What is the political impact of police corruption and abuse? From the literature, we know that police misconduct destroys people's confidence in police forces and hampers public collaboration with the criminal-justice system; but, what about the political regime, especially in countries striving for democratic governance? Does police wrongdoing affect the legitimacy of the overall regime? Focusing on Central America, this article provides empirical evidence showing that corruption and abuse perpetrated by police officers erode public support for the political order. Results indicate that, under some circumstances, police transgressions can have a greater impact on the legitimacy of the political system than crime or insecurity. They also show that police misconduct not only affects democratising regimes, such as El Salvador and Guatemala, but also consolidated democracies, such as Costa Rica.

China's rapid growth and increased integration with the global economy over the past three decades have significant economic impacts and political implications for Latin America. This paper reviews the debate over whether these impacts have on balance been positive or negative for the region. It argues that those who emphasise the positive economic impacts of China have been over-optimistic and underplay some of the negative impacts associated with Chinese competition in manufacturing and increasing Latin American specialisation in primary products. On the other hand, when focusing on the political dimensions, there has been a tendency to exaggerate both the extent of China's influence in the region and the fears to which this gives rise, particularly among US commentators.

The colonial state

Spain asserted its presence in America through an array of institutions. Traditional historiography studied these in detail, describing colonial policy and American responses in terms of officials, tribunals, and laws. The agencies of empire were tangible achievements and evidence of the high quality of Spanish administration. They were even impressive numerically. Between crown and subject there were some twenty major institutions, while colonial officials were numbered in their thousands. The Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias (1681) was compiled from 400,000 royal cedulas, which it managed to reduce to a mere 6,400 laws.1 Thus the institutions were described, classified, and interpreted from evidence which lay in profusion in law codes, chronicles, and archives. Perhaps there was a tendency to confuse law with reality, but the standard of research was high and derecho indiano, as it was sometimes called, was the discipline which first established the professional study of Latin American history.

This stage of research was brought to an end by new interests and changing fashions in history, and by a growing concentration on social and economic aspects of colonial Spanish America. Institutional history lost prestige, as historians turned to the study of Indians, rural societies, regional markets, and various aspects of colonial production and exchange, forgetting perhaps that the creation of institutions was an integral part of social activity and their presence or absence a measure of political and economic priorities. More recently, institutional history has returned to favour, though it is now presented as a study of the colonial state.

The Old World had known of the fabulous riches of Mexican and Peruvian mines for well over a century when reports began to come in of the wealth of the Buenos Aires pampas. Acarete du Biscay and Antonio de Ulloa were among those astounded by the abundant herds of wild cattle to be found on those endless plains and the latter's writings provided Adam Smith with examples of a primitive economy.1 By the time The Wealth of Nations was published, however, that early primitiveness was changing. According to Cosme Bueno, the increasing demand for hides for export had brought about a decline in the number of cattle around Buenos Aires with the result that simple hunting had become cattle raising.2 The supply of meat to the city had always necessitated cattle raising, but the ever-erratic demand for export hides had to be met by hunting expeditions - the vaquerías. No new hunting licences were granted after 1720 and the first surprise attacks a few years later by Pampa indians looking for domestic cattle signalled the end of the wild herds.3 The intensification of foreign demand for hides led in the first place to the spread of the vaquerías into Entre Ríos and the Banda Oriental and, later on, particularly after the adoption of free-trade policies by post-revolutionary governments, to the proliferation of estancias on the Buenos Aires pampas.

Elsa Chaney once argued that Latin American women turned to motherhood to justify their political participation. Now that Latin American women have gained unprecedented access to national-level office, we ask whether these cultural narratives of maternalism still condition female politicians’ access to political power. Using public opinion data, media analysis, and elite interviews, we conceptualise four strategic frames deployed by elite women to justify their national-level political careers: the traditional supermadre, the technocratic caretaker, the macho minimiser, and the difference denier. We argue that while today's female politicians have developed diverse responses to maternalism, their access to public office remains profoundly shaped by structural constraints and cultural narratives that privilege traditional feminine ideals of caretaking.

This article analyses the background to and the content of the Peruvian prior consultation law – the only one enacted in Latin America to date – and its regulating decree. In contrast to the widespread conception that prior consultation is a means for preventing and resolving conflict, it argues that this new legislation will not help to transform conflicts as long as the normative framework itself is contested and the preconditions for participatory governance are not in place. Establishing these preconditions would result in state institutions capable of justly balancing the diverse interests at stake; measures that reduce power asymmetries within consultations; and joint decision-making processes with binding agreements.

In recent years Latin American countries have enacted sweeping privatisation measures and major trade, financial and tax reforms, but they have moved much more slowly to reform their pension systems and labour laws. This pattern of reform partly reflects differences in the intensity of organised labour's opposition to the reforms. Organised labour has undertaken greater efforts to block labour law reforms and, to a lesser extent, pension reforms, because these measures impose severe losses on more unions than other types of reforms. These greater efforts, moreover, have had significant effects on policy outcomes. The article shows how organised labour reacted quite differently to various types of market-oriented reforms in Argentina and Mexico in the 1990s, and describes how the reaction of the unions helped shape the fate of the reform proposals.

