The gains and difficulties Latin American countries face from financial market development and liberalisation have received much attention in current economic literature. Nevertheless, significant issues have received little or no attention, even though the success of these efforts depends upon them. The purpose of this article is to explore the benefits from open and developed – two words that are not necessarily synonymous – financial and capital markets in Latin America and possible important obstacles which will be faced in the remainder of the 1990s.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, as cholera and yellow fever epidemics ravaged the Old and the New World alike, Brazil seemed to enjoy the reputation of being a remarkably salubrious country. In spite of its geographical position, its climate and the abundance of those elements that prevailing medical wisdom considered conducive to the more aggravated forms of disease, the fact was that Brazil long remained free of the two most visible scourges of the times.

Brazilian discussions of race between 1880 and 1940 were partly a use of European scientific theory to rationalise the native system of colour discrimination. When scientific orthodoxy turned against ‘race’ between 1920 and 1945, much of the intellectual racism of Brazil also dispersed. Quite rightly, most intellectual histories of race in Brazil stress a disjuncture around 1930. However, from the 1870s onward, and most clearly after abolition, there was also a medical-psychiatric strand to ‘race’ that can be unravelled from the rest of the skein. Part of racial thinking in Brazil reflected the general medicalisation of social thought that began when early-nineteenth-century physicians called for hygienic reforms within upper-class families to protect children from hereditary or environmental contaminations. The Spencerian and Comtean positivist social science that became fashionable in Brazil after 1870 also contributed to medicalisation. It saw society as an organism, and compared the role of the social scientist to the role of the physician: to examine symptoms of disease and propose therapies. From the 1880s through the 1920s, the national ailment that the medicalised social thought of Brazil most often diagnosed, an ailment that connected individual health to national well-being, was degeneration.

This text is a preliminary assessment of the potential for comparative and ‘trans-systemic’ study of the current role of the Roman Catholic Church in Central and East Europe. For observers of Vatican policy in world affairs, there is every reason to believe that the Church, now engaged in rapidly rebuilding its own institutions in Central and East Europe, will play a decisive part in shaping the future societies of the region in the coming decade, just as it did in Brazil and the rest of Latin America in the immediate post-war era. In fact, the recent history of the Church in Latin America, but above all Brazil, provides a timely and useful paradigm for helping fathom the current course of Vatican policy in Central and East Europe. In turn, the results of comparative inquiry may even serve to stimulate an entirely fresh discussion of the Brazilian and Latin American experience.

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.

Three main political parties regularly contested elections in Argentina in the late nineteenth century: the Partido Autonomista Nacional (PAN), the Unión Cívica Nacional (UCN), and the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR). However, little is known about the nature of party competition, the contesting parties' electoral performances or the characteristics of their electoral support. Discussion of the electoral politics prior to 1912, when the vote became secret and compulsory for all Argentine males over 18 years of age, has been dominated by notions of corruption, repression and lack of opportunity for popular participation. While in other countries such assessments have been revised in recent years after unreformed elections were analysed in more detail, accounts of electoral repression are still dominant in discussions of the pre-1912 Argintine electoral system.

On 28 February 1885 Guatemala's Liberal dictator, Justo Rufino Barrios, declared the Union of Central America, and made it plain that this would be achieved through force of arms if the four other Central American Republics did not consent to his decree. On 5 and 6 March, as Costa Rica's Liberal state began to plan a popular mobilisation against the Guatemalan threat, an article appeared in the pages of El Diario de Costa Rica, written by a resident Honduran man of letters, Alvaro Contreras. It was called ‘Un héroe annómino’. Curiously, though, this hero is not anonymous at all. The article soon reveals that his name is Juan Santamaría, a humble footsoldier who, during the Battle of Rivas in 1856, had volunteered to burn down the Mesón de Guerra from where William Walker's filibusters were decimating Costa Rican troops with rifle fire. The attempt was successful, but Santamaría sacrificed his life in the process. The invention of Costa Rica's ‘almost unknown soldier’ had begun.

