This article focuses on the intricate and developing nature of official politics and grassroots activism in post-revolutionary Mexico. It does so by tracing the trajectory of the Pentathlón Deportivo Militar Universitario, a right-wing youth movement that emerged in Mexico in 1938. By locating the group within both the international and domestic emergence of youth movements in the early twentieth century, the article shows how the study of Pentathlón's formation, objectives and later evolution can significantly enrich our understanding of an important phase in Mexico's post-revolutionary history. Within the context of right wing oppositional politics, analysis of the movement provides a fascinating insight into both the emerging Mexican state's ability to appropriate the radical impulses of the younger generation and the Pentathlón's willingness to accommodate such strategies in order to ensure its own survival.

By the time Evita* died on 26 July 1952, she had become the source of two widely contradictory myths coexisting side by side as if their subject were two different persons. In one, she was the beloved saint who had sacrificed her life for the poor; in the other, the ambitious parvenue who used her power to satisfy her insatiable thirst for revenge.

The Harvard political science professor Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) made visits to Brazil in 1972 and 1974 to advise the government about ‘decompression’ or regime liberalisation. The literature on Brazil's dictatorship references these visits as having had a major causal impact. This article argues that his influence on Brazilian regime change is greatly exaggerated. It also argues that Huntington, who became a leading theorist of democratisation, had an interest in and commitment to democracy that was more recent and circumstantial than is often thought. This helps to explain the current period of democratic ‘deconsolidation’ associated with the rise of authoritarian national populism in Brazil.

Scholars have paid considerable attention to the connection between Washington's withdrawal from intervention and the emergence of dictatorship in Central America during the 1930s. The current article seeks to enhance our understanding of those interconnected developments through the investigation of the US Foreign Service and its role in the early 1930s presidential campaigns in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. It shows that the dynamic interaction between actors in both Washington and Central America set in motion a process that would produce decades of authoritarian rule in the isthmus.

During the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–85), the Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro (‘8 October’ Revolutionary Movement, MR-8) attempted to mobilise peasants for its revolutionary project. This article analyses communication between MR-8 militants and peasants in Brotas de Macaúbas, Bahia. Based on interviews and document analysis, it documents the central role of José Campos Barreto (Zequinha) as a leader in this political process. The son of a local family, Zequinha enjoyed the respect of peasants and relied on his knowledge of their lives to better communicate with them. While the MR-8 made some inroads with peasants, its work in the region was prematurely ended when agents of the state descended on Brotas to arrest Carlos Lamarca, one of the dictatorship's most wanted militants.

Social scientists make a fundamental assumption about the nature of the relationship between theory and fact. For them, theories are seen, not as guides to individual behaviour, but as tools for the clinical investigation of social processes. The end of this search is a better theory. A theory has most chance of acceptance if it seems elegantly to order a very large number of hitherto unrelated facts.

This article explores the settlement of Russian Mennonites on the Paraguayan Chaco frontier during the Chaco War years. These colonists engaged in a range of seemingly contradictory place-making practices – from the agro-environmental and the political to the spiritual and the cultural – that served to solidify their tenuous claim to an unfamiliar and highly contested landscape. Ideas of food security – seen in terms of both production and consumption – linked these diverse exercises. In the Paraguayan Chaco, these former Russian wheat farmers experimented with new crops and foodways. Although pacifists, they supplied the Paraguayan military efforts even as they also sent their crops to Nazi Germany. Finally, as an ethnic group practising endogamy and seeking isolation from their neighbours, they unexpectedly initiated a campaign to evangelise the Chaco's indigenous population centred, in part, on reforming the latter's ‘deficient’ diet.

Southern and central regions of Argentina moved from being relatively poor in the sixteenth century to being the richest in the country today. Although there is some evidence of this reversal, the process of regional growth in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century is, in the main, unknown. In this paper, we present an estimation of the GDPs of Argentina's 25 provinces in 1914: this is the first consistent estimation of this variable for any period before the 1950s. Our results confirm that in 1914 the city of Buenos Aires and some districts in Patagonia had the highest per capita GDP, and a comparison with the available data for 1953 shows strong persistence in incomes per capita in this period; sectoral analysis of provincial GDPs suggests that growth in the leading districts was driven by economies of agglomeration in some cases and land abundance in others.

Human rights are the focus of research and teaching in multiple fields including law, philosophy, political science, sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology, history, literature and public health. Human rights are also the focus of advocacy and on-the-ground investigation by activists affiliated with nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), labour unions and social movements. Scholars interested in rights-based issues thus often face a dual challenge: that of crossing disciplinary boundaries in order to explore human rights questions, and that of bridging the academic-practitioner divide.

The Inca ruling elites of ancient Peru based their right to leadership on a claim not only to aristocratic but also to divine blood. They were, they assured their subjects, descendants of Manco Capac, the son of the sun who according to official Inca history had founded the Empire of Tahuantinsuyo (the four corners). For the Incas, therefore, legitimacy rested on charisma, in the sense in which Max Weber used that word: ‘It is the quality which attaches to men and things by virtue of their relations with the “supernatural,” that is, with the nonempirical aspects of reality in so far as they lend theological meaning to men's acts and the events of the world.’