and revolutionary movements in Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the revolution of 1880, it is argued that the fraud in favour of General Julio A. Roca, that was perceived to have occurred in the presidential election of that year, resulted in the mobilisation of vast sectors of the Buenos Aires population and the organisation of militias. By analysing the social composition, organisation, and sources of recruitment of these militias, the article claims that although personal allegiance, clientelism and coercion played a role in this mobilisation, these factors are not sufficient to explain the popularity of the movement. The revolution owed its wide and active support to the claims of its leaders, who centred their discourse on defending the purity of suffrage and the rights of citizens to bear arms in order to protect their rights and freedoms.

Among students of Latin America, the existence of sizable Indian communities within the region has provoked a lively debate about the relationship between ethnicity and social class. Such communities have failed to become part of class society, it is often said, because they retain those customs and traditions which arose under colonialism, because in some sense they remain encapsulated to this day within the feudal social order. A few experts even claim that these customs have themselves become the primary agent of economic and political exploitation in various rural areas.1 According to this view, native people have accepted more or less passively a culture which was designed for them by Spanish missionaries and administrators, a culture which emphasized ethnic difference at the expense of class solidarity.2 In contrast to these ideas, contemporary events provide us with many indications that such people did not simply resign themselves to the fate which colonial authorities elected for them, Of primary importance, native uprisings and rebellions, messianic movements and religious heresies occurred in Latin America with astonishing frequency throughout the centuries which preceded Independence. By analyzing these movements, then, and particularly the convictions which moved their participants to action, we may formulate a more coherent view of Spanish colonialism — a view which also helps us to understand the question of ethnicity among Indians today.

One of the most striking features of the study of colonial urbanism and urbanization in Spanish America is the extent to which emphasis has been placed upon the sixteenth-century phase of urban foundations. In many recent works authors have presented details of the formal and functional characteristics of these primary foundations, as well as of the several interrelated processes of Indian resettlement, population change, and the spread of European culture. Though it has been estimated that more than 300 towns were founded in Spanish America between 1492 and 1600, relatively little attention has yet been paid to the changing spatial system of urban centres during the 300 years or more of colonial rule.

This article explores the childhood of a Mexican Indigenous activist, Raúl Javier Gatica Bautista, who was born in 1963 in the Oaxacan market town of Tlaxiaco. Growing up in poor circumstances, Gatica would become a leader in the social movements that between the 1980s and early 2000s pushed Mexico toward gradual democratic reform. The article seeks to describe what it was like to grow up poor and Indigenous at a time (later dubbed the Mexican Miracle) of impressive social and economic advances. Paying special attention to the experience of racial abuse, the article also asks how Gatica's childhood came to inform his political militancy. While other historians have linked the phenomenon of political radicalism in twentieth-century Latin America to particular social conditions, or to the influence and adaptation of global ideologies, this article seeks the origins of Gatica's radicalism in the experience of a racialised childhood.

Economic development is positively related to the presence of favourable cultural attitudes (‘progressive values’): the radius of trust, the ethical system, the nature of the exercise of authority, and attitudes to work, savings, and innovation. This article explores the possibility of a virtuous circle linking economic policies and Latin American cultural attitudes, mostly using examples from Chile since the mid 1980s. The link from culture to development emerges from education, economic awareness and professional economics, and the traditional culture and spontaneous cultural change. The link from economic policy to culture is represented by developments in macroeconomics and the financial sector, industrial protection and free trade, and female participation in the labour market. The role of poverty and inequality, and the effectiveness of exhortation versus incentives, and of concentrating the effort on several specific groups, are also examined.

Joseph Welsh was the British Vice Consul in the port of Veracruz at the time of the uprising of 1832 by General Antonio López de Santa Anna against the government of Anastasio Bustamante. Contravening the orders of his superiors, who reiterated the view that it was his obligation to observe the strictest neutrality in the conflict and not interfere in Mexican politics, Welsh found himself supporting Santa Anna and the rebels. As a result, at the end of March, Bustamante's administration demanded that he be removed from office. The British Minister Plenipotentiary, Richard Pakenham, acquiesced. This article provides a narrative of the events that led to Welsh's forced resignation and explores what they tell us about British diplomacy in Mexico during the early national period. It also analyses Welsh's understanding of the revolt and his views on Santa Anna, providing some insights, from a generally ignored British perspective, into Santa Anna's notorious appeal and politico-military measures.

Party development in post-transition Latin America has often proceeded unevenly, as right-wing elites opted for non-partisan forms of political action and conservative parties remained poorly institutionalised. Recent research has demonstrated that party-building was facilitated where the political Right benefited from valuable political assets – party brand, territorial organisation, sources of funding and clientelistic networks – inherited from authoritarian regimes. This article argues that authoritarian inheritance in isolation is insufficient to foster conservative party institutionalisation. It analyses the trajectories of the major right-wing parties in Brazil and Chile, where former authoritarian incumbents benefited extensively from authoritarian inheritance and yet levels of institutionalisation differed widely across parties. The comparative analysis demonstrates that right-wing parties were most likely to consolidate where, in addition to inheriting valuable resources from the dictatorship, they experienced ideologically driven, violent conflict during their early years.

The objective of this paper, based on interviews with 95 human smugglers (coyotes) involved in agriculture and 51 in prostitution, is to provide a comparative analysis of the networks transporting (mostly) male migrants intending to work in US agriculture and those recruiting women/girls for the US sex industry. Networks carrying females for sex work are bigger and use more fraudulent recruitment strategies. However, migrant smuggling for agriculture is not totally different from sex trafficking; similarities between the types of networks analysed dwarf their differences. Smugglers frequently use some form of deception to convince their would-be clients/victims to undertake risky journeys. I conclude that both networks are demand-driven. Smugglers serve the interests of US agribusinesses and sex business owners rather than those of the males and females they recruit.

The so-called Brazilian economic ‘miracle’ has provoked a heated debate on the distribution between different socio-economic groups of the benefits and costs incurred in rapid income growth. This debate has clarified several empirical issues, notably the marked concentration of the personal income distribution and its significant deterioration in the 1960s.

This paper examines the actions of one Salvadorean priest – Padre David Rodríguez – in one parish – Tecoluca – to underscore the importance of religious leadership in the rise of El Salvador's contentious political movement that began in the early 1970s, when the guerrilla organisations were only just beginning to develop. Catholic leaders became engaged in promoting contentious politics, however, only after the Church had experienced an ideological conversion, commonly referred to as liberation theology. A focus on one priest, in one parish, allows for generalisation, since scores of priests, nuns and lay workers in El Salvador followed the same injustice frame and tactics that generated extensive political mobilisation throughout the country. While structural conditions, collective action and resource mobilisation are undoubtedly necessary, the case of religious leaders in El Salvador suggests that ideas and leadership are of vital importance for the rise of contentious politics at a particular historical moment.

In the rhetoric of United States foreign relations, the countries of Latin America occupy a very special place. They are ‘our sister republics’, ‘the Good Neighbours’, fellow members of a unique international system, and so on. The reality, not surprisingly, is different. Because of the vast disparity of power between the United States and Latin America, relations between them are inherently delicate and subject to strains. The issue of ‘intervention’ by the United States in the internal and external affairs of the Latin American countries is ever present, whether it is a matter of marines being sent into a small Caribbean republic or of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ‘destabilizing’ a major South American government.