Political studies of military institutions in Latin America have tended to lay heavy stress on their external linkages, with a good deal of emphasis being placed upon the ‘differential degrees of dependence upon other countries for supplies, parts, training and equipment by the various service branches’. This particularly the case when scholars attempt to explain why two military institutions differ in their political behaviour and ideological orientation. Thus, we find Lieuwen asserting that

[t]he aristocratic tendencies of [Latin American] naval officers… often were moderated by the democratic views of the British and United States officers who were their professional advisers. Conversely, before World War II, authoritarian attitudes of some Latin American armies were reinforced by the influence of German, Spanish, and Italian military missions.

The state of civil–military relations in the world, especially in the Third World, is very well summed up by Mosca's statement that civilian control over the military ‘is a most fortunate exception in human history’.

All over the globe, the armed forces have frequently preserved their autonomous power vis-à-vis civilians. They have also succeeded in maintaining their tutelage over some of the political regimes that have arisen from the process of transition from military to democratic governments, as in Argentina and Brazil. Spain is a remarkable exception. Today, Spain, despite its authoritarian legacy, is a democratic country. The constituted civil hierarchy has been institutionalised, military áutonomy weakened, and civilian control over the military has emerged. Spain's newly founded democracy now appears quite similar to the older European democracies.

In the 1980s more and more Latin American countries attempted to address daunting economic problems with variations on the so-called neoliberal theme. While one should have expected governments to implement some form of short-term fiscal and monetary adjustments to address the region's generalised fiscal crisis, it was less inevitable that this neoclassical formula should coincide with a more long-term structural adjustment formula, including such neoliberal (or neo-orthodox) policies as privatisation of State-owned companies, liberalization of tariffs, and reduction of the public sector workforce. As a result of this policy mix, the normal recessionary impact of adjustment intensified. The clamour for protection from that impact, and/or for putting an end to the policies themselves, has also intensified not only from the popular sector (that perennial target of all adjustments), but from the ranks of economic elites as well.

Latin America's workers perplex historians. Despite chronic political turmoil, revolt and undiluted class conflict, Latin America's mobilised workers have not been the vanguards of social revolution. Rather, variations of authoritarianism, populism and clientilism are said to characterise labour politics more accurately. The absence of independent working-class politics has prompted the search for aetiologies of class-formation in Latin America – the search for the missing ingredient to revolutionary working-class action.

Costa Rica has won praise for its democratic traditions and social stability. Social scientists have attributed this to many factors: the country's benign colonial past, its small and relatively homogeneous population, the existence of a land owning peasantry, and the development, beginning in the 1930s, of a social welfare state. As it did elsewhere, the Great Depression marked a crossroads in Costa Rica's development. In response to the collapse of its international markets and the ensuing labour unrest, the state jettisoned its economic liberalism, and assumed an interventionist role in the management of the economy and labour–capital relations. This fundamentally reformist role developed through the 1930s and culminated in 1943 with the passage of a package of Christian-based social reforms including a comprehensive labour code under the administration of Rafael Calderón Guardia (1940–4).

The two and a half years of the Collor de Mello government were marked by so many dramatic events that the significance of the election which made him the first directly elected President in 29 years was not accorded the attention it derserved. A succession of events made the 1989 election results lose much of their interest for debate and study: the drastic after the inauguration of his government; the marketing campaign every time Collor appeared in the media; and, above all, the serious accusations of corruption involving his wife, relatives, close friends and Collor himself leading to his impeachment in December 1992.

Scholarly studies that consider the relationship between economic dependence and foreign policy reveal a wide variety of dependent foreign policy behaviour. As a body, the dependent foreign policy literature lacks the theoretical continuity needed to understand and organise this empirical diversity. Such foreign policy diversity is particularly observable in capitalist Latin America. Despite the entire region's significant economic weakness and dependence on the USA, leaders implement foreign policies as defiant as Oscar Arias's peace plan for Central America and as apparently acquiescent as Carlos Salinas de Gortari's agreeing to a Free Trade Agreement between Mexico and the USA. Progress in theory building in the area of dependent foreign policy, therefore, has particular implications for the study of Latin American foreign policy, which has been dominated by individual case studies that too rarely place their findings in a theoretical context.

