In 1845, Argentine statesman Domingo Sarmiento predicted that ‘what took 20 years to occur in North America, i.e. the emergence almost by magic of numerous cities, provinces and states in what was once uninhabited terrain, will occur in Argentina in the same span of time’. Forty years later, however, French writer Emile Daireaux observed that ‘the commercial development of Buenos Aires is that of a satellite which orbits Europe's sphere of attraction; Argentina's other cities and towns are in turn satellites of Buenos Aires’. A half-century later still, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada could complain that ‘the country's progress will come only when…we care for the health of the entire body and not only the euphoria of its decapitated head’. The imagery of Daireaux and Martínez Estrada portrays Buenos Aires' comprehensive domination of the Argentine city system, a city system quite unlike the replica of the US model envisaged by an optimistic Sarmiento.

The thesis of this article, following that venerable geopolitical theory of Montesquieu, is deceptively simple. In post-independence Peru, the fundamental faultline of regional conflict was a north–south one, that of the limeño north versus the arequipeño southern coast. The sources of north–south differentiation were many: distinctive institutional legacies of colonialism, the centrifugal force of 1820s balkanisation, contrasting new forms of overseas penetration, the dichotomous pull of Pacific and Atlantic basin economies, overarching patterns of regional rise and decline, and rival visions for integrating the new country of Peru. By the 1830s, however, the north–south conflict had crystallised and polarised around one central issue: commercial policy or, to put it at its simplest, the north's ‘protectionism’ versus the south's ‘free trade’.

As originally proposed in the early 1970s, the proto-industrialisation model was meant to serve as a more complete explanation of that phase in the general transition from agrarian feudalism to industrial capitalism rather vaguely referred to as the period of manufactures. Early proponents emphasised the role of proto-industrialisation in channelling development toward fully-fledged factory system industrialisation. Proto-industrial theories dealing with the complex interplay of economic, social, demographic, cultural and technological processes eliminate many of the uncertainties generated by the original debates over the general process of transition. Certainly, it is no longer possible to deny the contributions of rural/peasant non-agricultural productive activities to the development of early factory industry as a whole, as well as to social changes leading to the emergence of a proletariat.

Like most of the peripheral countries of Europe in the nineteenth century, Portugal experienced population growth, agricultural expansion and even serious industrial development. By mid-century, in fact, it compared reasonably well in basic economic indices with most comparable late industrialising European countries. Although Portugal continued to develop in the second half of the century, its economy did not grow as rapidly as the rest of Europe and by the end of the century it had fallen seriously behind, becoming one of the poorest societies on the continent. This relative backwardness had several causes. Severe problems of land distribution affected the ability of national agriculture to modernise rapidly, especially in the densely populated north where minifundia land holdings predominated. Portugal's important wine industry was modernised but in only one sector and this sector could not expand its international markets.

Elite family networks with overlapping economic and political power have been a basic feature of Latin America. Their influence was characteristically strong during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the export economies expanded and national governments, particularly in the larger nations, advocated order and progress at the expense of participatory democracy. Historically, the influence of the elites has been primarily a regional phenomenon underpinned by ownership of land, mines, or lucrative commercial enterprises. They formed economic, political, and blood alliances to control production of vital products, monopolise local government and, on occasion, initiate bold entrepreneurial initiatives. Examples include the thirty families who dominated henequen production and local government in nineteenth-century Yucatán, the Grupo Monterrey who ran the industrialising economy of northeastern Mexico during the Porfiriato, and the Paraíba oligarchy who controlled cotton production, municipal government, and local tax revenues during the Brazilian Old Republic (1889–1930).

The 1948 Costa Rican civil war stands as the most significant breakdown of emerging democratic practices in what many believe is a country with a democratic destiny. No other political conflict has so polarised the country and cost so many lives. Nor has any other civil war so influenced the way analysts view and understand the development of democratic institutions in Costa Rica. Why political actors in Costa Rica settled their disputes on the battlefield, however, is a question that has yet to generate a satisfactory response.

Pancho Villa is an intriguing figure of the Mexican Revolution. His popular movement dominated northern Mexico from 1913 to 1915, greatly influencing the revolution's course and the character of modern Mexican politics. As a revolutionary, Villa remains immortalised as a bold and charismatic military leader who rose from poverty to attack the wealthy and powerful while championing peasants' and workers' rights. He also stands as a prominent symbol of national pride, a leader who fought against foreign domination and dared to attack the United States directly. But how ‘revolutionary’ were Villa and the Villista movement? What did they actually accomplish? If Francisco Madero stands for political rights and democracy, Emiliano Zapata for land reform, and Venustiano Carranza for nationalism and the 1917 Constitution, whatdoes Villa represent?

After a prolonged period of authoritarian rule, the rebirth of democracy in Latin America has prompted a resurgent interest in civilian control of the armed forces. Few disagree that political leaders will be unable to consolidate their democratic gains without resolving ‘la cuestión militar’. Given the history of military political intervention in the region, scholars have long expressed scepticism over whether governments can ever fully subject the armed forces to their political will. Recently, the terms on which power has been transferred from military to civilian hands and developments subsequent to the transfer have prompted an even greater anxiety about the future of some of these new and fragile democracies.

Constitutional issues are once again being considered from sociological and political perspectives, after many years of strictly juridical approaches. This renewed interest stems from both theoretical and practical concerns, raised by the multiplication of liberalisation and democratisation processes around the globe, as well as from the need to update and deepen the democratic content of stable democracies.

