Although in the literature there is almost a consensus that there was an advance of modernity in Brazil after 1870, tradition was sufficiently strong to maintain the values of a rural, patriarchal and hierarchical society. This modernity assumed characteristics that distinguished it from the classic model, represented by the Anglo-Saxon experience. In the period between 1870 and 1914 the ground was cleared for the conservative modernisation of the 1930s.

Studies of electoral fraud tend to focus their analyses only on the pre-electoral or electoral phases. By examining the Brazilian First Republic (1889–1930), this article shifts the focus to a later phase, discussing a particular type of electoral fraud that has been little explored by the literature, namely, that perpetrated by the legislatures themselves during the process of giving final approval to election results. The Brazilian case is interesting because of a practice known as degola (‘beheading’) whereby electoral results were altered when Congress decided on which deputies to certify as duly elected. This has come to be seen as a widespread and standard practice in this period. However, this article shows that this final phase of rubber-stamping or overturning election results was important not because of the number of degolas, which was actually much lower than the literature would have us believe, but chiefly because of their strategic use during moments of political uncertainty. It argues that the congressional certification of electoral results was deployed as a key tool in ensuring the political stability of the Republican regime in the absence of an electoral court.

This article analyses the failure of the Proyecto Marginalidad (Marginality Project), which the Ford Foundation financed in the 1960s, and the political and academic conflicts that it provoked. It takes into consideration the viewpoints of the principal actors involved (the director of the project, the Ford Foundation, and its critics). The original aim of the Marginality Project was to study the conditions of marginality of urban and rural populations in various Latin American countries, but it generated few results. The article shows that this outcome resulted from a series of ‘structural misunderstandings’, due to the fact that the different actors did not share what, in the words of Marc Angenot, might be called ‘social discourse’. In other words, their assumptions about what was thinkable and sayable in the Latin American context in the late 1960s and early 1970s diverged significantly, giving rise to a series of conflicts about the objectives and conduct of the project.

Founded in 1922, the Partido Comunista de Chile (PCCh) had a somewhat chequered career before the mid-1930s.1 Although the prestige of its founder, Luis Emilio Recabarren, and its close ties with organized labour gave the party an early significance, its progress towards becoming an important force in Chilean politics halted abruptly when General Carlos Ibáñez came to power in 1927. Forced into clandestinity by Ibáñez, the party emerged on his downfall in 1931 with its membership vastly reduced, its trade union arm, the Federación Obrera de Chile (FOCH), moribund, and its remaining activists deeply divided by ideological, tactical and personal differences.

On 1 January, 1899, the noon ceremony in Havana was brief but solemn. The Spanish flag was lowered, the United States flag raised. Officers of both countries exchanged formal salutes and informal salutations, whereupon the official ceremony came to an end. After nearly a century of covetous preoccupation with the island, the Unites States assumed formal possession of Cuba.

This paper analyses a government-facilitated truce, begun in 2012, between El Salvador's three principal street gangs. Using field theory and securitisation theory, it maps the evolution of the truce, distinguishing between the three related processes of making the deal, keeping the truce, and resisting it. It analyses the complex and intriguing political processes in which various actors, such as gang leaders, government officials and international organisations, interacted with each other and made deals about the use and visibility of violence and ways of diminishing, preventing or hiding it.

Although Chile is a relatively small country, writings about the Chilean party systems have long been better and more voluminous than is the case with most party systems in Latin America. Several orthodoxies have emerged in this literature: that Chilean parties are strong, that the party systems have been divided into three roughly equal parts, and that they have been relatively stable. The purpose of this article is to challenge these three orthodoxies. These orthodoxies are not completely wrong, but they need to be qualified.

The dominant view that Chilean parties are strong has been overstated. They have been strong in some respects and for some periods, but not in others. Parties have traditionally dominated mechanisms of representation in Chile's democratic periods, overshadowing unions, social movements, and other forms of representation. Party penetration in the electorate, however, has not been powerful. Parties have appeared and disappeared with frequency, and most parties have been relatively weak organisationally. More so than is the case in Uruguay, Venezuela from 1958 until the 1990s, Costa Rica or most of Western Europe, Chile's democratic periods have allowed space for anti-party populists to develop successful political careers, including capturing the presidency.