In August, September and October 1933 Cuban sugar workers seized several dozen mills and estates and, in a number of cases, inaugurated soviets. This major worker uprising coincided with the collapse of the regime of Gerardo Machado and the early stages of the reformist administration of Grau San Martín. An examination of the roots of labour organisation among sugar workers and of the dynamic of the insurgency reveals the strengths and the limitations of the role played by the Cuban Communist Party. The collapse of the institutional and coercive structures of the state apparatus greatly facilitated the worker actions.

Even though Mexico has been an important player in the international drug trade, this country's history in such illegal ventures has been insufficiently studied. In an effort to begin to understand how and when the country began to be an active participant in such illicit markets, this article first analyses regulations introduced in the United States regarding drug and alcohol consumption, marketing and production and assesses their impact on the Mexican side. Secondly, it argues that Mexico's participation in the narcotics trade, the routes that have developed and the Mexican states involved in this traffic have roots that can be traced to the beginning of the twentieth century at least.

A survey of the relevant literature indicates rather graphically that little scholarly attention has been given to an assessment of the independence of supreme courts in the developing areas. A familiar theme in the scant research which has been reported is not only the relative decline of these courts, but their political weakness and general dependence in Third World countries in the first place. Although the constitutions of most developing countries provide for independent, sometimes even coequal judicial branches of government, with clearly defined and significant powers, and with constitutional guarantees to protect their independence, the evidence suggests that no more than a mere handful of national courts in these countries are truly independent: that is, few courts are free to decide cases on the basis of the established law and the ‘merits of the case’, without substantial interference from other political or governmental agents. Gamer has concluded that usually the ‘highest power rests with a Prime Minister (or President) and a small inner circle of the cabinet, whose policy decisions are seldom challenged by courts, legislatures˜’ and ‘there are few constitutional/legal traditions to restrain this central power’. Almond has written that ‘central executives and bureaucracy tend to monopolize the “rule” functions at the expense of courts and legislature’.

This analysis of the historically high level of state-sponsored violence in Central America, typically explained in terms of ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘civil-military relations’, argues for according it a more independent research status. Three historic dimensions of state-sponsored violence – the mechanisms by which caudillo violence was displaced upward in the late 19th century, the level of subaltern collaboration with the agents of state violence as a function of clientelist politics, and the intrusion of US military power after 1940 – are proposed. The implications for the utility of political culture theory and for a reevaluation of the literature on civil-military relations are developed.

This paper analyses recent debates on race and racism in Cuba in the context of changing economic and social conditions in the island. Since the early 1990s, and largely in response to the negative effects that the so-called Special Period had on race relations, a group of artists and intellectuals began denouncing the persistence of racist practices and stereotypes in Cuban society. Although they are not organised around a single program or institution, these musicians, visual artists, writers, academics and activists share common grievances about racism and its social effects. It is in this sense that they constitute a new Afro-Cuban cultural movement. It is too early to fully assess the impact of this movement, but these artists and intellectuals have been largely successful in raising awareness about this problem and bringing it to the attention of authorities and the Cuban public.

In 1799 Dr Juan José de Gamboa, an influential canon of the cathedral chapter in Mexico City, presented a lengthy petition on behalf of the Marquesa of Selva Nevada seeking permission to found a Carmelite convent in Querétaro, a city of some 30,000 inhabitants. Whereas the capital possessed twenty wealthy convents with over nine hundred professed nuns, Querétaro only had two established houses, the Santa Clara and the Capuchines. Marvelling that, whereas in France the Revolution had destroyed convents, in Mexico the Church was still able to found new houses, the crown attorney advised granting the necessary licence. A handsome edifice was subsequently designed and constructed by Manuel Tolsa, the chief proponent of the neo-classic style in New Spain, and in 1803 the Archbishop accompanied the founding sisters on their journey from Mexico to Querétaro.

In recent years, socio-political crises have challenged democracy across South America. Social movements that succeeded in mobilising marginalised sectors are at the forefront of this turbulence, Ecuador's indigenous movement and the organisations of unemployed workers in Argentina being paradigmatic cases. Recent developments point to an intrinsic weakness of both indigenous and unemployed movements, in that democratic regimes have proved highly successful at ‘taming’ them. By comparing the two movements, in terms of their internal dynamics and interactions with the political system, this article argues that common characteristics that were crucial for successful mobilisation in the first place, at the same time, help explain their vulnerability to division and clientelist integration.