People of African descent in Costa Rica form a marginalised and geographically concentrated minority group. The limited interest that academics have shown towards people of African descent is a reflection of their position in Costa Rican society. National histories consistently ignore the contributions of West Indian immigrants to the economic and social development of modern Costa Rica. Moreover, the existing literature on people of African descent in Costa Rica fails to document properly West Indians' efforts to integrate into Hispanic society. As a result, several misconceptions continue to exist about the evolution of the West Indian community in Costa Rica.

Bolivia is one of the poorest countries of the hemisphere and its rural people have among the lowest life expectancy, health-care standards and educational levels of all Latin Americans. It is the only country in South America with a ranking of ‘low’ on the Human Development Index for 1991 compiled by the United Nations, a measure combining the per capita product with such factors as longevity and access to education. At the same time, the most valuable export of the country, cocaine, depends on the coca supplied by peasant cultivators in the regions where it grows. The explosion of the international cocaine trade has had profound repercussions, both positive and negative, on the lives of the campesinos of the Bolivian Yungas, who happened to supply, since colonial times and before, the coca destined for traditional consumption within the country; it was their most reliable cash crop. The conversion of their ancient crop to an illicit commodity of high, concentrated value has created the opportunity for some to experience a marginally enhanced standard of living (at a time when other rural Bolivians were seeing their own abysmal standard depressed even further), but at the same time has increased the risks they would run if they entered the lucrative but illegal cocaine trade.

The 1989 presidential elections confirmed the thesis that Brazilian voters use their ballots as weapons to express their dissatisfaction with the performance of their governments and, in particular, with the incumbents' ability to cope with the serious economic difficulties that have plagued Brazil in recent decades. Nearly thirty years after the last free presidential elections, the ballots cast across Brazil and in all segments of the society reflected a heightened plebiscitary tendency, especially in the most developed regions of the nation, that is, in modern Brazil. Looking at recent political history, we can observe that this trend became generalised in the 1970s, with the crisis of the authoritarian regime. Faced with a two-party system (Arena and MDB) imposed by the ruling military, the electorate voiced its protest by voting against authoritarianism and, in principle, in favour of democracy. Now that the authoritarian regime is no longer there, democracy seeks its consolidation – but the voters continue voting against; that is, they continue to use their ballots to reject incumbent governments (the 1986 elections being the only exception). The big change, however, is that now, in addition to reproving administrations which they deem inadequate, the voters are also protesting against the backwardness and vices of traditional Brazilian politics and, more specifically, against the practices of corruption, favouritism, and privatism.

The theoretical interpretation of social and economic change in the Brazilian Amazon has been dominated by a political economy in which the notion of the frontier, variously defined, has been central. Brazil is of course not the only country where a fuzzily defined idea of frontier development has been important, and we can think, as Turner did for the United States, of a Brazilian frontier thesis. It can be boiled down to a simple contention, although the arguments are often complicated: the frontier, now restricted to Amazonia, is the absorption of peripheral regions by an expanding capitalism. This perspective, fundamental to numerous studies of Amazonia, sees a tendency towards homogeneity in economic structure and social relations in the cycle of frontier development, with capitalism ending up as the dominant force. It regards the key subjects in the dynamic of the frontier as the peasantry, who are acted upon by the bourgeoisie and the state, and argues that the dynamic of events within the frontier is determined outside it, in the forms of capital accumulation in the national economy and the way regional economies are articulated to it. Although first formulated in the 1970s, it remains overwhelmingly the most influential theoretical approach to explaining Amazonia's modern history, irrespective, one is sometimes tempted to think, of the direction that history has actually taken.

The scandal involving President Fernando Collor de Mello, leading to his last-minute resignation on 29 December 1992, provoked understandable heart-searching in Brazil. This was clearly evident in a series of research interviews, which I held from August to October, when the political crisis was fast coming to a head, and already was reflected in published analyses of the P. C. Farias/Collor affair.

How did the indian majority in early republican Bolivia interpret the transformation of the colonial Audiencia of Charcas into an independent nation-state ? How was the new republican age and its symbols reconciled with the forms of social organisation and belief which had emerged from the meeting between native Andean civilisation and the Spanish colonial state?