Hundreds of indigenous Mayo ejidatarios became members of the SICAE (Sociedad de Interés Colectivo Agrícola Ejidal) sugarcane cooperative in North-West Mexico in the 1930s, gaining control of irrigated lands and marginalising non-members, called ‘individualists’, by the 1940s. This article focuses on how indigenous individualists of Los Goros and El Teroque ejidos navigated the SICAE's control of water and attempts to annex their lands. Mayo individualists’ resistance to corrupt ejidal leadership and the SICAE cooperative allowed them to influence local water development decisions. These individualist Mayo experiences exemplify how hydraulic social mobilisation became an indigenous people's strategy of survival in mid-twentieth-century Mexico.

Drawing on archives from the US labour movement, personal papers of transnational labour organisers, Bolivian oral histories and press reports, and government records from four countries, this article explores a web of Cold War relationships forged between Bolivian workers and US government and labour officials. Uncovering a panoply of parallel and sometimes conflicting state-supported trade union development programmes, the article reveals governments’ inability to fully control the exuberance of ideologically-motivated labour activists. Rather than succeed in shoring up a civilian government as intended, US President John F. Kennedy's union-busting programme aggravated fissures in Bolivia's non-Communist Left, ultimately frustrating its attempt to steer a non-aligned posture in Latin America's Cold War. Employing transnational methods to bridge gaps between labour, development and diplomatic history, this article points toward a new imperial studies approach to the multi-sited conflicts that shaped the post-war trajectory of labour movements in Bolivia and throughout the Third World.

During the Cold War, Havana symbolised the struggle for national liberation in Latin America. Yet in few other places on the island of Cuba did the Revolution's visions of development materialise as they did in the southern city of Cienfuegos. This article examines why two half-finished nuclear reactors and a decaying ‘nuclear city’ still remain in Cienfuegos. Through a comprehensive spatial and infrastructural transformation of Cuba, the revolutionary government sought to remedy the evils of dependency and unequal exchange. Cienfuegos, and its shifting place in the Cold War political economy, demonstrates how a radical critique of urbanisation merged with the spatiality of centralised energy infrastructure in the pursuit of ultimately-failed nuclear modernity. The history of Cienfuegos draws the academic gaze away from Latin America's major cities to broaden the ‘geographies of theory’ in urban, energy and Latin American studies.

The implementation of President George H. W. Bush's 1989 Andean Initiative brought to the fore competing US and Bolivian agendas. While US embassy officials sought to exert control in pursuit of militarised policies, the Bolivian government's ambivalence towards the coca-cocaine economy underpinned opposition to the ‘Colombianisation’ of the country. This article deconstructs prevailing top-down, US-centric analyses of the drug war in Latin America to examine how US power was exercised and resisted in the Bolivian case. Advancing a more historically grounded understanding of the development of the US drug war in Latin America, it reveals the fluidity of US–Bolivian power relations, the contested nature of counter-drug policy at the country level, and the instrumentalisation of the ‘war on drugs’ in distinct US and Bolivian agendas.

International conventions and domestic laws have been enacted to prevent, punish and eradicate violence against women worldwide. However, these progressive policy initiatives have faced opposition in contentious contexts where policy rivals have contested their creation and implementation. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on progressive networks that have led to policy advances, such as violence against women (VAW) policies, while emerging literature has noted their limited impact and implementation. However, there is scant attention paid to one major underlying cause of limited impact and problematic implementation: that there is sustained opposition to these policies by policy rivals that resist and undermine progressive policies. We identify opponents and entrenched opposition to VAW laws in Mexico and Nicaragua in the 1990s and 2010s. We also identify how these opponents leverage ties with the state and utilise ‘family discourse’, framing progressives as anti-family, as strategies and mechanisms for stunting and even reversing VAW laws.

Indigenous beauty pageants can be seen as a way of re-appropriating indigenous identity. This article approaches beauty pageants as being situated in multiple systems of power at four levels of contestation: (1) reproducing gender relations and creating new professional and political opportunities; (2) constituting a site for cultural and political agency and delimiting the ways to ‘be a Maya woman’; (3) reproducing class relations in terms of access to the event and contributing to social awareness of beauty queens; (4) as a social event consolidating (gender) relations within the family. The findings are based on longitudinal (2002–14) ethnographic fieldwork in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.

At a general level of neoliberal repudiation or expansion of social policies, most post-neoliberal Latin American governments in the 2000s have exhibited similarities. However, coalitions with popular actors have displayed a lot of variation. In order to compare popular-sector coalitions the article constructs a framework with two central dimensions: electoral and organisational/interest; in post-import substitution industrialisation (ISI) Latin America the latter is composed of both unions and territorial social movements (TSMs). It contends that the region witnessed four types of popular coalitions: electoral (Ecuador and Chile), TSM-based (i.e. made up of informal sector-based organisations, Venezuela and Bolivia), dual (i.e. composed of both unions and TSMs, Argentina and Brazil) and union/party-based (Uruguay). The study argues that government–union coalitions are largely accounted for by the relative size of the formal economy, and by the institutional legacies of labour based-parties. Coalitions with informal sector-based organisations are rooted in the political activation of these TSMs during the anti-neoliberal struggles of the 1990s and early 2000s.