In describing the impact of haciendas on Indian communities of Meso-America and Andean America, historians generally have emphasized the hacendado's unrelenting appropriation of land and labor from native settlements, which were forced constantly to retreat in the face of this pressure. This view can be represented by James Lockhart's description of hacienda expansion. He saw the great estate as an ‘essentially unitary social institution [that] maintained constant its function as intermediary between growing Spanish towns and receding Indian villages. It evolved along two simple lines — constant rise in legal ownership of land and change in the balance of the labor force, as permanent workers increased and temporary workers decreased.1 As the hacienda expanded outward from the cities, said Lockhart, it gradually engaged the Indians in acculturative processes that made the great estate ‘the most powerful instrument of hispanization in Spanish-American culture’.2

The nineteenth century was a critical period in the evolution of Puerto Rican society, as the following citation from Fernández Méndez eloquently indicates: The century of Salvador Brau [the noted Puerto Rican social historian] is the century of the forging on Puerto Rican soil of a native bourgeoisie of planters – padres de agrego or señores de ingenio— born in a movement of cultural transformation which converted the preponderant subsistence economy of the eighteenth century into an active agrarian capitalism of sugar and coffee plantations. This system of plantations in the realm of the Spanish Antilles was in its epoch the revolutionary equivalent of the manufacturing system which transformed life in European society in innumerable ways during the nineteenth century.1

Latin Americanists have become increasingly intrigued with questions concerning rural labour and oppression. In recent publications, traditional interpretations of peonage, labour contracting, wage labour and other topics have been questioned by historians with access to new documentary materials. Peru has been the setting for much of this discussion because of the important changes which occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the unusual opportunity to understand them since the creation of the Archivo del Fuero Agrario.1

For much of the twentieth century the Peruvian working-class has been limited in size and divided between different groups with divergent political objectives. Successive Peruvian governments have been able to capitalize on these features in their attempts to control the working-class, directly regulating workers' organizations or playing off one group against another. Yet, despite these limits and divisions, workers have on several occasions staged general strikes and pressured governments into taking account of their demands. Consequently, the political development of sectors of the working-class at the local level has been closely affected by political processes at the national level.

The 1920s remain a relatively neglected period in Brazilian historiography despite a recent boom in the study of contemporary Brazilian history and despite the intrinsic importance of that era.1 The post-war years constituted a watershed in the evolution of Brazilian culture, for example, as poets, novelists, artists and other pensants rejected further imitation of foreign models.2 The effervescence in the cultural sphere found ample resonance in political life; indeed, during the 1920s republican institutions were perhaps more seriously questioned than at any time since the early 1890s. The establishment of the Communist Party (1922) and the phenomenon of tenentismo were the most obvious manifestations of the erosion of the national consensus.3 The absence of an extensive body of scholarly literature on these subjects notwithstanding, their general configuration is at least familiar. One neglected field of inquiry, however, is foreign policy, the subject of this article. The aim of this exploratory probe is not to survey Brazil's diplomatic relations during the period; rather, the central analytical focus here is on the linkage between elite images and foreign policy strategy, the underlying premise being that policy decisions depend upon how policy-makers view their external environment.4

In Argentina during World War II the US stepped outside the limits of the Good Neighbor policy proclaimed by the Roosevelt administration in 1933 and attempted to overthrow the government of a major Latin American power.1 Between 1941 and 1945 Argentina was not only treated differently from the rest of Latin America by the United States, but was also singled out for harsher treatment than other neutrals, despite its large material contribution to the Allied cause. In 1944 Washington was readier to compromise with Franco's Spain, a country whose Axis connections were notorious, than it was to seek a settlement with the government in Buenos Aires.2 The purpose of this paper is to examine the development of US interference in Argentine affairs after Pearl Harbor and the reasons for US hostility to the rise of Perón following the military coup of June 1943.

The main concern of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) in recent years has been to lead and supervise the implementation of the resolutions adopted at its First Congress in 1975. Those resolutions cover a broad range of political, social, and economic issues, so that a full account of the Party's work over the past 5 years would require a complete survey of Cuba's domestic and foreign policies during that period.1 The very breadth of the PCC's work agenda in the latter half of the 1970s indicates how much the role of the Party in Cuba has evolved over the past decade;2 such responsibilities demonstrate a continuation of the process of strengthening the Party begun in the early 1970s.

Does political science advance or do fashions merely change? There can be no doubt that this past decade has seen a major change in the ways in which the nature of military rule in Latin America has been examined. To a large extent, this has been due to changes in the nature of Latin American governments themselves and, more particularly, to the emergence of the long term military-bureaucratic (sometimes called bureaucratic-authotitarian) government.

The facts are by now sufficiently clear for it to be common ground in any discussion of late nineteenth-century imperialism that the British State was disinclined to interfere on behalf of British capitalists with Latin American interests when these were threatened by local firms or States. Equally it is clear that British capitalists did not invest in Argentina in the belief that, by so doing, they were actively assisting the foreign policy of the British State. The State provided no grounds for this belief and no inducement to invest, and had it done so it is unlikely that the capitalists concerned – a pretty liberal bunch by and large – would have responded to any greater extent than they felt was consistent with their economic advantage. Again, there were not, in Britain, territorially ambitious militarists and aristocrats with their sights set on the South American republics. This element was quite adequately catered for in the Empire. In short, the models of imperialism favoured by Hobson, Schumpeter, and other conspiracy theorists, however appropriate they may be in particular cases, cannot be generalized and have very little relevance to Argentina.

Historians generally recognize that the writing of contemporary history is an exercise of some delicacy. Narrating the contests of the Christian sects at the time of Constantine, Edward Gibbon remarks that ‘the fierce and partial writers of the times, ascribing all virtue to themselves and all guilt to their adversaries, have painted the battle of the angels and the daemons. Our calmer reason,’ he goes on, ‘will reject such pure and perfect monsters of vice and sanctity.’