This paper examines the sensitivity of current account balances to several important variables. Variables are classified as external and domestic. External variables are those over which Central American countries have little or no control. In this study external variables are real interest rates in world capital markets, the terms of trade, and growth in the developed countries. Low real interest rates, improved terms of trade and rapid growth in the developed countries would be expected to improve current account balances. Domestic variables include budget deficits and real exchange rates. These are factors over which Central American countries do have control. Budget deficits and appreciations of real exchange rates can be expected to cause deteriorations in current account balances.

The accession of Hipólito Yrigoyen to the office of President of Argentina on 12 October, 1916, was the long-awaited climax to a quest for political power that had begun 25 years earlier with the founding of the Unión Cívica Radical. Since 1891 the UCR or Radical Party, as it is usually called, had been condemned to the status of an opposition party, its leaders waiting impatiently for their chance to uproot completely what they deemed to be the corruption and mismanagement of the régimen, their pejorative term for the conservative establishment that had dominated Argentine political life for decades.

In August 1933 a bitter revolutionary struggle reached its climax in Havana. Pressure from the United States during mediations conducted by American Ambassador Sumner Welles, a general strike and a military coup combined to topple the government of Gerardo Machado. National tensions made acute during the machadato and contradictions generated in the anti-Machado struggle converged in the newly constituted administration of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.

This article examines the experiences of the Afro-Brazilian coffee transport workers of Rio de Janeiro's port district in the generation following the abolition of slavery in 1888. While they have been condemned by some scholars as reformist and placatory, this article argues that these Afro-Brazilians aggressively contested the new ‘free labour’ regime and the thousands of immigrant labourers who arrived to compete with them. Indeed, far from marking them as passive recipients of state paternalism, the subsequent decision of the port workers to seek an alliance with the state points to the importance of nativism as a middle-ground upon which successive Brazilian governments and Afro-Brazilians could meet.