In the short history of anthropology as an academic discipline, polemics tinged with personal recrimination have been a constant feature. One might even be led to suspect that controversy has become a firm technique, in line with conflict theory, so that in the middle ground between opposing interpretations of social behaviour may be found a more acceptable aspect of the truth. ‘Penetrating analyses’, so the aphorism might run, ‘are tempered in the fire of animosity.’ Some protagonists had a positive genius for attracting thinly-veiled contumely and for polarizing opinion, even after they had ceased to be practising anthropologists. Perhaps the best example of this was Radcliffe-Brown, as a perusal of the journals Oceania in 1955 and the American Anthropologist from 1951 to 1956 will readily disclose. This method of advancing knowledge, if we may call it such, did not die with Radcliffe-Brown; it has been used many times since—and the discipline is the richer, one hastens to add.

‘As far as salaries go, there is chaos all over the country’, Fidel Castro exclaimed in 1986,1 and as he and other revolutionary leaders made clear throughout that year more than salaries was involved. Prices, credit, employment practices, administrative procedures and many other important aspects of the economy could be characterised as ‘chaotic’. It would be wrong, however, to take such characterisations at face value. For underlying this ‘chaos’ was a certain order: patterns of behaviour that this article will seek to disclose and explain.

Chile's seizure of Peru and Bolivia's nitrate regions during the War of the Pacific (1879–83) opened a new and unprecedented era of prosperity for the Chilean economy. During the next forty years the export duty on nitrates fuelled a rapid increase in government revenues, and the entire domestic economy benefited from the development of the industry. Yet the incorporation of the nitrate industry into the national economy also appeared to signal a decline in the dynamism of the Chilean economic elite. Despite the dominant role which Chilean entrepreneurs had played in the development of the national economy prior to the war, 69 per cent of the nitrate industry was in British hands by 1890.

Although most urban dwellers take for granted the running water accessible to them in their homes, its presence is the culmination of the long ‘conquest of water’. In effect, there are still minorities or even majorities in some Latin American cities whose days are punctuated with the task of fetching water for the household. This delineation between the fetchers of water and those with the luxury of in-house access is not a novelty. Within colonial cities, the spatial distribution of water was often an indication of social and economic divisions. Public fountains could serve as a friendly gathering place but were all too often too few for the urban population. The strategies of municipal government for the provision of water for their populace was a reflection of their political priorities and limitations. Studies of the role of water allocation in agrarian societies abound, but its function in the make-up of urban life is little known. By examining this issue for a large city such as Puebla de los Angeles, whose population had reached nearly 70,000 by 1678 (see Table 1), it is possible to delineate some of the social tensions at work and the strategies deployed by both municipal government and populace in order to overcome shortages of accessible water. In Puebla de los Angeles, competition for water was part of the internal workings of the city. The City of Angels faced two major obstacles: the challenge of creating and maintaining an infrastructure for urban distribution of water, and the adjudication of the system.

The subject of United States foreign policy towards Argentina in the years during and immediately after World War II continues to hold the attention of scholars. Their interest goes beyond the intrinsic importance which Argentina had then, or now. Rather, interest is fixed because this case provides the first post-War illustration of several serious problems which United States foreign policy in the hemisphere has demonstrated many times since, and currently in its relations with Nicaragua.

Early in 1869, when the flags of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay were unfurled from the turrets of Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, an end to the horrors of the Paraguayan War was at last in sight. The conflict between Paraguay on the one hand, and Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay on the other, had raged for five years, since 1865, destroying human lives and material wealth. The fighting came to an official end with the death of Francisco Solano López, dictator of Paraguay, on 1 March 1870.

Using recent data, this study examines the affirmative action programme of the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), the first Brazilian university to implement admissions quotas. The article analyses admissions records and finds that both the ratio of applications per place and minimum admission scores are considerably lower among quota students; scores in the admissions test are associated principally with socio-economic factors rather than racial ones; preparatory courses for the university's admissions tests do not appear to be a substitute for the quota system in terms of improving access; few quota applicants would be admitted in the absence of the system; and the applicants who displace others come from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. The article concludes that it is necessary to improve the quality of basic education in Brazil in order to enable disadvantaged applicants to compete.

