The gains and difficulties Latin American countries face from financial market development and liberalisation have received much attention in current economic literature. Nevertheless, significant issues have received little or no attention, even though the success of these efforts depends upon them. The purpose of this article is to explore the benefits from open and developed – two words that are not necessarily synonymous – financial and capital markets in Latin America and possible important obstacles which will be faced in the remainder of the 1990s.

Although most urban dwellers take for granted the running water accessible to them in their homes, its presence is the culmination of the long ‘conquest of water’. In effect, there are still minorities or even majorities in some Latin American cities whose days are punctuated with the task of fetching water for the household. This delineation between the fetchers of water and those with the luxury of in-house access is not a novelty. Within colonial cities, the spatial distribution of water was often an indication of social and economic divisions. Public fountains could serve as a friendly gathering place but were all too often too few for the urban population. The strategies of municipal government for the provision of water for their populace was a reflection of their political priorities and limitations. Studies of the role of water allocation in agrarian societies abound, but its function in the make-up of urban life is little known. By examining this issue for a large city such as Puebla de los Angeles, whose population had reached nearly 70,000 by 1678 (see Table 1), it is possible to delineate some of the social tensions at work and the strategies deployed by both municipal government and populace in order to overcome shortages of accessible water. In Puebla de los Angeles, competition for water was part of the internal workings of the city. The City of Angels faced two major obstacles: the challenge of creating and maintaining an infrastructure for urban distribution of water, and the adjudication of the system.

On 28 February 1885 Guatemala's Liberal dictator, Justo Rufino Barrios, declared the Union of Central America, and made it plain that this would be achieved through force of arms if the four other Central American Republics did not consent to his decree. On 5 and 6 March, as Costa Rica's Liberal state began to plan a popular mobilisation against the Guatemalan threat, an article appeared in the pages of El Diario de Costa Rica, written by a resident Honduran man of letters, Alvaro Contreras. It was called ‘Un héroe annómino’. Curiously, though, this hero is not anonymous at all. The article soon reveals that his name is Juan Santamaría, a humble footsoldier who, during the Battle of Rivas in 1856, had volunteered to burn down the Mesón de Guerra from where William Walker's filibusters were decimating Costa Rican troops with rifle fire. The attempt was successful, but Santamaría sacrificed his life in the process. The invention of Costa Rica's ‘almost unknown soldier’ had begun.

Latin America's workers perplex historians. Despite chronic political turmoil, revolt and undiluted class conflict, Latin America's mobilised workers have not been the vanguards of social revolution. Rather, variations of authoritarianism, populism and clientilism are said to characterise labour politics more accurately. The absence of independent working-class politics has prompted the search for aetiologies of class-formation in Latin America – the search for the missing ingredient to revolutionary working-class action.

People of African descent in Costa Rica form a marginalised and geographically concentrated minority group. The limited interest that academics have shown towards people of African descent is a reflection of their position in Costa Rican society. National histories consistently ignore the contributions of West Indian immigrants to the economic and social development of modern Costa Rica. Moreover, the existing literature on people of African descent in Costa Rica fails to document properly West Indians' efforts to integrate into Hispanic society. As a result, several misconceptions continue to exist about the evolution of the West Indian community in Costa Rica.

Bolivia is one of the poorest countries of the hemisphere and its rural people have among the lowest life expectancy, health-care standards and educational levels of all Latin Americans. It is the only country in South America with a ranking of ‘low’ on the Human Development Index for 1991 compiled by the United Nations, a measure combining the per capita product with such factors as longevity and access to education. At the same time, the most valuable export of the country, cocaine, depends on the coca supplied by peasant cultivators in the regions where it grows. The explosion of the international cocaine trade has had profound repercussions, both positive and negative, on the lives of the campesinos of the Bolivian Yungas, who happened to supply, since colonial times and before, the coca destined for traditional consumption within the country; it was their most reliable cash crop. The conversion of their ancient crop to an illicit commodity of high, concentrated value has created the opportunity for some to experience a marginally enhanced standard of living (at a time when other rural Bolivians were seeing their own abysmal standard depressed even further), but at the same time has increased the risks they would run if they entered the lucrative but illegal cocaine trade.

How did the indian majority in early republican Bolivia interpret the transformation of the colonial Audiencia of Charcas into an independent nation-state ? How was the new republican age and its symbols reconciled with the forms of social organisation and belief which had emerged from the meeting between native Andean civilisation and the Spanish colonial state?