The private sector plays a fundamental role in peace negotiations and in the implementation of agreements, as comparison between El Salvador, Guatemala and Colombia indicates. However, private sector involvement in peace negotiations varies: Conflict cost perceptions, degrees of unity of the pro-peace business faction, and varied access to the peace policymaking process account for important differences across the cases. Thus this article points to the need to fine-tune our understanding of private sector behaviour in the context of armed conflict and peace and underscores how private sector characteristics and business-state relations affect the emergence of peace negotiations and shape resultant outcomes.

Mexico's 1910 Centenario reflected a popular trend in Western Europe and its former colonies to use centenaries of important historical events to promote political programmes and philosophies through the construction of historical memory. Centennial organisers in Mexico linked Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and José Maria Morelos to President Porfirio Díaz in words and symbols, and associated state formation and civic culture with Liberal leaders and policies, such as public education, material progress and secularism. The planners also promoted Morelos as a mestizo icon and symbol for national identity and integration, while they simultaneously celebrated Mexico's pre-Columbian cultures and criticised contemporary natives as impediments to progress. The Centennial's audience included hundreds of thousands of Mexicans as well as foreigners from around the globe, who came away with different impressions based on their cultural perspectives, political philosophies and material interests. Following the overthrow of Díaz in 1911, Mexico's revolutionary governments continued to use Independence Day celebrations to promote their programmes, including some whose origins lay in the Porfiriato. As we approach the bicentenary of Latin American independence, competing visions of patrias will likely surface and provide insights into the construction of historical memory and contemporary political discourse.

At the beginning of Brazil's First Republic (1889–1930), the clandestine lottery called the jogo do bicho or ‘animal game’, which still exists today, gained enormous popularity in Rio de Janeiro, the city of its origin, and soon in the whole of Brazil. Reconstructing the spread and persecution of the jogo do bicho during its first decades reveals the social process of urbanisation evident in the daily, often informal and quasi-legal, interactions between the state and popular commerce in Latin America. The ambivalent official stance and public sentiment that developed toward this lottery suggest that ‘law and order’ concerns in themselves do not explain the criminalisation of vernacular practices.

During the second half of the eighteenth century the Spanish Crown monopolised the tobacco industry in its American colonies, creating vertically integrated organisations which included factories for the production of cigars and cigarettes. A detailed analysis of the regulations, organisation and policies applied during the Peruvian viceroyalty suggests that Bourbon officials were effective managers. The monopoly was successful at curbing contraband and extracting rents. The evolution of monopoly policies, however, reflected political constraints on the Crown's efforts to raise revenues. The archival evidence suggests that Bourbon officials closed the tobacco factories in Peru in 1791 as a result of public opposition.

This article contributes to a growing body of literature that questions state-centred approaches to analysing politics, adopting a more de-centred and cultural perspective. It does so by presenting a situational analysis and detailed ethnography of a local election rally in Western Mexico. The analysis of this event as a cultural performance highlights the dramatic enactment of culturally significant acts as a central part of electoral behaviour and shows how everyday organisational life, resource flows, public ritual and passion play a part in politics. That such acts are not merely symbolic is demonstrated by what occurs behind the scenes of political ritual: a local political group appropriates a Water Users' Association and draws on its staff, facilities, resources and wider power relations for its political campaign. Such practices also indicate the unanticipated outcomes of recent administrative decentralisation reforms. New producer organisations created by these reforms to administer former government tasks more efficiently are appropriated politically, not simply in an instrumental, but also in a culturally specific manner.

This commentary surveys some of the trends and gaps in current research on criminal justice reform in Latin America – with a focus on Brazil, and on two specific areas: police and prison/penal reform. It explores two principal themes: the uneven and thin production of knowledge about criminal justice issues; and the impact this has on policy reforms and on the ways in which these are framed and interpreted in terms of their relative success and failure. Overall it argues that we still know very little about criminal justice institutions and the actors within them. We also need many more finely-grained analyses of the dynamics of reform efforts and of the policy environments in which these take place in order to understand how and why reform initiatives are often derailed or subverted, and, more rarely, flourish and can be embedded and replicated.