This article analyses the history of the military clergy and contrasts its role in the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships on the basis of new, previously inaccessible sources. It is argued here that, in addition to its ideological orientation, two further factors explain differences in the influence of the military clergy on the two regimes: first, the structural position that the Military Vicariates occupied between the Church and the armed forces, and, second, the two dictatorships’ different needs for legitimisation. The analysis provides information relevant to understanding the public role of the Catholic Church and the dimensions of violence during the regimes.

In 1868 a cholera epidemic erupted in the north-western Argentine province of Tucumán. Urban-based doctors and politicians argued that fruit cultivated primarily in the south of the province was responsible for the spread of cholera. Hoping to avoid cholera, they advocated the complete prohibition and destruction of fruit in Tucumán as both a prophylactic measure, but also to prepare new land for sugar cultivation. Through a reading of governmental memos, medical journals, and public health reports, this article examines how agriculture, disease, and contagion mediated the interaction between Tucumán's urban minority and rural majority. This article offers a window into grassroots politics and state formation during one of Argentina's most formative periods.

…the record would seem to suggest that Latin American political studies have more often than not been unimaginative in concept and pedestrian in approach. A certain healthy eclecticism has been diluted by a Pavlovian tendency to respond to passing fads within the discipline. Political scientists committed to Latin American studies have in recent years rushed to follow the the comparative pack. They have distinctly been trend-followers rather than trend-setters.

This article examines the central role of sports media in the discussions about national sports programmes at the peak of Latin American populism, particularly during the governments of Juan Perón in Argentina (1946–55) and Carlos Ibáñez in Chile (1952–8). By exploring sports publications such as the Argentine magazines Mundo Deportivo and El Gráfico and the Chilean weekly Estadio, I argue that sports media staged stories and images that were both inspired by, and critical of, the larger populist projects in Argentina and Chile. Photographers and cartoonists, often in collaboration with sportswriters, produced and crafted populist ideas about class collaboration, the inclusion of children in the state project and women's participation in politics.

In 2013, Argentina's then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner sparked controversy for her decision to replace a monument of Christopher Columbus in Buenos Aires with one of nineteenth-century mestiza revolutionary Juana Azurduy. This article examines the history and iconography of these monuments, exploring the intersections between public space, art, politics and memory. It argues that these monuments — one representing Argentina's previously maligned Italian immigrant heritage, the other its forgotten indigenous culture — demonstrate how fundamental struggles over national identity have been embedded and contested in the capital's urban landscape, in ways that remain influential. It highlights Argentina's 1910 centennial and 2010 bicentennial as key to these efforts, and examines the power/politics of place in the central plaza where various actors have fought for public commemorative representation.

Professor Joan Thirsk has recently argued that the history of the peasant is not one history, but several. The demise of the peasant, insisted Professor Thirsk cogently, should be seen against the background of particular farming systems and the stages in their evolution. However obvious this point might be to an historian of sixteenth-century England, it is often lost on sociologists of contemporary Latin America. All too often attempts are made to assess the revolutionary potential of the Latin American ‘peasant’ without distinguishing clearly enough between sections of the rural population, and placing them within the context of the land-tenure system. Failure to distinguish between different groups of peasant farmers has important implications not only for academic research but also for Government policy.

The metal-mining boom Latin America experienced in recent decades precipitated highly contentious anti-mining social movements in Central America. In this context, El Salvador became the first country in the world to ban all metal mining by law. In contrast, policy in nearby Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua remained pro-mining. These cases are compared using a most similar systems design. Comparison reveals the importance of three variables: how national economic-elite networks and interests relate to multinational corporations; national movement coordination and goals, specifically in relation to prohibition; and how parties and leaders relied on popular bases or capital. These factors shaped the contention between elites and movements that influenced state actions around mining and led to this ‘least likely case’ of extractive policy change in El Salvador.

