The tenuous organisational structure of the Venezuelan neighbourhood movement explains its failure to live up to the lofty expectations which social movements created in Latin America in the 1980s. To understand why structural looseness prevails, it is necessary to examine social cleavages as well as the disparity between the theoretical model which underpins much discourse and legislation, on the one hand, and the daily practice of neighbourhood associations, on the other. An additional area of enquiry is the division in the national leadership between an apolitical current and one that views electoral politics as a natural avenue for the movement to pursue. Scholars, even those who have recently emphasized the importance of links between social movements and political structures, overlook the importance of organisational unity at the national level.

Exporters of raw materials under Iberian rule, the nations of Latin America continued to perform a similar role in the world economy after Independence. In the nineteenth century, however, a significant shift occurred in the kind of materials exported. Whereas in colonial times the great wealth of Latin America lay in her mineral resources, particularly silver and gold, aster 1850 agricultural production for foreign markets took on larger importance. The export of foodstuffs was not a new phenomenon, but in the nineteenth century the growth in consumer demand in the industrializing nations and the developing revolution in. transport much enhanced the incentives for Latin Americans who would produce coffee, wheat, cattle, or bananas for overseas markets.

The 1870s were a decade of crisis and change in the Peruvian economy. Guano, the bulk of Peru's exports, no longer dominated the republic's trade and finance as it had for thirty years. Quantity, quality and markets persistently declined from the peaks of the 1850s and 1860s. Two new growth sectors, however, increasingly diversified Peru's commercial pattern. On plantations in the north sugar production quadrupled between 1873 and 1876, overhauling cotton and wool among exports. At the same time, in the southernmost province of Tarapacá nitrate extraction and manufacture steadily increased.

This article analyses the intellectual and political activities of the newly-created consulados and Economic Societies in Spanish America between 1780 and 1810. It argues that these institutions decisively shaped both the formulation and implementation of metropolitan policy. Colonial elites used the consulados and Economic Societies as a vehicle to pursue licensed privilege and moderate, incremental reform in the context of a revivified, socio-economically stable Old Regime. They embraced the Bourbon reforms and used them to their advantage. Judging from consulado documents, the prevailing relationship between civil society and the state in Spanish America, at least until the late 1790s, was amicable and mutually supportive. After that time, mainly due to the disruption of Atlantic commerce, close co-operation gave way to conflict, but always within the framework of a cohesive empire. Drawing on archives in Argentina, Chile, Cuba and Spain, this essay traces the coalescence of numerous local intelligentsias that collaborated, to varying degrees, in the renovation of imperial governance and, simultaneously, incubated a robust public sphere in the nascent polities which gradually emerged after the collapse of Spanish royal authority in 1808.

Based on comparative research this article analyses indigenous women's organising trajectories and the creation of spaces where they position themselves as autonomous political actors. Drawing on social movement theory and intersectionality, we present a typology of the organisational forms adopted by indigenous women in Peru, Bolivia and Mexico over the last two decades. One of the key findings of our comparative study is that indigenous women have become social movement actors through different organisational forms that in part determine the degree of autonomy they can exercise as political subjects.

In view of the inconclusive statistical results associated with democracy's impact on economic performance, this article unpacks the dependent variable (economic development) by examining democratisation's impact on education policy. To determine whether democracy compels politicians to provide higher levels of educational opportunity, it traces the process of repression and democratisation in Brazil along with government spending on education. It finds that democratisation has observable effects on education spending on three different levels: 1) the percentage of government spending allocated to education; 2) the distribution of federal funding among different levels of education; and 3) the distribution of funds within primary education among state and local actors.

When on an Advent Sunday morning in 1511 Fray Antonio Montesinos uttered the phrase ‘Are these [Indians] not also men?’ he ignited a political controversy that would rage in Spain for the next four decades. And the continuing fall-out of that fiery speech still has the potential to inflame scholarly tempers and spark heated contests nearly five hundred years later. At stake for Spaniards of the sixteenth century was the way the inhabitants of the New World were to be treated. At issue for subsequent historians has been how that Spanish civilisation's treatment of the natives in the New World is to be assessed.

