In the field of modern political regimes, Spanish America holds a very special and, in some respects, paradoxical place. Indeed, even today, actual political life is very far from reflecting not only the constitutional clauses but even certain rules generally accepted in Western democracies. Political regimes are often ephemeral and dictatorships frequently interrupt institutional continuity. Pronunciamientos, coups d'état, rebellions and revolutions have been common means of coming to power, at least as common as elections. The political stage has often been occupied by particular human types: caudillos, caciques, charismatic leaders, guerrillas, revolutionaries…

In the last three decades, the economic history of Paraguay has been subject to an intense reexamination. It has been claimed that the state in Paraguay led a ‘spectacular industrialisation effort’ in the second half of the nineteenth century and that this effort was prematurely truncated by war. One author, for example, has stated that

From 1852 on, free circulation on the river Paraná permitted a rapid increase of exports, mostly under state control. The resources thus freed were devoted to the development of the modern manufacture of industrial goods and plant: iron and steel, engineering, shipbuilding, brickmaking, etc. A railway and a telegraph were installed without incurring an external debt. The experiment was nevertheless spoiled by the war with the ‘Triple Alliance’ (1864–1870), which opposed Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay to Paraguay, and resulted in the demographic and economic collapse of the country.

I argue here that economic activity fell considerably in the first three decades of Paraguay's early national period, below levels it had attained in the late colonial period and would attain again only after the mid-nineteenth century. I attribute this economic depression primarily to regional political fragmentation and the institutional regression it triggered. In the 1810s, the United Provinces of the River Plate sought to keep the former Viceroyalty of the River Plate under a single federal government, but failed to prevent Paraguay's early secession. Their subsequent trade blockades and military threats had profound economic and political effects on Paraguay: revenues from foreign trade taxation fell, scale economies in defence and justice provision vanished, a standing army emerged, government budget deficits worsened, mercantilist regulations heightened, the fiscal burden increased, and transactions costs generally rose. Proponents of federation, more representative governments, and freer trade progressively declined, while supporters of secession, political absolutism, and government regulation became ever more prominent. In the 1820s, blockade relaxations exacerbated economic intervention by the state, which substantially redistributed property rights in land towards itself. In the 1830s, renewed blockading had more than proportional negative effects on economic activity, which remained below late colonial levels at least until international waterways became freely navigable shortly after mid-century. Colonial absolutism and mercantilism may be said to have been restored with a vengeance. Long-run economic performance worsened.

In 1859 the district attorney of Montes Claros, in a long dispatch to the provincial chief of police, enumerating the many evils prevailing in his jurisdiction, included ‘craven traffickers who abduct little free children of colour whom they trick and seduce with fruits and presents, to sell as if they were slaves, trading them for livestock or mere trinkets’. This complaint was not an isolated incident; it reflected a larger trade in free people of colour which took place in the sertão of northern Minas Gerais after the closing of the transatlantic slave trade in 1851 and before the passage of the law of the free womb in 1871. The internal trade in free persons ceased in the early 1870s, when mandatory slave matriculation made illicit transactions more detectable.

Concern over the fate of the rain forest and peoples of Amazonia has inspired a renewed interest in the extraction of natural products from the region. Accounts of the Amazon Rubber Boom (1860–1910) are of particular interest in view of the dominance of the rubber industry during one of the most influential periods in the region's history as well as the continuing economic importance of wild rubber extraction to thousands of Amazonian households today. For many observers, the organisation and performance of the wild rubber industry – then and now – provides a good illustration of extractive industries in Amazonia.

The distinction between ethnic and racial categories in social analysis is finely drawn, and rarely clear. In the case of Latin American societies, ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are sometimes synonymous, and far more often deployed as if they were. Researchers are familiar with the ways in which processes of deracination, acculturation and miscegenation iron out the cultural edges that demarcate social groups, one from another; perhaps the classic example is the gradual loss of indigenous characteristics attendant upon native American migration to cities. Yet, even in the complete absence of rural-to-urban migration, such processes have been at work moulding present-day indigenous communities, which once recognised numerous ethnic distinctions within ‘Indian’ society, distinctions that were progressively diluted – though not wholly extinguished – during some three centuries of colonial rule. To draw attention to the protean nature of ethnicity in Latin American societies, however, is not to say that researchers are necessarily unaware of the problem, but rather that they often follow research agendas that may be inconvenienced by attention to such nuances. Thus, for example, a number of broad-brush racial cum ethnic classifications provided the basis for the fiscal demands of Crown and Church alike during the colonial period, and as such provide the essential pillars for much of the quantitative fiscal and demographic database that we possess.