The study of United States foreign policy has recently been invigorated by the introduction of Graham Allison's bureaucratic politics model (BPM). The basic unit of analysis of the BPM is governmental action viewed as political resultant. In Allison's words, the actions of governments are ‘resultants in the sense that what happens is not chosen as a solution to a problem but rather results from compromise, conflict, and confusion of officials with diverse interests and unequal influence…’. The BPM assumes that different players will have different perspectives toward similar problems, that is, they will each see different ‘faces’ of the same issue. The basic assumption of the BPM as it is applied to United States foreign policy toward Latin America by scholars such as Abraham Lowenthal is that United States decision-makes, who share power in both the formulation and implementation of policy, have differing points of view because of their differing organizational and personal perspectives.

If David Bell in his book Men on Horseback (2020) focuses on what is political charisma, how it functions, and what it means ‘to write its history’, this article examines how Brazil's ex-President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (‘Lula’) acquired charisma during the dramatic 1978–80 metalworkers’ strikes in the industrial ABC region of São Paulo, Brazil. While generating a vast literature, scholars of the ABC strikes have evaded the question of how Lula, the gifted organiser, emerged as a recognisably charismatic figure. This article explains where, when and why this happened and how a charismatic bond was forged as 100,000 stigmatised, fearful, self-doubting ‘peons’ came to constitute themselves as a locally articulated social actor, a group in fusion, whose boldness and creativity led to extraordinary feats of organisation and mobilisation. Arguing against conflating charisma and populism, it also establishes the utility of the theorisation of group-making advanced in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Since the Alliance for Progress was first established over fifteen years ago, a number of interpretations have been offered for United States agrarian development policy in Latin America. This paper examines two of these interpretations in the light of a detailed study of peasant organization and agrarian reform in Ecuador, a country which received considerable attention from AID from the early 1960s. It has been suggested that AID staff in Latin America are often confused about the role the Agency should play. Indeed, the former Peruvian President, Belaunde, is said to have remarked that ‘AID is very feminine: it never says “no”, but it always says “maybe”‘. It might be added that such prevarication does not seem to have prevented AID from curtailing its more ambitious proposals so as to make them ‘…acceptable to prevailing elites’ However, neither the undoubted conservatism of the Agency, nor its lack of decisiveness are its only notable features. A more penetrating analysis of AID's role in Latin America must begin with the context in which AID operated in specific cases, and consider the legacy of its involvement in particular countries. In this paper it is suggested that AID was instrumental in establishing the outlines of the agrarian development strategy currently being pursued by the Ecuadorian State. As such, its role cannot be considered in inflated conspiratorial terms, nor can AID's activities be interpreted as of only marginal significance in the continent as a whole.

This article studies the reformulation of Black Legend, Middle Passage and convivencia discourses in nineteenth-century narratives published by Cubans sent to Spain's de facto penal colony on Fernando Po. Contextualised with archival sources, this reading highlights how deportees condemned Spain's perpetuation of the slave trade while struggling to negotiate their own positioning within the racially-stratified practices of late-imperial space. Those negotiations often exacerbated traditional divisions between different communities within the Spanish colonial system. In some instances, however, the deportees’ encounters with citizens and colonised subjects from distant territories may have bolstered and expanded intra-imperial identification and solidarity.

This article analyses the short-run periods that can be derived from the GDP per capita series for Argentina between 1875 and 1990, after extracting its segmented long-run trend using time series techniques and unit root tests. It also studies the economic forces which, from the aggregate demand side, might provide an explanation for this behaviour. This mode of operation makes it possible to identify successive cycles more accurately than in previous studies. A high level of agreement is observed between the results of this study and arguments in the literature regarding the causes shaping these short-run periods: the analysis demonstrates that exports were the key factor until 1932 while after this year consumption and investment came to predominate.