This article explores the example of Cuba in order to understand how a contentious politics has evolved since the 2000s and especially after the semi-liberalisation of internet access in 2008. My aim is to analyse how use of new technologies impact the fragmented arenas of contention that already existed in Cuba. My argument is that they have reinforced existing dynamics, while creating new channels of expression and linkage, between contentious spaces within Cuba and with specific segments of the Cuban diaspora. Those dynamics have in turn allowed for the emergence of a transnational Cuban public arena and a more intricate contentious space in Cuba itself.

This article explores the US contribution to the illegal transatlantic slave trade to Brazil and the tensions generated by this hemispheric connection in the mid-nineteenth century. It combines qualitative and quantitative approaches, based on diplomatic records and Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, in order to assess the size and variety of forms of US participation in the traffic to Brazil. More generally, the article examines the tensions caused by the rise of abolitionism and the limits to the enforcement of anti-slave trade legislation in the free trade international environment that emerged after the Napoleonic Wars. By framing the attitudes of the US government within a broader Atlantic context, this work shows why certain forms of US participation in the contraband slave trade (such as providing US-built ships) became more predominant than others (such as directly financing and organising slave voyages) by the mid-nineteenth century.

This article analyses the history of the military clergy and contrasts its role in the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships on the basis of new, previously inaccessible sources. It is argued here that, in addition to its ideological orientation, two further factors explain differences in the influence of the military clergy on the two regimes: first, the structural position that the Military Vicariates occupied between the Church and the armed forces, and, second, the two dictatorships’ different needs for legitimisation. The analysis provides information relevant to understanding the public role of the Catholic Church and the dimensions of violence during the regimes.

This article studies the unfolding of a broad conservative bloc amidst the politico-cultural battles that took place in Cold War Argentina. Focusing on the unexplored gendered, sexual and generational dimensions of the figure of the ‘enemy within’, the article shows that this figure was at the core of a project which coincided with authoritarian practices emanating from the state and also from segments of civil society. The creation of that figure had significant effects, not only in the political but also in the educational and cultural realms, including the imposition of censorship and the delineation of restrictive sexual policies. Moreover, it conditioned the ways in which political repression developed in the context of 1970s state terrorism.

The history of the transition to civilian rule in Chile largely overlooks or marginalizes the role of the armed and confrontational forms of resistance to the dictatorship. This article traces the pre and post-coup history of the Left's engagement with armed forms of struggle and evaluates the effects their incorporation into the struggle against the dictatorship had upon the regime and the Reagan administration. It concludes that armed resistance was a major factor in determining US policy to Chile during the 1980s, and therefore played an important role in the transition as a whole.

The 1970s was the most violent decade of the entire twentieth century for Argentina. Its first half was characterised by the rise of political radicalisation, and its second by the reign of state repression. Studies devoted to investigating the issue of violence in the 1970s have concentrated fundamentally on the protagonists. By contrast, this article offers an analysis of the symbolic terrain, shifting focus from the conscious to the unconscious plane, from the real to the imaginary world. Dealing with visual representations of violence in popular culture, especially advertising in mass-circulation magazines, it explores how violence became naturalised during the first half of the 1970s. In so doing it adds an additional layer to our understanding of the social mood that preceded the military coup of March 1976.

What is the political impact of police corruption and abuse? From the literature, we know that police misconduct destroys people's confidence in police forces and hampers public collaboration with the criminal-justice system; but, what about the political regime, especially in countries striving for democratic governance? Does police wrongdoing affect the legitimacy of the overall regime? Focusing on Central America, this article provides empirical evidence showing that corruption and abuse perpetrated by police officers erode public support for the political order. Results indicate that, under some circumstances, police transgressions can have a greater impact on the legitimacy of the political system than crime or insecurity. They also show that police misconduct not only affects democratising regimes, such as El Salvador and Guatemala, but also consolidated democracies, such as Costa Rica.