On 1 February 1875, a hopeful President Santiago Pérez took pride in informing Congress of the peace and prosperity brought about by a decade or so of Radical rule in Colombia. His optimism was soon disappointed. A week later, he quelled a mutiny only by replacing both his Minister of War and the Army Commander-in-Chief. At the end of the month, the State of Magdalena was showing serious signs of political turmoil, while the recently sacked Minister of War, General Ramón Santodomingo Vila, was in the port of Barranquilla plotting against the government of the Union. By August, the States of Bolívar and Panamá had both officially declared war against Pérez's administration; rumours reached Bogotá which accused ‘Santo Domingo Vila of conspiracy to be President of the Republic of Costa Firme’. Customs-houses in the Caribbean ports were held by rebel forces for almost four months, and rebel steamers on the Magdalena river blocked the country's main artery of trade. Bloody confrontations completed the picture of another civil war, leaving behind an indefinite number of casualties and a Treasury in disarray. When President Pérez again faced Congress to give his annual message in 1876, he had to acknowledge his previous misjudgement.

The growth of a transportation system in Minas Gerais, especially the construction of a rail network in the province's booming coffee region, the Zona da Mata (the Forest Zone) in the late Empire, is an important chapter in the state's history. A close look at railroads in the Mata and in Minas tells us much about politics and the power and influence of certain groups, particularly planters and planter-politicians. Conflicts over railroad concessions provoked much rivalry within the Mata, but all mineiros agreed that transportation was the most important issue of the day. Meanwhile, flumimnses and paulistas were more preoccupied with the labour crisis. Hindsight permits us to say that transportation is not the key to understanding the development of Minas, at least not to the extent that contemporaries thought it was. Ecological factors, labour conditions and the onset of the national overproduction crisis in 1896 had more to do with the rise and fall of coffee exports than did railroads. However, coffee planters from the wealthy Mata and other mineiros from the province's less prosperous regions always credited railroads with the good things that went with economic development.

Historians all agree that the Cárdenas presidency was a crucial period in the development of twentieth-century Mexico. They would not agree as to the reasons for its importance. The range of interpretations is so wide and, at times, so nuanced, that it is risky to try to summarise the underlying disagreements. However, there are certain key differences which can be emphasised; and I shall begin this article with a quick review of what I consider those key differences to be.

In Juchitán, Mexico, a poor people's movement has challenged the local and national authorities of the Mexican government, withstood violent repression and military occupation, and succeeded in winning municipal elections and becoming a permanent leftist force in regional politics. This movement, the Coalition of Workers, Peasants, and Students of the Isthmus (COCEI), is one of the strongest and most militant grassroots movements in Mexico, in large part because Zapotec Indians in Juchitán transformed their courtyards and fiestas into fora for intense political discussion, gathered in the streets in massive demonstrations, and, in the course of the past two decades, redefined the activites, meanings and alliancesof therie culture.

Over the last decade or so, North American and European scholars have popularised a research focus on new social movements, or so-called autonomous and democratic struggles generated from within civil society against the state. The underlying theoretical premise of this approach is that challenges to the state from social movements are a principal driving force of political change in modern society. Despite its grounding in the advanced capitalist context, many Latin American scholars have found elective affinity with the argument, as evidenced in the recent tidal wave of studies on social movements by Latin Americanists. Basing their work primarily on analyses of Brazil, Argentina and Chile, scholars have argued that social movements help challenge the legitimacy and political power of strong and centralised governments in Latin America, at the same time creating from the grassroots a political culture suggestive of democratic transformation. In sort, there is growing consensus that social movements play a central role in bringing democracy to Latin America.

No topic encapsulates better the fundamental contradiction in capitalist development in Porfirian Mexico than the turbulent history of the copper industry. Within the space of a few years, the industry simultaneously experienced rapid growth, labour conflict and political controversy with international implications. This historical dynamic was unleashed, in part, by the Mexican government's policy of attracting overseas investors to Mexico through generous concessions and tax breaks that facilitated foreign control over key industries. The privileged position that public policy afforded foreign companies resulted in a nationalist backlash and exacerbated tension between native labour and foreign capital. The famous strike at Cananea, Sonora, in 1906 brought to national attention the grievances of Mexican workers over wage scales that favoured foreign workers over natives, falling real wages, and the power and arrogance of United States companies in Mexico. The strike became a scandal when armed North Americans from nearby Arizona crossed the border and assisted local authorities in crushing Mexican workers. This violation of Mexican sovereignty caused a storm of protest from both liberals and conservatives and unsettled the Díaz regime on the eve of the Mexican Revolution.