For twenty years the Soviet Union has had closer relations with Peru than with any other Latin American country apart from Cuba or Nicaragua. In fact, Peru was the first post-Cuban revolution centre of Soviet operations in South America, and perhaps still plays that role today. Now that the Cold War is over the balance sheet of Soviet relations with Peru can be evaluated with more detachment than ever.

Within a short time span Brazil became one of the world's largest producers of defence hardware. In 1987, Brazil was the fifth largest exporter of arms worldwide and the second largest arms producer among the newly industrialised countries (NICs). This article argues that the roots of this rapid development of the Brazilian Defence Industry (BDI) lie in the vital role of multinational companies (MNCs) and in the harmonious tripod orchestrated by the Brazilian government. The State, through its interaction with the Brazilian private sector and with subsidiaries of MNCs, brought together the political support, a supply of funds, the manufacturing capability and technology that are vital in any attempt to establish an indigenous defence industry. Above all, the Brazilian government achieved the balanced coordination of these variables essential for maintaining the dynamics of the industry.

It is now a well-known sad story that Alan Garcia's APRA government initially raised high hopes within and outside Peru and then collapsed into incoherent policy-making and political chaos, with hyper-inflation and a drastic increase in insurgent violence as a result. The social costs of that collapse have been grave indeed, and the worst victims have been the nation's poor, who were already subsisting at deplorable levels prior to the crisis. Paradoxically, one of the priorities of the APRA government upon coming to power in 1985 was the improvement of the precarious situation of the nation's poor and marginalised population in the pueblos jóvenes–shanty-towns–and in the sierra. The APRA government introduced a variety of innovative strategies directed at these groups. The most highly publicised of those–the Programa de Apoyo de Ingreso Temporal (PAIT)–is the subject of this study.

During the last 25 years Chilean society has experienced profound socioeconomic, political and even cultural changes. From 1964 to 1970 there was a ‘revolution in liberty’ under Eduardo Frei, from 1970 a ‘Chilean road to socialism’ under Salvador Allende, and from 1973 to 1989 a ‘silent revolution’ under Augusto Pinochet.

Although peasants have always been linked to larger economic systems, the expansion of capitalist agriculture and the augmented incidence of migration throughout the Third World in recent decades have transformed the peasantry and made it reliant on wage work in labour markets tied to the world economy as never before. In Latin America this transformation has taken many forms, but the overwhelming direction has been towards changing subsistence farmers into wage labourers. The overall effect has been that few rural households persist independent of wage labour, while the majority combine income from resource-poor landholdings with wage earnings. The dependence on off-farm income is especially significant among smallholder farm families who derive the majority of household income from off-farm sources.

Personal dictators remain a key feature of contemporary regimes termed ‘authoritarian’ or ‘totalitarian’, particularly in their early consolidating phases. But there is still disagreement over the seemingly ideological, polemical and indiscriminate use of the term totalitarian dictatorship as an analytic concept and tool to guide foreign policy formulation. Jeane Kirkpatrick elevated the taxonomy to a vociferous level of debate with a 1979 Commentary article. Entitled ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards’, the work raised anew semantic hairsplitting concerning the qualitative differences between all previous tyrannies and those bearing organisational similarities with the Nazi, Fascist or Stalinist prototypes.

This Commentary addresses the issue of ecological perception and ecological politics among poor populations, rural and urban. Some social struggles by poor people (and some national struggles by poor countries) can be understood also as ecological struggles. This approach reveals the ecological content, both hidden and explicit, of social movements from the past or present, which have been geared to defend access to natural resources against the advance of the generalised market system, and that have contributed to the conservation of resources to the extent that the market undervalues externalities. Examples are taken mainly from the history of highland and coastal Peru, but this approach is relevant also for the Amazonian region. Some comparisons are made with other countries in Latin America and also with India.

The recent experiences of transition to democracy in Latin America have taken place in circumstances which suggest a need to rethink the political and social dimensions of inflation. The experience of the 1980s reveals that the once familiar road which led from an inflationary spiral and a rising foreign debt to the collapse of democracy can also be travelled by other types of regime. The crisis of the bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes, Chile apart, reflected an inability to deal with those same focal points of political and economic uncertainty. The sequence which runs from high (or hyper) inflation to political regime change may be neutral, in the sense that it is indifferent to whether the regimes affected are democratic or authoritarian.

The most persistent theme in social science analyses of Haiti concerns the causes of the country's economic underdevelopment. During the past few years, a number of significant works have been published which touch upon this theme. The present article will comment on some of these contributions to the debate, beginning with the discussion of the Haitian state and the defence mechanisms employed by the peasants against the autorités. I will then move on to examine survival problems in urban areas before ending with a look at some of the controversies regarding the determinants of peasant poverty in Haiti.

Environmental issues have very obviously come to occupy a prominent place on the political agenda, both domestically and internationally. This process has been driven by grass-roots concern for the future consequences of environmental degradation, assisted in many cases by the adoption of the green movement and of green issues as a platform for protest on a broader range of social and political issues. National governments have increasingly taken up the cause of environmental protection, either out of genuine conviction or out of fear of the electoral consequences of not doing so. Internationally the emergence of green issues has been further encouraged by broader shifts in the international system and the declining salience of old issues, above all the changing nature of East/West rivalry.