The agrarian body of law created by government legislators and jurists in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), sought to restore pueblos’ juridical standing by allowing communities to hold land collectively in the form of ejidos. Yet, state efforts to restructure property relations in the countryside often articulated with local alternative territorial projects that challenged the implementation of these redistributive legal measures. During the course of 50 years, cattle ranchers from the community of El Huanal in Nautla, Veracruz, defended private property, resisted land expropriation, and prevented the establishment of an ejido in the community. How did rancheros achieve this? How did they respond to the pressures of ‘peasant’ mobilisation? How did post-revolutionary legal discourse come to frame this struggle over land? What changes did this failed attempt to implement land reform trigger in the region? Looking closely at the conflicts, interactions, negotiations, and everyday practices that unfolded among a variety of actors around the interpretation and the applicability of ‘the law’, this article demonstrates how the agrarian reform, despite never having been implemented, altered both the material landscape and the social configuration of this community of coastal Veracruz.

This article unveils the continuous and productive relationship that developed between Chile and the IMF during Salvador Allende's presidency (1970–73). This counter-intuitive relationship was made possible by the systematic depoliticisation and technocratisation of the ties between them. By downplaying ideological discrepancies and keeping a high degree of autonomy, the IMF and Chilean technocrats blurred rigid Cold War divides and circumvented the US-imposed embargo against Allende's regime. The examination of this relationship sheds new light on Allende's positioning in the international arena and provides a unique prism to reconsider dichotomist perceptions of the Cold War in Latin America.

This article focuses on the political thought and practice of the martyred Jesuit intellectual during the late 1970s. It employs the concept of desencuentros, probing the relationship between linguistic misunderstandings and political division. The article highlights Ignacio Ellacuría's novel analyses of the relationship between the ecclesial and the popular organisations, led by the radical Left. It discusses his political thought in relationship to the author's research on the base communities of northern Morazán. The article also discusses the Jesuit scholar's critical support for the Junta Revolucionario de Gobierno (15 October 1979–2 January 1980). The concluding section discusses Ellacuría's relevance for contemporary Latin American politics.

Based on extensive and long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2002 and 2009, and by analysing the presence, use and struggles over public space of cartoneros and vecinos in middle-class and central neighbourhoods of the city of Buenos Aires, this article examines practices, moralities and narratives operating in the production and maintenance of social inequalities. Concentrating on spatialised interactions, it shows how class inequalities are reproduced and social distances are generated in the struggle over public space. For this, two social situations are addressed. First, we explore the way in which cartoneros build routes in middle-class neighbourhoods in order to carry out their task. Second, we present an analysis of the eviction process of a cartonero settlement in the city.

This article analyses the failure of the Proyecto Marginalidad (Marginality Project), which the Ford Foundation financed in the 1960s, and the political and academic conflicts that it provoked. It takes into consideration the viewpoints of the principal actors involved (the director of the project, the Ford Foundation, and its critics). The original aim of the Marginality Project was to study the conditions of marginality of urban and rural populations in various Latin American countries, but it generated few results. The article shows that this outcome resulted from a series of ‘structural misunderstandings’, due to the fact that the different actors did not share what, in the words of Marc Angenot, might be called ‘social discourse’. In other words, their assumptions about what was thinkable and sayable in the Latin American context in the late 1960s and early 1970s diverged significantly, giving rise to a series of conflicts about the objectives and conduct of the project.

This article explores the worship of La Santa Muerte through a geo-mapping of street altars in Mexico City followed by an ethnographic analysis of the devotees' relationships with the saint. I find that this saint has gained momentum among the fast-growing prison population over the last two decades. In contrast to studies that emphasise the desertification of mass incarceration elsewhere, this study finds that La Santa Muerte connects families across the social abyss of imprisonment. I suggest that the family-like relationships that devotees maintain with this saint are crucial to understanding her success. Rather than a one-dimensional sacred defender of criminals and police she is adopted by prisoners, prison officers, police and their families as a capricious ‘family member’, embracing the same ambivalence as the forces she helps to navigate.