On 13 July 1992, the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) scored an important victory in the northern state of Chihuahua, winning not only the gubernatorial election, but also the most important cities of the state and a majority in the local Congress. As in the previous elections of 1986, one of the characteristics of this electoral process was the overt participation of entrepreneurs in the opposition, particularly small and medium-size entrepreneurs.

On 30 July 1989 Chileans cast ballots in an historic but unheralded plebiscite, and approved a massive revision of the Constitution that in 1980 the Pinochet regime had crafted to institutionalise its rule. Some observers had doubted that it would be possible to change Pinochet's prized ‘Constitution of Liberty’, while others have since questioned the significance of the reforms that were achieved. In fact, as a result of the July referendum, 54 modifications involving 12 of the document's 14 chapters were enacted before the Constitution even went fully into effect. Moreover, since the reestablishment of democracy in Chile, the coalition government of Patricio Aylwin has won passage of still other constitutional reforms involving administrative decentralisation, and has introduced draft legislation designed to bring about changes in the judicial and electoral systems. His successor, Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei, is also committed to reform.

This article is a study of the emergence of a populist leader. By combining an analysis of the social creation of the populist leader José María Velasco Ibarra in ‘La Revolución Gloriosa’ (or the May Revolution), with a study of his discourse, this paper explains why Velasco Ibarra became the central political figure in Ecuador in the mid-1940s.

One of the research issues which FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) has been most interested in is that of the heterogeneity found in the informal world. In a previous study we tried to clarify its presence in the metropolitan cities of Central America and we concluded that, although dynamic economic units orientated towards a logic of accumulation existed, activities orientated towards a logic of subsistence predominated. Thus, a central feature of informality became clear: its inner heterogeneity. This characteristic was previously deemphasised by an improper identification of informality with microenterprise.

This paper analyses two efforts of the Mexican Federal Government to implement a tax reform. The first was made by the Echeverría administration (1970–6). The second is currently taking place under the Salinas government, in office since December 1988.

My aim is to understand what economic, ideological and political conditions give rise to a successful tax reform. I will focus on government relations with business, in particular with big business; and on the nature of the proposed tax reforms (each of which had different distributional costs). The question is how these factors affected the outcome of the two reforms. While Echeverría's progressive reform was subsequently replaced by an increase in tax rates, the second, that of Salinas, has, so far, been successful.

For a long period, the consensus in development studies argued that the unemployed in urban areas were not part of the poverty problem. It was argued in the 1970s that open unemployment in developing countries was not, in general, a serious social problem. This was not because rates of open unemployment were low in urban areas – Turnham cited open unemployment rates in urban areas of over ten per cent for countries as diverse as Ghana, Guyana, Panama, Puerto Rico, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Korea and the Philippines. Rather, it was argued that the unemployed were not poor. They were predominantly the relatively well-educated young, who were waiting to find good jobs, or migrants ‘queuing’ for work in the formal sector, or people temporarily out of work as they moved from one job to another. The urban informal sector or agriculture would provide jobs for those really needing work. Therefore, the ‘needy’ would not remain in open unemployment for long. Long periods of open unemployment would be luxury, available only to the better-off.

When Patricio Aylwin accepted the Chilean presidential sash in March 1990 an era in Latin American politics dominated by authoritarian regimes came to an end. Virtually every country in the region now had to grapple with the complicated task of consolidating fragile democratic regimes. Surprisingly, given what may be the emergence of a new democratic era, one is hardpressed even to begin answering an obvious question: How will years of non-democratic rule affect future efforts to establish democratic political processes in their wake? Despite recent attention to the ways in which different types of transition process affect the prospects for democracy, the impact of authoritarian rule on subsequent political processes remains largely unstudied.

The objective of this article is to attempt to explain why free market open economy policies (FMOEP) have become so popular in Latin America in the 1990s. There are six possible major explanatory factors: (i) lessons learnt from the debt crisis and its immediate aftermath, (ii) more highly qualified technocrats, (iii) development of an entrepreneurial middle class, (iv) exhaustion of import substituting industrialisation, (v) a combination of tax reform, financial modernisation and export diversification, and (vi) a favourable public opinion. Yet none of these factors by itself was a sufficient condition for FMOEP; necessary factors were different from country to country, and the nature of the interaction between two or more factors was different in each country.