This article critically evaluates hypotheses that attribute decentralisation in Latin America to democratisation and economic liberalisation. It examines these hypotheses in historical perspective by looking at the experience over time with revenue decentralisation and recentralisation in Argentina, one of Latin America's early decentralisers. Because neither the democratic election of subnational officials nor the pursuit of economic liberalisation is unique to the contemporary period in Argentina, the Argentine case represents an opportunity to gain analytical leverage on the theories emerging in the contemporary period. The paper presents qualified support for the argument that democratisation drives decentralisation and confounding evidence for the liberalisation hypothesis.

During the twentieth century, the countries of Central America were characterised by remarkably different political regimes: military-authoritarianism in Guatemala and El Salvador, progressive democracy in Costa Rica and traditional-authoritarianism in Honduras and Nicaragua. This article explains these contrasting regime outcomes by exploring the agrarian and state-building reforms pursued by political leaders during the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberal reform period. Based on differences in the transformation of state and class structures, three types of liberalism are identified: radical liberalism in Guatemala and El Salvador, reformist liberalism in Costa Rica and aborted liberalism in Honduras and Nicaragua. It is argued that these types of liberalism set the Central American countries on contrasting paths of political development, culminating in diverse regime outcomes.

This article discusses the development of social categories and ethnicity in the peninsula of Yucatán, Mexico, since the Conquest in the sixteenth century. Based on the Yucatec case, it demonstrates that ethnicity is not a ubiquitous form of social organisation, but rather a historical process related to specific techniques of social distinction. It argues that the starting point for the analysis of ethnicity should not be ethnic collectives, but instead the ways in which individuals use ethnic categories in social interaction.

In 1970 Leslie Bethell argued that the Brazilian slave trade was ended by British pressure. Since then others have pointed to slaveholders’ fears of insurrection and of yellow fever. This article addresses the issue by reviewing Brazilian slavery, the African trade and yellow fever. Its analysis of sources and context leads it to question revisionist arguments. Moreover, while it supports Bethell on the centrality of British pressure, it goes beyond his appreciation of internal Brazilian political affairs. It provides greater specificity, clarifying the key importance of political history, the structure of state-society relations and the significance of the Brazilian leadership of the time.

This article attempts to fill the void in research on the Justicialista Party (PJ) organisation. Challenging accounts of the contemporary PJ as a weak, personalistic organisation, it argues that the party maintains a powerful base-level infrastructure with deep roots in working- and lower-class society. This organisation has been understated by scholars because, unlike prototypical working class party structures, it is informal and highly decentralised. The PJ organisation consists of a range of informal networks – based on unions, clubs, NGOs and activists' homes that are largely unconnected to the party bureaucracy. These organisations provided the government of Carlos Menem with a range of benefits in the 1990s, particularly in the realm of local problem-solving and patronage distribution. Yet they also constrained the Menem leadership, limiting its capacity to impose candidates and strategies on lower-level party branches.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States and Chile competed for dominance in the Pacific, and their maritime rivalry reemerged in the race to Antarctica during the 1940s. The US Navy was able to circumnavigate the white continent, for the first time ever, while Chile's once great navy no longer posed a threat even to its neighbours. The Chilean government expressed concern about the scope of US exploration since the Antarctic always had been an essential component of its maritime policy with national security ramifications. President Gabriel González Videla seized upon Washington's unsuccessful attempts to determine the legal fate of the Antarctic to gain acceptance for a Chilean proposal that avoided the need to renounce sovereignty claims. In doing so, he secured essentially maritime objectives by diplomatic means. This success was more profound than widely appreciated since it came at a time when US intervention in Chile's domestic affairs had reached an unprecedented level.

The traditional literature on Mexico's formerly hegemonic party, the PRI, notes the importance of the ‘informal rules of the game' in determining outcomes, such as who will be the PRI's presidential candidate. This article argues that the onset of electoral competition allowed weaker actors within the party to strengthen their position by reforming the statutes in order to give them decision-making power previously denied them. However, this was a difficult process. President Salinas was able to overturn statutory reforms, while President Zedillo was not. Now that the PRI has lost the presidential elections, internal mechanisms of distributing selective benefits become even more important because of the loss of the omnipotent president who once exacted cooperation from all actors within the party and the regime.

This article focuses on the changes that occurred within Querétaro's elite from the late Habsburg to the high Bourbon period in colonial Mexico from the perspective of its relationship to the convent of Santa Clara. It explores how creole elite families of landed background with firm roots in the early seventeenth century, tied together through marriage, entrepreneurship and membership in Santa Clara were slowly pushed out of the city's economic and administrative circles by a new Bourbon elite which broke with the social strategies of the past by not sheltering its daughters in the city's most opulent convent.