The thesis of this article, following that venerable geopolitical theory of Montesquieu, is deceptively simple. In post-independence Peru, the fundamental faultline of regional conflict was a north–south one, that of the limeño north versus the arequipeño southern coast. The sources of north–south differentiation were many: distinctive institutional legacies of colonialism, the centrifugal force of 1820s balkanisation, contrasting new forms of overseas penetration, the dichotomous pull of Pacific and Atlantic basin economies, overarching patterns of regional rise and decline, and rival visions for integrating the new country of Peru. By the 1830s, however, the north–south conflict had crystallised and polarised around one central issue: commercial policy or, to put it at its simplest, the north's ‘protectionism’ versus the south's ‘free trade’.

In this article I attempt to explain the differentiated development of the politics of recognition – that is the process of formal recognition of cultural diversity and indigenous peoples' rights – in Mexico, particularly in the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas. I follow an explanatory framework that proposes that the recognition agenda emerges in the context of armed conflict and/or legitimacy and governability crises, and evolves successfully when indigenous actors get access to the decision-making process and form alliances with key political actors. I find that government legitimacy has eroded in both states, and that governability has been severely threatened in Oaxaca and disturbed by armed conflict in Chiapas. However, only in the former have indigenous actors influenced the decision-making process and made alliances with the key decision-makers. This latter finding – fundamental within the explanatory framework followed – begs a further question – why was an alliance between the indigenous and the government elite possible in Oaxaca but not in Chiapas? I go beyond the original explanatory framework and identify a series of structural, contextual and agent-related factors that account for the uneven development of the politics of recognition in each state.

Despite recent attention to the relationship between the media and populist mobilisation in Latin America, there is a misfit between the everyday practices of journalists and the theoretical tools that we have for making sense of these practices. The objective of this article is to help reorient research on populism and the press in Latin America so that it better reflects the grounded practices and autochthonous norms of the region. To that end, I turn to the case of Venezuela, and a practice that has been largely escaped attention from scholars – the use of denuncias.

In 1994 Mexico's ruling party granted new powers of judicial review and increased independence to the Mexican Supreme Court. Would these reforms enable the Court to overcome decades of judicial subordination? I examine all Mexican Supreme Court decisions addressing the constitutionality of electoral rules – rules that are inherently contentious because they determine the chances for obtaining power – during Zedillo's sexenio. These cases, culminating with a 1998 ruling counter to a key PRI political interest, demonstrate a fundamental change in Mexico's institutional power balance. This study also demonstrates the utility of electoral cases to evaluate Court power within and across countries.

After a prolonged period of authoritarian rule, the rebirth of democracy in Latin America has prompted a resurgent interest in civilian control of the armed forces. Few disagree that political leaders will be unable to consolidate their democratic gains without resolving ‘la cuestión militar’. Given the history of military political intervention in the region, scholars have long expressed scepticism over whether governments can ever fully subject the armed forces to their political will. Recently, the terms on which power has been transferred from military to civilian hands and developments subsequent to the transfer have prompted an even greater anxiety about the future of some of these new and fragile democracies.

The 60th anniversary of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 led by the MNR provided an opportunity to review a Latin American political experience of disputed importance in the light of the government of the MAS under Evo Morales since 2006. This essay reappraises the historiography of 1952 from the perspective of MNR officialism and from critical positions, particularly those associated with indigenismo or Katarismo. Bolivia hoy, an influential collection of essays edited by René Zavaleta Mercado in 1983, is identified as a key moment in changing interpretations of the 1952 revolution.

This article examines the implications of Latin America's recent wave of state-embraced multiculturalism for the region's indigenous peoples, arguing that state recognition of indigenous difference is not inevitably empowering for indigenous groups or transformative of nation-states. It utilises data from fieldwork with the Kuna Indians of eastern Panama in order to delineate more precisely the contexts and strategies of indigenous peoples which may serve to push outwards more constrained forms of institutional multiculturalism. It explores the links between Panama's historical nationalist project, contemporary state multiculturalism and ethnically specific forms of mobilisation for land rights and autonomy. It also examines the transformative potential of multiculturalism in the context of the simultaneous implementation of global economic and cultural projects of neoliberalism.