Regional economic integration schemes abound in Latin America, yet very little is known about the degree of popular support for such programmes. Now that democratic regimes rule in almost all of Latin America, public opinion can have an important impact on national policies. This paper examines the attitudes toward economic integration in 17 mainland Latin American countries with interview data from over 18,000 people. Bi-variate and multivariate analyses are conducted on the factors related to support for regional integration. Perceived benefits of integration and perceptions of personal and national economic situation prove to be important factors, as are higher levels of education, support for democracy and gender (males favour integration more than females). Two novel findings are that a positive opinion of the European Union along with satisfaction with the functioning of democracy are both linked to greater support for integration.

Environmental issues have very obviously come to occupy a prominent place on the political agenda, both domestically and internationally. This process has been driven by grass-roots concern for the future consequences of environmental degradation, assisted in many cases by the adoption of the green movement and of green issues as a platform for protest on a broader range of social and political issues. National governments have increasingly taken up the cause of environmental protection, either out of genuine conviction or out of fear of the electoral consequences of not doing so. Internationally the emergence of green issues has been further encouraged by broader shifts in the international system and the declining salience of old issues, above all the changing nature of East/West rivalry.

Despite the recent development of a broad literature on urbanization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America, the topics of public order and crime have eluded careful study.1 The historiography of Argentine urbanization evokes questions about social control, but we know little more about changing patterns of crime and policing than did contemporary observers. Immigration, labor organization, class struggle, and political violence have all been the subjects of scholarly inquiries that suggest both high levels of disorder and the necessity of official responses.2

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.

Adjustment in Latin America has largely been analysed in terms of macroeconomic policy. However, for reforms to be sustainable in the long term, there needs to be accompanying change in the social sectors. Such reform is difficult and costly. It is necessary, however, not simply to sustain the economic reforms, but also for an effective long-term strategy of poverty alleviation and for the consolidation of democracy. There are lessons to be learnt from successful and unsuccessful social sector reform.

During the last 20 years ombudsmen have been established in most Latin American countries. This article provides an overview of the how these institutions have evolved in six countries, particularly with regard to their political independence and strength. In spite of the potentially important role that such institutions may have in promoting public accountability, respect for human rights and the rule of law in new democracies, some ombudsmen have been more successful than others in these tasks. This article reflects on possible factors accounting for the relative effectiveness of the ombudsman, and discusses the role that this institution plays in contemporary Latin America.

This paper focuses on congressional politics in Chile before and after the 1973 coup. It challenges a common perspective that sees the congressional decay of the early 1970s as being caused by stringent limits on particularistic bills and by presidents with wide-ranging formal prerogatives. It presents an alternative argument that focuses on electoral competition and ideological radicalisation, derives testable implications, and provides the first empirical comparison of legislative behaviour before and after the 1973 coup. The evidence, which centres on the analysis of policy networks derived from the joint sponsorship of legislation, appears incompatible with the implications of the conventional argument.

The persistent instability and disorder of Spanish American polities in the post-Independence period was undoubtedly one of the most perplexing concerns of Spanish American elites in the nineteenth century. It has remained a subject of interpretive debate by twentieth-century students of the area. The following article sketches several general approaches to the problem among twentieth-century interpreters, compares contemporary nineteenth-century analyses with the salient twentieth-century interpretations, and offers a critical commentary on the various sorts of twentieth-century analytical frameworks.

The three salient twentieth-century interpretations of political disorder in the nineteenth century are: (1) those that emphasise deeply embedded characteristics of Spanish American culture as underlying causes of political instability; (2) those that attribute political disorder to structural problems, particularly to weaknesses in the economic structure or shifts in the social structure; (3) those that see political instability as a reflection of conflicting ideologies, economic interests, and/or the aspirations or fears of identifiable social groups.