This article explores the relation between transatlantic immigration and wealth accumulation in late colonial Mexico City, the chief destination for transatlantic emigrants from Spain. In contrast to the prevalent focus in the literature on networks and transatlantic ties, I argue that economic mobility and thus entry into the upper classes of colonial society depended on the social background of immigrants in their home regions in the peninsula. Human capital rather than social capital was the key determinant explaining why certain regional groups, notably the Basques, succeeded economically as merchants and miners, challenging traditional notions of networks and interconnectedness in Atlantic history and beyond. The findings are grounded in quantitative datasets of Spanish immigrants, overcoming both the biases of anecdotal sources and the methodological intricacy of disentangling the causal relationship between wealth accumulation and social ties.

This article examines transnational connections among anti-communist women in Brazil, Chile and the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s. It explores the political beliefs and networks upon which these women drew and built in order to promote their role in the overthrow of João Goulart and Salvador Allende and to encourage other women across the Americas to join them in the fight against communism. This paper shows that these women reversed the flow of ideas, served as models for each other and for anti-communist women, and built gendered transnational networks of female anti-communist activists.

Latin America is widely known as a low-tax region, but Brazil defies that description with a tax burden almost double the regional average. Though longstanding, Brazil’s position atop the tax burden ranking is not a historical constant. As recently as the early 1950s three other countries, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, had similar or even heavier burdens. However, by the early 1980s Brazil had emerged as the most heavily taxed country in Latin America, and subsequent decades reinforced that status. This article seeks to uncover the roots of Brazil’s heavy taxation by examining the process through which it rose to the top of the regional ranking and managed to stay there. It emphasises two variables, the social class bases of public sector growth and the degree of support for democracy among key political actors. Despite changing over time, these variables have consistently interacted in ways that favour rising taxation.

Popular attitudes towards crime in Latin America induce local legislators to support harsh sentencing frameworks. What, therefore, explains the adoption of non-prison sentences across the region? Using Brazil as a case study, this article claims that sentencing reform is a consequence of the growing autonomy of bureaucrats who manage the criminal justice system. Insulated from patronage networks and granted broad mandates to pursue solutions to pressing penal crises, these policy elites use their position in the state to develop new rules and facilitate their approval despite popular opposition to measures that limit the state's punitive capacity. The findings point to the importance of bureaucratic autonomy for the enactment of policies that can benefit the underprivileged but do not enjoy widespread support from voters.

This paper examines the meat supply system in Rio de Janeiro from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s. For a period of time the city's monopoly over meat processing and retailing guaranteed a steady supply at predictable prices. However, at the turn of the century, ‘interlopers’, as municipal officials labelled those who attempted to introduce their product into Rio's market, began to question this century-old monopoly. Hence, for a relatively short period, Rio de Janeiro implemented a number of measures: curtailing the long-standing custom of clandestine slaughtering; establishing a centralised and somewhat regulated public abattoir system; and, finally, introducing meat-packing companies. This study considers these developments by undertaking a broader inquiry into how they affected per capita meat availability in Rio de Janeiro from the 1890s to the 1920s.

This article provides a new interpretation of the changes that occur in party-civil society relations when progressive parties of mass-based origin gain state power by looking at the experience of the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) during the Lula administration. The need to preserve what is defined here as ‘social governability’ changes the nature of party-movement relationships when political parties move from opposition to government. The article shows how the PT in national executive public office, to a large extent, managed to secure social governability through reward-based linkages, such as the distribution of jobs in the state apparatus and the allocation of massive state subsidies.

Anthropological analysis elucidates how discourses about agriculture in one North-east Brazilian community reflect relational roles of citizens and the state, the position of farmers in society, and the relationship of individuals to their work. In these discourses, farmers are positioned as moral, hard-working, autonomous citizens, justifying their participation in low-paying activities. The declining numbers of agricultural workers is explained as a result of individual laziness or government irresponsibility. In using these discourses to take stances publicly on agricultural issues, speakers assign responsibilities and moral status to agents. In constructing rural identities, such moral discourses emphasise the symbolic value of subsistence agriculture as its economic value declines.