Many studies of Latin American elites are compilations of biographical sketches. These increase understanding of various personalities, but tend to be unsystematic and unrelated. Frequently, no attempt is made to draw the data together into meaningful generalizations about elite background, recruitment, behavior, and the like. Many other studies that take a group approach also concern elites but often this is not explicitly recognized by the author. Much of the literature on the Latin American military falls into this category.2

This paper examines the meat supply system in Rio de Janeiro from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s. For a period of time the city's monopoly over meat processing and retailing guaranteed a steady supply at predictable prices. However, at the turn of the century, ‘interlopers’, as municipal officials labelled those who attempted to introduce their product into Rio's market, began to question this century-old monopoly. Hence, for a relatively short period, Rio de Janeiro implemented a number of measures: curtailing the long-standing custom of clandestine slaughtering; establishing a centralised and somewhat regulated public abattoir system; and, finally, introducing meat-packing companies. This study considers these developments by undertaking a broader inquiry into how they affected per capita meat availability in Rio de Janeiro from the 1890s to the 1920s.

This paper uses corruption in Mexico City's markets as a lens to examine state–society relations and the construction of the PRI's hegemony in post-1946 Mexico. It presents three case studies that show how some ostensibly corrupt practices supported state functioning, while others contributed to the process of party building. It demonstrates that these practices were driven by shifting social dynamics and conflicts among vendors, which operated through networks of formal and informal power. Historicising corruption illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of the Mexican state as well as the balance between co-optation and popular demands that lay behind it in this period.

Consensus politics delayed the achievement of Mexican independence. The numerically small, but variegated elites, regrouped in a common stand against Hidalgo's revolutionary movement in 1810. Themselves fragmented, mutually antagonistic on central issues, they sank their differencesfor the duration of the counter-revolutionary struggle. This re-forged unity proved, needless to say, temporary. A tactical alliance concealed far-reaching divisions: ultimately, the removal of the revolutionary challenge created a new set of circumstances.

It is common knowledge that, prior to the military coup of 1973, Chile was the only Latin American country to have strong workers' political parties of the European type. Many reasons have been given for this phenomenon, but it is clear that Chile has been the only country in Latin-America to allow the development of Marxist parties with strong appeal and a strong following, within the framework of what could be called liberal, democratic processes. Up to 1970, the electoral force of the Socialist and Communist Parties in Chile oscillated between 20 and 30 per cent of the total national electorate. This rose to more than 40 per cent during 1975.

Nowhere, perhaps, is the often-remarked historiographical bias in favour of social/economic studies for the colonial period and political/ institutional studies for the national period more jarring than in treatments of the activities of the Mexican church before and after independence.1 The position of the church in the colonial economy has been the subject of several specialised works and is widely regarded in broader histories as most significant.2 But students of independent Mexico have usually focused on the church's role in the political arena, characterising the politics of the period from 1821 to 1856 as, in essence, a battle for supremacy betweenthe church and the state, or in a slightly different formulation, as a struggle between liberalism and conservatism.3

After a struggle of eleven years, and the loss, according to the conservative estimate of Carlos María de Bustamante, of 2000,0000 lives, Mexico awoke in September 1821 an independent nation. For months before the culmination of independence there was no doubt who would rule the nation – that is, who was the de facto chief of state, at least for the moment. Agustin de Iturbide, author of the Plan of Iguala, conceiver of the idea of the Three Guarantees that united all factions in favor of independence, chief of the Army of the Three Guarantees, signatory on Mexico's part of the Treaties of Cordoba that granted independence de jure (in Mexico's view), was the undisputed leader. Incorruptible, invincible, wise, Christian, the consummate politician, the salvation of the Church, the Protector of Spaniards in Mexico, the Hero of Iguala, the Liberator, the Father of the Nation, Iturbide had broken the yoke of the Lion of Castile. Mexicans, of all political persuasions, rallied around the demigod in a euphoria of rejoicing and hope that has no equal in the history of the country.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, ecclesiastical wealth in Mexico consisted basically of real estate and mortgages. The Church avoided investments in mining, industry and commerce. There were regional differences, the Church being richer in some parts of the country than in others: in the two most important cities, Mexico and Puebla, the different ecclesiastical corporations owned about half of the total real estate, whereas in some of the smaller cities, such as Veracruz, Jalapa, Orizaba, Córdoba and San Luis Potosí, the Church was proportionately much poorer. The urban real estate consisted of houses rented on fairly favourable terms to both rich and poor, monastic buildings and churches. In the countryside, the Church was considerably poorer than in the cities: its haciendas were few compared to the number of those privately owned, and their value amounted to about 5 per cent of that of all rural estate. Real estate formed about one-half of Church possessions; the other half consisted of mortgages.