The distinctive feature of cultural interpretations of Latin American politics is their common belief that cultural characteristics are indelible and more-or-less unchangeable. And, since such cultural interpretations emphasise what might be considered ‘negative’ aspects of Spanish or Spanish American culture in order to explain defects in Spanish American politics, their assumption that cultures do not change over time tends to imbue such interpretations with a certain pessimism about the future of Spanish American politics.

An early twentieth-century exponent of cultural approaches to understanding Spanish-American political disorder was Francisco García Calderón, who, thinking particularly of the phenomenon of caudillismo, emphasised Spanish authoritarian individualism.

Charting the historical paths to democracy has been a long-standing concern of political sociology.1 With the demise of authoritarian rule in Latin America over the last decade, a classic question of the genre has resurfaced: are there certain developmental sequences that are more likely to produce successful transitions to democracy? If there is any conclusion to be drawn from recent experiences, the answer is no. Highly heterogeneous circumstances have produced Latin America's most recent wave of democratisation. From the Caribbean to the Southern Cone, countries at different levels of economic development, with distinctive authoritarian legacies and divergent class structures, all underwent transitions to elected civilian governments in the last decade.

This article treats Tio Faustino, a little-known samba musician and Afro-Brazilian religious leader living in Rio de Janeiro, as an entry point for exploring larger questions about Brazil and the African Diaspora. The inquiry expands outward from Tio Faustino to Rio's early twentieth-century markets in ‘African’ commodities, the city's nascent music industry and the growing call to defend intellectual property rights in Brazil. In order to advance their careers, Tio Faustino and other artists accessed nationalist sentiment in ways that highlighted differences rather than commonalities with African-descended peoples elsewhere. In this way, Brazil's global standing and its colonial history and post-colonial trajectory functioned as a counterweight to transnational and diasporic connections. These findings deepen, rather than completely unseat, recent trends in diaspora and transnational studies.

This article provides an analysis of Ernesto Che Guevara's theory of guerrilla warfare, the foco. The numerous changes to the original foco thesis, as presented in Guerrilla Warfare (1960), are examined in detail covering two dozen articles, speeches, essays, interviews and books authored by Guevara, Castro and Debray while stressing their relation to national and international politics. The author argues that there was an apparent discourse between Cuban politics and the numerous changes in Guevara's writings. Juxtaposing changes to the foco theory from 1960 to 1967, to Cuban historical events, reflects the political expedience of the 1960s and the primary interests of the fidelistas, specifically Guevara.

The transcripts of the television programme Aló Presidente, the centrepiece of President Hugo Chávez's media strategy, provide insight into the different ways in which his movement promoted the image of its leader and sought to solidify his emotionally charged connection with the Venezuelan masses. The study outlines the dynamics behind the changing format and content of Aló Presidente and places it within the context of earlier research on populist media use in Latin America. Although similar to its predecessors, the programme was a unique creation of Chavismo, designed to balance Chávez's knack for improvisation with a structure designed to curb his excesses and keep him on message. This led to occasional tension between Chávez and the media professionals charged with the programme's production. The article provides a corrective to inaccurate treatments in the media and scholarly literature, and offers new information on Aló Presidente to facilitate future comparative studies.

During the last military dictatorship in Argentina, between 350 and 400 citizens who feared for their life managed to find shelter in Israel. This article traces the evolving procedures, institutional mechanisms and routes of escape operated by the Israeli diplomats and representatives stationed in Argentina and the neighbouring countries, against the contradictory background of lack of clear-cut official policies in Israel, the latter's cordial relationships with the military government, and an ethos of helping persecuted Jews evinced by some of those Israelis stationed in Argentina. In parallel, the article presents the social and political background of those who chose to appeal for Israeli help and finds – on the basis of a specially designed database covering between fifty-seven and sixty-five per cent of the fleeing individuals – that many were not associated with Israel or Zionism and a minority were not Jews, as defined by religious criteria or even by broader criteria. The broader significance of these contradictory trends is discussed.