Brazil's left, especially the Workers' Party (PT), largely views civil society participation as a means of correcting the shortcomings of liberal democracy, and to break clientelistic politics. This article questions the underlying assumptions that civil society is inherently a pro-democratic force and that participatory arrangements enjoy sufficient autonomy from local power dynamics to democratise state action. Effective participation requires a positive interplay between government commitment, civic virtues, and supportive institutional design. Participatory democracy presupposes a well-functioning representative democracy rather than curing its ills. The article compares four municipal health councils in towns with varying combinations of government commitment and civicness, which highlights a complex interaction of political, civic, and institutional factors that shaped deliberative participation.

The occasion of honouring the memory of John Brooks, a great friend of Latin America, has helped me vanquish my initial reluctance to tackle a topic that is as broad, varied and still open-ended as the present situation of democracy in South America. As a first measure of my limitations, with the exception of some references to Costa Rica and Mexico, I will not discuss Central America and the Caribbean, not because I feel these regions are unimportant but because, simply, I do not know enough about them. However, when I feel that I am on sufficiently solid ground so as to refer to Latin America as a whole, I will do so.

I begin by noting that in contemporary South America some countries satisfy the definition of political democracy. Those countries share two main characteristics. One is that they hold elections under universal adult franchise that, at least at the national level, are reasonably fair and competitive. These are standard criteria in the political science literature. However, having in mind the experience of Latin America and elsewhere in the third world, I believe that we should add that such elections must be institutionalised. By this I mean that all relevant actors expect that elections of this kind will continue being held in the indefinite future so, whether they like or not, it is rational for them to play democracy, not coup-making or insurrection. We should also stipulate that these elections are decisive, in the sense that those who are elected do occupy the respective offices and end their terms in the constitutionally prescribed way; they are not, as it has happened too often in Latin America, prevented from occupying office or thrown out of it because some supra-constitutional power feels that they are the ‘wrong people’.

The second characteristic is the enjoyment of certain political rights, especially of opinion, expression, association, movement and access to a reasonably free and pluralist media. Of course, these and other rights are important per se; in addition, they are instrumental – necessary conditions – for the effectuation of the kind of elections I have just specified.

Drawing on interviews, published sources and archival documents, this article examines Cuba's policy towards Latin America after Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara's death. It argues that as a result of this event and other setbacks in the region, Cuba reconceptualised its priorities, de-emphasised armed revolution and embraced new revolutionary processes. The results were mixed. By the mid-1970s, Havana was more disillusioned about revolutionary prospects in Latin America than ever before. However, it had also rejoined the inter-American system after more than a decade of isolation. This article asks how, why and with what consequences for Fidel Castro's stated pledge to ‘make revolution’ these shifts in Cuba's Latin American relations took place.

This study examines Emperor Maximilian's efforts in using public rituals, patriotic symbolism, and the emblems of nationalism to devise an appropriate past for his Mexican empire. The ‘republican’ celebration of independence and its heroes formed the cornerstone of an effort to reconcile feuding political factions, build social cohesion, and ultimately legitimate his regime. The article concentrates on the independence ceremonies, speeches, and statuary employed by the empire. Ultimately, the political dissension existing in Mexico could not be surmounted by symbols alone. Nevertheless, the attempt reveals the creative use and limits of public rituals in the political realm.

This article uses both new and published data on Mexico's foreign trade to measure terms of trade and to investigate the relationship between trade and the early growth of domestic industry. This analysis yields five conclusions: (1) Mexican terms of trade declined, largely due to the dramatic fall in the price of silver; (2) the growing diversity of Mexican exports significantly cushioned the short-term impact of silver depreciation; (3) declining terms of trade did not characterise the entire era, but instead were concentrated in two periods: 1891–97 and 1912–21; (4) although net barter terms of trade declined, Mexico's capacity to import – measured by the income terms of trade – improved markedly, and (5) this proved absolutely crucial in financing the concurrent process of incipient import-substituting industrialisation. In other words, the Porfiriato witnessed a development process in which trade growth and the spread of domestic manufacturing were highly complementary. Without the former, industrialisation would have been severely handicapped.

Peasant movements in Brazil are not a recent phenomenon but have recurred throughout the history of this essentially agrarian nation. The earliest manifestations of peasant discontent were pre-political movements of both a religious and a secular nature. They were primarily local expressions of immediate felt needs, temporary outbursts against misery and oppression. They were largely atomistic movements, confined in time and space, and characterized by a lack of unity and effective communication. More important, they were most often led by social deviants who were generally incapable of expressing realistic social goals which had appeal beyond the local group.