This article systematically analyses the inner circle of the coalition that governed Chile between 1990 and 2010. To this end, it takes the notion of ‘technopol’ and transforms it into a sociological category by clearly identifying the nature of the ‘technical’ and ‘political’ resources of 20 agents who served as ministers and undersecretaries in key government posts. Over two decades these agents provided the governing coalition, the Concertación, with a form of collective leadership. The article thus shows that only this small group of powerful agents can be termed technopols since only they exhibited ‘tech’ and ‘pol’ resources as well as a particular form of political competence, making it possible to differentiate them from technocrats and politicians.

Although unimagined and unanticipated within the Creole nationalist ‘discursive frameworks’ of the liberal-republican state, nineteenth-century Andean peasant communities sought mediated re-insertion in the postcolonial Peruvian Republic. Key to peasant political engagement in the Andean region of Huaylas-Ancash was the tactical deployment of ‘Indian rights’ of colonial origin to make moral and material claims on the postcolonial caudillo state. In Huaylas-Ancash peasant claims and political practices destabilised liberal notions of ‘republic’ and ‘republican’ citizenship, and eventually challenged the teleogical historicity of Creole nation-building itself.

By analysing the socially segmented party–voter linkages deployed by the Unión Demócrata Independiente (Independent Democratic Union, UDI), a Chilean conservative party, this article demonstrates the usefulness of combining Kitschelt's party–voter linkage framework with Gibson's conceptual approach to conservative party electoral coalition-making. In Latin America, parties take advantage of social fragmentation and the availability of non-state campaign financing to combine multiple linkage types and thus attract socially diverse constituencies. Although it is an opposition party, UDI's historical trajectory and organisation have enabled it to receive private funds from its traditional and party-identified core constituency (business and conservative sectors), whose programmatic preferences and interests it represents, and then use these resources in a ‘charismatic’ mobilisation approach and particularistic exchanges with a non-core constituency (low-income, non-traditional voters of the radical right), in a segmented, but nationally integrated, electoral strategy.

Recent literature on Latin American political economy appears to echo work of the 1960s and 1970s emphasising technical expertise in government. Sikkink and Geddes, for example, suggest that the role of technical experts and professionalisation of the bureaucracy explain Brazil's relative economic successes in the 1960s.1 Conaghan, Malloy and Abugattas focus on the role of technocrats in economic policy—making in the Central Andes.2 Following seminal work by Camp and Smith, Hernández Rodríguez presents the latest data on the role of technocrats in the Mexican political elite.3 To a large extent, this recent literature on technocrats in Latin America fails to address one of the main issues debated in the earlier literature: the political consequences of increasingly technocratic government. A second problem with recent work is that, when it does address causal issues, it tends to follow the functionalist logic of earlier literature. Using data on Mexican political elites, this article develops a new typology which carefully differentiates the new technobureaucratic elite from other elite groups. The aim is to shed new light on the debate over the implications of increasing technocratisation. Secondly, this study of the rise of a new elite emphasises the role of institutional changes within the government bureaucracy in addition to the state's functional response to changes in its politico—economic environment. This article begins with a brief discussion of earlier general — and Mexico—specific — literature on technocrats.

Some analysts of technocracy in the 1960s and 1970s saw technocrats as apolitical specialists whose growing role in society heralded ‘an end to ideology’ and increased efficiency in government.4

Historians concerned to evaluate the turbulent political history of southern Peru in the late colonial period have, in the main, sought their answers in the voluminous correspondence generated in the wake of the several rebellions, seditions and sundry protests and riots which so scarred the epoch. Several historians have recently explored the wider structural context of such unrest, and we even have a socio-racial analysis of the leading cadres of the Túpac Amaru rebellion of 1780. Beyond the political and economic or commercial context within which such political conflict took place, however, we still lack an analysis of social stratification in southern Peru which embraces both the divisive and cohesive facets of inter-class relations, with all that the imply fo the potential formation of political alliances in the region. Moreover, apart from the immediate conflicts which precipitated the two major uprisings of 1780 and 1814, little is known of the nature of social relations at local level during the interregnum of some three decades which separated those two revolts, or indeed before 1780.

In 1908 an editorial in El Diablito Rojo, itself a penny journal, made some disparaging, yet revealing, remarks regarding the impact of the penny press of the time on Mexican workers:

There is hardly a worker in Mexico [today] who every morning does not bring to his workshop or leave at home the paper of the day in addition to the small papers dedicated to workers which he acquires with real pleasure. In the big paper [the worker] looks for the daily news… in the small weekly he looks for a joke, a caricature, an anecdote; something that can distract or instruct him…

But is that small press useful to its readers?… No: the journals constituting the small press all call themselves defenders of the worker and preach a dangerous gospel: hate of the bourgeois… [so that today] The worker already sees the bourgeois as an ogre…

The small press does not… demonstrate to the worker the evils brought about by rebellion or violence, instead it tries to flatter the proletariat, indeed defending it in its own way when it is victimised, but only by fomenting in him a bad attitude towards his work.1