Under his administration (1994–2000), President Ernesto Zedillo replaced Pronasol, the targeted poverty alleviation programme created by his predecessor, with his own programme, Progresa. Pronasol had come under severe attack as a politicised federal welfare programme intended to generate votes for the PRI. In contrast, the Zedillo administration insisted that Progresa was a genuine poverty-alleviation programme devoid of any political agenda. The purpose of this article is to assess whether Zedillo's claim is valid. To do so, I build a statistical model with the aim of identifying the factors that may have influenced the reach of Progresa in 1999, an important year of electoral preparation for the July 2000 elections. The picture that emerges is not entirely clear-cut. On the one hand, poverty indicators played a key role in determining who should benefit from the programme. On the other hand, Progresa also displayed a political edge, revealing that, in certain respects, the executive and the PRI continued to resort to old tricks in an attempt to alter electoral results.

The most widely-accepted views of the origins of the South Atlantic War contend that it arose either out of the Argentine junta's need to divert attention away from a worsening economy or from misperceptions in both London and Buenos Aires. This article argues that the ‘demobilisation’ of Argentine civil society removed the need for a diversionary war; and that the lengthy crisis bargaining that followed in the wake of the ‘grab’ of the Falklands/Malvinas Islands substantially mitigated the impact of any misperceptions. This article advances an alternative to existing theories that explains the outbreak of this war by reference to both structural and organisational factors. A fast decreasing gap in relative power between Argentina and Britain may have encouraged the junta more seriously to consider the possibility of initiating a war between the two. Thereafter, however, the organisational pathologies of the Argentine military led to a suboptimally timed preemptive invasion, intransigent diplomacy and a ‘hedged’ approach to deployments that severely undermined Argentina's military effectiveness, allowing Britain to undertake reconquest of the islands with a very reasonable chance of success.

This article focuses on the political and institutional process by which the privatisation policy was approved in Argentina during the 1990s. It concentrates mainly on the relationships that the President maintained with Congress and the political parties sitting in it. By looking through the lens of the privatisation case-study, the article aims to analyse the institutional capacity of Argentine democratic presidents to enact policy reforms. The article shows that the Presidency's constitutional resources in combination with the President's strong base of partisan support permitted the adoption of the innovative privatisation policy at an institutional level. However, the article also explains that the political and institutional resources of the Presidency were not invariable and permanent. Rather, the approval of the privatisation policy shows that policy-making processes involve a dialogue between President and Congress, an institutional interchange that can serve either to enhance or to constrain the powers of the President. By showing that congressional intervention should not be underestimated, this article claims that the Argentine presidential regime is better characterised as one of limited centralism than as an example of hyper-presidentialism. The first characterisation not only acknowledges the complexity of the institutional relations, but also the fact that, given a situation of presidential centralism, institutional relations are variable and, most importantly, contingent upon political conditions.

This article traces the historiography of the romantic yet poorly understood mistress, friend and political ally of Simón Bolívar: Manuela Sáenz Aizpuru de Thorne (1797–1856). It highlights two opposing schools of interpretation on Sáenz: the ‘bad girl’ and ‘heroine’ schools. Nationalism and the cult of Bolívar (especially among Venezuelan and Ecuadorean authors), have combined with the later influence of revolutionary socialist and feminist ideas to ensure the predominance of the latter and, thus, of an heroic-mythic view of Sáenz. Yet scholars' efforts to recover the historical woman have challenged this view and, above all, paved the way for a more nuanced, gender-conscious understanding of Sáenz's role and significance.

This article is a case study that shows the difficulty and complexity of structural adjustment by examining in great detail the reform of a single programme, the promotion of industrial investment in the less developed regions of Argentina. The article describes how the programme grew after 1956 when industrial promotion was first implemented so the reader can fully understand its intricate complexity. The reform process is described in detail, from the time that officials first became aware that the program was costing several percent of GDP to the present. Changing the system was an elaborate process of thrust and parry and counterthrust by government reformers and entrenched supporters of the old regime. The Congress, the Supreme Court, provincial officials and various international institutions were all able to exert considerable influence over the pace and nature of reform. The reform effort also illustrates the role of a free press and public opinion. A cadre of economists working within the government and in private research institutes carried out an effective campaign to inform the public about the programme's excesses. The end result is a precarious and far from simple or transparent, though decidedly less expensive, set of compromises that pleases no one.