In almost all the developing countries ‘planning’ has become the open sesame to an industrial future. Private enterprise, it has been argued, is either incapable or unwilling to provide the investment necessary to develop the world, and therefore the task must be carried out by the state, acting through a wide variety of ministries, nationalized corporations, and ‘mixed’ businesses in which the state is the main shareholder. But making a plan is not the same thing as carrying it out, as most of the nations of the Third World have discovered to their cost. A new and highly sophisticated administrative structure will be necessary to carry out the national plan, and the existing government systems, which are mostly based on foundations laid when the responsibilities of the central government were very much smaller, are mostly inadequate. This dilemma can be seen most obviously in the case of Brazil, where a strenuous and partially successful effort has been made to reform the administration and to fit it for its new tasks. What lessons can be learnt from the successes and failures of the administrative reform in Brazil?

Charles Darwin once described the Atacama as the world' most desolate desert, and it is hardly surprising that its ownership was not vigorously contested before the 1860s. The discovery, however, first of guano and then of nitrates, made the Atacama the object of a diplomatic dispute between Chile and Bolivia, both of which now coveted this once undesirable land.

At the end of the 1960s a number of clouds overshadowed the Peruvian economy. Among the factors which we can list as limiting and endangering economic expansion in the medium term, are: stagnation in the export sector and in agriculture, growing heterogeneity in the productive structure, a loss of dynamism in private investment, and the trend to denationalization in ownership and concentration of income.

This article examines the demise of the Grenadian People's Revolutionary Government (PRG) in the summer of 1983 and the internal power struggle that destroyed the PRG in October that year, culminating in the execution of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. A detailed analysis of events and interactions between Grenada, Barbados and the United States in the week prior to the crisis period of 19–25 October is provided. I conclude that this pre-crisis period established the foundations for, and direction of, subsequent decision-making and explains why a military intervention solution was chosen and subsequently occurred only five days after Bishop's death.

This article presents an entangled history of Argentina and Egypt in the years surrounding the 1952 Egyptian Revolution. It combines diplomatic, migration and anti-imperial activism histories to delineate the intellectual and institutional links between these nations from the late 1940s to the 1950s – from the rise of Peronism through to Nasser's management of the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. Diverse Argentine social and political sectors saw parallels between the anti-imperial struggles in the Arab world and in Latin America. Though with differing and sometimes competing agendas, these groups learned and deployed the language of non-alignment and South–South solidarity in the escalating Cold War.

This article provides a picture of the political economy of tourism and violence in Medellín. It analyses the way criminal actors and tourism entrepreneurs share a territory, by shedding light on the extortion of tour guides, street performers and business owners in some of its barrios populares (poor neighbourhoods). The main objective is to demonstrate how intimate relationships – between and among kin, friends, long-term acquaintances – impact what is considered the criminal governance of tourism. This contribution shows that extortion in Medellín meets only limited resistance from tourism entrepreneurs. It also emphasises how criminals, tourism actors and tourists themselves contribute to the creation of fragile secured spaces in the developing touristscapes of Colombia's second city.

During the Mexican Revolution, male revolutionaries in Mexico repeatedly tried to suppress confession by invoking the trope of the sexually predatory priest menacing weak, superstitious women. Campaigns against the rite resulted from long-standing gender divisions over the Church, fears of Catholic counter-revolution, and male revolutionaries' drive to modernise marriage as companionate and secular but still patriarchal. Although ultimately unsuccessful as policy, attacks on the confession strengthened radical anticlericalism. By equating masculinity with reason, nation and progress while painting femininity as vulnerable, fanatical and potentially treasonous, the campaigns subtly shaped gender roles and helped to consolidate post-revolutionary patriarchy.

It is axiomatic, but certainly deserving of periodic repetition, that the long-term configuration of political, social and economic institutions in Iberian America has been determined both by the apparatus, operation and rationale of the metropolitan state, as well as by the premises and patterns of colonization. Equally apparent is the premise that the politico-administrative crisis associated with the achievement of independence in early nineteenth-century Latin America must be studied in the light of this ‘set’ of New World institutions, and particularly in relation to what Richard Morse calls the Spanish patrimonial state.

This study explores some of the changes currently taking place in the USSR and the possible impact of changing Soviet foreign policy on Latin America. The article begins with an analysis of the possible effects of the attempts to separate Party and State on foreign policy and on the interpretation and observance of the so-called internationalist obligations of the Soviet Union towards Latin America. It goes on to investigate the possible impact of perestroika on the internal relations of COMECON countries and any weakening in the commitment of its members to political and social changes in the Latin American republics. These changes are looked at particularly, though not uniquely, with reference to Cuba and Nicaragua. Some predictions are also made as to the possible future moves the USSR might make to strengthen and improve its relations with the largest countries in the region such as Brazil and Argentina.