This article examines the relationship between elections and political participation in nineteenth-century Peru. Focusing on the elections of 1871–72, I argue that for a better understanding of the way elections facilitated political participation, we should consider not only the vote itself but also analyse the extensive electoral campaign. Generally, voting was irregular, as the different political factions attempted to impede the participation of their opponents through violence. To win the violent clashes on election day it was necessary to mobilise the popular classes. Especially in the cities, corruption and patron–client ties alone proved to be insufficient to gain support. To build powerful political factions, candidates had to win public opinion through massive campaigning and they had to respond to the claims of the urban middle and lower classes. All factions engaged in electoral fraud and neither the government nor any other political actor could determine the electoral outcome. Strong political factions were able to counterbalance governmental interference. That is why, in 1872, a government-opposed candidate, Manuel Pardo, was able to win the presidential election.

This article examines the process of militarisation in Honduras in the 1954–1963 period, also the public reaction to it and its political consequences. The extant literature ignores the significant public opposition to an institutionalised military. As an autonomous military institution was first taking shape in the 1954–57 period, the militarisation issue was one of the dominant themes in the national press, and a sophisticated public debate took place between school teachers and military officials over whether the country needed a military at all, or whether the country should follow the Costa Rican example of military proscription. The 1957–59 period witnessed pressures from politicians, students, and labour to curtail military power and excesses. Finally, the platform of the favourite candidate in the 1963 presidential elections called for demilitarisation and again the Costa Rican model was a high-profile alternative. Demilitarisation played well with the masses, and this contributed to the preemptive military coup just days before the elections. Militarisation affected power relations and undermined democratic consolidation.

This article is concerned with the implementation of the Anglo-Argentine 14th July 1999 Joint Statement relating to the Falklands/Malvinas and the South West Atlantic. Initial consideration is given to the recent historical and political context of the Falklands/Malvinas dispute. The arrest of General Pinochet in London is shown to have been a significant factor in Anglo-Argentine relations during the period of 1998–1999. Thereafter, the background relating to the 14th July 1999 Joint Statement is considered in some detail as it relates to fishing, travel, place names, land mines and an Argentine war memorial on the Falkland Islands. Each element of the Joint Statement is shown to be problematic, and the article concludes with the belief that the provisions of the Joint Statement will continue to strengthen the rapprochement between Britain and Argentina without making any substantial progress towards the eventual solution of the dispute over the Falklands/Malvinas.

O'Donnell's diagnosis regarding the delegative nature of the new Latin American democracies has won wide acceptance in current debates on institutional consolidation. Through the analysis of the Argentine case this commentary challenges the delegative democracy argument as one-sided. The delegativeness hypothesis, it will be argued, turns a blind eye to the truly innovative processes that have taken place within Argentine society and make this democratising wave distinctive.

Chile's new civilian government, the centre-left Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia, has been strongly praised for its efforts to strengthen the rights of labour and correct Chile's severe social inequalities. After nearly a decade of civilian rule, however, it has become increasingly clear that these efforts have not succeeded. Indeed, one of the defining features of Chile's new democracy is the profound inequality and imbalance of power between capital and labour upon which it has been constructed. This article seeks to explain this outcome and examine its implications for Chile's post-military political and economic order.

The 1989–1990 Colombian student movement played a key role in bringing about a constituent assembly to draft a new national constitution. This article utilises contemporary social movement theory, secondary sources and interviews with student activists to examine the trajectory of this movement. Key explanatory variables of social movement theory – political opportunity structure, organisational form, the framing process and the repertoire of collective action – provide useful insights into the origins, impact and ultimate demise of the Colombian student movement. Judicious use of such variables could benefit research on other social movements in Latin America.

In response to the gradual disappearance of the Movimiento Nacional Socialista as the dominant force of the extreme right during the course of 1938, new groups emerged on Chile's political scene. The Partido Nacional Fascista and the Movimiento Nacionalista de Chile, established in October 1938 and February 1940 respectively, attempted to assume the role of nacismo after it had turned to the left. Operating in a national and international environment, which became increasingly detrimental to the development of national fascist organisations, these new voices of Chilean fascism never managed to build up substantial support. They remained on the sidelines of the political system. The return of the Vanguardia Popular Socialista (the name of the MNS since January 1939) to its fascist roots in the (Chilean) autumn of 1940 did not revive the dwindling forces of the radical right. The Vanguardia, the Movimiento Nacionalista and a number of smaller groups that followed the former dictator Carlos Ibáñez established the Unión Nacionalista in March 1942, but this was a last desperate attempt to breathe new life into a dying cause.